Barn This
People really do have better manners in the south. Well, most people.
I got to the Savannah airport early, and went to Nathan's for a hotdog. As I was peacefully enjoying my food, this woman, who was waiting for her hotdog in the middle of the restaurant, started heehawing into her phone. (Not surprisingly, she was wearing shower shoes.)
Sorry this isn't a shot of her yammering. I think she had to take a breath, and let the other person talk for a moment.
I shusssshed her. And shusssshed her. And finally I said something. She was either oblivious to anything but the subject of her braying, or didn't care that I might want to eat my hotdog without being forced into her loud, dull life.
She didn't stop either, when I said "Yoohooo!" and took her picture.
She didn't care that she was bothering anyone. In fact, by my being bothered...I was bothering her!
I did tell her she'd show up on advicegoddess.com. I hope she wasn't too busy braying to remember the URL.
As Cathy Seipp would have said, "Classsy!"
Why Stanton Peele's Kid Isn't A Drunk
I've posted about this before, but now Stanton Peele's on CNN, talking about his new book, Addiction Proof Your Child: A Realistic Approach to Preventing Drug, Alcohol, and Other Dependencies, about why it's wise to not ban alcohol but to introduce it in a reasonable way to your kids:
Over dinner recently, Anna Peele recalls one of the first times she drank alcohol. "I was like 14 or 15," Peele says. "I ordered a beer and they served me."She had just finished her freshman year of high school and was traveling in Greece with family friends. "We would just have wine with dinner," Peele says. "In Greece it's so not a big deal."
While that experience would cause some American parents to worry, Peele's parents weren't upset.
In fact, starting in middle school, her parents allowed her and her siblings to have an occasional sip of beer or wine. By the time she was in high school, Peele was drinking beer and wine regularly at family functions and social events. But it was always in moderation, Peele says. She says her parents' attitude toward alcohol made it seem less mysterious. "It wasn't some forbidden fruit," Peele says. "I didn't have to go out to a field with my friends and have 18 beers."
Experts say binge drinking continues to be a growing problem across the country. According to a recent report from the U.S. surgeon general, there are nearly 11 million underage drinkers in the United States. Nearly 7.2 million are considered binge drinkers, meaning they drank more than five drinks in one sitting.
In this age of "just say no," some people believe it is time for Americans to reconsider how they teach kids about alcohol. Peele's father is at the top of the list.
"We taught them to drink in a civilized fashion, like a civilized human being," says Stanton Peele, psychologist and author of "Addiction-Proof Your Child."
He says many of the programs set up to stop alcohol abuse contribute to the teen binge-drinking crisis. Any program that tells kids flatly not to drink creates temptation, he says. "Preparing your child to drink at home lessens the likelihood that they are going to binge drink," he says. "Not sharing alcohol with your child is a risk factor for binge drinking."
Peele says other cultures have figured it out. He points to Italy, Greece and Israel, where children are given small amounts of wine at religious celebrations or watered-down alcohol on special occasions.
But many other experts say the psychologist is off base. "That's ridiculous," says Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation. "By allowing teens to drink," Fay says, "you are giving permission to your children to do harmful things."
Sorry, Calvina, my experience says just the opposite. Because my dad frequently offered us "a taste" of alcohol when we were growing up, and because, being raised Jewish, there was always wine served at various holidays, drinking had no forbidden appeal for me.
I'm also the only person I know who didn't get drunk during college. I did once get drunk at a wedding with my parents. I was 15, and curious about what it felt like, and I knew I'd be safe with my dad there to drive me home. I threw up on the way, and he laughed at me, and said, "Bet you won't do that (drink to excess) again!" And I didn't.
As for those who say drinking leads to drunk driving -- perhaps if kids don't have to sneak out to drink...they won't need to be behind the wheel or in a car at all?
Rude Because You're American Or...Just Rude?
My French friend, Chantal, an editor at a big publishing house in France, who speaks perfect French, experienced this recently when making a restaurant reservation:
Last night at around 9pm I call Chez Benoît, very fancy bistrot, belonging to Ducasse (where Diana was supposed to go the day she died ) to make a reservation for the 29. No answer, only a waiting message, and the feeling that somebody was hanging up on me 3 times. Finally somebody picks up the phone and says to me "we are in the middle of service", meaning you are disturbing us, with a very nasty and uncommercial voice.So I told him I had been trying to reach them for more than 15 mn and that in the end I was not going to make a reservation after being treated like a dog. No excuse from the guy, no sorry. Incredible. i guess we will never go again too bad they have the best profiteroles au chocolat in Paris!!
Too bad
A bientôt
Chantal
To all you bigtime France detractors, the next time somebody is rude to you in the USA, ask yourself whether they're rude because you're American. Parisians can be snobby, but, frankly, they're that way toward people who aren't Parisian, not just people who aren't French. And P.S. Go to NYC, and look like two galoots from the midwest, and see if you don't get a bit of le snob treatment yourself. (Hint: It's an urban thing, not a French thing.)
Another View From My Temporary Bedroom
Savannah, Georgia. I'm here to promote my column at the conference for daily newspaper features editors from across America. I forgot my camera when we went to Washington Square, but here's another view out my hotel room window.
According to the conference program, John Berendt, who wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, singlehandedly revived the economy of Savannah with his book. Berendt spoke at the conference about southern writing and its sense of place, and about his newer book on Venice, The City of Falling Angels, which sounded pretty interesting, especially for anyone who's been there.
One of the authors Berendt quoted from was Eudora Welty. I was reminded of the photo Jill Krementz, the wife of the late Kurt Vonnegut, took of Welty. Gregg and I had lunch with Krementz and Vonnegut when we were in New York a couple of years ago, and afterward, he took a nap and she took us down the basement to her photo archives and showed us, among other things, her portrait of Welty at work. Krementz pointed out the noteworthy thing from this shot -- that a southern woman of Welty's age and upbringing awoke at 5 a.m. to write, without first making her bed.
(This photo, and other photos of writers' work environments -- including, I think, Elmore Leonard's -- are in Krementz' book showing the work environments of many famous writers, The Writer's Desk.)
A Marriage License Should Be More Like A Driver's License
I've said this for years. Here, from one of my very old old columns, Will You Bury Me?, the pretend approach:
Treat your marriage license like a driver’s license -- renewable every couple of years -- and you might be inspired to put as much effort into your marriage as you did into making the guy propose.
And from one of my slightly less old columns, Holding On For Dear Wife, the comprehensive plan:
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.”
A German politician is coming around to my way of thinking. Madeline Chambers writes for Reuters:
Bavaria's most glamorous politician -- a flame-haired motorcyclist who helped bring down state premier Edmund Stoiber -- has shocked the Catholic state in Germany by suggesting marriage should last just 7 years. Gabriele Pauli, who poses on her web site in motorcycle leathers, is standing for the leadership of Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU) -- sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) -- in a vote next week.She told reporters at the launch of her campaign manifesto on Wednesday she wanted marriage to expire after seven years and accused the CSU, which promotes traditional family values, of nurturing ideals of marriage which are wide of the mark.
"The basic approach is wrong ... many marriages last just because people believe they are safe," she told reporters. "My suggestion is that marriages expire after seven years."
After that time, couples should either agree to extend their marriage or it should be automatically dissolved, she said.
This means women would be less predisposed to take a life shortcut they often do -- being all about "Who am I with?" instead of "Who am I?", per my more recent column, Bridget Jones' Diarrhea (which some papers that use my headlines called "Quitting Old Turkey" -- my alternate title).
Of course, I'm for ending marriage privileging -- special tax breaks and allowances only for people who have longterm committed relationships the church-approved way; for removing religion from marriage (meaning anybody can get married, not anybody the church approves); and having a secondary system more like the PaCs (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) in France -- a form of civil union, but one that's a little more realistic about human nature. For starters, the bond is not assumed to be a lifetime thing. Which, I'm sure, mirrors the actual version of "'til death do us part" a lot of you (formerly) married people actually participated in.
And finally, a little story from Elmore's Christmas party. Gregg and I are very affectionate (no, we're not "doing it" in full view under the mistletoe, but people get that we're into each other). People, like a couple at the party, sometimes ask if we're newlyweds. The answer: Not newly, and not wed. When I told the couple this, they asked if we were getting married. My answer: No, we're very happy, no intention of getting married. Don't believe in marriage. The woman said: "Well, someday you'll meet the right man for you." Uh, what about "you look like newlyweds" seems like it isn't working?
