Under Construction
We are installing new software. Oops, Gregg says: "Who's we, white girl?"
Make that: Gregg's installing new software, which, I hope, will get rid of the error messages that sometimes pop up when posting comments.
There may be glitches. If anything bad happens...well, it should be fixed by morning. We hope. We, white girl, and we, Gregg.
Okay, gotta run. Gregg is getting impatient: "Come on you nutty broad, love of my life."
Awww.
The Democrats Cut Up The Credit Cards
It's a pay-as-you-go Congress now. (Better way-too-late than never.) Lori Montgomery writes for The Washington Post:
On its second day under Democratic management, the House yesterday overwhelmingly approved new rules aimed at reining in deficit spending and shedding more light on the murky world of special-interest projects known as earmarks.Under the new provisions, the House will for the first time in years be required to pay for any proposal to cut taxes or increase spending on the most expensive federal programs by raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere. And lawmakers will be required to disclose the sponsors of earmarks, which are attached in virtual secrecy to legislation to direct money to favored interests or home-district projects.
In recent months, with revelations that lawmakers had earmarked funds for projects with little public benefit, earmarks had became a political embarrassment and a symbol of fiscal profligacy.
Frank Pasquale wonders (with the barn door wide open), if Pay-Go would've stopped the Iraq War, estimated by some experts to cost between one and two trillion dollars...and still no Osama. Pasquale runs a comparison:
If we accept the figure that the cost of the war is about $200 billion annually, it's rather striking in comparison with the cost of some other goals, includingUniversal health insurance ($100 billion)
Universal pre-school ($35 billion)
Worldwide immunizations ($0.6 billion)So an interesting hypothetical would be: what would have happened if the Iraq war had to have been proposed in conjunction with, say, at least $100 billion in annual tax increases? Would Congress have approved it so quickly? And if, say, an average tax increase of about $330 per person per year would have been an insurmountable obstacle to war, what does that say about the nation's collective commitment to the endeavor?
All these points are raised in a more interesting way by Michael Ignatieff's Virtual War, where he worries (inter alia) that advanced technology (such as unmanned drones) could so lower the cost of war for its owners that they turn to military action far more quickly than they ought to. Pay-go brings up a more quotidian, but just as pressing, dilemma: does the concentration of the costs of the war on certain groups, and effective mortgaging of those costs far into the future, make us too prone to conflict? While obscure budgetary rules barely make the headlines, they may well be at the foundation of political support (or lack thereof) for war.
Unfortunately, Americans have been about as interested in spending limits in government as they've been in their personal, debt-soaked lives. I'm always amazed to overhear people bragging about getting a great rate on a credit card. I mean, sure, maybe sometimes you have a dire emergency, but why do you need a "great rate"?
It's really simple: Don't spend money you don't have. You're a chump if you do...especially if you do silly things like line up in the cold outside some store on "Black Friday." Think of all the money you saved! Yes, think of it as you're paying 16-plus percent interest. So, that sweater you got for 15 percent off...was actually 30 percent added, after you got done paying off Visa?
Of course, percentages like that are rather nebulous. So...just imagine if there were signs in stores with the actual cost of some "bargain" item after you get done paying for it:
"Relatively crappy pants, $39.99. Your price: $259.77!"
Five O'Clock Eyeshadow
I just posted another Advice Goddess column, about whether a man can wear makeup to improve his appearance. My first line pretty much sums it up:
A man improves his appearance by getting into a Jaguar, not Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse Foundation.
The rest is here.
Tom Cruise, Jesus Wanna-Be
(And instead of The Virgin Mary, we have the Stepford Katie.) Some people read the news; my boyfriend's pretty good at predicting it. Gregg said, a few weeks ago, Tom Cruise wants to be god. Now, there's this, in the fine Brit publication, The Sun. Emily Smith writes:
TOM Cruise is the new “Christ” of Scientology, according to leaders of the cult-like religion. The Mission: Impossible star has been told he has been “chosen” to spread the word of his faith throughout the world.And leader David Miscavige believes that in future, Cruise, 44, will be worshipped like Jesus for his work to raise awareness of the religion.
A source close to the actor, who has risen to one of the church’s top levels, said: “Tom has been told he is Scientology’s Christ-like figure.
“Like Christ, he’s been criticised for his views. But future generations will realise he was right.”
Yes, we are all filled with tiny, crushed-up aliens, as a crappy sci fi writer contended in hopes of making a buck. Then again, that story is no less stupid and unbelievable than the stories other people invented in hopes of making a buck. Oh...excuse me, I have an Ark to catch.
Grief Without God
Carol A. Fiore's test pilot husband dies in a horrible crash, but first suffers for 36 hours in the burn unit, and she's forced to cut through the god crap all the while. No, there's no evidence there's a god, just gullible humans who pretend god exists, in turn, exacerbating Fiore's pain. Fiore writes:
Before I arrived at the hospital just hours after the accident, Eric had been given the last rites by a Catholic priest. On whose authority? During the entire time I lived at the hospital I heard the following comments over and over: "God has a plan", "God never gives us more than we can handle", "Put your faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." One respiratory therapist even told me that unless I prayed for Eric, he would die. She'd seen it happen before, she repeated. When the family doesn't pray, the patient dies. Almost without exception, every single person who visited, called, or sent cards said the same thing "I'm praying for your husband."After Eric died I heard the same statements but with a new even more infuriating one thrown in: "He's in a better place." What place? He was dead! I can assure everyone that Eric loved life, his family, his job. There was no better place for him than right here. And what of God's plan? Did these people really believe that their God was watching Eric, out of all the beings in the universe? If so, why didn't he answer the prayers of more than half the city of Wichita? If there is a God and he has a plan, maybe this is what he was thinking:
Gee, I think I'll cause a really great guy to crash on takeoff. He's a test pilot who tries to make the skies safe for everyone, but just for fun I'll cause the jet to stall, plow into the runway, and catch fire. Then, just to torture the wife, I'll make her watch the test pilot suffer horrible injuries and burns for 36 days. Then as the final blow, I'll make sure the small children are present at the moment of death so their lives will be screwed up forever. I will ignore their pleas not to let their Daddy die because hey, I'm God and I can do whatever I want.
A plan? I certainly hope not.
Yet, even now, in 2007, those who seem to prefer nonthink and mumbo jumbo to rational thought persist...vastly outnumbering the rational and thinking. And why is it that so many people seem to be under the impression that lying and nonthink will be a comfort to a woman who uses her head as more than a convenient resting place for her hair? Fiore continues:
So how can we avoid all these painful religious comments spoken to people already enduring an unbelievable amount of torture? How about listening? People are being thoughtless in thinking that everyone is comforted by these kinds of statements. I repeatedly asked people not to pray (though I understand that sometimes people don't know what to say, so responding they'll pray seems like a safe comment). I threw the priest out of Eric's room, and I refused any more rites or prayers to be mumbled over him. People still didn't get it. They thought perhaps Eric would change his mind about not believing in God, that I would too. I'd suddenly come out of the atheist closet. What was the point now? I was going to make sure Eric got the funeral he wanted, and I knew he didn't want people praying over him.Eric's service was held in a hangar with various memorabilia and awards lovingly displayed under the outstretched wings of his favorite test plane. There were no pews; no religious leader conducted the service. There were no prayers, no reading of scripture. Fellow pilots wore their flight suits, speeches were given honoring Eric's life, and a microphone was passed around. It was a moving tribute to a man who had dedicated his life to aviation.
My mother, a strict Catholic who had once enrolled in a convent, said to me afterwards, "Well, that was a nice, well whatever it was. I guess it wasn't really a service, but I guess it was nice." Many of the hundreds present seemed to be confused about the lack of religious content of the service, but the closet atheists were all too obvious and there seemed to be more than a few. They were the ones who were most obviously overwhelmed. From them I heard comments like "I never knew a service could be so beautiful", or "It's the most moving service I've ever attended", or "I couldn't have imagined a better tribute to Eric." They didn't say "Eric is in a better place."
During the years since Eric's death, I have been told repeatedly to "put yourself in the Lord's hands and he will help you." But I learned that if there was any helping and healing to do, I'm the one who has to do it. Does God really help you get better? Does he make the grief go away? Even the little happy pills known as antidepressants didn't make it go away. The psychiatrists hurt more than they helped, the counselors made no difference, and though the family tried, they really couldn't do anything. Listening to me talk about Eric did help somewhat, but in the end, it was me who had to deal with the grief. Not God.
An important part of my recovery process has been in honoring Eric and in keeping my promise to him that the world would know who he was. I donated the entire sum of money given to me from The Challenger Fund to Eric's favorite museum, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. Every year a full scholarship is awarded to a deserving high school student to attend the Future Astronaut Training Program. A magnificent display has been set up to honor Eric.
Additional money has been donated to Eric's alma mater, where another display has been erected in his memory. I set up a program at the burn center where Eric was a patient. The Eric Basket Program is designed to help burn victims and their families. I have given several speeches in honor of burn patients and survivors.
I have tried to heal myself by performing various charity works in my own little town: Meals on Wheels, wildlife rehabilitating, conservation work, donating money and items for homeless people. One of the ways I have found to fight grief is by helping others.
I have spent many years of my life writing a book about Eric, his life, my experience at the hospital, and our incredible love. I continue to edit and polish the work. I am even going back to school to acquire better writing skills, so that I can better accomplish my goals.
I still miss Eric every day and maybe it would be easier to believe that he is safe and happy in a beautiful garden with a kind God and pretty angels. But it would be a lie. I try to be thankful that I had the love and support of such an amazing man as Eric, even if it was for such a short time. Maybe I was actually one of the lucky ones. I had the kind of love that people dream about. It was real and tangible, not a dream about some other world.
I would venture that people like me, who refuse to believe in god, the tooth fairy, or santa without evidence, value the here and now much more than the "believers" do. Since I don't believe in "heaven" -- no evidence of the existence of that place, either -- I do my best to live every day like it's my last. I don't have boring friends, I try not to have a bad lunch, and I do what I can to "leave the planet better than I found it"...and not because it'll bring me credits from the Big Invisible Man the gullible believe is waiting to give them a plasma screen and/or 72 virgins on the back end.
via Machines Like Us
George Carlin's Prayers
God vs. Pesci, by George Carlin:
You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci. Two reasons; first of all, I think he's a good actor. Okay. To me, that counts. Second; he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. Doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that God was having trouble with. For years I asked God to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog. Joe Pesci straightened that cock-sucker out with one visit.I noticed that of all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers that I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50 percent rate. Half the time I get what I want. Half the time I don't. Same as God 50-50. Same as the four leaf clover, the horse shoe, the rabbit's foot, and the wishing well. Same as the mojo man. Same as the voodoo lady who tells your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same; 50-50. So just pick your superstitions, sit back, make a wish and enjoy yourself.
Also in Joe Pesci's favor is the fact that he has never been accused of or suspected of diddling an altar boy.
"A Rather Louche Garment..."
I love the word "louche" -- but it's not exactly gang lingo.
"Louche" is the word the dangerous felon/Oxford historian/Tufts University Spanish Culture and Civilization chair Felipe Fernández-Armesto used to describe the bomber jacket of the Atlanta policeman who came after him for jaywalking earlier this month while he was attending the American Historical Association conference.
Since Fernández-Armesto is a Brit, and not used to policemen dressed this way (or, for that matter, the notion of jaywalking as a criminal act), he asked the cop to show him some identification. The cop, according to Fernández-Armesto, "didn't take kindly" to this. Shortly afterward, the prof, a man Colby Cosh describes as "about as physically imposing as the Taco Bell chihuahua" found himself thrown on the ground, thrown in jail, and treated like a hardened criminal.
I couldn't help but watch the entire video interview with the self-described "mild-mannered" prof. (Part two of the video is here. Part three is here.) It does raise the question -- how often is there abuse of police power that isn't so obviously silly?
And, are these local yokels with badges that entirely oblivious to the fact that not everybody on the planet grew up in Georgia and is familiar with local law and police custom? Or is that simply something that provides them with a little added enjoyment on the job?
Power trip!
Here's what the officer had to say for himself -- and the professor's response:
On Tuesday, four days after the arrest, Officer Kevin Leonpacher told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the professor was no innocent in the affair that landed him in jail for eight hours. "I told him, it's gonna be awful silly if I have to take you to jail for jaywalking," Leonpacher told the paper. "I used an excessive amount of discretion."Professor Fernandez-Armesto says the officer has defamed him. In a point-by-point rebuttal, he insisted firmly that he had not realized it was improper to cross the middle of the street and had watched his colleagues do so repeatedly without interference (in his native Great Britain, he noted, jaywalking is not an offense). He said it was not clear to him that the "young man" who called out to him to cross at the light was a policeman because the officer's badge and insignia were not visible. He said he is both morally and physically incapable of violence. "I am a feeble physical speciman," he said. There was a major scuffle, but he "did not offer physical resistance."
Jaywalking is a particularly ridiculous "crime," since, as an adult, shouldn't it be your decision whether you risk your neck and cross without the light?
And sorry for taking so long to put this blog item up, but it's been a mad-busy month, and the video still seemed worth airing.
What 200 Calories Looks Like
Photo essay by WiseGeek. Maybe if you're dieting, you should do as I do (I'm not dieting, which is one reason I'm not a tub), and have some fun eating donuts...
and avoid boring bagels?
The fat in the donut will keep you full. The fat in the plain bagel? Negligible. You'll eat it at 9:30 and probably be starving by 10:15. If you have some kind of low-fat spread on it? You'll probably be starving by 10:16.
More photo comparisons at the WiseGeek link above.
How Palestinians Resolve Their Differences
There's been some infighting between Palestinian terrorist groups lately. How do they kiss and make up? By murdering a few Israelis. A Palestinian barbarian, uh, official, praised the murders of innocent people in a bakery in Eilat by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Via CNN:
A Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a bakery in this southern Israeli resort town on Monday, killing himself and three people, police said. It was the first suicide bombing in Israel in nine months and the first ever to hit Eilat, Israel's southernmost city.A spokesman for Hamas, the radical Islamic group that controls the Palestinian parliament and Cabinet, praised the bombing as a "natural response" to Israeli policies -- a position likely to complicate the group's efforts to end a crippling aid boycott imposed by the international community.
Two Palestinian militant groups, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, claimed joint responsibility for the attack.
Both groups said the attack was meant to help bring an end to weeks of Palestinian infighting that has killed more than 60 people in the Gaza Strip since December.
Gunmen from Hamas and the rival Fatah Party battled each other across the Gaza Strip on Monday, attacking security compounds, knocking out an electrical transformer and kidnapping several local commanders. Four people were killed.
"The operation has a clear message to the Palestinian rivals. It is necessary to end the infighting and point the guns toward the occupation that has hurt the Palestinian people," a posting on the Islamic Jihad Web site said.
What's hurt the Palestinian people is their unwillingness to live in peace with the Israelis. If they just wanted to make a few bucks and go to Israeli universities (as students, not murderers)...do you think the Israelis would have any beef with them at all?
As I've pointed out before, imagine how you'd feel (and how we'd respond) if Mexicans in this country started blowing up dry cleaners, bakeries, and Starbucks.
UPDATE: Ever wonder what kind of advice Palestinian moms give their suicide bomber children? Wonder no more. Treacher has it here:
* Look both ways before crossing the street to blow up a bakery full of filthy Jews.
* Never talk to strangers, unless they're Jews, in which case you're allowed to tell them "Allah Akbar" before you destroy them.
* If you drop a piece of food on the ground, you can still eat it as long as you pick it up within 5 seconds. Unless it's a bagel, because that means you haven't wiped out all the Jews yet.
* Always wash your hands after using the toilet or handling Semtex.
* If you just follow your heart and believe in yourself, you can blow up anything!
He also wisely advises, "Don't ever do a Google image search for 'suicide bomber.'"
Papa Smurf In Clay
Japantown, San Francisco, where I stayed for the alternative newspaper conference. Picked up a paper, too!
If you want to read my column where you live, contact the editor of the local alt weekly or the editor of the features section (usually called "Life" or something) of the daily and ask them to pick it up.
Thanks For The Genocide!
Much as I think we shouldn't have gone into Iraq (Osama attacks the WTC and we attack a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with it?) and I think it's utterly horrible American soldiers are dying because Bush and his puppeteers were stupid and arrogant -- I also think we can't leave. We broke it, we have to pay for it. For how long? I'm really not sure.
But Saddam, horrible as he was, held back the civil war we've unleashed. And David Brooks points out in The New York Time$, what we've unleashed is worse than civil war -- it's "a civil war using all the tactics of genocide"...
...and it has all the conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek correspondent, Christian Caryl, wrote recently from Baghdad, “What’s clear is that we’re far closer to the beginning of this cycle of violence than to its end.” As John Burns of The Times said on “Charlie Rose” last night, “Friends of mine who are Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — all foresee a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that would absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now.”Iraq already has the warlord structures that caused mass murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Violent, stupid men who would be the dregs of society under normal conditions rise amid the trauma, chaos and stress and become revered leaders.
They command squads of young men who leave the moral universe and have no future in a peacetime world. They kill for fun, faith and profit — because they find it more rewarding to massacre and loot than to farm or labor. They are manipulated by political leaders with a savage zero-sum mind-set, who know they must kill or be killed, and who are instituting strategic ethnic cleansing campaigns to expand their turf.
Worse, Iraq already has the psychological conditions that have undergirded the great bloodbaths of recent years. Iraqi minds, according to the most sensitive reporting, have already been rewired by the experiences of trauma and extreme stress.
Some people become hyperaggressive and turn into perfect killers. Others endure a phased mental shutdown that looks like severe depression. They lose their memory and become passive and fatalistic. They become perfect victims.
Amid the turmoil, the complexity of life falls away, and things are reduced to stark polarities: Sunni-Shiite or Shiite-Sunni, human-subhuman. Once this mental descent has begun, it is possible to kill without compunction.
In Rwanda, for example, the journalist Jean Hatzfeld interviewed a Hutu man who had killed his Tutsi neighbor. “At the fatal instant,” the man recalled, “I did not see in him what he had been before. ... His features were indeed similar to those of the person I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had lived beside him for a long time.”
The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through.
The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb — simply get out of Iraq “in short order” — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences. Does the party that still talks piously about ending bloodshed in Darfur really want to walk away from a genocide the U.S. is partly responsible for? Are U.S. troops going to be pulled back to secure bases to watch passively while rivers of Iraqi blood lap at their gates? How many decades will Americans be fighting to quell the cycle of regional violence set loose by a transnational Sunni-Shiite explosion?
What Serious Cellulite Looks Like At Closing Time
Bar, Japantown, San Francisco, where I'm attending the AAN (Association Of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference.
That Liberal Media
Now maybe there's something not evident to the casual observer about this piece (and note to the casual observer -- video includes dead bodies), but it seems odd that CBS is refusing to broadcast it. The piece is by their chief foreign correspondent, and it's about violence on Haifa Street in Baghdad. Rory O'Connor and David Olson write for MediaChannel:
We at MediaChannel believe that an informed citizenry is necessary to keep our democracy viable, and we have been strong advocates of the call for all news outlets -- mainstream or independent -- to produce and distribute accurate stories on the situation in Iraq.Which brings us to Lara Logan.
One would assume that Ms. Logan, as CBS chief foreign correspondent, has a fair amount of influence as to what stories she gets to cover, and that most of her important stories, once produced and delivered, will be broadcast. But when a story comes out of the mean streets of Baghdad that doesn't fit the officially sanctioned narrative of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers working arm in arm to help protect thankful Iraqi citizens, even chief foreign correspondents sometimes need to ask for help in getting it seen. Imagine our surprise recently when -- over the digital transom -- we received a copy of an email from a frustrated Lara Logan (see below).
