Joey Palmer Should Get A Damn Job That Pays
Palmer's a guy who had an expensive hospital bill after a motorcycle accident. Here's what happened, from an SFGate story by David Lazarus that starts out with those terse sentences clearly intended to tug at our heart strings (gag):
There are 47 million people in this country without health insurance. Richmond resident Joey Palmer is one of them.He learned how costly this can be after fracturing a rib in a relatively minor motorcycle accident and subsequently being hit with a bill for more than $12,000 from San Francisco General Hospital.
"There's no way I could pay something like that," Palmer, 32, told me. "I'm not a bum, but I'm not making a lot of money right now. How is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that?"
Iman Nazeeri-Simmons, director of administrative operations at San Francisco General, said she sympathizes with Palmer's situation.
"It's not us," she said. "It's the whole system, and the system is broken. We need to look closely at making changes and at how we can deliver care in a rational way."
Palmer's story illustrates the broader problem of runaway health care costs in the United States and a system that leaves millions of Americans to fend for themselves.
Excuse me, but who should be fending for them? What ever happened to American individualism and self-determination? It can't be a total myth, because I have it, and know at least a few people who have it -- you know, that personal responsibility thing?
According to Lazarus' story, Palmer only earns $7,500 a year as "a woodworker who specializes in the decorative touches on wealthy people's yachts," and gets by "primarily with the assistance of relatives."
Dude -- that's called "a hobby." You could get by on much more if you got a job at Starbucks. And if you worked more than 20 hours a week at Starbucks, you'd have health insurance, too. And if you don't have health insurance, Mr. Genius, maybe you have no business riding around on a motorcyle (which a commenter here, I believe, recently noted that hospital emergency room doctors refer to as a "donorcycle").
The hospital administrator in Lazarus' story has the answer:
"Universal coverage would mean that a Joey Palmer doesn't get left out in the cold just because he was in the wrong county," Nazeeri-Simmons said
"Universal coverage"? Yeah, that's a nice name for it. It translates to "'U' do your woodwork hobby while the rest of us work long hours at real jobs to pay for your care."
Why Good People Go Evil
Philip Zimbardo just published a book called The Lucifer Effect. On his website, he writes:
In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.
From a UDelaware press release about a talk Zimbardo gave:
The torture of detainees by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was the tragic result of perceived anonymity, the absence of a sense of personal responsibility and tacit approval by military commanders, factors that have been shown in experiments to make good people do evil, Philip G. Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, said at UD Dec. 6.Speaking to an audience of nearly 600 in Pearson Hall Auditorium, Zimbardo, who is widely credited for popularizing psychology through the PBS-TV series Discovering Psychology, cited several studies, including the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment that he led in 1971 and a 1961-62 study of obedience to authority by the late Stanley Milgram, who was then a professor of social psychology at Yale University.
Zimbardo said the Milgram study, which found that 65 percent of ordinary residents of New Haven, Conn., were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks of up to 450 volts to a protesting victim so long as a person in authority commanded them to, is a lesson in how an ideology of doing public good can be used to create evil.
“You always start with an ideology. All evil begins with a big ideology,” Zimbardo said. “What is the evil ideology about the Iraq war? National security. National security is the ideology that is used to justify torture in Brazil. You always begin with this big, good thing because once you have the big ideology then it’s going to justify all the action.”
The lecture, titled “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” began with a slide and video presentation of graphic images of the victims of torture and murder in Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo obtained the images while testifying as an expert witness for U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who is serving eight years in prison after pleading guilty to five charges of abusing prisoners in the prison, including dereliction of duty, assault and committing an indecent act.
“War is all about old men wanting young men to kill other young men, but we only want them to kill them when they are there; when they come back, we don’t want them to become killers. That’s why we put men in uniforms,” Zimbardo said.
Zimbardo said a study of abandoned cars in certain neighborhoods shows that a sense of anonymity can encourage vandalism by ordinary-looking individuals. “Anonymity of a person and anonymity of place works similarly to get good people to do bad things,” he said.
The Stanford experiment, a planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life using college students, had to be ended prematurely after only six days when the guards became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.
Zimbardo said that in addition to poor training and supervision, the same psychological forces that were at work in the Stanford experiment were present at the Abu Ghraib prison and that the findings of the experiment should have been a forewarning to the military about possible dangers of abuses of power.
Zimbardo said Frederick was “the most normal, the most average, the most patriotic American,” who could have been “a poster boy for the U.S. Army” and a good person before he went to work in appalling conditions at Abu Ghraib, where soldiers were rewarded for breaking prisoners down in preparation for interrogation by Navy Seals, the CIA and civilian contractors.
Zimbardo said the military court disregarded his testimony and held Frederick responsible for his actions, saying that the soldier should have known to do what was right.
“They ignored all the situational, all the systemic influence,” Zimbardo said. “They dishonorably discharged him, imprisoned him for eight years, put him in solitary confinement in Kuwait, lowered his rank to private, took away 22 years of his Reserves retirement funds, totally disgraced, took away his medals and now his wife is divorcing him because they are broke. After eight years, when he gets out he will have nothing.”
Quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a victim of Soviet repression and the gulag prison system, Zimbardo said, "The line between good and evil lies in the center of every human heart." He added that any person is capable of doing evil depending on situational forces.
Zimbardo said that unless systemic forces, including poverty, racism and military conditions like those that existed in Abu Ghraib are recognized and changed, imprisonment alone will never eliminate the problem of evil behavior and there will always be a bad apple at the bottom of the barrel.
Peanutbutter, An Atheist's Nightmare!
Via Machines Like Us:
What proves that evolution is nonsense? Why, peanut butter, of course! Just open a jar—do you ever find any life in there? Of course not! That's because life never spontaneously sprouts from non-life. Now that's proof!
Watch the YouTube video here.
The Difference Between Equal Treatment And Special Treatment
Why I don't call myself a feminist (from an e-mail exchange yesterday with a friend of Cathy's):
I don't call myself a feminist because I loathe that feminism is, essentially, victimism these days. But, if pressed, I tell people I'm an Elizabeth Cady Stanton feminist -- for women having the vote, and for women making the same amount of money if they do the same job. (Not if they simply HAVE the same job but leave at 4pm to pick up the kids.) In short, I'm for equal treatment, not special treatment.
Perhaps more women should think this way, define themselves this way. Well, those women who consider themselves people, not victims.
A Letter From My Neighbor
Now, if this guy was involved in a coup that involved murder, I don't support that. But, what is clear is that he was sentenced to death in abstentia -- no due process. And I'm very much against that. Sending the guy back, without a trial, under Patriot Act provisions, means sending him straight to his death without a fair trial. Here are the details, from a letter my neighbor wrote to our congresswoman.
Rep. Jane Harman,I am writing on behalf of a school friend, Rouben Mohiuddin, who’s
father, Mohiuddin A.K.M. Ahmed, (A# 75474811) is in danger of
deportation, and death. Ahmed was tried in abstentia, in Bangladesh for
taking part in a 1975 coup in which the country’s leader was killed. He
was found guilty and sentenced to death. Because he was not in the
country at the time of the trial, he is not allowed to appeal the case.I am not sure whether Rouben’s father did something that deserves the
death penalty. I don’t even know him personally. However, as the
daughter of a defense attorney, I was incensed that the man will not
get a day in court to defend himself. If we, citizens of the United
States, allow him to be deported back to Bangladesh, he can be taken
straight to the gallows. Personally, I can’t stand still and not let my
voice be heard. This is not OK with me. Everyone, whether guilty or
innocent deserves a chance, a real chance, to defend himself or
herself, especially if their life hangs in the balance.I know that right now standing up for people with names like Ahmed is
not popular politically. The case against Rouben’s father is not black
and white, it is a very complicated political web – a web, I might
point out that includes the United States. If we stand by and allow
this to happen, we are complicit in it. Ahmed must be allowed a fair
trial for the whole truth to come out. We need help to make that happen.Ahmed needs help getting documents to allow him to travel to a country,
probably European, which can accept him, and facilitate his appeal to
the death penalty conviction in Bangladesh. He is currently being held
at Terminal Island, and is scheduled to be deported tomorrow – so time
is of the essence. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) made a
call to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s office and
requested a delay. Please let me know what you can do to help. I will
be calling your office tomorrow morning.I have lived in Venice now almost 10 years. I have been pleased with
your performance as a congresswoman, and it is because of your record
that I now come to you for help. I have known Rouben for most of this
time, and it pains me to see his family with such trouble. Thank you
for your time.Kelly Boston
Venice, California
Here's the LA Times story by Ashley Surdin:
A Venice man ordered to return to Bangladesh to face execution for his role in a 1975 military coup is waging an eleventh-hour battle to avoid deportation.Mohiuddin A.K.M. Ahmed, 60, has been living in Los Angeles for the last 10 years and working as a translator for a telephone company.
He was tried in absentia in Bangladesh in 1996, convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging for taking part in the coup, which led to the killings of the country's leader and most of his family.
Ahmed, then an army major, says that although he manned a roadblock a mile from President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's home, he thought the leader would be arrested peacefully.
"Myself and others believed that the orders we received were lawful," Ahmed said. "At no time was I, or my troops, involved in any violence."
But Rahman and seven family members, including his wife and 10-year-old son, were killed, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ahmed had participated in terrorist activity.
"Even his own account of his actions established that he assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of persons on account of their political opinion," a three-judge panel of the federal court said last month.
Ahmed's family and lawyer want him deported to another country where he could seek political asylum and fight his conviction. His lawyer, Joseph Sandoval, said Ahmed cannot appeal in Bangladesh because he was not in the country during his trial.
"Essentially, they want to take him from the plane to the gallows," Sandoval said. "We think that is fundamentally unfair." He added that his client is not the "heinous person" the U.S. and Bangladesh governments have made him out to be.
But time is running out. Ahmed was to have left the country Monday night, but Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) called Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's office and requested a delay.
"Amnesty International and our State Department has questioned the integrity of the Bangladeshi judicial system," said Tara Setmayer, a spokeswoman for Rohrabacher.
"And because of that, Dana felt as though there would be no harm in trying to buy some time for his legal counsel to find a country" where he would not be put to death.
The White House As A Big Lobbying Firm
Guess who's editing those government climate reports? Thomas Friedman writes in The New York Times:
Sometimes you read something about this administration that is just so shameful it takes your breath away. For me, that was the March 20 article in this paper detailing how a House committee had just released documents showing “hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.”The official, Philip A. Cooney, left government in 2005, after his shenanigans were exposed in The Times, and was immediately hired by, of course, Exxon Mobil. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil industry lobby arm.
The Times article, by Andrew Revkin and Matthew Wald, noted that Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions on behalf of the oil industry had “no bearing” on his actions at the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.” (How about loyalty to scientific method?) Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”
Let’s see, of all the gin joints. Of all the people the Bush team would let edit its climate reports, we have a guy who first worked for the oil lobby denying climate change, with no science background, then went back to work for Exxon. Does it get any more intellectually corrupt than that? Is there something lower that I’m missing?
The War On Reason
The administration doesn't want you to think too hard. And lucky for them, they're in power a country where a whole lot of people don't. In The Washington Post, Zbigniew Brzezinski points out the nebulousness of the term, the "War On Terror":
The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."
To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.
Solutons? He doesn't offer any. I don't agree with everything he writes, and I do think Islam is a danger to free western society, but he's got a point here:
Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.
Thanks, Norm!
It's A Religion Thing
The husband beat his wife and threatened to kill her, so she applied for a speedy divorce. But, wait -- they're both from Morocco, so a German divorce court judge refused her the accelerated split based on a passage in The Koran! From a Der Spiegel article by Veit Medick and Anna Reimann:
The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It's a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike."The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds."The right to castigate means for me: the husband can beat his wife," (the woman's lawyer) Becker-Rojczyk said, interpreting the judge's verdict.
In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Becker-Rojczyk said the judge indicated to her that it makes no sense to insist on an accelerated divorce. The judge's advice? Wait for the year-long waiting period to elapse.
...On Wednesday, after the Tuesday evening publication of the story on SPIEGEL ONLINE, the attorney received a fax from the Frankfurt court granting the conflict of interest claim and excusing the judge from the case.
Still, it is unlikely that the case will be heard again before the mandated year of separation expires in May. But the judge who heard the case may have to face further consequences for her decision. On Wednesday, numerous politicians in Berlin voiced their horror at the verdict -- and demanded disciplinary action against the judge.
"In my opinion, this is a case of extreme violation of the rule of law that can't be solved with a mere conflict of interest ruling," Social Democrat parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspütz told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "There have to be further consequences. This is a case for judicial supervision -- this case needs to be further investigated."
The deputy floor leader for the Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Bosbach, agreed. "This is a sad example of how the conception of the law from another legal and cultural environment is taken as the basis for our own notion of law," he said on Wednesday.
...But there remains quite a bit of work to do. "In my work educating sexist and short-sighted Muslim men," asked Michaela Sulaika Kaiser of the Network for Muslim Women, "do I now have to convince German courts that women are also people on the same level with men and that they, like any other human, have the right to be protected from physical and psychological violence?"
Robert Spencer, on Frontpage.com is guardedly optimistic:
Judge Datz-Winter’s decision caused a furor in Germany, and she was quickly removed from the case. That may be one small sign that Europe is inching toward throwing off its multiculturalist blinders and recovering the spirit of General Sir Charles James Napier, the British Commander-in-Chief in India from 1849 to 1851. It is said that a Hindu delegation protested against the British prohibition of sati, the practice of burning a widow to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, by telling Napier that it was part of their cultural custom. Napier famously responded:You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.It is long past time for authorities in Europe and the United States to begin to emulate Napier in their dealings with increasingly restive and demanding Islamic communities. Instead of issuing “religious diversity handbooks” and making special accommodations for Islamic practices, Western officials need to reassert the validity of our own laws and mores, and – at least as long as Europe’s suicidal immigration policies remain in place and neither Europe nor America treats immigration as a national security issue – remind newcomers that they are not welcome to bring with them customs and practices that are at variance with our own. This is the standard to which visitors and immigrants to Islamic countries are expected to adhere. The West should demand no less.
Pleased To Meat You
I get some nitwits writing to me, like this woman who turned 38, "was feeling unfulfilled," didn't want to encounter any men, so, what did she do? She went out to a bar! Just posted another Advice Goddess column. Here's the woman's question:
I turned 38 last week, and through some introspection, realized I’m unfulfilled. I thought a girls’ night out might help. The last thing I wanted was attention from men. Of course, at the bar, I ended up getting hit on by a 50-something overweight man. Shortly after introducing himself, he told me I have a lovely figure and began guessing my height, weight, and measurements (including bra size!). Then he asked me my age! Outraged, I said my stats were none of his concern, and that if he’s in the habit of treating women like sexual objects he should take his chauvinistic attitude elsewhere. Then I slapped his face, and told him it was on behalf of all the women who’ve had to endure his offensive pickup lines. He walked sheepishly back to his laughing buddies. My friends gave me “you go, girl” high fives, but said I seemed a little on edge lately. If they’re right, do you know some good techniques to find inner peace?--Venting
And here's my answer:
Common sense is getting rarer every day. My neighborhood grocery store just started tagging cheese with the sticker “CONTAINS: MILK.” A Welsh regulatory agency said Smoked Welsh Dragon Sausages should be renamed so it’s clear they’re made of pork -- not dragon. Surely your local pickup joint will soon post advisories on the door, like “Contains drunks” and “To avoid attention from men, hold girls’ night out in a convent, not a bar.”I’ll hazard a guess as to what really went down last week. A man approached you at the bar. Although you consider men who judge women by their looks chauvinistic pigs, you noted that he was not a 30-something blond Adonis but a 50-something fat man. He noted that you noted this -- probably because you shot him the high school mean girl death ray for daring to even dream of hitting on you. Okay, fine. If he couldn’t get you, he’d at least get a rise out of you. You didn’t disappoint.
Naturally, you assumed he was a foot-soldier in the vast conspiracy to keep women down -- not just some obnoxious drunk. Asking apparently uptight girls in bars their age and bra size -- isn’t that what obnoxious drunks do? Come on, you know that, but acknowledging it isn’t half as satisfying as flapping your wings and squawking about being “objectified” (as if people in bars are on the prowl for inner beauty and spiritual depth). Finally, to show him how the civilized half lives, you cracked him one. Just a thought, but if a guy did that to you, would you be slinking sheepishly back to the girls -- or feverishly dialing 911 to have him incarcerated for life?
As for what you could’ve done in response, you’re a girl who was supposedly loath to engage. Didn’t ignoring him occur to you? Or, if you wanted to give back in kind, since it was a fat guy going troll on you, when he asked “What’s your bra size?” you could’ve looked down at his chest and said, “I dunno, what’s yours?” You only became a victim when you started acting like a victim. You’ll probably continue to feel like one until you figure out what’s missing from your life, and take steps to change -- instead of taking out the feeling something’s missing on the nearest aspiring toxic bachelor. As for how to find inner peace, Krishnamurti’s Freedom From The Known has some pretty good guidelines. As for where; there’s no paved path that I know of, but for best results, try standing by a babbling brook instead of a beer tap.
The original posting, and some comments, are here.
The Ugly Place Islam And Catholicism Meet
There's a term in Islam, taqiyya -- "calculated deception" -- that means it's okay to lie for the good of the faith. Here's a bit on it, from Abdullah Al Araby, in Islam Review (sponsored by Pen Vs. The Sword, an organization to defend the human rights of Christians living under Islamic regimes in the Middle East):
Unfortunately, when dealing with Muslims, one must keep in mind that Muslims can communicate something with apparent sincerity, when in reality they may have just the opposite agenda in their hearts. Bluntly stated, Islam permits Muslims to lie anytime that they perceive that their own well-being, or that of Islam, is threatened.In the sphere of international politics, the question is: Can Muslim countries be trusted to keep their end of the agreements that they sign with non-Muslim nations? It is a known Islamic practice, that when Muslims are weak they can agree with most anything. Once they become strong, then they negate what they formerly vowed.
The principle of sanctioning lying for the cause of Islam bears grave implications in matters relating to the spread of the religion of Islam in the West. Muslim activists employ deceptive tactics in their attempts to polish Islam's image and make it more attractive to prospective converts. They carefully try to avoid, obscure, and omit mentioning any of the negative Islamic texts and teachings.
