Who Pays For Your Kids?
Who should pay the cost of your kids? You? Your boss? Your coworkers? A random taxpayer you pass on the street? There's a story in New York Times Magazine called "Family-Leave Values," about who should bear the cost of time off from the workplace for childcare and other family issues. Eyal Press writes:
(UCSF law prof Joan C.) Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.At a Starbucks after the E.E.O.C. hearing, as she sipped tea and picked haphazardly at a brownie, Williams told me she wasn’t sure when she wrote the book what the best remedy was. One possibility was legislation — subsidized child care, generous parental-leave policies — of the sort many European countries have. Another was for employees to take legal action, an idea she described in the book’s most provocative chapter. To show how discrimination can harm caregivers, Williams told the story of a lawyer with sterling performance reviews who was passed over for a promotion because she was a mother; management had assumed she wouldn’t be interested and promoted an unmarried woman instead. Even though the position was not given to a man, a court agreed the firm’s action might constitute sex discrimination, not least because numerous fathers had received such promotions. Negative assumptions about the capabilities of women with children pervade the marketplace, Williams averred, and can violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act even when employers insist their actions are not motivated by sexism.
...Some employers, lawyers say, may be tolerant, even welcoming, of an employee who bears one child, only to balk when discovering she has become pregnant again. Attorneys who handle such cases refer to this as “the second-baby syndrome.” Other times, tension may arise when another factor — say, a disability — enters the picture. This is what Lucia Kanter believes happened to her. An attorney from San Francisco, Kanter started working several years ago at the Administrative Office of the Courts, the policy-making body of the California judicial system. She loved the job and, she says, was well regarded by her superiors. She also thought she would finish her career there, in part because it seemed like an accommodating place for working parents. After the birth of her first son, Julian, in January 2004, Kanter was given a generous (albeit unpaid) 11-month leave. She was then allowed to return on a four-day-a-week, 80 percent schedule. A year and a half later, she had a second son, Thanael, and this time was given six months off.
Shortly after Thanael was born, however, tests confirmed something that Kanter and her husband had begun to suspect: Julian, their older child, was autistic. They now faced the daunting challenge of raising a child with a disability. When Kanter learned this, she says she wrote to her manager to ask whether she might return, at least initially, either on a 60 percent schedule or an 80 percent schedule with a rotating day off, so she could attend Julian’s therapy sessions. Her request, she says, was denied. Then she asked for an extended leave of absence but again was turned down. Finally, she says, she suggested resuming her prior schedule, but with some additional time off so she could hire a second nanny. She figured the agency would at least be open to discussing this, but it said no.
Instead, she says, she received a termination letter.
She was stunned. “If my jaw could have dropped to the floor, it would have,” she told me when I visited her recently at her home in San Francisco. Now, invoking both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act, she is suing her former employer for discrimination, a decision she said she agonized over: “I have a child with 14 therapists, and another young child — I don’t need this headache.”
Of course, her colleagues at the Administrative Office of the Courts may have had reason to worry about that very fact, and to wonder whether her hands might be too full to handle an ordinary workload. (The agency would not address the specifics of the case, but in court papers and in a statement it denied all wrongdoing alleged by Kanter.) In non-F.M.L.A. cases, if employers can show an adverse action was taken for legitimate business reasons — if a worker’s presence in the office is essential to a company’s operations, say — they often can persuade a judge or jury to spare them liability, particularly if they can point to a positive track record toward the protected class of employees. Kanter acknowledged there were worse places for women with children to work, though she also recalled how, at an office baby shower, she overheard a high-ranking superior tell a female attorney: “So this is it, right? There aren’t going to be any more pregnant women after this?”
There are so many questions -- in a time when people have become very transient, and sometimes "family" are people who act like family rather than blood relatives, how come you you can't get time off to care for an extremely sick friend if everybody else is getting time off to care for grandpa?
If we're going to have a Family and Medical Leave Act, why not a Friends Medical Leave Act? Where does it end? If you get rights to care for who you care about, why should who I care about go uncared for simply because they weren't born related to me? Or what if your partner is gay or lesbian and can't marry you?
And then, if you choose to have kids, why should others in your workplace be expected to pay the price. Be honest: It's definitely a shifting of priorities. Single Childless Advice Goddess and Single Gay Boy, like Lena, are likely to put in many more hours and be much more committed to their jobs than people who've spawned, and especially, mothers.
Sure, there are dads who are primary childcare givers like Glenn Sacks, but that sort of thing is rare. And regardless of sex, when your coworkers start leaving early to take the kids to soccer -- whether they're mothers or fathers -- shouldn't they accordingly make less dough? And yes, the same should go for parents who have autistic or other medically challenged kids. It's tough, and if your workplace values you enough and can make accomodations for you, maybe they will. But, should it really be the law that the workplace picks up the cost of your bad roll of the dice in the procreation game?
As for the hew and cry to have women equally populating the workplace...um...why? If we're truly in favor of equal rights, shouldn't the question simply be who can put in the best work and the requisite amount of work? Versus those who disappear because they have different priorities? As I've said when people talk about how thrilling it would be to have a woman president, thanks, I'll choose my president based on their qualifications for the job, not on whether they happen to have labia.
But, back to this issue, why do so many people seem to expect equal pay for rather or very unequal work? And, finally, as I've said before, let's untie health benefits from the workplace. You pay your own way, and that of your family, so it doesn't come out of a pool at the workplace -- which means single people aren't subsidizing married people with families of five. In other words, yes, I'm very much in favor of the Bush health care plan:
*Under The President's Proposal, Families With Health Insurance Will Not Pay Income Or Payroll Taxes On The First $15,000 In Compensation And Singles Will Not Pay Income Or Payroll Taxes On The First $7,500.
o At the same time, health insurance would be considered taxable income. This is a change for those who now have health insurance through their jobs.
o The President's proposal will result in lower taxes for about 80 percent of employer-provided policies.
o Those with more generous policies (20 percent) will have the option to adjust their compensation to have lower premiums and higher wages to offset the tax change....The Tax Code Now Penalizes People Who Do Not Get Health Insurance Through Their Employers. Those who buy insurance on their own pay higher taxes for insurance than those who can get it through their job. The self-employed pay no income taxes on their premiums, but because they still owe payroll taxes, they are also disadvantaged compared to those who get health insurance from their employer. No one should have to pay higher taxes just because they do not work for an employer that provides health insurance. Under the current system, those without employer-provided health insurance – including the unemployed, retirees without retiree coverage, and workers at companies that do not offer health insurance (most of which are small businesses) – may have to pay substantially more for health insurance than those with employer-provided plans, a cost which many cannot afford.
Hack The Vote
Thanks, I'll opt for the #2 pencil over the fancy gadgetry.
John Wildermuth reports for the SF Chron that, according to a UC study, state-sanctioned teams of hackers were able to break into virtually every model of California's voting machines and change the results or take control of some functions:
The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.
"All information available to the secretary of state was made available to the testers,'' including operating manuals, software and source codes usually kept secret by the voting machine companies, said Matt Bishop, UC Davis computer science professor who led the "red team" hacking effort, said in his summary of the results.
The review included voting equipment from every company approved for use in the state, including Sequoia, whose systems are used in Alameda, Napa and Santa Clara counties; Hart InterCivic, used in San Mateo and Sonoma Counties; and Diebold, used in Marin County.
Election Systems and Software, which supplied equipment to San Francisco, Contra Costa, Solano and Los Angeles counties in last November's election, missed the deadline for submitting the equipment, Bowen said. While their equipment will be reviewed, Bowen warned that she has "the legal authority to impose any condition'' on its use.
Bowen said in a telephone news conference Friday that the report is only one piece of information she will use to decide which voting systems are secure enough to use in next February's presidential primary election.
If she is going to decertify any of the machines, she must do it by Friday, six months before the Feb. 5 vote.
California residents contact Debra here to express your opinion.
Civil Idiotarians
It's annoying and upsetting to deal with some of the "preventive" measures against terrorism since they mostly seem annoying, upsetting, (sometimes unconstitutionally) invasive and not very preventive at all. On an glaring incompetence note, for example, the TSA has proven very effective at finding bottled water in luggage, and not very effective at all at finding bombs. I sometimes think they'd have a hard time finding bin Laden himself if he strolled through the line in a Cubs shirt and a Disneyland baseball cap.
Still, the answer isn't dumping preventive measures, or sacrificing civil liberties willy nilly, but figuring out what is and isn't a must for fighting terrorism -- which most definitely is a threat, just read Jihadwatch for a week, and you'll get it. Cathy Young writes for Reason that civil libertarians shouldn't be cavalier about terrorism:
There is little doubt that the terrorist threat has been exploited by politicians—including the Bush administration, which has used the specter of September 11 to justify questionable policies both foreign and domestic. Half-baked plots by incompetent wannabe jihadists are hyped as imminent attacks with devastating consequences. Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff incurred much ridicule when he spoke of his "gut feeling" that a terrorist attack could be imminent.This situation has led some civil libertarians, most notably Ohio State University political science professor John Mueller, to declare what left-wing enfant terrible Michael Moore was excoriated for writing a few years ago: There is no terrorist threat. In a 2006 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mueller notes that radical Islamic terrorists have not made a major attack on U.S. soil since September 11, and argues that this is unlikely to be due to the vigilance of homeland security. Mueller concludes that the Al Qaeda has been largely defanged and that terrorists are clearly not as determined, effective or ubiquitous as they are made out to be. Thus, he asserts, we may have authorized massive surveillance and detention programs and other restrictive policies in response to a phantom menace.
Yet a new National Intelligence Estimate contradicts Mueller's assessment of the threat level: according to the report, the Al Qaeda has regrouped and is now the strongest it has been since 2001. This is not Bush Administration propaganda. In fact, Bush critics, including The New Republic and New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, were quick to seize on the NIE as an indictment of the administration—for going after Saddam Hussein while failing to capture Osama Bin Laden, and for turning Iraq into a terrorist launching pad and recruiting tool.
This indictment may well be accurate, and quite damning for an administration that has used keeping Americans safe from terrorists as a catchall rationale. But is also a reminder that the terror threat is more than mere hype.
Most of the recent failed terror plots may have been inept exercises in fantasy. But even if one out of a thousand such plots succeeds, it could be a tragedy of horrific proportions, especially if biological weapons or suitcase nukes are involved. Clearly, not all terrorists are inept; besides, even the most inept of bumblers sometimes manage to get lucky. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which did only minor damage, was the work of amateurs of almost comical ineptitude. Eight years later, no one was laughing.
...In the past, wars and other national security threats led to far worse assaults on American liberties than anything being contemplated now. Already, the majority of Americans seem willing to accept at least some curtailment of civil liberties in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. Even one more major attack, let alone three a year, could usher in some very dark days for freedom. If champions of civil liberties want to prevent that, they need to take a different approach: to show that the compromises we are being asked to accept will not make us safer, or that there are ways to make us more secure without sacrificing our bedrock principles. If they want to be heard when they warn about loss of liberty, they cannot afford to sound cavalier when they talk about loss of life.
Linked Out
I hate these networking services...Linked In, Facebook, etc. If I like you, I'll have a drink with you. If we're actual friends and you need me to help you with something, you'll call me or e-mail me and I'll get on it.
I keep having a problem with invites on Linked In because people are sending them to three different e-mail addresses, and I can only get their fucking software to "accept" one (and then there are all the people I wonder if I actually know, but can't quite remember if I do, who invite me to join their networks).
Frankly, I'd rather be part of nobody's "network" but the one I already have in real life. I mean...how loserish to write somebody on Facebook and ask them for a deal. Is that how people like to believe it will work? Does anyone really think that's going to happen? If I could just click one of these "invitations" to join somebody's network, be reasonably sure it will work, and be done with it, fine. Instead, it's a big time-waste, and I only click on these links because I don't want friends or acquaintances to think I'm snubbing their asses!
Who Gets To Say Where The Road Ends?
Part of the problem with spawning is the responsibility you have to the kiddies. So, on one hand I can understand the need for a guy to not endanger himself, but on the other hand, how do you deny a person the one thing that makes them happy on the level of a Labrador bounding after a dirty tennis ball?
Jeff Opdyke writes in The Wall Street Journal of his own experience being pushed by his wife to give up soccer -- and of the experiences of other men giving up sports they loved -- so as not to endanger the family income pool, diminish the man's ability for childcare, for help around the house, and/or for other exigencies:
As I've noted in the past, I play soccer -- specifically, goalkeeper. And though I'm 41 years old, I play with the vigor and intensity -- Amy, my wife, would say "stupidity" -- of a 20-year-old. Either way, all my numerous injuries have been minor...until now.I suffered a blow to my right quadriceps in a recent game that nearly resulted in emergency surgery -- a procedure in which the doctor would slice open my leg to relieve pressure from the blood that had accumulated in my muscle.
This -- a major injury -- has been Amy's biggest fear surrounding my soccer exploits. While she's concerned about my health, of course, she also worries that I will damage my body to such a degree that it affects my ability to earn a living as a writer. As it is, I've hurt my hands in so many ways that I now cannot remove my wedding ring because my ring-finger knuckle is so swollen.
Had any of my injuries been worse, she complains, "you might not be able to be a writer, and then what do we do?"
Her question always gives me pause -- and, as a result of the latest injury, has led to some pretty lively debates in our house of late. The immediate issue is whether I should hang up my soccer-goalie gloves. But the broader issue is even more difficult: Can a spouse veto your hobbies when those activities potentially affect your livelihood?
...Every time something like this happens, Amy quickly pushes me to retire from soccer, reminding me that I risk not only the family's income stream, but the ability to play with my kids and travel with her or even navigate the long flight of stairs at our lake house.
...Just as quickly, though, I disregard her complaints and continue playing. I love this game.
I've been off the field just two weeks, and despite passing out, despite throwing up in the doctor's office because of the pain, despite the pain I currently feel when walking, I cannot wait to return to the goal. If I could choose to do anything, I'd play goalkeeper every day; I love the game that much.
Amy doesn't share a similar passion for any particular activity, so it's hard for her to relate. She does, however, have a passion for family. And to her I'm jeopardizing all we've worked for.
He writes of a friend whose wife got him to give up playing baseball:
Without putting her foot down, my colleague says she encouraged her husband to forgo baseball for the family's benefit, telling him he needed to consider the family's future. So far he has kept himself on the bench. But the game constantly calls to him."I miss that part of my life," Eleazar says. "There's no other sport I like nearly as much. I was very happy and now it's gone. I feel like I'm missing something in my life. But, to me, it comes down to what's more important: my hobby, or my job and my family? If something happens to me and I can't pursue my job because I can't use my legs, that would be more devastating than not playing baseball.
"But I do miss the game. A lot."
And speaking of The Wall Street Journal, who thinks it was wrong for Daniel Pearl to continue doing such dangerous work in such a dangerous part of the world after he knew he had a kid on the way?
In 2002, for CNN, Brian Cabell wrote of a remark the WSJ managing ed made before Pearl was brutally murdered by the terrorists who kidnapped him:
"This is a man who lives for three things," Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor, said recently. "He lives for covering stories accurately. He lives for his wife -- they have a wonderful relationship -- and he lives for his unborn child."Mariane Pearl is about seven months pregnant with their first child.
Squawk, Squawk
Oh, the media parrots and their "statistics"; in this case, the oft-repeated claim that airline travel causes more CO2 emissions than driving an SUV. Dave Kopel writes for the Rocky Mountain News:
Actually, typical coast-to-coast commercial air travel may produces vastly less CO2.Let's stack the deck against air travel: We'll consider United's Los Angeles to New York's JFK service; this involves a relatively older plane, the Boeing 757-200, in a configuration which cuts the 757's normal seating capacity of 182 down to 110. Using United's average 2005 load factor of 81 percent, we have 89 passengers on a typical flight.
Figuring the plane would burn 5,000 gallons of fuel on the trip (probably an overestimate), we get about 56 gallons of jet fuel per passenger.
If you burn 56 gallons of motor fuel in your SUV, assuming 15 highway miles per gallon, then you would drive only 840 miles before using as much fuel as did a passenger in the 2,475 mile LAX to JFK trip.
Jet fuel emits about 8 percent more carbon dioxide per gallon than motor fuel. (EPA, "Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2002" Annex 2, tables 2-17 and 2-24). Even so, the jet is 3.2 times better than the solo SUV for the coast-to-coast trip - even for a flight with an unusually small number of passengers and an older plane. Imagine a newer plane with more passengers, and the environmental superiority of air travel (for long flights) becomes even greater.
Jonathan Tourtellot, the National Geographic Traveler editor who wrote the 2004 article on which Carman had relied, agreed with me that in the particular example above, the commercial flight would be better than the SUV. Because airplanes use so much fuel on takeoff and landing, the average miles per gallon for a long flight will be much better than for a short flight. Tourtellot suggested that the 2004 article might have relied on older data for airline fuel economy, which did not distinguish long flights from shorter flights; the older data might also have been based on the days when there were fewer passengers per plane than today.
It was not unreasonable for Carman to cite National Geographic, nor for National Geographic to use the best data it had available in 2004. Still, because so many people rely on the media for advice about environmentally responsible behavior, it is important to stop the spread of misleading factoids.
via Volokh
Fred Thompson On Being OverFed
Fred Thompson writes that there are too many federal crimes:
When I served as a federal prosecutor, there were not all that many federal crimes, and most of those involved federal interests. Since the 1980’s, however, Congress has aggressively federalized all sorts of crimes that the states have traditionally prosecuted and punished. While these federal laws allow Members of Congress to tell the voters how tough they are on crime, there are few good reasons why most of them are necessary.For example, it is a specific federal crime to use the symbol of 4-H Clubs with the intent to defraud. And don’t even think about using the Swiss Confederation’s coat of arms for commercial purposes. That’s a federal offense, too.
Groups as diverse as the American Bar Association and the Heritage Foundation have reported that there are more than three thousand, five hundred distinct federal crimes and more than 10,000 administrative regulations scattered over 50 section of the U.S. code that runs at more than 27,000 pages. More than 40 percent of these regulatory criminal laws have been enacted since 1973.
I held hearings on the over-federalization of criminal law when I was in the Senate. You hear that the states are not doing a good job at prosecuting certain crimes, that their sentencing laws are not tough enough, that it’s too easy to make bail in state court. If these are true, why allow those responsible in the states to shirk that responsibility by having the federal government make up for the shortcomings in state law? Accountability gets displaced.
Now, there are plenty of areas in criminal law where a federal role is appropriate. More and more crime occurs across state and national boundaries; the Internet is increasingly a haven for illegal activity. A federal role is appropriate in these and other instances. But today the Federal Bureau of Prisons has quadrupled in size in little more than 20 years.
Perhaps the clearest example of federal over-involvement in state and local responsibilities is public education. It’s the classic case of how the federal government buys authority over state and local matters with tax-payer money and ends up squandering both the authority and the money while imposing additional burdens on states.
No, as Ilya Somin points out over at Volokh, the clearest example of federal over-involvement would be in the drug laws:
He is right to note the massive growth in the federal prison population over the last 20 years, but fails to point out that most of that growth is due to the War on Drugs. As I explained here, convicts incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses make up 55% of the total federal prison population. And it was the War on Drugs that led to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which largely gutted constitutional limits on federal power. Any serious effort to reverse the federalization of criminal law must include cutting back on the War on Drugs; by comparison, the laws making it a crime to misuse the symbols of the 4-H Club and the Swiss Confederation are utterly insignificant. Is Thompson willing to advocate that? Will he promise to nominate judges committed to overruling Raich? I'm not holding my breath. But if he does, he'll certainly win my endorsement - the same priceless political asset that carried Nancy Pelosi to victory back in November:)!
40 Reasons Not To Have A Child
There's a new book out in France, by French economist/psychoanalyst and mother Corinne Maier, "No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children."
It doesn't seem to be out in English, but it's reviewed in the British papers; here, in The Telegraph, by Janine di Giovanni:
...It's a touchy, awkward subject. It's as close to a taboo as you can get: admitting that you don't want children and that if you have them, perhaps life would have been better if you did not. It's the kind of thing you might say to your shrink, but not something you blurt out at a polite dinner party.Maier claims she wrote her book half as a provocation and half as a genuine thesis addressing questions that people ask themselves. Part of it comes from growing up in a culture where we are surrounded with images of Madonna-like pregnant women and where children, though heavily disciplined, have a crucial role in society.
"In France, people go on too much about the glory of motherhood," Maier has said. "I thought it would be fun to take a dig at the myth that having children is wonderful."
Her French publisher, Editions Michalon, plans on making a fortune out of this book. It sent it out with an odd press release: "What are you doing this summer? Going on vacation, plan on having a bit of fun? Tropical ambiance, no clothes, dirty dancing? Sounds fun? Be careful, danger lurks! No we are not talking about Aids or Ebola but pregnancy; accidents happen so fast."
It's a rather odd way of promoting a book, and it's also rather odd that it has been written by a French woman. France has the highest fecundity rate in Europe, 830,000 births in 2006, the average of 2.9 children per woman.
It even surpasses Ireland. Part of the reason is religion and tradition but also the fat subsidies the state hands out to pregnant women, babies, new mothers, and families. It's one of the few places I know where young girls start talking about having a "bébé" in their early twenties and where reproduction, rather than a career, is viewed as a viable option after leaving university.
This is the only country in the world, as far as I'm aware, where a state-paid helper arrives a week after you give birth to make you carrot soup and help arrange your layette. It is the only country I know of that pays for a physical therapist to work with you to get your stomach muscles (and your reproductive muscles, but that's another matter) strong again, so that you look good in a bikini a few months after giving birth (and reproduce swiftly again).
It is also the only country that gives you a 50 per cent tax break on your nanny and awards huge discounts on rail travel if you have a child. Of course the French state is bankrupt on the back of this, but never mind.
Maier complains about all the things that most people with children feel but would never say: the loss of those wonderful lazy weekends, lounging in bed and drinking coffee on Sunday mornings; the vast expense of having a child; the overwhelming sense of responsibility for the next two decades.
She hates McDonald's, Disneyland and the Disney Channel.