Thanks, Flynne, for the link
A Son In Iraq
What we miss in the papers, in stories about the war in Iraq, are the stories beyond the stats and the politics -- stories about the soldiers who are there, and what they and their families go through. I get to read some of these stories because my column runs in the Stars and Stripes, and I get amazing letters from soldiers; some asking for advice, some just writing about their experiences or commenting on my column.
Here's a mother's perspective. Rochelle Reed, my editor at the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune wrote a moving piece about how she tries to cope with her son being in Iraq for the Karen Stabiner-edited book, The Empty Nest, about kids leaving home (some for college, some in less orthodox ways). Here's an excerpt from Rochelle's chapter:
Now Evan is serving in Iraq. I wake up early these days. I make coffee, retrieve the morning papers and then compulsively read every story about murdered soldiers, beheaded soldiers, tortured soldiers, wounded soldiers, soldiers with missing limbs and damaged brains, soldiers who have gone berserk and raped and murdered innocent civilians.I purposely teeter on the edge of fear and grief, bracing myself for whatever the future brings. I hate surprises, so I plan for worst-case scenarios. Would I be able to widen the doorways in our home if Evan comes back in a wheelchair, I wonder?
Every time I take a trip, I worry how the Army will find me to tell me that he’s dead if I’m out of town. I’ve promised Evan that if the worst actually happens, I’ll bury him in a coffin next to my parents and grandparents in rural Wyoming. But would Evan really mind if I placed his ashes in an urn so I could keep him close to me?
“Please oh please let him call me” is now my daily mantra. I breathe, I exhale. Put this in perspective, I demand of myself. Evan volunteered for the Army. He wasn’t conscripted like my father’s father in Austria. Or my mother’s father, who returned shell-shocked from the Great War after he watched his hometown buddies blown to bits. My father’s mother sent four sons to World War II; one didn’t return. A cousin died in the Battle of the Bulge. My mother’s only brother, a jovial test pilot I dimly remember, was killed at the beginning of the Korean War. How many mothers throughout history have seen their sons off to war, I ask myself? I’m merely one of millions…no, probably billions.
If only my thinking could stop here, but I must grow tough, tougher, toughest. Evan volunteered for this, I remind myself. He’s promised to defend his country at all costs. My son may hesitate before he pulls the trigger, but he’s trained to shoot to kill. He’s donned the uniform, so whatever happens —ambush, rocket fire, mortar attack, an insurgent’s sword — he must face the consequences. Now I must accept that the son I raised to be a gentle, caring soul is somewhere in the Iraq desert, a loaded M3 in his arms. At this very moment, he could be exalting with his buddies that he killed the enemy, ending the life of another mother’s son. If, God forbid, another mother’s son kills Evan, will I share the same empathy — “He was only doing his job” — that I’m willing to extend to my own flesh and blood?
Faces Of The Troops
I've sometimes asked soldiers if I could blog thoughts or experiences they e-mail me about, and most decline. This great guy, however, wrote me about something he read in my column in Stars and Stripes, and sent me pictures which he allowed me to post. Here's his e-mail, with photos in between:
Of course you can post the pictures. I'm not sure which ones I sent, so here's four with descriptions. The HELO (Helicopter) pic is of us (the 386th Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility - CASF) training to load and unload patients from helicopters. We are at an "undisclosed location" in Southwest Asia. That's what they allow me to say.
The picture of me with Gary Sinise was taken when he came to visit our facility. He does a lot for the troops. He was a great guy and his website (LtDanBand.com) keeps people informed of what they do for us.
I am MSgt (Master Sergeant) Anthony Kazlouski, the Non-commissioned Officer In Charge (NCOIC) of the 386th CASF. I'm deployed from Wright-Patterson AFB, OHIO. I'm originally from Philadelphia, PA.
The Med Group pic is of our entire medical group here in SW Asia.
The Top Three pic is of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW) Top Three group (we are the top three enlisted grades).
I can't thank you enough for the e-mails and you being interested in the pics. And a thank you for the "adorable" complement, I've been smiling all day. Like I said, I'd be glad to send more pics and fill you in on what us Air Force medical folks are doing here if you'd like. I can't wait to check out your site when I get back to the states!!!!!Kaz
"Religion As A Black Market For Irrationality"
Sam Harris, in Newsweek, lays out the gist of evidence-free living:
Reason is a compulsion, not a choice. Just as one cannot intentionally startle oneself, one cannot knowingly believe a proposition on bad evidence. If you doubt this, imagine hearing the following account of a failed New Year’s resolution:“This year, I vowed to be more rational, but by the end of January, I found that I had fallen back into my old ways, believing things for bad reasons. Currently, I believe that smoking is harmless, that my dead brother will return to life in the near future, and that I am destined to marry Angelina Jolie, just because these beliefs make me feel good and give my life meaning.”
This is not how our minds work. To believe a proposition, we must also believe that we believe it because it is true. While lapses in rationality can often be detected in retrospect, they always occur in the dark, outside of consciousness. In every present moment, a belief entails the concurrent conviction that we are not just fooling ourselves.
This constraint upon our thinking has always been a problem for religion. Being stocked stem to stern with incredible ideas, the world’s religions have had to find some way to circumvent reason, without repudiating it. The recommended maneuver is generally called “faith,” and it actually appears to work. Faith enables a person to fool himself into thinking that he is maintaining his standards of reasonableness, while forsaking them. There is a powerful incentive to not notice that one is engaged in this subterfuge, of course, because to notice it is to fail at it. As is well known, such cognitive gymnastics can be greatly facilitated by the presence of others, similarly engaged. Sometimes, it takes a village to lie to oneself.
In support of this noble enterprise, every religion has created a black market for irrationality, where people of like minds can trade transparently bad reasons in support of their religious beliefs, without the threat of criticism. You, too, can enter this economy of false knowledge and self-deception. The following method has worked for billions, and it will work for you:
How to Believe in God
Six Easy Steps1. First, you must want to believe in God.
2. Next, understand that believing in God in the absence of evidence is especially noble.
3. Then, realize that the human ability to believe in God in the absence of evidence might itself constitute evidence for the existence of God.
4. Now consider any need for further evidence (both in yourself and in others) to be a form of temptation, spiritually unhealthy, or a corruption of the intellect.
5. Refer to steps 2-4 as acts of “faith.”
6. Return to 2.As should be clear, this is a kind of perpetual motion machine of wishful thinking—and it leads, of necessity, to reduced self-awareness and diminished contact with reality. But it is reputed to have many benefits, and once you get it up and running you will be in fine company. In fact, from the looks of it, you will never be lonely again.
Enjoy!
Soupy Sales
The view from my hotel room in Savannah, Georgia, where I'm attending the conference of daily newspaper features editors from across America to promote my column.
The problem with dailies? Just as they're all mewling that their readership is dwindling, they live in terror that they might get an angry letter or two from a reader, and are in a panic to see to it that they read like the church gazette. Here's a quote from a piece by Chicago Tribune public editor Timothy McNulty explaining why they censored a comic:
I asked Geoff Brown, associate managing editor for features, when and how often he decides to pull a comic strip.Brown said he might determine that a particular comic's content is offensive once or twice a year. "Some people claim it's censorship, but I call it editing," he said. "We don't allow our own reporters to write vulgarities, double-entendres or untruths, even in jest." He thought the "nut-crunch" joke was just vulgar.
In a letter on Jim Romenesko's media news site, Gary Dretzka put this silly thinking in its place:
I applaud those family-conscious editors who re-direct family-unfriendly comic strips, political cartoons, photos and columns to their paper's family-neutral websites or sites belonging to anti-family artists, photographers and writers. I know that my kids, now grown, would never of thought of looking for offensive material on the Internet. That would mean they had learned how to type, read, spell and think for themselves, and that doesn't happen until one is old enough to vote. Or, does it?A possible solution: Newspapers should consider making their websites family friendly, and reserve the marginally questionable material for print editions, which would become family-neutral. Theoretically, then, print demographics would begin to trend younger, while traffic on Internet sites skewed older. Or ... no one will be satisfied, and the newspapers (along with their websites) would simply dry up and blow away. Unlikely, but possible.
And, memo to ombudspeople, on comics and most other issues: your paper's editors aren't intimidated by toothless opinions, and readers aren't buying such imprecise copouts as, "(The Chronicle) offer(s) several Spanish-language publications, and we have not cowered away from reporting on immigration rights and other issues important to the Latino community" or, on the perceived censoring of "Get Fuzzy," "Newspaper articles are not written in stone and neither are comic strips." No kidding.
Such inarguably classic comic strips as "Pogo" and "Li'l Abner" were far more topical and controversial in their day than anything the authors of "La Cucaracha" and "Get Fuzzy" will ever do. In the '50s and '60s, more family members read newspapers cover-to-cover than is the case today. Somehow both the republic and newspaper industry managed to survive and prosper. Amazing.