An example of Islamic deception is that Muslim activists always quote the passages of the Quran from the early part of Mohammed's ministry while living in Mecca. These texts are peaceful and exemplify tolerance towards those that are not followers of Islam. All the while, they are fully aware that most of these passages were abrogated (cancelled and replaced) by passages that came after he migrated to Medina. The replacement verses reflect prejudice, intolerance, and endorse violence upon unbelievers
In conclusion, it is imperative to understand, that Muslim leaders can use this loop-hole in their religion, to absolve them from any permanent commitment. It is also important to know that what Muslim activists say to spread Islam may not always be the whole truth. When dealing with Muslims, what they say is not the issue. The real issue is, what they actually mean in their hearts.
Is Catholicism so superior? Well, ask sex abuse victims who were protected by an elderly nun, who, in an LA Times story by John Spano, said she "could remember almost nothing" about a kid who'd been sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest:
Lawyer Irwin Zalkin was puzzled because church records showed she had heard several complaints about the San Diego priest, and the file noted that she had reported them to higher authority.Finally, Zalkin asked whether she was familiar with "mental reservation" — a 700-year-old doctrine by which clerics may avoid telling the truth to protect the Catholic Church.
"She explained in her own way that it is 'to protect the church from scandal.' She said she subscribed to the doctrine," Zalkin said. "What are you going to do?"
Mental reservation is not sanctioned in canon law, experts say, and is infrequently invoked. But in litigation arising from clergy sex abuse cases in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, at least half a dozen lawyers representing victims report having encountered it.
The idea goes back to times when there were two separate court systems: ecclesiastical, or church courts, and civil courts run by the state. Today, all disputes are settled in civil courts.
The doctrine has been used in modern times to "claim that it is morally justifiable to lie in order to protect the reputation of the institutional church," said Thomas P. Doyle, a Virginia priest who is an expert in canon law and has been widely consulted by lawyers for people who say they were victims of abuse.
It has been misused "to justify lying," Doyle said last week. The doctrine is "not accepted church teaching" but has been widely discussed by scholars and moral theologians, Doyle said.
Yeah, well, it sounds like it's been working rather well for the church, and not so well for the church's victims.
The story continues:
Doyle has noted that the oath newly minted cardinals take before the pope includes the vow that they will never tell secrets "the revelation of which could cause damage or dishonor to the Holy Church."
...Perhaps the single largest landowner on the planet. Hint: When somebody says, "It's not the money, it's the principle," it's usually the money. It's business baby...down to the last slimy lie.
Blogging Death
In the LA Times, Sandra Tsing Loh on the blogosphere on Cathy Seipp's passing:
The first tsunami of Seipp-inspired blog posts was rousing. As early as March 19, premature announcements of Cathy's death began appearing, but the bloggers did seem sincere, and sad....Into this heartfelt swaying and singing of "We Are Cathy's World" entered the cyber-squatter. This is the disgruntled blogger who years ago bought the domain name cathyseipp.com; as a result, Cathy blogged from cathyseipp.net. What he did on cathyseipp.com varied — first he posted as Cathy, and then he merely posted disparaging comments about Cathy, Photoshopping her and her daughter's heads atop various bodies.
On the one hand, it would be hard to confuse cathyseipp.com with her actual site. On the other hand, when the cyber-squatter last week reverted to his earlier ways, posting a "last blog entry" signed "Cathy Seipp" in which Cathy supposedly begged final forgiveness for her politics, her friends and her parenting … this seemed to cross a new line.
By week's end, Cathy's family and friends were debating whether to take legal action. Everyone was offended, exhausted and still staggered with grief. The public expression of which — Cathy's funeral — was, of course, recorded without our knowledge and posted by another blogger. Yep, it's all out there on the Web, just start Googling — you'll see snot pouring out of my nose as I wail helplessly through my eulogy, which, along with everything else involving the ceremony, has all already been critiqued online.
"It's like Cathy was the only thing that kept these people civilized!" was the horrified comment of friend Andrew Breitbart who, one should note, edits the Drudge Report. Even he!
And yet, I suppose the whole carnival is fitting. In the high-water days of Old Media, a writer's passing involved a duly-agreed-upon period of reverence, reticence and literary self-restraint. Our grief over a lost talent would dictate a certain vague lionization, and a certain dullness. Not so in this brave new Cathy's World of New Media, in which, as fishbowlLA calls it, Cathy's "funeral rites in Blogistan" have involved a verbal flaming pyre. That's right, highly searched Technorati entities literally have little flames next to them, and the initials WTF — "Where's The Fire?"
Cathy would've loved it.
Do You Use The Most Harmful Drugs?
Whoops! Those would be alcohol and cigarettes -- which a new study in the Lancet classifies as more harmful than pot, and "substantially more dangerous" than LSD, or X.
Harmful drugs are currently regulated according to classification systems that purport to relate to the harms and risks of each drug. However, these are generally neither specified nor transparent, which reduces confidence in their accuracy and undermines health education messages.Professor David Nutt from the University of Bristol, Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, and colleagues, identified three main factors that together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse:
1. the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug
2. the tendency of the drug to induce dependence
3. the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society...Professor Colin Blakemore added: “Drug policy is primarily aimed at reducing the harm to individual users, their families and society. But at present there is no rational, evidence-based method for assessing the harm of drugs. We have tried to develop such a method. We hope that policy makers will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than many illegal substances.”
Sane, intelligent drug policy, anybody? For starters, how about refusing to vote for candidates who aren't behind it? Beats paying to keep a bunch of potheads and trippers in prison.
via BoingBoing
Like Chavez, Like Bush
George Bush plans to spread socialism in South America! From a press release from Ayn Rand Institute, Dr. Yaron Brook finds Bush's pledge to bring American tax dollars to South America morally and economically lacking:
As President Bush ends his tour of Latin America, he has vowed to deliver "social justice" to poor Latin Americans."In announcing his commitment to achieving 'social justice' in Latin America," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "President Bush is following in the footsteps, not of Thomas Jefferson, but of Hugo Chavez.
"'Social justice' is the notion that everyone deserves an equal share of the wealth that exists in a nation--regardless of how productive he is. Justice, on this view, consists of seizing the wealth of the productive and giving it to the unproductive. This is the ideal preached and conscientiously put into practice by leftist dictators like Chavez.
"But it is precisely this type of envy-driven philosophy that is responsible for the wretched conditions in Latin America. It is no mystery why a nation that shackles and loots its most productive citizens should be weighed down by poverty and stagnation.
"President Bush should tell the people of Latin America to reject the immoral goal of 'social justice' and embrace the American principles of freedom and capitalism."
Come on, Mr. Prez, you've heard of workfare, haven't you? As for the "social justice" you're proposing -- is it going to come out of the social security payments I think I have little hope of seeing?
Read about Bush putting our tax dollars to work in South America. Now, perhaps it can be argued that we have a national interest in doing this -- providing health care and education and job training for people in countries down south. Or perhaps this should be the province of charitable organizations, not American taxpayers. What do you think?
How To Make The LA Times A Better Paper
Use people there already on staff! From a comment I left over in Patterico-land:
You know, it strikes me that, if they just let the upstarts be in charge at the paper — the young new hires like Richard Rushfield, Matt Welch, and Rob Barrett — they’d put out a much better paper. Why bring in Grazer to decide who does op-eds? Matt Welch, who, if you look at his Reason Mag years and his blog, is a pretty insightful, innovative-thinking guy. Why not just let Matt decide who goes in the op-ed section some weekend? Wow — you mean, hire good people, then just let them do their jobs? Put Matt in charge and you might just get somebody fascinating to read; say, Heather Havrilesky, instead of Rosa Parks — sorry, Rosa Brooks — Barbara Ehrenreich’s unreadable Virginia law professor daughter.
Oops...last night, I'd forgotten to link to Allison Silver, the former LAT Op-Ed editor, who supports my point about at least turning to somebody with editing experience who has an idea or two:
Editing is not a hobby, any more than teaching elementary school, producing a television show or running a political campaign is. The way I see it, the public debate, continual and intense, is like a huge mural that readers are looking at and trying to get a handle on. My job, any editor's job, is to give them easy access. It is as if I were holding up an empty frame to a specific part of the canvas, focusing in on one aspect of the wide-ranging discussion. This frame could be provided by an historian or an economist, a political analyst or cultural commentator, a constitutional scholar or a former diplomat; an intelligence expert or a humor writer.There is a rhythm to the public debate, it has a flow and a syncopation. A big news story evolves as the weeks go by. For example, to help readers understand the varied elements of the story of Elian Gonzalez, a young Cuban boy claimed by relatives in Miami, first we had a political analyst write about the role of Florida in national politics; then an expert in Latin American affairs write about Cuban-U.S. relations; then an expert in the Cuban exile community in Florida; then a Mexican-American novelist who knew about magical realism (dolphins played a role in Elian's rescue); then a constitutional scholar on the power of a mayor versus the federal government. Each week of that story, there was a different element to focus on.
The trick is to ask the right question, and then get the right person to answer it.. That Platonic combination of the best person on the ideal topic creates the strongest piece.
And once you have the best possible piece, it has to fit into the best possible mix. Is there too much national news? Are there too many conceptual pieces? Have we missed a big urban design issue? Do we need to look at why a big movie resonates with the public? An editor plays this version of musical chairs regularly.
No matter how clever and talented the invited guest is, the decision to go outside journalism suggests indifference to editing as a critical profession. It goes without saying that you wouldn't turn your Sunset Strip restaurant over to your mom for the night no matter how good a cook she is, or take the Jet Propulsion Lab away from CalTech and give it to Cal Arts to run, just to shake things up. But the newspaper was suggesting that any one of a number of smart amateurs could pull together a Sunday analysis section, given a little guidance. Professional experience and journalistic skill were deemed of secondary value.
He Who Dies With The Most Kalashnikovs Wins
Hugh Fitzgerald, over at Jihad Watch, says we should get out of Iraq, pronto. (Leave them all to kill each other, and maybe they'll be too busy to come after us):
...This is the main point: the inevitability of Sunni-Shi'a conflict....No matter what cosmetic changes are made, what phony "oil bill" is passed that may outwardly satisfy the Americans, just as soon as those Americans leave the Shi'a militia will go at it and get their revenge, and they will be even more likely, having been held back by the Americans, to engage in the kind of warfare that is the only kind that gets the attention, and possibly some cooperation, from the Sunni Arabs. It won't be the kid-gloves treatment of the Americans in Iraq, nor the scrupulous Israelis. It will be Muslim on Muslim. From outside Iraq, others will supply money, men, weaponry, to their coreligionists, and within Muslim lands -- Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Pakistan being the main ones where there are significant Shi'a communities -- all kinds of spillover effects will only increase the domestic unrest and headaches for regimes that, until now, have managed to export to the Infidel world, the Western world, all of the refusal to compromise, the aggression and the hostility to which Islam naturally gives rise, and which those growing up in societies suffused with Islam exhibit. It will be a very nice Demonstration Project for the Infidels of the world.
...It is and will be a country riven by civil conflict. The Sunni Arabs -- the ones likely to be more favorable to Al Qaeda, for example -- will be devoting all of their energies to attacking, or repulsing the attacks of, Shi'a Arabs. Both kinds of Arabs in the north will be attacking, or repulsing the attacks of, the Kurds. The Kurds will see the Sunni-Shi'a conflict as the perfect opportunity to make the most of these conditions to make their move for independence, a move that should be supported by the Americans. The Americans should realize that an independent Kurdistan would cause great problems to both Iran and Syria, and even to Islam more generally. The spectacle of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke would or could inspire other non-Arab Muslims, such as Berbers in North Africa, and even Berbers in France, to recognize Islam for what it is: a vehicle for Arab imperialism, linguist, cultural, economic, and political.
Will this be recognized? Is there anyone in Congress who will state this kind of opposition to the war? Who will show up the Bush Administration not for its being too ruthless, or too tough, but for being too ignorant, too inhibited, too un-ruthless, too uncomprehending of all the things that it should be trying to accomplish instead of the things that it is trying to accomplish in Iraq, which is to say a stable, unified country.
There are two things wrong with the Administration's goal of a stable, unified country:
1. It is impossible of achievement.
2. It is exactly the wrong goal.Other than those two reasons -- it's just fine.
Not Your Mother's Vaporizer
This one's for smokeless pot. Via Wired:
Herbal enthusiasts -- otherwise known as potheads -- are putting a high-tech spin on the age-old practice of getting high as a kite. Tokers are turning to specialized devices that vaporize marijuana rather than burning it. The vaporizers get hot enough to extract all the plant's psychotropic chemicals, but not hot enough to actually combust. The smoker gets a hit of sweet, sticky vapor -- and an allegedly healthier high, since the carcinogens and solid particles get left behind, that's especially attractive to users of medicinal marijuana.
How To Prevent Air Rage
You knew there were utter drooling morons running the FCC when they proposed letting passengers on airplanes talk on their cellphones in flight.
Now, when somebody's in a restaurant shouting on their cell, I do have the option of leaving if they simply won't stop. When I'm buckled into my seat for hours in a tin can hurtling thousands of miles next to some loud blatherer of the most inane details? Forget checking me for tweezers, hairspray and nail clippers. I'll kill the fucker with my bare hands.
Thankfully, the proposal, writes Paul Davidson in USA Today, "is about to be grounded." And not because the geniuses running the FCC (fire them, institutionalize them!) think it's a bad idea.
The FCC has long worried that wireless calls at 35,000 feet would clog hundreds of on-ground towers at once. That hurdle was expected to be remedied by a plan to send passengers' cellphone signals to a small airplane antenna, known as a pico cell. The antenna would then relay calls to earthbound towers over spectrum — earmarked just for air-to-ground use — won by AirCell in an FCC auction last year.But tests conducted last year by CTIA, a wireless association, showed that in-flight calls still cause interference, especially if the pico cell couldn't recognize the passenger's cellphone signal, says CTIA Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe.
AirCell CEO Jack Blumstein says the interference issues can be fixed. The larger obstacle, he says, is a lack of enthusiasm by both consumers and wireless industry players for in-flight cellphone use. In a USA TODAY survey in 2005, 68% of respondents favored keeping the ban. Consumers have voiced concerns that cellphone chatting by air-travel neighbors would be disruptive.
Duh. Want to ground the airline industry? Allow cellphone calls on planes. I'll crawl hundreds of miles on broken glass to avoid taking an airplane. Or, I'll use asshole canceling headphones -- perfect for avoiding hearing not only cellphone calls but any trivial announcements the captain might make.
Davidson continues:
Also, Cingular and Verizon also have told the FCC they don't what to share their frequencies in the skies with competitors. Such sharing of constantly-shifting frequencies likely would be necessary for cellphones to work, AirCell has said.Major wireless providers and AirCell are more interested in providing less-obtrusive broadband services, Blumenstein says. A $10-per-trip AirCell service slated to roll out by early 2008 would let passengers use Wi-Fi-equipped laptops to e-mail, surf the Web and access corporate networks. JetBlue, meanwhile, has said it may introduce an in-flight e-mail and text-messaging service later this year.
"We've always been interested in broadband Internet and e-mail, not voice," Blumenstein says.
Finally, somebody with sense speaks. And, P.S., if you sit next to me and start Skype-calling somebody, expect the same courtesy I'd show some loud asswad on a cell.
via Pajamas Media
The Gestapo Of Dolls
Girls apparently go whacko for American Girl dolls. As I am a girl of 43, and have been careful not to have any girls of my own, I've just heard about this. Apparently, these dolls are ridiculously expensive (car payment-priced -- like, they can be hundreds of dollars with clothing), so a 6-year-old kid spent her own money on an American Girl-like doll at Target for considerably less (although the $29.99 she spent isn't peanuts). A friend then invited her to come with her to have her doll's hair styled at the American Girl Place in Manhattan. Bad idea. Her mom blogs about what went down when Etta, her little girl, got to the front of the line:
“This isn’t a real doll!” the stylist exclaimed. (Thank your stylist!--we never would have had the heart to explain it that way!). And to prove that a fake doll isn’t worth the plastic she’s molded out of, she refused to do the doll’s hair.I’m not sure exactly what’s in it for your company, because you still stood to make $20 off of my daughter for doing the fake doll’s hair. I have two thoughts on that. Either her $20 wasn’t worth the same as someone else’s $20 (in which case I’ve learned something new too!) OR it was worth the $20 to you to be able to be the one to break the news to, I mean, to *enlighten* my little girl. You do promise to teach little girls, don’t you?
And she cried and cried and cried, and your stylist held her ground. That was a good lesson for her too. That feelings don’t have a place in "the heart of Manhattan’s prestigious shopping neighborhood" (another quote from your website).
And did you realize how loyal to you all the other mommies in line were? You’d have been proud of them.
One chided Etta for not knowing she couldn’t bring a fake doll to the store. Tsk tsk. She’s in first grade now and can read by herself (taught herself, in fact). She probably should have done the research. There’s another great lesson for her. (Thanks mom in line!)
One mom muttered to another that Etta probably couldn't afford a real one. Great hunch! She's six!
One mom just smiled and said "Well, American Girl Dolls aren’t for everyone, you know.” A sentence cleverly crafted to make Etta feel like someone cared about her but also to be aware that she really didn’t belong there in your fancy store with the other, richer, better girls. How compassionate!
So, another little girl had a life-changing experience at The American Girl Place!
Hooray for you!
To think, she might have gotten through first grade with her self-confidence intact!
...As promised, her experience at your store gave her "memories she’ll cherish forever." You cared enough to realize that there’s a limit to what I can teach her at home and you rushed in and offered up some good old-fashioned and completely unforgettable public humiliation!
Good job!
Forever grateful,
Etta’s mom.
While I think this was pretty awful, if it's true, some commenters on the site noted that the mother should've called to see if the store -- which is all about one brand of dolls -- would do other kinds of dolls...and I tend to agree.
It's kind of like the American guy in New Jersey with a summer house in France who recently wrote me that American women who rented his place "should have known" that his price of "fifteen hundred a week" was 1500 eu, not the 1500 dollars they tried to pay him on return. I told him it was up to him to spell out. (And the fact that he took payment on return says he's naive to begin with -- not a crime, but if you don't take personal responsibility, and do due diligence, you really shouldn't be too shocked when things don't turn out the way you'd hoped.)
via Consumerist
Cathy Seipp
(New blog items will appear below. This one's staying up through Friday, the day of Cathy's funeral.)