In it, Logan asks for help in getting attention to what she calls "a story that is largely being ignored even though this is taking place every single day in Baghdad, two blocks from where our office is located."
The segment in question -- "Battle for Haifa Street" -- is a piece of first-rate journalism but one that appears only on the CBS News website -- and has never been broadcast. It is a gritty, realistic look at life on the very mean streets of Baghdad and includes interviews with civilians who complain that the U.S. military presence is only making their lives worse and the situation more deadly.
"They told us they would bring democracy, they promised life would be better than it was under Saddam," one told Logan. "But they brought us nothing but death and killing. They brought mass destruction to Baghdad."
Several bodies are shown in the two-minute segment, "some with obvious signs of torture," as Logan points out. She also notes that her crew had to flee for their lives when they we were warned of an impending attack. While fleeing, another civilian was killed before their eyes.
Logan's email, with the one-word subject line of "help," was sent to friends and colleagues imploring them to lobby CBS to highlight that people are interested in seeing the piece. In it, Logan argues that the story is "not too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore … It should be seen. And people should know about this."
Those Poor, Persecuted Palestinians
But, oops! Who's persecuting them? As in Iraq, where Sunni and Shiite are killing each other, Palestinian on Palestinian violence has intensified. From Ayn Rand Institute, "Palestinians Better Off under Israeli Rule":
The bloody street fighting between Hamas and Fatah has intensified the lawless chaos in the Palestinian territories, while rocket attacks against Israel continue. "But the solution is not further 'unity talks' between the murderous rival factions," argues Elan Journo, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute; "instead, the solution is a political regime that protects individual rights. The Palestinians would be better off under Israeli rule."The feuding Fatah and Hamas factions have perpetuated the terrorist war on Israel and unleashed their gangs of 'security forces' who tyrannize, rather than protect the life and property of, Palestinians. Gun battles between the factions are compounded by the widespread racketeering, carjacking, kidnapping. Palestinian territories are on the brink of anarchy.
"When safe enough to speak freely, some Palestinians acknowledge that they would much rather live under Israeli rule, because their lives and property are safer. Arabs living under Israeli rule have long enjoyed political rights and a standard of living unmatched by any other Middle Eastern country. For example, Arab citizens can freely air their views without fear of retribution; they can serve as members of parliament; they can seek legal redress under a rule-of-law judicial system.
"Instead of abetting terrorists and clamoring for their 'right' to establish a tyrannical regime, Palestinians who value peace and prosperity should petition for Israeli rule."
How To Drive A Humvee In Baghdad
Via Metafilter, here's the video.
What Did ATT Fix?
Lunch!
Via Consumerist, an ATT tech goes grocery shopping from the alley. Consumerist's Ben Popken writes:
Brian spotted an AT&T tech "fixing" something in his back alley for the past three days. Turns out, the tech was fixing himself lunch, using his truck's ladder to steal oranges from a customer's tree.So Brian made a little video.
Brian had the frame of mind to put a soundtrack, clever pictures and text, and his logo on it. He did not have the frame of mind to get a closeup on the tree so we could confirm it holds oranges. Nor did he have the frame of mind to go out and confront the tech on camera. A shame.
And while we're on videos, here's one that's not-to-be-missed: Via Reason, Alternate Universe Ron and Nancy talk to the nation about drugs.
Where they go right: In suggesting it's our constitutional right, despite the dumbass Interstate Commerce Clause, to go mind-walking if we want. As long as we're not behind the wheel.
If There's A Black Caucus, And A Latino Caucus...
Why not a white caucus? Tom Tancredo speaks out against the racism of race-based caucuses in Congress:
"It is utterly hypocritical for Congress to extol the virtues of a colorblind society while officially sanctioning caucuses that are based solely on race," said the Colorado Republican, who is most widely known as a vocal critic of illegal immigration."If we are serious about achieving the goal of a colorblind society, Congress should lead by example and end these divisive, race-based caucuses," said Tancredo, who is scheduled pitch his longshot presidential bid this weekend in New Hampshire.
I don't think we will ever have a "colorblind" society -- one of those things people automatically advocate without really thinking. I do think we should have a society where neither race-based discrimination nor special treatment is sanctioned.
Naturally, some jerk comes out to play the race card:
“This story is really about a member of the minority party using intolerance to advance his presidential campaign,” said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo.
Wow...a politician using a platform to advance his own cause? What a shocker.
The request comes in the wake of reports that freshman Rep. Stephen Cohen, D-Tenn., was refused admission to the Congressional Black Caucus because he is white. All 43 members of the caucus are black.Cohen said in a statement that he told a reporter that he would be honored to join the caucus but did not apply, "nor has the CBC denied membership to me."
The political Web site Politico.com, which first reported the issue, quoted Rep. William Clay, Jr., D-Mo., as saying the black membership in his group is "an unwritten rule."
What's Lower Than Self-Publishing?
Self-Xeroxing.
I got this "book" (a 75-page stapled, badly photocopied pamphlet priced at $25) in the mail this week. It's rife with errors (and even rifer with embarrassing ideas and writing).
"Do I want to mention it in my column?" the guy is wondering. I'm dying to, but I thought I'd spare you the embarrassment, dude.
Cartoon Violence Vs. Real Violence
Millions of Muslims are yawning in unison. From Thomas Friedman's column in Wednesday's New York Times:
"How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report?"
Thanks, Norm
Hey, You Forgot the Spicks, Wops, and Polacks!
Wal-Mart recruits former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to chair its company-funded Working Families for Wal-Mart. From CNN.com:
In an August interview with an African American newspaper in Los Angeles, Young says the megaretailer "should" displace its urban corner-store competition."You see, those are the people who have been overcharging us.... I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it's Arabs."
Thanks, Deirdre
Bonjour. Where's My Sharia Law?!
French Muslim is shocked, shocked, when Sharia law is not applied in a secular society. Why? Because certain Muslims expect it to be applied...and when the Muslim birth rate in France gets high enough, guess what? It probably will. Here's the story from Reuters UK:
A French Muslim who attacked a male gynaecologist for examining his wife just after she had given birth, saying it was against Islam, has been jailed for six months by a Paris court.Fouad ben Moussa burst into the delivery room at a Paris hospital last November and shoved, slapped and insulted Dr Jean-Francois Oury as he examined the woman after a complicated birth, the prosecution said in court on Wednesday.
Police had to intervene to remove him.
Ben Moussa, a 23-year-old lorry driver, apologised for the attack and said he had requested a female doctor. French state hospitals comply with such requests when staffing permits but say patients must accept treatment from the doctors on duty.
"This is a public and secular place," prosecution lawyer Georges Holleaux said of the state hospital where the attack occurred. "This is not the place where one can invoke religion to get different treatment."
Not at the moment, anyway.
Visit old Europe while you can. Before you have to do it in a hijab, or worse.
Oh, and don't bother blaming the "poor conditions" in which European Muslims live. From another Reuters UK story by Michael Holden about a group of British Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up U.S-bound planes, who were radicalized "in just weeks or months":
..."One of the really shocking things ... is the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well-educated, British-born people were converted," police chief Ian Blair told a conference on Islamophobia.
Save The Wails
Just posted another Advice Goddess column. This one's from a girl who doesn't understand what men want -- and no, it isn't relationships that start out as mortal combat (for a lot of people, they usually get to that point soon enough). Here's her question:
I recently got in touch with my high school sweetheart (AKA the love of my life). He said I had uncanny timing since he’d just gotten divorced, and we met at a club and talked and laughed for hours. He e-mailed later saying I was really sexy, and he’d had a great time. I started e-mailing him about topics I find interesting, like overpopulation and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. First, he was into it, but we had a heated debate about how to control overpopulation (which I feel very strongly about) and suddenly his e-mails dropped to two words at most. What happened? Did my passion for protecting the environment and humanity scare him off?And here's my answer:--Opinionated
Do you want a boyfriend or a bar fight?You’d like to believe this guy just wasn’t man enough to handle the issues: “Did my passion for protecting the environment and humanity scare him off?” Oh, please. No, probably the fact that he just got divorced, and the idea of bringing a combative woman into his life fills him with about the same joy as the prospect of adult circumcision.
If your in-person chat was anything like the e-mail exchange you forwarded me, one or both of you must take your conversational cues from humorist Fran Lebowitz (“The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting”). Of course, e-mail brings out the worst in those with a tendency toward monologue over dialogue. At least in instant messaging there’s an in-the-moment opportunity to correct misunderstandings. But, only face to face do you have all the information -- the ability to notice that something you’ve said has caused the other person to boil with rage, fall asleep, or go over and sit on somebody else’s lap.
What’s with all the typing, anyway? You haven’t seen the guy since high school, but instead of snuggling up to him over a bottle of wine on a red velvet banquette, you’re home alone pounding out position statements on Mahmoud Abbas. Come on, is the point getting to know each other or proving what a little miss smartypants you are? If you simply like to hear yourself talk, why not save him the aggravation, and just leave yourself long, rambling messages on your answering machine?
Now, let’s say you want to save the spotted owl, and he’s sending out Evites to a spotted owl chili cookoff. And maybe he traded in his Hummer for an 18-wheeler with the bumper sticker, “Proud Supporter Of OPEC,” and spends his free time pouring used oil down the drain. The big issue in a relationship actually isn’t the issues. I just read a comprehensive study about this by University of Iowa psychologists Shanhong Luo and Eva C. Klohnen that really surprised me. They found that people tend to couple up with others who are similar in attitude, religion and values, but it’s overall personality similarity that’s the best predictor of whether they’ll be happy together. Maybe that’s how America’s strangest bedfellows, Republican apologist Mary Matalin and Democratic apologist James Carville, make it work. Or maybe they just have some really stupendous sex: “You dirty, dirty liberal!” “Say that again, and you’ll see at least one WMD!”
In other words, you don’t have to open your head, extract all political thought, and refill it with lime Jell-O. You (and whoever) do have to start with a base of good feeling to bridge disagreements -- honeymoon first, irreconcilable differences later. Luckily, it generally doesn’t take much to bond with a guy: Just undo a couple buttons on your blouse and ask him about himself; no need to get right in there and club him over the head with a baby seal.
The original posting is here.
Sperm Limits
A new piece in Time magazine inspired me to ask all you girls out there a question:
Let's say somebody -- not you -- robs a bank. Somebody has to go to jail. The police see you on the street and bring you in for it, figuring you're as good a candidate as any. The case goes to trial. The prosecution brings no evidence. Everybody just assumes you did it. In fact, even you start to believe it. Finally, you get thrown in jail for 18-to-life. Okay with you?
That's essentially what happens to men every day in this country. I've written about it before, as has Matt Welch -- the terrible fraud being perpetrated on men in the name of "welfare reform." Here are a few words I wrote a while back about his Reason piece on the subject:
...Any woman can name any man -- even one she's never met -- as the father of her child, and if he doesn't fight back (and fast) -- he could end up losing everything. Yes, everything. "A name, race, vague location, and a broad age range is sufficient to launch a process that" can cause a man who is not the child's father to have his wages garnished and his passport blocked, and have liens put on his assets.It isn't even a crime for the mother to name the wrong man. Welch notes that "for both the mother and the state, the punishment for making a mistake is indirect, in the form of receiving less child support." But, the man's credit -- and his life -- can be ruined in the process.
It all boils down to paperwork. If the alleged father doesn't get, or ignores the (confusing) notice to respond to the paternity charge, he has a limited time to contest it before he's assumed to be daddy in the eyes of the law -- whether or not he actually is. Welch reports that the accused father has 30 days to respond to a paternity complaint (it helps if the complaint form has actually gotten to him, but in many cases it never did). Then, he has 180 days to contest a child support order, and two years from birth to challenge paternity using DNA evidence. "If," Welch writes, "for whatever reasons, any of these deadlines aren't met, no amount of evidence can move the state to review the case; the DCSS has to be sued." Unfortunately...
...Family cases typically hew to the "finality of judgment" principle to prevent disruptions in children's lives. Or, in the words of former California legislator Rod Wright, "It ain't your kid, you can prove it ain't your kid, and they say, 'So what?'"That's how a man like Taron James could be slapped with a support bill for thousands of dollars from Los Angeles County in 2002, and continue to be barred from using his notary public license, even after producing convincing DNA evidence and notarized testimony from the mother that her 11-year-old son, whom he's seen exactly once and looks nothing like, is not his child and that she no longer seeks his support. James says his name was placed on the child's birth certificate without his consent while he was on a Navy tour of duty; then the mother refused to take blood tests for eight years, and he became aware of a default order against him only when the Department Of Motor Vehicles refused to issue him a driver's license in October 1996. By that time, James had missed all the relevant deadlines, the court was unimpressed with his tale of woe, and he has since coughed up $14,000 in child support via liens and garnishments.
Hideous stuff. Terribly wrong. It's clear what's right here, and all lawmakers like Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), who oppose paternity-related reform bills, should be voted out post-haste.
Personally, I would like to take the rights of men a step further. I don't think any man who doesn't want to be a father -- and clearly expresses that to a woman -- should be forced to pay for any child that ensues from having sex. Because a woman is the one who gets pregnant, if paying for and raising a child as a single mother is a problem for a particular woman, she needs to take steps -- and double steps -- to prevent pregnancy -- or be ready to have an abortion or give up the baby after it's born. Men shouldn't be forced into financing fatherhood -- by anyone -- be it a fuckbuddy or a representative of the state.
By this, I mean, if you have sex with some guy you meet in a bar, and you get pregnant, the guy could help you pay for the abortion, if he's feeling charitable, but with the science to guard against pregnancy, it's your body and your responsibility.
Here's a column I wrote on the subject.
And here's how, "Duped Dads Fight Back," from the Julie Rawe Time magazine piece:
Advocates for these so-called duped dads say such men should be treated as victims of fraud and liken the need for paternity-disestablishment amendments to truth-in-lending laws. They point to many an egregious case in which the law's marital presumption of fatherhood has ended up enslaving a divorced dad, like the Michigan man who proved he had not sired his son but was still ordered to send child-support payments directly to the boy's biological father, who was granted custody after the mom moved out of his place and left the kid there. Increasingly, policymakers across the country are turning a sympathetic ear to such complaints. Florida last year joined Georgia and Ohio in allowing a man to walk away from any financial obligations regardless of how many years he may have been acting as a minor's father if he discovers he was deceived into parenthood. Fathers' rights groups in Colorado, Illinois and West Virginia are pushing for similar legislation that would remove or extend existing time limits for challenging paternity.Spearheading the legislative movement is Carnell Smith, a Georgia engineer who found out shortly after he broke up with his girlfriend that she was pregnant and spent the next 11 years believing he was the girl's father. Then, in 2000, after his visitation time had been cut back around the same time that a court order nearly doubled his monthly child-support payments, he took a test that showed he was not the biological parent. Three years and about $100,000 in child support and legal fees later, Smith, 46, managed to disentangle himself from any responsibilities for the girl, and says he walked out of court "a broke but free man." He successfully lobbied his home state to pass its paternity-fraud law in 2002 and now runs a DNA-testing company. Its slogan: "If the genes don't fit, you must acquit!"
But justice for a disillusioned dad can clash with the best interests of a child raised to think of him as a father. "These cases get cast as the duped dad vs. the scheming wife," says Temple University law professor Theresa Glennon, who has examined the changing legal landscape. "This is really about men deserting children they have been parenting." She points out that severing paternal ties could devastate a child depending on the length and quality of his relationship with the nonbiological father.
Sorry, but should you be fooled into fatherhood? Some guys would rather not know. But guys who do care should get the kid DNA tested at birth. Even if they are lovey dovey with the mother at the time.
But, finally, a little justice for the non-dads:
Even so, last May the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the state's current law doesn't let a court consider a child's best interests when a father requests DNA testing to determine paternity. And in a sign of the further complications genetic testing may have unleashed, the New Jersey Supreme Court is debating whether a nonbiological father can sue the biological one for $110,000 in child-support reimbursement. The plaintiff in the case didn't learn the truth about the son he had believed to be his own until the kid was 30.
And then there are the complexities. She doesn't mention gay parents (oops!), but then there are non-biological dads who have raised their kids, and other issues.
Some legislators, however, are acknowledging that there is more to fatherhood than what can be defined solely by the sharing of a few genes. Oklahoma last year joined several states in adopting a law that limits the time frame for contesting paternity to a few years after the child's birth. Paula Roberts, an attorney at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy who helped craft these measures, argues that such time limits protect both the child and the nonbiological father, should Mom ever try to shut him out or the biological dad suddenly show up wanting to horn in. Meanwhile, activists in Oregon are planning to submit two competing bills this session. Both allow a man to contest paternity within a year of discovering he is not the biological father, but only one forces the courts to consider a child's best interests in every case. The other allows a nonbiological father to get out if he wants to, but if he's the one fighting to maintain parental status, then the court has to consider the child's interests. That's a lot of nuance, but when it comes to determining fatherhood, sometimes an easy answer isn't what's best.
It's unfortunate for kids who are born to scammer women, but why should you ever have to pick up the tab for something you didn't do?
We Get Mail
All I can say is...Why?
Finally! Justice For Crooked Congresspeople
Richard Simon writes in the LA Times that that House voted to deny pensions to lawmakers-turned-felons. It makes me sick to think these scumbags would have collected taxpayer-funded pensions -- and that other scumbags have been collecting them. An excerpt from Simon's piece:
The measure, which the former California congressman once supported, won't affect him or any other lawmakers already convicted of crimes, including ex-Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio), who was sentenced Friday to 2½ years in prison for his dealings with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The bill's sponsors said it cannot be applied retroactively.Cunningham, who is serving an eight-year prison term after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes and evading more than $1 million in taxes, is eligible for an estimated $36,000 a year pension from his eight terms in Congress, according to the National Taxpayers Union. Ney will be eligible to draw a congressional pension of about $29,000 a year when he turns 62 in 2016, the group estimated.
Unfortunately, they left a few crimes off the bill. The Republicans (rightly) chimed in that the bill didn't go far enough:
Now, lawmakers can lose their pensions if convicted of a crime against the United States, such as treason. Under the House measure, bribery, conspiracy and perjury would be added to the list.Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) contended that the list should include 17 other felonies, such as income tax evasion, wire fraud, intimidation to secure contributions or racketeering.
"I will support the bill," Kirk said, "but it falls 17 felonies short of the reforms needed to improve the ethics of this House."
Screaming Brat And Parents Thrown Off AirTran
It's tantrum time!
Dianne Williamson writes in the Worcester Telegram of a 3-year-old eating Cheetos at the airport and watching the planes take off and land...
Then came…The Boarding. Suddenly and without warning, angelic little Elly morphed into every parents’ nightmare.Her mom thinks it may have been because of the ear surgery Elly underwent earlier this month, and perhaps her memory of the discomfort and ear pressure she endured during the plane’s descent into Florida. For whatever reason, when they got on the plane, Elly started to cry and wouldn’t stop. Nor would she sit down — she plopped herself down on the floor in front of her seat and proceeded to throw a temper tantrum.
“I was trying to console her and the stewardess came over and said, ‘Did you buy that seat for her?’ remembers Ms. Kulesza, 31, who is four months pregnant. “I said yes, and she told me my daughter needs to sit in it. I told her I was trying.”
"Ms. Kulesza, who is four months pregnant..."? (Can't handle one? Have another!)
Right, I forgot, it was the earache. Or...insert other plausible excuse here.