Just wondering, too: Now that we know the "open" rate for a full-page ad in the New York Times normally (operative word, normally) is $181,000, is it worth asking what the going rate for a comparable ad on the NYT website might be? And, by "comparable," are we talking about an easily ignored 2-inch banner ad across the virtual masthead or an instantly disposable and highly irritating pop-up ad that can be closed in a single keystroke? After more than a decade of on-line success, porn sites seem to have learned that pop-up clutter doesn't automatically translate into additional subscribers, and banner ads that distract from free T&A may be just as effective when placed on the scroll-down (under the fold, if you will) than above the teaser content. As has become clear, the production of teaser content is all advertisers, stockholders and publishers desire of journalists.
Will media interests accustomed to 20-percent-plus growth, year after year, be able to maintain the same ad rates in the Internet age ... when print circulation declines and Internet traffic expands? Or, will advertisers prefer to spend far less money on pop-ups and banners on niche sites, where they already know whose and how many eyes are watching what, and when they're doing it? (The precipitous decline of book-review sections has, in part, been blamed on inflexible ad rates, which don't reflect actual readership.)
Holy conundrum, Batman!
Someone once compared the Internet to a lake that's 100 miles long, 10 miles wide, but only a foot deep. For a media conglomerate to navigate such a body of water on daily basis, shore to shore, would require a craft that more resembles an airboat or motorized kayak, than a battleship. Unfortunately, such compact vehicles wouldn't have much room for passengers, crew or equipment. To compensate, publishers have already begun selling their docks, launching smaller boats and throwing crew members overboard, including those seasoned pros who know where the big fish can be found.
If the trend continues apace, someday there won't be any room for passengers, either. The trophy fish will still be lurking in the weeds, but there will be many fewer guides available to help customers find them.
Or, maybe the media conglomerates will simply dredge the lake or siphon the water into a hole in the ground with broader shores. The bass will disappear, but the battleships will have a place to drop anchor. On Wall Street, apparently, that's a fair trade.
Times When You Wouldn't Hyphenate Your Name
Very funny. I'm reminded of a street in suburban Detroit called Big Beaver.
Murder With Fries?
Amy Alkon on abortion for Pajamas Media
Is abortion murder? Is eating a cheeseburger? I approach the first question the same way I approached a question in my syndicated advice column from a meat-eating woman whose vegetarian boyfriend was becoming increasingly abusive about her choice of entree. In her words, “When we eat out, and I mention that my food smells wonderful, he launches into a tirade about how I’ve made an animal suffer a horrendous death because of my eating habits.” Mmm…genteel! (Why are the “be kind to animals” types so often such jerks to other humans?)
Personally, my preferred habitat for a cow is on a bun on my plate. That said, I buy free-range meat, and believe animals should be raised and killed humanely. I also believe animals are lesser creatures than humans, and do not deserve the same rights, as rights come with responsibilities. We don’t, for example, hold a hyena responsible for eating a gazelle -- we can’t. I apply the same thinking to the abortion issue. While a clump of cells or even a large gathering of them that resembles a baby can become a person, it isn’t a full-fledged human being deserving of rights.
It’s possible you think differently. Well, as I wrote to the carnivore with the bunny-hugger boyfriend, “Your boyfriend’s entitled to his beliefs, and you’re entitled to yours.”
Don’t bother accusing me of “moral relativism.” I’ll admit to it freely, and you should, too -- because there’s no definitive answer on whether it’s right or wrong to eat meat or on when a fertilized egg becomes a person. There’s only my opinion and your opinion, and the opinions that shaped them.
As an atheist who lives an evidence- and reason-based life, I turn to science for guidance. Michael S. Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist who served on President Bush’s Council On Bioethics, explains that a potential person is not a person. In The Ethical Brain, he gives an analogy comparing embryos created for stem cell research to a Home Depot. “You don’t walk into a Home Depot and see thirty houses. You see materials…to create a house.” Likewise, “a fertilized embryo is not a human,” and to give it such status is “patently absurd. When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not ‘30 Houses Burn Down.’ It is ‘Home Depot Burned Down.’”
What does religion say about abortion? Well, which religion? Different religions, and even different factions within religions, have different doctrines. According to Susan Weidman Schneider, author of Jewish and Female, Jews believe the fetus becomes a person when the head emerges from the womb. Additionally, Schneider notes, in Judaism, “the life of the fetus does not take precedence over the life of the woman,” which is “the opposite of the Catholic belief that the fetus is alive and must be delivered even if the mother’s life is forfeited.” So, Catholics are not really pro-life, but pro-one-life-over-another?
Reform Jews support aborting when amniocentesis is positive for the deadly genetic disease Tay Sachs. Orthodox Judaism generally prohibits it -- even though a baby will be brought into the world only to endure a few years of terrible suffering, and then death. The same goes for another inherited disorder, Gaucher disease. In an LA Times article taking a dim view of abortion, staff writer Karen Kaplan breezily deems this disease “treatable” -- which it is…for a price, with biweekly enzyme infusions that cost $100,000 to $400,000 a year.
And you wonder why your health insurance costs so much? (I'm guessing Gaucher-positive-testing parents who choose to gamble and bring kids into the world aren't all the private jet/multimillionaire set.) It’s great to have principles, but I’m reminded of a Spanish proverb the therapist Nathaniel Branden once quoted to me: “Take what you need, but pay for it.”
That’s essentially the advice I gave one of the angry sprout-munchers who wrote to chastise me for eating meat. He mentioned his wish to start some great big nature preserve for all the dinner animals out there; apparently, to have the cows roam free, frolicking in the tall grasses (do cows frolic?) until they fall over and die a natural death. What was stopping him? Money. Not surprisingly, he was willing to huff and puff in support of his beliefs, but not-so-willing to pony up cold, hard cash.
That’s the approach I suggest for the anti-abortion crowd. Don’t want women to have abortions? Pay them to have the babies. Pay for the care of the babies after they’re born -- and don’t forget the college educations. And keep funding programs to show people why your point of view is right and mine is wrong. I celebrate your right to speak your point of view. I am, however, completely opposed to your attempts to force your point of view on me. Once again, the solution here parallels the only fair resolution to the meat is/isn’t murder argument: Go ahead and have your Tofurky, but without cramming it down my throat, too.
The counterpoint, by Julia Gorin is here.
Fall Fashion With Gregg
My Detroit-ornery boyfriend sometimes attempts to meet me somewhere in shoeland -- and fails miserably. (I think I'd be scared if he didn't). Here's Tuesday's conversation:
Gregg: You know those Tommy Mongoloid shoes they wear on that show?
Amy: Tommy Mongoloids?
Gregg: You know…uh, Sex And The City
Amy: You mean Manolo Blahniks?
Gregg: Yeah, whatever.
Of course, he could probably tell you what shoes Himmler was wearing at any given moment. I told him this in the car.
Gregg: Shoes? Himmler didn't wear shoes.
Amy: He didn't wear shoes?
Gregg: He wore pumps. Red satin pumps with a big Nazi logo.
Amy: He did not!
Gregg keeps driving.
Amy: Himmler was a cross-dresser?!
Gregg: He wore boots! Himmler wore boots!
Woo's On First
Regarding "alternative" medicine (aka "woo," or as I like to call it,"quackhockey"), I'm with former New England Journal Of Medicine editor-in-chief Marcia Angell, who, with Jerome Kassirer, wrote:
It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride... There cannot be two kinds of medicine — conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work.
Homeopathy -- remedies with so little actual remedy in them they seem like a practical joke -- is one of those medicines that has not been proven to work. In fact, Quackwatch's Steven Barrett calls it "the ultimate fake":
A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth. Imagine placing a drop of red dye into such a container so that it disperses evenly. Homeopathy's "law of infinitesimals" is the equivalent of saying that any drop of water subsequently removed from that container will possess an essence of redness. Robert L. Park, Ph.D., a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.Oscillococcinum, a 200C product "for the relief of colds and flu-like symptoms," involves "dilutions" that are even more far-fetched. Its "active ingredient" is prepared by incubating small amounts of a freshly killed duck's liver and heart for 40 days. The resultant solution is then filtered, freeze-dried, rehydrated, repeatedly diluted, and impregnated into sugar granules. If a single molecule of the duck's heart or liver were to survive the dilution, its concentration would be 1 in 100200. This huge number, which has 400 zeroes, is vastly greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe (about one googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes). In its February 17, 1997, issue, U.S. News & World Report noted that only one duck per year is needed to manufacture the product, which had total sales of $20 million in 1996. The magazine dubbed that unlucky bird "the $20-million duck."