(UPDATE BELOW, 4:51pm Wednesday) Cathy Seipp has lived five extraordinarily courageous years with lung cancer, and it's 8:10 pm Monday night as I'm writing this, and they took the oxygen mask off three hours ago (because she was suffering so), and she's still hanging on. The doctor apparently thought it would only be "minutes" after he took it off. Apparently, this doctor didn't know Cathy. I've never experienced another person with her strength and courage.
For those of you who didn't have the privilege of knowing or being a friend of Cathy Seipp, that's her in front from the day she and I and Emmanuelle Richard spent at Chateau Marmont with Toby Young. These were taken just this past July.
My life in Los Angeles, my friends in Los Angeles, my experience of Los Angeles (the fact that it feels like home) -- in so much of it, I owe Cathy. Around 1997, when I was still living in New York, but going back and forth to L.A., I e-mailed her a fan letter after reading her column, "Letter From L.A." in New York Press. As somebody who thinks a whole lot of writing is crap, I found her hilarious, extremely smart, and somebody I wanted to know.
She wrote back, we talked on the phone, and we had the first of our "Writergirl breakfasts" at The Farmer's Market, and did our first book party at my house for Ron Rosenbaum's "Secret Parts Of Fortune." Cathy was so generous -- I didn't know anybody in LA, and she quickly brought me into her circle, her friends became my friends, and she became a sort of big sister/mentor to me, supporting me as a writer and encouraging me to go after the undermannered (a pet peeve of hers as well). I was in awe of her, as I'm sure many people are, and I was so touched the other day when Debbie Gendel told me that Cathy spoke of me "always with affection and awe."
Cathy isn't one to be mushy, but I did tell her how much she influenced me and supported me when I was at her house one day these past few months. And, come to think of it, I probably said it better by being there to make her ice cubes. It was a privilege.
I think she understood how loved she was by the great outpouring of all her friends, including big-hearted Jackie Danicki who came all the way from London, and Nancy Rommelmann, who flew down from Portland to try to soothe her with her with what I can best describe as the warmth of her Nancyness and with her fabulous cooking.
A few typical Cathy stories from her time with cancer:
•At the party at Debbie and Morgan Gendel's to celebrate her remission, she announced, "I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn't made me a better person."•Here's the piece I wrote about her for the roast we gave her at the Figueroa Hotel in September.
•And a link from LAObserved when Cathy revealed on her blog that she had lung cancer (of course, joking when people asked her if she had breast cancer, "I wish!"):
Because sure, breast cancer is no fun; I’ve had friends who’ve died of it. But it also has a survival rate of around 85%. That’s the unsurvival rate of lung cancer, which is what I have. I’m actually lucky still to be alive, given that I was diagnosed almost three and a half years ago, after a cough that wouldn’t go away, and most lung cancer patients don’t make it past two years. Except that, since I never smoked even one cigarette, never lived or worked with smokers, and in fact have zero family history and no other risk factors at all (unusual even in people who don’t get cancer), the bald truth is I’m pretty unlucky to have this in the first place.[skip]
Here is my situation, which really has put a crimp in my usual Nietzschean sense of physical superiority: I have Stage 3B (if the pathologist is feeling Pollyannaish) or 4A (if he’s not) adenocarcinoma of the lung, the kind nonsmokers get, although most who get it do have some history of smoking. It’s too widespread to be treated by surgery or radiation. “Obviously, this is not resectable,” the surgeon wrote in his report. Occasionally I flip through my giant file while I’m waiting to see the oncologist, see that sentence, and think: OK, I understand he‘s talking to other doctors here, but did he have to say obviously like that?
The only options so far are different kinds of chemotherapy or newer drugs like Iressa, and these have mostly worked for a while (they don’t for most people – again, lucky me!), but eventually everything runs out of steam and you have to try something else. That’s where I am now, on a new semi-experimental treatment, and I don’t know yet if it’s having any effect. The three tumors that show up on CT scans are still relatively small, which is why I seem in better shape than most of the slugs you see around town. But being physically fit, unfortunately, is not always a Get Out of Jail Free card.
•When I kept her company at chemo (before she started having it on my deadline days), I used to bring cookies and Pellegrino. One day, I brought her a cashmere sweater my sister had given me because it happened to be her favorite color green. I said, "If you have to have chemo, I believe you should also get a cashmere sweater." She said, "Thanks, Maia will love this." Typical Cathy. I believe she lived as long as she did -- way beyond the expectations for someone with the cancer she had -- in large part, to be here for Maia. (photo from LAist, taken by Emmanuelle Richard)
Maia is another person, even at 17, that I feel privileged to know. Cathy and I talked about what a sweet, generous, loving person Maia is when I was with Cathy on Friday at Cedars. I'm just glad I was able to tell Maia. This all happened so fast. As Debbie Gendel said, and a few people echoed, "Until now I was pretty sure she was invincible."
Here's the post Maia put up on Cathy's blog earlier on Monday:
In hospital
posted 03/19/07
As earlier mentioned in the comments section, my mother is in the hospital. The doctor says that right now they're just making her comfortable. She's sedated, with painkillers among other things. Lungs collapsed so right now we just want to make sure she has dignity and is not in pain. The doctor says she has a couple days left. I want to thank all her readers for reading this blog, her friends for supporting her who made up "Team Cathy." Through you all, I learned what a true friend was. I'm at her bedside now, holding her hand. I tell her she has 292 comments on the latest blog post..her last but she just squeezes my hand. She was very happy with this blog. In honor of her, if you can...support the American Lung Cancer Society and or adopt stray dogs and cats from the pound. Those were her causes. Thank you all so much. Will keep everyone posted.
And here's the e-mail I got from Emmanuelle in early evening on Monday:
Dear friends of Cathy, Sandra just called at a quarter to 6 and said that the doc thought that Cathy was in too much pain and decided to take the oxygen mask off at 4:47 pm. It's almost a quarter to 6 and she's still fighting. It's incredible. From what I understood yesterday, you're not supposed to survive that long in her condition without the mask but now, it's a matter of minutes. Sandra is with Maia, and Michelle is there as well as Jerry all around her. Please forward to anyone I may have forgotten. Courage
Both Emmanuelle and I are on deadline right now, and couldn't be there today, but we've both been part of "Team Cathy," an incredible group of Cathy's friends who saw to it that she wasn't alone -- emotionally or physically -- throughout this. We went with her to chemo, stayed with her at home...there were shifts of friends and there was a "Team Cathy" calendar on Google so we could see to it she always had somebody by her side.
Friends with time gave time, friends with money gave money, and a total stranger -- Kari at Celadongifts.com -- even sent Cathy a free heat wrap when Cathy's microwave ate hers. There were times when I was at Cathy's and I'd figure out something she needed -- like a laptop or a new microwave so the new heat wrap wouldn't be destroyed -- and all I had to do was e-mail "Team Cathy," and within minutes somebody would come up with whatever was needed. Or three or four somebodies would. The outpouring of love and energy in a town that's supposed to be filled with shallow assholes was incredible.
Of course, Cathy being Cathy, she felt bad that people were going out of their way for her. The truth is, as I told her whenever she'd protest what we were all doing for her, that it's just what friends do, and that the friendship she's shown is a testament to who she is. It's so sad that that word will soon change to "was." Boy, that's hard to write. It's so hard to believe that this tough, vibrant, full-of-life person I love is on her way out -- about to disappear from the planet. All I can do now is take solace in the fact that her terrible suffering will soon cease, be mindful of all she's given me, and think of how she's influenced so many people in her too-short time on the planet.
Luke Ford
Mary Madigan
Dreams Into Lightning
Nancy Rommelmann
Emmanuelle Richard
The Corner
Jackie Danicki
Jackie gets it right about Cathy's work ethic. Two weeks ago, Cathy was complaining about how "lazy" she was (the day after chemo, on which she was typically [and understandably] exhausted). I had to keep telling her it was okay that she hadn't gone down to her office yet...reminding her that it was okay "because you had chemo, and you're tired!" P.S. She did make it down there by the end of the day. I finally realized she'd feel a lot better psychologically if she did, so I encouraged her, and she worked a little -- despite the pain and the chemically-induced exhaustion.
Lewis Fein, over on Cathy's blog:
With just a few notable exceptions, she never spoke about her presumably impending death: she wanted to protect Maia financially, and her other great concern, notably lower on the totem of importance, was that I would wear shorts to her funeral, much to her regret.
Comments for Maia on Cathy's blog. I was struck by this one from Cathy's good friend Anne Thompson:
maia, you are handling the worst time in your life with grace and dignity. In other words, you are a chip off the old block. Give your mother's hand a squeeze from me.
Moxie's incredible photo of Cathy
Nancy Rommelmann again
Denise Hamilton, one of our writergirl breakfasters
Mickey Kaus
Brian Doherty at Reason:
Her wit and enormous capacity for friendship drew around her the most interesting swirling nexus of L.A. writers, politicos, and characters one could ever hope to meet.
My boyfriend, Gregg Sutter, who is flying in a day early from Detroit (he spends a lot of time there for work) to take me to the funeral, called Cathy "a good-looking broad." I told her so at one point when she was feeling bad, and it perked her up. And she was -- even throughout her illness. Just look at those pictures above, taken in July, and how beautiful she looked at her roast, in September.
I remember her telling me a story of somebody who told her how jealous they were of how great she looked -- better than they looked, even though she was supposedly quite ill. And she was -- but just as she hated to complain, and rarely did, despite some pretty serious agony, she looked so good people found it hard to believe she was so sick. Anyway, reflecting that, here are some pictures of her Emmanuelle's linked to.
Unfortunately, a couple of the updates here disappeared in a bit of coding mess -- if anybody has cached text, please send. Just home from being with Maia, and totally exhausted. In the mean time, here's a lovely post by Kate Coe:
She was kind and cranky, silly and profound. She made Los Angeles seem a little bit like her own red living room--warm, cozy and full of interesting bits. She was generous with her time, her knowledge, and her opinions. Especially those opinions. I will miss her enormously, as will all the rest of her friends. Those who disagreed with her will miss her even more, knowing they'll never again have such a worthy opponent.
Our friend Tony Ortega, who will kick ass as the new editor of The Village Voice, posted more lovely words there:
I met Seipp at the end of the last century, when she was busy on two projects: trying to convince journalists that bringing back the grand tradition of gathering in social settings to get soused was something we never should have lost, and also trying to convince those of us in the print business that we were ignoring one of the biggest stories in years—the impact bloggers were having on the news business.Of course, she was right on both accounts. With advice columnist Amy Alkon, Seipp started a series of drinkathons for Los Angeles journalists that continued for years (and for all I know, is still going), bringing together those of us at newspapers with the new names of online reporting. You knew Seipp was onto something when blogging trailblazers like Matt Welch and Ken Layne are trying to convince you to throw away everything and come help them launch a new paper to be delivered free to the homes of rich people that will be underwritten by millionaire and former LA mayor Richard Riordan, and you've almost had enough tequila shots to go for it.
That was the kind of craziness Seipp was after. She loved the mashup of old and new journalism worlds, and tried repeatedly to get me and others to pay attention to what was happening. Media evolution got plenty of treatment in her own columns, of course. She'd long been a caustic critic of the Los Angeles Times (and Seipp fans will remember one of her all-time, most entertaining takedowns with three familiar words: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez), but she also had loads of criticism for the company I worked for, called New Times then (Village Voice Media today), and how it was transforming the alternative media business. Unlike other critics of New Times, Seipp did her homework and knew what she was talking about. She'd met enough of us to know what we were actually trying to accomplish, even if she believed we were falling woefully short of the mark.
I'll miss Cathy Seipp keeping us on our toes. And I'll miss those damn drunks in LA. Cathy, you won't be forgotten.
Here’s what I liked most about Cathy: With a zest unmatched by the healthy, Cathy simply willed herself to endure. To smile. To laugh. To care. To befriend. To love. To live.
FOUND THE LOST UPDATES:
UPDATE: It's Wednesday morning, 9:02am, and Cathy, incredible Cathy, defying all medical predictions, is still with us. Harvey, Cathy's dad, stayed the night with Cathy, and I stayed over with Maia last night and we'll go to Cedars in a little while. We're holding Cathy's hand and talking to her -- watching Moxie do that last night, and stroking her hair, and reassuring her, was so moving. Moxie had me read Mark Steyn's piece on Cathy to Cathy, and I read her a few of the e-mails and comments on her and told her about the hundreds of comments from people on her blog.
P.S. Like mother, like daughter. Maia had two friends drive three and a half hours to spend a couple hours with her at Cedars, and then they had to make the three and a half hour drive back to UCSD. You get the friends you deserve.
UPDATE, 4:51pm: I'm back at the house with Maia. By now, many of you have probably heard, Cathy is no longer suffering. She died today at 2:05pm. Greg Critser, Sandra Tsing Loh, Maia, her dad, Jerry Lazar, Debbie Gendel, Emmanuelle Richard and I were there with her at the hospital so she wouldn't be alone.
There will be a public funeral at Friday, 10 am, at Mt. Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles, 90068. There will be a nice LA Times obit tomorrow (in Thursday's print edition -- but it's up online now at this link).
Richard Rushfield writes:
We've got her on the home page of the latimes.com with a lovely pic...with a message board for people to share their memories. This place has lost its most loyal critic.
I called Diana at LA Press Club to let her know so she could put something up on the website, and she said this year's LA Press Club awards will be dedicated to Cathy, which is a pretty big deal.
Maia is doing very well under the circumstances. Her mom would be proud.
**comments are open again (had a bit of a coding nightmare for a few hours).
Welcome To The Ghetto For Girls!
Like special schools and classes for slow learners, there's now a special art museum for women, as part of The Brooklyn Museum. Catherine Morris writes in Time Out/NY of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, showcasing work by women artists from 1960 onward:
Reached by phone in her Brooklyn office, the center’s curator, Maura Reilly, described the opening as “an historical moment of feminism infiltrating the museum.”
This is a good thing? I believe Louise Nevelson managed to get into a museum or two without a special affirmative action wing. As did Helen Frankenthaler and a number of other women artists. To me, this is like government grants for art. If your art is good enough, you'll make money. If not, it's not an art career, it's a hobby, okay?
The article winds up with this from Carolee Schneemann:
...whose radical performances of the ’60s politicized the female body, finds relevance in the Sackler Center opening as the Bush administration drives the country deeper into war. “Feminism has always battled against hypermasculinity” she says. “This position couldn’t be more vital than it is in our current political moment.”
Oh, please. The woman does vagina paintings, with menstrual blood. Is this art? (Hint: When they use the word "discourse" to talk about your work, that's the bullshit alert.) Here's a bit from her website, from a performance where she's wearing a set of horns on her head, looking pretty ridiculous:
The Vulva speaks: "If the traditions of patriarchy split the feminine into debased/glamorized, sanitized/ bloody, madonna/whore... fractured body, how could Vulva enter the male realm except as "neutered" or neutral... "castrated"?
The Vulva speaks? Tell the vulva to make like the penis and shut the hell up. There's plenty of hilarious stuff at her website; unfortunately, no permalinks, so you'll have to look for the silliness yourself. Check out "Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology," in which she shovels the shit (or, shall I say, used maxi pads) sans spell-check, punctuational correctness, and without making the slightest bit of sense:
"Fresh Blood- A Dream Morphology" posited female physical exposeure the feminine as normative. In examining our most taboo viscerality I was built an ethos in which male phobias were eliding. I would invert the projects of the unsanitary leakage, abject, I could posit all the wet bloody cyclic not only in it's physicality, but in a conceptual frame of positive range so that the phobic masuline would have to shrivel and cower... the functions of my body would not be symptomatic or all that is not male."
Hey, Lady...man or woman, if you've got diarrhea, your period, or an antsy bladder, kindly use the toilet and flush afterward. (Shut the door first.) No need to alert the media, not even if you're attempting to either channel or parody Foucault. P.S. Saying so isn't anti-woman; it's basic personal hygiene.
And again, the more Foucaultian bullshit-speak you use to describe your work, the less value it tells me your work actually has. Nevertheless, kudos to you for taking the P.T. Barnum route to earning a living! And doing it well, considering you've fooled your way into museums in the business of showing art, and have a loft in New York City.
Now, I'm not just strictly figurative in what I appreciate in art: I like abstract expressionism for challenging the representative status quo, and appreciate specific abstract expressionsists (especially Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb for his red and black orb paintings, and Franz Klein, for his black fire-escapey looking paintings).
Additionally, I love Dada, and thought Ad Reinhardt was clever for doing one black painting. Good joke...move on, thanks. He didn't. And, after all the ab exers did their thing for a while, all the no-talent slobs and slob-ettes saw that they didn't have to learn how to paint or have any visible meaning in their work -- they could just stick some myth-dripped title on it and get a good art publicist and a Saatchi interested, and they were golden. Nice "work" if you can get it.
P.S. Some of my favorite modern art is Austrian/German expressionism, especially Egon Schiele. If you're a fan, too, when you're in New York, visit the museum called Neue Gallerie.
article link via ifeminist
Yoga Psychos
Appropriately, since the first book party Cathy and I ever gave (before we knew Emmanuelle, and she started throwing them with us) was for my pal Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune...my first blog item after Cathy's passing will be on a great piece by Ron, "The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga."
My little sister does yoga every day, but isn't like the woman who recently nearly crashed into my car while on her cell phone, then parked, gave me the finger, and got out with her yoga mat. "Just off to find a little fucking inner peace, you redheaded bitch!" Yeah, I get it. My little sister was in town a while back and went to YogaWorks on Main Street. She's, shall we say, something of an original, and doesn't always follow the program at a yoga studio. She called, before she went, to ask if that would be a problem. No, they'd take her money, no big deal.
Well, not until she got there and started stretching somehow inappropriately, and got dressed down by some Yogaworker. In the nastiest way, but in new-age-speak, which she found disturbing, yet hilarious. Being as we're cut from the same bitchyass cloth (good to our friends, and the deserving, but don't try to put one over on us), she calmly let him know she was told it wouldn't be a problem and kept up with what she was doing, to his hostile, new age dismay.