But most of all, she hates the way that people's lives are curtailed and thwarted when they have children. If people did not have them, she retorts, "they'd think about what they really want and just go out and do it".
And apparently, while Maier is in the minority, it's a trend that is growing. Last month, the newspaper Le Parisian said that 10 per cent of French women do not want to have children. Another book was published in France in January called Being a Woman Without Being a Mother.
It's worked very well for me. When women write to me who are thinking of having kids, I advise them to talk to actual mothers to see what the day to day reality of that is. I have friends who are happy they had kids, but when I sometimes ask parents if they'd do it if they could do it all over again, they often say no.
If you need to be reminded of some of the pros and cons of having them, here's a helpful list in English, "20 Reasons Not To Have Children/10 Reasons To Have Children. Although they forget to mention that having sex and getting a woman pregnant might mean you'll almost never have sex again. Still, my personal favorite from their list is number one:
Birth. Imagine pushing a grapefruit through your anus. Imagine it taking ten hours. Imagine that after ten hours of trying to push a grapefruit through your anus and failing that doctors cut a big hole in your belly to remove the grapefruit. Don't believe anyone who says that they forget all about it in a few months.
Mmm, sexy! This list was a little god-focused (ugh!) at the top, but it had some good points:
1. God does not give blessings to people who are baby-rabid; he gives them to people who deserve them. Also, babies are not blessings - they are curses disguised as ugly beasts vaguely resembling humans.4. It's hardly exciting seeing who God will bless with an autistic child or a child with an incurable heart condition, or cancer.
9. The birth of a baby will stretch out my vagina and make it loose and flappy like a parachute, making sex less appealing to both myself and my partner. Children require lots of care and attention, and they are usually what breaks the loving bond between a man and his wife (because Hubby gets emotionally divorced from wifey as soon as the loaf is hatched).
13. I'll have one less person to wake me up in the middle of the night as they wail and scream blue murder.
18. A baby in my family will drive everyone else crazy with its wailing, and then everyone will pretend to be happy and curse me out behind my back.
37. I can't work and be a parent - I would prefer to be an office drone than have a screeching loaf vacuum-sucking my tit.
75. I love not wasting my hard-earned money on some idiotic toy for a kid, only to have them take it for granted and toss it aside without a thank-you.
85. I love to feel my ass fit into my old jeans.
91. Parenthood is an emotional and societal prison.
So...what's in your wallet? A strip of condoms, or pictures of your spawn? And why? (C'mon, don't be bashful...you can tell us if it was an accident.)
Emmanuelle Richard's $2 Shoes
Today's foray into cheap chic is by a friend who usually even has me beat. (Here's a dress she bought for $15, which has even LA's philanderer-in-chief, the Mayor, impressed. And here's one she got for 50 cents!)
These are Marc Jacob pumps (and excuse the dirt and such stuck on them -- we were at a garden party and tromping around through the grass). The only problem, Emmanuelle said, was how shockingly cheaply they were made (considering they were originally pricey Marc Jacob shoes), with plastic inside. She had them redone by a shoemaker, which added $40 to the cost, but still...pretty sexeeee bargain, n'est-ce pas?
The event, by the way, was a fundraiser for the Democrats (Emmanuelle was invited, and she forwarded the invite to Gregg and me), where I was reminded of one of the biggest problems with the left -- how much more boring and long-winded they are than the right.
Where the right makes emotional appeals to the voters (and swells they want thousands of dollars from) the left just goes on and on and on...and then some. The worst offender of the evening was the guy who promised he'd speak for three minutes. I guess he meant in dog years. I was reminded of Cathy Seipp, who was always so great at keeping boring people down when we hosted an L.A. Press Club panel. She would've given him the hook three weeks before he ever spoke.
P.S. The right also dresses better.
This guy later told me (I had to ask) that he was holding this old couch afghan for his friend. (But why was she wearing it instead of giving it to Goodwill?)
And these drapes, I mean, this dress, had to be pricey...the poor dear.
And one more little fun fact: One of the speakers bragged about how the organization had recently gotten loads of Blacks and Latinos involved in the Democratic cause...none of whom, Gregg pointed out, were in attendance at this chi-chi white gay guy and aging rich white hippiechick-populated event.
L'Amour
While we're on Matt and Emmanuelle, it was their 10 year anniversary on Thursday. One of the great love stories. Here they are at their wedding in Joncy, France.
Emmanuelle tells a few more stories within the story here. Bilingue, aussi, comme toujours! Unfortunately, they're sad stories -- about gay couples with one foreign partner that can't be together, thanks to the fundies who continue to bar gay marriage.
P.S. On a happier note, here's a photo Emmanuelle included of the celebratory card I got them -- couldn't resist, as it combined le Frog et le Prince in one.
Not To Worry, Potheads
About that study everybody in the media is screeching about regarding pot use causing schizophrenia...there was a terrific comment on The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, that puts it in perspective:
Anti Drug PropagandaRemember when the gov’t scare propaganda for drug use had to be realistic to have any effect? Me either. At one point there were racist suggestions that associated marijuana with rape and now, in the more PC age, we are being warned that it may contribute to mental illness.
Conclusion: The States guns should have greater control over our body, for our own good.
The MSM articles on the study (gated version at Lancet**1) have focused solely on the percentage increases in mental disorders without mentioning the rarity of psychotic disorders in the first place. One of the few articles that does mention the chances of developing such disorders puts the prevalence of schizophrenia in the US at 50 in 1000 or .005.**2
Using US Drug policy data we can estimate how much risk a 40% increase entails. Marijuana use is only listed by Last Month Used, but being the most popular illicit drug, so overall usage numbers are close enough. The NHS**3 survey on drugs puts the lifetime use for any illicit drug at an average of 36% from 1979 – 2001* which puts 36% of the population at a 40% higher risk for schizophrenia and the other 64% for normal risk. Using the general population schizophrenia rate of .005 as the risk factor gives marijuana users a .006118 chance of schizophrenia as opposed to the .00437 odds for someone with a lifetime of drug abstinence. There’s your 40% from about 4/1000 to 6/1000.
Buying two lottery tickets will double your odds of winning too. You can go from having the nearly same odds as being hit by lightening to…having nearly the same odds as being hit by lightning. And you’ll be down a buck.
Besides ignoring the unlikely event of mental disorder none of the articles have touched on any comparable risks. Anyone who suggests that this is a good reason to increase the penalty for marijuana use would surely be hypocritical if they didn’t suggest a total ban on alcohol. Its abuse, “is a stronger predictor of psychotic symptoms than regular cannabis use (by a factor of four).”*4
1. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607611623/abstract
2. http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=106&sid=1201512
3. http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/druguse/index.html4. http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/RN/2006-07/07rn21.htm
*The survey had gaps in some years but since the numbers were so consistent from year-to-year filling them in would not have a significant effect on the conclusions.
Comment by NBAT - July 27, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Oh, Slay Me With Your Flattery
If you want free advice from me, be a little bit patient. I know it's shocking to consider, but there's some chance that my world does not revolve around waiting for you to e-mail me with the details you failed to give me the first, second, and third time around.
It goes like this: It's Friday, July 20. The guy writes me for advice. He omits the essential detail from his e-mail -- exactly what was the mysterious lie he told his girlfriend that's making her refuse to speak to him? His question:
How do you make it up to a woman who is so mad at me, she will only talk to me through email? I lied to her in a big way and she found out about it.
I write back:
What was the lie? And tell me the details of your relationship - how long together, how old you are, how old she is, how committed you were, etc. Please copy this entire e-mail into your reply.
He writes back, still omitting essential details. I write back to him again:
Why did you do this? Please try to give me all the important details. I'd like to help you, and if you give me the essential information instead of making me ask you piece by piece, it's much easier for me. Please copy this entire e-mail into your reply. Best,-Amy
He writes back:
Tell me how this works. I don't want to give too many identifying details. Is this private (email only) or are you looking for something juicy to publish? How will I know if it is published? Are there release papers to sign?
I write back, Monday, 4:59 p.m.:
Look, either tell me or don't tell me. But why write to me if you're going to have me get thinking about this, and then you're going to get all squeamish? I may publish it, I may not. I don't identify people who write to me by name. You'll get the answer via e-mail if you actually follow through on giving me the information. Why write to me if you have reservations? I'm not psychic, so I can't answer a question without enough background information to tell me what the problem was.
So, finally he gives me the information, why he pretended he didn't have money when he was actually hiding a bag of cash (according to him, his girlfriend was something of a spendthrift). While I answered his earlier e-mails right away, by the time his e-mail with actual information in it came, I was on deadline.
I woke up at 4 a.m. on Tuesday, finished my column at 3:15 p.m., then started opening e-mails. Oddly, there were two from him, one with the details behind his question -- sent at 8 a.m., Tuesday, and another sent at 8:10 a.m. Apparently, he was peeved that I didn't answer his 8 a.m. e-mail milliseconds after he'd sent it. I guess he thought he'd insult me into responding:
I have to warn you: I think it is unfair to you, for me to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Well, I'm all for fair. I wrote back:
Glad to know you feel that way. In that case, I'll let you answer your question yourself.
"You Don't Know Happiness Until You've Had A Baby"
I didn't truly know nausea until I read that statement -- one a mother made to a woman named Carrie Friedman who's not yet a mother, and whose main reservation about becoming one is the aggressive superciliousness of other women who've spawned. Friedman writes:
If you want me to join your ranks—and you've made it clear with your cold, clammy hands on my stomach that recruiting my uterus is of paramount importance to you—I need to set some ground rules.First, please stop asking me when I'm going to get pregnant.
For all you know, I cannot have kids. For all I know, I cannot have kids, as I have not yet tried. But imagine how painful this line of interrogation would be if I had submitted to all kinds of procedures, only to come up empty-wombed. It would be emotionally devastating. Yet ever since the day after my wedding two years ago, I have fielded this question from the eye doctor, the dental assistant, my yoga teacher, the bagger at the grocery store. All of them feel entitled to ask. Don't. It's none of your business.
Next, don't completely abandon your own life and passions. You're setting a bad example for aspiring mothers-to-be like me.
I recently expressed my happiness over an achievement I had at work to a mother-friend of mine. She said, dripping with condescension, "Well, you don't know happiness until you've had a baby."
That's very possible, but don't rain on my parade, as I've never said to you, "Remind me, when you went to that expensive college you majored in diaper-rash prevention, right?"
I happen to love my job. It fulfills me in ways no other person—even a child—could. I learned through my own mother's example that the best lesson you can teach your kids is to pursue their passions. It's not selfish to have your own life. In fact, it's selfish not to.
...Finally, don't make your kid an extension of your own narcissism.
No one could possibly love your kids as much as you do, so stop inflicting them on others. Don't bring your kid to adult parties when you're not sure if it's kid-friendly. If they didn't invite your kid, they don't want your kid there. If you don't want to get a babysitter, stay home.
My husband thinks some people, particularly mothers, behave in these ways because it helps them validate their own choices. But he doesn't truly understand how infuriating it is, and that's because nobody badgers men with questions about procreation.
Becoming a parent was your decision, and I am thrilled for you. All I'm asking is that you let me make that choice in my own time. And keep your hands off my belly.
In case you're wondering, while I have six (smart, cool, well-mannered) kids who are my friends, when I'm asked whether I have any children of my own, I typically joke, "None that I know of." No, I didn't forget to have them, and no, I don't want to share yours in restaurants, stores, or airplanes, thanks. If you don't feel right drugging them, muzzling them, or (perish forbid!) teaching them manners, kindly limit their outings to Chuck E. Cheese -- or tie them to a stake in your yard until they can conduct themselves in a civilized manner.
Thanks, Norm
Rape, Roofies, And The First Amendment
Snakeman99, an attorney who's a pretty regular commenter here, writes:
Amy – I came across this article (Time magazine) yesterday and was reminded of your coverage of the Tory Bowen alleged rape case.
As you may recall, Ms. Bowen contacted you and made some cryptic remarks about how her case had now become a 1st Amendment issue.
Her e-mail, which I posted at the bottom of this entry:
Amy- I was forwarded your blog, and you are mistaken. I have never gone home with someone I had met at a bar... let alone church - and I wasn't a drunk slut as you seem to insinuate. I was drugged. But, you wouldn't know that - and the jurors aren't allowed to know that as well because the vial of urine sent for ketamine, rohypinol, and all other date rape substances broke in the mail (it's court records). They also found vomit in his car (tested - it was my DNA) - before I was raped which means he knew I was very sick and probably should have been taken to a hospital.As for the nurse that testified '2 am' she asked me what time I thought the first rape would have occurred, 1 am is the time that the bars closed, so I said 'I don't know - 2 am?' You have your opinions, and advice. But regardless to if you think he raped me or not - I am fighting for all women (you included) to at least have the liberty to state under oath what they believed happened. At this point, it is a free speech issue. I gather by your remarks you'd be livid if the defendant was mandated by the courts to testify that it was rape - a victim should receive the same rights.
Incidentally, you write very well - I just wish it weren't about me.
a fellow red-head,
Tory Bowen
Snakeman99 continues:
After reading the above (Time magazine) article (and a few others), I finally understand her claim.Apparently, the judge at her alleged attacker’s trial banned Ms. Bowen from using the term “rape” at trial, claiming that it would be too inflammatory for the jury to hear that term. This is an arguably reasonable stance. Had Ms. Bowen claimed on the stand that “he raped me,” the statement would likely be inadmissible under the rules of evidence as whether or not a “rape” has occurred is a legal conclusion that only a finder of fact may conclude. If the jury were to hear such testimony, the legally offensive testimony would typically be stricken from the record and the jury would be instructed to ignore the statement. At that point, despite the Judge’s instruction, its hard to un-ring that bell. Thus, the preemptory instruction. My friend, who is a criminal attorney here in L.A., assures me that such instructions are routine for all criminal cases. A mugging victim would also be unable to say “he robbed me” for the same reasons.
In any event Ms. Bowen is appealing the judge’s order on the theory that the instruction violates her 1st Amendment rights.
Pimp My Ride
I Coulda Been A Childhood Felon
It was third grade. Jeannie Willaker and I were supposed to sweep our classroom as punishment for talking. She wouldn't do her part, so little pre-libertarian me, I thwacked her over the head with the dustpan. I got talking-to from the principal, and that was that. No assault charges were filed. I did no time in The Big House. And (phew!) I learned my lesson and managed to go straight as an adult.
I was reminded of my childhood foray into violent crime when I read a story by award-winning former New Times LA investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith, whom I grew up near in suburban Detroit. Susan writes in the Oregonian about the utter ridiculousness brought down on two boys in Minneville, Oregon for swatting girls' butts as they walked down the hall in school:
Two McMinnville middle-schoolers facing sex abuse charges for spanking girls in the hallway probably will not do jail time or be required to register as sex offenders, the Yamhill County district attorney said Monday as the case against the boys grew into a media sensation.The comments from Bradley Berry outraged the parents of the two 13-year-olds, Ryan Cornelison and Cory Mashburn, who with their lawyers were deluged with calls from ABC, CNN, Fox, Court TV and radio stations across the country a day after a story about the prosecution appeared in The Sunday Oregonian.
Until now, Berry has declined to discuss specifics of the case or explain why it merits criminal charges. After spending most of Monday fielding complaints, however, he elaborated for the first time.
"From our perspective and the perspective of the victims, this was not just horseplay," Berry told The Oregonian. "People may disagree, and I understand that."
Based on his experience in similar cases, Berry said it's unlikely the boys, if convicted, would be sentenced for the maximum jail time for each of the counts. "That type of sentence has never been imposed in my county or in any county that I know of for these types of offenses," he said.
Berry said he, too, was inundated with calls and e-mails from readers who complained that charging the boys with 10 counts of sex abuse and harassment was an overreaction, as their parents maintain. Lawyers for the boys say each count could bring a year in confinement and mandatory registration as sex offenders.
...Lawrence (the lawyer for one of the boys) noted that Berry's office initially charged the boys with felony sex abuse before reducing the charges in May. The boys also spent five days in detention in February. Officials at McMinnville Public Schools and Patton Middle School imposed a five-day suspension on the seventh-graders.
Okay, talk to them about why this is wrong, maybe even suspend them for a few days -- after some stern adult figure gives them a talking-to and explains why it's wrong, and if they do it again. They're 13-year-olds boys. This sort of thing is what 13-year-old boys do, and why we have them in school and not running in loincloths in the wild. School is, in part, an opportunity to correct behavior like that, to explain that it's inappropriate. To charge them with felony sex abuse and try to send them to jail? Who does that serve? (Is the prosecutor up for reelection?)
Here's Susan's original story, from the Sunday Oregonian:
The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran -- what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher's aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.
After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.
Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?
Bradley Berry, the McMinnville district attorney, said his office "aggressively" pursues sex crimes that involve children. "These cases are devastating to children," he said. "They are life-altering cases."
Last year, in a previously undisclosed prosecution, he charged two other Patton Middle School boys with felony sex abuse for repeatedly slapping the bottom of a female student. Both pleaded guilty to harassment, which is a misdemeanor. Berry declined to discuss his cases against Mashburn and Cornelison.
The boys and their parents say Berry has gone far beyond what is necessary, criminalizing actions that they acknowledge were inappropriate. School district officials said Friday they had addressed the incident by suspending the students for five days.
The outlines of the case have been known. But confidential police reports and juvenile court records shed new light on the context of the boys' actions. The records show that other students, boys and girls, were slapping one another's bottoms. Two of the girls identified as victims have recanted, saying they felt pressured and gave false statements to interrogators.
The documents also show that the boys face 10 misdemeanor charges -- five sex abuse counts, five harassment counts -- reduced from initial charges of felony sex abuse. The boys are scheduled to go on trial Aug. 20.
A leading expert called the case a "travesty of justice" that is part of a growing trend in which children as young as 8 are being labeled sexual predators in juvenile court, where documents and proceedings are often secret.
Here's another example, by Erin Cunningham, of the Herald-Mail:
HAGERSTOWN - A kindergarten student was accused earlier this month of sexually harassing a classmate at Lincolnshire Elementary School, an accusation that will remain on his record until he moves to middle school.Washington County Public Schools spokeswoman Carol Mowen said the definition of sexual harassment used by the school system is, "unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors and/or other inappropriate verbal, written or physical conduct of a sexual nature directed toward others."
Mowen said that definition comes from the Maryland State Department of Education.
According to a school document provided by the boy's father, the 5-year-old pinched a girl's buttocks on Dec. 8 in a hallway at the school south of Hagerstown.
Charles Vallance, the boy's father, said he was unable to explain to his son what he had done.
"He knows nothing about sex," Vallance said. "There's no way to explain what he's been written up for. He knows it as playing around. He doesn't know it as anything sexual at all."
The incident was described as "sexual harassment" on the school form.
...School administrators at a Texas school in November suspended a 4-year-old student for inappropriately touching a teacher's aide after the prekindergarten student hugged the woman.
...During the 2005-06 school year, 28 kindergarten students in Maryland were suspended for sex offenses, including sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexual activity, according to state data. Fifteen of those suspensions were for sexual harassment.
How insane have we gone that we're punishing children for hugging?
Furthermore, I think the paranoia that everybody is a potential kiddie diddler is pretty sick and pretty crazy. When I spent a month in Rome a while back, visiting my friends Thomas and Roberta, we'd have dinner every night at Roberta's parents' apartment. Ro's sister or somebody would come in with their baby and the baby would be removed from their arms and passed around the room for grandpa and grandma and uncles, aunts, and cousins to each cootchie-coo it, or whatever it is they say in Italian. Perhaps it's an incorrect assumption on my part, but I'm guessing that's why children from Latin cultures seem better adjusted and aren't as fearful around people not in their immediate family as American children tend to be.
Marksmanship Not Marxmanship
My good friend Jackie Danicki, who recently moved back to the States from England, posted a photo of a Kentucky gun shop on her blog, and wrote:
It’s SO refreshing to be back in a country where so much of the population has a normal and healthy attitude towards self-defense. (There’s a knife shop right across the street from this gun shop, which delighted me.) It’s nice to know that not just the criminals and cops are packing around here.This reminds me of one of the funniest questions I used to get from (supposedly worldly) Europeans all the time: “Aren’t you afraid of getting killed in a drive-by shooting when you’re in America?!” A lot less than I feared being killed or injured by socialized healthcare in Britain, as it happens…
So...where do you stand on the Second Amendment? (I'm for it.)
Albert Ellis Died This Morning
Very sad, just heard the news from mutual friends. Here's the NY Times obit by Michael T. Kaufman:
Albert Ellis, whose innovative straight-talk approach to psychotherapy made him one of the most influential and provocative figures in modern psychology, died early today at his home above the institute he founded in Manhattan. He was 93. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This ImageDr. Ellis (he had a doctorate but not a medical degree) called his approach rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T. Developed in the 1950’s, it challenged the deliberate, slow-moving methodology of Sigmund Freud, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment at the time.
Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. Neurosis, he said, was “just a high-class word for whining.”
“The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better,” he told The New York Times in an interview in 2004. “But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”
If his ideas broke with conventions, so did his manner of imparting them. Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100 or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often lacing his comments with obscenities for effect.
His basic message was that all people are born with a talent “for crooked thinking” — distortions of perception that sabotage their innate desire for happiness. But he recognized that people also had the capacity to change themselves. The role of therapists, Dr. Ellis argued, is to intervene directly, using strategies and homework exercises to help patients first learn to accept themselves as they are (unconditional self-acceptance, he called it) and then to retrain themselves to avoid destructive emotions — to “establish new ways of being and behaving,” as he put it.
His methods, along with those of Dr. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist who was working independently, provided the basis for what is known as cognitive behavior therapy. A form of talk therapy, it has been shown to be at least as effective as drugs for many people in treating anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other conditions.
His admirers credited Dr. Ellis with adapting the “talking cure,” the dominant therapy in extended Freudian sessions, to a pragmatic, stop-your-complaining-and-get-on-with-you-life form of guidance later popularized by television personalities like Dr. Phil.
Here's a photo of Al, with his wife Debbie, from the Erickson Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference a few years ago.