Yeah, fuck the other passengers. WE WANNA GO TO FLORIDA, WE CAN'T (OR WON'T) LEAVE THE BRAT WITH A BABYSITTER, AND THAT'S ALL THAT COUNTS! SO THERE! ("Apple doesn't fall far from the tree" theory, anyone?)
I dunno about you, but kids in my family didn't throw tantrums. And no, we weren't beaten or anything. It. Just. Wasn't. Done.
Of course, we never went anywhere on a plane at an age when there was any chance we might disturb anybody. On my first flight (from Michigan to Florida), I was 12, and my youngest sister was 7.
But, back to our heartwarming little tale:
Moments later, an AirTran Airways employee armed with a walkie-talkie addressed Mr. Kulesza.“Sir, you need to get her under control,” she said.
“We’re trying,” Mr. Kulesza noted.
The passengers, meanwhile, were quite understanding and one of them offered the toddler a lollipop, which she rejected.
Just a guess: The passengers weren't understanding; many simply acted understanding, because, in this, The Age Of Indulgence, it's somehow socially unacceptable to express irritation at the persistent ear-splitting screeches of somebody's little darling.
Then the walkie-talkie woman returned to the Kuleszas’ aisle and displayed the raw tact and diplomacy of Donald Trump.“Sir, you need to get off the plane,” she announced.
Wow. I'm flying AirTran.
“What?” a stunned Mr. Kulesza asked. “Are you serious?”“Sir, you need to get off the plane now.”
They got off the plane, while their luggage and car seat flew on to Boston. In the terminal they were directed to an AirTran supervisor, who told the couple that the stewardess was uncomfortable “because you have an unruly child who struck a woman on board.”
Mr. Kulesza was incredulous. “That was her mother,” he explained. “She hit her on the arm. Lady, this is a 3-year-old child we’re talking about.”
Yes, one who doesn't belong on the plane. What of the other passengers peace, quiet, and/or tendency toward migraines? Oh, right...if you brought your 3-year-old on, maybe you don't give a shit?
“Sir, we don’t differentiate between 3 and 33,” the AirTran supervisor replied. Mr. Kulesza said the woman proceeded to lecture him about child discipline, and how she would never tolerate her children behaving in such a manner, at which point Mr. Kulesza said, “You really need to stop talking now.”
No, Mr. Kulesza, you need to shut up and start listening.
The couple were also told that, since they had been ejected from the plane, they were banned from flying with AirTran for 24 hours. So they were forced to return to Bonita Springs for the night, and Mr. Kulesza missed a 16-hour work shift,
Oh, boo frigging hoo...
and the next day they returned to the airport and can surely be forgiven if they fed their daughter enough Children’s Benadryl to fell a stallion. I exaggerate, perhaps, but it’s certainly what I would have done.
And what they should've done to begin with when bringing a tantrum-throwing child on a plane. Surely, it wasn't the first time.
In any case, Elly slept through the return flight home.The incident has sparked varied responses from those who heard the story. While many people — mostly parents — sympathize with the Kuleszas, others are less inclined. For example, when I related the tale to an unnamed colleague and asked if he had ever heard of an airline bouncing a child from a flight he said, “No, but I’m all for it. Couldn’t they have checked her with the baggage?”
This colleague, as it happens, has no kids.
Yes, and if this colleague and the other people on the plane wanted to spent hours straight amidst screaming children, they'd get jobs in nursery schools.
AirTran, meanwhile, has apparently had a change of heart.
So have I. Now, I'm not flying AirTran.
After the airline received a phone call Thursday from yours truly, an AirTran customer service rep called the Kuleszas, apologized profusely for the incident and refunded them the $595 cost of their tickets.“We do believe the situation could have been handled differently,” said AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver.
Yes, the parents could've waited until the kid could fly without throwing a tantrum to indulge themselves in a Florida vacation.
Note that the columnist, as is typical to daily newspapers, which seem to prefer voiceless, opinionless writers to opinionated bitches like me, is careful never to actually express a point of view in this column. Note the irony -- a screen shot of the page the column appears on:
Yet...the airline "received a call" from her. Period. Not a call saying, "You go!" or "You meanies!" Just a call. And newspapers wonder why they can't attract "younger readers," or retain the readers of all ages they already have. Hire somebody with an opinion, huh?
Oh, right...you might get angry letters. Well, then you'll know somebody's reading you instead of simply letting you pile up until they remember to call and cancel.
The lady writes like her hair.
Amy On Nightline -- Video Is Up
Running, so I can't post a still right now. But here's the link.
Today's Dumbshit Comment
Every morning, I wake up, I erase my hotyoungpussy spam, and I see what blog comments people have left while I was sleeping. Sometimes they comment on entries from a while back, where I know few people will see them. And sometimes they're worth bringing forward because the comments are so smart, or, in this case, so fucking stupid.
This one's from the entry, Everything Under The Sun Is Racism, about how people find racism wherever they look -- if they're looking for it. And sorry, I'm Jewish (really post-Jewish), because I find religion and belief in god, without evidence, primitive and silly, but too many Jews are too into how "persecuted" they are, finding persecution at every turn.
But, first, here's an excerpt from the old entry:
I've found, in the course of writing my column, that mere mention of certain groups, usually racial or religious groups (but don't even get me started on polyamorists), will cause accusations of racism or anti-something-ism.My favorite past incident of my own stemmed from my response in my column to a question from a controlling woman, basically telling her to ease up or she'd lose her boyfriend. I started my answer with a example showing how people value freedom:
Note that there were Cubans floating to the US recently, in a green 1959 Buick they turned into a boat, but no Jewish grannies from Miami sailing the other direction in their retrofitted giant yellow Cadillacs: “Oy, Irving, I think I left my heart pills back at the condo.”Naturally, from the mere mention of a Jewish grandmother in a Cadillac I got letters:
How dare you use your column as a platform for anti-semitism!My response:
Shalom! If I am anti-semitic, I learned my anti-semitism at Temple Beth El. P.S. That's my bubbie, who used to live in Florida and drive a gigantic pale yellow Cadillac. I thought she'd get a kick out of making it into my column.
One guy totally missed the point...perhaps because he's Googling "Jew" and just tossing accusations of anti-Semitism around like birdseed. He's not helping his case -- not that there seems to be a "case." I sure didn't see one.
The guy, Adam Goldberg, who signs his entry from ADL.org -- the Anti-Defamation League -- writes:
These GEICO caveman commercials are totally anti-semitic and awful in the way they portray White Anglo Saxon Protestants as somehow superior to the obviously neurotic and whiny Jewish caveman character.Utterly offensive.
I responded:
Are you out of your mind? The whiny Jewish caveman character? Again, some people see racism everywhere. See above, where people thought I was racist. My bubbie (translation: Jewish grandmother) was just pleased I used an image of her in my column.
Oh yeah, and to be all Fairness Doctrine about this, I'll post the Advice Goddess Blog comment from the dumbshit Muslim "Racism" Finder Of The Week. (Oops, Islam isn't a race! Somebody please inform this idiot.) He posted on the entry, The Evil Among Us, about Muslims at a supposedly interfaith'y/let's make nicey-nicey with the infidels center in Britain.
I was just reporting the news:
Certain mosques in Britain claim to be about moderation and interfaith dialogue, but this is the kind of stuff they actually preach (quotes I pulled from the film):"We Muslims have been ordered to do brainwashing..." "Allah created the woman deficient""If she doesn't wear a hijab we hit her"
"Take the homosexual man and throw him off the mountain..."
"You have to live like a state within a state then you take over..."
"The pinnacle, the crest, the summit of Islam..is jihad."
Has this kind of Islam infiltrated our country? What's to stop it?
But, here's what (heh!) "NormalPerson," who later said he was Muslim, had to say about what I posted:
Shameful site and shameful rasist, hateful comments. Here you show your real face. You would be afraid to make such comments about certain racial and religious groups protected by law in your countries, but here you show who you really are.You are really no better than that bearded fanatic on the picture. You use him to judge a religion you know nothing about, you use your ugly and primitive stereotypes to judge 1 billion people !!!
I wrote:
You might come here more often, "NormalPerson." It's not like I give anybody who believes, without evidence, in god, a pass. It's just that very few Jews or Christians or astrologers want us dead because we don't believe in their shit...and quite a few Muslims do. Watch the video, dimwit. Furthermore, Islam isn't a race, so it's impossible to be "racist" against Muslims. Oh, sorry, make that "rasist."We have freedom of speech in this country at the moment, not Sharia law. I'd like to keep it that way.
And FYI, again, watch the video. It isn't "stereotypes" I'm using, but ugly remarks from powerful Muslims themselves, out of a mosque in Britain that supposedly promotes interfaith relations. Kill 'em if they don't think your way? Now there's an interfaith relation!
The Sky Is May Be Falling
Reason's Cathy Young has a new piece on global warming -- on the extremists on both sides of the issue. The complexity of climatology doesn't help matters, making it difficult for the ordinary person to assess who's telling the truth. Yet, many people are just so sure that the polar bears are going to be wearing grass skirts and sipping mai tais, or, on the other end, that nothing whatsoever is going to happen.
UCLA Public policy prof Mark Kleiman, a man who identifies himself with the "L" word (liberal -- which conservatives use like it means "steaming turd"), sympathizes with environmentalists, Young writes, but...
...he notes that "their eagerness to believe the worst" -- for instance, in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" -- "is just as evident as the right wing's denialism."As an analogy, Kleiman cites many social conservatives' attitude toward the AIDS epidemic, which has been used to portray sex outside monogamous heterosexual marriage as fraught with deadly peril and to preach the message of premarital abstinence. (Kleiman doesn't explicitly say this, but his comments hint at another abuse of science: Many conservatives and gay rights activists, for different motives, have exaggerated the fairly tiny risk of HIV infection from heterosexual sex.)
The analogy between AIDS and global warming also extends to attitudes toward ways to remedy the problem. The religious right, Kleiman points out, pooh-poohs condoms as a way to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases because the effectiveness of such a remedy would undermine the abstinence message. Similarly, those on the left who embrace environmentalism as their substitute religion don't want to hear about scientific and technological solutions to climate change -- from nuclear power to geoengineering, the artificial manipulation of the global environment -- that do not include stepping up regulation and curbing consumption.
There is a growing number of voices in the scientific community that reject both denialism and alarmism on global warming. Roger Pielke, an environmental science professor at the University of Colorado, calls such people "nonskeptical heretics" -- those who believe that human-caused global warming is a real problem, but one that can be met in part with technological management and adaptation. Mooney has come to embrace such a viewpoint as well.
Pielke has pointed out an unfortunate tendency toward political polarization within the scientific community. Last year, Tech Central Station, a website that supports the free-market system, promoted a statement by several scientists who dismissed any connection between hurricanes and global warming -- while environmental activists promoted the views of other scientists who argued that such a connection exists.
Most journalists and pundits have limited knowledge of science; as a result, they tend to pick whichever science best suits their political prejudices. Both science and journalism deserve better. Perhaps we can start by remembering that an ideological crusade can be as strong an inducement to bend the truth as the profit motive.
How To Chase People Away From Your Gallery
Birmingham, Michigan, Robert Kidd Gallery. Gregg and I are here for a wedding. (We certainly aren't here for the weather.)
Charming.
The best parts of the wedding were before the wedding, when we hung out with Elmore and Christine at their place...
...and hanging out with Elmore's kids who are Michigan-real like Gregg and me, and a lot of fun, at the wedding.
Here's my outfit. I had some lowcut thingamashirtie to wear, but it's arctic here, so I wore my librarian turtleneck with my little Ralph Kemp shrug. (Ralph Kemp's my favorite young Parisian designer -- and everything he designs, even pants that look like leather, and fancy sequinned jackets, can be thrown in the washing machine.)
I generally loathe weddings. This particular wedding was quite strange. These people did go all out. The wedding was at The Roostertail, on the Detroit River. But, they didn't allow dancing until midnight. (Elmore's daughters and I, and Ann and Ken Calvert, danced in our seats to rebel.) And you had to wait in line to forage your food from guys serving at buffet tables, which I call "hunter-gatherer dining." I prefer "waiters in dinner jackets deliver your filet mignon dining."
And here we are under mortar attack:
Helen Fisher Is...What?
I've been getting these press releases about anthropologist Helen Fisher, who, apparently, has licensed her name and work to Chemistry.com:
In a message dated 1/17/07 7:36:02 AM, Melissa.Noon@WeberShandwick.com writes:As Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, love seems to be everywhere: cupids in store windows, love songs on the radio, V-day candy and cards flooding your pharmacies, red roses being ordered by the dozens…the list seems endless.
Yet, Feb 14th, deemed by many as a “Hallmark holiday” or a ploy just to sell cards, is not always such a joyful day for single people around the country. George Clooney might seem like he enjoys his esteemed bachelor status, but maybe he is really looking for that perfect mate and just didn’t pay enough attention in Chemistry class….
Dr. Helen Fisher says that finding the right person is more a scientific process than a game of chance. As a world-renowned researcher who has traveled from the back-woods to the outback, into the field and back to the lab, Dr. Fisher, who works with Chemistry.com, has determined what makes humans fall in love. Our brains have a specific reaction when we sense a romantic attraction and biology can actually tell us with whom we will be most compatible. She says we are unconsciously attracted to those who complement us biologically, as well as socially, psychologically and intellectually. There are real chemical reactions involved in “chemistry.”SNIP
As you start to think about Valentine’s Day stories, please consider Dr. Fisher as a resource who can discuss everything from tips to finding your soulmate, to the world’s worst matchmakers, to reasons why our beloved celebrity couples just can’t last.
Beloved celebrity couples? Are you sitting around thinking fondly of Britney and pondering why her marriage to Skanky didn't last? As I "start to think about Valentine's Day stories"? Gag.
I wrote back to Melissa Noon:
I have Helen Fisher's books, have referenced her work a number of times in my column, and heard her talk when I presented "How To Build A Better Meme" at the Human Behavior & Evolution Society Conference at Rutgers, but come on, is she really sitting around designing quizzes for Chemistry.com?The real problem is with the companies that take advantage of Valentine's Day as a commercial enterprise, and highlight people being partnerless as if it's a problem. I suggest you check out the work of professor and researcher Bella DePaulo -- http://www.belladepaulo.com/ -- on the stigmatization of singles. Here's a column I wrote referencing her work (excerpted below):
DePaulo and Morris aren’t anti-couple; they were just surprised when their data showed most people suspect single equals loser -- even single people. When they asked 950 undergrads to describe the characteristics of married and single people in general, married people were assumed to be “mature, stable, honest, happy, kind, and loving.” Singles got nailed with “immature, insecure, self-centered, unhappy, lonely, and ugly.” Of course, the truth is, sometimes two is the loneliest number. Is there really anything lonelier than feeling completely alone when you’re in relationship with somebody else?It doesn’t help that award-winning social scientists keep making bold pronouncements about the transformative power of marriage, like E. Mavis Hetherington’s claim, “Happily married couples are healthier, happier, wealthier, and sexier than are singles.” Don’t be too quick to assume they also have bigger breasts, flatter abs, and are less likely to be abducted by aliens. The above quote from Hetherington’s recently published book was just one of many examples cited by DePaulo and Morris of couple-glorifying sloppy methodology and data analysis. DePaulo told me via e-mail, “I think that cultural notions about singles and marrieds are so pervasive, and so unquestioned, that even respected scholars do less than their best work on the topic.” DePaulo and Morris point out the rather obvious flaw in Hetherington’s claim: She compared only happily married people to all single people. Wow, imagine that: Happily marrieds are more satisfied with their lives than, say, suicidal singles.
And here's an excerpt from a column I wrote referencing Helen Fisher's work:
Desire runs on the economics of scarcity. That's why diamonds, not speckled gray pebbles, "are forever," and why special occasions are celebrated with champagne and caviar, not tap water and a scoop of tuna. You want what's rare, or seems rare, not what's there 24/7 gassing up your couch.Biology is not on our side. In fact, recent research suggests people in relationships are chemically predisposed to come to find each other about as sexually compelling as yesterday's Cream of Wheat. Another one of nature's charming practical jokes? Actually, anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, surmises sexual ennui was evolution's way of getting lovers to stop bouncing naked off the cave walls and raise their kids.
While, to the average person, a relationship seems to be one big crock pot of lust, attraction, and commitment, Fisher and other researchers see three distinct stages, each biochemically different. Lust, fueled by testosterone, gets you out in a short skirt looking for prey. In the attraction stage, you're drunk on a cocktail of dopamine and other excitors (the "love high"), still lusty, but laser-focused on one particular object of desire. Finally, there's the attachment stage, when the bonding chemicals vasopressin (in men) and oxytocin (in men and women) take over -- and getting off on each other tends to give way to nodding off on each other.
Sound familiar? Don't despair. Who says Mother Nature isn't ripe for a con? Helen Fisher suspects you can fool your biochemistry into believing you're still back in the chase phase. "Novel experiences drive up levels of dopamine in the brain," writes Fisher. This "can stimulate the release of testosterone, the hormone of sexual desire."
In other words, there's no security in security. Imagine, on the first date, if a guy ignored you to play Grand Theft Auto. Why is it any less a problem at the one-year mark? Clearly, you need to break up a little to have any hope of staying together. Move out and make like you're dating. Remember dates? They're special events where two people get all excited to see each other, put a lot of effort into looking and smelling seduction-friendly, pay close attention to each other, then, jump on each other instead of the Internet.
Fisher also cites experiments that suggest bringing an element of danger into a relationship can elevate a couple's dopamine. Perhaps you could relocate your boyfriend's lost libido while jumping out of an airplane or taunting mother bears. Or, if you aren't exactly a great outdoors type, just continue badgering him about whether he's attracted to you. Then again, while that might tempt him to throw himself off the nearest terrace, it probably isn't the kind of near-death experience Fisher had in mind.
Getting back to Melissa Noon, I wrote:
I wonder if you might rethink what you're doing -- the way you're doing it, capitalizing on the single as desperate thing -- as the problem, not part of the solution. If you actually care. PR can be a really important thing for getting out news that should be publicized, but not all PR is such a good thing. --Amy Alkon*
"A Reader Named Gregg"
I slept with this mysterious man last night -- the guy (above) the LA Times' Steve Harvey mentions in his mention of my blogslapping of Eva Burgess. And he didn't e-mail me; he posted a comment on my blog. Steve Harvey writes:Amy Alkon said she was in the Rose Cafe in Venice "trying to listen to the classical music and enjoy my breakfast" when a loud woman at the next table called an eye doctor on a cellphone to make an appointment. It was too much for Alkon, an advice columnist concerned with what she calls "the disintegration of public manners."As the woman "shouted her information so anybody near her could (and, in fact, was forced to) hear it," Alkon wrote, "I took notes (rather conspicuously) and then posted the information, including her phone number, on my blog."
...Alkon concedes that she has heard from several people who "didn't like what I did." But apart from whether she was justified, a reader named Gregg e-mailed her about another aspect of the case. Whatever happened, he asked, "to good old fashioned paranoia? I won't say anything personal or (about) business to anybody unless I'm behind closed doors and the room has been swept for bugs."
I'd pitched the idea of doing a feature or regular features on my "interventions" on the undercivilized to the LA Times' West magazine. Naturally, they turned me down. At what point -- if ever -- do you think the LA Times' features sections will ever run my column or any piece of my writing? Predictions?