On Slate, Ron Rosenbaum hits on what's become of yoga:
"New Age" culture being those scented-candle shrines to self-worship, the love-oneself lit of The Secret, the "applied kinesiology"-type medical and metaphysical quackery used to support a vast array of alternative-this or alternative-that magical-thinking workshops and spa weekends. At its best, it's harmless mental self-massage. At its worst, it's the kind of thinking that blames cancer victims for their disease because they didn't "manifest" enough positive vibes.One "manifestation" of this takeover is the shameless enlistment of yoga and elevated Eastern yogic philosophy for shamelessly material Western goals. Rather than an alternative, it's become an enabler. "Power yoga"! Yoga for success! Yoga for regime change! (Kidding.)
And then there's what you might call "Yoga for Supermarket Checkout Line Goals." Or as the cover story of Rodale's downmarket magazine YogaLife put it, yoga to: "BURN FAT FASTER!" (Subsidiary stories bannered on the YogaLife cover: "4 WAYS TO LOSE 5 POUNDS"; "ZEN SECRETS TO: HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS ... INSTANT CALM.")
Then he tells the incredible tale of somebody who sounds like one of the readers who writes me, supposedly for advice -- one of those letters where they try to sanely present their case...a case that's really just a ploy to get their pitch to some poor stalkee in the paper. Ron continues, about a story that appeared in Yoga Journal:
The story, which appeared in the December 2006 issue, was titled "Forgive Yourself." It's by this woman who tells us about an "intense" friendship she once had with a guy nearly 20 years ago, when they were 16. She says it was "never romantic," and it clearly wasn't—on his part.Somehow she picked a fight with him—remember, this was 20 years ago. She defaced some "artwork" he'd done on the back of her jean jacket and danced with some other boys in an attempt to make him jealous.
She claims he gave her a "stricken" look.
Then, 20 years later, she starts to hound the guy. She claims she just happened to be going through some boxes and found a journal of his. She claims the journal convinced her that what she needed to do was apologize and ask his forgiveness. So she Google-stalks him, or, as she puts it: "With the help of an Internet search engine, I tracked him down and sent an e-mail. I told him I was sorry and that I hoped we could talk."
After much effort on her part, the guy sent back a note, "What part of no don't you understand?" "Just about every single part of no there is," Ron writes. Ultimately, the nutwad ends up enabled by YJ editors to stalk the poor guy, with a long bullshit piece where she winds up with "lighting candles," (of course!) "journaling," and, the kicker...
You must next and last, "Send yourself flowers when you've completed letting go."No premature floral deliveries, mind you. Only when you've "completed" letting go, which sending yourself flowers certainly signals. OK maybe one more poem, but that's it! This is the kind of misguided narcissism (it's always all about you; metaphorically, it's all sending flowers to yourself) that gives yoga, an ancient, honorable tradition, a bad name. This is what is meant by the "hostile New Age takeover of yoga." All this hectoring about the right way to feel. Yoga and other Eastern disciplines are supposed to work from the inside out and not depend on product placement candles, scented bath oils, and "yoga therapists."
And it's still not over! If the ritual bath and flower-sending don't do the trick, there's a "four-step practice rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that can take us through the process of making amends." You could spend a lifetime "moving on" from some imagined 20-year-old incident. Then move on to the next incredibly elaborate "Moving On" ceremony. You never get to move in, or move out.
The final step in the great journey of self-understanding the Yoga Journal editors have force-marched her on is realizing it's all about her "relationship with herself." Whitney Houston yoga: I found the greatest love of all—Me! It's the return of New Age Me-generation narcissism. And there's nothing worse than narcissism posing as humility.
Hey, if Buddhism and other Eastern traditions are about compassion, why not skip the scented bath, skip making amends with the self, skip realization of "the opportunity to embrace aparigraha or non-grasping." Instead, go down to the local soup kitchen or homeless shelter and help some people who don't have the resources to send flowers to themselves, people who actually need help. Rather than continuing the endless processes of anointing yourself with overly scented candlelit self-love.
After all this self-indulgence, it's almost refreshing to turn to a yoga magazine that offers stuff like, "BURN FAT FASTER!"
You Get What You Copay For
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. I'm running off to Cedars, so I'll just put the whole thing up below. The posting in my columns section is here, and should collect more comments.
I’ve been arguing a point with a male friend who’s in a relationship with a very nice woman. His girlfriend got on the birth control patch because they wanted a more reliable method than condoms. She’s just a student, and in their two years together, birth control has set her back $1,140 ($570 a year). She’s been asking him to split the cost of the patch ($35/month) and her yearly checkup to renew it ($150), and he's balking. He feels that since she's the one using it, as opposed to him using condoms, he shouldn't have to help. If you say he should pay, he promises he will. What's the verdict?--The Mediator
Yes, he correctly notes, “she’s the one using” the birth control patch -- mainly because slapping a medicated sticker with female hormones on his hairy back won’t do much more than increase his bra size from 46AAA to 46B, and maybe make him lactate a little.
So, who was the eighth-grade teacher who forgot to send your friend to summer school to repeat sex ed? Somebody should break the news to him that babies are made by a man and a woman having sexual intercourse, not dropped off by a giant cartoon stork. Maybe once he gets hip to the whole sperm meets egg/egg inflates into baby thing, he’ll come to understand that his girlfriend isn’t wearing the patch as a fashion statement or because it’s a recreational drug and she’s looking to get an estrogen buzz.
What’s more, she isn’t just paying for the patch in dollars and with that day at Disneyland otherwise known as a visit to the gynecologist. Potential “adverse reactions” published by the pharmaceutical company include nausea, vomiting and weight gain; depression, corneal shape-shifting and cerebral hemorrhage; and then there’s yeast infection, loss of scalp hair and hirsutism. While most women use the patch without major side effects, there is a chance his girlfriend could end up bald, with a really big gut and a beard.
Mr. All Play, No Pay may not know there are health risks involved, but the fact that his girlfriend has to beg him to undo the padlock on his wallet is seriously disgusting. As for the princely sum she’s looking to have him chip in, let’s see…it’s $35 a month for the patch, plus the yearly $150 doctor exam ($12.50 per month), which comes to $47.50 a month. Divide that by the two people enjoying pregnancy-free sex, and you get a grand total of $23.75 a month per enjoyer -- a considerable savings over $1,228.08, the average monthly cost, according to a 2005 USDA report, for middle-class parents to raise a child to age 17. In other words, this guy could be getting off cheap, with highly effective child-support prevention for less than a dollar a day. Instead, he’s merely getting off -- while rubbing his girlfriend’s nose in what a tightwad he can be.
My verdict? If you’re sleeping with somebody who quibbles about going halfsies on birth control, you aren’t having sex, you’re getting screwed. And remember, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Action is character.” This guy’s actions suggest he’s the kind of boyfriend who’ll always be there for her -- until the chips are down or the check comes. And, who is she? Let’s hope, somebody who finally sees the wisdom in telling him to keep his $23.75 and put it toward a case of Kleenex and a magnum of Vaseline Intensive Care.
Pimp My Living Room
Barbarians At The Gate
There's news about the cold-blooded slaughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. From a story by Massoud Ansari in the UK Telegraph:
Shocking video film of Pearl's murder, seen around the world via the internet, was in fact a partial reconstruction of what had happened a few moments earlier, officers have been told.The camera operator made a mistake and missed the moment of his death, which his murderers then re-enacted, before decapitating the reporter.
...His efforts to converse with his captors were limited since they could speak only broken English. However, one said: "He made clear that he was a Jew and his wife a Buddhist. He used to imitate the way she prayed, and sing hymns and songs whenever he thought about her."
How do you kill a guy like this? And if that's what your "religion" teaches you, what are you?
Pearl apparently knew for several hours that he was about to be killed, but resisted attempts to sedate him. Ansari's story continues:
On the day Pearl died, two of his Pakistani guards were present: Ali Khan, arrested just two weeks ago, and Fazal Karim, an employee of Saud Memon. One recently told interrogators how the Arabs tried to sedate Pearl, first by injection, then by doctoring his tea."I think he understood that he was going to be killed and refused to accept tea or to gulp pills. He even did not allow himself to be injected."
Before he was murdered, they forced him to relate his Jewish background and express sympathy with detainees in Guantanamo Bay before putting the knife to his throat once - and then again, a second time, owing to the faulty camera.
One of those present told police: "When they were slaughtering him in front of me I thought it was a bad dream. I had seen the cutting of a goat or chicken many times, but had never seen a human being slaughtered in front me."
From one of Andrew Sullivan's readers:
I was a friend of his through high school and college and stayed in touch with him until before he left for overseas. I had many discussions with him about what motivated people and about the nature of evil and power. I have no doubt that the reason he refused sedation is that he did not want to make it easier, in the least, on the killers' consciences. So he was willing to go through hell fully conscious as the price.
War Protest In Hollywood On Saturday
Apparently, the protest was pretty big. Gregg was giving some friends from Detroit a tour of Hollywood, and he took some photos. (All photos in this entry by Gregg Sutter.)
The LaRouchies dropped off a few pamphlets:
A lucky thing these ladies live in the United States, not a Muslim country, or they most likely wouldn't be allowed to speak so freely -- or speak publicly at all:
Mitchell G. Bard writes about what passes for human rights in Arab countries:
...most of the Arab states are ruled by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, which deny their citizens basic freedoms of political expression, speech, press and due process. The Arab Human Development Report published by a group of Arab researchers from the UN Development Program concluded that out of the seven regions of the world, Arab countries had the lowest freedom score. They also had the lowest ranking for "voice and accountability," a measure of various aspects of the political process, civil liberties, political rights and independence of the media.
And about women's rights, specifically, Bard writes:
In most Arab countries, the Shari'a, or Islamic law, defines the rules of traditional social behavior. Under the law, women are accorded a role inferior to that of men, and are therefore discriminated against with regard to personal rights and freedoms....Traditionally, the Arab woman marries at a young age to a man of her father's choice. A husband is entitled to divorce any time, even against his wife's will, by merely declaring verbally that this is his intention.
Although the image of the egalitarian woman is slowly developing within some more secular Arab states, it remains largely confined to urban centers and upper-class circles. Ritual sexual mutilation of females is still common in rural areas of Egypt, Libya, Oman and Yemen.
Furthermore, laws that restrict women's rights remain in force in almost all Arab countries. In Syria, a husband can prevent his wife from leaving the country. In Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Yemen, married women must have their husbands' written permission to travel abroad, and they may be prevented from doing so for any reason. In Saudi Arabia, women must obtain written permission from their closest male relative to leave the country or travel on public transportation between different parts of the kingdom.
According to the UN, "utilization of Arab women's capabilities through political and economic participation remains the lowest in the world in quantitative terms….In some countries with elected national assemblies, women are still denied the right to vote or hold office. And one in ever two Arab women can neither read nor write."
In a Saudi Shari'a court, the testimony of one man equals that of two women. In Kuwait, the male population is allowed to vote, while women are still disenfranchised. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all have laws stating that a woman's inheritance must be less than that of her male siblings (usually about half the size). Moroccan law excuses the murder or injury of a wife who is caught in the act of committing adultery; yet women are punished for harming their husbands under the same circumstances.
Wife-beating is a relatively common practice in Arab countries, and abused women have little recourse. As the State Department has noted regarding Jordan (and most of the Arab world): "Wife beating is technically grounds for divorce, but the husband may seek to demonstrate that he has authority from the Koran to correct an irreligious or disobedient wife by striking her."
In Saudi Arabia, restrictions against women are among the most extreme in the Arab world. Saudi women may not marry non-Saudis without government permission (which is rarely given); are forbidden to drive motor vehicles or bicycles; may not use public facilities when men are present; and are forced to sit in the backs of public buses, segregated from men. At Riyadh's King Saud University, professors lecture to rooms of men while women watch via closed-circuit television from distant all-female classrooms. "[Islamic] Advice columns" in the Saudi Arabian press recommend strict disciplining of women as part of a proper marriage. Women must cover their entire body and face in public, and those who do not are subject to physical harassment from the Saudi religious police, known as the Mutaaw'in. The Saudis even extend their discriminatory treatment to women abroad. During a visit to the United States by Crown Prince Abdullah, for example, the prince's aides requested that no female air traffic controllers be allowed to control his flight into Texas to meet President Bush. They also requested that no women be allowed on the airport tarmac with the jet.
...Arab regimes find different ways to deal with the international pressure to improve women's rights. They often prefer to introduce mild improvements in women's status rather than to enacting radical reforms that might contradict their ideology and antagonize conservative elements in the country.
Freedom From Paying For Religion
As of 1976, it looked like the church owned 10 percent of all U.S. property. That study has never been replicated, writes Christopher Ketcham, via Machines Like Us, so...how great a percentage of non-taxed property wealth do you think they own today? Imagine how your taxes might go down if religious organizations were forced to pay taxes on their holdings. But, Ketcham writes, religions aren't even made to disclose their finances. And they use their pulpits to wield political power -- no taxation with overrepresentation:
The IRS today likes to pretend it maintains at least a few regulatory brickbats to bar the “ecclesiastical corporations” from direct influence in the halls of power. Chief among the rules is that churches shall not endorse candidates or otherwise engage their flocks in electoral efforts. This unfortunately did not sit well with certain congregants or their leaders in the run-up to the re-election of George W. Bush, whose victory arguably rested more than any other factor on the singular purpose and organization of an evangelical franchise. Mobilizing the faithful, Bush’s arch-fixer Karl Rove conducted weekly conference calls with the priests of the movement, who handed over membership lists for registration drives, while the Rev. Pat Robertson counseled at least 45,000 churches on the mechanics of working to re-elect the born-again president. All of this was in frank violation of IRS law.Lack of oversight and disclosure coupled with timidity in regulation (or outright impotence) predictably leads to opportunity for fraud, or, at least, to generous allowances in the definition of “religious institution.” The village of Fleischmanns, New York, like all small towns a dependency of property tax, last year went bust after the majority Hasidic community declared their summer cottages “religious institutions.” Wiccan covens, brothels operating as churches of love, whole towns of New Ageists have received similar tax exemptions over the years. In Florida, a Biblical theme park, featuring live Jesus acts, demanded exemptions in a lawsuit that remains snagged in the courts, while in West Virginia a white supremacist group that worshiped, among other divinities, white people, received an exemption for land dedicated to prayer services (so did the Klu Klux Klan in Harrisburg, Penn.). The thieving psychobabble cult of Scientology retained its tax exemption by a simple name change: it became the Church of Scientology.
Meanwhile, the Austin, Tex., chapter of Ethical Society, the secular humanist group, fought bitterly in the regional federal appellates to win tax exemptions in 2004 for its atheist “ceremonies.” The Ethical Society victory, in retrospect, appears to dispel any meaningful curb on religious tax exemption claims. It makes hash of the Supreme Court’s only key ruling on property exemptions for churches, the Walz case of 1970. The Walz court offered that the religious tax exemption must be upheld primarily because it serves the social good of furthering the charitable function associated with religion—a function then as now purely ostensible and almost entirely taken up by social security for the disabled, county shelters for the homeless, state schools for the blind and deaf, etc. (The majority’s argument in Walz, it should be noted, is predicated on a delusion: Researchers at the University of Arizona concluded that just 3 percent of an average congregation’s total budget is spent on social services; only 6 percent of congregations have a staffer who devotes at least a quarter of his time to social services. “The bottom line,” said study author Mark Chaves, “is that most congregations are involved in social service activity in only a minor and peripheral way.”)
...If verification and regulation are thus deemed illegal, and widespread fraud is therefore a given, the simplest way out of the morass, perhaps, is to tax the churches across the board, much as that similarly cherished creature of the First Amendment, the press, has been taxed and has not suffered for it, except to become more competitive (though the exemption might be retained for those elements of a church—schools, soup kitchens, shelters—that actually serve the charitable function). Indeed, why should a righteous free market fund believers over non-believers? As Ben Franklin noted, “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself, and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it…'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
But don’t wait up nights for this eventuality, for in a society that boasts 325,000 houses of worship, roughly one for every 860 persons, in which church-going is the highest in our history (and the highest in the world), in which 83 percent of people take the Bible to be the “actual” word of God, half fear the devil, three-fourths believe in religious miracles, and a mere 9 percent swallow whole the concept of Darwinian evolution, there is no reason to expect the narcotizing effect of religion to cease its sway over presidencies, legislatures, and, most dangerously, over the high courts of the land, all of whom must in one forum or another answer to a public jealous of its hypnotic totems. Religion in the United States is more than simply respected. It is adored, petted, drooled over; it can do no wrong. This irrational consideration has catalyzed a silent but tectonic rifting not simply of the tax system but of the American legal system itself. Two separate and unequal set of laws now exist unquestioned: one for believers; and one, unbelievably, for everyone else.
They Say It's The Thought That Counts
It is a delicious way to say thank you. Of course, it's an equally delicious way to say "Fuck off, douchebag."
The Real McCain
Not only is the supposedly "straight-talkin'" John McCain clueless that condoms help stop the spread of AIDS, he doesn't even know what his own position is on contraception. Here, let me help, Mr. McCain. Next time, just say:
"What Bush said."
And here, from Adam Nagourney in The New York Times, is a little quote showing what McCain's made of ("Brian" is his press secretary):
Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”
To get to know what a "greatest generation" fascist the guy really is, read Matt Welch's excellent piece on McCain in the April Reason magazine, "Be Afraid of President McCain -- The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick." An excerpt:
McCain’s dazzling résumé—war hero, campaign finance Quixote, chauffeur of the Straight Talk Express, reassuring National Uncle—tends to distract people from his philosophy of government, and his chumminess with national journalists doesn’t help. There is a more useful key to decode how he might behave as president. McCain’s singular goal in public life is to restore citizens’ faith in their government, to give us the same object of belief—national greatness—that helped save his life after he gave up hope as a POW in Vietnam.Although Bill Kristol and David Brooks coined the phrase “national-greatness conservatism” in a 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, the sentiments they expressed and the movement forefathers they chose would have been right at home in one of the Chamber of Commerce speeches about the virtues of patriotism that McCain gave in the 1970s. Kristol and Brooks wrote that “wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine” and “what’s missing from today’s American conservatism is America.” McCain, then an ambitious pol-to-be working the rubber chicken circuit as a famous ex-POW, would deliver inspiring sermonettes about the value of public service and restoring America as an international beacon. All three men would eventually come together on such National Greatness projects as the “forward strategy of freedom” in the Middle East, trying to drive money out of politics, and, not least or last, getting John McCain elected president.