Here's my blog item on his talk.
Courting Stupidity
Islam isn't a race. There can be blond, blue-eyed Muslims, and I wouldn't be surprised if those who want us dead because the Koran says to convert or kill the infidels are looking to sign up a few good corn-fed Americans who blend in. So, don't be too sure you know what a radical Muslim looks like.
That said, expressing any suspicion of terrorist plotting may soon be grounds for a lawsuit. So, unless you have a lawyer on retainer, you may be tempted to avoid, say, reporting your observation that a group of 45 Muslim doctors was threatening to use car bombs and rocket grenades in terror attacks in the USA. Via Debbie Schlussel, John Steele writes for the Telegraph/UK of messages on an Islamist Internet site:
One message read: "We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America."The first target which will be penetrated by nine brothers is the naval base which gives shelter to the ship Kennedy." This is thought to have been a reference to the USS John F Kennedy, which is often at Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, Florida.
The message discussed targets at the base, adding: "These are clubs for naked women which are opposite the First and Third units."
It also referred to using six Chevrolet GT vehicles and three fishing boats and blowing up petrol tanks with rocket propelled grenades.
Would you keep silent and thus unsued if you spotted these two Islamic lovelies standing around with binoculars, scouting out Dallas' Love Field airport? From a story by Jason Trahan in the Dallas Morning News:
"I'm a trained sniper and proud of it," Ms. Al-Homsi said in an interview Thursday after first refusing to comment on whether she has any terrorism ties. She then said no.Police officials said they have no direct evidence the women have ties to terrorism.
"I am not a dangerous individual," said Ms. Al-Homsi, who said she is an accountant who has dual Syrian-U.S. citizenship.
On the afternoon of Feb. 25, Ms. Al-Homsi and a friend who could not be reached for comment, Aisha Abdul-Rahman Hamad, 50, of Irving, were spotted at Love Field wearing Muslim robes and camouflage pants and "acting suspiciously," the bulletin states. The surveillance video shows one of the women walking back and forth, apparently pacing off distances.
...On Dec. 20, 2005, Ms. Al-Homsi was arrested after a report that she waved a grenade at a motorist on Central Expressway near LBJ Freeway. Richardson police stopped her car and arrested her. The Garland bomb squad determined the grenade was a fake. She was released the next day, after officials charged her with making a bomb hoax. She was placed on probation.
Even reporting something as outrageous as this, you could be putting yourself in legal hot water thanks, says The Wall Street Journal, to some Democrats in Congress (although I could only find the name of one when I was writing this blog item, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee). Here are more details from the WSJ editorial, "Speak and Be Sued":
A rider of New York City's subways would have to have his nose stuck way deep in his morning newspaper to avoid seeing the anti-terrorism placards urging: "If you see something, say something." Now, if some Democrats in Washington have their way, the signs will need to be amended to read, "If you see something and say something, prepare to be sued."That's the message the six "flying imams" tried to deliver in November when suspicious behavior got them thrown off a US Airways flight from Minneapolis -- and the passengers who blew the whistle on them threatened with lawsuits. And that's the message endorsed by Democrats in Congress who are pressuring a conference committee to remove language from the final homeland security bill that would confer civil immunity on citizens who "in good faith" report suspicious behavior to authorities.
This "John Doe provision" passed the House in March by a bipartisan vote that included every Republican and 105 Democrats. Opponents argue that it "could invite racial and religious profiling," as Senator Patrick Leahy said last week.
Well, boohoo. Sorry, but you don't hear about a lot of Mormons, Wiccans, or Jehovah's Witnesses plotting to kill those who don't follow their religious lead.
And, while we shouldn't be so quick to assume the danger is only from people who look like Middle Easterners, I don't know about you, but if I see two ladies in "Muslim robes and camouflage pants" "pacing off distances" outside LAX, excuse me if my first thought isn't that they're scouting out locations for an interfaith peace center.
The piece continues:
New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority said last week that the subway tipline had received 1,944 reports in 2006. We'll never know precisely how many terrorist acts may have been prevented because of those workaday whistleblowers. But as the Fort Dix plot -- uncovered by a retail clerk -- proves, vigilance works.Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who drafted the John Doe provision, asks how Democrats "can possibly say they're passing 'the ultimate comprehensive homeland security bill' while eliminating the provision that protects people who report terrorist activity." Good question.
Al Qaeda Parties While Iraq Burns
We're just finding out about the nixed operation to capture or kill Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri -- nixed by Donald Rumsfeld himself, that is, just as at least three other such operations ended up stillborn during the Clinton administration.
Former National Security Council staffers (from 1994-99) Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon write, in an op-ed for The New York Times, that going after Al Qaeda is a job for the CIA, not the Pentagon:
In theory, the best place in the government for small-scale missions to be planned and executed is the Pentagon, because snatch or kill teams should be plugged into a larger military support team. The reality, unfortunately, is that they can’t be plugged in without being bogged down.Senior officers, trained to understand the American way of war to mean overwhelming force and superior firepower, view special ops outside a war zone as something to be avoided at all cost. This has been true even in lower-risk efforts to capture war criminals in the Balkans. The record demonstrates that our military is simply incapable of adapting its culture to embrace such operations. The Pentagon should just stop planning for missions it won’t launch.
While the C.I.A. doesn’t have an unblemished record, its counterterrorism operations have shown more promise than the Pentagon’s. The agency has already had some successes operating in ungoverned spaces. In the first reported attack in such a region, a C.I.A.-operated Predator drone launched a missile that killed a Qaeda lieutenant in Yemen in 2002. Since then the Predator has been used to strike Al Qaeda at least eight times, although with limited success. At least initially, the trigger in these attacks was pulled by C.I.A. operatives, not soldiers.
The record of a small, vulnerable C.I.A. paramilitary force in Afghanistan in 2001 was more impressive. The group’s audacious reconnaissance work and direction of local warlords in action against the Taliban provided the most significant battlefield success of the post-9/11 period. Without this risky, cold-start intervention, the American troops that followed the agency into Afghanistan would have gone in blind and worried more about their flanks than about Al Qaeda.
The agency’s history of ill-conceived covert political operations from the 1950s through the 1970s may cause some to worry. That agency, however, no longer exists. Congressional hearings and legislation, as well as fear of casualties, have given the clandestine service its own case of risk aversion, though it seems less severe than the Pentagon’s.
We have failed in Pakistan, and are failing in Iraq, to achieve a primary aim of our counterterrorism policy: preventing Al Qaeda from acquiring safe havens. Our military has shown itself to be a poor instrument for fighting terrorism, and there are now thousands of jihadists who weren’t in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. When the inevitable American drawdown occurs, we will need a way to keep the terrorists off balance in Iraq and to disrupt the conveyor belt that is already moving fighters to places like Lebanon, North Africa and Europe.
With new leadership at both the C.I.A. and the Defense Department, the Bush administration has a chance to fix this problem. The missing ingredient for success with the most important kind of counterterrorism missions is not courage or technical capacity — our uniformed personnel are unsurpassed — but organizational culture. With a small fraction of the resources that Pentagon has for special operations, the C.I.A. could develop the paramilitary capacity we profoundly need.
My Outfit Cost Less Than Your Outfit
No, I don't write in my pajamas. How boring. Here I am, Monday morning, at my favorite writing café.
•Skirt, $15, on final clearance at Loehmann's. (It's a party dress skirt. The way I see it, every day's a party, or should be.)
•Jacket, $20 from a depot vente in France (used clothing store).
•Shirt, $3 (Well, to be fair, it was "two for $6" at Style Express in Culver City)
•Necklace, $8 boring beaded choker from Monoprix (like Target, in France).
•Beaded antique flower attached to make it unboring -- FREE! Because it's from an old wooden steamer trunk I found in the trash on Desbrosses Street in my old neighborhood in NYC.
Total cost of outfit, $46.
And, okay, maybe it sounds a little self-serving, since getting dressed is one of my hobbies, but what I'd like to see in the L.A. Times is not just the clothes of people who go to Barney's and drop thousands on a sweater (there's a style-stressor!). How about shots of the numerous people around L.A. -- non-sweatpants/flip-flops wearers, that is -- who slap together a couple or three twenties and manage to look pretty original and fab?
Yeah...if I ran the paper (well, if I ran the paper my column would run in it)...if I ran the paper, that Image section would have a regular feature in the print editon and online of snazzily dressed locals who don't just bend over for Fred Segal and/or Ann Taylor...and a couple words about who they are and why they wear what they wear.
I've never lived in a town where I've known less about the locals from the local daily!
There's Nobody Up There
What does it means if you're told god's all knowing and all powerful, and you're suffering terribly, and you pray and pray, and your suffering continues?
While the religious tend to claim believing in god brings them great comfort, to believe there's a god and to have all evidence point to god not giving a shit about your excruciating pain or horrible disability can't feel good. (I'm reminded of the site Why Does God Hate Amputees?) Gia Cortina writes of the now-late Tammy Faye Messner in the Post/Chronicle:
It was a little over two months ago that Tammy Faye said on her web site, "The doctors have stopped trying to treat the cancer and so now it's up to God and my faith. Please continue to pray for the pain and sick stomach."
Faith doesn't cure cancer, catching it in time and getting the appropriate medical care does. That's something I'm guessing William Lobdell learned. He was the religion reporter for the LA Times. He had a long but compelling piece I read from word one to the end in Saturday's LA Times about his journey in the religiosphere:
WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers.As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show.
I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.
But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.
I won't go all Harry Potter reviewer on you and give away the ending. Read the whole thing. It's worth it.
My take, of course: Religion is a business, and one that has to perpetuate itself by perpetuating nonthink in its members. It's an insinuating mental parasite. And this while we all have so much information available to us, on so many subjects, and it's easy enough to look into the merits of rationality and see that believing, without evidence, in god, really doesn't make any sense.
P.S. Carnival of the Godless is now up. I forgot to enter a blog item in this one, but there's some good stuff there. Here's a piece from Atheist Revolution, "Religious Intolerance: Atheist Pot, Christian Kettle":
What is Religious Intolerance?Religious intolerance is the failure to respect "the fundamental right of other people to hold religious beliefs that are different from your own." It has nothing to do with religious practices or behavior motivated by religion. The focus rests squarely on respecting the right of others to hold religious beliefs.
I think it is fair to say that I have never met an atheist (nor am I such an atheist) who does agree that others have a fundamental right to hold any religious belief they select. It is your absolute right to maintain your Christian beliefs even if they are false and even if they cause harm to you. I hope you will outgrow them. I think they are laughably absurd. I have not one shred of respect for the beliefs themselves. However, I respect and defend your right to hold them.
Accordingly, I've been meaning to recommend a terrific book Lena recommended to me, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned To Love Identity And Ignore Inequality, by Walter Benn Michaels. Michaels clarifies the difference between prejudice and disagreement:
How To Make A Suicide Bomber
Fascinating piece in TIME by Robert Baer, who interviewed a failed suicide bomber who was preparing to assassinate the governor of Afghanistan's Nangahar Province:
Only 17, he was terrified. Not only because of an uncertain fate, but perhaps more so because the world was not as the Taliban had described it. The Taliban indoctrinated him well, convincing him the Americans were stealing the faith of Afghan Muslims. Turning them into kafirs. I asked him if he hated the governor. No, it was simply that in working with the Americans he'd fallen away from Islam. He deserved to die....When I asked he said he'd read the Quran. I asked it him if he understood it. He shook his head. It was then it became apparent his education went no farther than the madrassa—he was taught to recite the Quran in Arabic but did not understand a word. Other than what he was told.
And this is where the Taliban came in. Spotting him in the village mosque, they invited him to attend what can only be called an indoctrination course in Waziristan. There he was taught that suicide bombers go directly to heaven, where they're met by virgins and lush gardens. Farhad was also taught that any Muslim working with the Americans in Afghanistan was no longer a Muslim, but a "munafiq," a pretend Muslim. It was written in the Quran, Farhad was assured.
Even I, who have tried to get a grip on Muslim suicide bombing, was stunned by the depth of the brainwashing. I'd never seen anything like it. So I asked the question, What religion is Musharraf, the president of Pakistan? He's a Jew, the Taliban had assured Farhad.
No wonder Farhad agreed to go to Jalalabad to kill a fellow Muslim. Still, wasn't there a doubt in his mind about taking his life like that and who knows how many others? No. The Taliban had told him that when he pushed the button on his suicide vest, it was Allah then who would decide whether to summon him to heaven or not.
Dumb 'Em Down Young
The kid looks to be about six. I just heard his mother tell him, "You're a Virgo," and read him his horoscope out of the LA Times -- as if it has meaning and relevance.
Who Marches Against The Cop Killers?
Great piece by my pal Heather Mac Donald in City Journal, on how black leaders are so often silent when police are gunned down trying to protect black neighborhoods:
New York police officers have yet to hold a “no justice, no peace” rally in Brooklyn, where three black thugs in a stolen BMW fatally gunned down Officer Russel Timoshenko on July 9. Nor have New York’s Finest stopped patrolling Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Central Harlem, where they put their lives at risk every day to protect residents from violent crime.Yet under the race-baiting precedents established by Al Sharpton, New York City Councilman (and former Black Panther) Charles Barron, and New York Times columnists and editors, the police have more than enough grounds for racial complaint. Blacks are blowing away police officers at rates far exceeding their own numbers. Nationally, blacks made up 40 percent of all cop killers from 1994 to 2005, even though they are only 13.4 percent of the American population.
That fact is not allowed in polite company, however, because race-baiting is tolerated in only one direction. Any time an officer shoots a black civilian, he runs a risk of igniting protest in the African-American “community.” (Even if the officer is black, he will be treated as an honorary white for purposes of denouncing cop racism, as the shooting of Sean Bell last November demonstrated.) The media will turn out in force for all such anticop demonstrations, lovingly documenting every gesture of black rage. But justified police shootings constitute only a minute fraction—and unjustified police shootings, an almost imperceptible fraction—of homicides of blacks, virtually all of which are committed by other blacks. New York police killed nine civilians in 2005, for example, all of whom had attacked the officers first, compared with hundreds upon hundreds of black-on-black killings. But blacks can shoot whites—police officer and civilian alike—without anyone’s organizing a street demonstration about it, much less daring to point out the pattern.
Beyond the racial issues, people are quick to malign cops in general and slow to show appreciation for individual cops who do a good job.
On a related note, I was chastised by a blog commenter for thanking soldiers when I see them in airports (if I'm remembering correctly, that commenter was a mother with an enlisted kid who sees Iraq as a fool's errand, and is embarrassed to be thanked for being part of it). Although I think we were wrong to invade Iraq, I understand that people who enlist in our military are putting their lives on the line on behalf of the rest of us, and I'm immensely grateful for that.
I also thank the police and firemen in my neighborhood when I see them. It's tough being a cop, not only because it's dangerous or can even be deadly, but thanks to the few bad apples on the force who are highlighted in the media. Maybe you, too, should give a wave of thanks to the cop on the beat in your neighborhood. Maybe there'd be fewer bad apples if we gave credit and thanks to the good cops out there. People don't realize this, I don't think, but letting somebody know they're appreciated can make a real difference in how they do their job.
We Get Hate Mail
And it often makes us laugh. Yesterday's selection is from yet another guy who accuses me of being a man-hater, but can't quite bring himself to use the word:
GUY: I can tell you with absolute certainty, that you are the type of screwed up B---H that this guy was describing.ME: You can spell out the word, I promise your keyboard won't catch fire.
Later in the e-mail, I escalated my word usage to full fur-burger:
If anybody dislikes me, it's the feminists -- like the ones I took apart in all the articles I've written for Hustler (which must be hiring me because I hit a nerve with male readers since I don't believe a lot of women buy it for the spread-eagled pussy shots).
I'm guessing paramedics were called. Have yet to hear back from the poor dear.
Advice To The Jailbound Lovelorn
My column runs near quite a few prisons in this country, so I get a lot of mail from prisoners. Their letters usually have a few things in common:
1. They didn't do it.
2. They're looking for a pen-pal.
Hint: if you want a pen-pal, your best shot probably isn't somebody who answers mail for a living.
Here's a bit of a letter from this week's prisoner grab-bag:
The Potty Words Police Are At It Again
Excuse me, but what happens if you hear what could be best termed "a fleeting fuck" -- an expletive somebody accidentally lets fly on radio or TV? Does your head explode? Do your clothes disintegrate into a pile of ash? Does a section of your brain melt like a candy bar on hot pavement?
Brooks Boliek writes in the Hollywood Reporter that the Senate Commerce Committee is considering a bill called the "Protecting Children From Indecent Programming Act":
It would reinstate the FCC policy making broadcasters liable for a $325,000 fine for a slip of the tongue. A committee vote on the indecency measure is expected Thursday.Earlier this year, the federal appeals court in New York tossed out an FCC indecency ruling that said a fleeting obscenity reference gets broadcasters a fine for indecency, telling the commission that it failed to give a good reason for its decision and likely could not find a good reason if it had to.
The committee members are likely to approve the legislation, as it has the support of the committee's leaders and is something that is politically difficult to oppose.
"It looks like it's getting the support that it needs to go through the committee," said Steven Broderick, spokesman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. Rockefeller is the chief sponsor of the legislation and a senior committee member.
Commerce Committee chairman Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, and the ranking member, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, both support the legislation.
Rockefeller also is preparing legislation that would give the FCC the authority to regulate "excessively violent" content on television -- be it cable, satellite or broadcast TV.
Hey, you pandering jerk, there's already a means for doing that; in fact, two: the on-off switch and an antiquated practice called "parenting."
Furthermore, does anybody think "protecting" kids from hearing the occasional "fuck" that slips out of somebody's mouth on TV (and what five-year-old is up listening to Bono anyway?) is going to keep the odious words out of their ears?
Many or most kids probably hear plenty of swear words in movies their parents rent and in speech at home -- and maybe even overhear hints of them in news reports of vice-presidents speaking in the Senate. And besides, as I've said before, probably by about 11, kids are talking about teabagging on the playground. And the accidental "fuck!" or "fucking!" is going to burn up their tiny young ears?
UPDATE: Actually, the Senate Commerce Committee has passed the bill, and now it moves on to the full range of vote-panderers in the Senate:
But CDT (Center For Democracy and Technology) also points out that if Senator Rockefeller’s bill becomes law, it will certainly force the courts to consider the constitutional question: Does the FCC have First Amendment authority to censor the use of a single curse word over the airwaves?
We'll Be Invading Iran Today
Cheney can't claim he's not of the executive branch today, because he'll be president while doctors are giving the president a colonoscopy. Here's hoping he just keeps the seat warm for the usual terrorism-fomenting doofus in charge.
Now, this isn't my idea, but I read it somewhere -- somebody complaining that we go through this huge vetting process during the election to pick the president, then he just plucks the VP out of his hat without anybody giving the VP much scrutiny. My idea: Perhaps we should get more of a selection for VP; i.e., instead of having candidates appoint the VP, each candidate would give us a few choices and let us vote. Bringing competition to the VP race might add a bit of much-needed oversight. (Of course, there is that caveat that it's the public electing the person -- and remember, even Paris Hilton votes!)
You Can Bet Yer Black Ass
Or your partially black ass. Which is what your white ass may turn out to be. Or vice versa. Paul Harris writes for The Observer:
Last year, Professor Peter Fine at Florida Atlantic University had an idea for an art class. He would gather a group of students to produce work around their idea of their racial identity. But as part of the class he asked them to take a DNA test that would break down their racial background. His bet was that most of the class - of whom the majority saw themselves as whites of European descent - had no real idea who they were.He was right. Of 13 students, only one turned out to be completely European. The rest displayed a mixture of European, Native American, African and Asian genes. The one black student turned out to be 21 per cent white. Fine himself - who admits to looking like a corn-fed stereotype of a white Midwesterner - discovered he was a quarter Native American. 'I honestly think these tests could have a large effect on American consciousness of who we are. If Americans recognise themselves as a mixed group of people, that could really change things,' he said.
Fine has a point. For centuries, America has been less a racial melting pot and more a stew, where different communities bump up against each other, but keep mostly to themselves. Yet, as millions of Americans take DNA tests, they are discovering a surprising truth: America's strict racial lines are, in fact, blurred. One-third of white Americans, according to some tests, will possess between two and 20 per cent African genes. The majority of black Americans have some European ancestors.
...Greater knowledge can pose troubling questions. While hosting African American Lives, Professor (Henry Louis) Gates, one of America's most eminent black scholars, was stunned to find he was half European. He had more ancestors in France and Ireland than in Africa. Such discoveries unsettle even the greatest mind. In the show, Gates lamented what this meant to a proud black American. 'I have the blues,' he said, and then asked: 'Can I still have the blues?'
...That is where Barack Obama's past came back to haunt him. Obama is seen as black by most Americans. Yet that skin colour comes from his Kenyan father, who met his white mother, from Kansas, at college. That prompted some leading black commentators to claim that Obama is not a real black American (or not black enough). This, in turn, led a group of genealogists to trace Obama's mother's family back to before the Civil War - and they found that some were slave-owners. That is how - if he wins the 2008 race - America's first ever black president will be the direct descendant of white slave-owners.
Hmmm, that makes this woman's campaign a little...uh...difficult. But, first, a little history. Damali Ayo, first came up with the satirical rent-a-negro:
Why rent-a-negro? Why not buy? As we all know, the purchase of African Americans was outlawed many years ago. As times have changed the need for black people in your life has changed but not diminished. The presence of black people in your life can advance business and social reputation. These days those who claim black friends and colleagues are on the cutting edge of social and political trends. As our country strives to incorporate the faces of African Americans, you have to keep up. rent-a-negro offers you the chance to capitalize on your connection with a black person. At any gathering our service can bring a freshness and tension that will keep things lively. This adds currency to your image and events. We all go out for ethnic food every once in a while, why not bring some new flavor to your home or office...for all your friends and colleagues to enjoy!