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Nightline -- My "Blogslappings"
I couldn't find the video or story up yet on ABC (or on YouTube), but here's the preview:In addition, and not altogether different, we feature the work of Amy Alkon, who runs a Web site called advicegoddess.com. After years of suffering rude and discourteous behavior, Alkon decided to record such behavior on a Web site. She posts pictures, names and even the telephone numbers of the offenders. And she's not the only one using the Internet as a form of social correction. How it works, and how it feels to be highlighted, will be revealed tonight, and it's not entirely comfortable.The hate mail is trickling in, though! Much of it from the semi-literate, like the ?guy who repeatedly spelled "disgusting" as "discusting"!
And then, there are those who think they can fool me. This person was supposedly seated in the empty cafe near me (and the three-person camera crew). Now, if you know anything about news crews, pro camera and sound people make it their business to blend into the background. Most hilariously, the idiot had me for a second -- until I realized they'd e-mailed me before the show had run on the west coast. I ran a locate on their IP and it was Illinois. Here's what they wrote. PS My "fro" is naturally curly, thank you. I can't find time to get to the grocery store. Who the hell has time to get a "perm"?
Also, we went to the cafe (Mediterrina, in Venice...very good food!) at around 2:45, when nobody was there, so we wouldn't be in the way. We had permission from my neighbor Josh, the chef who owns the place. (His and his wife's pot roast-shaped Yorkie, Leroy, is Lucy's boyfriend):
Here's the email, subject-headered "Carrots":
Hey you walking carrot, I just find it pretty amusing how you explain to the world how you will fight back against the "rude" people of the world (i.e. those who have conversations at restaurants) yet you subject the public to the horror that is you. I have a story for you and your blog - I was having a peaceful lunch at a nice little outdoor cafe when this walking carrot (I call this thing a walking carrot due to its bright orange afro-perm with bangs, orange lipstick, orange jacket and orange scarf) strolled in with a camera crew. It sat down and began showing off its "craft" by typing on a laptop. I'm not sure what the interview was for but from the looks of the subject matter it must have been something for the home and garden network explaining how if you don't keep proper care of the carrots in your garden they may grow up and become bloggers. Anyhow this carrot truly ruined this nice little afternoon that I had planned for myself. So if you would please urge the other walking carrots of the world not to bring camera crews into restaurants and not to type right in my face I would greatly appreciate it. Thank You, WCHere's my response:
Actually, assclown, this e-mail was sent from the midwest, and the story hasn't run on the west coast yet, and you obviously weren't there. Filled with hate, are we? Must say mean things about my appearance? Woooo, I'm so hurt. Sorry that something's obviously terribly wrong with you and you must lash out at me to feel better, but whatever it takes to make a pathetic schlub like you feel good. Furthermore, we were quite far from the few other customers, and it's quite a large patio, and, as I wrote earlier, we were given permission by the owner, who's also my neighbor, and went at a time when nobody would be there. Furthermore, the "crew" was a cameraperson, a sound guy, a correspondent who sat with me at the table, and a producer who sat quietly at the table behind us. Not exactly Cecil B. DeMille's cast of thousands. Poor dear. Hope it gets better for you.I'm getting lots of supportive e-mail, though. Much, much more than the hate mail. My mail's running about 20-1 supportive to hate. Here's one of the supportive letters:
Hello Amy,You go Girl (an Endearment/not a slam).
Too many people have no respect of their neighbors we are all neighbors. Keep up the GOOD work. I saw you on Night-Line. I watched it three (3) times I should have taped it.
I can't tell you where I work but it's in retail and it sounds like a favorite fruit, "As good as _______ Pie". and I see so many arrogant, snobbish, misbehaved people/children all the time. I want to yell at them and I am a 60+ year old Vietnam Vet who can take care of my self and nothing fazes me, except the condescending and misbehaved people/children that I meet daily. It seems like the world has left their morals, decency and all good value judgments somewhere else. Where, I don't know.
I will tell my wife that you are yelling for me.
Keep up the good work and please don't use my name.
Thanks, A fan
And a few people who do a few things of their own wrote, too:
Hey Amy - You're interesting. I believe in your cause, although our family vehicle is probably larger than you would like to see (LX 470). Personally, I feel that the only thing uglier than a person driving a Humvee is a person driving a Humvee on the phone. However my bigger issue is with the cell phone drivers (hands free or not) almost to the point of obsession. I display large signs in my side windows that exclaim "HANG UP THE PHONE AND DRIVE". While I'm sure this isn't obsessive by your standards I still feel compelled to share the sentiments of many of my friends and family "Be careful girl some of these angry people could run amok and harm you." You should be careful and avoid harm so you can be around to annoy these people another day. Good luck in your journey, JohnnyHere's the boring repeat of an e-mail I often get:
Do you really think today's SUVs are worse for the enviornment and guzzle more gas per mile than your pink Rambler?I wrote back:
I drive a 2004 Honda Insight, which gets about 60 mpg on the highway if I don't drive too fast and there isn't too much traffic. The Rambler was the first car I ever bought, and all I could afford at the time. My problem isn't with people who need a large vehicle (contractors, for example), or who can't afford a less polluting vehicle, but with people who could do with less car or can afford a less polluting, less endangering vehicle, and still drive something named after a mountain range.So...what do you drive? 98 percent of the time, I'd guess, people who send me e-mails like yours are the bunwads who endanger their kids in some giant rollovermobile so they can look cooler when they pull up to the golf club. Not that a gigantic SUV makes you look like more than a monkey to trends. I mean, on an objective level, is driving a giant whored up moving van really attractive? If you were actually rich, and actually classy, you'd have, maybe a Jag, not a Lincoln Navigator.
This was the most entertaining e-mail (besides the hate mail, since it gets dull after a while correcting the grammer of the pre-literate). The subject line, "Holy shit...I can't stop laughing":
Alright. I just found your site and feel the need to tell you about my day. First and foremost I was here in my hotel flipping channels and stopped on a show (Nghtline maybe?) that was showcasing your website. The opening was "When did people get so rude?" I had to stop.More on my day now and it will all tie together!
So, I am on a break from working for a few weeks...that basically means my job was eliminated and I am trying like hell to find a new one. I have a friend who is a mobile marketing rep for a doorknob company. Exciting, I know. She asked me if I wanted to tag along with her for a few weeks. Hell...free hotels and corporate card dinners every night...how can one turn that down? So, she gets her weekends to do as she pleases. We had been in San Francisco and Sacto for the week and she got the brilliant idea we should go to Reno. Yep, I said it...Reno. Now keep in mind, I braved Las Vegas for New Years with this girl and maybe would of preferred the end of the world to the shit time I had. How could I think Reno was going to be a good idea? I knew. In my head all I could think was...this is gonna be bad, real bad.
The day started out leaving Sacto and driving part of the way with her on a hunger rage. She needed Arby's. Why does anyone ever need Arby's? Not the point. As I slugged down coffee and smoked cigs profusely, she soldiered on thru her haze of hunger. We finally arrived 8 miles outside Reno to spot an Arby's. That's right...8 miles. With all the choices that we would have if we just drove 5 more minutes, we stopped at Arby's. We ordered and as she waited at the counter for the food, I picked up the necessities such as napkins, straws and "horsey sauce" which is the only thing that can help wash down a beef and cheddar. I found a both in the fairly crowded restaurant. I sit and as soon as my ass finds the warm spot on the plastic chairs I hear my name being called very loudly across the room. My friend is screaming across the room to see if I need any sauce for my potato cakes. I look down, utter a silent prayer and say in a meek voice "No thank you."
She then proceeds to sit down and within the first minute I hear it...her phone. The ring is not a normal ring. It's not even a peppy little Journey ringtone that I could laugh about. It's the loudest most irritating discoteque glowstick loving rave beat I have ever heard. And did I mention that it is turned up on high as she sticks it in her purse where it is covered in lipglosses, receipts from 2 years ago, makeup compacts, hairbrushes, gum packs, etc. So, for her to be able to hear it, it must be full blast. Wait...I feel that I have left something out...her purse is the size roughly of a remote control. So...that being said you can understand that she cannot usually find it for a full minute and a half since it is on the bottom and covered and crammed by everything else. So, as I sit and listen to it ring as she tries to find it she finally grabs it and pulls it out. She then stops and looks at it as it is still ringing to see who is calling and opens it up to I guess maybe check the persons thumbprint and DNA to make sure it is indeed them calling. I finally lose it and say "Answer the DAMN THING!" She looks up from the phone with big doe eyes as it is still ringing..."Why are you yelling at me?"
Okay, so yeah...we're in Arby's. I get that. It is not the swankest of establishments and there ar probably not that many people half as irritated as I am. But this is a 3 year annoyance in the making. When I step in a public shared space, I put my phone on vibrate and place it in my pocket. If I do get a call that absolutely cannot wait, I step outside to take it. This is just common sense to me. I guess I am still baffled that it is no common sense to everyone. I have thought long and hard on the subject more times than I really care to count and just cannot come to terms with it.
Approximately 2 minutes later, the same thing happens with a woman sitting next to us. I give her a dirt look and say very loudly "Really? Is it that important to interrupt your Big Montana? Really?" She give me a dirty look and starts talking even louder. This is all within 2 hours of being awake. Someone kill me please.
I am gonna skip over the checking into the El Dorado hotel and casino part of this saga as well as the dinner portion of the evening that involved a Grande Burrito which was the most expensive menu item as well as having brown lettuce upon it. I will just skip to the casino portion of the evening.
My friend and I have very, very different fashion sense. Her little stumps have not seen the light of day without the covering of a pair of stiletto's since she was 16. The jeans are tight on the ass and perfectly altered. The belt must match the earring which must match the necklace which must match the lip gloss that matches the toe nail polish which matches the purse which matches the perfectly blown out hair...you're getting the idea.
I guess I've lived on the road for entirely too long. Comfort plays a big part in my day. I am an avid makeup fan and would rather spend 5 extra minutes throwing on a coat of mascara to hide my bloodshot eyes than waiting for the straightening iron to heat up to straighten my already straight hair. I threw on a pair of cute but worn in True Religions and an old band t-shirt with my vans and a blazer. I was ready for Reno. Really...it's just Reno.
My friend apparently does not understand the clientele in a town like Reno. We head down to the casino and on the way there a street man cat calls at my friend. She giggles nervously and looks at me with the perfectly shadowed and lined eyes and says..."ewww...gross!" Well sweetie, get ready for the casino cause shit knows it's gonna be 10 times worse than that. We walk thru the El Dorado and men of every nationality look her up and down- "Yo, mama...damn!", "Shit girl!" and "Grrrrr...." were a few of the calls that were shouted out. Now, don't get me wrong, my friend is cute. But in a town like Reno...she's a god damned supermodel- all 4'11" of her.
We continue on thru The Nugget, The Lucky Leprechan, Harrah's, Circus Circus and the Silver Legacy. At this point...it's getting old. As we are walking by a brewery 2 very cute indie rocker lookin boys walk by us. I make the eye contact...finally! Maybe someone cute and fun to hang out with, right?!?! This night might be salvagable. WRONG! We turn to say something and see that we are being tailed by three incredibly ghetto fab, slightly overweight, sideways hat wearing Middle eastern men. The cute boys look at us, look at them and shake their heads. NOOOOOOOO!!!! WE ARE NOT WITH THEM!!!! They apparently were walking so close behind us or aka "tailing us" that the cute boys thought that we were a group. At this point I lose it for the second time that day. I turn and the first words to fly out of my mouth are "What the fuck do you think you are doing? I will tear off your arms and beat you with the bloody stumps if you take one more step closer to my ass!" Yes, a slight over reaction in my part. I will fully admit it.
However, when did it become appropriate for men to think that growling, catcalling, "tailing" and just plain leering is the way to pick up a woman? Don't get me wrong- there was not a chance in hell that either of us was going home with or hooking up with any of the men that made their attempts, but what really is the appropriate response to these comments? "yeah baby, let's just swipe off the Texas Hold 'Em table and get down to business!" or "uh yeah...follow me to the buffet and it'll be just like 9 1/2 Weeks!" Not gonna happen.
The only solice I have is the dirty martini that I am drinking right now as I write this and the fact that my friend got sick from one of the free casino drinks mixed with the french dip dinner so we got to come back to the room early. As I sit here watching a film from Julia Roberts "I'm not being so selective about my roles these days" phase and sip my martini and recall the day's events- all I can think is- Damn. When did people really get so rude? When did people stop thinking about social consequence? When did people become some very self centered, technology addicted and caveman-like all at the same time?
At least I can attempt to look back on it in humor and with laughter. But shit...really? Come on people...come on. It's a simple matter of common courtesy and for all you lecherous men in the casino- try dating within your own ...nevermind, I'm only opening myself up for a complete backlash if I say what I really want to to end that sentence.
So, now that I have all that out of my system I fully intend upon spending the next few hours sifting through your website and reading some more of these tidbits that seem to say exactly what I find going through my head more than 90% of the day.
Thank god for people like you that still have the guts to say what reall needs to be said. Things that people don't like to hear. Well guess what- I don't want to hear cell phones ringing and cat calls either but I have to. So, if I have to hear that shit- then I'm glad someone had the balls to post things like your blogs.
Reading and Regurgitating in Reno
I like this girl. A lot.
In addition to the comments about my blogslappings, I've also been getting a lot of comments and e-mails from people who've never read my column before, who are surprised they don't get to read it in a paper near them.
A features editor who does run my column recently explained why I'm not in more dailies. According to her, it's because I'm ""not dowdy" and it makes some features editors who see me at their conferences mad -- as does the fact that I go to their conferences at all to try to sell my work. How dare I?! (Apparently, you're supposed to be a small gray sparrow sitting around waiting for them to "discover" you.) John Carroll, the former LA Times editor, told me that's why they were angry at me in the LAT features department: I pitched them my column and stories too often! Seriously, that's what he told me. (How often was too often? The same four or five times I year I sent mailings out to all the other papers!)
Anyway, if you'd like to see my column in paper near you, if it's an alt weekly, please write to the editor, and if it's a daily paper, write to the "Life" or features editor.
And if you'd like to see more of my blogslappings, hold on, because I'm working on a book...just finishing the revisions from my agent on the proposal, which should go out soon. And, in the meantime, check back here. There's no shortage of rude people around these United States!
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Who's Yer Mommy?
Parent your own damn kids -- don't expect an Internet site to do it for you. Parents are suing MySpace after their kids were sexually abused by predators they met through the site, writes Jessica Mintz of AP:The law firms, Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas, and Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, said families from New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina filed separate suits Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation by the companies."In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users," said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer.
More like MySpace is perfect for poaching by aggressive lawyers making excuses for their parents who didn't monitor their children's Internet usage properly.
"Hopefully these lawsuits can spur MySpace into action and prevent this from happening to another child somewhere," he said.Oh, please. I'm sure that's his only interest. More from Jessica's story:
Critics including parents, school officials and police have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace, where youth-oriented visitors are encouraged to expand their circles of friends using free messaging tools and personal profile pages.MySpace has responded with added educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. The company has also placed restrictions on how adults may contact younger users on MySpace, while developing technologies such as one announced Wednesday to let parents see some aspects of their child's online profile, including the stated age. That tool is expected this summer.
"MySpace serves as an industry leader on Internet safety and we take proactive measures to protect our members," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said in a statement. "We provide users with a range of tools to enable a safer online experience."
But he said Internet safety is a shared responsibility, requiring users to "apply common sense offline safety lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue."
The lawyers who filed the latest lawsuits said the plaintiffs include a 15-year-old girl from Texas who was lured to a meeting, drugged and assaulted in 2006 by an adult MySpace user, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Texas after pleading guilty to sexual assault.
Suing an Internet site because something bad happened due to something posted on it is a bit like suing the maker of your television because you had a heart attack when "24" got a little scary. (I just left the room when they were torturing Jack during the debut episode, and Gregg just sat there laughing at me in the kitchen asking when it was safe to come back to the television.)
As in another case, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) said that it's essential that Internet sites be protected from such suits (ie, take your legal redress in criminal court, don't try to cash in against the sites just because you think you can):
"The Internet allows people all over the world to share information and diverse opinions. Without Section 230, no one would risk creating a website where others express ideas," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "This doesn't mean that people like Hollis can't pursue defamation cases. They can. But they should sue the person who made the statement in the first place, not the person who created the forum where it was made."*
Date Change AGAIN! Amy On Nightline
FridayMondayFriday Night again
On ABC, starting at 11:35 EST and PST, and 10:35 Central Time. It's now tonight again. Who knows, maybe somebody undied or something. About going after the undercivilized.Mediabistro's Kate Coe had some nice words here, too.
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Need A Great Tenant?
Know somebody around Venice/Mar Vista/Westchester/Santa Monica who does? Now, you know I'm not in the habit of placing ads on my blog, but for this, I'll make an exception. My editorial assistant is just a great person: Smart, cool, creative, fair, totally responsible, great integrity, and simply "a good egg," as they used to say. She's looking for an apartment...or something...to rent. Details follow:AREA: Mar Vista, Culver City, Venice, Santa Monica, Westchester, Playa Del Rey.
WHAT SHE'S SEEKING, IN HER WORDS:
I'm looking for either a guest house or a studio/one bedroom in a small complex (under 10 units), or a trailer. Hardwood floors are great, so is a garden or a yard or even a semblance of a yard, and a stove.I can pay between $600-$775/month.
HOW SHE DESCRIBES HERSELF: quiet, artist, writer, no pets, no kids, non-smoker.
I vouch for her totally.
A big hassle of renting is wondering if you'll get somebody who'll trash the place, not pay the rent, have their their gang friends in on the weekend to sell drugs out the kitchen window. With Stef, you get none of that, just peace of mind...which is worth a hell of a lot.
If you have a place to rent, or know somebody who does, I'd be super grateful if you'd e-mail me, and I'll forward your e-mail to Stef.
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The Evil Among Us
It's an undercover film about Muslims in Britain being trained in hate by Saudi-funded radicals, but Debbie Schlussel in Detroit has infiltrated Muslim groups there and made equally chilling discoveries. Chilling. Primitive. Ugly.
Certain mosques in Britain claim to be about moderation and interfaith dialogue, but this is the kind of stuff they actually preach (quotes I pulled from the film):
"We Muslims have been ordered to do brainwashing...""Allah created the woman deficient"
"If she doesn't wear a hijab we hit her"
"Take the homosexual man and throw him off the mountain..."
"You have to live like a state within a state then you take over..."
"The pinnacle, the crest, the summit of Islam..is jihad."
Has this kind of Islam infiltrated our country? What's to stop it?
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Today's Nasty Little Snot
Hint: If you're going to ask me for advice, which I provide free of charge, and you're also going to ask other advice columnists, at least have the decency to write us separate e-mails. If I see, in the very same e-mail you're sending me, that you apparently have help from other quarters, I'm going to bow out and answer another letter from my pile. It's not like I lack for people to advise.That's what I told a girl in the U.K. who writes me too frequently with rather silly questions. (I'll give advice to a person more than once, but hey, figure a few things out yourself. I'm not your daily genie in a bottle.) Anyway, the girl wrote back like so, which I found rather amusing:
Excuse me, but you are supposed to give me advice, not insult me. Now give me advice, before i report you to the council.My response:
You can report me to whomever the fuck you want. The council? I'm in America, dear, dispensing free advice. What are they going to do, reach through my computer and give me a spanking?!*
A Swine Romance
Lots of new comments on my Eva Burgess entries, here and here, with different comment strings (and tedious assclowns) on each. A lot of people don't like what I did. That's okay. As I told a commenter:As far as whether people agree with what I did or not, I don't take a poll to figure out my course of action in a given situation. If you do, you have bigger problems than being exceptionally tedious.For the uninitiated, Eva Burgess is the woman who made a loud cell phone call while at the table next to me at the Rose Cafe as I was trying to listen to the classical music and enjoy my breakfast.