Like Kristol and Brooks, McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. A McCain presidency would put legislative flesh on David Brooks’ fuzzy pre-9/11 notions of “grand aspiration,” deploying a virtuous federal bureaucracy to purify unclean private transactions from the boardroom to the bedroom. And it would prosecute the nation’s post-9/11 wars with a militaristic zeal this country hasn’t seen in generations.
Whatever it takes to be gleaming and great. Perhaps he, like George Bush, is just waiting for everybody to say thank you, as Fred Kaplan writes about Bush on Slate:
As Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center (and generally a Bush supporter), puts it, "Gratitude is something you give to somebody who's superior. It's very different from, say, appreciation, which is something that equals give each other."Apart from his view of Iraq, Bush may have a point when he complains that America gets too little credit for its generosity (though this is hardly new). He doesn't acknowledge, however, that governments give aid or go to war for their own interests, not just for the interests of others, and therefore don't generally require thank-you notes. Nor does he seem to realize, whatever his motives, that nobody likes a whiner—that donors who demand bowing and scraping are often resented, if not despised.
Not to put the president on the couch, but personality probably plays some role here. I remember watching a White House press conference (looking it up, I see that it took place on April 5, 2004), where an Associated Press reporter started to ask Bush a question without first uttering "Mr. President," the customary preface when addressing the leader of the free world. Bush snapped at him: "Who are you talking to?" The reporter corrected his discourteousness, reciting the honorific, before restarting his question.
It was a startling display of a president who seemed insecure in his authority, bitter that some piddling reporter wasn't treating him (the president of the United States, damn it!) with the proper respect. The same complex may be triggered when piddling nations don't repay his good intentions with the proper "gratitude."
But this tendency reveals something deeper, and more worrisome, than some hypothetical character quirk. It reveals a basic misunderstanding of foreign policy and of the modern world.
Great! Let's elect another one just like him!
Don't Say "Never Again," Just Ask "When?"
The Holocaust will happen again -- unless all the Jews clear out of Europe. And if it isn't the Jews losing everything, it'll just be non-Islamic Europeans. Bye-bye Western civ! As I've said here, "Visit old Europe while you can -- because it won't be around for long!" Diana West writes in The Washington Times of what's to come:
Europe, as we may readily observe, is very far along in an accommodation with its still-increasing Muslim immigrant population that is resulting not in the Europeanizing of Islam, but rather the Islamizing of Europe. As Bernard Lewis declared in 2004, Europe will have an Islamic majority by the end of the 21st century at the latest. As Vlaams Belang's Mr. Dewinter recently put it, "We are becoming foreigners in our own land." Such tragic pronouncements turn conversation with Vlaams Belang into a kind of political free verse -- sadly evocative but rooted in a desperate reality that should shake American complacency. That is, "foreigners in our land" is poetry; Mohammed as the most popular boy's name in Brussels for six years running is implacable fact. The idea that "We are living on a dying continent but we are not dead yet," as Mr. Dewinter has explained, is metaphorical. His citation from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi that "Allah is mobilizing Muslim Turkey to add... 50 million more Muslims" to the European Union augurs world-class revolution.Is such a revolution desirable? After writing nearly incessantly about Islamization since September 11, I won't surprise anyone by saying no -- not if freedom of conscience, religious equality or women's rights are your bag (not to mention the glorious representational artwork Europe's museums are stuffed with). Besides, the strategic implications for the United States are, in a word, bleak.
In multiculturally totalitarian Belgium, however, you make such judgments at your own risk. Vlaams Belang, a conservative, free-market party that stands for Flemish secession from the French-speaking part of Belgium and opposes continued immigration, now stands trial in a Belgian court for a comment -- a comment! -- Mr. Dewinter made in 2005 to a New York publication, The Jewish Week. When asked why Belgian Jews should vote for a party that espouses "xenophobia," Mr. Dewinter replied: "Xenophobia is not the word I would use. If [it] absolutely must be a 'phobia,' let it be 'Islamophobia.' Yes, we're afraid of Islam. The Islamization of Europe is a frightening thing."
If convicted of the "crime" of "Islamophobia" ("1984," anyone?), the party would lose its state funding. In a country that effectively prohibits private political fund-raising, Vlaams Belang -- the largest party in Belgium -- would ultimately cease to exist. And so, too, would free speech in the center of Europe.
...As Mr. Vanhecke put it in a recent speech, "They call us 'intolerant' because we oppose intolerance. They call us 'fascists' because we oppose Islamofascism. They call us 'the children of holocaust perpetrators,' because we oppose Islamists who are preparing a new holocaust against the Jews."
America must start paying attention to Europe. And to Vlaams Belang.
I'm reminded of a question I asked my father when I was a kid: "Why didn't Jews in America do anything about The Holocaust? Why didn't anybody?" He didn't have an answer. Maybe people were as complacent then as most of us are now -- caring more about the Anna Nicole Smith of the day than the wolf in a bomb vest at the door, waiting to impose Sharia law, dhimmitude, and/or death on the rest of us.
Reminder: Every victory for Islam in America is a victory against the free society we now have, and a chipping away of our freedoms.
via Brussels Journal
Killed Cartoons
Freedom of the press is relative -- relative to how much freedom the press gives itself. There's a great deal of self-censorship in the media, especially of cartoonists. And if you want to see about 100 cartoons that newspaper editors thought were too much for you, pick up the terrific new book by my good friend David Wallis, Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression.
David writes about the editorial squelching of expression on SFGate:
It's not as if we're in Soviet times when the government totally controlled what readers could and could not see. Here, it's the newspapers and magazines that do most of the censoring. Work deemed controversial, sacrilegious, risqué, politically incorrect or simply bad for business often gets killed before publication.It merits mention that understandable motives can drive editors to kill. The world changes so fast that a political cartoon drawn today can become dated tomorrow, and sometimes a promising idea just doesn't work on paper. Editors also keep their creative types from breaking libel laws, flouting industry ethics and gratuitously offending people. Insult should be a byproduct of a reasoned argument rather than a goal in itself.
Too often, editors fail to make that critical distinction. They squelch compelling cartoons out of fear -- fear of angering advertisers, the publisher's golf partners, the publisher's wife, the local police chief or the president of the United States, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, homophobes, gays, pro-choice advocates and anti-abortion protesters, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Midwest grannies -- especially Midwest grannies. They even fear getting noticed. Cartoonist Milt Priggee remembers what an editor told him soon after he joined the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.: "If you want to survive at this paper, you've got to stay under management's radar. Don't do anything good. Don't do anything bad."
Internal politics dooms many compelling cartoons. Consider Kirk Anderson's 2002 cartoon on the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, which portrays a Vatican "fireman" rescuing a priest from a burning church while ignoring a screaming child trapped in the flames. Anderson's paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota had irked the local diocese for several years. But it repaired relations with the church after publishing an essay by the city's new archbishop. Anderson, who was later downsized, believes his editor spiked his cartoon rather than risk "rocking the boat" even though that is arguably the cartoonist's job brief.
David continues:
Enraged readers, as many editors have learned, freely express their fury through the Internet. The Web is a double-edged sword, providing cartoonists with a way to distribute censored cartoons, but also making it easy for offended parties to register protests out of proportion to their numbers.Perhaps the specter of full in-boxes factored into the Los Angeles Times' decision to quash Paul Conrad's 1999 cartoon of an angry elephant mounting a startled donkey to symbolize the reality of "congressional bipartisanship." To slip the "Wild Kingdom" humping past his paper's decency patrol, Conrad omitted any hint of genitalia. His editor, who called it "thigh-slapping fun" in an interview with a local alterative weekly, killed it anyway. In doing so, the prudish paper deprived readers of a vintage Conrad spanking of Republicans, who were bellowing about bipartisanship while impeaching Bill Clinton over a sex scandal.
...Mike Luckovich, the cartoonist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, had to wait awhile to truly express doubts about the Bush administration's honesty. In 2003, he was prevented from publishing a sketch, spelling out "W LIED" with military coffins. Luckovich's editor told a trade magazine that she thought "it was too early in the war to lay these deaths firmly at the president's feet."
By 2005, as public support for the war plummeted, Luckovich's paper approved a heart-wrenching cartoon to mark the loss of the 2,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq. Luckovich hand-wrote the names of every dead soldier to craft the word
"WHY."The Why cartoon, which helped Luckovich win his second Pulitzer Prize last year, reminds us that, when freed to deploy the potent weapon of ridicule by supportive editors, cartoonists matter. Powerful editorial art reaches out from the pages of newspapers and magazines, and now the screens of the Web, to poke readers in the eyes. Cartoons sting us in a primitive place, forcing us to question our leaders, our neighbors, our values.
Here's one final cartoon from the book. David e-mailed me a note about this one:
Trostle's cartoon sent up a ridiculous plan by local officials in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to tighten security to discourage revelers from attending the city's annual Halloween street party--an obvious terrorist target!
Disney Notices That Black People Have Disposable Income, Too
Via the AP, Disney is coming out with an animated film featuring their first black princess. The film is set in New Orleans -- presumably, not in the Superdome.
Are You A Stooge For God?
Sam Harris, in the wake of California Democrat Pete Stark's revelation that he's an atheist, writes in the LA Times of "god's dupes" -- the "moderate" believers who give cover to religious fanatics:
The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.
...The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?
There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.
Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
"Hey, Lady..."
"...does my ass look fat in these pants?"
"How Many Jews Did Mama Kill?"
Some children's mommies are librarians. Some children's mommies are doctors. Some children's mommies stay at home all day and read them stories. And some children's mommies -- some Islamic children's mommies -- blow themselves up.
Here, from MEMRI, is how sicko primitives raise their children:
Interviewer: "Let's talk with the two children of the jihad-fighting martyrdom-seeker Rim Al-Riyashi, Dhoha and Muhammad. Dhoha, you love Mama, right? Where did Mama go?"Dhoha: "To Paradise."
Interviewer: "What did Mama do?"
Dhoha: "She committed martyrdom."
Interviewer: "She killed Jews, right?"
Interviewer: "How many did she kill, Muhammad?"
Muhammad: "Huh?"
Interviewer: "How many Jews did Mama kill?"
Muhammad: "This many... "
Interviewer: "How many is that?"
Muhammad: "Five."
Interviewer: "Do you love Mama? Do you miss Mama?
"Where is Mama, Muhammad?"
Muhammad: "In Paradise."
Interviewer: "Dhoha, what would you like to recite for us?"
Dhoha: "In the name of Allah the Merciful the Compassionate: 'When comes the help of Allah, and victory, and you see people entering the religion of Allah in troops, then celebrate the praise of your Lord, and ask His forgiveness, for He is ever ready to show mercy.'"
via Jihadwatch
Pillage Talk
Just posted another Advice Goddess column -- from a guy whose girlfriend is lacks ambition and is stealing from him -- taking cash from his pants pocket, his wallet, and his change jar -- and he hopes getting her to move to a new place will change everything. Here's my reply:
So…if a guy at a concert picks your pocket, do you chase him and try to tackle him, or sit down and ponder whether he just needs an apartment of his own?It’s bad enough that you have to worry about strangers in Romania phishing your bank account over the Internet. Now you also have to worry that your own girlfriend is phishing your dresser? Of course, you should probably consider yourself lucky if all her larceny is the petty kind. While women typically wait until they marry to take a man’s name, your name may already be appearing on credit cards you’ll only find out about when the repo man is driving away in your car.
You could be checking your credit report for fraud right now -- if only you weren’t so busy making excuses for your girlfriend: She has a bad job! She doesn’t make enough money! There may be demons in the washing machine! Right. There’s a reason it’s the fruit of your labor disappearing, not your Fruit of the Looms. (Ever try to buy earrings with a fistful of tighty-whities?) Cough it up already: Your girlfriend is a thief. She isn’t “finding” money, she isn’t borrowing money, she’s stealing it, plain and simple. On the bright side, she isn’t endangering your life by holding you up at gunpoint, since your gullibility is the only weapon she needs.
Sometimes reality bites, and when it does, the answer isn’t reaching down to pet it and give it a biscuit. Sure, you really, really want to believe there’s a loving relationship in there somewhere -- perhaps because you’ve already put so much time into believing that. Or, perhaps you think admitting your girlfriend doesn’t love you means admitting you’re unlovable or undeserving of love. The truth is, you might be quite lovable, but you’ll never find out as long you’re with a woman whose idea of a 50/50 relationship involves lifting $50 from your wallet, then cashing in another $50 from your change jar.
Getting your girlfriend to move out will change one thing -- her address. While management companies do give away a lot of amenities to lure new renters, ethics and ambition aren’t among them. You can have a woman who shares your values, provided that you keep looking until you actually find one. If it makes you feel better, consider the money this woman filched a course fee of sorts: a lesson to avoid ignoring the disconnect between what you have and what you really want -- which, presumably, isn’t a girlfriend who can’t keep her hands off your hard…earned cash.
The entire question and answer is here.
Why Is There So Little Feminist Humor?
Is it that so much of feminism is really victimism? My personal problem with a lot of feminism is that it's not about equal rights for all but special rights for some -- those supposedly victimized by "the patriarchy" at every turn. The notion of victimization at every turn has to be maintained to keep the feminist industrial complex going. But, back to my question: Why are so many feminists so stone-cold serious (in the funniest way) and so incapable of laughing at anything?
Criminally Ill
An M.S. sufferer, Richard Paey, is now serving a 25-year mandatory prison sentence for illegally obtaining drugs to medicate away his pain -- after making the mistake of moving to Florida where he couldn't find a doctor to treat his pain. This isn't a surprise, since doctors are suspected by the drug warriors for prescribing large doses of pain medication -- even to legit sufferers like Paey. Maia Szalavitz writes on Alternet that Paey, in prison, is getting double the dosage he was illegally obtaining on the outside:
In a jeremiad of a dissent, Judge James Seals called the sentence "illogical, absurd, unjust and unconstitutional," noting that Paey "could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen 50 oxycodone pills, which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist."But the Florida Supreme Court disagreed, letting the sentence stand, without comment. It released its cowardly decision in the media quiet of a Friday night. As Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief Network points out, "Where Florida stands now is that individuals have no recourse to the courts when the executive and legislative branches behave tyranically." Under the Constitution, the role of the judiciary is supposed to be to check the powers of the other branches -- not simply to defer to them.
Paey's only other alternatives now are an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court or clemency from Governor Charlie Crist.
Writing in support of clemency, leading academic pain specialist Russell Portenoy, MD, said, "the information available indicates that any questionable actions [Paey] took, actions which led ultimately to his arrest, were driven by desperation related to uncontrolled pain."
He noted that such cases "may increase the reluctance of professionals to treat pain aggressively."
Portenoy wrote that despite the fact that Paey required high doses of opioids, those doses were "clearly in the range used by pain specialists in this country." He stressed that, "The number of pills or milligrams of an opioid required for analgesia says nothing about any of the negative outcomes associated with these drugs-including abuse, addiction and diversion-and reference to the amount of drug as evidence of these outcomes by regulators or law enforcement should not be condoned."
Unfortunately, across the country, pain patients are being undermedicated and doctors are going to prison because the Justice Department refuses to believe this.
People profess to be experts about addiction because they have personal experience with drugs or addicts; they think they know about opioid drugs because they've watched a few episodes of E.R. or been through DARE classes at school. The truth is that opioids are amongst the safest drugs known to humanity -- when given appropriately, they do not kill.
Unlike aspirin, Tylenol, Vioxx, Celebrex, Advil, Alleve and every other known class of pain medications, opioids do not harm any organs and there is no maximum dose once a person has become tolerant to them. People need to educate themselves about the complexities of how drugs, brains and settings interact before making policies about them that send people like Richard Paey to prison.
Governor Crist, please, do the right thing and send Richard Paey home.
Taxpayers' Rights
There are four of them, put out by The Republican Study committee. David Weigel lists them on Reason's Hit & Run blog:
1. Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.2. Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3. Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4. Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.
I think people just assume it's futile to demand reasonableness from government. But, I think it's time we started. I've criticized Segolène Royal, the leftist French candidate, for being like some dim housewife who can't balance her checkbook for her suggestions about the minimum wage in France (the money has to come from somewhere, Madame!)
But, here, in our own country, lawmakers spend the same way and get elected again and again -- and nobody really gives it much thought. I'd love to see a hit list of lawmakers who are always buying what we can't pay for. Perhaps that would be all of them. And perhaps that's another good reason to have a strong third party -- a libertarian party -- to balance things out.
It's Starbucks, Not Lutece
Starbucks, Main Street, Santa Monica. I think it was just two people who did all this damage. (I took the photo just before the barista cleaned it up, and I can't remember whether he said one or two yahoos were responsible.)
Beyond this particular mess, how come so many people seem to be under the impression that busboys come around at Starbucks with little table scrapers? I'd give anything to put up a hidden camera in the ceiling, catch these rectums leaving a pile of food and trash on the table, and play the footage for their mothers: "Soo, Mrs. Slobsmith, did you teach Danny his lovely manners, or were you just too busy with the sailors?
From 1776 To 2007
There was a very important new declaration of independence last week -- issued in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the Secular Islam Summit. Signatories include a couple of my heroes, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here's the current list of endorsers, plus a little biographical info I've linked to on each of them:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Magdi Allam
Mithal Al-Alusi
Shaker Al-Nabulsi
Nonie Darwish
Afshin Ellian
Tawfik Hamid
Shahriar Kabir
Hasan Mahmud
Wafa Sultan
Amir Taheri
Ibn Warraq
Manda Zand Ervin
Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi
Robert Spencer, in FrontPageMagazine, calls this declaration "the most comprehensive and forthright statement of Islamic reform anyone has yet managed to come up with":
Confronting directly the elements of Islamic Sharia law that are at variance with otherwise generally accepted principles of human rights, it affirms “the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience,” in contrast to the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s dictum, “If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him” (Bukhari 4.52.260), and calls upon governments to “oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy.” It declares, “We believe in the equality of all human persons,” cutting against the Qur’anic observation that non-Muslims are the “the worst of created beings” (98:6) and that “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves” (48:29).Challenging the jihadist aspirations to establish a unified Islamic state under the rule of Sharia, the Declaration states: “We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights…. We call on the governments of the world to reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms…”
Anticipating criticism, the Declaration adds: “We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called ‘Islamaphobia’ in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.”