She wrote a book, How To Rent A Negro. A reviewer on Amazon writes:
I found this book painfully narrow minded and basically aimed at making a dollar by exploiting the ignorance on both sides of the racial tension between blacks and whites. I guess when I was 5 years old I was "renting" my best friend. And don't try to put character before color, it's all about color.I recommend Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" if you actually want an insightful look into (actually backed by research!) why things are the way they are. If you are white, prepare to be frustrated for about 200 pages in Ms Ayo's book. If you are black, prepare to laugh at white lameness for 200 pages while you avoid any deep, hard look into the racial issues of our day.
An excerpt from the Publisher's Weekly review of Sowell's book on Amazon:
Hoover Institution Fellow Sowell, author of Ethnic America, argues that "internal" cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices. The title essay posits a "black redneck" culture inherited from the white redneck culture of the South and characterized by violent machismo, shiftlessness and disdain for schooling. White liberals, gangsta-rap aficionados and others who lionize its ghetto remnants as an authentic black identity, Sowell contends, have their history wrong and help perpetuate cultural pathologies that hold blacks back.
Damali Ayo takes a far different approach in her talks on racism. Here's a PDF of one of them, with some really ridiculous bits:
So...if, according to Ayo, there is no reverse racism, what was it I encountered at the University of Michigan when I happily sat down at the end of a table of black girls in the beginning of my freshman year, and they all went silent like in the old E.F. Hutton commercial, and looked down the table at me as if I were a giant turd with legs?
And what do you call all those "minority fellowships" in journalism, that are not available to poor white people who could only afford community college, but are available to wealthy black people who went to Harvard, not on scholarship, but paid for in full by their black parents? The black people I know are no different than the white people I know -- smart, educated, interesting and accomplished. Of course, the black people I know don't revolve their lives around how oppressed they are (and listen, it was no picnic growing up Jewish in a neighborhood where people hated Jews...but I also find the whole Jewish, chest-thumping "We're persecuted!" thing equally tiresome). So, whomever you are, you may have had persecution in your ancestry, and even in your own lifetime, as I did, but if you define yourself by it, your life becomes about that instead of about building and creating something.
Accordingly, here's Ayo's latest project, a national day of "Panhandling For Reparations":
OCTOBER 10, 2007. People all across the United States will take an hour or two to sit in a range of locations in our communities: outside of businesses, libraries, museums, art galleries, or on busy street corners. We will wear signs reminding passersby of the history of slavery in the United States. We will collect reparations in the form of money from white Americans for the enslavement and free-labor of Africans and African Americans during the establishment and economic rise of this country. This money wiill be immediately paid out to black passersby. Both parties wiill be offered a receipt. We will do this to offer a convenient opportunity for American citizens to acknowledge, apologize and compensate the unpaid labor of African Americans, the travesty of slavery, and the rightful due of reparations.
How disgusting. I can see a black friend of mine being shoved money for "reparations," and being just mortified, as she identifies herself by how much she's achieved not by being a persecuted person. Also, her family emigrated a generation ago from St. Lucia (some of them did; some are still there); they were not brought over here as slaves.
Finally, as for my family, when black people were being enslaved over here, we were being chased around Russia by the Cossacks. My relatives came over on boats from Eastern Europe, so if you're looking to place blame for slavery simply because I have the complexion of Wite-Out, well, you really shouldn't be looking at me.
I do hope, however, that you will look to me as an example of how somebody who's from nobodies -- my Michigan-dwelling parents are the only two employees of a small business my father started -- can accomplish a whole lot in America if they just focus on how much they want to do instead of on how much has been done to them.
If You Publish Humor, It's Best That It's Actually Funny
It's billed as "An irreverent guide to international travel behavior." Here's an excerpt from the LA Times piece by Thomas Swick, who's actually the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Columnist:
In Europe, don't eat with one hand under the table.In Muslim countries, don't express admiration for Danish cartoonists.
In the South Pacific, don't tell people they live in paradise.
In Cuba, don't say you hope things never change.
In Australia, don't go into a restroom marked "Sheilas" (if you're a man) or into one marked "Blokes" (if you're a woman).
In Canada, don't pretend to be Canadian.
In Germany, don't accept a beer without a head.
In Paraguay, don't say your least favorite musical instrument is the harp.
...In Scotland, don't call the people English.
In Myanmar, don't call the country Burma.
In Kazakhstan, don't mention Borat.
In Finland, don't forget to mention Conan.
In Egypt, don't walk like an Egyptian.
In Hungary, don't splash in the baths.
Yes, the LA Times actually had to "order in" to get a piece this obtuse, uninteresting, and/or obvious, and decidedly unfunny (when there are plenty of obtuse, uninteresting, obvious, and decidedly unfunny writers right on staff)...while they let actually talented J.R. Moehringer take the buyout. Bright.
P.S. Walk Like An Egyption was a hit 21 years ago. If you're that hard up for material, just know you're not a humor writer and let that be that.
Truth Speech Isn't Hate Speech
Somebody on Consumerist with the name SETH_WENT_TO_THE_BANK posted a comment about somebody else's comment:
Nachas, I was going to reply until I read your bon mott "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."Even Dubya, as dense as he is, would call you an idiot.
ACAMBRAS wrote:
Not all muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are muslims.Uh... Timothy McVeigh? The Unabomber? Eric Rudolph?
My reply to that comment:
Most terrorists are Muslim. A handful are not.
Bruce Thornton shows how terrorism springs straight from Islam -- contrary to the squeals of those who keep proclaiming it "The Religion Of Peace" (as if calling Charles Manson by the name Mahatma Gandhi will bring back Sharon Tate):
Common sense tells us that Khomeini and the other modern jihadists know their own faith and its doctrines, and are speaking squarely in that tradition, as can be documented from the Koran, Hadiths, and subsequent Muslim theologians, jurists, and other commentators (see Andrew Bostom’s invaluable anthology, The Legacy of Jihad). All these sources tell us that jihad indeed is the imperative to follow the example of the prophet Mohammed, who said in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”Modern jihadists, then, aren’t “heretics” or “fanatics” who have “highjacked” the “religion of peace” in order to compensate for their neurotic “humiliation” at Muslim backwardness. Bin Laden and his lieutenant Aymin Al Zawahiri have issued many writings that define their terrorist war as a traditional jihad, backing up their argument with numerous references to Islamic theology and jurisprudence. In a few weeks The Al Qaeda Reader will be published, Library of Congress researcher Raymond Ibrahim’s translation of the most significant Al Qaeda treatises, many of which have not appeared before in English. This promises to be one of the most important books since 9/11, a critical resource for accurately understanding the motives of Al Qaeda. These writings, especially those intended for Muslims, ground the war against the West squarely in the Islamic tradition of jihad: “Zawahiri’s writings,” Ibrahim notes, “especially are grounded in Islam’s roots of jurisprudence; in fact, of the many thousands of words translated here from his three treatises, well more than half are direct quotations from the Koran, the Sunna of Muhammad, and the consensus and conclusions of the Ulema [past and present commentators and interpreters of Islamic belief and practice].”
Even the killing of women and children is argued for on the basis of that same tradition, which provides traction for rationalizations based on Islamic military weakness, sophistic definitions of “innocence,” and the oft-repeated injunction to kill all infidels. This interpretation may be erroneous, but the mere fact that it can be argued for at all, and accepted by many Muslims, is itself significant. And such an interpretation is possible because there already exists the doctrine of jihad, which glorifies and justifies violence against non-believers. This helps to answer the obvious question why other ex-colonial peoples supposedly “humiliated” by their failure to keep up with the powerful West have not resorted to terrorist violence.
...No, it is we who are the dupes of distorters, all those apologists, propagandists, and Western useful idiots who obscure the truth of Islam and its history. And they are successful: Washington Times columnist Diana West, writing on July 6 about Robert Spencer’s important web-site jihadwatch.org, reports that “very ominously, Mr. Spencer's Web site is being blocked by assorted organizations which, according to his readers, continue to provide access to assorted pro-jihad sites. Mr. Spencer reports he's ‘never received word of so many organizations banning this site all at once.’ These include the City of Chicago, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, GE IT, JPMorgan Chase, Defense Finance and Accounting Services and now, a federal employee in Dallas informs him, the federal government.” Why? “Some Internet providers deem the factually based, meticulous analysis on display at jihadwatch.org to be ‘hate speech.’”
This is the pass that we have come to: facts about the motives of an enemy sworn to our destruction are censored as “hate speech.” This betrayal of the truth demonstrates perfectly the West’s self-loathing failure of nerve that confirms the enemy’s belief in his spiritual superiority–– and his ultimate victory.
Hybrid Cars Were Actually Out There In '98
1898, that is. Detroit's had a hell of a long time to sit around not innovating.
Autoworker Sings The Praises Of Detroit-Built
I got an e-mail from a guy who works in the auto industry about my post from yesterday, "Buy American! (The Automakers Need Your Charity)," in which I open with:
I'm from Detroit, and I'd love to buy an American car -- just as soon as they start coming out with cars that top the imports.
Well, truth be told, GM did come out with a pretty groovy car that I wanted to buy -- the EV1. Note to Ted Danson, whom I used to see at Gold's Gym:
No, I never had the hots for you, just for your car. Hope this clears the staring thing up.
Unfortunately, there's no chance of buying an EV1, because GM not only stopped making them, they yanked them back from their owners and turned them into scrap -- the subject of the film, Who Killed The Electric Car?
The guy who wrote me contends that Detroit is making nifty autos. I dunno, I don't read many auto reviews, but it seems when I do, the auto reviewers aren't exactly dancing in the streets over Motor City design. Here's the guy's e-mail:
While Honda and Toyota produce excellent product lines, Ford and GM can match them them on several levels. What about the rest of the Japanese automakers? People seem to forget that the majority of them, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi etc. produce inferior vehicles to Detroit. And the Europeans? Please. They may look nice, but unless you buy a Porsche, GM and Ford are far better choices.
As someone who works in the automotive field I got a kick out of the letter from the guy from Colorado. Often when I talk to someone who states, almost proudly (oddly enough) that "I will never buy an American car again because they all suck" further questioning usually reveals that they are rarely informed. "When is the last time you owned an American car?" I'll ask. "1984 is the usual answer. Or, as in the case of our Colorado friend he will say "topped off with scuffing my shoe on the ridiculous foot operated parking brake that hasn't evolved since 1960." That's a tell. I haven't seen a car built by the Big 3 with a manual transmission that has this type of parking brake in.....ever that I can remember. And "scuffs" his shoe? Please. I'm 6'4" and I've never scuffed my shoe on my American car or my piece'ocrap BMW that I had on the parking brake. A hand-operated parking brake in an automatic vehicle is just stupid.
Detroit lost lots of customers in the 80s and they deserved it. However, today, Detroit produces many vehicles that are superior to Japanese makes but unfortunately consumers, while pointing the finger at Detroit for being behind, are actually living in the past themselves.
So...which Detroit vehicles are so much better than the imports?
Buy American! (The Automakers Need Your Charity)
I'm from Detroit, and I'd love to buy an American car -- just as soon as they start coming out with cars that top the imports. (Or even even come close.) At the moment, I drive a Honda Insight hybrid -- first introduced in 2000 -- and I don't know about you, but I spent $157 on gas...last year. And my car's look reminds me of something out of Tom Swift. As for the vehicles Detroit's producing, here's a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal that hits the nail on the head (gasket):
It's as Simple as This: Detroit Is Not Delivering the GoodsYour defense of the auto industry against raising fuel economy standards ignores the fundamental failure of automakers to respond to the already skyrocketing price of gasoline ("The Drive-a-Toyota Act," Review & Outlook, July 2). You suggest a gas tax is the only way to curb American consumption of oil. But that assumes the auto industry responds rationally to higher gas prices by producing more fuel-efficient vehicles. History proves otherwise. Over the past seven years, the price of gas has doubled, and despite promises to make more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, Detroit has continued to churn out huge SUVs, Hummers and pickups.
Ironically, you suggest it would have been irrational not to continue building these gas-guzzlers, because additional labor costs add about $1,500 per vehicle, compared with Japanese or Korean competitors, thus forcing automakers to manufacture the vehicles with larger profit margins than more-fuel-efficient cars. Okay, let's consider the $6,000 rebate offered with the Dodge Ram pickup truck, and similar high-priced rebates for other huge white elephants stranded on dealer lots. If those dollars had been invested in fuel-saving technology they wouldn't have to offer rebates that are two to three times as large as the labor cost differential. Instead, Detroit opted to virtually bribe Americans to buy vehicles that will cost them much more for fuel, and send many more dollars overseas to buy oil from nations hostile to our interests.
Finally, you admit that "technology exists to further increase fuel efficiency," but warn that to employ it would hurt the Big Three because it will make their cars more expensive, less competitive and reap smaller profit margins. Huh? This ignores the price of gas -- which you said would drive the market -- and the hue and cry of people who are shedding their gas- guzzlers in droves. Our analysis shows that with gasoline at $3 per gallon, the average consumer who takes out a five-year loan to buy a car or truck will save money because the increase in monthly loan payments is less than their savings on gasoline expenditures. Fuel economy, especially for trucks, is cash-flow positive from the first month.
Mark Cooper
Director of Research
Consumer Federation of America
Washington
And, echoing my words above, here's an excerpt from another letter from another guy who'd like to buy American:
I desperately want to back the U.S. automakers when I buy a car, but the Big Three and their labor forces need to stop whining and start delivering....At the same time, GM did not see a short-term benefit in hybrids while Toyota was looking forward 10 years (who could have imagined instability in the Middle East affecting fuel prices?) Now Detroit is struggling with SUV withdrawal and it's hurting.
...As a frequent traveler, every time I rent an American car I am reminded of why I no longer have one. My sympathy for Detroit is undermined by brittle interiors, clumsy handling, a big gas bill for a very short trip, topped off with scuffing my shoe on the ridiculous foot-operated parking brake that hasn't evolved since 1960. When I bought a one-ton truck, I gave Ford every chance to match the value of the Nissan Titan. I'm sorry to report that Ford couldn't get within $1,500 of the Titan with an F-150 with fewer features and less confidence from this consumer. I decided it wasn't my job to subsidize bad management decisions and union demands that result in workers making $27 and hour to play cards because their contracts guarantee a job when there is no work to do.
I was a happy owner of a brand new Saturn the second year it was available. I recall it was a success until the managers in Detroit tightened their grip on the start-up division and began forcing shared platform components from the other GM units. After buying Saab, the GM visionaries saw fit to outfit the Saab 9-3 with components from the Chevy Malibu. Having rented a car that "you knew America could build" but that only Avis would buy, I suddenly lost my appetite for a Saab convertible.
Steve Town
Erie, Colo.
As for what's become of Detroit in the wake of the automakers' laziness, see the photos at Lowell Boileau's site, The Fabulous Ruins Of Detroit. And here's Lowell shooting photos in Hollywood, where all the wreckage is human.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Oopsy!
The TSA -- or should we call it the TMA (Transportation Monkeys Administration)? -- lost a hard drive the other day, with THOUSANDS of employees bank and payroll data on it. 100,000, that is. Luckily, it was encrypted, right? Uh, not exactly. Uh, no. Thomas Frank writes in USA Today:
The TSA said it does not know if the external hard drive was stolen or lost inside the agency. The portable drive contains the bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, names and birth dates of people who worked at the TSA between January 2002 and August 2005, the TSA said in a statement on its website.The TSA said it learned that the hard drive was missing Thursday, and told employees in an email sent Friday at around 6:45 p.m.
Don Thomas, a TSA screener in Orlando, was enraged that he did not find out sooner. "It's totally unacceptable. Who are they to hold this information back from people?" Thomas said Friday night as he was contacting his banks to tell them to block withdrawals from his accounts. "All it takes is 30 seconds to wipe you out. They [TSA officials] don't care about their screeners."
...In August, the TSA notified 1,195 former workers that forms containing their names and Social Security numbers may have been mailed to the wrong former workers. Last May, the records of 26 million military personnel were potentially compromised when a laptop was stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee. The computer was recovered without any reported data breach.
The TSA will provide workers whose information was lost with a year of theft protection and monitoring.
Paid for by...the people whose butts they're looking up at airports, I'm sure!
If you live in California, or anywhere else where you can freeze your credit, I highly recommend it. Here's the deal:
If you live in California, you have the right to put a "security freeze" on your credit file. A security freeze means that your file cannot be shared with potential creditors. A security freeze can help prevent identity theft. Most businesses will not open credit accounts without first checking a consumer's credit history. If your credit files are frozen, even someone who has your name and Social Security number would probably not be able to get credit in your name.A security freeze is free to identity theft victims who have a police report of identity theft. If you are not an identity theft victim, it will cost you $10 to place a freeze with each credit bureau. That’s a total of $30 to freeze your files.
How do I place a security freeze?
To place a freeze, you must write to each of the three credit bureaus. You must provide identifying information. If you are an identity theft victim, provide a copy of your police report (or DMV investigative report) of identity theft. Otherwise provide payment of $10 to each of the credit bureaus.Write to the addresses below or use the same letters on the Identity Theft page of the Office of Privacy Protection Web site.
Equifax Security Freeze
P.O. Box 105788
Atlanta, GA 30348* Send by certified mail.
* Include name, current and former address, Social Security number, and date of birth.
* Pay by check, money order, or credit card (Visa, Master Card, American Express or Discover only). Give name of credit card, account number, and expiration date.Experian Security Freeze
P. O. Box 9554
Allen, TX 75013* Send by certified mail.
* Include full name, with middle initial and Jr./Sr., etc.
* Include current address and home addresses for past five years, Social Security number, birth date, and two proofs of residence (copy of driver license, utility bill, insurance statement, bank statement).
* Pay by check, money order or credit card. Give name of credit card, account number and expiration date.TransUnion Security Freeze
P. O. Box 6790
Fullerton, CA 92834-6790* Send by regular or certified mail.
* Include first name, middle initial, last name, Jr., etc.
* Current home address and addresses for past five years, Social Security number, and birth date.
* Pay by check, money order or credit card. Give name of credit card, account number and expiration date.Can I open new credit accounts if my files are frozen?
Yes. If you want to open a new credit account or get a new loan, you can lift the freeze on your credit file. You can lift it for a period of time. Or you can lift it for a specific creditor. After you send your letter asking for the freeze, each of the credit bureaus will send you a Personal Identification Number (PIN). You will also get instructions on how to lift the freeze. You can lift the freeze by phone, using your PIN. The credit bureaus must lift your freeze within three days. The fee for lifting the freeze temporarily is $10 for a date-range lift and $12 for a lift for a specific creditor.
Malice In Wonderland
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. A woman wrote me. She'd gotten angry with her fiancé, and said, “No wonder your wife divorced you and your daughter doesn’t speak to you!” And lo and behold, the guy was wise enough to dump her. She's all queasy now about being dumped (and not terribly concerned for his well-being), and wants to know, "Is a man really worth this? My reply:
There are times in a man’s life when he comes to understand what “I love you” really means; in this case, “I’d like to tear out your liver with my bare hands, cut it up into hors d’oeuvre-sized pieces, and feed it back to you on Ritz crackers.”Okay, sure, you apologized -- which is the equivalent of saying, “I mean, ‘I’d like to tear out your liver, etcetera, etcetera…Snookums.’” The guy trusted you enough to show you all the little broken pieces in him, and you rewarded him by gathering them up, wrapping them around a bat, and playing piñata with his ego. Surprise, surprise, that didn’t go over too well. And it seems the cards and flowers aren’t doing the job to clear up how you really feel. Or…maybe they actually are: “So sorry I showed you my true self. Won’t happen again!”
People who care about each other do have disagreements -- just not to the point where somebody has to come by and clean up what’s left of one or both of them with a dustpan, a damp rag, and a squeegee. When you love somebody, you don’t forget it. Even in the heat of the moment. Even when you know, down to your DNA, that you’re right and they’re wrong. That’s because love, in the words of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, is “the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” And no, the epilogue to that isn’t “except when I’m not getting my way, in which case I can revert to all the handy lessons I learned at the Joseph Stalin school of seduction.”
“Is a man really worth this?” you ask -- suddenly mindful of how inconvenient it can be when your party manners plummet like the shoulder strap of Tara Reid’s dress, and your boyfriend decides eliminating toxic anger from his life is more prudent than trying to manage it. Let’s just say your ability for self-non-examination is profound. This isn’t about him or getting him back -- although that might be a fringe benefit of exploring how feeling powerless leads to power plays, and how being too insecure to calmly assert yourself can turn you into the kind of person who eventually goes after a mosquito with a shoulder-fired missile. Try to see this as an opportunity. Cut the card and flower shower, forget trying to maintain the appearance of love, and focus on getting yourself to the place where you consistently show the real deal. At that point, getting caught up in the “heat of the moment” should have you ransacking the nightstand for a tube of Astroglide instead of running out to the garage for a 55-gallon drum of napalm.
They Don't Have Ladies' Night For The Ladies
What, you think bar owners reduce prices for chicks out of the goodness of their hearts? Over at Volokh.com, Ilya Somin discusses what he calls a "seriously misguided" attempt at a class action lawsuit by attorney Ray Hollender that contends Ladies' Night at bars is discriminatory. Somin writes:
...Many of the members of the class in question ("men charged more money or burdened by stricter time restraints than women" at the night clubs in question) actually benefit from these practices. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a key purpose of ladies nights at night clubs is to benefit (heterosexual) men. Many night clubs and bars become relatively unappealing to men because the male-female ratio is too high, reducing male patrons' chances of picking up a date. By attracting more women, ladies' nights improve the dating odds for male patrons. To be sure, there are men such as Hollender who decry ladies nights as invidious discrimination. But many of the men belonging to the class specified in Hollender's suit probably prefer a night club with ladies night that increases the percentage of female customers to a nondiscriminatory policy that results in a more unbalanced male-female ratio. Many, perhaps the vast majority, of the men in the class Hollender proposes to represent have interests diametrically opposed to the result he seeks to achieve....Hollender says that "[w]hether this case succeeds or fails, it will result in a much needed victory for men." True enough (except maybe for the "much needed" part). If he wins, men who agree with him will get a "victory," but those who benefit from ladies nights will be harmed. If he loses, the male beneficiaries of ladies nights will have reason to celebrate.