As somebody who's a bit concerned -- tweaked even -- about what I call "the disintegration of public manners," when Ms. Burgess shouted her information so anybody near her could (and, in fact, was forced to) hear it, I took notes (rather conspiciously) and then posted the information, including her phone number, on my blog (Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!).
I guess a few people, including my Charlotte, N.C./Brussels friend Little Shiva, gave her a piece of their mind on loud public cell phone abusage. Little Shiva wrote:
I called her. Got a woman with a childlike voice – not sure if this was Eva pretending not to be Eva or if it really was someone else. When I asked for Eva and the woman asked what it was regarding, I said "her new glasses!" Then I asked her to let Eva know she was mentioned on this blog. Oh, and Gregg, your first sentence up there is a crack-up!Gregg wrote:
What ever happen to good old fashioned paranoia? I won't say anything personal or business to anybody unless I'm behind closed doors and the room has been swept for bugs.What Amy does is like the Homeland Security guys who carries bad things onto airplanes to prove it can be done. She points up the lack of security that people have on their stupid phones, which goes hand in hand with their suspension of manners.
As she points out, people want to fill in the other half of a one sided cellphone conversation, especially when it's so public. Why not just hop on a podium and have an open mike to tell everybody your soc number and all your accounts and passwords? Might as well.
To be stupid and rude is a lethal combo. Amy can't prevent the Arctic ice from melting or insure we'll have Chilean Sea Bass in 2045, but she is taking a crack at public rudeness which eats up the bandwidth of our precious shared space. One jerk at a time.
My favorite new comment on my earlier Eva Burgess posts is this one:
Trying to bring waves of innocent harassment against someone for the minor rudeness of making a cellphone call in public is like trying to clean up a speck of dust on the dresser by hosing it down with urine. Your behavior is much more impolite than hers. That's the real problem. Not that there's some fanciful legal argument, not that she supposedly consented to having her number published. It's rude to openly invite people to harass one another. Period.Of course, by your logic, I have a perfect right to publish a full-page ad in the New York Times, scolding you for your rudeness and suggesting that all and sundry post nasty comments over and over on your blog. But I choose not to do so, because, well, your obnoxious behavior doesn't justify mine, just as Eva Burgess's didn't justify yours.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at January 17, 2007 12:31 AM
(I'm not sure what "waves of innocent harrassment" are -- except, perhaps, a sign of the continuing degeneration of literacy in this country.) But, here's how I responded:
Why is it "minor rudeness"? Perhaps the fact that others find it a "minor rudeness" is reflective of the problem. Why do you find it it "minor" that somebody else's peace in a shared space should be aggressively disturbed?You absolutely have a right to publish a full page ad criticizing me in The New York Times, and I celebrate that right. Haven't you read The Constitution and The Bill Of Rights? Why would publishing an ad against what I did be obnoxious behavior? It's part of being an involved citizen in a democracy.
Now I know the world is truly upside down.
What's most frightening is that you, unlike so many of the others, have the guts to publish this (presumably) under your own name -- which shows how ignorant you are of both our country's freedoms and what it means to have basic civility to others, and why it's so important that we don't take having either for granted.
And here's a frequently asked question:
You blogged about this? Why not just go over to her and ask her to keep it down, or take it outside? It sounds like there were two immature people in that Starbucks.Posted by: Not Amy at January 12, 2007 12:58 PM
It was The Rose Cafe, not Starbucks. And here's my response:
That was the part that didn't make it into (Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Saranow's story -- along with my name and a few other details). Conveniently, I still have the answers to the questions along those lines asked by the reporter. I'll paste the text in below:I just don't always feel like getting into an argument with people in the moment. People who are rude enough to shout into their phone in a public place are often too rude to care that you're disturbed by their phone call, and will get ugly with you even if you ask in the most polite way for them to pipe down a little. And why should I have to say something to them and potentially get into an ugly situation? No, we didn't have cell phones growing up, but weren't we all schooled in "Do unto others..."? Does Eva Burgess really want to hear me shouting into my phone about my personal business? Maybe, since I have her number I should call her up and read her my grocery list?Incidentally, Saranow's editor e-mailed me to say he wanted to talk to me about why my name wasn't included in the story. I'm of the "more is more" school of journalism: Give people information, don't withhold it from them, so I couldn't understand why they led the story with what I did, yet called me a "blogger" instead of, say, "blogger Amy Alkon."
I was on deadline when he e-mailed me, but I hope to speak to him today.
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Do-It-Yourself Diplomacy
I'm all for it. It's amazing what can be accomplished by regular people, a world away from a disaster.When I heard Bill Clinton speak at the alternative weekly newspaper association conference this past summer, he talked about how we did more to bridge differences between ourselves and Muslims in the east with the relief we gave after the Tsunami -- i.e., more than with any war (supposedly for democracy) that we might have gotten ourselves into in the Middle East.
And now, ordinary citizens are fighting genocide in Darfur with bake sales and lawn signs, writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times:
President George W. Bush and other world leaders have dropped the ball on Darfur. But that vacuum of moral leadership has been filled by university students, churches and temples, celebrities like George Clooney and Mia Farrow, and armies of schoolchildren.Their arsenal — green armbands, phone calls to the White House, bake sales to raise money — all seem pallid. How can a "Save Darfur" lawn sign in Peoria intimidate government-backed raiders in Sudan or Chad who throw babies into bonfires?
Yet, finally, we see evidence that those armbands and lawn signs can make a difference. Last week, the Save Darfur Coalition — the grass-roots organization that puts out those lawn signs — sponsored a trip by Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor, to Khartoum to negotiate with President Omar al-Bashir.
Sure, it's a little weird when a private advocacy group undertakes freelance diplomacy. But if Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Hu Jintao twiddle their thumbs, then more power to the freelancers.
Richardson worked out a joint statement in which Sudan agreed to a 60-day cease-fire to allow peace talks to resume, provided the Darfur rebels go along as well. Bashir also agreed that Sudan would prosecute rapes and stop painting its military aircraft to look as if they belong to the United Nations.
...It's clear that the cease-fire was a consequence of all those armbands and lawn signs. Richardson told me that Bashir was motivated by concern at the way the killings have been spotlighted by Darfur activists. Richardson quoted him as saying, "These guys have caused me a lot of damage."
Ken Bacon, who heads Refugees International and accompanied Richardson, said of Bashir: "One thing that was very clear was that the Save Darfur movement has gotten under his skin. The vilification of the Khartoum regime in columns and editorials and ads is making a difference."
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Wouldn't A Fly Swatter Be Sufficient?
Photo by Jackie Danicki.
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No Dumb Kids Left Behind?
Interesting op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. Murray says the real limits on children -- the ones that cannot be repealed -- are the ones placed on them by intelligence. You can pump up a high-IQ underachiever to do better in school, but a kid with a low IQ is likely to be "left behind" no matter what. Here's an excerpt from Murray's piece -- the first in a three-part series:Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95....To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Would we be better serving the kids lower on the IQ scale if they learned skills more suited to their level of ability and job potential -- basic reading and writing skills, elementary reasoning, calculation of percentages and such...and taught them a trade -- instead of treating them like they're college bound?
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The Bush Legacy
First, the short version, by Tom Tomorrow:I got us into this clusterfuck and by god, I’m keeping us there.For the expanded version (sorry, Crid!), we turn to Keith Olbermann:
Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America.Now he says it is vital.
He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control.
Last night he promised to embed them in Iraqi units.
He told us about WMD.
Mobile labs.
Secret sources.
Aluminum tubes.
Yellow-cake.
He has told us the war is necessary:
Because Saddam was a material threat.
Because of 9/11.
Because of Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaida. Terrorism in general.
To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom. To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases.
Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.
Because — 439 words in to the speech last night — he trotted out 9/11 again.
In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
To get Muqtada Al-Sadr. To get Bin Laden.
He sent in fewer troops than the generals told him to. He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government “de-Baathified.”
He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.
He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. He gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
He and his government told us: America had prevailed, mission accomplished, the resistance was in its last throes.
He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.
He has insisted it’s up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.
He has trumpeted the turning points:
The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam. A provisional government, a charter, a constitution, the trial of Saddam. Elections, purple fingers, another government, the death of Saddam.
He has assured us: We would be greeted as liberators — with flowers;
As they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about “stay the course.”
We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad. And, last night, that to gain Iraqis’ trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.
He told us the enemy was al-Qaida, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.
He told us the war would pay for itself. It would cost $1.7 billion. $100 billion. $400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night’s speech alone cost another $6 billion.
And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November and the majority of the American people.
How did anybody buy into this? Is it because he looks like a cowboy people want to have drinks with? Because he makes the fundies feel safe that they won't have to believe that hoohah about the Grand Canyon being millions of years old?
And, finally, who here is a reformed Bush believer? Come out, come out, wherever you are.
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Arnold For President
Arnold and/or any other foreign-born Americans who want to run. An LA Times editorial rightly points out that the prohibition against the foreign-born running for president comes out of the founding fathers' fears of a foreign king and an ensuing foreign takeover.The editorial rightly suggests amending the Constitution to be more in keeping with the times: We're a nation of immigrants, many of whom are more exemplary and loyal to their adopted country than people born here.
I'm reminded of a volunteer I met on election nite at Schwarzenegger headquarters (I was there for Pajamas Media), who'd emigrated from Russia. She'd never missed voting -- couldn't even imagine it -- in the 40-some years she'd been in the USA, and appreciated this country in a way few Americans seem to.
Here's the essential excerpt from the LA Times piece:
Supporting Schwarzenegger for governor (we did) does not necessarily lead to supporting him for president (we don't — yet). But why should Californians have their governor sidelined from the race? And why can't voters across the country be entrusted to decide for themselves whether the governor of California is sufficiently "American" to earn their vote? It's insulting, really.Yes, the nation will manage without Schwarzenegger at the helm. But his situation is a reminder of this constitutional flaw. The issue is also important at a symbolic level. It isn't that there aren't enough qualified "natural-born" Americans to run for the highest office in the land, it's that there is an asterisk attached to the citizenship of many great Americans.
Think about it. Someone could come to the U.S. at the age of 2 from Britain or China or Peru, become a citizen, join the military, win a Medal of Honor, cure cancer — but that person would still not be "good enough" for the White House.
One of the exceptional qualities of this meritocratic nation of immigrants is its sense of possibility. Americans like to tell their kids that they can be anything they want to be when they grow up — including president. But for millions of patriotic Americans, the Constitution says otherwise. The idea of citizenship only as a birthright is a decidedly foreign notion. And the idea that voters cannot elect as their leader a naturalized citizen is decidedly undemocratic.
That's why California's representatives in Washington should support a constitutional amendment. If the United States is a nation of immigrants, California is a state of immigrants. And California leaders who want to hold on to the 18th century prohibition against naturalized citizens running for the presidency are not doing a very good job representing their constituents.
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Where The Wild Things Aren't
Well, not at this lady's daughter's wedding, for starters.No, it isn't just assclowns on cell phones I'm irritated about. The underparented child is one of my perennial un-favorites. In keeping with this week's Advice Goddess Blog theme of the disintegration of public manners, here's the Advice Goddess column I just posted:
My daughter is getting married this month, and we’re having a formal evening reception featuring champagne and dancing. On the invitation, we stated “Adult Reception.” You cannot imagine the trauma this has caused. We don’t have the budget to have lots of children at the reception, but more importantly, my daughter, her fiancé, and I feel a formal evening event is not appropriate for children. Were we out of line, and do we need to apologize?--Mother Of The Bride-To-Be
And here's my answer:
Well, excuse you if the last two words you want to hear at your daughter’s wedding are “FOOOOD FIGHT!” And maybe, just maybe you’d like to avoid having some parent pull you aside at the reception and whisper, “You don’t think the bridesmaids’ dresses are flammable, do you? My 8-year-old’s in her arson phase again.”Who says America isn’t a monarchy? It’s ruled by millions of tiny tyrants named Cody and Madison, presiding over adult-sized serfs called parents whose single greatest fear is not being liked by their children. Such parents have their uses. No, not setting boundaries, but filling toy orders, nodding submissively at their children’s self-revised bedtimes, and sweeping up meatloaf and peas hurled on the floor and replacing them with Cocoa Krispies with a side of Snickers in chocolate sauce.
Parents like these are convinced that the world revolves around their children, and they can’t understand why your wedding should be any different: A little cake, a little champagne, and little Amber yelling out in the middle of the father of the bride’s toast, “Mommy, Jason cut one!” “Did not!” “Did too!” The truth is, even well-behaved kids are still kids: at times, whiney, ornery, fidgety attention-piggies. The bottom line is that this event is not being catered by Ronald McDonald, and will not feature kiddie karaoke, games of Super Soak The Groom, or Pin The Tail On The Bride. Accordingly, you tactfully informed your guests that you’re having an “Adult Reception” instead of getting more to the point: “Leave your loud, underparented brats at home.”
Quite frankly, you’re doing the rest of us a favor by setting limits for the savages. Because people get tweaked about it doesn’t mean they’re right and you’re wrong. (It’s your party, you can ban crying babies if you want to -- and shy, angelic 13-year-olds, too.) Think about what these people are asking; essentially, “Hey! Where’s my kid’s free dinner and entertainment?!” It’s the height of rudeness. And now, ask yourself something: What kind of person goes through “trauma” over a subtly worded hint that an elegant champagne formal is no place for children? Who else? The parents who are last to understand that having their particular kids in attendance means you’ll not only need monogrammed napkins and place cards, but precut strips of monogrammed duct tape to bind and gag the little darlings when they act out.
As for any parents who get indignant at the need to hire a sitter, if this was going to be an issue, they should’ve used protection. That said, if some of your guests are coming from afar and bringing their children, you might want to provide a list of baby-sitters, or even set up a baby-sitting service in a hotel room or at somebody’s house. But apologize? Please. You may as well send out revised invitations that say, “Why stop at the kids? Why not bring your Saint Bernard? And, hey…while you’re at it, truck over your daughter’s life-sized robotic pony so she can gallop circles around the bride and her father while they share the first dance.”
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We Get Hate Mail!
This one's from Lehigh Valley, PA, about this recent Advice Goddess column, "Where The Wild Things Aren't."A lady (see above entry) sent out invitations to her daughter's wedding, noting that there would be an "Adult Reception." Oh, the uproar. The child-indulgent went loonytunes. I told her to stand her ground. My response: essentially -- It's your party, you can ban screaming brats if you want to.
The lady who sent the angry letter below (I think it's a lady) probably reads me in the Allentown Morning Call. This is actually the first in a series of letters from the same lady; this one postmarked December 30.
The letter I got from her last week (same handwriting/postmark code) was signed "Anonymous." Ooh, clever. Gutsy! What does she think I might do if I have her name and address, mail her a bunch of exploding bad prose?
In case it's hard for you to read, here's an excerpt:
Nice you are not. Bitter, heartless, abusive & miserable, yes! Going to great lengths to call children "tiny tyrants" & "savages" along with food fight elaboration is sick. What happened to you in your childhood? Hope children are not part of your life. They don't deserve you! Seek therapy! You are sick! Also a stinko advice columnist!I love the serial hate-mail writers, especially the hilariously humorless ones. As for her suggestion that kids don't "deserve" me, the kids really don't seem to give a shit.
My 10-year-old friend Oliver, for example, loved that he got to read the above column while it was in progress (I called him to fact-check the food items I used with him). He said the column cracked him up, and asked me when I was coming to see him and his family.
I actually have a few kids who are my friends. Two are the kids, 3 and 6, of my closest neighbors. The moment they spot me, they yell, "Amy! Amy! Amy!" and drag me off to show me their latest fort or dinosaur warren they've built.
Oliver, Avery, and Sophie are in New York. Their mom produced a TV thing I was in. They've since adopted me. I call them "my sitcom family," because they're hilarious -- never a dull moment, and they'd be depressed and so would I if I didn't stay with them when I'm in New York. (I think they secretly hate it when Gregg comes because I stay with him in hotel instead of on their sofa bed.)
Perhaps I'm not giving my all to communicate what a "bitter, heartless, abusive & miserable" individual I truly am? The truth is, I don't dislike kids; I enjoy some kids as individuals, just like I like (certain) adults. I just really, really resent the hell out of bad parents.
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Please Melt
Sure, come to America (ideally, if you are a highly educated Japanese scientist -- not a Muslim looking to take flight lessons and spread the joy of Sharia law).The way I see it, immigrants and foreign visitors are guests in our country, and should behave accordingly. I don't go to France demanding that things be done like they are in America. If I need things done like they are in America, I'll stay home.
Swedish politician Nyamko Sabuni, herself an emigrant from the Congo, champions an idea I've taken for granted until recent years: that immigrants need to make an effort to fit into their adopted country. Sarah Lyall writes about Sabuni in the IHT:
Nyamko Sabuni would stand out anyway, being tiny, dark-skinned and obviously foreign in a place where those things are still anomalies. But as the recently appointed minister for integration and gender equality, she tends to draw more attention for her unusually blunt pronouncements about the place of immigrants in Swedish society.As an opposition politician, Sabuni proposed banning the veil for girls under the age of 15. She proposed that schoolgirls undergo compulsory medical examinations to check for evidence of genital mutilation. She denounced what she called the "honor culture" of some immigrant groups, proposed outlawing arranged marriages and called for an end to state funding of religious schools.
Even as furious immigrant and minority groups demand that she be removed from her post, Sabuni, 37, insists that she is not as extreme as people make her out to be. Given the political reality of Sweden's center-right coalition government, it is unlikely, anyway, that most of her ideas could plausibly translate into actual law.
..."A lot of people misread their rights," she said recently. "They think that freedom of religion means that they can do anything in the name of religion, or that human rights means that they can act however they want against others."
Not true, she said. "If they want to live here, have kids, have grandchildren, they must make an effort to adapt to the society where they live."
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"The Lord Has Chossen You As A Vessel"
My favorite spam e-mail of the week.The Lord has "chossen" me as a vessel? The Lord should get spell-check.
Unfortunately, "The Lord" never got around to e-mailing me to tell me exactly what kind of vessel I'd be. Nuclear sub? Empty Pellegrino bottle? Microwaveable fish cooker?
A very nice lady in Nigeria says she'll ask him and get back to me -- if only I'll give him my bank account numbers so he can be sure it's really me.
I guess all it takes is one dumbshit in a million.
While we're in the land of, well, irrational thought...how would you feel about voting for a presidential candidate who said, in all seriousness:
"I have a simple philosophy – we need to take the tooth fairy more seriously and ourselves less seriously.’’I mean, we have no evidence the tooth fairy exists, so the guy would have to be a light in the thinky department, huh? Same as if he said what he really said, which is:
I have a simple philosophy – we need to take God more seriously and ourselves less seriously.’’I think we need to take Zeus more seriously, but only when I have a really bad fever.
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The Truth Will Set Your Freer Than You'd Like
Another great Bob Morris column in Sunday's New York Times, about the truths we're not allowed to tell. You can't say anything about a woman's age, and also off-limits is calling anyone fat:...When someone asks you “Does this dress makes me look fat?” you have to say no, even when it does. Had Donald Trump known that calling a woman fat is never allowed (even one who fully admits that she is), he might have saved himself from prolonging his ongoing feud with Rosie O’Donnell.“The F word in our house is fat,” Ms. O’Donnell said on “The View” last week.
It seemed to be a curse in Nan Kempner’s house too. The late famously thin socialite once caused a public furor when she quipped that she “loathed fat people.”