Problems with that, anyone? But, of course! There's CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations; or, perhaps we should refer to them as Investor's Business Daily does, as "the PR machine of militant Islam." Spencer continues his piece with a few words from huffy CAIR spokesdrone, Ahmed Bedier:
“In order to have legitimate reform, you need to have the right messengers.” In an editorial, Investor’s Business Daily gave the perfect response to this: “And who might that be? The four CAIR executives who have been successfully prosecuted on terrorism-related charges? The CAIR co-founder who said the Quran should replace the U.S. Constitution as ‘the highest authority in America’?”
Oops! So what's CAIR really about, anyway? To twist a little Aristotle, it seems inaction is character. Spencer asks about CAIR:
Shouldn’t a dedicated and sincere group of Islamic moderates jump at the chance to go on record opposing “all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy,” as well as opposing “female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage”?Shouldn’t CAIR gladly and without hesitation endorse a statement calling for protection of “sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence” and the elimination of “sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims”? Isn’t CAIR dedicated to protecting “civil liberties”? And as for the developing of “an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation,” wouldn’t such a public atmosphere help CAIR “encourage dialogue” and “build coalitions”?
What’s not to like? CAIR need not worry that endorsing the St. Petersburg Declaration will lead anyone to think they are associated with the “neoconservatives” behind the Summit. But such an endorsement would go a long way toward reassuring people that CAIR is indeed what it presents itself to be, and not a group whose goals are, in fact, quite different from those of the St. Petersburg Declaration.
A Direct Attack On Free Thought
Some brainwashed primitive gave his life to blow up Mutanabi, the Baghdad book mart. Sumana Raychaudhuri and Saswato Das write in the LA Times:
The symbolism was clear: The suicide car-bomber wanted to strike at the heart of Iraq's intellectual life.Nearly four years ago, looters rampaged through the Iraq National Museum, set fire to the National Archives in Baghdad and burned down the Koranic library at the Ministry of Religious Endowment shortly after that. Priceless books and documents, letters from Ottoman and other Arabic courts, the written records of a thousand years or more, went up in smoke. And now this.
Mutanabi, named after a famous 10th century Arab poet, was once one of the grandest bazaars of knowledge, a place where books, old and new, on science, law, literature and religion were stocked in abundance. It had become a shadow of its former self in war-torn Baghdad. The supply of foreign books and magazines had been cut off.
Yet somehow it had managed to carry on. Beleaguered and now indigent Iraqis often disposed of rare, century-old books in Persian and Arabic from family collections, and many a foreign visitor picked up priceless volumes for a pittance. Afterward, surely some of those visitors whiled away hours at the nearby Shah Bandar cafe, a coffeehouse frequented by Iraqi intellectuals that was also obliterated Monday.
Neither the ordinary Shiite nor the typical Sunni gain anything by this fanatical act of destruction, which took away a resource from Iraqis and from the Arab world at large. This wasn't a strike against a particular sect but an attack on free thought.
It is clear that the bombing that left a 20-foot-wide crater was targeted at those who think, read or are interested in learning. Books and libraries have been burned through the ages, starting with the destruction of the great library of Alexandria, to the purges of knowledge ordered by Cisneros and Savonarola in the 15th century, to more modern bonfires of the vanities by the likes of Mao, Pol Pot and the Taliban.
The terrorists who are fighting for control of Iraq realize that freedom of expression and learning are their enemies. Why else would anyone give his life to obliterate thousands of books, manuscripts and magazines?
Travis Bickle Meets L. Ron Hubbard
No time like Saturday, at the New York City subway at Union Square, for a little E-metering and Dianetics.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Reviews The West
I was hoping The Wall Street Journal would free up Joseph Rago's interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali that I read on the plane on the way home from New York, and they didn't disappoint. Here are a few excerpts:
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."
After the murder of Theo Van Gogh over a film he made with her about passages from the Koran that authorize violence against women, she said:
"Immediately after the murder," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "we learned Theo's killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare. He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, 'I have an alternative framework. It's Islam. It's the Quran.' "At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made "Submission" or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. "And why?" Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. "Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see," she continues, "that this isn't something that's caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It's religion."
After a Dutch hard-line minister canceled her asylum, she came to America and took a position with the American Enterprise Institute:
But the crisis, she says, is "still simmering underneath and it might erupt--somewhere, anywhere."That partly explains why Ms. Hirsi Ali's new autobiography, Infidel, is already a best seller. It may also have something to do with the way she scrambles our expectations. In person, she is modest, graceful, enthralling. Intellectually, she is fierce, even predatory: "We know exactly what it is about but we don't have the guts to say it out loud," she says. "We are too weak to take up our role. The West is falling apart. The open society is coming undone."
Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."
The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history."
This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam's most holy human messenger. "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of "the most basic freedoms."
These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. "People say it is a bad strategy," Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. "I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed."
This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.
Is It Just An Upskirt Photo Or Is It Art?
The Trans Fat Psychos Are Changing Your Food In A Bad Way
Kim Severson writes in The New York Times that, in response to "trans fat hysteria," bakers are being compelled to replace butter with palm oil or margarine because of the small amounts of trans fat butter contains:
When the F.D.A. was considering the 2006 trans fat labeling law, the dairy council and others argued that natural trans fat should be uncoupled from artificial trans fat because natural trans fat might not be dangerous and because people get relatively little trans fat from meat and dairy products.Dale E. Bauman, a Cornell University professor who specializes in animal science, says natural trans fat can be used by the body to synthesize conjugated linoleic acid, a good fatty acid that could help prevent diseases like cancer. Other trans fat researchers are a little more cautious, but still believe natural and artificial trans fat should not be viewed with the same concern.
Dr. Walter Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health said the chemical makeup “of specific trans fatty acids in dairy fat is different than in industrial partially hydrogenated trans fat, so it is possible that the effects are different.”
In his original paper on trans fat in 1993, which is largely credited for revolutionizing thinking on partially hydrogenated oils, Dr. Willet found that the increased risk of heart disease was associated with the amount of industrial trans fats people ate. But he cautions that even if the trans fat in butter turns out to be fine, the saturated fat it contains will always be a concern.
In the end, the F.D.A. decided not to distinguish between the two fats, and requires all trans fat amounts to be labeled if there is a half a gram or more per serving. The half-gram mark is in part because it would be impossible to rid the nation’s diet of the natural trans fat in meats and dairy products.
As processed food manufacturers and fast-food restaurants struggle to find new kinds of trans fat-free oils, and some bakers struggle over what to do about butter, the natural trans fat in meat has gone largely unnoticed. (Two ounces of ground beef would be over the limit.)
But nervous meat purveyors are starting to ask about it, especially as more and more city health officials push through trans fat bans, said Lynn Morrissette, senior director of regulatory affairs for the American Meat Institute.
A little science, anyone? Here's an excerpt from a blog posting I put up a while back:
Yes, but what of "the French paradox" -- the fact that the French eat a high-fat diet but don't die of heart attacks anywhere near the rate of Americans? Will Clower, the neurophysiologist author of The Fat Fallacy, notes the findings of a massive European study called "the MONICA project," showing that rates of heart diease are three times greater for men from 35 to 64 in Scotland and Ireland than in southern European versions. The dietary difference? Eating high quantities of animal tissue fat daily, such as bacon and sausage. Clower, on page 22, compares this with the kind of fat the French eat:Dr. Boué and his colleagues looked at the fats typically eaten by a large population of healthy French women. Of the "ruminant fats" (which incluide dairy products, beef, mutton, and tallow), their study showed that a majority of their dietary intake, a full 85 percent of it, came form dairy products like whole milk and cheeses.So here's the French recipe for low weight and decreased heart disease: Go low on animal tissue fats (particularly red meat) and high on other natural fats.
Clower continues to note the irony that you find "the highest bulk of overweight people in the same place as you find the largest commitment to diet foods, diet drugs, and economic markets for weight-loss products and programs."
Well, Saddam's Dead!
As I used to live in New York, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, Osama's been on my mind. Turns out it his 50th birthday was maybe on Saturday. Ahmed Rashid writes in The Telegraph/UK:
LAHORE, Pakistan — Osama bin Laden could not have imagined as he fled the battlefield in Tora Bora in 2001 that he would have lived to see his 50th birthday.But he has done that and more — restructuring Al Qaeda despite its losses, creating new bases in Africa and Iraq, expanding into Europe, drawing in thousands of new recruits, reviving the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, and turning Pakistan into Terrorism Central.
Jonathan Evans, the new director-general of Britain's MI5 and an expert on Al Qaeda, will have a tough time tracking him down.
Last month, American intelligence officials disclosed that Mr. bin Laden had wanted to die fighting in Tora Bora but that they forced him to flee into Pakistan's mountainous tribal areas.
From here, he and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have reshaped Al Qaeda. Although Mr. bin Laden takes part in strategic decision making, day-to-day running of the movement is in the hands of Mr. Zawahri, the Egyptian doctor who has placed fellow countrymen in many of the key leadership positions.
...What unites and inspires the militants remains the global jihad ideology of the original Al Qaeda. Rather than talk about day-to-day events as Mr. Zawahri does, Mr. bin Laden expounds on global jihad — uniting the Muslim world under one leader, spreading Islam, and taking on the West.
Now, I'm no military strategist, but wouldn't it kind of made a lot of sense to send the full weight of our military to Afghanistan, rather than going after Saddam? They wouldn't have even needed to make up stories about WMDs!
The Grand Canyon
Coming from the suburban wild, I've always appreciated, not only the beauty of nature, but the beauty of cities.
Rationalist Scum!
I'm one. Are you? You? I mean, one of those people who doesn't believe in god, Zeus, Mohammed, The Great Pumpkin, The Easter Bunny, or The Tooth Fairy. Radley Balko writes in Reason about the person least likely to be elected president -- a logical, rational thinker; a person who doesn't believe in stuff just because they're told to, but requires evidence; in other words, an atheist...like me.
Isn't it kind of embarrassing that American, by a substantial margin, refuse to elect an a person committed to rationality as our leader? Instead, Balko writes, we've got this sort of silliness in our leader:
Take the war on terror. President Bush has made no secret of the fact that the hand of God nudged him into office at the same time radical Muslims launched the attacks of September 11. He believes he was put in the White House by the divinity to fight the war on terrorism.Since those attacks, his administration has declared that it has the power to spy on American citizens and foreign citizens on American soil without a search warrant; to arrest and detain them without giving them access to a lawyer; to torture them; to try them without a jury, all without letting them see the evidence (or in some cases, even the charges) against them, and with a lower standard of proof than in other criminal cases. Some of President Bush’s supporters have even argued that the government should be able to arrest and imprison any journalists who dare to expose any of this.
"God," who we can't go to for verification, just like Mommy, operates on the "Because I said so!" principle. I'm sensing a theme here.
And those are just enumerated rights. The power of the Constitution is not that it grants us the liberties expressed in the Bill of Rights, it's that it maintains we retain all rights, save for the small power we grant to the government to protect those rights. The Bill of Rights only expressly lists those rights necessary to preserve all the others. This is why we have the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. They're redundant, but James Madison and others thought they were necessary.This administration has been even more hostile to unenumerated rights. The White House believes a sick person (or for that matter, a healthy person) doesn’t have the right to smoke marijuana for relief; that he doesn’t have the right to play a game of poker over the Internet; and that he doesn’t have the right to consume pornography involving consenting adults—all within the privacy of his own home. They don't believe that long-suffering people have the freedom to end their own lives peacefully and painlessly. President Bush also believes the federal government has the power to take money from some people and use it to buy prescription drugs for other people. Only a word count limit prevents more examples.
None of these policies is remotely consistent with the theory that the people have inalienable natural rights, and that the government’s only powers are those that we the people grant it in order to protect those rights.
...None of this is to say that religious people aren’t capable of respecting our rights. There are of course countless devout believers who are also eloquent defenders of liberty.
But to say that a man without religion can’t be trusted to respect our rights is nonsense. Especially when religious faith has motivated so many of our prior political leaders to erode them. Not least the man who currently occupies the White House.
What I'm consistently astonished by is the fact that people who have an evidence-free belief in god aren't embarrassed and don't hide it from everyone but their closest friends. Why people don't understand that this should be as mortifying as running around with a little idol to worship, I don't know. Instead, people parade around like this guy I saw yesterday on a New York City Street, advertising the fact that they run their whole life around believing, utterly without reason, in god.
Sorry about the dirty window. Since I don't believe in god, I can't either blame it on god or say god will be around with a bottle of Windex. I'm always amazed when there's a tragedy and people say "god" spared them because he heard their prayers. Yeah? What of the 10-year-old down the block? Did he pray wrong, or was he just such a shitty kid that god decided to smite him?
Look! Down Here!
We've got a psycho! I recently posted an entry about how much to leave for a tip. Personally, I leave a minimum of 20%, after tax; more at a bar, since I don't drink much at all. Also, I'm pleasant and friendly with the person serving me, which probably counts for something. All in all, it's rare I have problems with the service at places I go. On the blog item at the link there was a long and varied discussion, and then this (I always love when people rage at me, and start right off the bat with a hilarious spelling error):
Amy "Yes you should tip 15% at least." Are you that NIEVE?Have you EVER heard of "PRESSING A WRONG BUTTON?" Have you EVER heard of "FORGETTING TO PUT AN ORDER IN?"
YES, that's happened to MY HUSBAND AND I. Forgetting to put an appetizer in has happened to us once, which we waited literally a half an hour for an appetizer, which is JUST as long as a entree order should take there abouts 25-35 minutes average wait for an normal entree(not including something well done.) We've also had ***SEVERAL*** instances where the **********SERVER*********** just PRESSED THE WRONG BUTTON, THEREFORE, THEY **ADMITTED** THEY DID! SO HOW THE HELL CAN THAT BE THE "COOK'S" FAULT? IT CAN'T BY ANY MEANS! COOKS DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL TO COOK, THEREFORE, EITHER NO FOOD OR THE WRONG FOOD CAME OUT. THE TIP SHOULD REFLECT WHAT *********THE SERVER*********** DID! THE COOK HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE ISSUES, NOTHING! IT'S THE TRUTH!
Also, cold food, I've had a server I SAW LITERALLY chit chatting with one of her customers, therefore got a ZERO for my order not being correctly being brought to me. If I would have saw her busting butt, that's different, but considering she had the TIME to CHIT CHAT, she SURE THE HELL HAD TIME to get my order correct, didn't she? It was plain obvious she was FLIRTING with the guy after more than at least 5 minutes talking to just him and the way she acted and NEVER APOLOGIED(OF COURSE).
I tip for people who actually WORK for their money, NOT PLAY MAKING MY SERVICE BAD. If you think for one second that a server is NEVER responsible for wrong food or cold food, you are TRULY 100% STUPID!
YOU SAY: "If ever you get a discounted meal, you should tip on the full price of the meal."
ONLY if it's ***NOT*** YOUR server's fault. If it IS, WHY THE HELL SHOULD SOMEONE PAY SOMEONE WELL TO PRESS A WRONG BUTTON OR "FORGET" THINGS OR PLAY AROUND? One time at Chili's, a waitress went to greet another table instead of putting my white russian order in to get her HAND KISSED by 4 guys. F*** HER TIP, HER TIP WENT TO AROUND 5%! YOU SHOW ME YOU ARE WILLING TO DO ******YOUR JOB***************, THEN I WILL TIP YOU, OTHERWISE, WTF DO YOU THINK YOU DESERVE FOR *******F*** FLIRTING ON THE JOB? 10% EVEN? F** THAT! TREAT OTHERS AS YOU'D LIKE TO BE TREATED!
YOU SAID: "Additionally, I take into account that I don't drink very much when tipping at the bar, and leave more."
If you leave ANYTHING for a beer that's in a bottle you are being VERY, VERY, VERY, UNFAIR to the people at McDonald's that put ice and drink in a cup for NO TIP! So unless they MAKE a mixed drink, ONLY THEN DO bartender's deserve a tip.
I wonder what would happen if she squeezed a couple extra coins out of her ass. Would she explode?
New Yuck City
I actually love New York. Lived here for years, and it was the first place that ever felt like home. (Michigan, where I grew up, never did.) I'm in New York now with Gregg. We went to Elaine's for a drink the other night with Elmore's editor and her novelist husband, who recognized a retired mob hit man standing next to me at the bar, and chatted him up.
I love living in L.A. now, but there's a John Callahan cartoon that reminds me of a big difference: In New York, a guy says "Fuck you!" and he means "Have a nice day." In L.A., a guy says "Have a nice day" and he means "Fuck you!"
In that spirit, here's a little footage of Yucko The Clown on the streets of New York:
P.S. We went to a fantastic Alsatian restaurant last night, Café d'Alsace. In case you go there and want to know what to eat, I had the bone marrow appetizer, La Moelle (Lena, when we're in NYC at the same time, we have to go there and eat this). Then fricassee of filet mignon with wild mushrooms, pearl onions, carrots, and mashed potatoes. And then tart au chocolat. Everything was amazing.
Oh yeah, and then I'm reminded of things I don't like about New York -- New Yorkers like the guy sitting next to us, who asked, like a woman on some crazy diet, if he could have the fricassee of filet mignon without the fricassee. Idiot. It's cooked that way. And have a look around you: It's a nice French restaurant, not Burger King.
Guess Who's Running For President
Now, why would Newt Gingrich suddenly spill the info that he had an affair while he was chasing after Clinton for his thingie with Monica? And note who he spills the info to -- James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Very friendly environment to spill such info in. Here's what Ben Evans writes for the AP:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group."The honest answer is yes,'' Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards.''
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.
No, he should be viewed as somebody who was out for blood.
"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,'' the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials.''
Yeah, right. Very clever of them to portray it that way -- as if that was really the issue, not just the issue they were able to catch him on.
Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.
Well, I'm betting you can count on him forming one.
In Reason We Trust...
...Despite the proliferation of people who believe, without evidence, in god, astrology and medicinal woo. Hint: Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't mean it makes an iota of sense to follow their lead.