Actually, the laws of chemistry state that there is a limit to the dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro's number, corresponds to homeopathic potencies of 12C or 24X (1 part in 1024). Hahnemann himself realized that there is virtually no chance that even one molecule of original substance would remain after extreme dilutions. But he believed that the vigorous shaking or pulverizing with each step of dilution leaves behind a "spirit-like" essence—"no longer perceptible to the senses"—which cures by reviving the body's "vital force." Modern proponents assert that even when the last molecule is gone, a "memory" of the substance is retained. This notion is unsubstantiated. Moreover, if it were true, every substance encountered by a molecule of water might imprint an "essence" that could exert powerful (and unpredictable) medicinal effects when ingested by a person.
Many proponents claim that homeopathic products resemble vaccines because both provide a small stimulus that triggers an immune response. This comparison is not valid. The amounts of active ingredients in vaccines are much greater and can be measured. Moreover, immunizations produce antibodies whose concentration in the blood can be measured, but high-dilution homeopathic products produce no measurable response.
Except on the condition of your wallet. Oh, and then, the complications, suffering and death they lead to if you take them in hopes of curing a serious disease. I would never go to any doctor who believes in homeopathy -- whether or not they try to use it on me. The fact that a doctor is even the slightest bit woo-based in his or her practice should be enough to make any patient who understands evidence-based medicine run. Unfortunately, the next guy's cancer got him before his kids could advise him to put on his track shoes.
Jaclyn O'Malley writes in the Reno Gazette-Journal of serious malpractice by an "anti-aging" homeopath with a medical degree. The patient is an elderly man, but there's more tragic woo-woo malpractice at the link:
In February 2000, Horton complained to Shallenberger of rectal bleeding and abdominal pain -- symptoms of colon cancer. But the medical board complaint said Shallenberger told Horton, formerly of Carson City, that he suffered from hemorrhoids and advised him to use suppositories and take baths in witch hazel."At no time from the initial presentation of (Horton's) medical symptoms did he examine the patient, order a test or record in the medical records why those actions weren't taken," Cousineau said.
"If you ask a beginning medical school class what is at the top of your list for a 75-year-old man with rectal bleeding and abdominal pain, it's colon cancer," said Horton's daughter-in-law, Dr. Katherine Gundling, an internist who heads the allergy and immunology clinic at the University of California, San Francisco.
"You rule that out first and worry about the rest later," she said. "Shallenberger's treatment was unbelievable."
Horton had been Shallenberger's patient for more than a decade, and seven months after emergency room doctors diagnosed Horton with stage-four colon cancer and said he had six months to live, Horton, 76, returned to Shallenberger for homeopathic cancer treatments. Those treatments included injections of insulin and laetrile, which, according to the National Cancer Institute, has shown little anti-cancer effect in laboratory, animal or human studies. Horton died in October 2003.
...Although Horton's son, Robert, is a biomedical scientist in the San Francisco Bay area and his daughter and daughter-in-law are medical doctors, Horton was an advocate of homeopathic medicine, his son said.
"It is ironic, though, that my dad kept going back to (Shallenberger)," Robert Horton said. "But you talk to any medical doctor about this case and they will have trouble believing it because it's so wacky."
"If my dad would have gone to a real doctor, he would still be alive," he said. "They would have caught it before it spread."
Thanks, Smurfy
Why It's Dumb To Be Anti-War
War is sometimes necessary -- to defend freedom, to defend against genocide. (Whether, in a particular situation, that should be America's job, is another question). In short, it's smart to be anti-specific war, but to be anti-war entirely is idiotic. Yet, of course, people in anti-war movements are often under the illusion that they have the one-size-fits-all solution, when the actual answer to ending war sometimes lies in calling on a strong army, air force, and navy. Bret Stephens makes that point from a historical perspective, via George Orwell, in his WSJ piece on the ridiculous justification by Columbia University for allowing Iran's chief nutbag to come speak -- while prohibiting the ROTC on campus:
What, then, would be the purpose of such an invitation? Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, offered a clue in a statement issued last week: "Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas -- to understand the world as it is and as it might be," he said. "Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through dialogue and reason."That's an interesting thought, coming from a man who won't countenance an ROTC program on campus. But leave that aside. What's more important is the question of how Columbia defines the set of ideas it believes are worth "confronting," whether its confidence in "dialogue and reason" is well placed and, finally, whether confronting ideas is a sufficient condition for understanding the world.
In a March 1952 essay in Commentary magazine on "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," Trilling observed that "the gist of Orwell's criticism of the liberal intelligentsia was that they refused to understand the conditioned way of life." Orwell, he wrote, really knew what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime -- unlike, say, George Bernard Shaw, who had "insisted upon remaining sublimely unaware of the Russian actuality," or H.G. Wells, who had "pooh-poohed the threat of Hitler." By contrast, Orwell "had the simple courage to point out that the pacifists preached their doctrine under condition of the protection of the British navy, and that, against Germany and Russia, Gandhi's passive resistance would have been to no avail."
Trilling took the point a step further, assailing the intelligentsia's habit of treating politics as a "nightmare abstraction" and "pointing to the fearfulness of the nightmare as evidence of their sense of reality." To put this in the context of Mr. Coatsworth's hypothetical, Trilling might have said that in hosting and perhaps debating Hitler, Columbia's faculty and students would not have been "confronting" him, much as they might have gulled themselves into believing they were. Hitler at Columbia would merely have been a man at a podium, offering his "ideas" on this or that, and not the master of a huge terror apparatus bearing down on you. To suggest that such an event amounts to a confrontation, or offers a perspective on reality, is a bit like suggesting that one "confronts" a wild animal by staring at it through its cage at a zoo.
Global Worming
There's yet another alarmist report in the press; this time, about men not washing their hands when they leave the bathroom. Hmmm, this is a job for the queen of the parasites (oops, that didn't come out right -- and oops, since this is starting out as a post about bathroom behavior, neither did that)...but I'm talking about Marlene Zuk, a behavioral ecologist (studying the evolution of behavior) who gave a fascinating talk at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference two years ago at Penn.
Zuk's point, in brief, is that we co-evolved with parasites, and, as she put it in an e-mail the other day, "we remove all of them (or try to, with anti-bacterial everything) at our peril. This hyper-cleanliness may be behind some of the enormous increase in allergies, asthma, Crohn's disease and some of the other 'diseases of the advantaged.'"
At HBES, Zuk gave details on the downsides of removing our pathogens (put away that Purell, you clean freaks). A few of my notes from her talk:
Asthma, which is more common in industrialized countries, increased 75% from 1980-84 in US. Asthma is less common in rural environments, and families with more children, pets or farm animals. Just having older siblings is likely to be associated with decrease in asthma.Drinking unpasteurized milk means people are less likely to have allergies (Amy-torial in support of Zuk's point: We idiotic Americans don't allow unpasteurized cheese, except for some hard cheeses at Whole Foods and other such stores. Pasteurized cheese tastes like nothing compared to unpasteurized [and healthier] cheese. What about the danger of listeria?! Come on...all of France isn't coming down with it from unpasteurized cheese, now are they?)
Endotoxin, a component of bacterial cell walls, may be a crucial component of the human body. It's particularly prevalent in rural environments. And higher endotoxin levels in bedding were associated with lower levels of asthma in a study 812 European children.
Zuk also spoke of parasite-based success in treating Crohn's by a researcher named J.V. Weinstock, who gave Crohn's patients (put down your breakfast!) a solution of pig whipworm in Gatorade. And then, in a 2004 double-blind study, 3/4 of the patients showed remission of the disease after six months. (In case you don't know this, that's a pretty amazing success rate.)
More from Marlene Zuk in a moment. But, first, an AP story by Marilynn Marchione, about a study showing that one-third of men (compared to 12 percent of women) didn't wash their hands after using the toilet.
Not surprisingly, a PR dude for soap manufacturers -- those who "co-sponsored" the survey and the related "education campaigns" -- was among the first to chastise all the naughty, naughty men for not washing their hands:
"Guys need to step up to the sink," said Brian Sansoni, spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association.
But, do they? Granted, there are those guys I really, really want to wash their hands: Those who have done more than urinate, and those who wear a stethoscope to the office. As Lena put it the other day, the latter are in the business of sticking their fingers in places fingers, in day to day doings, are generally not stuck.
Marchione's story continues:
Frequent hand washing is the single best thing people can do to avoid getting sick, from colds and the flu to germs lurking in food, doctors say. And a recent Harris Interactive survey found 92 percent of Americans said they always wash up after using the bathroom.