"I Did Not Vote For Him, But He's My President, And I Hope He Does A Good Job."
A quote from John Wayne about JFK.
A couple of quotes about Bush and where our country's gone from Keith Olbermann's piece:
"You ceased to be the president of the United States"..."and became the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican party.""The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of a permanent Republican majority, as if such a thing -- or a permanent Democratic majority -- is not antithetical to that upon which rests our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms."
L.A. Times Eats What The Publicists Feed Them
There was an ENORMOUS profile of the utterly uninteresting but non-sweatpants-wearing soccer wife Victoria Beckham in the LA Times' Image section this Sunday. Supposedly, according to the LAT, Mrs. Beckham's taking the town "by storm." It appears to me that the only people she's taking anywhere are the writers and editors hoodwinked by her publicity army.
The reality, in short: She's here. Nobody cares.
Why is this even significant? Well, because I think it shows the pull publicists (and lobbyists) can have on those who drink the Kool Aid and eat the free lunches.
At least Linda Stasi, at the New York Post, gets it:
The Beckhams drive to become as famous in the U.S. as they are in the U.K. is driven, of course, by Beck's signing a $250 million (yes, million) contract to play for the LA Galaxy soccer team. Good luck.Until soccer can have as many commercials as football, baseball or basketball, it will never be covered as big time on U.S. TV. And without soccer taking hold, I don't think they will ever achieve their dreamed-of status as the most famous couple in the U.S.
But over at the LAT, Booth Moore, probably the least interesting fashion writer at a major daily, drools on publicist command:
IT'S her first time going for drinks at the Chateau Marmont, but she negotiates the dark staircase up to the lobby like a pro, using the kind of sidestep one has to perfect when 4-inch Balenciaga heels are everyday footwear.
In the words of a French photographer I know: "Eef you cannot do stairs without walking like a crab, you have no beezness wearing heels."
Booth continues her multi-page dribbling:
"Beckham, is it?" the bar hostess asks in a feeble attempt at acting nonchalant.
Oh, please. The bar hostess at the Chateau Marmont is suddenly starry-eyed at the pop star wife of a soccer player? Am I wrong to not trust Booth Moore's appraisal? Well, scroll down.
It's no use. There is just no way not to notice Victoria Beckham. She's dressed in a black bandage dress by Hervé Léger, her legs tanned the color of an Hermès Birkin.
Tanned the color of an Hermès Birkin? Would that be ice blue or hot pink?
Now, perhaps she means the original Birkin, made for actress/singer/Serge Gainsbourg muse Jane Birkin. Was the original brown? Did all the LAT readers have access to Google as they read this story to search all the various colors of Jane Birkin's Birkin? (Apparently, she only ever had two, and this one seem to be the older one, and it's black. So Victoria Beckham has...jet black legs?)
Birkin, Merkin...Oh, fuck it. Let's move on.
This week, the Beckhams and their three boys move into the $22-million, 13,000-square-foot Italianate house they bought in Beverly Hills. ("I didn't want anything too big and ostentatious," she says, by all indications being serious.) But for months, every detail of their arrival has been engineered to build buzz. The Beckhams hit the Oscar party circuit in February, then announced plans for a reality show in March, which Victoria began filming in May, popping up at the Grove, the Saddle Ranch Chop House and the Pleasure Chest sex shop — always with a film crew in tow and always in a head-turning get-up.
I can't think of a less compelling woman, and frankly, while she does typically look put-together, it's the merely the look of money buying trashy, and her style is neither very creative nor very interesting.
By the way, speaking of sex shops and soccer wives, the LAT has yet to correct this July 8 story by Grahame Jones on which Mickey Kaus "fact-checked their ass":
On another occasion, while Victoria was expecting their third child, Beckham spent $1.8 million for a diamond-encrusted sex toy with matching 16-carat diamond necklace.
Here's Mickey pretending it's Luke who was sloppy:
The Strange Case of the Diamond Dildo:It's just like porn-centric lone L..A. blogger Luke Ford, writing about new arrival David Beckham, to recklessly report:
On another occasion, while Victoria was expecting their third child, Beckham spent $1.8 million for a diamond-encrusted sex toy with matching 16-carat diamond necklace. [E.A.]
Too good to check--and bloggers don't have to check, do they? It turns out Mrs. Beckham has now denied the tidbit:
"It isn't true," Victoria said, her voice calm and measured. "We do buy each other nice things," she admitted, but some things get exaggerated. "I don't have a diamond-encrusted vibrator."Indeed, a quick NEXIS search brings up a lot of stories citing a man who was selling $1.8 million diamond-encrusted vibrators speculating that Beckham was thinking about buying one. Anyone with any professional journalistic experience would view with suspicion subsequent reports that might have Beckham actually purchasing the thing.
Nancy Rommelmann Is Not Black
But, she wrote an insightful piece on moving with her husband and daughter to a black neighborhood in Portland. Beyond her thoughtfulness on the issues, what I always love about Nancy's work is how she's always so great at writing people, like Squeaky at the end (at the link). Actually, I think you can just about smell the people when you read her work. Here's an excerpt from her piece, for Willamette Week:
I knew nothing about Portland. My husband, who grew up here, said the house's location—in Boise-Eliot, an area roughly bordered by Northeast Broadway, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Skidmore Avenue and Overlook Bouvelard/Interstate Avenue—could not be beat. Also, I'd seen him scowl when we looked at properties in Laurelhurst, in Ladd's Addition. It was all too done, he said; he didn't want to move someplace where everybody had their nice little frou-frou lawn. Boise-Eliot wasn't like that; the huge and elaborate Victorian and Craftsman and Foursquare homes were as often as not in disrepair.We made an offer on the house. A few days later, while in the produce aisle of an L.A. supermarket, my husband's cell phone rang, a semi-frantic call from his aunt who lives in Beaverton. "You can't move there," she said, explaining that it was dangerous: too many gangs, too many drugs. I heard, though she did not say, too black.
We bought the three-bedroom 1905 house for $304,000 and, in the summer of 2004, moved in. I met the kids, who immediately sat on my steps and introduced themselves and their baby dollies. They played outside all day and into the night. Seeing their bikes left on the sidewalk, sometimes for days, made the street feel both old-fashioned and safe, as did my neighbors, sitting in the evenings on their porches.
Before the year was out, the college kids renting the house next door were displaced by the owner, a 50ish white guy who eventually sold to a white couple. The dilapidated Craftsman across the street was sold by a black gentleman to another white couple. Last month, the duplex that was home to three of the little girls I'd seen that first day, went on the market. In less than two years, the racial mix on my end of Cook had gone from 50/50 black/white to 70 percent white.
A few weeks ago, I asked my neighbor across the street about a hunter-green Ford Taurus parked in front of her house that hadn't moved in eight months and was now covered in moss. Catherine said it was her ex's, it wasn't running, she didn't have the key, and if I wanted it off the street, I could call the city to have it towed.
That night at about 9:30, there was a knock on my door. It was Catherine, leaning on the hiking pole she uses as a cane and wanting to know, "Why is it important to you to have that car gone?"
I told Catherine to forget it; the car didn't matter. Later, I wondered whether I was one of those a-holes who call themselves "urban pioneers" but who become self-congratulatory and smug—the sort who suggest you might, for the sake of the street, trim your lawn.
I was amazed at the slew of vitriolic comments below Nancy's piece -- accusing her of everything short of sneaking out in the wee hours to burn crosses in her neighbors' lawns. Here's the one I left in response:
Amy Alkon Jul 16th, 2007 1:08am"Squeaky is not Nancy's equal in education or achievement. A black person who is would make Nancy nervous."
Oh, please.
I know Nancy from Los Angeles and I've seen her around black people who are her "equal in education and achievement," and she treats them the way she treats everyone (at least, as far as I've experienced in the 10ish years I've known her): With respect, kindness, and warmth.
If you're lucky, you'll get to meet her some day. I'm guessing, face to face with the warmth that is Nancy, all you anonymous commenters spewing your vitriol above will melt into little puddles on the floor.
What's weird here are all the suppositions that she's arrogant, a terrible person, a bad driver, and Jewish (would that make her better or worse as an accused neighborhood ruiner?) FYI, regarding the aggressive driving accusation -- I've driven with her a number of times, and lived to tell the tale. She actually drives pretty boringly -- like a mom with a kid -- which she is.
All in all, Nancy's just a regular girl from Brooklyn, born with a plastic spoon in her mouth, who's worked hard as a writer for everything she has. She bought a beautiful old house, volunteers at the school, and has become part of the neighborhood -- just like she was in her neighborhood in Los Angeles. This is a problem for you up there in Portland...because her skin's the wrong color? If that's not racism, what would you call it?
For the record, I still live in Los Angeles, hood-adjacent, and my next-door neighbors (who are also my friends) are black. If there were some dumpy-ass vehicle growing moss on our block, they'd probably be the first to call to get it hauled off (that is, if I didn't beat them to it). Wanting to live in a nice, safe neighborhood isn't a black/white issue, it's a human issue.
More of Nancy's writing here, at her blog. And here, at the new site Hillary Johnson just built for her.
George Bush Runs Yet Another Business Into The Ground
Ours. And even Peggy Noonan has had it with him. Peggy Noonan! From her op-ed column in the WSJ:
As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president's seemingly effortless high spirits. He's in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president's since polling began. He's in a good mood. Discuss.Is it defiance? Denial? Is it that he's right and you're wrong, which is your problem? Is he faking a certain steely good cheer to show his foes from Washington to Baghdad that the American president is neither beaten nor bowed? Fair enough: Presidents can't sit around and moan. But it doesn't look like an act. People would feel better to know his lack of success sometimes gets to him. It gets to them.
...With Mr. Bush it is the people who are forced to be cool-eyed and realistic. He's the one who goes off on the toots. This is extremely irritating, and also unnatural. Actually it's weird.
...President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.
That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can't take care of -- the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part. You meet your part of the bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things -- the boy's ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can handle within your ken, and give the big things to the president.
And if he can't do it, or if he can't do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.
Americans can't fire the president right now, so they're waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.
As for those who seem to remain his supporters, do they actually support him, or is it just a way to avoid throwing support the way of the Democrats? And as for Peggy, this isn't the first time she's expressed her disillusionment with GWB...this time, though, it really seems like she's hit bottom.
Dumb California Democrats' Jobs Tax For Health Care
Instead of attracting business to California, and keeping businesses we have, why not tax all businesses -- including mine -- out of the state?
I pay my assistant as much as I can, buy her lunch when she's here, toss her bags of liquid velvet (Ristretto Roasters coffee, every few months, whenever I order some for myself), and give her nice bonuses when I do a magazine article.
Yet, here's the deal: Even though she's part-time, I could end up paying 7.5 percent of the money she makes into a new state healthcare fund. What does that mean? I couldn't give her any raises for a long time, and I probably can't give her bonuses, for one. Here's the essential paragraph from the the bill, California AB 8:
16)Effective January 1, 2009, establishes an election for employers to either: a) make health care expenditures, defined as any amount paid by an employer to or on behalf of its employees and dependents to provide health or health-related services, or to reimburse the costs of those services, for its full-time or part-time employees, or both; or, b) pay an equivalent amount to the Fund, and establishes a minimum spending requirement for employers equal to 7.5% of Social Security wages for full-time employees working 30 or more hours per week and part-time employees working less than 30 hours per week.
And, oh no!...I'm not sure if I'd also have to pay in for my bookkeeper, who, luckily, only works a few hours a month and lives in Oklahoma.
Here's more on the entire stupid health care plan.
What I don't understand is why all these idiots (and not just the current idiot Democrats in power) keep tying health care to the workplace. We don't tie, say, car insurance to the workplace, or grocery bills to the workplace. Why can't everybody do as I do, get their own health insurance and pay for it themselves? And especially as it's extremely unfair to have the single person subsidizing the worker with the family of five sucking off the workplace hog.
How To Buy An Apartment In Los Angeles
My friend Laurie Pike, L.A. Mag fashion editor, blogging at The Paris Blog, looked at the L.A. real estate prices and promptly bought an apartment thousands of miles away -- on rue Nobel in Paris' Montmartre, and then did so well on it that her accountant invested in two more with her. And now it's all in The New York Times (yet again, we Lost Angelenos have to get our local news from the east coast!) From a story by Ariane Bernard:
Buying in Los Angeles did not appeal to Ms. Pike, who says that although she finds it the easiest city to live in, she is turned off by its natural instability: “the earthquakes, the landslides, the fires.”And then there is the cost. Prices vary widely across the sprawling city. In the once-again chic area of Hollywood, apartments average $640 a square foot, not necessarily including taxes, utilities or maintenance costs, while small apartments in Paris average a bit less, and those charges are included.
Ms. Pike spent time in Paris over 20 years ago as a student at the Sorbonne. On a recent visit there she realized that mortgage rates were affordable — about 5 percent — and property values were not as costly as she had thought. Aided by the Bonapart Consulting agency, which specializes in finding homes in Paris for clients from abroad, she went on the hunt for an apartment.
The third one she saw was a studio on the Rue Nobel, a short street in Montmartre that has access to the stairs of Rue du Mont Cenis — a picturesque site for which this Parisian neighborhood on a hill is known. Ms. Pike had lived in the neighborhood when she was a student.
She bought the place in 2006 for 148,000 euros ($176,000 at the time), and spent 9,000 euros ($10,700) on renovations. The 22-square-meter, or almost 237-square-foot ground-floor studio, which has a glass chandelier, also has a small bar to separate the kitchen area from the rest of the room; the bathroom has a bathtub. To supplement a 20 percent down payment, Ms. Pike got a mortgage with a French bank that she found through a broker, France Home Finance. She generally rents out the apartment, which generates enough income to cover the mortgage, taxes and all costs associated with its upkeep.
Emboldened by the success of the operation, she partnered with her New Jersey-based accountant, a friend of 20 years, and bought two more properties: a small one-bedroom in eastern Paris, between Bastille and Nation, and a studio in the Marais, on the Rue aux Ours.
Each apartment cost about 170,000 euros, or about $230,000, and has been furnished in a low-key way. As they, too, are being rented out by short-term visitors, Ms. Pike has avoided setting out much memorabilia. She did not want the apartments to feel “too lived in” and turn off American tenants.
Much more at the link. But I prefer Laurie's moving story of her first days in Paris as an au pair:
The Centre Information et Documentation Jeunesse, on Quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower, has jobs listings posted on a wall. My first trip there was at the age of 19, shortly after I had moved to Paris from Cincinnati with $100 in my pocket. Coincidentally, the job I took was on the very same street, in a grand building overlooking the Seine. I looked after two children and stayed in a chambre de bonne on the 8th floor. The help was not to use the elevator.On my first day as an au pair, Madame set out some fresh vegetable—vegetables I had never seen before—next to a coquotte minute, and told me to make a puree for the kids. I was too scared to tell her that my cooking experience was limited to tossing fish sticks in a toaster oven. “People just eat hamburgers in America,” she told her husband at a rare dinner I was allowed to attend. “And when they meet each other, they say, ‘Hello, how much do you make?’” She turned to me. “Don’t they?”
I was unhappy in my six months with the family, but what an experience it was absorbing aristocratic French life in their vacation homes in Avignon, Cannes and Normandy. I wrote home about waxing the children’s shoes, feeding them a spoonful of honey before bed, having to “verify the laundry” by checking every button and zipper before hanging it up.
...Last year, many moons after my first visit to this fertile crescent of my French experience, I went back to the Centre. It was still there. Curious, I walked in. It was remodeled. Clean and bright, yet still intimidating in that official, bureaucratic way. I sensed an invisible wall. The efficient hum versus the palpabale desperation. This unnerving feeling brought back memories of just how lonely and sad I was as an au pair. I remembered conducting imaginary conversations with my best friend back home, speaking in a whisper in my room in Avignon. Apologizing for breaking a glass and Madame responding, “Sure you are.” Writing in my diary that the beautiful countryside would be a whole different thing if only someone could hear me say “wow” about it.
I looked around to see if there were still au pair jobs posted. Sure enough, there were—and about six young girls, of all colors, perusing them and making notes.
I burst out crying. It was like looking at myself in the past. Were they down on their luck? Were they waiting for a $20 bill from their sister in the mail, as I once did for days on end? Would any of them say yes to a salary bump, winding up like Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie?
Unable to control my tears, I looked around for the bathroom. An attendant warned me, in an icy tone, that it would cost a half Euro to use the toilet. I pulled myself together enough to channel Madame, and I attempted her screech when I said, “I can afford it!”
Here I am with Laurie at a Paris blogger party at Richard Nahem's:
And here's Susie Hollands from Bonapart Consulting, who helped Laurie buy her apartment. (Susie's great, if you're looking for a place.) We're with photographer Sue Rynski's techie husband Franck.
Kiddie Raping Costs The Church Big
The Church agreed to a $660 million settlement for all the pedophile priests they protected...in Los Angeles alone. Joe Mozingo writes for the LA Times:
In Los Angeles, some 75% of the archdiocese's 288 parishes were served at some time by a cleric accused of molesting, according to a Times study. As the scandal's details slowly emerged, it became clear that the church hierarchy knew about complaints against some priests and that at least a dozen were allowed to continue working in ministry after their conduct with children was questioned.The archdiocese has issued a stream of mea culpas, acknowledging its responsibility for shielding some of the alleged abusers. At the same time, Mahony strenuously opposed giving prosecutors and plaintiffs' attorneys confidential personnel files that would detail accusations against priests and any actions taken — or not taken — by him and others in the hierarchy.
...The archdiocese says it now takes all abuse allegations seriously, admitting that in the past a firm denial from an accused priest often used to end the matter. When complaints are made today, church officials say, they immediately notify police, pay for counseling for the victims and, if the complaint is deemed credible, remove the priest from active ministry.
Although Mahony has removed at least 17 priests from ministry over accusations of sexual abuse, his credibility has been called into question by cases like that of defrocked priest Michael Stephen Baker.
In 1986, Baker told Mahony that he had abused two or three boys several years before. Instead of calling police, Mahony sent the priest to New Mexico for treatment and over the years transferred him to nine different parishes, where he allegedly molested 23 boys and girls.
Baker faces 15 criminal charges. Mahony has acknowledged making serious errors in the case, calling it the one that troubles him the most.
The lawsuit that was to be heard Monday involved accusations against Father Clinton Hagenbach, a priest who died in 1987. He has been accused of molesting 18 boys from 1968 to 1986. The archdiocese settled one man's claim against him in 2002 for $1.5 million.
Outside the cathedral Saturday, Ferrell, a retired nurse, said she was 7 years old when Monsignor George Scott started abusing her. She said whatever money she gets from the settlement won't repay her for the hard times of her life, which included alcohol and drugs and her current bout with Parkinson's disease. But it will make her more comfortable and provide an inheritance for her three children and six grandchildren.
"This was 50 years ago," she said. "But it didn't end 50 years ago."
More Sleaze At Pandagon
Why is it that the people who scream loudest for rights for themselves are the first to thumb their nose at the rights of others? Such as copyrights.
The nutbags at Pandagon have, apparently, thieved again. I don't read their blog, but during the Edwards/Amanda Marcotte incident, I popped over to see what the deal was -- and found what I figured was a stolen B. Kliban cartoon. I posted a comment inquiring whether they had rights to it -- which those staunch freedom advocates over at Pandagon promptly erased. Later, B. Kliban's rep told me they had lifted it -- without pay. (What, workers' rights only count when the workers are little brown people?)
Yesterday, in my comments on my B. Kliban/Pandagon theft blog item, "How To Explain Theft To Socialists," Jerry posted an exchange with the extraordinarily disagreeable Amanda Marcotte, who yet again, justifies stealing. I'd say this woman has the ethics of a sand flea, but I hate to slander sand fleas. Here's the exchange:
Nina Berman took an aware winning picture of a Marine disfigured in Iraq at his wedding.http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php?pag=prt&dir=marine
Amanda decided to use it as part of a post entitled, "Blogger Fuckfest 2007: Not as fun as it sounds"
Several people took issue with her use of the photograph:
# Jay Tea Mar 1st, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Gee, I wonder if it ever occurred to the author to ask the subjects of that photo if they minded their images being used to make some sort of political point?
Nah. That would be the decent, responsible, honorable thing to do. If they don’t like it, fuck ‘em.
J.
# 12 Amanda Marcotte Mar 1st, 2007 at 8:56 pmAs yes, Jay—politics. Where we shouldn’t use curse words or get angry, because it’s not real.
Fuck you, you sleazy fucking asshole. Your belief that politics has no bearing on real life—and your willingness to cut corners and make ridiculous assertions to score cheap points like you just did(if you look at Doc’s link, you’ll see that the photographer grew close to the couple)—is why this young man nearly died. Your game took his face, his hands, and nearly took his life.
But it’s a game and we are big meanies you use curse words and make “political” points, “political” points meaning points that have to be made to stop sociopathic assholes like you who think this is a game and has no bearing on real life.
I asked Amanda if she had obtained copyright permission:
jerry Mar 1st, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I don’t see that Jay Tea said anything particularly conservative or liberal in nature.
I am not certain under what conditions they released that photo, or if have permission of the copyright holder to use it, but I think that before someone makes a political point with another person’s photograph, common decency would be to ask permission to do so.
Assuming you don’t have their permission, I find your desire to use it here understandable, but exploitive.
You really don’t know the context of the photograph. You don’t know what the woman was feeling. You feel it with your projections, but it could have just been one bad camera moment out of a very joyous day. Because of the doubt about the context, I think it is exploitive to use that photograph without getting further information and permission from the couple.
and followed that with:
jerry Mar 1st, 2007 at 10:12 pmAh! Following Lindsay’s link, I do find the photo at reduxpictures. Their copyright says:
Please note: all images are subject to copyright laws and may not be sold, distributed or otherwise displayed without the explicit permission of the copyright owner. By making this feed available, the owner has agreed to allow you to display the images as part of a feed in the context of an RSS reader, website or blog. That permission can be withdrawn at any time by the owner, and the owner reserves all rights regarding the display, distribution and sale of the images. Feeds are restricted to personal, non-commercial use only.