Well, it seems the U.S. Treasury is accidentally on the side of the enlightenment. From the AP, coins are now circulating without the inscription "In God We Trust":
PHILADELPHIA - An unknown number of new George Washington dollar coins were mistakenly struck without their edge inscriptions, including “In God We Trust,” and are fetching around $50 apiece online.The properly struck dollar coins, bearing the likeness of the nation’s first president, are inscribed along the edge with “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum” and the year and mint mark. The flawed coins made it past inspectors and went into circulation Feb. 15.
"Flawed coins"? Why is it a flaw to have separation of church and state? Freedom FROM religion, even on our money?
P.S. A note to all you fellow atheists out there -- or others contemplating joining the ranks of the rational. When somebody calls you godless...it's a compliment.
Giving The Gift Of Life? Well, What If You Want To Sell It Instead?
Kerry Howley writes in the LA Times about the booming business of organ donation, where somebody could make $100,000 from parting out your cadaver -- providing that somebody is a biotech company, not you.
And don't be trying to sell a kidney while you're still with us. Nope, that would be illegal -- meaning, as kidney donor Virginia Postrel has noted -- there are far too few people giving up kidneys relative to very sick people who need them. An excerpt from Howley's piece:
Tissue procurement organizations have a story they sell to donors, and it's one of medical miracles, not booming businesses. As the Ohio Department of Health explains on its donor recruitment website: "Through … tissue donation everyday citizens, just like you, have a chance to make a difference. To be a life saver. To be a hero."Well, that's half the story, and here's the rest: Within the biotech world, miracles and business are one and the same. There is nothing inherently wrong with biotech companies reselling donated tissues. Think of it this way: The Salvation Army — hardly a bastion of greed — sells donated secondhand clothes. Resale is often the best way to get donations to people who need them.
Then again, if you decide to skip the donation bin and sell your outdated suit on your own terms, no politician will stop you. The same should be true for tissue. But federal law has one set of rules for tissue donors and another for businesses.
Saner rules would treat the human body as the increasingly valuable property it is, allowing potential donors to will the value of their bodies as they do the rest of their assets. At the very least, donors should know they're giving to a system that will sell their parts, not a charity that funnels them to those in need.
The major objection to normalizing the tissue trade is already moot. Ethicists and policymakers worry that letting donors (or more precisely their heirs) profit from the market would encourage predatory behavior. But we've seen that behavior — from tissue procurement organizations looking to make a buck within the shadows of a gray market. Recent body-snatching scandals demonstrate the dangers of keeping this trade underground. In a transparent and regulated tissue market, plundering bodies would be harder — not easier — to do.
There is something inherently disturbing about slapping a price tag on a pelvis. But the question of whether it's right or wrong to sell human tissue has already passed us by. We're knee-deep in the body bazaar, and the only remaining question is whether individuals or corporations will set the terms of trade.
The way I see it, your body is yours to sell, rent, fill with drugs or do whatever you want with it -- providing you don't try to make the rest of us pay for it.
Yeah, sure, there will be abuses, but just as we don't ban alcohol because some people are drunk drivers, we shouldn't have laws against you selling a kidney to pay for your college education because some kidney buyers or sellers will engage in something shady.
How To Best "Celebrate The Human Body"
My suggestion: Do it in the privacy of your own home. Whatever you do, unless you are built like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, please avoid the "World Naked Bike Ride":
On Saturday 10 March and 9 June 2007, in cities around the world, people will be riding bikes naked to celebrate cycling and the human body. The ride demonstrates the vulnerability of cyclists on the road and is a protest against oil dependency.
Like riding naked is going to do wonders for people paying attention to the road. And while bikers usually have good bodies, in this race, it's probably the nude beach types who will be taking to the highway. And on a nude beach, the people you'd least like to see naked are always the quickest to throw off all their clothes.
Making Telemarketers Pay...Cash
André-Tascha Lammé is doing a wonderful thing. He was pushed into it by telemarketers barraging him with calls at home, "Do Not Call Registry"-be-damned. He asked them to stop. And asked. And asked. To no avail. And then he asked them for thousands of dollars. And they paid.
Here's his story below, in brief. But for all the details, plus helpful tips on suing, go to his site, killthecalls.com:
Why I Started Suing Telemarketers
A few years ago, I became supremely sick of the massive number of telephone calls I would receive from telemarketers. My standard response was to curse them and hang up on them. As we all know, such tactics do not work. Those companies that are attempting to sell you a new garage door, a mortgage refinance, a new furnace or who knows what else are persistent. They will keep calling until they make a sale. As we all do, in frustration I looked on the internet for information. I learned that one can actually sue telemarketers. Unfortunately, many of the websites will give you only a little bit of information and then ask you to buy an e-book or purchase a subscription. Being the kind of guy that I am, I delved into the code and figured it out myself.The Telephone Consumer Protection Act
Many people believe that by placing their telephone number(s) on the National Do Not Call Registry they shall be insulated from the intrusive telemarketing calls that have plagued us the past few decades. Although the Do Not Call Registry has had some beneficial impact, it is not by any means the panacea that some may have envisioned. In fact in many cases, I would see the practical results of the Do Not Call Registry to be a total joke. Unless the company making the telephone calls is making enough calls to numbers listed on the Do Not Call Registry to warrant a multitude of complaints to the appropriate authorities, nobody is going to do a bloody thing about going after these firms (trust me...been down that road...gave it up as a lost cause).Luckily for those of us who are besieged by the bloody mortgage firms wanting us to "refinance before the interest rates go through the roof!", the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 gives us the right of private action. This means that we can sue the crap out of those telemarketers who just do not understand the meaning of No!
As I have told friends, associates and (recently) Bob Sullivan of MSNBC, despite first thoughts, it is not at all difficult to pursue legal action against those telemarketers who refuse to acknowledge your (just) demands to be left alone. In fact it is actually pretty bloody easy! As long as you know the law (which is - surprisingly - clear and brief) and follow some pretty basic steps, you stand an excellent chance at lining your pocket with potentially a few thousand dollars with maybe an hour of total time invested and about $50 in court fees.
He's doing all of us a big service. For every telemarketer he sues, that's one telemarketer who'll find it a little less profitable to lay off their marketing costs on consumers.
Hilariously, they accuse him of being "in it for the money." (Like they're in it for the love?) The truth is, he's a busy guy -- a web developer and software consultant with plenty on his plate -- but at a certain point, a guy just has to refuse to take the crap and start taking the certified checks instead.
P.S. Consider signing his petition to support H.R. 479. I signed. It's a bill to make political/campaign calls subject to the provisions governing the Do Not Call Registry...and/or to support a Private Right of Action to allow private citizens to sue the telemarketers only the government can now go after for up to $11,000 a call, but rarely does. (It's and/or because you can check a box to support either or both.)
At the moment, André-Tascha notes, "There are those telemarketers who know that the number of calls that they make contrary to the applicable provisions are low enough that the government shall never go after them." This bill would help put an end to that.
The Wireless Enema
Fleet, for example? Fleet or a generic like it should be your anal douche of choice when you're traveling by plane. Avoid following the lead of the idiot Iraqi who tried to get on a plane at LAX with his ass all wired up. Via Reuters:
An Iraqi national wearing wires and concealing a magnet inside his rectum triggered a security scare at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but officials said he posed no apparent threat.The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Fadhel al-Maliki, 35, set off an alarm during passenger screening at the airport early on Tuesday morning.
A police bomb squad was called to examine what was deemed a suspicious item found during a body cavity search of the man. Local media reports said a magnet was found in his rectum.
"He was secreting these items in a body cavity and that was a great concern because there were also some electric wires associated with that body cavity," Larry Fetters, security director for the Transportation Security Administration at the airport, told reporters.
Maliki, 35, who lives in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was preparing to board a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.
Scum Kind Of Wonderful
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. This one's from the friend of a girl who's "standing by her man." Problem is, as she puts it, "it came out on the news that he was engaged in some stomach-churning attempts to pick up 13-year-olds for sex in Internet chat rooms." Oops. Yet, her friend still wants to marry and have babies with the guy. This girl, of course, can't get behind that, but she's afraid of saying so, because "if she gets mad and refuses to have me as a support system, she's more likely to stay with the creep." Here's my reply:
That happy family fantasy of hers has a few snags; for example, dinner. Let's see...there they all are at the table, Mommy, the pervert, and their two beautiful children, and then Mommy leaves the room to get more mashed potatoes...turning Daddy into a parole violator. And then, even if Daddy is, for some wildly insane reason, allowed around his own children, it'll be a bit hard for him to drive them to school if he isn't allowed within 1,000 feet of the place: "You girls look both ways as you're running across the highway!"Perhaps not surprisingly, my first inclination was to have you ask "Claire" who stole her brain and replaced it with Fluffernutter. My second and wiser inclination was to call Dr. Stanton Peele. Peele, an addiction treatment specialist, is the guy I think best understands the psychology behind self-destructive behavior and what it takes to pry yourself or somebody else off a compulsion. He told me your hunch was right -- the least productive thing you could do is slap your friend upside the head with her pedophile boyfriend. He explained that people don't change because you tell them they should, but because they realize "what they're doing violates what they are most about, and what they want most for themselves."
Chances are, Claire wasn't looking to end up with Chester The Molester. When she started dating this guy, she probably saw him as her ticket to white picket fence-ville. In time, a few pesky facts got in the way. But, never mind them! Like a lot of people, she simply pretended away the disconnect between what she has and what she wants -- which, in turn, left her standing by her man as if he's coming back from the war instead of the kiddie diddler wing in some prison.
To get Claire to face the contradictions, Peele recommends a non-judgmental, non-confrontational technique called "Motivational Interviewing." (See Peele's book, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction.) Start by becoming a double agent of sorts: Convince her you're behind her no matter what so she'll be free with facts and feelings, which you'll tuck away for later use. In Peele's words, "You need to be there as a support system and look for a teachable moment." Instead of telling Claire she's got her head on backwards, get her to answer questions that will make it obvious to her; for example, "So, you say family's important to you. What do you think your family life will be like with this guy?" If you sense resistance, back off. "The key," Peele writes, "...is to push the ball back to the other person (generally by asking questions)." Eventually, this should lead Claire to a question or two of her own, such as, "Did I seriously consider having a family with a guy who'd celebrate becoming a father by handing out cigars announcing, 'It's A Girlfriend!'?"
The entire thing, including the girl's question, is here.
I See Naked People
Are children actually damaged by seeing images of naked people? Or do people just leap to that conclusion? Here's an image from the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere Della Sera:
I looked outside, and no Italian children seemed to be rioting or having orgies in the street as a result of the ad's publication. But, here in America, where they're sounding the alarm about children supposedly teabagging on the playground, a substitute teacher's classroom computer started flashing nudie pop-ups and the headline in the Norwich Bulletin is "Teacher guilty in Norwich porn case." Greg Smith writes:
State Prosecutor David Smith said he wondered why Julie Amero didn't just pull the plug on her classroom computer.The six-person jury Friday may have been wondering the same thing when they convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.
Oct. 19, 2004, while substituting for a seventh-grade language class at Kelly Middle School, Amero claimed she could not control the graphic images appearing in an endless cycle on her computer."The pop-ups never went away," Amero testified. "They were continuous."
The Web sites, which police proved were accessed while Amero was in the classroom, were seen by as many as 10 minor students. Several of the students testified during the three-day trial in Norwich Superior Court to seeing images of naked men and women.
Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero's defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site "that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control."
"If you try to get out of it, you're trapped," Horner said.
But Smith countered Horner's testimony with that of Norwich Police Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes investigator. On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links.
"You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."
Among the sites Amero visited were meetlovers.com and femalesexual.com, along with others with more graphic names.
Sounds damning, huh? Well, on Network Performance Daily, there's a little more detail, from Herb Horner, a computer forensic examiner who was called as a defense expert witness in the case:
On October 19, 2004, around 8:00 A.M., Mr. Napp, the class' regular teacher logged on to the PC because Julie Amero being a substitute teacher did not have her own id and password. It makes sense that Mr. Napp told Julie not to logoff or shut the computer off, for if she did she and the students would not have access to the computer. The initial user continued use of the PC and accessed Tickle.com, cookie.monster.com, addynamics.com, and adrevolver.com all between 8:06:14 - 8:08:03 AM. During the next few moments Julie retrieved her email through AOL.http://www.hair-styles.org was accessed at 8:14:24 A.M., based upon the hair style images uploaded to the PC we were led to believe that there were students using the computer to search out hair styles. The user went to http://www.crayola.com at 8:35:27 A.M. The user continued accessing the original hair site and was directed to http://new-hair-styles.com. This site had pornographic links, pop-ups were then initiated by http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com. There were additional pop-ups by realmedia.com, cnentrport.net, and by 9:20:00 A.M., several java, aspx's and html scripts were uploaded. A click on the curlyhairstyles.htm icon on the http://www.new-hair-styles.com site led to the execution of the curlyhairstyle script along with others that contained pornographic links and pop-ups. Once the aforementioned started, it would be very difficult even for an experienced user to extricate themselves from this situation of porn pop-ups and loops.
All of the jpg's that we looked at in the internet cache folders were of the 5, 6 and 15 kB size, very small images indeed. Normally, when a person goes to a pornographic website they are interested in the larger pictures of greater resolution and those jpgs would be at least 35 kB and larger. We found no evidence of where this kind of surfing was exercised on October 19, 2004.
Horner's conclusion:
This was one of the most frustrating experiences of my career, knowing full well that the person is innocent and not being allowed to provide logical proof.If there is an appeal and the defense is allowed to show the entire results of the forensic examination in front of experienced computer people, including a computer literate judge and prosecutor, Julie Amero will walk out the court room as a free person.
Let this experience stand as a warning to all that use computers in an environment where minors are present. The aforementioned situation can happen to anyone without fail and without notice if there is not adequate firewall, antispyware, antiadware and antivirus protection. That was not provided by the school administration where Julie Amero taught.
"I Can't Believe It's A...Garage!"
Garage space wanted, preferably with plumpish, home-owning, lingerie-wearing woman attached. From Craigslist:
"If you find yourself interested in learning more, please respond with a recent picture of your garage. If you were standing in the background in heels and a girdle, that would be appreciated."
Thanks, Deirdre!
Equal Pay For Equal Work? Not If Your Boss Is Named Allah
Islam consistently treats women like third-class citizens (and that's on a good day). You know how suicide bombers get the proverbial 72 virgins in exchange for doing the murderous bidding of "The Religion Of Peace"? Don't think for a second female suicide bombers get 72 hot young cabana boys to rub lotion over their...oh, never mind, I forgot the burkhas for a moment.
Check out this article on Slate, by Michelle Tsai, about the heavenly compensation for bitches who bomb:
If male martyrs can expect to find 72 virgin maidens in paradise when they die, what rewards can female suicide bombers expect?Their husbands. The Quran itself describes little about the specifics of the afterlife, but it does note that believers will find huris, or maidens "of modest gaze, whom neither man nor jinni will have touched before them." (Every believer can end up in heaven; martyrs just get there faster.) Respected commentator Al-Tirmidhi said in a hadith that every man will have six dozen huris in heaven, but very few commentators enumerated the rewards for women. Ninth-century scholar Al-Tabarani did argue that women will be reunited with their husbands in the next world, and those who had multiple husbands can pick the best one to be their eternal spouse. (Other commentators added that a woman who never married can marry any man she wants in paradise.)
Uh-oh...sounds like a suicide bombing sales pitch for those ladies who aren't making it on Match.com. And here's another choice passage, complete with rear entry:
From the 9th through the 12th centuries, Muslim scholars described paradise as a place of sensual delights—for men. They debated whether men remained married to their wives in heaven, whether they could have sex with the virgins, and whether the heavenly virgins had anuses. (Some said there was no need for elimination in the afterlife.)
Somehow, I don't think that's why they were all pondering the existence of the anus.
P.S. If you believe this shit, you're an anus in this life, or my favorite word of the week, an "ignoranus." Here's what we know about the "afterlife": When you die, you decompose and are eaten by worms. Period. Hang onto life with everything you've got, and enjoy it while you have it, because soon, the maggots will be enjoying you.
Just another helpful message from an atheist bitch who thinks it's wrong to murder other people -- even if all the women around you are wearing pup tents, the men are too busy fucking young boys, and/or you, yourself, haven't been fucked in forever.
The Other Red Meat
Why can't you eat Trigger for dinner if you want to? Christa Weil writes in The New York Times of the attempts by the American Horse Defense Fund to ban slaughter of horses for meat. A rep of the organization claims "...Americans will never view horses as dinner." Weil notes that that's not entirely accurate, as we have eaten horse in the past, and we're not the only ones:
During World War II and the postwar years, when beef and pork were scarce or priced beyond most consumers’ means, horsemeat appeared in the butcher’s cold case. In 1951, Time magazine reported from Portland, Ore.: “Horsemeat, hitherto eaten as a stunt or only as a last resort, was becoming an important item on Portland tables. Now there were three times as many horse butchers, selling three times as much meat.” Noting that “people who used to pretend it was for the dog now came right out and said it was going on the table,” the article provided tips for cooking pot roast of horse and equine fillets.A similar situation unfolded in 1973, when inflation sent the cost of traditional meats soaring. Time reported that “Carlson’s, a butcher shop in Westbrook, Conn., that recently converted to horsemeat exclusively, now sells about 6,000 pounds of the stuff a day.” The shop was evangelical in its promotion of horse as a main course, producing a 28-page guide called “Carlson’s Horsemeat Cook Book,” with recipes for chili con carne, German meatballs, beery horsemeat and more. While no longer in print, the book is catalogued on Amazon.
...It can be said, awkwardly, that horses are America’s sacred cows. But our reverence stems not just from their noble equine attributes. Our ability to commune wordlessly, with a shift in the saddle, the flick of a rein, a whistle, forges a transcendent relationship. I have eaten all manner of improbable items, from antelope to waterbug, but the fact that horses so graciously did my bidding several decades ago means I won’t knowingly eat their kind (or dog, or dolphin) unless hard times make it a necessity.
It’s easy to denounce the inhumane transport and slaughter of horses, even before taking into account the significant environmental cost of transporting 100,000 carcasses and animals a year thousands of miles to overseas markets.
But the fate of less charismatic food animals is also a brutal business. Last year, 150 pigs being shipped from Ohio to a Texas slaughterhouse died after spending up to 72 hours in a truck with no water, food or relief from 95 degree heat. The dispatch of male chicks on an egg farm can be flat-out horrific. The ill treatment of slaughter-bound horses is bad, but it would be worse still if it made us pay less attention to the undue suffering of other food animals.