Oh, great. So "doctors" say it. (There's some great reporting.) Whaddya wanna bet your doctor hasn't read more than 10 studies (if that) since he or she left med school? And, if I want to know whether it really matters if people wash their hands, I'm not going to go on peer pressure ("92 percent of Americans...). And sure, maybe 92 percent said they wash up after using the bathroom. What percent of those people do you think were actually telling the truth about it?
Clearly, this was a question for Marlene Zuk. So, I e-mailed her:
AMY: We all want people to wash their hands after a bowel movement, but it's my impression urine is sterile, and from what I've read, the bacteria, if any, may come from handling the genitals. I see a doctor recommending people wash with (ugh!) sterile wipes. Also, it seems the real danger of picking up bacteria comes from handling faucets. But, you're the expert here!
Here's what she wrote back:
MARLENE ZUK: ...the piece you sent is interesting. I have always wondered about this very issue myself. You are right, urine is more or less sterile when it leaves the body, although it can certainly contain bacteria if a person has a urinary tract infection. Washing hands keeps pathogen transmission down, certainly, but I too have wondered about why highlighting hand-washing after using the toilet is so important.On general principles, the more you wash your hands, the less likely you are to convey viruses or bacteria. And mucous membranes like those around the genitals carry these microbes. But I'd be willing to bet that no one has done the kind of epidemiological study necessary to confirm that washing after urinating *per se* is important. You'd have to have a group that did so and a group that didn't, and then confirm that the former transmitted fewer diseases. It's hard getting those data for humans without also getting a lot of confounding variables; maybe the hand-washers also have other habits that keep pathogens at bay, for example.
And do include a word about the folly of antibiotic overuse! Honestly, people are way too worried about things that are a very small risk, like shark attacks or Ebola, and not worried enough about things that are much larger risks, like antibiotic-resistant infections in hospitals.
I truly appreciate the mention (and have been enjoying your column and blog). On the other hand, with my first book on sex/gender and animal behavior, I got a lot of weird emails about orgasms. I am a little worried that this one will get me people telling me all about their bowel problems, what with the stuff on worms and Crohn's. Such is a writer's life, I guess.
Best, Marlene
This seems a good time to mention that Zuk has written a very interesting book -- Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are -- which I have read and recommend. It's well-written, and an easy read, and, considering her subject matter, filled with unexpected bits of wit: her confession that she feels like "the Anne Rice of crickets"; the way she starts a section, "I came to a fondness for chickens late in life"; and her title for another, "Lice, Hair, and Getting Dates."
(Presumably, with hair and without lice.)
Oh yeah, and don't miss the section on bedbug sex. Seriously.
"The Scientist And The Stairmaster"
That's the title of Gary Taubes piece in New York Magazine -- from research he did for his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, which, unless it's allowed to be squashed in the name of science that is really "science," should revolutionize America's approach to eating, heart disease, obesity, and the subject of this article, exercise. (P.S. The book should be out tomorrow, on Amazon, but you can order it now.) In a piece adapted from his book, Taubes debunks the widely health myth about exercise as a way to lose weight, and lays out how how exercising more simply makes people eat more, and how that was kept from the public:
My favorite study of the effect of physical activity on weight loss was published in 1989 by a team of Danish researchers. Over the course of eighteen months the Danes trained nonathletes to run a marathon. At the end of this training period, the eighteen men in the study had lost an average of five pounds of body fat. As for the nine women subjects, the Danes reported, “no change in body composition was observed.” That same year, F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, then director of the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Obesity Research Center in New York, reviewed the studies on exercise and weight, and his conclusion was identical to that of the Finnish review’s eleven years later: “Decreases, increases, and no changes in body weight and body composition have been observed,” Pi-Sunyer reported.Granted, all this still doesn’t explain why we bought into Mayer’s idea that we could exercise more and not compensate by eating more. One simple reason is that the health reporters bought it, and we were reading their articles, not the research literature itself. In 1977, for instance, the National Institutes of Health hosted its second conference on obesity and weight control. “The importance of exercise in weight control is less than might be believed,” the assembled experts concluded, “because increases in energy expenditure due to exercise also tend to increase food consumption, and it is not possible to predict whether the increased caloric output will be outweighed by the greater food intake.” That same year, The New York Times Magazine reported that there was “now strong evidence that regular exercise can and does result in substantial and—so long as the exercise is continued—permanent weight loss.” By 1990, a year after Pi-Sunyer’s pessimistic assessment of the evidence, Newsweek was declaring exercise an “essential” element of any weight-loss program, and the Times had stated that on those infrequent occasions “when exercise isn’t enough” to lose weight, “you must also make sure you don’t overeat.”
As for the authorities themselves, the primary factor fueling their belief in the weight-maintaining benefits of exercise was their natural reluctance to acknowledge otherwise. Although one couldn’t help but be “underwhelmed by” the evidence, as Mayer’s student Judith Stern, a UC Davis nutritionist, wrote in 1986, it would be “shortsighted” to say that exercise was ineffective because it meant ignoring the possible contributions of exercise to the prevention of obesity and to the maintenance of weight loss that might be induced by diet. These, of course, had never been demonstrated either, but they hadn’t been ruled out. This faith-based philosophy came to dominate scientific discussions on exercise and weight, but it couldn’t be reconciled with the simple notion that appetite and calories consumed will increase with an increase in physical activity. Hence, the idea of working up an appetite was jettisoned. Clinicians, researchers, exercise physiologists, even personal trainers at the local gym took to thinking and talking about hunger as though it were a phenomenon exclusive to the brain, a question of willpower (whatever that is), not the natural consequence of a body trying to replenish itself with energy.
Ultimately, the relationship between physical activity and fatness comes down to the question of cause and effect. Is Lance Armstrong excessively lean because he burns off a few thousand calories a day cycling, or is he driven to expend that energy because his body is constitutionally set against storing calories as fat? If his fat tissue is resistant to accumulating calories, his body has little choice but to burn them as quickly as possible: what Rony and his contemporaries called the “activity impulse”—a physiological drive, not a conscious one. His body is telling him to get on his bike and ride, not his mind. Those of us who run to fat would have the opposite problem. Our fat tissue wants to store calories, leaving our muscles with a relative dearth of energy to burn. It’s not willpower we lack, but fuel.
For the last 60 years, researchers studying obesity and weight regulation have insisted on treating the human body as a thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference (calories in minus calories out) ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the matter. Thus the official recommendations to eat less and exercise more and assuredly you’ll get thinner. (Or at least not fatter). And in the strict sense this is true—you can starve a human, or a rat, and he will indeed lose weight—but that misses the point. Humans, rats, and all living organisms are ruled by biology, not thermodynamics. When we deprive ourselves of food, we get hungry. When we push ourselves physically, we get tired.
What makes us fat?
Since insulin is the primary hormone affecting the activity of LPL on our cells, it’s not surprising that insulin is the primary regulator of how fat we get. “Fat is mobilized [from fat tissue] when insulin secretion diminishes,” the American Medical Association Council on Foods and Nutrition explained back in 1974, before this fact, too, was deemed irrelevant to the question of why we gain weight or the means to lose it. Because insulin determines fat accumulation, it’s quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much or exercise too little but because we secrete too much insulin or because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer than might be ideal.To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it’s quite possible that the foods—potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer—that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.
As for those people who insist that exercise has been the key to their weight-loss programs, the one thing we’d have to wonder is whether they changed their diets as well. Rare is the person who decides the time has come to lose weight and doesn’t also decide perhaps it’s time to eat fewer sweets, drink less beer, switch to diet soda, and maybe curtail the kind of carb-rich snacks—the potato chips and the candy bars—that might be singularly responsible for driving up their insulin and so their fat.
For the rest of us, it may be time to take a scientific or biological view of our excesses rather than a biblical one. The benefits of exercise include the joys of virtuousness. I worked out today, therefore I can eat fattening foods to my heart’s content. But maybe the causality is reversed here too. Maybe it’s because we eat foods that fatten us that the workout becomes a necessity, the best we can do in the battle against our own fat tissue.
Taubes' Q&A from yesterday's NY Times is here.
Google Causes Autism!
No, not really. But, there's as much evidence Google causes autism as there is for vaccines causing it. (Somebody please tell that to Jenny McCarthy, who thinks she's now an expert on autism, thanks to her ability to Google.)
Unfortunately, celebrity is one of the more dangerous weapons against science and reason, and McCarthy, who's the mother of an autistic child, is wielding hers like a baseball bat in a Wedgwood china outlet.