So you do have conditional permission to use them as part of a blog, but no other permission, and the owner can withdraw that at any time.
At BAG News, they reiterate that the images are for commercial sale.
Ah! Nina Berman says at her website: All photographs contained in this web site are © Nina Berman, all rights reserved. They may not be copied or reproduced without written pemission.
But the one thing I haven’t found anywhere is any text describing the picture. So I just happen to think that since it is a photograph and not a painting, it is presumption on our part to place the photograph in the context that Amanda is.
I suspect she’s right, but it could just be pre-wedding jitters, and not a contemplation of a marriage to someone so harmed by the war.
Ms. Berman’s contact information is here:
http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php?pag=con
It should be pretty easy for you to speak with her and obtain permission.
I emailed Ms. Berman, cc'd to Amanda, and had a response within an hour or so in which Ms. Berman thanked me, agreed with me, and asked Amanda to remove the photo from her post.
Amanda did so, without explaining to anyone why, so hours later (to give her some time) I added the following:
jerry Mar 2nd, 2007 at 12:34 am
Amanda,
Do you think you owe your readers an explanation?
Here was her response the next morning:
Amanda Marcotte Mar 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 am
Interestingly, the copyright troll emailed the photographer and openly lied to her about his intentions and misrepresented himself as sympathetic, when of course he’s all about maximizing the amount of soliders who hav to suffer like this.
Right wingers are interesting people. Their willingness to lie, cheat, steal and kill (so long as it’s done by others and out of sight) seems not to prickle the conscience like pretty much ever. I’m really beginning to see how the Good German mentality formed. Hell, you see tons of bloodthirsty Good Germans on this thread.
I am about as left as they come, and am proud to have lived in the two People's Republics. The PR of Santa Monica as well as the PR of Berkeley. And I have my own issues with copyright, mainly the way that Disney and others have turned it from a temporary and reasonable monopoly into a permanent monopoly.
And I have been against this war since before it started and I have the emails to prove that.
I think that not understanding theft is one of the least of Amanda's problems.
Jerry posted one last thing:
I forgot to add the obvious. After the last post, she banned me of course.
The photo, it seems, has since been removed from the post (I'm guessing, at the behest of the copyright owner). But there are still comments up about it, like the very first one on the entry, from Nothip:
While your point is well taken, (FUCK!) I’m not sure this photo should be the icon of suffering. It is a wedding photo, after all, and the couple was surely joyous about the occasion, even if we are put off by some of the details of their joy (or the suffering within the joy). Are there other pictures that do not needlessly spotlight people getting on with their lives available to make the same point?
And the second one, from chuck:
dear lord that picture is brutal, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it, but it still hits hard, had to scroll past it before I started crying like I did the last time I saw it.
Last time, when somebody paid for the rights to the photographer's labor?
Our God Is The Cool God, And Yours Sucks!
How do all these people who believe, without evidence, in god, know that their particular brand of evidence-free belief is the right one? From IBN Live, Christian irrationalists rudely interrupted the prayers of Hindu irrationalists on the Senate floor:
For the first time, a Hindu clergyman led the US Senate in a Hindu prayer at the start of a session on Thursday. However, three people were arrested for shouting protests against the prayer ceremony in the visitors' gallery before the prayer began.The shouting was audible on the tape around 0930 hrs local time as Director of Interfaith Relations at a Hindu temple, Rajan Zed, delivered the short opening prayer.
Capitol Police Sgt Kimberly Schneider stated that two women and one man were arrested in the Senate visitors’ gallery for disruption of Congress, a misdemeanor. The three were shouting slogans such as ''This is an abomination''.
"At this time, we don’t know their religion," Schneider was quoted as saying by agencies.
Afterward, the Christian fundanutters proudly claimed responsibility:
Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers."Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them." Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue
I'm not as clued in on the teachings of Jesus as Flippy the Pinhead here, but I seem to remember stuff about healing the sick, clothing the naked, and such...not shouting down people who don't share your primitive beliefs in the U.S. Senate.
And as for which unproven belief in god wins you entrance to the right big door in the sky: If you grow up the rationality-challenged child of Christian parents you'll believe in the Christian god. If you grow up the rationality-challenged Jewish parents...well, you get the drill.
And, FYI, the founding fathers weren't such big fans of god.
Too Bad About That Penis You Have
It's staffing season for TV writers, and a friend of mine was up for a job on what promises to be one of the best comedies on television. The hiring was down to him and one other guy, and then his agent called him and said they'd picked him. All they had to do was wait for clearance on hiring him from the network. He wasn't worried, though, since the network had to "clear" him as hireable so the showrunner could even consider him.
Well, surprise, surprise, the network said they had to hire a woman. They gave the producers two women to choose from -- neither of which, the producers told my friend, were anywhere near as good as the two guys they'd initially narrowed down their selection to.
Amazing, huh? If a network said that to a woman, "Sorry, but we have to hire a man," she would have been in court 20 minutes ago. My friend won't take that option -- "If I do that, I'll never work in this town again."
I consoled him, "If you're good enough to get almost hired by this show -- but for reverse discrimination -- you're going to do okay." Unfortunately, knowing you were the best one for he job is no way to pay the rent.
Women won't have "equality" until the solution to past discrimination against women isn't current discrimination against men. Hire the best woman for the job -- even if she has big hairy balls.
Paternity Fraud Makes CNN
Now that it's not a sad secret of the many men who are screwed by this every year -- including guys who can't answer the summons because they're over in Iraq -- maybe some legislators will take steps to change the law. Here's the latest of so many stories from CNN:
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (CNN) -- Francisco Rodriguez owes more than $10,000 in back child support payments in a paternity case involving a 15-year-old girl who, according to DNA results and the girl's mother, is not his daughter. art.rodriguez.wsvn.jpgFrancisco Rodriguez is fighting for leniency in his paternity case. "It's not right. I'm not the father, " he said.
Rodriguez, who is married with two daughters and a son from his wife's previous marriage, is fighting for leniency. "It's not right. I'm not the father, " he said at a recent court hearing.
He says he knew nothing about the other girl until paperwork showed up about four years ago saying he was the father.
He now has DNA results that show the 15-year-old girl wasn't fathered by him. He even has an affidavit from the girl's mother -- a former girlfriend from 1990 -- saying he's "not the father" and asking that Rodriguez no longer be required to pay child support.
Yet the state of Florida is continuing to push him to pay $305 a month to support the girl, as well as the more than $10,000 already owed. He spent a night in jail because of his delinquent payments.
Why is he in such a bind?
He missed the deadline to legally contest paternity. That's because, he says, the paperwork didn't reach him until after the deadline had passed. Video Watch Rodriguez plead in court for a break »
"It's like you're drowning every day," says Rodriguez, a massage therapist.
Rodriguez's case highlights the legal dilemma states face over how to handle paternity cases. More than a third of children born in the United States are born to unmarried parents, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But paternity laws vary from state to state, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a nonprofit organization that works to improve the lives of low-income families.
Some states have detailed laws to challenge paternity within deadlines, while others offer little guidance. In most cases, men have 60 days to challenge paternity, according to CLASP.
After that, it can be "challenged only on the basis of fraud, duress or material mistake of fact," CLASP said last year in an update to a report on paternity law.
"There are no perfect answers," says Susan Paikin of the Center for Support of Families in Delaware. "Deadlines are imposed so that when families are broken -- the legal process is handled quickly."
Here, Susan, let me help you with the perfect answer: Don't make men pay for kids who aren't theirs.
To Catch A Thief
Geeks One, Thieves Zero. Well, this time around:
Our tale actually begins several weeks ago when James was robbed. Not much you can do about it in Los Angeles. Your options are limited. You could upgrade security (pricey), sit around all day with a gun (boring), or buy a dog (shitty), but James did what every good tech wizard would do - he installed a webcam.Most detective work is really boring. Not that I would know. Magnum PI used to say that every time he was on a stakeout, trying to blend in from behind the wheel of his Ferrari. Usually right before getting shot at. Real life stake-outs must suck. James left the magic window on his laptop open waiting for something to happen. Weeks of nothing, did in fact happen.
Today, something happened. James was shocked to find this man stalking around his house, opening drawers and using James' own duffle bag to loot his home.
...While James dialed 911 to report the 459 in progress at his residence, the fella scoped-out the stealables.
And then raided the refrigerator on camera...his undoing. Pix at the link.
Orson Welles, Fermented In The Bottle
Hilarious outtakes of Welles, drunk out of his skull, in the filming of Paul Masson commercials.
War For Their Money
Cui Bono? Who benefits -- from the war in Iraq? Well, the real surge is in the bottom lines of the U.S.-paid private contractors over there. T. Christian Miller writes for the LA Times that private contractors in Iraq now outnumber American troops:
More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.
The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.
"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."
An Iraq war widow writes to Camille Paglia on Salon, who mentions Miller's book, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq, in her reply. Here's the letter:
My husband, Donald Neil, was killed on March 8 at an ammunition supply point outside Najaf. He was a private contractor who was over there destroying the tons of ammunition that Saddam bought with his oil revenues. This, apparently, was how Saddam bought respect in the outside world. My husband was one of the contractors being paid absurd amounts of money from the government treasury under the aegis of Halliburton.My first comment on your column was simply, "How could any of these politicians have learned anything from the consequences of the Vietnam War?" Most every one of these political hacks was dodging the draft legally in order to (as it was so delicately phrased) "preserve their political viability."
This was not colossal ineptitude but a deliberate, calculated move to enrich cronies. I don't believe that it was Mr. Bush's intent. I think he believed all that high-minded crap. It is pretty clear that thinking in tonalities and grappling with complex concepts is not one of Bush's strong suits. The only one who was inept in this was the president.
Did you know that there are over 100,000 contractors in Iraq? While my husband was doing something that I honestly believe was good for world security, most of the contractors over there are either truck drivers or security personnel. Some of the truckers have started talking about how they were ordered to drive empty trucks across the desert in dangerous areas so that Halliburton could bill by the trip.
Blackwater Security (an octopus firm with deep roots in Republican Washington, which pretty much fields Bush's mercenary army) is suing the survivors of the four contractors slaughtered and then dragged through the streets, to try to keep them from accessing the real story about what happened to their loved ones. I have not been told what really happened to my husband (we have two children).
But the fact is this was ALL about enriching the war profiteers, and I am sure (as it sounds like you are) that it was Dick Cheney who came up with the plan. And sold it to our dimwitted commander in chief as a holy crusade.
And the REAL reason that we cannot bring the troops home? Because they are the cheap labor protecting Halliburton's gravy train. Think about it, and check Halliburton's profits for the last five years. And the unholy grotesque disgrace in all of this? The fact that Halliburton has now moved its corporate headquarters offshore to avoid paying taxes on its obscene profits -- a fair percentage of which will probably end up in Cheney's blind trust. My question: Where is the "liberal media," which ought to be all over this story? They could bring the troops home, win a Pulitzer Prize, and bring down the administration if someone would just put the pieces together like I have. This isn't rocket science -- it's corruption so "in your face" it is sickening. Where is Woodward? Where is anybody?
Cynthia Neil
More about Blackwater's lawsuit from the lawyers for the families of the men who died, here on Alternet:
Raleigh, NC -- The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men's estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.
Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.
After filing its suit against the dead men's estates, Blackwater demanded that its claim and the families' existing lawsuit be handled in a private arbitration. By suing the families in arbitration, Blackwater has attempted to move the examination of their wrongful conduct outside of the eye of the public and away from a jury. This comes at the same time when Congress is investigating Blackwater.
...In addition to assembling its litigation troops, Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed. Over the past two and a half years, Blackwater has not responded to a single question or produced a single document. When the families' attorneys, Callahan & Blaine, obtained a Court Order to take the deposition of a former Blackwater employee with critical information about the incident, Blackwater quickly re-hired him and sent him out of the country. When the witness returned to the United States more than a year later, the families obtained another Court Order for his deposition. Blackwater again prevented them from taking his deposition by seeking the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office to block the deposition under the guise that he possibly possessed national secrets. Following an investigation, the U.S. Army reported that the witness had no secret information and that it had no objection to the deposition.
...The families are simply without the financial wherewithal to defend against Blackwater. By filing suit, Blackwater is trying to wipe out the families' ability to discover the truth about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths of these four Americans and to silence them from any public comment. In February, the families testified before Congress.
However, Blackwater's lawsuit now seeks to gag the family members from even speaking about the incident or about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths. This is a direct attack to their free speech rights under the First Amendment.
For Vitter Or For Worse
You gotta love the flexibility of the social conservatives. When journalists start poking into their sex lives, "It's a personal issue" (Giuliani's words about Christian far right senator David Vitter's hooker visits). When they're poking into the sex lives of the rest of us, it's "family values."
Vitter, who compared gay marriage to Hurricane Rita plus Katrina, follows a long line of holier-than-thou Republicans (like New Gingrich, who was after Bill Clinton for his marital infractions while busy, busy, busy with marital infractions of his own). Adam Nossiter writes for The New York Times:
From the beginning of his political career 16 years ago, Senator David Vitter has been known for efforts to plant himself on the moral high ground, challenging the ethics of other Louisiana politicians, decrying same-sex marriage and depicting himself as a clean-as-a-whistle champion of family values.“I’m a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history,” Mr. Vitter, a 46-year-old Republican, wrote in a letter last year to The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily.
That self-created image, a political winner here since 1991, when Mr. Vitter joined the Louisiana House, took a tumble Monday with the disclosure that his phone number was among those on a list of client numbers kept by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam, who is accused of running a prostitution ring in Washington.
Mr. Vitter admitted Monday night to a “very serious sin in my past,” and talk radio and coffee shops here buzzed all day Tuesday with the front-page news, even as the senator remained out of sight. But the fallout was far bigger than local: his admission is also a blow to the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani, for whom he is Southern campaign chairman.
Mr. Vitter, an uncompromising foe of abortion, same-sex marriage and the immigration compromise that died in the Senate in June, was supposed to be Mr. Giuliani’s ambassador to a region with large numbers of social conservatives suspicious of the candidate’s moderate views. His viability in that role is now in doubt with his acknowledgment that his number was already in the phone records of Pamela Martin & Associates before he ran for the Senate in2004.
And he gets to apologize to his wife while Palfrey gets prosecuted. Nice. I don't think prostitution should be illegal, but as long as it is, maybe there should be...let's say...equal pay for equal work?
Oh yeah...and this apparently isn't the first time Vitter Focused on something other than The Family. Glenn Greenwald writes on Salon:
So, to recap: in Louisiana, Vitter carried on a year-long affair with a prostitute in 1999. Then he ran for the House as a hard-core social conservative family values candidate, parading around his wife and kids as props and leading the public crusade in defense of traditional marriage....As always, it is so striking how many Defenders of Traditional Marriage have a record in their own broken lives of shattered marriages, multiple wives and serial adultery. And they never seek to protect the Sacred Institution of Traditional Marriage by banning the un-Christian and untraditional divorces they want for themselves when they are done with their wives and are ready to move on to the next, newer model. Instead, they only defend these Very Sacred Values by banning the same-sex marriages that they don't want for themselves.
Nutbags From The Mailbag
The Screw-Loose Club just bought a book of stamps:
I guess he missed this one. And this one. And a few others. On the bright side, he isn't an animal rights activist. The bunny huggers are a bit tweaked with me this week for mentioning in my column that I think it's okay to eat meat.
Dr. Mouthpiece
In today's least shocking news, it comes out that the Bush Administration repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress public health reports for political reasons. Gardiner Harris writes for The New York Times:
The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.
“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.
The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.
When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”
In response to lawmakers’ questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.
...His testimony comes two days before the Senate confirmation hearings of his designated successor, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr. Two members of the Senate health committee have already declared their opposition to Dr. Holsinger’s nomination because of a 1991 report he wrote that concluded that homosexual sex was unnatural and unhealthy. Dr. Carmona’s testimony may further complicate Dr. Holsinger’s nomination.
The question remains, why didn't the guy mention that he was muzzled during his tenure?...say, to somebody from Congress or The New York Times?
Regarding the idiot Holsinger, here's a quote from "The Gay Animal Kingdom," by Jonah Lehrer, on SeedMagazine.com:
Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.
As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it.
The Recall Of Thiefy Delgadillo
Let the games begin! (My preference was his resignation, but I'll take a booting of his unethical ass out of office any way I can get it.)
Hunk In The Trunk
In my most recently posted Advice Goddess column...the answer to the pressing question:
Which of the following doesn’t belong?1. I have a rare fatal form of B.O.
2. I’m in the middle of a bear breeding ground wearing a necklace of beef jerky.
3. My boyfriend is tall, buff, and incredibly hot.
And You're Ugly, Too
Nicole Winfield writes for the AP that The Pope just came out with a statement about non-Catholic denominations of Christianity; essentially, "My Imaginary Friend's better than your Imaginary Friend, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!"
Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.Benedict approved a document from his old offices at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that restates church teaching on relations with other Christians. It was the second time in a week the pope has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that modernized the church.
On Saturday, Benedict revisited another key aspect of Vatican II by reviving the old Latin Mass. Traditional Catholics cheered the move, but more liberal ones called it a step back from Vatican II.
Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.
In the latest document — formulated as five questions and answers — the Vatican seeks to set the record straight on Vatican II's ecumenical intent, saying some contemporary theological interpretation had been "erroneous or ambiguous" and had prompted confusion and doubt.
It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."
The guy's just a walking ad for ecumenicism, isn't he?
So, He Beats His Wife A Little When He's Drunk
The quote:
"I’ll beat up Betty when I’m drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever bruised her, but I do have my way. If she says one thing I don’t like then I’ll chin her."
Are you outraged?
Of course you are.
Are you still outraged when you learn it's really rocker Amy Winehouse talking about getting drunk and socking her husband one? The quote from the U.K. Sun:
“I’ll beat up Blake when I’m drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever bruised him, but I do have my way. If he says one thing I don’t like then I’ll chin him."
The "Forgotten" Refugees Of The Middle East
No, not the Palestinians, but the Jews who were run out of Arab lands. A woman named Giulietta Boukhobza writes a letter to the editor to The Wall Street Journal inspired by WSJ reporter Lucette Lagnado's piece ($) on how Lagnado and her family were forced out of Egypt. Boukhobza writes of her own experience:
I could recount a remarkably similar story about Libya, my native country. It was exactly 40 years ago this month that more than 2,000 years of the Jewish presence on what is today Libyan soil came to an end. That presence, incidentally, predated by centuries the Arab conquest and occupation. At its peak, the Jewish community numbered 40,000 and was particularly active in the country's thriving commercial life. Most left after deadly attacks against Jews in 1945 and 1948, but several thousand remained, including my family, hoping against hope that the 1951 constitution, which formally protected the minority rights of Jews, Italians, Maltese and Greeks, would ensure our well being. But we were wrong. Jews could not vote, hold public office, obtain Libyan passports, acquire majority ownership in any new business or even supervise their own communal affairs.In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, when Jews once again became targets of locally inspired violence, we were compelled to leave, never to return. We, and hundreds of thousands like us in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, became the "forgotten" refugees of the Middle East. Unlike generations of Palestinians who have languished in camps that are incubators of hatred and violence, we moved on and established new lives in Israel, Europe and North America. But the scars have not healed. How could they? Our properties were seized. But more importantly, our presence was extinguished. There is no trace today of the rich legacy of Jewish life in Libya. Cemeteries have been destroyed, synagogues converted to other purposes. It is as if we never existed in a country that we called home for two millennia.
To understand the current deficits of political, economic and cultural dynamism in much of the Arab world, it is critically important to grasp the patterns of discrimination and exclusion against non-Arab, non-Muslim minorities and the outflow of these groups to this very day. But alas, apart from Ms. Lagnado's superb article, far too little attention has been paid to this critically important dimension of the region.
Here's an excerpt from Lagnado's piece:
In January 1952, in what became known as "Black Saturday," angry crowds rushed through the streets of fashionable downtown Cairo torching all the symbols of luxury and foreign excess: department stores, cinemas, airline offices, banks, restaurants, private clubs and hotels. Among the victims: Shepheard's, Groppi's and Cinema Metro. They had made the average Cairene feel like stranger in his own land, because for those who were neither foreign nor rich nor Jewish much of the city -- even a patisserie like Groppi's -- was off limits. The vast majority of Egyptians never felt welcome and most couldn't afford it.The anger against British dominance and government corruption culminated with the overthrow of King Farouk in July, 1952 by a group of military officers. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, a leader of the coup, took over in 1954 and set out to remake Egypt. Neither foreigners nor Jews were welcome -- even those who were born there or had lived there for decades. They were forced out as Nasser nationalized industries, sequestered businesses and put military people in charge. Driven in part by idealism, he instituted land reforms that took land away from the rich and imposed rent control laws to protect the poor. Positioning himself as leader of the Arab world, he allied himself with the Soviets, socialized Egypt's economy and waged several wars against Israel.
Within a space of 19 years, nearly all of Egypt's 80,000 Jews left. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans also fled -- British and French who were ordered out, as well as others who held foreign passports and had no choice but to leave because they had been stripped of their businesses and livelihood.
Here are a few more words on Jewish uprooting in the Middle East, by professor Ada Aharoni, from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology:
The various efforts for peace between Israelis and Palestinians have overlooked an important factor concerning the Arab - Israeli Conflict. The displacement of 850.000 Jews from Arab countries, the loss of all their assets and property, and the hardships accompanying their migration and emigration to Israel, constitute an aspect of the Middle East refugee problem which has been neglected. As almost half of the Jewish citizens of Israel, together with their descendants, are from Arab countries, peace research and future peace efforts should take this important part of the history of the conflict into account, and to address it, in all its complex aspects.To be able to reach a peaceful solution to the Conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, this neglected part of history should be amply researched and duly addressed. The uprooted Jews from Arab countries in Israel feel that although the displacement of Palestinians is well documented and relatively well known, their own forced migration from Arab countries has been overlooked and this fact makes them rather intransigent toward a possible solution of the conflict that does not include their own heritage and history. Taking into account the forced migration of the Jews from the Arab countries as part of the tragedies incurred during this long and painful conflict, would give a better chance to peace.