King Cody And Princess Dakota And Their Peasants, Uh, Parents
The latest children-ruling-parents insanity is over who sleeps in the parents' bed, and the need to hire high-priced "sleep consultants" to figure it out. Seriously. Even the "celebrities" are doing it...and how desperate do they have be for a good night's sleep to whore for these sleep consultants by (I'm guessing, but I'm probably right) agreeing to be mentioned in the article?
Come on...for the second time in about a week, I have to ask: Is it really too much to ask parents to parent? It's really not that difficult. Here's how it works in this case: You don't let the kids engage in what's called "co-sleeping," meaning they get in mommy and daddy's bed every night, meaning mommy and daddy get even less sex than they were getting already, being married and parents and all...plus, the little darlings learn that all they have to do is scream, yell, or whine and their every need will be met.
The alternative? Two letters. N-O. Use them repeatedly until the little monster you've created gets the message. By the way, you might consider sending them to military school or Outward Bound to undo all the damage you've likely done by raising them to think their every want and need will be immediately indulged.
From a New York Times article by Penelope Green:
More than a decade after the infant sleep expert Dr. Richard Ferber horrified parents by warning against co-sleeping and advocating a cry-it-out approach, and four years after the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development published a survey in which 12 percent of respondents reported sleeping with their babies anyway, never mind Ferber, it would seem that those babies have grown into children, and those children are not at all tempted by the princess and airplane beds their parents have so hopefully prepared for them. Child-sleep consultants say their practices are swelling, and that they are treating the parents of “ambulatory” children just as much as the parents of infants.Jill Spivack and Jennifer Waldburger, the child-sleep gurus behind Sleepy Planet in Los Angeles, are seeing about 50 clients a month, including Ben Stiller, Greg Kinnear and other Hollywood notables, and have a two-week waiting list. As a result, they are expanding their staff of four sleep specialists to six, they said. Meanwhile, their first book, “The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent’s Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep — From Birth to Age 5” (HCI), will be out next month, joining a veritable canon of child-sleep self-help books. “Since we started in 1999,” said Ms. Spivack, who charges $395 for a two-hour sleep session, “we have seen thousands of families.”
Jean Kunhardt, a therapist and a director of Soho Parenting in Manhattan, a 19-year-old counseling service, said she and her partner, Lisa Spiegel, never intended to be sleep specialists. “But that is what we’ve become known for,” she said. “The vast majority of new people coming to us are coming for sleep.” (Ms. Kunhardt has some serious child-sleep credentials: she is a granddaughter of Dorothy Kunhardt, the author of “Pat the Bunny,” the bedtime story so many were reared on.)
“Everyone I know has been to some sort of sleep center,” said Liz Lange, the maternity wear designer, who “went the sleep consultant route” for help with her son Gus’s peripatetic nighttime ways. “It seems like most of my friends have seen Jean. With Gus, we tried the reward system, the stickers and the charts and the trip to the toy store. At Soho Parenting, they gave us a whole routine, with me in the chair moving farther away from the bed. At one point, putting him to bed was consuming our entire night. Now we have my son out of our bed, and my daughter, who has always been a brilliant sleeper, has taken his place.”
Hint, Liz, it doesn't take stickers or charts or trips to the toy store. You just have care enough about your children to be a bitch. To not be liked. To behave like a grownup instead of a needy premenopausal kid who'll do anything to just be liked.
And, hey, by the way, a big pre-fuck you -- from all of us to you, in case we happen to encounter the extraordinary asshole you're surely raising by acting like your kid's friend instead of his mother.
Ann Coulter's Been A Little Short On Press Lately
And that just won't do!
Reed It And Weep
In case you haven't read about the neglect soldiers are experiencing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, here's the link to the Dana Priest/Ann Hull story showing what disgusting lip service is all the talk of "supporting the troops." An excerpt:
Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, 43, came in on one of those buses in November 2004 and spent several weeks on the fifth floor of Walter Reed's hospital. His eye and skull were shattered by an AK-47 round. His odyssey in the Other Walter Reed has lasted more than two years, but it began when someone handed him a map of the grounds and told him to find his room across post.A reconnaissance and land-navigation expert, Shannon was so disoriented that he couldn't even find north. Holding the map, he stumbled around outside the hospital, sliding against walls and trying to keep himself upright, he said. He asked anyone he found for directions.
Shannon had led the 2nd Infantry Division's Ghost Recon Platoon until he was felled in a gun battle in Ramadi. He liked the solitary work of a sniper; "Lone Wolf" was his call name. But he did not expect to be left alone by the Army after such serious surgery and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had appointments during his first two weeks as an outpatient, then nothing.
"I thought, 'Shouldn't they contact me?' " he said. "I didn't understand the paperwork. I'd start calling phone numbers, asking if I had appointments. I finally ran across someone who said: 'I'm your case manager. Where have you been?'
"Well, I've been here! Jeez Louise, people, I'm your hospital patient!"
The medical care is good or great -- it's the follow-up care that's terrible. These soldiers deserve better:
On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.
"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."
Soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers who have tried to fix the system say each mishap seems trivial by itself, but the cumulative effect wears down the spirits of the wounded and can stall their recovery.
"It creates resentment and disenfranchisement," said Joe Wilson, a clinical social worker at Walter Reed. "These soldiers will withdraw and stay in their rooms. They will actively avoid the very treatment and services that are meant to be helpful."
Danny Soto, a national service officer for Disabled American Veterans who helps dozens of wounded service members each week at Walter Reed, said soldiers "get awesome medical care and their lives are being saved," but, "Then they get into the administrative part of it and they are like, 'You saved me for what?' The soldiers feel like they are not getting proper respect. This leads to anger."
This world is invisible to outsiders. Walter Reed occasionally showcases the heroism of these wounded soldiers and emphasizes that all is well under the circumstances. President Bush, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and members of Congress have promised the best care during their regular visits to the hospital's spit-polished amputee unit, Ward 57.
"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah blah, blah blah blah.
When "Arbitration" Is A Very Bad Thing
That's when it's a thing called "mandatory arbitration," and you didn't agree to it, it just slipped by you in the mess of ads and small print with your credit card bill, to name just one example. From the National Consumer Law Center:
It may be in tiny print among the ads stuffed into your credit-card bill. Or a few lines buried in a multi-page health insurance agreement, home-repair contract or college loan. The language is often dense legal-ese, but make no mistake: It translates into a giant trap door for consumers.Welcome to the astonishingly unfair and undemocratic world of mandatory arbitration clauses. All that small print and buried verbiage boils down to this: that by simply continuing to use your credit card or health plan, for instance, you've suddenly agreed to resolve all disputes arising with that company - even very serious ones - through binding arbitration.
This passive consumer "agreement" to arbitration is a rather shocking way to obtain what passes for "informed consent" to a truly momentous waiver of rights. And it's only the start of the problem.
So beginning today, and in light of recent nationwide developments on this issue (details below), NCLC is calling on consumers and the news media to focus far more attention on the consequences of these clauses, which are spreading like wildfire across America.
A look at how businesses are using mandatory arbitration clauses says more about why they're so disturbing. The kind of passive "notice" that locks consumers into arbitration increasingly ties them to a system that thoroughly stacks the deck when serious disputes arise. Companies alone select the arbitration service - often one dependent on them for repeat business. Those same companies often write the arbitration rules, and unsurprisingly those rules often demand complete secrecy about the proceeding and its outcome while limiting what evidence consumers can present. Consumers usually pay more for arbitration proceedings than they would for a public court proceeding. If they lose there's no appeal -- that means even legal errors in an arbitrator's decision are frequently beyond remedy. And if they refuse to participate in this rigged game these clauses often dictate they'll automatically lose the dispute with no further recourse.
National Consumer Law Center advocates believe these clauses are the single biggest threat to consumer rights in recent years, a de-facto rewrite of the Constitution that undermines a broad range of consumer protections painstakingly built into law. No other consumer issue hits so many Americans where they live every day.
Some people see the clause but can't help but agree to it. For example, from the NCLC link above:
An NCLC staff member recently -- and after the fact -- discovered such a clause in the "sign-in" papers of his elderly, desperately-ill father, who was being sent from a hospital to a rehabilitation center in Florida. What fair-minded person believes any family member would take issue at such a moment - or choose to go shopping for another facility than the one the hospital chose? The family member who'd traveled from afar to accompany the sick man says she never even noticed the clause when signing him in. She may well not have recognized its significance if she had.To make things even more interesting the sick man's medication regimen was somehow mixed up for the first week at the rehab center. Luckily no serious harm was done, but if there had been serious harm the rehab center would have already all-but-dictated the process for settling damage claims -- against itself. That's a little like letting one side set the rules for the World Series, except the sportsmanship's missing.
The business community loudly proclaims that these clauses are merely a private-sector alternative to the courts, a way of streamlining and speeding up the judicial process while controlling costs.
But one party to a public court proceeding doesn't get to pick the judge, write the rules, limit the evidence and demand that testimony and outcomes never come to light. Unlike many arbitrators, judges aren't dependent on one side for future business. And the costs of arbitration proceedings for plaintiffs at least -- according to a report by the consumer group Public Citizen -- are "almost always higher than the cost of instituting a lawsuit." It can cost a consumer several thousand dollars just to have a complaint heard - a situation that remains true today despite industry claims that arbitration fees have fallen. Public Citizen says such costs "have a deterrent effect, often preventing a claimant from even filing a case......high arbitration costs can be used to bludgeon an adversary."
How well does arbitration usually work out for the consumer? Well, here's one example, from a Jim Hightower piece:
Consumer Reports magazine notes that the credit card firm, First USA, paid an arbitration firm $5 million to arbitrate some 19,000 cases with its customers . . . and customers won only 87 times!
So, at the very least, when you can, listen to my dad who said never sign anything until you've read and made sure you understand the whole thing. I'm awaiting word from the NCLC as to whether they've got anything else going. You might contact your elected lobbyist tool representative and tell them how you feel about this practice.
The Hidden Realities Of Islam
Or, rather, why we're all fucked if we continue to believe, as I used to, that Islam is just another religion and Muslims just want to make nicey-nicey interfaithy outreach to us. It turns out there's a lot that's pretty ugly and frightening under all the "Religion Of Peace" propaganda -- for example, all the passages in the Koran commanding Muslims to convert or kill the infidel...and then all the Muslims jumping at the chance to do just that. No, all Muslims aren't like this. But, quite enough are to cause some serious damage or death. From Jihad Watch:
Here’s a case study, based on the posts of a Muslim who dropped by Jihad Watch a few days ago. He asked:My questions to you are: Do you personally know any Muslims? Do you have any Muslim friends? Do you know about the Muslim experience in the post 9/11 America? Have you ever visited a Mosque? Have you ever been to an inter-faith event (e.g. poetry recital)? Have you ever read the Holy Qur'an or any of the other Islamic spiritual texts such as the works of Jalaluddin Rumi or al-Ghazali, Rabia al-Adawiyyah, Muhammad Iqbal, etc.?The questions are misplaced. Many of the readers at this site have visited those Mosque Outreach exercises in Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque. Many have read the Qur'an, and have read and reread it, keeping in mind several things:
1) About 20% of it makes no sense, even to Muslims who know classical Arabic. See Christoph Luxenberg for one attempt to solve that matter of philology.
2) The internal contradictions in the Qur'an are resolved through the doctrine of "naskh" or "abrogation," so that, as in the systems of common law, where the doctrine of stare decisis ordinarily holds but later decisions, when different, cancel the effect of earlier ones (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson is not valid after Brown v. Bd. of Education).
3) The doctrine of "naskh" allows the so-called Meccan suras, the softer ones, which were presumably the product of a time when Muhammad still felt the need for support and had not yet become as harsh toward Infidels as he became once he had taken control in Medina (Yathrib), to be cancelled or overruled or overturned by the much harsher so-called "Medinan" suras.
4) While there are more than 150 Jihad verses in the Qur'an -- though only 27 appearances of the word "qitaal" or combat, the most dangerous ones, such as those contained within Sura 9, are among the very last “revealed,” and hence possess great authority.
5) In English or French, as Western scholars of Islam familiar with the original texts have noted, the Qur'an's verses are far less harsh than they are in the Arabic. Many of the words involving the treatment to be meted out to Unbelievers, that is Infidels or non-Muslims, are of this kind.
6) The official Muslim groups tend to distribute the translations that are much milder than the real thing. Even those used by Muslims, such as that of Yusuf Ali, do not always adequately convey the real meaning. But that can be found usually in the notes, and it is important for Infidels to read those Muslim annotations.
7) The Qur'an by itself does not yield up its full meaning, and the Sunnah, that is the customs and practice of Muslims of the time, of Muhammad and the Companions, is the true interpretive aid, the essential means by which obscure meanings are teased out. That is why Muslims so often refer to "Qur'an and Sunnah."
8) Islam is a collectivist faith that does not admit of free exercise of conscience. That is, it will not permit -- often on pain of death -- individuals from deciding for themselves that they wish to leave Islam, sometimes for another faith, sometimes for no faith at all. That Islam does this makes it akin to other totalitarian belief-systems that do not tolerate anyone leaving that closed system. In a sense, a Muslim who leaves Islam is treated as a deserter from the army of Islam, just as someone who is persuaded to become a Muslim, even without any real understanding and with very incomplete (often deliberately withheld) knowledge, merely by reciting the single verse of the Shehada, is regarded as a recruit to the army of Islam, someone who has been signed up, rather than someone who has been carefully taught in order to save his individual soul.
9) Yes, not only have many of those posting here visited mosques during those phony Outreach Programs, but we have made it a point to attend those utterly phony presentations of Islam, in which none of the real questions -- about how Islam divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel, and territorially between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb -- ever come up. And of course there is never a discussion of Muhammad, that is of the killings of Abu Afak and Asma bint Marwan, the decapitation of the bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, the attack on the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, the tale of little Aisha, and so much else.
Oh, P.S. It's the goal of many, many Muslims to have us in the west living under Sharia law, and by using our own religious freedom-promoting laws against us, they just night. Of course, if they can't convert us, they'll just have to kill us! (See below.)
Fire In A Crowded Theater, Islamic-Style
Freedom of speech, even in our country, has its limitations. You can't, for example, advocate violence (except, perhaps, in a joke -- and even then, you'd better not make violent jokes about the president, or you can expect some G-men at your door). Well, in Denmark, a political party is demanding censorship for parts of the Koran -- the parts that encourage violence. Here's the piece from the Danish newspaper SABAH:
A political party called Stop Islamisation of Denmark has claimed that 67th and 69th verses of Quran are violating the Danish constitution and the mosques across the country should be closed according to the 78th article of the Danish constitution. SABAH Newspaper has talked with the leader Anders Graves of SIAD; a party that has about 400 members. Graves said: "Denmark is our country. Some verses of the Quran are filing me with worries about the lives of my children and grand children." Stating that they have no intention or expectation on banning the Islam religion across the country Gravers said people living in Denmark should obey the constitution of the country no matter what they believe in.
On Sugiero's blog, where I found this link, there's also this video of "Cruelty From The Koran":
And yes, there's some nasty, stupid shit in the bible, too, but you don't see Jews or Christians preaching to their congregations that they should go stone the neighbors for adultery or anything. Why is it that every year that we advance we seem one step closer to the cave, thanks to a bunch of barbarians who've gotten their hands on technology invented, of course, by the West?
And what will it take for the West to wake up to what's going on? Another terrorist attack?
You'd Rather See Women Posed In Burkhas?
An AP report says ads for "America's Next Top Model" were dropped from Santa Monica buses after residents complained:
The ads showed host Tyra Banks and the new season's swimsuited contestants posing in front of a waterfall.Most of the complaints were from people concerned that the city might be endorsing a show they believed was disrespectful to women, said Stephanie Negriff, director of transit services in the beach city.
"It's a matter of public taste," she said. "We try to be sensitive to the community."
"We wouldn't want to do anything that would disrespect women," Negriff said.
The ads were up for about two weeks. The bus line is refunding money the CW network paid for the promotion.
"It's a jungle out there in bus marketing. Even America's next top models aren't safe anymore," CW spokesman Paul McGuire said.
You disrespect me by treating me like a soppy moron and removing paid ads from a municipal bus system that can probably use the money -- not by showing me pretty women in swimsuits, which I always enjoy. Perhaps a TV show featuring this sort of view would be more acceptable to "the community"?
An unintended consequence: Thanks to the uptight fatsos in Santa Monica (you think contented, attractive people complain about seeing leggy women in bathing suits?) the show has gotten some fantastic free publicity.
The End Of The French Fry
I can't figure out how I manage to live "a healthy lifestyle," in light of the fact that the Big Mac has yet to be banned in the USA, and I eat one from time to time. Sometimes with fries and a Coke. From This Is London:
Prince Charles today said banning McDonald's fast food was the key to a healthy lifestyle.His comments came as he attended the launch of a public health awareness campaign. Charles, a strong advocate of organic food, was touring the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in Abu Dhabi with the Duchess of Cornwall.
He asked nutritionist Nadine Tayara: "Have you got anywhere with McDonald's, have you tried getting it banned? That's the key."
Royal observers said that Charles would have been aware that his comments would be picked by the media.
"He knew there was a reporter there and this is a subject close to his heart," said one source.
A Clarence House spokesman travelling with the Prince today issued a statement saying: "The Prince of Wales has for a long time advocated the importance of a balanced diet, especially for children.
Well, I don't think it's healthy to eat Mickey D at every meal, but I do think making certain foods forbidden probably contributes to eating disorders. Eating what you want, in moderation, seems much smarter. Along with pretending your TV won't work unless you're riding an exercise bike in front of it.
As for eating organic foods, if you've shopped for any lately, you know it pays, when buying them, to have a royal treasury at your disposal.
Welcome, Assholes!
See all those big, boxy things next to where you parked your car this past Friday night? They're called houses! People live in them. People who are often doing things like sleeping at 12:30 am (imagine that!) when you were blasting your radio at full volume with your car windows open for about five minutes straight. Luckily, I wasn't among them, so I was able to get a nice, clear photo of your license plate.
Lucky for you, I decided the one of you I could sort of see looked too thuggish to safely get close, so I only got a partial photo of him -- the head-shaved cur in the passenger seat.
Anybody know these lowlifes?