Here's Orac of Respectful Insolence on McCarthy's recent Oprah appearance, and "Google knowledge versus scientific knowledge":
Far be it from me to attack Jenny McCarthy for wanting to help her autistic son. Her devotion is admirable, and virtually all parents, other than crappy parents, want to help their children. The problem is that, in seeking to help her son, she's seriously drunk the Kool Aid and believes that vaccines contributed to her son's autism. Moreover, like so many parents, she's been subjecting him to a wide variety of "biomedical" treatments whose rationale is dubious at best and for which there is no good evidence of efficacy to try to "cure" his autism. Now, she's using her B-list celebrity to peddle a boatload of misinformation about autism, vaccines, and biomedical treatment.
Contrary to McCarthy's Googling would have her believe, the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine has NEVER contained mercury or thimerosal. Sources are at the link.
Who Pays When You Don't Abort?
Karen Kaplan has a piece in the LA Times which questions whether the aborting of babies with genetic diseases has gone too far. A study found counseling for parents who found they had a chance of having babies with Gaucher disease minimized the number of parents aborting. Is this a good thing? Kaplan writes:
One-quarter of fetuses found to have Gaucher disease were aborted over an eight-year period, even though half of all children with the metabolic disorder will never experience any symptoms, such as pain, organ enlargement and anemia. The rest can lead normal lives with treatment.Importantly, the researchers found that among couples who met with a Gaucher expert and learned that the disease was treatable, only 8% chose to terminate their pregnancies. All of the couples who didn't have those meetings opted for abortion.
Yes, Gaucher is treatable, but at what price, and to whom? Kaplan continues:
Among children who inherit two faulty genes, the most common result is Type 1 Gaucher. Half will become symptomatic at some point in their lives, when harmful amounts of glucocerebroside build up in the spleen, liver, lungs and bone marrow.Patients can experience pain and suffer from fatigue, although the symptoms can be treated with biweekly infusions of the enzyme that their bodies fail to produce in sufficient quantities. The intravenous infusions take an hour or two at home and cost $100,000 to $400,000 a year.
And you wonder why your health care costs so much? (I'm guessing Gaucher-positive-testing parents who choose to gamble and bring kids into the world aren't all the private jet/multimillionaire set.)
The Art Of Money Laundering
Well, what would your guess be?
Finally! Somebody Important And Muslim Speaks Up!
Osama Bin Mass Murderer's mentor has finally awakened from his Rumplestiltskin-like slumber and noticed that a whole lot of people are being brutally murdered in the name of Islam. His awakening was, apparently, a reaction to Bin Laden's recent TV appearance, writes Sarah Lawrence professor Fawaz A. Gerges in the IHT.
And, sure, this is a good thing, this denunciation. After all, better very, very, very late than never. Here's an excerpt from Gerges' piece:
In an open letter, one of bin Laden's most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Oadah, publicly reproached bin Laden for causing widespread mayhem and killing."How many innocent children, elderly people, and women have been killed in the name of Al Qaeda?" asked al-Oadah in a letter on his Web site, Islamtoday.com, and in comments on an Arabic television station.
"How many people have been forced to flee their homes, and how much blood has been shed in the name of Al Qaeda?"
...In his statement, al-Oadah holds bin Laden personally accountable for the occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the killings of thousands of Afghans, and for deluding young Muslims and tarnishing the image of Islam and Muslims all over the world.
"Are you happy to meet Allah with this heavy burden on your shoulders?" al-Oadah asks bin Laden. "It is a weighty burden indeed - at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people, if not millions [displaced and killed]. And it is all because of the 'crimes' perpetrated against civilians by bin Laden's Al Qaeda on 9/11."
Al-Oadah also reminds his former disciple that Islam prohibits the killing of any bird or animal, let alone "innocent people, regardless of what justification is given."
The open letter to bin Laden has received considerable publicity in the Arab media, including the Al Jazeera network and Islamonline.com, and has already elicited angry reactions from Al Qaeda supporters.
Indeed, the attack on bin Laden and his group by a respected religious authority is lethal, especially coming at a critical juncture for Al Qaeda and like-minded militant factions worldwide.
So...is Al Oadah right about what a nice, sweet peaceful religion Islam is? Well, Gordon Nickel, in the National Post of Canada, is bending over backward, and then some, trying to give Islam and Muslims the benefit of the doubt, but still, he ends his piece with a few passages from the Koran. Here's a short list:
- al-Taubah (9):123 - "O believers, fight (qaatiloo) the unbelievers (kuffaar) who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness (ghilza)."- Baqara (2):191 - "And slay them (aqtuloohum) wherever you come upon them"
- Baqara (2):191 - "But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then if they fight you, slay them (aqtuloohum) -- such is the recompense of unbelievers."
- Nisaa' (4):89 - "then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them (aqtuloohum) wherever you find them"
- Nisaa' (4):91 - "If they withdraw not from you, and offer you peace, and restrain their hands, take them, and slay them (aqtuloohum) wherever you come on them; against them we have given you a clear authority."
- al-Taubah (9):5 - "Then when the sacred months are drawn away, slay (aqtuloo) the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush."
- Nisaa' (4):74 - "So let them fight (yuqaatil) in the way of Allah who sell the present life for the world to come; and whosoever fights (yuqaatil) in the way of Allah and is slain, or conquers, we shall bring him a mighty wage."
- Muhammad (47):4 - "When you meet the unbelievers, smite (darba) their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds; then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads."
That's the second time this week they've made me want to sing Kumbayah!
A Porpoise-Driven Life
What happens in a society where they allow exposed breasts at every turn?!
Uh, people just go about their business like they do when the breasts are clothed? At least, that's the way it looks to me when I go to France, where Gregg took this photo of this rather strange statue.
photo by Gregg Sutter
They're "Vigilant" About Protecting Privacy
Just not vigilant enough. Ameritrade is the latest of the big companies to send out the "Whoopsy!" letter, as in "Whoopsy! Somebody may be having a hot time buying fur coats at Saks Fifth Avenue after hacking your Social Security Number out of our database."
Here's the letter I got:
And here's a Network World story about what looks to be a two-year-old cover-up on Ameritrade's part:
E-mails obtained by Network World show that Ameritrade received explicit and repeated warnings from an IT security expert starting Jan. 9, 2006 that its customer data had apparently been compromised, placing the start of the breach much earlier than previously reported and likely pushing it into 2005. Nevertheless, the company insisted for the next 20 months that a flood of stock-related spam being received by numerous clients was not indicative of a more serious problem.Following that January 2006 e-mail, subsequent warnings from multiple sources - including a column this May by my Network World colleague Mark Gibbs - also failed to prompt the company to alert its clients. Only last Friday did Ameritrade publicly acknowledge that "unauthorized code" on its systems had "allowed certain information stored in one of our databases, including e-mail addresses, to be retrieved by an external source."
More than 6 million customer accounts were exposed, although Ameritrade contends there has been no known identity fraud associated with the breach.
"I warned Ameritrade of a security breach in January of 2006, which means that it likely occurred in mid- to late-2005," says Joshua Fritsch, who sent the Jan. 9, 2006 e-mail and provided copies of his exchange with Ameritrade to Network World. Fritsch has 15 years of experience in networking, including "security design and management for a global financial firm."
Ameritrade stands by its decision to hold off on an earlier public notification.
"We didn't know how the information was getting out," company spokeswoman Kim Hillyer told me this morning. "We didn't know the scope of the issue."
Asked if prudence might have suggested an earlier alert - given the number of sources and the expertise of those warning the company, coupled with all the internal uncertainty - Hillyer fell back on her talking points and insisted there was nothing more they could have done.
Nothing more they could've done to protect themselves from bad PR, don'tcha mean? You mean, like how easily "Ameritrade" becomes "Scum-meritrade," after I've learned about their apparent coverup?
Scum-meritrade, Scum-meritrade...pass it on!
And for those of you who live in California, as I've urged before...security-freeze your credit already.
How high a price do you place on peace of mind? Or, if anybody commenting here has had their identity stolen, on what you've had to go through to fight it?
What I'd like to see is somebody who's had their identity stolen sue, not just to get creditors to remove false information about them from their credit file, but if they can trace the path back to some lax company like Ameritrade, TJ Maxx, or so many others, to take that company to court and make them pay!
link via Consumerist
I Know Gay People
San Diego's mayor decides, at the last minute, that he can't screw over his lesbian daughter and his gay staffers, and takes "a stand on behalf of equality and social justice” by supporting a resolution for gay marriage passed by the SD City Council. (He'd originally planned to veto the measure.) He gets teary about it below:
Should One Of Your Comments Get Eaten
By my spam filter, which, at the moment, is a bit...aggressive...don't take it personally. You're not alone. Notice any familiar names in the screen shot below?