Starting in 1948, 856.000 Jewish refugees were uprooted in their hundreds of thousands from the lands of their birth in which they had dwelled for centuries prior to the Muslim conquest, that is, before the Arabs came from the Arabian desert to these regions in the 7th century A.D. Until the 10th century A.D., 90 percent of world Jewry lived in regions now known as the Arab countries.
Hey, where are the Jewish suicide bombers? Those cells of angry Jewish orthodontists throwing firebombs into Arab embassies? And where are the Jewish children being taught that Arabs are apes and pigs who should be killed?
In the words of Golda Meir about the Arab/Israeli conflict, "Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us."
Sneaky Verizon Cuts Your Copper Wires
You might think you're just "trying" Verson's new fiber-optic service, but the truth is, there's probably no turning back. When Verizon installs this service they're routinely disconnecting and even removing the copper wires that carry the phone signal on the traditional phone system. And they did it to Henry Powderly without warning, he says. From an AP story in the IHT:
Verizon's new high-bandwidth fiber lines are fully capable of carrying not only calls but also Internet data and television with room to grow. But once the copper is pulled, it's difficult to switch back to the traditional phone system or less expensive Digital Subscriber Line service. And Verizon is not required, in most instances, to lease fiber to rival phone companies, as it is with the copper infrastructure.What's more, anyone who owns Powderly's house in the future will face higher bills with FiOS than another home with copper. Right now, for instance, Verizon's DSL plans cost as little as $15 (€11) a month. FiOS Internet starts at $30 (€22) a month.
"I was not given an option," said Powderly, a 30-year-old resident Long Island, just east of New York City.
Besides limiting options down the road, the switch to FiOS can have other implications. Unlike copper-connected phone service, FiOS does not work during power outages once a backup battery goes out — not even for emergency calls. Home-alarms and certain other devices work best with copper.
As it hooks up homes and businesses to its fiber network, Verizon has been routinely disconnecting the copper and, many subscribers say, not telling them upfront or giving them a choice. More than 1 million customers have signed up for a FiOS service, which is offered mainly in the suburban areas of 16 states.
Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said customers should have been notified at least three times — once by the sales representative when FiOS is ordered, by the technician before copper is cut and through paperwork given to the customer. Some customers say that has not happened.
Here's a question for you: Would you pay more to do business with a company that shows itself to be ethical in its dealings with customers? That makes a pledge to be fair and ethical, and actually follows through?
It seems to me that this could be good old capitalistic good business. A "unique selling benefit," sad to say. Or do you think people will just continue to complain but stick with whatever company is cheapest? What's ethical business worth to you?
Primitive Understanding Of Biology Leads To Primitive Behavior
Time and time again I see that spreading science and reason is the best way to bring the primitive religious fanatics into the future (sorry, I mean, up to the present). Globalization is probably the only way to sneak science and reason into Muslim cultures.
At the moment, though, in Iraq, because of a lack of the most basic knowledge about biology (an ignorance which conveniently serves Muslim notions of women as something more like pets than people deserving rights equal to those of men), rape is sometimes literally murder. Cultural anthropologist Diane E. King writes in the IHT:
In the kind of patriliny found in Iraq, procreation is imagined via a seed and soil metaphor. During ethnographic research I have carried out since 1995, Iraqi Kurds have explained to me their understanding that, during sex, a man "plants a seed" in a woman. This seed is then nurtured in the "soil" of the womb. Only the seed is seen to contribute the essence of the child. I once heard it explained by a proponent of this cultural theory that a child who bears resemblance to his or her mother is a product of a seed that failed to fend off permeation by some of the soil during gestation. This could lead, I was told, to ridicule of the child's father for producing weak seed.Rape is always humiliating, always a violation, always awful. But under patrilineal cultures, it can also be a tool of sectarian discord and even genocide. This is the case in Iraq, where rape is frequently used as a weapon of sectarian conflict. When a Shiite militiaman rapes a Sunni woman, for example, he is seen as potentially implanting a Shiite individual into her womb. He is causing her to suffer dual humiliations: She is sexually violated, with all of the personal implications that that would carry in any culture. But the rape further serves like a Trojan Horse: Thereafter, an offspring bearing the rapist's identity may well be hidden inside her body, an enemy who will emerge in nine months.
So cross-sectarian rape as a weapon of political conflict hypothetically can force a woman to nurture her own enemy. But in actual practice, this rarely happens. Rather, the tragedy of rape is compounded when a member of that woman's group eliminates her and any enemy offspring through an "honor killing." Honor killings are usually carried out by the father or brother of the victim, although they may be committed by others from the group. Alternatively, the woman herself may commit an "honor suicide."
Honor killings have been on the rise in Iraq. The connection these killings have to a corresponding rise in rapes has not been documented, but there seems to be every reason to assume a connection.
I Like To Pay The Small Bucks, Not The Big Ones
It's on the rarest occasion that I walk into a retail store these days. If I am in one, it's probably only because there's some ginormous sale. I order everything off eBay that I can -- getting fabulous clothes for about $20, like a gorgeous vintage jacket I got recently for $19.64 (including shipping).
This Randolph Duke wrap jacket was $20.84 with shipping.
I know my sizes in certain designers' clothing, and I know my measurements, and even if I screw up in buying something, if it's $20, and I give it to a friend, that raises the prices of two subsequent successful purchases to, what, $30? Sometimes, you can't even find an ugly t-shirt for that price in a department store.
In the spirit of not paying through the nose for things, when I recently (boohoo!) was told during a $25 opthamologist visit at Kaiser that I needed glasses for distance (driving at night, for example), I went and looked at the frames at Kaiser outside his office. What?! $167 and up for ugly, unstylish frames? Nuh-huh. And then getting lenses put in...the whole thing could cost hundreds of dollars for some serious ugliness.
I went home and Googled "discount eyeglasses," and came up with eyeglassdirect.com. I found that, for $35, plus shipping (a big $5!) I could have my lense prescription filled and mailed back to me. Thrills! (For more information on them, and why you shouldn't pay big bucks for prescription eyeglasses, click on the Smart Money link on the right side of their site...it will download an article in PDF.)
I decided to buy glasses on the beach (about $10) or reading glasses in the drugstore and have them turned into prescription glasses. But, I tried on a few reading glasses at Rite-Aid, and they didn't really work, and then I came home and talked to my architect neighbors, who handed me a sale thingie for The Optical Shop of Aspen on Main Street. 60 percent off!
I trotted over, got a pair of groovy frames for $99 on sale, and sent them off to eyeglassdirect via three-day Fedex -- because I know the secret of three-day Fedex. If you sent them from an urban area like Los Angeles to an urban area like New York, they'll usually get there the next day.
So, I'd dropped them in the Fedex box at Staples on Saturday afternoon, and by Monday afternoon, I had an e-mail from eyeglassdirect telling me my glasses were done and were being shipped out to me. Woohoo! I had them by the end of the week. And they're great. Cost:
$99 glasses
$39.95 prescription filling/lens installation/shipping
$15 Fedex (okay, so impatience leads to a wee bit of extravagance)
Total cost for my glasses: $153.95
Although...had I bought beach frames instead of these more groovy ones, and sent them Fedex Ground, I could have gotten away with spending less than $60.
Oh yeah, and when Gregg's Gucci glasses that he paid over $500 for (with prescription, "at some tony-poo shop called Eye-ons" on Melrose) broke, I found the frames for $40 on eBay. So, even if you have your "eye-on" a pair of pricey glasses, there's still probably a much more reasonable alternative to retail.
And here I am in my new frames (from when I was buying them in the store).
Deliver The Catholics And Convert Them To Rationality
I guess if there were an atheist "prayer," that would be it. Hey, don't be offended, Catholics. It's no worse than what the Pope said about the Jews. Jason Burke writes in The Guardian:
Jewish leaders and community groups criticised Pope Benedict XVI strongly yesterday after the head of the Roman Catholic Church formally removed restrictions on celebrating an old form of the Latin mass which includes prayers calling for the Jews to 'be delivered from their darkness' and converted to Catholicism.In a highly controversial concession to traditionalist Catholics, Pope Benedict said that he had decided to allow parish priests to celebrate the Latin Tridentine mass if a 'stable group of faithful' request it - though he stressed that he was in no way undoing the reforms of the Sixties Second Vatican Council which allowed the mass to be said in vernacular languages for the first time.
'What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,' Benedict wrote.
However, the older rite's prayers calling on God to 'lift the veil from the eyes' of the Jews and to end 'the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ' - used just once a year during the Good Friday service - have sparked outrage.
Yesterday the Anti-Defamation League, the American-based Jewish advocacy group, called the papal decision a 'body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations'.
'We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday mass, it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted,' said Abraham Foxman, the group's national director, in Rome. 'It is the wrong decision at the wrong time. It appears the Vatican has chosen to satisfy a right-wing faction in the church that rejects change and reconciliation.'
Now, now, people. One form of backward superstitions and evidence-free belief in The Imaginary Friend is really no better than any other!
"I'm Rubber, You're Glue"
The LA Times notes that Hillary Clinton's criticism of Bush for pardoning Scooter Libby rings a wee bit hollow:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-N.Y.) denounced the administration for considering itself above the law, and said the commutation "sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice." She happens to be right. A defining feature of this administration has been its arrogant refusal to submit to the most basic public inquiry, a hubris that extends to its rejection of the rule of law.But Clinton is a particularly poor spokeswoman for that idea, as her husband displayed the same cavalier regard for equal justice under the law. With the sand running out on his administration, President Clinton hustled through pardons for 141 people and commutations for 36 more. Among those who received pardons were 27 men and women convicted of drug crimes, deserters from the military, a former member of the Clinton Cabinet who pleaded guilty to making false statements to authorities, and various perjurers and obstructionists. Clinton's half-brother walked away that day with a clean record, as did Patty Hearst and financier Marc Rich — at the time a fugitive from justice on charges of violating the embargo against trade with Iran, tax evasion and other unsavory deeds. Clinton's pardons were particularly offensive because they were issued just as his presidency ended, so there was no way for him to be held accountable for his misuse of power.
Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton, and his misdeeds are not hers. But her candidacy for president is appealing to many voters in part because she embodies the restoration of his administration, still glitteringly popular among the hard-core Democrats who will pick the next nominee. It is in that context that her remarks on the Libby case highlight the uncomfortable tension in what she offers to voters: She seeks to surround herself with her husband's legacy and yet strains to stand apart from it. Other candidates criticized Bush for the Libby commutation too, but only Clinton's comments provoked White House spokesman Tony Snow to question her "chutzpah," in light of the Clinton administration's pardon record.
Organic Food Doesn't Just Taste Better
The BBC reports that a study by Dr. Alyson Mitchell, a food chemist at the University of California, and her colleauges, found that organic tomatoes had almost double the level of flavonoids - a type of anti-oxidant:
Flavonoids have been shown to reduce high blood pressure, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke.Writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the team said nitrogen in the soil may be the key.
...New Scientist magazine reported that the different levels of flavonoids in tomatoes are probably due to the absence of fertilisers in organic farming.
Flavonoids are produced as a defence mechanism that can be triggered by nutrient deficiency, such as a lack of nitrogen in the soil.
The inorganic nitrogen in conventional fertiliser is easily available to plants and so, the researchers suggests, the lower levels of flavonoids are probably caused by over-fertilisation.
As our friend retired woodworker friend Pierre in Paris says, "Better the lettuce has a few bugs than pesticide."
Tancredo's Simple Solution To Illegal Immigration
Sometimes the simple solutions are the best. And this is one of those cases. No need for an immigration bill. No need to quibble about paying taxpayer dollars for health care for illegal immigrants, or school for their children, or for other services. Just a few simple steps, as Mark Z. Barabak writes in the LA Times about Tancredo's prescription for illegal immigration:
First, secure the borders, doing whatever it takes. Build a fence — or two or three — along the borders with Canada and Mexico. Station armed guards to block illegal entry. Then, go after businesses that hire illegal workers, hitting employers with massive fines and, if need be, criminal charges.Also, bring criminal cases — aiding and abetting — against mayors and city council members who establish "sanctuary cities" that prevent city employees from cooperating with federal immigration agents. (Yes, that would have included Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani, back when he was mayor of New York.)
Once the jobs dry up, the estimated 12 million people in the country illegally — or 20 million, by Tancredo's count — will go home. No need for the jackboot immigration raids that are conjured up by his many critics.
"Attrition through enforcement," Tancredo called it, sipping green iced tea on a shady patio before opening his campaign office in Ames, home of Iowa State University. "If people cannot get the thing for which they came — a job — they go home."
Some look at the immigration issue and see a complicated and confounding tangle of interests and emotions. Not Tancredo.
"I have a solution," he told a Friday night crowd of about 100 at the Quality Inn in downtown Des Moines. "It's a radical one. Scary. Enormously controversial." Then he paused and spaced his words for effect. "It's called: Enforce … the … law."
I'm all for it.
God Says You Can't Have Sex Before Marriage, But Anal Sex Is Okay
I found a hilarious website that finds justification for everything from backdoor fun to threesomes in the Bible. Here's why "abstinence only" means everything but the cooter for the fundies, from Sex In Christ:
“If you’re going to have anal sex, why not just have regular sex?”This is a good question: If you’re going to have sexual contact before marriage, why not just go the whole nine yards and have regular sex? There are many good reasons for having anal sex instead. The first reason is practical: having conventional vaginal intercourse can lead to unwanted pregnancies. While it’s true that the Lord bade us to “be fruitful and multiply,” (Gen 1:22) the Bible also counsels that “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (Ecl. 3:1) Pregnancy outside of wedlock can have dire and life-altering consequences for all those involved. Having anal sex allows you to greatly reduce this risk.
Second, for a young woman who has never engaged in sexual intercourse, having anal sex allows her to preserve her virginity (i.e., maintain an intact hymen) until marriage. There is no greater gift that a bride can give than to offer her pure, unsullied maidenhead to her husband on their wedding night.
Finally, anal sex allows both partners to save the most intimate and powerful sexual act, that of face-to-face vaginal intercourse, for their mates in marriage. This type of sexual relationship represents the most powerful union between a man and a woman, and so it rightfully should be reserved for one’s life partner. Fortunately, you can engage in anal sex prior to marriage and still be able to share the deeper, more meaningful act of consecrated love through vaginal intercourse with your wedded spouse.
Next issue? "Threesomes Within A Christian Marriage." And yes, good to go!...as long as it's only the wife having lesbian sex with the third person, and the husband isn't getting it on with one of those "straight" men Lena enjoys from time to time. Oh yeah, and the lesbian had better not be too butch! Here you have it, from the website:
Playing by God’s RulesIf, on the other hand, a married couple feels their relationship would benefit from them establishing a loving involvement another woman, out of respect for the couple’s marriage, and out of respect for any marital attachments of the other woman, they must abide by certain limits and conditions:
(1) To avoid the impropriety of male homosexuality, a heterosexual couple should not under any circumstances form a threesome with another man.
(2) Both women involved in the threesome must be willing to keep within traditional female roles (i.e., not taking on masculine appearance or behavior in or out of the bedroom) and recognize the male as the leader in the relationship.
(3) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is unmarried, it may be permissible for the husband to have relations with her only with his wife’s consent.
(4) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is unmarried, but the wife does not wish her to have relations with the other woman, the husband should respect this.
(5) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is married, her husband must not have objections to the relationship.
(6) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is married, the husband should refrain from having any sexual relations with her, and should make every effort to control his fantasies about her. He should concentrate his attention on his own wife.The latter case is the most difficult for the husband, since he must not only refrain from having relations with the other married woman, in order to avoid making them both adulterers, but he must also refrain from having lustful thoughts about her, because of what Matthew 5:28 tells us: “But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” In this situation it is recommended that in order to avoid temptation, both the husband and his wife’s female partner focus their attentions and affection on the wife. If the husband finds it difficult to control his thoughts and fantasies about the other woman, it may be helpful to realize the meaning of this passage, which is that if you commit an act in your thoughts, it’s the same as committing it in real life. If a man imagines having intercourse with a married woman, then indeed, he has committed adultery in his heart. Instead, we would counsel this man to imagine that same married woman having sex with his wife; by taking himself out of the picture, he renders himself blameless. When in doubt, a married man would do well to apply this same principle in any situation involving a threesome with his wife and another woman.
To summarize, we feel a Christian threesome is morally acceptable if it meets these conditions: It must be composed of one man and two women, all of whom recognize and maintain proper sex roles for men and women in and out of the bedroom. All married members of the threesome must consent to the arrangement and have consent from their spouses. And finally, the purpose of the relationship must be that it ultimately strengthens the existing bond between husband and wife and allows all three parties to share and celebrate their love of God together.
Well, if they're doing it right, I'm sure somebody will be screaming, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"
Sometimes, You Don't Even Have To Read The Letter
To know there's a problem.
Yes, this letter on this stationery is from a man, and one who's been over 12 for quite some time.
Why I Have Anthelios XL 50+ Sunblock And You Don't
The best sunscreen protection out there is offered by a chemical called Mexoryl, but while Europeans enjoyed its protection for the past decade, it wasn't allowed on the American market. Did a single European drop dead from using it? I don't believe so. No, they simply got to avoid skin cancer and the aging effects of the sun. And meanwhile, the FDA has yet to update their 30-year-old regulations for sunblock, as the science surrounding skin and cancer has expanded dramatically, writes Natasha Singer for The New York Times:
Critics have clamored for the F.D.A to update the rules, saying that the standards have not kept pace. At the same time, they complain, the agency has allowed manufacturers to make vague and improbable-sounding marketing claims, leaving consumers confused and, worse, misled about what to use and how to use it to protect themselves.The pressure on the agency has been mounting in recent weeks. Last month, reports by Consumer Reports and by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group in Washington, found that a variety of popular sunscreens lacked sufficient broad protection against the sun’s harmful rays. And in May, Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, sent a scathing petition to the F.D.A. saying that unclear sunscreen labels and inflated marketing put people at risk.
“Most sunscreens are deceptively and misleadingly labeled, most perniciously to give consumers a false sense of security,” Mr. Blumenthal said last week. “In my view, the F.D.A.’s failure to act is unconscionable and unjustifiable in any public sense.”
John Bailey, the executive vice president for science at the Cosmetics, Toiletry and Fragrance Association, an industry trade group, said that the directions on sunscreens adequately convey coverage. “These are very beneficial products which should be used to protect against the adverse effects of sunlight,” said Dr. Bailey, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Nonetheless, the F.D.A. seems poised to address the labeling issue. Although it has been planning since 1999 to confirm new rules, Rita Chappelle, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., said the agency expected to issue new sunscreen standards in the coming weeks. But until they are released, Ms. Chappelle said the agency would not answer questions about forthcoming regulations.
One fact about sunscreens is indisputable: They can impede sunburn and lower the incidence of at least one form of skin cancer in humans.
And make you look like a lot less of an old bag. A few weeks ago, I called L'Oreal/Anthelios flack Jennifer Jones, and she wouldn't tell me whether higher numbers of Anthelios than SPF15 (which is currently all you can legally buy in the States) will soon be available...but it sounded like she was hinting that there's something in the approval process.
In the meantime, you can either get Anthelios XL 50+ (pour visage -- for face) at Zitomer Pharmacy in Manhattan, or buy it in bulk in France, like I do. Of course, what I pay about $10 for in France, you'll pay $39 for at Zitomer, plus shipping. The price of buying illegal "drugs," you know? (Hey, isn't pot cheaper?)
More of my posts on Anthelios and the silly FDA here.
Yo, Senator, We're Not That Stupid
Thomas Sowell celebrates the stoppage of the immigration bill (as do I):
Among the fraudulent arguments was that illegal immigrants were taking "jobs that Americans won't do." What that really meant was that they were taking low wages that Americans wouldn't take.Another fraudulent argument was that "We can't find and deport 12 million people."
A much bigger problem than these 12 million people are the tens of millions of additional immigrants who are virtually certain to come in, legally or illegally, if amnesty is extended.
After all, there were only 3 million illegal immigrants the last time an amnesty bill was passed, back in 1986. That's how we got to 12 million.
Research at the Heritage Foundation indicates that tens of millions more people can be expected to come over the border from Mexico in the years ahead unless something is done to stop them.
These tens of millions would include not only Mexicans but also people from other countries entering the United States from Mexico because that border is so poorly guarded. Terrorists would find that very convenient.
The "comprehensive" immigration "reform" bill offered nothing that was likely to stop them.
Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III exposed how little this bill added to border security laws already on the books, in a June 7th column in the Wall Street Journal.
...There is no inadequacy in our existing laws on border security that the new bill would have remedied. But no law is adequate if it is not enforced.
Non-enforcement of existing laws by the federal government and active sabotage of these laws by state and local officials who forbid the police from reporting illegal aliens to the authorities suggest that existing laws could be effective -- if enforced.
When the new immigration bill gave the government just 24 hours to "investigate" each illegal immigrant before rubber-stamping him into legality, it is clear that there was no serious intention of investigating or enforcing the new law.
You can't get a credit card application approved in 24 hours. But Congress was prepared to fling open the borders to millions of people on the basis of 24-hour investigations.
I guess, to buy Latino votes, and those of businesses paying, or who'd like to pay, exploitative wages for labor...while letting the taxpayers pick up the cost of health care and other services for their employees.
Give The Scooter Treatment To Jailed Potheads
Just for one. In a press release I got yesterday, the Libertarian Party thinks the Bush administration should stop with those harsh sentencing guidelines they've been proposing (to prevent judges from going by anything but federal sentencing guidelines to make a sentence more lenient than those guidelines propose). Well, that is, for anyone but Scooter. Here's what the big L libertarians say:
Libertarian Party Challenges Bush to Focus on Nonviolent Offenders with Libby Commutation
The president’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence raises the question of whether the standard should be applied to all Americans sentenced for nonviolent crimes.