Imagine how she would feel right now, when extra-skinny models are under attack by the fashion industry, as are certain actresses who are being called anorexic by the press. But forgive me. Speaking truthfully of dead socialites isn’t really allowed either, is it? O.K., so Helen Mirren, who would later play a British royal, got away with saying about the public response to Princess Diana’s death, “I didn’t see it as grief,” but as “addicts having their drug taken away.”
But when the Australian author and commentator Germaine Greer astutely suggested that Steve Irwin, the much mourned crocodile hunter of Australia, was responsible for his own death because he got too close to wild animals, she suffered a severe lambasting.
One Australian politician was so outraged he labeled her stupid.
John Kerry got similar treatment last fall when his “botched” joke suggested that hard-working students don’t end up in Iraq, even though many people do see the military as a last resort for people whose options don’t always include a college education.
And Gwyneth Paltrow had a lot of backpedaling to do last month after being quoted in England saying that the British are more intelligent and civilized than Americans. She also said that instead of talking about work and money, the English converse about interesting things at dinner parties, and that London is not as hectic as New York or as vapid as Los Angeles. Hard to disagree.
But that doesn’t mean that she’s allowed to talk like that.
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Next, We'll Blow Glass To Make A Bottle To Store It In!
I've always hated all those suggestions that people eschew store-bought hair products and, say, pour a giant jar of mayo on their heads. You can get Pantene at the drugstore for a couple dozen coins...why go to the trouble and mess?Quite frankly, if you can't afford drugstore hair products, you've got bigger problems than dull, lifeless hair or skin. Yet, there's always this notion that it's just wunnnderful -- almost holy -- when people come up with these homemade innovations in beauty. I just read a posting on Consumerist linking to some girl who suggests using baking soda as an exfoliant "instead of paying extra money," blah blah blah. Here's the quote from the blogger, twopenniesearned:
Instead of paying extra money for a facial exfoliant that is probably too harsh for the delicate skin on your face (despite what the manufacturer would have you believe), just add a little bit of baking soda to some Cetaphil (an excellent mild face wash that I use twice a day), mix with your fingertips, massage in circles all over your face, and rinse. For a gentler exfoliant, simply use more Cetaphil and less baking soda in your mixture.Here's the comment I left on Consumerist:
Oh, please. St. Ives apricot scrub is $2.99 a tube. Isn't your time worth something? How many years of your life do you spend gathering ingredients, mixing baking soda in a little bowl, then washing the bowl, blah blah blah? It's 2007, no need to live like we're all starring in a remake of "Little House On The Prairie."In the time you'll save, over a lifetime, if you avoid mixing up your own face potions, I recommend reading "Passionate Minds," by David Bodanis, about the love affaire of Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire.
And P.S. As I believe I've posted here before, the only face potions you really need are: Cetaphil (about $12 for a Costco vat of the stuff that lasts at least six months, St. Ives, and sunblock that actually blocks sun). No moisturizer made from sheep feces that requires a second mortgage to purchase, none of that.
And let's move on from the Laura Ingalls Wilder days, shall we?
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There's No Such Thing As "Progressive" Humor
I'll take the "pollution" of actually funny guys like Greg Gutfeld over whiny weenies like David O. Russell any day.*
Eva Burgess' Optometric Needs Make The Wall Street Journal
Although the reporter, Jennifer Saranow, spent hours talking to me by phone and e-mail about my various "blogslappings" of the undercivilized, I ended up as mere background (grrr!). I told her she might warn people of that when she interviews them in the future. She thought that was good advice. Yeah, I'm all about good advice.Saranow does mention my blog item on Eva Burgess, the cell phone shouter from The Rose Cafe a few weeks ago. Here's a quote from Saranow's piece (free access):
Last month, Eva Burgess was eating breakfast at the Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., when she remembered she needed to make an appointment with her eye doctor. So the New York theater director got on her cellphone and booked a date.Almost immediately, she started receiving "weird and creepy" calls directing her to a blog. There, under the posting "Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!" her name, cellphone number and other details mentioned in her call to the doctor's office were posted, along with the admonition, "next time, you might take your business outside." The offended blogger had been sitting next to Ms. Burgess in the cafe.
It used to be the worst you could get for a petty wrong in public was a rude look. Now, it's not just brutal police officers, panty-free celebrities and wayward politicians who are being outed online. The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking (Caughtya.org) and leering (HollaBackNYC.com) to littering (LitterButt.com) and general bad behavior (RudePeople.com). One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre.
Helping drive the exposés are a crop of entrepreneurs who hope to sell advertising and subscriptions. One site that lets people identify bad drivers is about to offer a $5 monthly service, for people to register several of their own plate numbers and receive notices if they are cited by other drivers. But the traffic and commercial prospects for many of the sites are so limited that clearly there is something else at work.
The embrace of the Web to expose trivial transgressions in part represents a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some academics believe shame became less powerful as a control over everyday interactions with strangers in all but very small neighborhoods or social groups, as people moved to big cities or impersonal suburbs where they existed more anonymously.
P.S. I'm writing a book about my blogslappings and other episodes of "do-it-yourself justice," like recovering my stolen car and getting telemarketers to pay me for use of my time and phone line. I just sent the revised proposal to my agent.
And finally, thank you to everyone who called Eva Burgess. If people can't be persuaded to be considerate because it's the right thing to do, perhaps they'll be persuaded because they don't want a lot of weird calls from strangers who also resent having their breakfast interrupted by somebody else's loud, dull life.
Ever notice how you rarely hear valuable information dispensed in these high-volume public calls?...although there was that time the guy sitting behind me on the plane to SF talked about his multi-million-dollar insurance deal while we were stuck on the tarmac for half an hour. A secret multi-million-dollar insurance deal he would've been screwed on if "anyone" found out "before Monday."
Unfortunately, I was too busy to blog it when I got there. Not only was the guy rude, he was stupid. I took notes on his conversation, then, when I was getting off the plane, I even "fact-checked" a name he'd mentioned. "Excuse me, but was that Scott Colber, C-O-L-B-E-R, you were talking about?" I asked him.
No, it's "Culver, C-U-L-V-E-R," he said. Boy, did that guy get lucky I had a busy weekend.
UPDATE: Kate Coe links to it here on FishbowlLA.
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If You Make $7.25 An Hour, How Dare You Have A Kid?
I was reading Consumerist.com, one of my favorite sites, when I came upon this quote in a piece about the minimum wage, from a Washington Post story by David Finkel:At the register, meanwhile, Shannon Wilk, 33, who makes $6.25 an hour, said that of course she would like to earn more money. It would help her. It would help her 18-month-old daughter. "It would be good," she said, "but also, for me, I live in income-based housing, and if I get a raise, my rent would go up, and I would lose my assistance." Even the tiniest raise would affect her, she said, and with nowhere to go, the last thing she can afford is a raise to $7.25.Hell, I waited until I was in my mid-thirties to even own a dog, because I needed to know I could afford whatever medical care she might need. (And a lucky thing that was, since she needed a $900 PET scan [don't laugh, that's what they're called] when she was just a tiny puppy.) How horribly selfish and irresponsible to extrude a child into the world when you can't even afford to pay for your own needs, let alone the child's.
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Bush's Best Friends Are Financing The War
For the other side, that is:CAIRO, Egypt -- Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.
But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.
Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zakat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.
Some Saudis appear to know the money is headed to Iraq's insurgents, but others merely give it to clerics who channel it to anti-coalition forces, the officials said.
In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.
Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.
"There isn't any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts," said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any "suspicious financial operations," he said.
But the Iraq Study Group said "funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."
Here's a picture of our president with his Saudi Arabian girlfriend, Crown Prince Abdullah.
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Meet The Burqini
Muslim Women in New Zealand feel perfectly comfortable demanding society bend over to meet their primitive religious needs -- like the edict that Muslim women have to go around in pup tents. From The Dominion Post, the Kiwi Muslim women, like Muslim women in other western societies, say they must have "special pools where they can swim without compromising their religious beliefs." They currently are without special pools, and...Because of this, many Muslim women had no opportunities to exercise and were putting on weight."They become medically unfit. Their health is affected and they're quite depressed."
What a bunch of crap. I don't go to a gym. I have an excercise bike in my home. Of course, I'd find it a little hard to exercise wearing a burqa, so I just throw on a pair of yoga pants and a bra and pedal (thanks, Kitt!) away. I find the suggestion that society should warp itself -- that tax dollars should go to meeting people's weird, unmodern religious needs -- akin to being invited over to somebody's house for dinner and demanding they cook an entirely different meal for you.
If your religious practices don't fit with a society -- perhaps you don't belong in that society. Freedom to practice one's religion is one thing, but this, like the Orthodox Jews demanding an "eruv" -- a line of fishing wire that could prove dangerous to the birds and may spoil the view for people, simply so the Orthodox Jews can do stuff on Sabbath -- is disgusting.
The difference is, I don't think you can find an Orthodox Jew (maybe there's one nutbag somewhere) who wants all the rest of us either dead or converted to Judaism. I still don't think society should be warped to meet people's imaginary needs. What if I have an imaginary husband, who drives an imaginary car, and I live in an area where there's permit parking. Should my imaginary husband get an extra parking pass?
On the bright side for the Muslim fundamentalists, until they can get us to bend to their will and build them their own swimming pools, there's now the "burqini" (photo at link) so Muslim women can maybe swim when other women do. Oops, but back to the article, there's the problem of naked rational people around them!
Martin Winkels, of the Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre at Kilbirnie, said the complex offered private spas and three family changing rooms for customers who may wish to bathe or change in private.He knew of only one incident in which a brown-skinned man expressed his unhappiness at being in changing rooms where other men were standing undressed before or after going swimming.
Hey, it's the 21st century. There's no evidence of god, despite millions of sheep who believe in god, sans evidence, and far too many who believe their god commands them to convert or kill those who believe in other gods or who don't believe at all (like me). How pathetic that, in light of all the science we have, people are still bowing down to the imaginary and running their lives on it. How scary that it might lead to them murdering some or all of the rest of us. Don't think for a moment that the swimming pool demand is the last one they'll make on our society. Many want nothing less than Sharia law enacted on all of us.
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Drawing A Smileyface On The War
I'm not a liberal. I'm not a dove. I think we should have flattened the mountains of Afghanistan after 9-11 to get Osama. But, what I'm not for, as a true fiscal conservative/libertarian is the "nation building" George Bush promised not to do -- and certainly not on bullshit Gulf of Tonkin-type reasons.What's shocked me most, vis a vis Iraq, in the past few years, is the way "conservatives" (or rather, people who call themselves that -- often mainly because they're religious nutters) have stood behind the president no matter what he does.
Jay Rosen has an interesting piece about this on Pressthink. He writes of Rich Lowry's National Review column of December 19:
Speaking to fellow conservatives (and directly to warbloggers, I thought…) Lowry started slowly: “The conservative campaign against the mainstream media” has certainly “scored some notable successes.” Dan Rather’s national guard investigation and Newsweek’s Koran desecration story are mentioned. (And how great would it have been to add the Jamil Hussein saga?)He’s right: we’ve had a conservative campaign against the mainstream news media. But has this campaign been good for conservatives? Not in Iraq. “The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit,” Lowry wrote. “It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.”
That such a discovery—hey, the press can be accurate, people—would be confounding to conservatives is important to know. I give Lowry a lot of credit for saying that. (Prompting Ed Morrissey to agree.) For it shows how far things had gotten.
In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.Yes, and by helping to forestall that cold look they were helping to create the huge failure that our policy in Iraq has become.
As I argued in my Dec. 18 post (and the 214 comments it drew) the Bush government’s retreat from empiricism is not some unfortunate tendency or bad habit that George W. Bush fell into. It’s part of an emancipatory impulse in the political style that he and Cheney invented, right in front of our eyes. I draw attention to its down side when I call it a retreat. The upside is you are much freer to act, to invent, to surge and conceal your surging from the enemy.
There’s a story I want to tell you from Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks, Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. That’s the book that recently made Republican Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon “heartsick” because it documents, on page after page, the retreat from empiricism and lack of professionalism (as well as failed oversight) in the making of the war.
Ricks is discussing Retired Lt. General Jay Garner’s preparations to head to Iraq and take charge of post-war operations for the White House. This is Bush’s man on the ground, hand-picked. On Feb. 21-22, 2003 Garner convened experts from across the government for the one and only meeting they would have to bring war policy roughly in line with what they could roughly predict would happen. (The effort failed.) Ricks goes on:
Of all those speaking those two days, one person in particular caught Garner’s attention. Scrambling to catch up with the best thinking, Garner was looking for someone who had assembled the facts and who knew all the players in the U.S. government, the Iraqi exile community, and international organizations, and had considered the second-and third-order consequences of possible actions. While everyone else was fumbling for facts, this man had dozens of binders, tabbed amd indexed, on every aspect of Iaqi society, from how electricity was generated to how the port of Basra operated, recalled another participant.
“They had better stuff in those binders than the ‘eyes only’ stuff I eventually got from the CIA,” said a military expert who attended.“There’s this one guy who knew everything, everybody, and he kept on talking,” Garner recalled. At lunch, Garner took him aside. Who are you? the old general asked. Tom Warrick, the man answered.
“How come you know all this?” Garner asked.
“I’ve been working on this for a year,” Warrick said. He said he was at the State Department, where he headed a project called the Future of Iraq, a sprawling effort that relied heavily on the expertise of Iraqi exiles.
“Come to work for me on Monday,” Garner said.
And Warrick did just that. A few days later Rumsfeld takes Garner aside and tells him he has to get rid of Warrick. “I can’t,” says Garner. He’s good, he’s smart and he knows a ton about Iraq. Rumseld says there’s nothing he can do; the order comes from above. Garner goes to see Stephen Hadley, deputy director of the National Security Council. Hadley can’t do anything either. Later Richard Armitage explains it to Ricks. “Anybody that knows anything is removed.” And Warrick was removed from Garner’s team, undoubtedly on Cheney’s orders.
Now why would the White House (Cheney) hamper the White House (Garner) in that particular way? The retreat from empiricism is replete with puzzles of this kind. That’s why it’s important for conservatives and warbloggers to ask how it happened on their watch.
Links within are live if you go to the original piece.
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The Path Of Leash Resistence
I just posted another one of my Advice Goddess columns, about a girl whose boyfriend is either controlling or "pushing her to be her best." Here's the question:I’m 26; my boyfriend is 32. He called me “a woman about to bloom,” and said he wants to be there to help. He started by pushing me to move out of my mother’s house after my situation there became unbearable. I dreaded leaving my comfort zone, but now I’m thrilled to have my own place. He’s also urging me to move up the ranks at work by dressing the part, being punctual, and wearing makeup. His exact words: “You will wear makeup.” No, I don’t dress as nicely as I could, and I’m really makeup-free out of laziness, but I was in jeans, an old shirt, and no makeup when we met. Lately, even if we’re going to the mall, he expects me to look nicer. Sometimes I feel like a child being told what to do. When I overslept and was late to work yesterday, he said, “This is not acceptable.” Granted, he’s successful, works hard, and is never late. Some of my friends think he’s controlling, and others think he’s pushing me to be my best. Which is it? He says he loves me for who I am, and then tells me to change.--A Little Confused
And here's my answer:
You aren’t the only one who’s confused. Does your boyfriend often seem unsure whether to take you to dinner or to the dog park so you can scramble after an old tennis ball, and maybe sniff some Yorkshire terrier butt? Set the guy straight: You’ll take advice, upon request -- not orders. You’re his girlfriend, not his cocker spaniel.Okay, he’s older, seems to know a few things, and hasn’t been late since he emerged from the womb. And you? In the words he must’ve borrowed from some ad exec on the pantiliner account, you’re just “a woman about to bloom.” He probably means well, but have you ever known a plant to flower because somebody’s standing over it and yelling at it?
Don’t be too quick to assume that his South American dictator approach to life-coaching comes from feeling personally together and secure. Chances are, beneath that titanium super-executive shell of his, there’s a tiny, sweaty man living in terror of spontaneity, uncertainty, and disorder. Avoiding those fears turns a guy into a control freak -- staving off his anxiety by micromanaging you from head to toenail polish, all the while insisting he loves you just the way you are.
That said, can you really argue with being on time and looking spiffy for work? Well, unlikely as it is that your boss will base her next round of promotions on which employees arrive latest and most undergroomed…maybe your boyfriend’s ambition is not your ambition. Figure out who you are and what you want, and maybe it’ll coincide with what he thinks is best for you. Or, maybe you’ll choose to take your chances that, say, avoiding what I call “The Purina Lifestyle” (cat-food casseroles in your 80s) won’t hinge on whether you have the energy to apply eyeliner on Wednesday.
As for dressing up to please your boyfriend, what does dressing up mean to you? Is it no big deal, just a little thing you do to make him happy? Or is it what camping is to me, as somebody who sees “getting close to nature” as walking down a city sidewalk where there’s grass growing up between the cracks? I can love a man to pieces, but if I’m cold, dirty, and being chased by a bear…suddenly, it will all become clear: Love is not the answer, a four-star hotel room with pulsating shower heads is the answer.
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Reminder! Sue Shapiro-A-Thon
My NYC friend, Sue Shapiro, (originally from the Detroit suburbs, like me), is largely or partially responsible for the careers of an incredible number of writers of magazine and newspaper articles and books.
I believe she still holds a regular Tuesday night writers' workshop at her apartment, free of charge, where writers and aspiring writers come to have Sue and writers like her friend Gerry Jonas critique their work. (Bio: Gerald Jonas was a regular reviewer of science fiction for the New York Times, the author of six nonfiction books and a screenwriter of nationally televised documentaries. He worked at The New Yorker from 1963-1993).After one of my friends -- an events planner -- attended Sue's Tuesday night workshops, he started publishing pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and national magazines. A typical story.
Nobody's better than Sue on the topic of how to sell stuff -- books or articles -- and she's coming to Los Angeles January 10-13 on a book tour for her new book, Secrets Of A Fix-Up Fanatic, and a few Media Bistro seminars. The first one sounds particularly good. David Ulin is the editor of the LA Times' book section. Martin Smith is an editor at the magazine. And Betsy and B.J. are very smart literary agents:
Wednesday night 1/10 7 to 9 FROM JOURNALIST TO BOOK AUTHOR panel with guest star agents B.J. Robbins& Betsy Amster and L.A. Times editors David Ulin & Martin J. Smith at the Ted Ashley room of the American Film Institute 2021 N. Western Avenue $20 tickets at the door phone: 323-856-7600Thursday 1/11 from 7 to 8 pm SANTA MONICA BORDERS BOOKS READING of SECRETS OF A FIX-UP FANATIC 1415 3rd Street Promande Free & open to the public
Saturday 1/13 HOW TO SELL YOUR FIRST BOOK SEMINAR
from 2 to 8 pm w/agent Besty Amster in West Hollywood
$100 ($75 for members) register on Mediabistro.comI haven't read Secrets yet, but I loved Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking, And Everything Else I Love In Life But Sex, and Five Men Who Broke My Heart (one of whom is a rather famous evolutionary psychologist I know...who turned bright red, this summer at Penn, when I told him we had a friend in common, and who).
Sue's site is here.
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Borrowing From Karzai To Pay Al-Maliki
That "troop surge" has to come from somewhere, huh? Like, from our forces in Afghanistan. David Wood writes for the Balt Sun:KABUL, Afghanistan -- Taliban forces, shattered and ejected from Afghanistan by the US military five years ago, are poised for a major offensive against US troops and undermanned NATO forces. This has prompted US commanders here to issue an urgent appeal for a new US Marine Corps battalion to reinforce the American positions.NATO's 30,000 troops in Afghanistan are supposed to have taken responsibility for security operations. But Taliban attacks have risen sharply, and senior US officers here describe the NATO operation as weak, hobbled by a shortage of manpower and equipment, and by restrictions put on the troops by their capitals.