At the moment, every comment I make is eaten as spam. Luckily, I can rescue them immediately. Should you get a "403 error," or a "Sorry, your comment got munched by the spam filter" notice when you post a comment, please e-mail me right away and I'll retrieve it. Here's a screen shot of the "uh-oh, sorry" message:
We should be changing server companies in October, which should alleviate much of the problem. In the mean time, I've written to Akismet, which makes the super anti-spam software I've been using (they've given me my life back -- or at least the hour or so I used to spend every day managing spam), and asked them to take me out of their banned links/IPs. P.S. They're also great in terms of service. I think they must get bazillions of e-mails, but after a few days, they generally get to the request to unban somebody (old Chuckles, per example!) and follow through.
Honey, It's A Man About A Cat
(I think they get more turned-on if you get all wigged out about it.)
6pm Wednesday. Phone rings, I answer: Hello?
Guy on phone: Hi, I was just thinking about you.
Me: Who's calling please?
Guy on phone: I was just thinking about how I wanna eat your pussy.
Me: Great, my boyfriend's right here. Tell him.
Me, handing phone to Gregg: Gregg, this guy says he wants to eat my pussy.
Gregg (bellow-mode): Hello?
Guy on phone: I was just telling your girlfriend I wanna eat her pussy.
Gregg: Well, stay on the line so we can trace your call.
Click.
No Mom Left Behind
Is the world flat? Well, one of The View's new cohosts -- a 40-year-old woman with a child and a megabucks job speaking to millions and millions of people on national TV -- really couldn't say.
Good Science, Bad Science
What should be a landmark book, a book I predict will revolutionize the way Americans eat, will be out at the end of the month. It's the product of seven years hard work by a great science journalist -- perhaps the best one out there -- investigative science journalist Gary Taubes.
In July, I quoted Taubes in Splendor In The Wheat Grass, my answer to a question from a hostile sprout fiend and his meat-eating girlfriend. And here's a link to his new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease.
Taubes book deal came out of his terrific cover story in New York Times Magazine, "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?", which can be summarized by Taubes' opening paragraph:
If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.
This past weekend, he had another Times Magazine cover story, "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?" about how studies are read and misread; the risks of leaping to conclusions based on observational evidence -- versus large, randomized clinical trials (which, for reasons of expense and ethics can't always be performed); how some studies are interpreted to give "the appearance of cause and effect where none exists"; and what this means for our health. You really need to read the whole thing, but here's the upshot:
So how should we respond the next time we’re asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it’s the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it’s this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical.If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they’re also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity.
If the association involves some aspect of human behavior, which is, of course, the case with the great majority of the epidemiology that attracts our attention, then question its validity. If taking a pill, eating a diet or living in proximity to some potentially noxious aspect of the environment is associated with a particular risk of disease, then other factors of socioeconomic status, education, medical care and the whole gamut of healthy-user effects are as well. These will make the association, for all practical purposes, impossible to interpret reliably.
The exception to this rule is unexpected harm, what Avorn calls “bolt from the blue events,” that no one, not the epidemiologists, the subjects or their physicians, could possibly have seen coming — higher rates of vaginal cancer, for example, among the children of women taking the drug DES to prevent miscarriage, or mesothelioma among workers exposed to asbestos. If the subjects are exposing themselves to a particular pill or a vitamin or eating a diet with the goal of promoting health, and, lo and behold, it has no effect or a negative effect — it’s associated with an increased risk of some disorder, rather than a decreased risk — then that’s a bad sign and worthy of our consideration, if not some anxiety. Since healthy-user effects in these cases work toward reducing the association with disease, their failure to do so implies something unexpected is at work.
All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologist’s study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, it’s never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.
Here's an excerpt from an earlier Frontline Interview with Taubes that's an easier read:
Why is it so easy for us to believe that fat is a bad dietary ingredient?The idea is that fat has nine calories per gram, and carbohydrates and protein have four calories per gram, and somehow the theory is that the denser the calories, the more easier it is for us to eat more of them. What happened is in the '50s and '60s, when researchers started fingering fat as a cause of heart disease, the obesity researchers, the obesity community started advocating low-fat diets, which they had never done before. A low-fat diet is by definition a high-carbohydrate diet.
But you had this sort of synchronicity where you had the heart disease people saying, "Give up fat, saturated fat, for heart disease," and the obesity people started saying, "Give up fat because it must be the best diet because fat is the densest calories." They moved from there without ever testing actually either of those hypotheses, so the obesity people start recommending low-fat diets; the heart disease people are recommending low-fat diets. They have actually no idea whether it's going to cure heart disease, and the obesity people have no idea whether these diets even work. But because they believe that it's only the calories that [are] important, obviously if you give up the major source of calories in the diet, you must lose weight.
You get this hypothesis that animal fats are the worst kind of fats. That seems reasonable.
That came out of studies where you compare the fat consumption in various countries versus the heart disease rates. Basically that's what we still believe, that the Japanese have a very low fat consumption. Greeks have very low animal fat consumption. They have low heart disease rates. The U.S., Sweden, Finland have high fat consumption, they have high heart disease rates, and that's the genesis of that whole belief. "It's a worthless exercise," is what one researcher in the '50s called it. You cannot say that because fat consumption associates with heart disease, that that means it causes heart disease, because a lot of other things, for instance, associate with fat consumption. Wealthy nations have a lot of fat. They eat a lot of fat; they eat a lot of sugar; they get less exercise; they smoke more cigarettes; they drive more cars; they have more televisions.
There's a world of difference between the countries that eat low-fat diets and the countries that eat high-fat diets. And to finger fat because that's what you have in your mind to go in [to the study], is just bad science. But that's what they did, and that's how animal fat came out of it. We knew that animal fat, saturated fat, raised cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, and it was just this sort of series of suppositions--
And we knew that cholesterol was associated--
And we knew that cholesterol was associated with heart disease. The higher the cholesterol, the higher the heart-disease risk. Although when you actually look at the studies, [it's] kind of amazing. If you or I were to reduce our cholesterol levels by 30 milligrams per deciliter, we would probably increase our chances of living an extra 2 years by one-thousandth of a percent or something. For the actual individual who doesn't have extremely high cholesterol, lowering cholesterol makes very little difference in how long you're going to live.
There were several studies done in the late '80s, where they actually calculated how much longer you would live if you cut back on saturated fat. If everyone in the country cut back on saturated fat to that recommended by the government, and cut back their total fat consumption, you could then calculate from these studies how much longer you would live. And the answer was a days to a few months. And as the authors of this study pointed out, that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, those are at the end of your life. It's not like you get an extra month between 46 and 47. It's, you're in the nursing home and you die at, say, 77 and three weeks instead of 77 and one week. One commentary that was published along with one of these results said this is the equivalent of rearranging the [deck] chairs on the Titanic.
Central Casting Comes Through
Could there be a more French-looking old guy?
Of course, he's probably from Cleveland, and just pretend-French like me.
photos by Gregg Sutter
Ron Diagnoses Hill
Reason science writer Ron Bailey takes apart Hillarycare, version two, and finds she's misdiagnosed the problem with our healthcare system:
The chief broken part of health insurance in the United States is the faltering system of employer-based health insurance. Since 2000, firms offering their employees health insurance have dropped from 69 percent to 60 percent. Clinton's plan maintains the employer-based insurance system by mandating that large employers continue to buy health insurance for their workers.
Thanks, I'll take Bushcare, untied from the workplace, and non-discriminatory against self-employed people like me. From CNN:
How would it work? Everybody who buys health insurance, whether through work or independently, would get a standard deduction of $7,500 for individual coverage and $15,000 for family coverage.This standard deduction would be available to everyone, whether they itemize on their tax return or not. And you can take the full deduction even if your health plan costs less.
So if you paid $10,000 for family coverage, you could still deduct $15,000.
The proposal differs from current law in two key ways: 1) under current law, people who buy insurance on their own typically don't get a tax break at all; under the proposal they would; and 2) those who are insured through work can currently buy coverage with an unlimited amount of tax-free money. Under the proposal, a limit would be set.
A primary goal of the proposal is to level the playing field, in terms of tax breaks, between those who buy insurance on their own and those who buy it through an employer.
Bailey continues taking apart Hillarycare below:
...Sen. Clinton compares her health care plan to the mandate that all drivers carry car insurance. But it's a bad comparison. Employers don't buy their workers' car insurance or home insurance. Why should they buy their employees health insurance? When someone leaves his or her job, they don't have to change or lose their car insurance. It's portable. A modern health insurance system would really make insurance the personal responsibility of each American....How would Clinton make sure that everybody complies with the new mandate? A Clinton campaign spokesperson, Laurie Rubiner suggested that one penalty could be the loss of the standard deduction on their income tax filings. This would mean that the IRS would have to monitor compliance.