Washington, DC – National Libertarian Party chairman William Redpath is challenging President Bush to address the issue of prison time for nonviolent consensual crime offenders after saving Lewis “Scooter” Libby from serving 30 months in prison. “After freeing Scooter Libby because of what he calls too strong of a sentence, we challenge President Bush to do the same for same for the thousands of Americans currently in prison for other nonviolent victimless offenses,” Redpath said upon the announcement of Libby’s sentence commutation. “These Americans are forced to serve a sentence for offenses far less serious than those committed by Libby.”Bush stated too harsh of a punishment as one of the reasons he commutated Libby’s sentence.
Nonviolent offenses are generally classified as those crimes that lack the use, or attempted use, of violence. These crimes are often referred to as “victimless crimes.” The Libertarian Party believes jailing nonviolent offenders is a waste of government resources, which could be used in turn for what the party calls “real crime.”
“Currently in the United States, it is estimated that one out of 15 people will spend time in jail at some point in his life,” Redpath continued, citing findings from a US Department of Justice study. “At what point do we say enough is enough, and something needs to change?”
The average sentence for a nonviolent offender is over 50 months in prison.
According to a report released by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the American prison system held over one million nonviolent offenders by the end of 1998—the first time ever in American history. The same report found that prison costs of incarcerating the 1.2 million nonviolent offenders totaled $24 billion dollars for that year.
“If President Bush feels that Libby’s punishment is too severe for the crime, then why does our judicial system still require prison for some nonviolent crimes where no victim exists?” Redpath continued. “It is a grotesque waste of scant judicial resources.”
The platform for the Libertarian Party calls for the immediate reform of the judicial system’s mandatory sentencing policy, to both reduce a skyrocketing prison population and ensure violent offenders are not prematurely released from jail. It also calls for a repeal of statutes that “work against the protection of the rights and freedom of American citizens,” and “particularly laws which create a crime where no victim exists.”
“In the supposed ‘Land of the Free,’ we have the highest prison population in the world,” Redpath said. “The Libertarian Party believes this is a serious problem that demands serious attention.”
How To Get Me To Photograph Your Store
Just put up a sign telling me I can't.
This is the Pinkberry store on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. It's been the source of much neighborhood uproar, because Venice residents really don't want chain stores on the street I used to call "The Boulevard Of Broken Furniture" -- inspired by the prices into the thousands for sticks of furniture at the store Bountiful.
Here's what Venice Unchained sees happening to the neighborhood.
I'm a free-marketeer, so I'm for boycotting, not banning, businesses you don't want around. And for telling off people who patronize those businesses. And/or photographing them sucking down their chain store food.
Sentencing Rules Are For Other People
The Bushies come down hard on perps -- with the exception of Scooter, writes Harlan J. Protass on Slate:
...What's astonishing is that the factors Bush relied on in commuting Libby's sentence are the same ones that the administration has aggressively sought to preclude judges from considering when imposing sentences on everyone else.The specific bases Bush gave for the commutation are that the 30-month prison sentence was too harsh for Libby's crime, that he was a first-time offender who had a long history of public service, that his conviction had already damaged his career and reputation and caused his wife and young children to suffer, and that sentencing Judge Reggie Walton rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended that he consider "factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation." Defense attorneys would generally agree that these are all good reasons for reducing Libby's sentence—particularly in light of the nature of his offense. They would also agree that 30 months was too long in the first place to serve for the nonviolent crime of making false statements.
The Bush administration, however, has consistently maintained that at sentencing, judges should be precluded from thinking about precisely the sort of individual circumstances the president raised in lending a hand to Libby.
Consider the case of Victor Rita:
...Victor Rita also got "caught up in a criminal investigation and ultimately was indicted on five felony counts based on allegations that"—like Libby—"he lied while giving grand jury testimony." Rita was convicted. At sentencing, he argued that he should receive a sentence below the range in the federal guidelines because he was elderly and sick, had served for 24 years as a Marine, including tours in Vietnam and the first Gulf War, and was vulnerable to abuse in prison because he'd worked in criminal justice on behalf of the government.After receiving a within-the-guidelines sentence of 33 months, Rita appealed on the ground that the sentence was unreasonable given the nature of his offense and his personal circumstances. The Bush administration opposed Rita's appeal. The government argued that 33 months was reasonable simply because it complied with the federal guidelines. And the Supreme Court agreed, affirming Rita's sentence. Berman lists other cases in which Bush prosecutors demanded and got harsh sentences for minor crimes committed by sometimes-sympathetic defendants. The point is that this administration has steadfastly asserted its belief in uniform sentencing.
Meanwhile, on the LATimes' letters to the editor page, people who wrote in noted that even Paris Hilton served more time than Scooter Libby. As did Martha Stewart.
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
My brilliant friend Satoshi Kanazawa is the coauthor of a book by this name with Alan S. Miller. Here's Satoshi joking around at dinner at the last Human Behavior & Evolution Society at William & Mary.
His book was just excerpted in condensed form in Psychology Today, the magazine my friend, editor-in-chief Kaja Perina, has turned around into something worth reading. The piece is called "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature." A few of other the ten? "Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harrassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive." But, first, their preamble:
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.
Since I've already blogged Satoshi's paper detailing why most suicide bombers are Muslim (very worthwhile reading), here's Miller and Kanazawa's politically incorrect truth about sexual harrassment (you'll find the other nine at the Psychology Today link above):
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexistAn unfortunate consequence of the ever-growing number of women joining the labor force and working side by side with men is the increasing number of sexual harassment cases. Why must sexual harassment be a necessary consequence of the sexual integration of the workplace?
Psychologist Kingsley R. Browne identifies two types of sexual harassment cases: the quid pro quo ("You must sleep with me if you want to keep your job or be promoted") and the "hostile environment" (the workplace is deemed too sexualized for workers to feel safe and comfortable). While feminists and social scientists tend to explain sexual harassment in terms of "patriarchy" and other ideologies, Browne locates the ultimate cause of both types of sexual harassment in sex differences in mating strategies.
Studies demonstrate unequivocally that men are far more interested in short-term casual sex than women. In one now-classic study, 75 percent of undergraduate men approached by an attractive female stranger agreed to have sex with her; none of the women approached by an attractive male stranger did. Many men who would not date the stranger nonetheless agreed to have sex with her.
The quid pro quo types of harassment are manifestations of men's greater desire for short-term casual sex and their willingness to use any available means to achieve that goal. Feminists often claim that sexual harassment is "not about sex but about power;" Browne contends it is both—men using power to get sex. "To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money."
Sexual harassment cases of the hostile-environment variety result from sex differences in what men and women perceive as "overly sexual" or "hostile" behavior. Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.
Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men's repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.
The LA Times Finally Notices That Thiefy Delgadillo Is Crooked
July 3, they call for him to do "the honorable thing," and resign. Here's an excerpt from the piece on the LAT op-ed page:
Rocky Delgadillo's pattern of misconduct makes him unfit to serve as L.A.'s city attorney.CITY ATTY. Rocky Delgadillo came to office with sterling credentials and the support of some of Los Angeles' most esteemed leaders. He had a captivating personal story — Eastside kid who did well, went to Harvard, then to Columbia, then on to one of the nation's most impressive law firms and City Hall, where he worked for Mayor Richard Riordan. In short, Delgadillo had the drive, the education and the support to be one of this city's leading public officials. Instead, he has squandered those advantages on egocentrism and bad judgment, falling well short of the high standards required of an office that prosecutes others for offenses such as he has committed. He should resign.
We take no delight in this position. It is never a happy sight to watch a public leader contort in the media glare the way Delgadillo has in recent weeks. But the evidence of misconduct has mounted too steadily — and the roots of Delgadillo's troubles go back too far — to sanction his continued role in Los Angeles government.
There were warning indicators from the beginning. During his first race for elected office, Delgadillo received the support of billboard companies, which donated $424,000 worth of space to his campaign to defeat City Councilman Mike Feuer. When Delgadillo's office later negotiated agreements that allowed hundreds of illegal billboards to receive permits, critics accused Delgadillo of cutting a soft deal to benefit his benefactors. Then, when one of those companies was accused of vandalism for allegedly destroying city trees, Delgadillo's staff closed the case after a cursory investigation, refueling the suspicions of that relationship. The resulting spectacle of fines by the Ethics Commission and attacks from clean-government advocates was particularly dispiriting in that the target was the official elected to police such laws. Those concerns were amplified by reports of fudging on Delgadillo's political resume — he claimed to have gone to Harvard on a football scholarship, then revised that; he also claimed to have been an "All-American," then acknowledged that he was an honorable mention — and rapid staff churn, as capable senior officials in the office came and went with alarming speed.
Of course, June 20, the moment I saw how he'd snaked taxpayers into paying for damage by his wife to a city-owned vehicle she was not supposed to have been driving, I began pressing people to write the mayor (mayor@lacity.org -- it's not too late to do it now) to pressure him for his resignation. (Why should we have a recall? That would cost us taxpayers money.)
This guy's the city attorney -- Mr. Law & Order. If he thinks obeying the law is for other people, some other person who thinks differently should have his job.
The Seven-Year Itch Gets Shorter
Sam Roberts writes in The New York Times about a study by USC's Kelly Musick (Yay, Kelly! [Lena and I know her]), who has bad news for those on the together forever plan:
Not to disillusion the half million or so June brides and bridegrooms who were just married, but new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years.Researchers analyzed responses from two sets of married or cohabitating couples: one group was together for one to three years, the other for four to six years.
While the researchers could not pinpoint a precise turning point — the seven-year itch, as popularized in the play and film about errant husbands, was largely a theory — they found distinct differences between the groups.
“We know the earlier ones are happier,” said Prof. Kelly Musick, a University of Southern California sociologist. “The initial boost that marriage seems to provide fades over time.”
Research also showed that the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce remains a little more than seven years, which means that those couples will likely spend more than half their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake.
“Some folks start getting less happy at the wedding reception,” said Larry Bumpass, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the study with Professor Musick.
Is there a three-year itch?
“There is not necessarily anything magical about year three,” Professor Musick said. “We know that typically when marriages end in divorce, half end before seven or so years and half end after. This is the same idea.”
...The research doesn’t address whether blissful 21st-century relationships are any more or less enduring than they were in the 20th century, so it may be that happy coupledom always came with a three-year expiration date. With nonmarital childbearing more common and women more economically independent, “What’s keeping people together is their love and commitment for each other,” Professor Musick said, “and that’s fragile.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the findings have some foundation.
Bart Blasengame, a 33-year-old freelance writer from Portland, Ore., was with his former fiancée for three years. “I felt like, by year three, we were both forcing it,” he recalled.
“It’s the whole cliché of pursuit,” he said. “Your dates are planned out like some Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with unicorns and rainbows. By year two, we were cruising along, living together, relatively happy. But from a growth standpoint things had started to atrophy. We were happy, content is a better word, but there was no spark.”
But the evolving rules of marriage provide both opportunities and pitfalls, Professor Musick said. “There may be greater potential to find fulfillment in relationships,” she said, “but that possibility and the expectations that come from it may lead to greater disappointment for some” if the expectations aren’t fulfilled.
The truth is, according to Stephanie Coontz, another sociologist I know, until about 200 years ago, marriage was basically a business arrangement, not a love arrangement. Here's a column I wrote on the subject in 2005:
I’ve been in a relationship with a lovely woman for two years. Six months ago, she gave me an ultimatum. Now I have two weeks to make my decision: marry her or break it off forever. She’s crazy about me, and my family and friends adore her, and all would be ecstatic if I took the plunge. The problem is, I am just not passionate about her. A friend’s father once told me “it doesn’t matter who you marry.” I find that really sad, but if it’s true, what am I waiting for?--Down To The Wire
Romeo and Juliet were overprivileged freaks. Until 200 years ago, according to historian Stephanie Coontz, “the theme song for most weddings could have been ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’” Sure, sometimes love did follow, but for thousands of years, writes Coontz in Marriage, a History, people married for sensible reasons, like keeping peace between France and Spain. For commoners, matches were not typically made in heaven, but in three inches of manure: “My daddy’s pigs and your daddy’s cows forever!”
Back in the 1550s, when it took two to do a lot more than tango, divorce was about as common as cell phones. In those days, putting food on the table meant chasing it, killing it, skinning it, then turning it on a spit over a fire, and there was a bit more to housework than despotting the water glasses and wiping down the microwave. Since the laboring class usually married in their late 20s, according to Lawrence Stone and other historians, and “growing old together” could mean making it to 40, a marriage might have lasted 10-15 years, at best. These days, with some gerontologists predicting that living to 120 will soon be the norm, if you pledge “til death do us part” at 25, you could be promising to spend 100 years together. (You might serve a similar amount of time if you murder several of your neighbors.)
Love isn’t the answer, it’s the problem. As Coontz observes, once people started marrying for love, they started getting divorced for lack of it. Nobody wants to ask whether it makes sense to tell another person you’ll love them until you drop. Yes, it can happen. Everybody’s got a story of that one couple, still madly in love at 89, and chasing each other around the canasta table. Guess what: They lucked out. You can’t make yourself love somebody, or continue loving somebody after the love is gone; you can only make an effort to act lovingly toward them (and hope they don’t find you too patronizing). Love is a feeling. It might come, it might go, it might stick around for a lifetime. It’s possible to set the stage for it, but impossible to control -- which is why people in the market for durability should stop looking for love and start shopping for steel-belted radials.
I’ve always thought a marriage license should be like a driver’s license, renewable every five years or so. If your spouse engages in weapons-grade nagging or starts saving sex for special occasions -- like leap year -- well, at the end of the term, give them bus fare and a change of clothes, and send them on their way. But, what about the chi-l-l-ldren?! Maybe people who want them should sign up for a “delivery room to dorm room” plan, with an option to renew. It’s counterproductive to preserve some abusive or unhealthy family situation, but maybe more people would buck up and make parenting their priority if they knew they just had to get through 18 years on family track: “We’re very sorry you’re in love with your secretary, but there are children involved, so zip up your pants and take the daddy place at the dinner table.”
Some people do have to settle. They’re afraid to be alone, or they aren’t brave or creative enough to thumb their nose at convention, or it’s closing time in the egg aisle, and if it’s male and willing, they’ll take it. According to your friend’s father, “it doesn’t matter who you marry.” Maybe it didn’t matter to him because he’s one of those guys who really just wants a tidy house, regular sex, and hot meals -- and he never figured out he could come close with carryout food, topless bars, and a cleaning lady. Do you have what it takes to hold out for a woman who really lights you up? You might -- providing you don’t need another half to be whole. If you let this girl go, you may feel empty, bored, and lonely for a while -- but it beats marrying her and feeling that way for a lifetime. Maybe you can’t order up “happily ever after,” but if you try for “realistically ever after,” you might find “happily ever now.”
Why So Many Muslims Want To Convert Or Kill The Rest Of Us
Hassan Butt, a former member of radical group Al-Muhajiroun, raising funds for extremists and calling for attacks on British citizens, explains why he was wrong, why fellow Muslims must renounce terror, and, in turn, straightens out a few points about the reason many Islamists are terrorists. Butt writes in the London Observer:
...Yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.
I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN - I met him on two occasions - and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.
How did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting this (flawed) utopian goal? How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion? There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world. Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion. There is no 'rendering unto Caesar' in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same. The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world. Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
This understanding of the global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain. For decades, radicals have been exploiting these tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state for their benefit, typically by starting debate with the question: 'Are you British or Muslim?' But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Islamic institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology. They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex topic of violence within Islam and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace, focus on Islam as personal, and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory of ideas open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, every time mosque authorities banned us from their grounds, it felt like a moral and religious victory.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism. A handful of scholars from the Middle East has tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion. In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
...However, it isn't enough for Muslims to say that because they feel at home in Britain they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers. By refusing to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
Know Your Death Squad!
It turns out one of the guys suspected to be behind the Glasgow attack, and maybe the London attack, too, is a doctor. Via CNN.com:
One of the suspects, who is in critical condition at Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is a doctor at the hospital where he is being treated for severe burns, according to the woman who owns his rental house.It is believed that he shared a house on Neuk Crescent Street in the small Scottish village of Houston, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) from Glasgow's airport, with the other suspect who is in police custody.
The agency that rented the property to the two men said police called one of the agency's employees about 15 minutes before Saturday's Glasgow airport attack, asking about a mobile phone number.
Police have declined to identify any of the suspects, but British television and newspapers identified one who was arrested on the M6 motorway as Mohammed Asha.
The doctor is believed to work at the North Staffordshire Hospital, near the Midlands town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, where police searched a house on Sunday. The hospital refused comment.
Asha is a Jordanian-educated physician who moved to England with his family two years ago, according to a source in Jordan.
More here, from CBS.com:
CBS News has learned that Mohammed Asha, arrested Saturday, was born in Amman, but his family is of Palestinian origin. Police have refused to confirm the identities of any suspects in the case.Asha was arrested Saturday night along with a 27-year-old woman, believed to be his wife, as they drove on a major highway in Cheshire, in northwest England, in a joint swoop by officers from London and Birmingham.
Asha attended The Jubilee School in Amman, an elite school initially founded by Jordan's Queen Noor in 1984 for children who show great academic promise. He graduated with straight A's in 1998.
Asha graduated from Jordan University's medical program in the summer of 2004 — at the top of his class — and then moved to Birmingham with his family, where he continued his medical studies. He was most recently a resident neurosurgeon at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, in northern England.
CBS News has found a posting dated February 20, 2006 by someone using the name Mohammed Asha, of Jordanian nationality, on an Islamic Internet chat forum. Referring to a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed published by European newspapers, the post reads: "we have had to put up with you in the West for a long time. But now, after you insulted our prophet, we shall not forgive you."
Boo frigging hoo. You're going to slaughter a lot of people because somebody put out a mean cartoon of your imaginary religious figure?
See the level of what we're dealing with here?
Yo, Mr. Asha...couldn't you just blog about it? Put up a page making light of the Holocaust or something?
Oh, wait...that's been done.
Sorry...I guess the Jews forgot to be murderously insulted. Perhaps we should send them a memo?
(By the way, there's a bomb disposal vehicle on the grounds of the hospital where Asha works, and where the other suspect was taken after the attack. I heard on CNN that they just preemptively exploded a car.)
Tea And Crumpets With Osama
Now, I was against the Iraq war before I was against the Iraq war. I'm no dove, but I thought attacking Iraq because bin Laden attacked the WTC was kind of like jailing Danny DeVito because somebody robbed a bank, and somebody has to pay.
But, especially in light of what happened in Scotland yesterday, and what almost happened in England, I was incredulous about this statement on this mini-SUV, parked outside a gallery opening at the renovated Helms Bakery in Los Angeles.
I laughed to my friend, "What does this person suggest we do...stand outside the Glasgow airport, and when you see the terrorists in their flaming SUV hurtling toward you, wave your arms and say, 'PLEEEEEEEEASE! STOHHHHHP!'?"
At that moment, a woman went to get in the vehicle. Of course, she was a Topanga-looking lady, wearing a bandana kerchief-style on her head...and to clarify what Topanga-looking means, exactly...a man from Topanga Canyon had told me earlier at the opening that a number of his neighbors don't speak to him because he isn't left-wing.
I asked the woman, "Do you seriously think talking to terrorists is the answer? I repeated the crack I made to my friend.
She asked me, "Do you listen to KPFK?"
Delusional!
As a matter of fact, I do listen to (NPR station) KPFK...and Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Tom Leykis, Randy Rhodes, Adam Carolla, and Larry Elder, because I like to be informed about what everybody's saying...although I can't quite stoop to Hannity. But, I wasn’t going to tell her that. It was beside the point.
I explained, I read on this subject every day. Islamists want us dead...
"Don't use the word Islamist!"
What should I call them, terror-bunnies?
"What do you think of George Bush?" she demanded.
Immaterial! “They blew up the U.S.S. Cole on Clinton's watch! It's not about who's president. THESE PEOPLE WANT US DEAD!”
“And by the way,” I added, “I voted for that scumbag Kerry.”
I used to think of Muslims the same way I thought of astrology nuts, which is, "If you want to believe in this silly unproven shit, fine with me." Actually, truth be told, I didn't really think of Muslims at all. Or any religion very much. I just found all god belief quite silly.
And then there was 9-11. Then I started reading, and learned that a whole lot of Muslims want us dead simply because we don't share their primitive beliefs. I told her, “The incitment to kill non-Muslims is throughout the Koran, and shouted out in mosques around the world.”
She asked if I’d seen the Bible, and similar stuff in there. I pointed out the difference: Jewish orthodontists don't want to kill people who aren't Jewish orthodontists. Christians, aside from five nutbags blowing up abortion clinics, don't want the rest of us dead. The Muslims -- not all, but a great many -- want everybody who isn't Muslim converted or dead. And if you don't have your head so far up your ass that you can see the underside of your bandanna...you might come to realize that.
I didn't say that, exactly. Instead, I told her, "Talking to you is like talking to a stuffed teddy bear."
Some dude in a cowboy hat thought he'd join the discussion. Unfortunately for him, if you're going to go on at length about something inane, I'm not going to waste my short life listening to you. Unfortunately for me, my lack of interest in his argument didn't stop him from trying to make it...loudly...repeatedly: "Every person's opinion is very important to them."
Yeah? And?
That opinion's a close relative of the idiotic "Every person's opinion is worth as much as the next person's" -- which is, of course, bullshit.
If your opinion seems well-reasoned and informed by actual fact, I'll listen to you. Otherwise, shut up and let me talk. I know a thing or two about this subject, because I read volumes on it, and can support my point of view with actual information, not just talking points from The Nation (which, by the way, did a real sleaze job on LA Weekly's news editor Jill Stewart the other day...exposed by Kate Coe at FishbowlLA).
Of course, Ms. Granola-For-Brains was unpersuadable...but it was fun while it lasted, and my friend was very much entertained. My only disappointment was that the woman didn't see me get into my car, since nobody out-P.C.'s my wheels (for those who don’t know, I drive a hybrid Honda Insight). Unfortunately, I couldn't catch her eye as she was driving off to go bake vegan cookies for the terrorists, or whatever people like that do for fun on a Saturday night.