The accelerating war here and the critical need for troops complicate the crumbling security picture across the region -- from Afghanistan, where the United States chose to strike back after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, to Iraq, where US troops, in almost four years of fighting, have been unable to establish basic security and quell a bloody sectarian war.
President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Let's just hope we don't need to deploy any soldiers anywhere else in the world. Hmmm, suddenly, all those gay soldiers the armed services spat on are looking pretty good, huh?
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An American Foreign Legion
How long before we outsource our armed services? Colby Cosh thinks we eventually won't have a choice:America was once able to promise young men pensions, access to higher education and lifelong health care in exchange for military service. But today, every American enjoys Social Security and Medicare as a matter of right, and college is no longer an upper-class game preserve. Military service has become an evaporating social duty unsupported by economic incentives. And with family sizes decreasing, parents are becoming more sentimental toward children and less likely to urge them toward the profession of arms. To put it bluntly, military recruitment is easiest where human life is held less dear.The prestige of soldiering in the United States is being annihilated by American virtues: high social mobility, low unemployment and infinite possibilities for the young. Because of the same virtues, hundreds risk their lives every day just to physically enter the bounds of the U.S. If they were asked to face similar hazards on behalf of the American cause, in exchange for English-language instruction and access to genuine American citizenship, the queue would girdle the globe.
Some find the idea of recruiting "American" soldiers in Mexico or India distasteful. The concept has already inspired talk of "blood money" and "coercion" of the world's poor. And foreign military recruitment is dangerous to national security in the long run, as the Romans (and the French) discovered. But for the U.S., there is no other way out of the immediate dilemma. Sooner or later, under one name or another, there will be an American Foreign Legion.
Troop "surges," no draft, and an overextended military. What other answer is there?
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Ugly Is All-Natural; Beauty Takes Work
I'm sick of the celebration of the supposed egalitarianism of ugly. Garance Franke-Ruta writes in The Wall Street Journal that the push for women to be accepted "as they are" or to be seen as beautiful without any effort is what's most anti-egalitarian:It is far more punishing than the one that says any woman can be beautiful if she merely treats beauty as a form of discipline.Only in America do we think that beauty is a purely natural attribute rather than a type of artistry requiring effort. Look at the French: They are no more beautiful as a people than we Americans, but they understand that every woman can be attractive--if not beautiful--if she chooses to be. Yes, we are given forms by nature, but how we choose to present them is a matter of our own discretion. Few people are blessed by nature and circumstance with the Golden Mean proportions that seem to be universally appreciated. Thus, in the end, it is more democratic to think of beauty or attractiveness as an attribute that one can acquire, like speaking a foreign language or cooking well. To see beauty as a capacity like any other--the product of educated taste and daily discipline--is to see it as something chosen: to be possessed or left aside, according to one's preference.
The same goes, relatedly, for maintaining a certain size. In contemporary America, becoming thin is a choice that for most people requires rigorous and sometimes painful self-discipline. But so does becoming a lawyer, or a concert pianist. The celebrity press is wrongly decried for giving women false ideals. In fact, it has demystified the relationship between effort and beauty, between discipline and weight. It opens up a path for non-celebrities.
One celebrity glossy recently estimated that, in a single year, the actress Jennifer Aniston spends close to the average woman's annual salary on trainers and other aspects of a high-level work-out. Former tween-queen Britney Spears told Oprah Winfrey that she used to do between 500 and 1,000 crunches a day to perfect her on-display abs. Actress Kate Hudson told one interviewer that, to lose post-pregnancy "baby weight," she worked out three hours a day until she lost her 70 pounds: It was so hard that she used to sit on the exercise cycle and cry. Entertainment figures and models are like athletes; it takes a lot of discipline and social support to look like them. Money helps, too.
The celebrity magazines also specialize in a genre of stories best understood as tutorials in beauty as artifice: celebrities without their make-up. Makeover shows like "What Not to Wear" and "The Biggest Loser"--even "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"--show beauty as something created, a condition to which anyone can have access with the right education and effort. This is a meritocratic ideal, not an insistent, elitist one. The makeover shows also help to make it clear that a life of artifice is not for everyone. Once we see the effort and hours that go into making a body more appealing, we may decide not to attempt a labor-intensive presentation of the self. We may decide that other things are more important.
If so, just don't celebrate it as anything more than laziness and/or priorities being elsewhere.
Looking good gives you a leg up. Don't whine about it, girls. Wash your hair, lift and separate, then put on clothes that don't make you look like you're on your way to fix somebody's toilet, maybe a pair of kitten heels, a touch of mascara and a slash of lipgloss. And unbutton a button or two. Oh, sorry, am I yanking away your power by suggesting that? Well, I don't know about you, but I've never found distracting a man while making a deal to be disadvantageous in the end.
Beauty is power -- except for those who'd rather not spend the time. They call it "pandering to the male gaze." Yeah, it's that, too. Like wastrel kids whose legacy relative gets their asses into Yale, sometimes a little cleavage, a nice smile, and a fabulous hat get you a better seat on the plane. When they offer to move you to first class, what do you do, offer your seat to the ringer for Andrea Dworkin?
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Exactly How I See The Democrats
In the words of Nancy Pelosi from November:"The gavel of the speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now it will be in the hands of America's children."Actually, she's pretty good on the Republicans, too.
Quote is paraphrased here.
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Another Day, Another Death Threat
This time the "religion of peace" people are after a French high school philosophy teacher named Robert Redeker who published a piece in Le Figaro criticizing Islam as a violent and barbaric religion.Naturally, Muslims were quick to show him how wrong he was -- by publishing detailed death threats against him (including directions to his house so he could be more easily murdered).
Redeker's friend, Johns Hopkins University literature and philosophy professor Christian Delacampagne writes in Commentary:
The piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled “What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?” It was a fierce critique of what Redeker called Islam’s attempt “to place its leaden cloak over the world.” If Jesus was “a master of love,” he wrote, Muhammad was “a master of hatred.” Of the three “religions of the book,” Islam was the only one that overtly preached holy war. “Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimize violence,” Redeker concluded, “Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.”Having been posted online, the article was read all across France and in other countries as well, and was quickly translated into Arabic. Denunciations of Redeker’s “insult of the prophet” spread across the Internet. Within a day after publication, the piece was being condemned on al Jazeera by the popular on-air preacher (and unofficial voice of Osama bin Laden) Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi. In Egypt and Tunisia, the offending issue of Le Figaro was banned.
As for Redeker himself, he soon received a large number of threats by letter and e-mail. On an Islamist website, he was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, also provided his address and a photograph of his home. Fearful for himself and his family, Redeker sought protection from the local police, who transferred the case to the national counter-espionage authorities. On their advice, Redeker, his wife, and three children fled their home and took shelter in a secret location. Since then, they have moved from city to city, at their own expense, under police protection. Another teacher has been appointed by the French Ministry of Education to replace Redeker, who will probably never see his students again.
The article, in the original French, is here. Here's a rough Google translation in English. (The "string" means thong bathing suits, and he's talking about "Paris Plage," the banks of the Seine that, thanks to Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, are turned into a sandy "beach" every summer.)
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One More Bad Thing That's Good For Them
People are afraid of all the wrong things, as Barry Glassner pointed out in Culture Of Fear. MySpace wasn't around when he wrote that book, but it seems parental fears that every kid is trading e-mails with some Internet predator are unfounded. From TechDirt:Many of the stories discussing social networking sites and sexual predators paint the sites in a negative light, portraying teenagers as doe-eyed automatons without a whit of common sense. A new study shows that teenagers are actually pretty wise about what kind of information they're sharing online. The study shows that the vast majority of teenagers don't show their full name, and 40% keep their profiles private unless you're on their friends list. Of the remaining public profiles, just 1% offered an e-mail address. What's more, researchers found that kids gain confidence as well as valuable writing, networking and HTML skills while using the sites. As it stands, it's not clear if the warnings and scary reports are to thank for careful kids, or whether they were being careful all along, and nobody bothered to study them. Many parents have been eager to focus on the negative aspects of social networking sites -- even going so far as to blame MySpace for sexual predators. In the end of course it comes down to quality parenting -- informed kids not only reduce their risk of problems online regardless of the technology used, they know what to do when problems do occur. While there are kids who still stick forks in electrical sockets, we don't blame the electrical sockets -- we ask why the parents weren't paying attention to what their kids were doing.Links within the paragraph above are live if you go to the original, here.
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The New Saddam
Oops! Seems we made a martyr (duh!). Hassan M. Fattah writes in The New York Times of the new way the Arab world is looking at Saddam:In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.
“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”
In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931.
In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States.
Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.”
“God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”
By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past.
“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”
Was this really that hard to predict? Well, at least we're finally uniting the Arab world!
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Ignoring The Past
Short memory they have over there in Washington. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. writes in The New York Times of the folly of ignoring the past:Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable. The Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna famously said, “Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity to history temper and civilize our use of power. In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is forever in the making. Let historians never forsake the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology, a religion, a race, a nation.
The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.
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How To Beat Your Wife
From Bahraini Cleric Abdullah Aal Mahmud...who else?!
Don't go soft on us now, Cleric Abdullah!Of all the religions out there, Islam is the worst for women. For the Atheist Foundation Of Australia, Inc., Voula Papas writes:
Under Shari'a - Islamic law - a man can marry up to four wives. He can divorce his wife or wives by saying “I divorce you” three times. For a wife to obtain a divorce is usually very difficult. Muslim apologists claim that Muslim women have the right to divorce and that in Islam the mother is revered and respected. Upon divorce, fathers win custody of boys over the age of six and girls on the onset of puberty. Many women would be reluctant to divorce violent or polygynous husbands for fear of losing their children. Despite the exaltation of motherhood - Mohammed once told a follower that paradise is found at the feet of the mother - children are considered the property of the father with the mother being merely the caretaker. How is it possible for a Muslim man to respect his mother when immutable religious law proclaims women's inferiority and inadequacy?Under the Shari'a, compensation for the murder of a woman is half the amount of that of a man. A woman's testimony in court is worth only half of a man's. Women are entitled to only half the inheritance of males; the reason given for these is that males have families to provide for. In sura 4:34 men are granted superiority and authority over women because they spend their wealth to maintain them, this implies that women are a burden on society and that their work in caring for children, household and livestock is insignificant and trivial.
Girls as young as nine can be married off by their father even if the mother disapproves of the marriage, often they end up as second or third wives of much older men - here is a way to instantly eradicate illegal paedophilia! Conservative clerics have resisted moves to raise the minimum age for girls. One of Mohammed's wives, Aisha was seven when she was betrothed to Mohammed and nine when the marriage was consummated, Mohammed was in his fifties with several wives.
Any attempts by various governments to give women more freedoms, greater property and marriage rights have been vehemently opposed by conservative Islamists, who insist that the reforms are against Islam.
In the Qur'an the prescribed penalty for adultery is one hundred lashes and a year in exile - sura 24:1. However, Mohammed did condemn people to be stoned to death, in one case the rabbis brought a man and a woman accused of adultery, Mohammed ordered the pair to be stoned to death. The Jews practiced stoning for adultery and it is mentioned in the Old Testament under Mosaic Law. Today many Islamic fundamentalists advocate the stoning of women and stoning does occur in many Muslim countries.
In Muslim countries, men have the power of life and death over their women. Honour- killers usually escape punishment and the ones that are tried and convicted, receive only a few months in prison where they are treated like heroes by other inmates. Honour killings are carried out by men against women in their family for disobedience or suspected sexual transgressions. Even women who have been raped are killed for defiling the family honour.
Welcome to The Religion Of Peace!
Papas continues:
Islam's psychotic obsession with female chastity, modesty and virginity has rendered men incapable of viewing women as equal and worthy companions. How can we expect these men to treat women decently when their religion and culture forbids it! In fact, Muslim men can relax only when their foot is firmly placed on their women's necks!In Muslim societies religion governs all aspects of life and has priority over secular laws and local customs, therefore, the excuse that tradition alone is responsible for women's oppression is untenable. Unless Muslim apologists are prepared to back their claims by a campaign to reform their religion and improve the situation of women, their assertions that Islam is blameless in oppressing women, are null and void.
There is a risk that multiculturalism and freedom of religion will ensure that tradition and religion remain eternally immutable. Should respecting other cultures mean that we should turn a blind eye to sadism, torture and brutality?
Video link via Andrew Sullivan
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The Secret Of Great Skin
No, it isn't rubbing yak urine on your wrinkles, or even a $110 jar of Creme de Mer (that's for the 1 oz. size). Read the hooha about it on their site:Even now, it is not entirely clear how Crème de la Mer works. For us schooled in logic, it is something of a jolt to the imagination.For $110 for an oz, I don't just want a jolt to my imagination; I want full-scale teledildonics.
Now, I don't know how great my skin is or isn't, but people always comment on it...I look younger than my age, blah, blah, blah.
Skin care costs me less than $20 a month and it's only that much because my sunblock, with Mexoryl, is the best there is, and until recently, it's been banned in the U.S., so I've gotten tubes of it by the dozen in France.
The sunblock is Anthelios #50+ creme pour visage (a little over 9 eu for 50 ml at my favorite little pharmacy in the Marais), and I wash with Cetaphil at night ($11.49 for a vat of the stuff that lasts me months and months), and St. Ives Apricot Facial Scrub (about $3) in the shower in the morning. Period. No fancy schmancy lotions and crap. Maybe just a little vaseline if my lips are feeling chapped. Here's my entire lotion and face-wash lineup:
Oh yeah, and I don't spend any time in the sun unless I'm wearing a hat or holding an umbrella. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. At least one of us won't have the skin of a 100-year-old leather ottoman at 50.
Hope in a jar, $60 and up? Ha. Try focus group in a jar. Here are a few results of some testing, reported in this New York Times piece, which pretty much recommended all the cheap face crap I use. Here's a key quote:
A study of wrinkle creams published last month by Consumer Reports concluded that there was no correlation between price and effectiveness. The study, which tested nine brands of wrinkle creams over 12 weeks, also concluded that none of the products reduced the depth of wrinkles by more than 10 percent, an amount “barely visible to the naked eye.”The Consumer Reports study found, for example, that a three-step regimen of Olay Regenerist products costing $57 was slightly more effective at reducing the appearance of wrinkles than a $135 tube of StriVectin-SD or a $335 combination of two La Prairie Cellular lotions.
Note: Anthelios is considerably pricier if you buy it in this country, where our wonderful FDA has spent over a decade protecting us from protecting ourselves from the results of too much sun -- despite the fact that people in France and elsewhere have been using it without ill effect since 1993.
Also, a lady wrote me that, now that the FDA has approved Mexoryl, she was able to buy the Anthelios SPF 15 somewhere in the USA. To me, SPF 15 is practically worthless. They aren't selling #60 anymore in France, but 50+. Make sure that's what you get. I mean, if you don't want melanoma or a face like an old ottoman. Or an old Ottoman, come to think of it.
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Help Amy With Her Homework
I need some old wives' tales of love and dating, like that "Beware of a man who's 40 and has never been married." And/or silly rules "Don't accept a date for Saturday night after Wednesday." Got any?*
Color Them Criminal
Three were white women assaulted by a crowd of black teenagers shouting racist epithets. The LA Times' (and national media's) response? Yawnnn. I remember there was some protest by somebody at the LA Times that it was not a local story -- about when they ran a long story about some guy from San Francisco who'd been conned and murdered by his South American, Internet-met bride-to-be. About the Long Beach affair, Kate writes in the LA Weekly:Last Halloween in the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach, where neighbors put on a lavish fright fest each year, three young women left a haunted house and found themselves caught in a street brawl with a crowd of teenagers. By melee’s end, one woman’s face was fractured in 12 spots, her teeth were broken and she’d suffered partial loss of sight in one eye. Two of the women suffered brain concussions and assorted broken bones after being kicked, punched and even struck by a skateboard wielded as a weapon.The story broke on November 3, when local Web site editor William Pearl scooped other media on LBReport.com, quoting Long Beach police spokeswoman Jacqueline Bezart as saying a crowd of black attackers hurled racial taunts (“White bitches!” “We hate whites!”) at the young women, and the police were pursuing it as a hate crime.
At the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, reporter Tracy Manzer quickly landed an exclusive interview with the victims, introducing awkward issues of race and culture rarely seen in California media. Said one victim, identified as Laura: “They asked us, ‘Are you down with it?’ We had no idea what that meant so we didn’t say anything and just walked by them up to the haunted house. They were grabbing their crotches — we didn’t know if it was a gang thing or what.”
Suddenly, newspaper editors, TV-news directors and other media faced an unsettling prospect of their own: If white-on-black hate crime is covered with an apologetic tone and references to the legacy of slavery, what’s the tone for covering black-on-white hate crime? Can a minority be a racist? And how can we, the media, get out of this?
As the Press-Telegram reported on November 3, three white women aged 19 to 21 emerged from a “maze” walk in a house and were confronted by up to 40 black teenagers who pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. The paper said, “The taunts and jeers grew more aggressive, the victims recalled, as did the size of the crowd. Now females joined in, and everyone began saying, ‘We hate white people, f--- whites!’”
The bizarre case, now in its fifth week of trial, resulted in hate-crime charges against nine girls and three boys, two of whom will be tried later. Yet the story didn’t run in the Los Angeles Times until November 7, buried inside local news. In that piece, writer J. Michael Kennedy quoted the Press-Telegram’s interview with the victims, watering down the racist language to the vague and more acceptable phrase “a series of antiwhite epithets.”
While some media tiptoed around the story, another outlook was emerging as the fast-tracked trial — required in youth cases — hurtled toward its late-November start date. Well-known black political columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who has explored both sides of the story in a levelheaded manner, was quoted by City News Service as noting that the latest FBI hate-crimes report showed that blacks now commit more than 20 percent of the hate crimes, the majority of victims white.
Hutchison writes:
A well-known local civil rights activist drew applause and praise when he announced that he planned to lead a walk against hate two days before Christmas in support of victims of racially motivated violence in Long Beach, California.In years past, that would have scarcely raised an eyebrow and drawn only the barest of media coverage since civil rights groups have held countless marches and demonstrations in past years against white on black hate violence. Local and national civil rights leaders almost certainly would have eagerly endorsed the walk.
But this time, none publicly endorsed it.
The walk was not in protest of black hate violence. The victims are not blacks. They are three white women. They were brutally beaten on Halloween night in Long Beach. Ten black teens are charged with the attack. During the attacks the blacks allegedly hurled racial insults, and taunts that included shouts of "I Hate Whites." That prompted prosecutors to slap eight of the teens with a hate crimes charge. The hate charge raised two thorny questions: Can, and do, blacks commit hate crimes? And if they commit them, what should civil right groups say and do?
The second question is even more perplexing and conflicting. That was plainly evident during a contentious meeting Long Beach officials called in mid-December to ease racial tensions stemming from the attacks. Blacks were deeply divided over the issue. Najee Ali, director of Project Islamic Hope, who organized the anti-hate walk, challenged civil rights leaders to break the code of silence on hate violence when blacks are the accused attackers, and whites are the victims.
The editor of Long Beach's black newspaper hotly disputed that there was any racial motive in the attacks, blamed the white women for provoking the violence, and accused prosecutors of overkill in piling on the hate charge.
I couldn't find the piece in the paper (I'm assuming it was the Long Beach Times). Odd that Ofari Hutchison doesn't mention the paper or editor by name -- or that of the civil rights activist. (Perhaps he didn't want to give them publicity? Still, he's discussing something they did -- they should be named.)
Ultimately, the question is, could you imagine if the tables were turned? If somebody white blamed blacks for being the victims of some terrible mob attack, and intimated that the prosecutor should dial back a little?
Racism is racism is racism. As I wrote the other day:
...Either you're against all racism, or you really have to admit you're for racism, just as long as it isn't against your peeps.*
Small Is Bigger
Parents say their disabled daughter will have a better quality of life by remaining small. Sam Howe Verhovek writes for the LA Times:Ashley is a 9-year-old girl who has static encephalopathy, a severe brain impairment. She cannot walk or talk. She cannot keep her head up, roll over or sit up by herself. She is fed with a tube. Her parents call her "Pillow Angel" because she stays right where they place her, usually on a pillow.Her parents say they feared that their angel would become too big one day — too big to lift, too big to move, too big to take along on a family outing.
And so they decided to keep her small.
In a highly unusual case that is stirring ethical debate in the medical community and elsewhere, doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital and the parents involved are describing how Ashley has received treatment over the last few years designed to stunt her growth.
The treatment, known as "growth attenuation," is expected to keep Ashley's height at about 4 feet 5 and her weight at about 75 pounds for the rest of her life. Doctors expect her to have a normal lifespan. Had she not been given the treatment, doctors estimate, she would have grown into a woman of average height and weight — about 5 feet 6 and 125 pounds.
The parents' decision has drawn criticism and even outrage from some doctors and caregivers, who say such treatment is a violation of a person's dignity. Some say it's also a violation of the medical oath: First do no harm.
But Ashley's parents say the move was a humane one, allowing her to receive more care, more interaction with her younger brother and sister, and more of the loving touch of parents and others who can carry her.
As a result, they say in a written account posted on the Web this week, "we will continue to delight in holding her in our arms and Ashley will be moved and taken on trips more frequently and will have more exposure to activities and social gatherings (for example, in the family room, backyard, swing, walks, bathtub, etc.) instead of lying down in her bed staring at TV (or the ceiling) all day long."
Sorry, it's unusual, but isn't this the humane thing to do? Instead of shoving her in some home because only some John Lithgow-sized aide can lift her? Read the whole story before you decide.
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Pat's Best Friend, God
God dropped in for a beer with Pat Robertson, and you'll never guess what he said:In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007."I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.
God also suggested bright yellow will be the new black, and was quite firm that, in the coming year, there will be a number of sales at Target.
(Thanks, Patrick)
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When Billionaires Divorce
Doing what I do for a living, I'm constantly amazed at how people who once (said they) loved each other treat each other when it's over. For a refreshing change, check out billionaires Tim and Edra Blixeth's do-it-yourself amicable division of property before the divorce. Robert Frank writes in The Wall Street Journal:A couple of months ago, they decided to separate or divorce. Their four kids -- all from previous marriages -- were grown. "Our lives and interests were growing apart," Edra says. "There was no scandal or affair or event. It happened over time."Neither wanted to place their fate in the hands of a judge. So they hatched a plan for their own deal. They each made a list of their assets and their estimated worth. They ranked each by order of personal importance. Then they met at the Beverly Hills Hotel to compare their notepads.
"We sat down, and I joked 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours,' " Edra recalls.
Surprisingly, the lists were relatively compatible, though they're still wrestling over a few assets and valuations. (And they had to be interviewed separately.)
They started with their estate, called Porcupine Creek, a 30,000-square-foot mansion with a 19-hole golf course and eight cottages and casitas. Realtors say it's one of the most expensive homes in the country, with an estimated sale price of $200 million or more (though it's not on the market).
Edra grew attached to the home where she raised her kids, while Tim says he is more of a "nomad." They put Porcupine Creek on Edra's side of the ledger.
The rest of the couple's properties fell into easy "his" and "her" categories. Edra kept the condo in Seattle, since it's close to one of her start-up companies. Tim got the condo in Boise, Idaho, near his timber operations. She got the beach house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, while he kept the villa just down the coast in Tamarindo.
They will each keep their own businesses and will remain partners in the companies they operate together, including Yellowstone. They agreed to share their three jets. And for now, Edra gets the dogs, a golden retriever named Andy and a Shi Tzu named G2 (as in Gulfstream 2).
"For me, the businesses were the most important," Tim says. "This is what I do for a living, it's exciting, I love doing it, and it has a very bright future and a lot of upside. I can always build another Porcupine Creek."
Granted, Tim and Edra would have had to divide their fortune in half anyway. California's community-property laws require couples without pre-nups to equally split assets acquired during their marriage, unless they came from inheritance or gifts. And Tim and Edra both had lawyers sign off on the deal before they filed the divorce in court.
Of course, there's a chance that the deal won't last. "This is not to say that the whole thing won't blow up in court," Edra says. "But unless one of us does something out of character, I don't think it will."
If their agreement holds up, the Blixseths may have set a new example for the wealthy -- and the not-so-wealthy.
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Too Mush Of A Good Thing
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. A girl keeps having male coworkers mistakenly thinks she's into them. Is it something she's doing? Not necessarily. Here's my answer:A man can get “signals” from a woman across the room with her back to him, confiding to her friend, “By age 8, I knew I was a lesbian”; which, of course, is her way of telling the man, “Just for you, big guy, I’m wearing the purple pasties with the propellers.”Studies by psychologist Antonia Abbey, evolutionary psychologist Martie Haselton, and others, show that men actually have a tendency to perceive friendly overtures as overly-friendly overtures -- inferring sexual interest from a woman where there is none. The most likely explanation is Haselton and David Buss’ “Error Management Theory”: Humans are evolutionarily hard-wired to make errors in judgment on the side of their least “costly” option. Women, for example, are prone to underestimate men’s commitment, since, back in the Pleistocene era when human psychology was formed, being easily charmed into believing a cad would stick around to dad probably meant starving their furry little children to death. Likewise, in the great hairy singles bar that was the cave, it would have been less costly for a schlub to make a fool of himself chasing a girl who wasn’t interested than to miss an opportunity to pass on his schlub genes.
Be aware that there is a certain kind of guy who’s more likely to get freaked by friendly. He’s the guy who goes decades without a girl giving him a second look; well, save for a steel-piercing glare that says “Hello, rapist!” when he randomly pulls into the parking space next to hers, and accidentally makes eye contact. He’s the guy who always had a stuffed-up nose in junior high, who might have a girlfriend now, but only because she clubbed him over the head and dragged him on dates. Or, at his worst, he’s the guy who wrote me about the co-worker who “broke (his) little heart.” For over a year, he had it all planned: “I figured she'd marry me and have my babies.” And then, she got engaged -- for the second time since he’d known her. Oops…it seems he’d never gotten around to asking her out!
So, is your problem merely being overly sunny to the overly pathetic? If you can honestly say you’re just being friendly, not “Can you help me find the file cabinet key I lost down my cleavage?” friendly, you’ll have to decide what’s more important, being true to yourself or never being mistaken for the office nympho. If it’s the latter, wear dark glasses and a smock, keep your head down in the hall, and speak only when spoken to. The alternative? Deciding it’s their problem if they get squirmy when you wear those Ann Taylor separates that scream “Line up here for a lapdance,” and say sexually charged things like “Hey, how was your weekend?”
P.S. David Buss saw the column in a paper when he was traveling, and wrote me a nice e-mail about it, which made my day. The entire thing is here.
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Scam-Vites
Via my witty friend Kate Coe...as if Evites aren't irritating enough, now it isn't just your party-throwing friends you want to hit over the head with a brick. Here, I'll paste in a bit of the text from the Evite link Kate got in the mail, so you won't have to click on it:You may be surprised to receive this mail, as you read this, don't feel so sorry for me because I know everyone will die someday.My name is Mrs. Felicia Samson, a business woman in London. I have been diagnosed with...
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
If you're having a party, or trying to scam me out of my life's savings, kindly send a typed out e-mail like a civilized human being or con artist.
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Not Annoying Enough?
Here, put one of these endangered wildlife ringtones on your mobile phone. Or, if you want to be an endangered human being, put one of these on your phone and then sit next to me.On a more positive note, I've had some success in the past couple of weeks quieting down assholes shouting into cell phones with the line:
"Excuse me, but your cell phone call is getting in the way of my quiet enjoyment of my breakfast."Who can argue with the quiet enjoyment of one's breakfast? Well, I'm sure I'll encounter him and her in the next several days. Or, maybe I already have.
Sunday, Lena and I were at our local Hippie Haus of Coffee when an aging psychologist and his aging wife came in with their (gasp!) young child; apparently a miracle of fertility science, since the sell-by date on the lady's eggs must have come and gone sometime during the Reagan administration.
What is it about parents that makes them incapable of hearing the constant Plonk! Plonk! Plonk! and little singing voices of their child’s video game, and/or incapable of understanding that other people may not find these sound effects desirable additions to their attempt to think, converse with a friend, or read a book?
Well, in these parents' defense, maybe they left their Miracle Ears home on the dresser.
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Let's Get Intolerant About "Tolerance"
The bullshit kind. Spiked's Brendan O'Neill lays out the good kind:Real tolerance, according to OED definitions and the words of Enlightened thinkers such as Voltaire, means ‘permitting free expression of views one does not share’; it is about ‘broad-mindedness’; it is about having a ‘fair, objective and permissive attitude towards opinions and practices that differ from one’s own’; tolerance is about being rigorous and robust, allowing all views to be freely expressed so that the ‘value of each…can be tested.’ (1) See The age of intolerant tolerance, by Mick Hume)And then there's the other kind, the kind where we feel compelled (by guilt, perhaps?) to twist and deform our society to meet other people's primitively based needs:
Official Tolerance is censorious rather than genuinely tolerant. It is about stifling debate rather than encouraging it. It is a demand that we do not rock the boat or ask probing questions, instead just respecting everything. Except, that is, those who are judged to be intolerant. They can be slapped down and censored with impunity. Tolerance has become a new moral code that you transgress at your own risk.This is clear in the debate about the veil. When Khadijah, taking her cue from numerous Muslim community groups, says we must be tolerant of her ‘personal choice’ to wear the full face veil, she is effectively saying that we should not question or ridicule it. Why shouldn’t we? It is absurd for women in a modern, pretty open society like Britain to cover themselves from head-to-toe in black cloth; Jack Straw was right when he said these oppressive garments are a ‘visible demonstration of separateness’ (3). Although, of course, Straw’s own New Labour government did a great deal to nurture the notion that rigorous debate or criticism of religious practices should be curtailed lest it cause someone like Khadijah ‘cultural offence’. The government’s Religious Hatred legislation, which makes it a crime to ridicule or offend Islam or other religions, is Official Tolerance put into practice – a law that says public speech must be restricted in the name of ‘tolerating’ all cultures. That is a flagrant attack on the hard-won right in our secular society to speak out against superstitious nonsense, and a flagrant attack on genuine tolerance of people’s views and right to express them.
Official Tolerance is about giving a sedative to society, blanking out awkward questions, and covering up the hole at the heart of British culture. That may be another reason why the royals – isolated, and always keen to close down pesky debate among the masses – are drawn to today’s idea of tolerance. They can stave off debate by using the trendy and diverse-sounding language of respect. Religious figures find Official Tolerance attractive for the same reasons: it allows them to avoid having to defend their backward beliefs against their secular ridiculers. Meanwhile, among those who are critical of the traditional religions or something like the Muslim veil, all too often the complaint is that it is these religious practices that are truly intolerant, because they don’t respect women’s rights or gay rights, etc. The accusation of ‘intolerance!’ is wielded by both camps in order to shut up their opponents by getting the censorious Tolerant State on their side. Too many are inviting the authorities to be true to their word and punish anyone who appears intolerant.
We really could do with a more tolerant society in 2007 – a more genuinely tolerant society, that is. That means allowing people to believe and say what they like, just so long as the rest of us are free to challenge them. It means enlightening and enlivening public debate, rather than dampening it with demands that we all hold our tongues in case we offend sensitive religious souls, the Windsors, or anybody else. And it means doing away with the criminalisation of the ‘intolerant’ as the sinners of our new age in favour of cultivating a robust and open culture where everything is up for discussion. In a secular, democratic society seven years into the twenty-first century, we should tolerate nothing less.
Hey, everybody, this is America, a free speech zone. You prefer censored speech? Move to North Korea, Cuba, or Saudi Arabia.
By the way, check out the criminals hiding under the veil. And how just plain creepy it is, if you're a waitress, to serve somebody with their face covered, or with their entire body hidden under a pup tent, with only their eyes peeking out:
Others simply tell me, “Natalia, you bigot. You ought to embrace others.” No. I do not wish to see the face-veil banned or removed. I just don’t like its symbolism. I don’t like the way it makes a person look, like faceless black pillar on a crowded street. Aesthetically, it brings up unpleasant connotations for me - disconnect, removal, even disdain. It brings up notions of feminity as a dangerous object that must be covered up and blurred and maybe even completely restricted. Finally, it makes me feel as though the person wearing it does not trust other people (with good reason, perhaps, but an unsettling thought nonetheless). This could all be very different from the actual intentions and desires of the individual covering her face, but that does not stop me from feelings this way.On one level, it’s almost an animalistic kind of reaction: like a blind-spot that I, a person traveling through my urban jungle, become quietly unsettled by.
Finally, what about men who cover their faces in public? Brrrr. I had to serve coffee to a guy who thought he was terribly clever and “counter-culture” for wearing a scarf over his face. I kept thinking that he must be some sort of convicted criminal, hiding in case the police happen by. Was I also a raving bigot then? Is it then perfectly OK for women to cover their faces but not men?
I came to the West with a lot of my own cultural baggage. Some of it I’ve come to view as positive, even as something I could share with others. Other things from my background are much more problematic. I don’t expect my neighbours to see the entirety of my heritage as something that must be, here’s that word again, “‘embraced.” Tolerated, sure. And even then, not all of it.
For example: Homophobic Slavic immigrants are currently busy threatening the gay community in Sacramento, CA. Homphobia is perfectly acceptable in most communities in Eastern Europe. But not here, right? When these people are out there harrassing the gay community, you can’t look away and tell yourself that it is simple their “‘culture” and that we ought to be tolerant. Everyone has the right to free speech here (and the Phelps clan is a shining example of that), but then again, everyone also tries to define this country for themselves. And this process can be unpleasant and uncomfortable. It’s OK to admit that homophobia makes one uncomfortable, no? Why not the face-veil?
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What Is Racism?
As a girl, if I'm walking down a dark or lonely street, and I see a young guy or bunch of young guys coming toward me, I'll walk in the street, cross the street, or take some precaution. If it's a guy wearing a hoodie and dressed all "street," especially. Black face, white face, other-face. It's about dress and manner, and the fact that men generally have more muscle mass and upper-body strength than women, among other things, not about color, but that's probably not how it seems to a guy who feels "profiled" for SWB -- strolling while black.On the other hand, if you're a guy wearing a nice suit, and carrying a briefcase, or a really geeky looking guy, I'll probably just keep walking where I'm walking. (Hmmm...perhaps muggers and the like would do well to "dress for success"?) On a side note, I always wonder if geeky guys feel kind of bad when I feel somebody behind me, whirl around, and then don't cross the street; i.e., the message is "Well, you're completely harmless!"
But, back to racism, I read on Overlawyered of a case where a kid was disciplined to bring up the white kid ratio in the number of overall kids being disciplined. Bald-faced racism -- just like shoving Asians to the back of the college admissions line. Here's the bit:
"To avoid charges of 'racism,' we disciplined black and white students differently." (Edmund Janko, City Journal/OpinionJournal.com, Oct. 25). According to the byline, "Mr. Janko taught in the English department of Bayside High School in New York City from 1957 to 1990.".And here's a quote from Janko's piece:
What this meant in practice was an unarticulated modification of our disciplinary standards. For example, obscenities directed at a teacher would mean, in cases involving minority students, a rebuke from the dean and a notation on the record or a letter home rather than a suspension. For cases in which white students had committed infractions, it meant zero tolerance. Unofficially, we began to enforce dual systems of justice. Inevitably, where the numbers ruled, some kids would wind up punished more severely than others for the same offense.And a couple of interesting comments on the case over at Overlawyered:
This sounds like the City Councilwoman in Pittsburgh who complained that the Police were racist because 80% of the arrests made in her district were Blacks. One of the assistant Police Chiefs replied that it was because 80% of the crimes in her district were committed by Blacks. (Her district is 80% Black)Posted by: Jim Collins | October 25, 2006 02:57 PM
-- One thing that needs to be noted is that discrepancies in disciplinary actions often occur not because of racism or racist notions of blacks being more likely to commit crime, but to cultural/environmental factors.A couple of years ago I sat in on a RAND presentation examining the probability that blacks are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though rates of use are virtually identical.
What the RAND researchers found is that blacks tended to buy/sell/use marijuana in public places and to buy and sell among strangers. Whites, on the other hand, tend to buy and sell only among close friends, and buy/sell/use in private homes, away from public view.
So, it wasn't a matter of racism that was responsible for a disparity in black/white arrests for marijuana posession so much as it was the way in which the two groups tended to participate in the drug trade.
Posted by: Seth | October 25, 2006 03:24 PM
There's a parallel here with feminism, not as a mode of advancing equal treatment for women, but for getting special treatment for women, which is sexism against men. Likewise, speaking out against the appearance of racism, versus actual racism, can lead to racist behavior against whites or others; still racism, just in vanilla or strawberry instead of chocolate. In short, either you're against all racism, or you really have to admit you're for racism, just as long as it isn't against your peeps.
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And We're Worried About Two Nervous Homos Being Parents?
Police: Toddler found playing on highway - CNN.com.*
The End Of Dumb
On Edge, John Brockman asks his annual question to a bunch of the world's thinkers:WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.
What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!
Daniel Dennett is optimistic that we'll see "the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion," as he more politely puts it (more politely than "The End Of Dumb") in the next 25 years:
Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today we’ve learned that we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries. Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions? Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction? It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?Why am I confident that this will happen? Mainly because of the asymmetry in the information explosion. With the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television), it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working. For every well-publicized victory–the inundation of the Bush administration with evangelicals, the growing number of home schoolers in the USA, the rise of radical Islam, the much exaggerated “rebound” of religion in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to take the most obvious cases–there are many less dramatic defeats, as young people quietly walk away from the faith of their parents and grandparents. That trend will continue, especially when young people come to know how many of their peers are making this low-profile choice. Around the world, the category of “not religious” is growing faster than the Mormons, faster than the evangelicals, faster even than Islam, whose growth is due almost entirely to fecundity, not conversion, and is bound to level off soon.
Those who are secular can encourage their own children to drink from the well of knowledge wherever it leads them, confident that only a small percentage will rebel against their secular upbringing and turn to one religion or another. Cults will rise and fall, as they do today and have done for millennia, but only those that can metamorphose into socially benign organizations will be able to flourish. Many religions have already made the transition, quietly de-emphasizing the irrational elements in their heritages, abandoning the xenophobic and sexist prohibitions of their quite recent past, and turning their attention from doctrinal purity to moral effectiveness. The fact that these adapting religions are scorned as former religions by the diehard purists shows how brittle the objects of their desperate allegiance have become.
I don't entirely share his optimism, but it doesn't stop me from railing against the non-think of religion. Perhaps that is the beginning of dumb, but I'm aspiring to optimism. Or, as I sometimes put it, "I'm not a pessimist, just a disappointed optimist."
What are you optimistic about for 2007 and beyond?
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