Individual mandates could be the cornerstone of a complete privatization of health insurance, giving consumers more choices and much greater control over their health care needs. The first step is allowing employers to pay workers the money the companies have been spending on health insurance. Workers could then buy health insurance fitted to their own specific needs, not the bottom lines of they firms for which they work.
For Americans who can't afford health insurance, why not offer them vouchers so that they can buy their own private health insurance? Such income-based vouchers would be self-enforcing since recipients could spend them only on health insurance and health care. The vouchers could be paid for by reprogramming funds now spent on government programs like Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Programs.
In such a thoroughly privatized system, Herzlinger argues, consumers who would now experience directly the actual costs of their medical insurance and medical care will begin to drive down those costs, just as they do in other markets. Right now health insurance is made more expensive by some 1800 state and federal mandates. "It's like I'm shopping for a car and my state mandates that all cars have heated seats," says Herzlinger. Car buyers would not long stand for a heated car seat mandate that raises the price of a car by $1,000, and similarly individual health insurance shoppers would object to unnecessarily expensive insurance mandates.
As I've said before, because I don't currently get my healthcare through The Man, but through the girl's checking account -- this girl's -- I'm very connected to what it costs, and whether to pay for those metaphorical heated seats. (My answer: I went for the unheated seats at Kaiser Permenente and paying my assistant better.)
Government is already way too meddly in our lives. Plans to squeeze employers further will neither help the economy or help sick people. Employers will simply hire fewer people -- or, as Bailey points out, ditch employees in this country who'd require health care by law and hire those in India and other countries who don't. Then all those American employees will not just be out of health care but out of a job. Free mental health care next on Hill's agenda? (Free, as in the rest of us pay, the unemployed don't.)
Bridget Jones’ Diarrhea
Just posted another Advice Goddess column -- a coming-of-age story from a girl who thinks she just needs to choose between two guys. Here's her question:
I’m a 23-year-old woman and my boyfriend is 37. We’ve been very happy and communicate well, but I recently started hanging with a guy my own age, and I ended up having feelings for him, too. I hate going behind my boyfriend’s back when he’s fully committed, but my biggest fear is that my family will think he’s too old for me, and their approval means a lot. I need to choose soon because I hate lying to people I love. How do I decide who’s right for me, and what should I base my decision on?--Confused
An excerpt from my answer:
Write each guy’s name in catsup on your kitchen counter. Find a pregnant iguana. Clip its toenails and scatter them in a circular pattern around each name. Walk outside and ask the first person you see their name. More than eight letters? Go with the older guy. Fewer than eight? The young dude. Or…just dump both, leave the iguana to lick up the catsup, and throw yourself at the next guy who asks you the time.No, I’m not kidding. At this stage in your life, this is as good a method as any for deciding who will stay and who will go. The truth is, nobody is particularly right or wrong for you because there isn’t a whole lot of you to be right or wrong for. In fact, if you’re like a lot of people in their early 20s, you’re a larva in shoes. With boobs and a job, you probably look the part of an adult, but at best, you’re the test market for Smirnoff Ice and probably have a hard time with existential questions deeper than “Bleu cheese or ranch?”
The rest of my answer, plus comments on it, are here.
Your Galaxy Or Mine?
Nude self-portrait with alien. Probe sold separately.
Free-Market Socialists
Consumerist had a post about how FCC chair Kevin Martin thinks cable prices are too high. Well, duh. Glad you finally came out of your long slumber, Kev. From a Leslie Cauley story in USA Today:
If you're tired of paying for dozens of cable TV channels that you don't want and don't watch, relief may be on the way.The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday plans to begin considering banning programmers from "tying" — making cable systems take less-popular or new channels to get must-haves, such as ESPN (DIS) or CBS (CBS).
Programmers have used the practice to launch scores of channels. That's why you see all those spinoffs of Walt Disney's ESPN on basic and digital cable. Operators didn't necessarily want them — they just couldn't see a cheaper way to get the flagship channel.
Each extra channel adds a fee to customers' bills. "The problem for consumers is that they have to pay higher rates for a bunch of channels they may not want or watch," says FCC chief Kevin Martin.
...Cable operators are required to carry all local TV stations, but federal rules let broadcasters pick how they want to be paid: Cash or carriage of their company's cable channels.
Polka says programmers typically set the cash price so high that operators have little choice but to agree to take their channels. Recently, they've even started to demand support for their websites, he says.
Martin says that under the bar on bundling that the FCC plans to examine, programmers would have to sell channels individually. "You can't tie the channel in any way. … If you only want one channel, you shouldn't have to take 10 or 20."
Cable consumers pay a lot less in Paris, where the commies gather at night to rue the new Sarko-nomics:
Yet, in the supposedly free-market, capitalist US, I pay over $100 for home phone service -- a phone line and a fax line -- alone. Disgusting.
Cable is another $60-some (of course, unlike in France, I only have one "choice," Comcast-turned-Time-Warner). And I pay $70 for DISH TV.
So, that's more than $200/month over the price I'd pay in commie France for all three combined: 19.90 eu. See?
Do you think it's possible to be a capitalist -- except when the utility bills come?
photo of Amy by Gregg Sutter
Amy Unlocked
This is my ATT Razr V3 back in the old US of A with my Orange/France SIM card still in it.
In other words, it's been unlocked. Not only that, I got ATT (Cingular when I joined 'em) to do the unlocking...free!
Since around 2002, I've had a cell phone in France and a separate cell phone in the USA. In the USA, thanks to the poor-service-upon-hellishly-poor-service I got from ATT/Cingular, I just wrangled six months free, plus this new Bluetooth GSM phone (works in Europe!) to replace my obsolete Sony Ericsson t68i, a phone that never lived up to Cingular's promises that I could use it to connect my iBook to the Internet.
In France, my groovy non-subscription plan allows me, whenever I'm there, to go to a tabac (a tobacconist) or a phone store, pay 5 or 10 euros, get a code to punch into my phone, and get phone service for about 55 cents/minute when I dial out, and for free when people call me. Even when Gregg calls me from the USA.
And now, because I'm kind of a pushy broad, and I know the magic words (explaining, with the most pretentious French accent I could muster, that I have an account with "Frahhhnce Télécom"), I got ATT to fork over an "unlock code," which allowed me to use my groovy new Razr on the GSM network in France, simply by swapping in my Orange France SIM card.
I knew to do this after reading about a law, passed in 2006, that allows allows cell phone users to break the software "lock" carriers put on their cell, as Phuong Cat Le writes for the Seattle PI:
The ruling doesn't prevent cellular companies from locking a phone, but if a consumer unlocks it he wouldn't be in violation of copyright infringement rules, said Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society."It's great for consumers," said Granick, who argued in support of the exemption.
In its ruling, announced as part of regular revisions to technology-related copyright law, the Copyright Office found that the software locks restrict the owner's use of a cell phone to "support a business model rather than protect access to a copyrighted work itself." The new exemption to the copyright law expires in three years.
Unlocking a phone requires entering codes or a special set of numbers, which a cellular company may or may not share with the user. Verizon Wireless doesn't lock its cell phones. T-Mobile will unlock a customer's phone 90 days after fulfillment of the contract. Sprint won't unlock phones because it believes customers already benefit from a Sprint-subsidized phones, said Travis Sowders, a spokesman for Sprint Nextel. Cingular will do it upon request but only when a contract expires or under specific conditions, said Mike Broom, a Cingular spokesman.
...Unlocking phones typically benefits people who are on the globally dominant technology GSM, or Global System for Mobile. Like Barrett, users of GSM phones can take their phones overseas, swap out the SIM card to a local carrier and pay cheaper rates for those calls.
"If you can persuade the wireless carrier to give you the code, it's simple and you key it in," he said.
Otherwise, there are numerous unlocking services that charge between $5 to $35. Check your policy, though because doing so may invalidate your warranty.
...the scumwads.
If you can't get success by getting on the phone with your carrier and sounding like a pretentious, Europe-jetting jerk, here are a few of the unlocking services.
P.S. If you're going to try to get your phone company to pony up, call well in advance of any trip. Cingular told me it could take, if memory serves me, about a week to get the code. I actually got it via e-mail in a few days. If you don't have a French phone or a phone of whatever European country you're going to, find out if they have a carrier like Orange, with cheap, no-subscrip plans.
You'll probably have to give a local address. Make one up, give a friend's, or use the address and phone of your hotel. You're not getting a subscription, just the ability to have temporary, pay-as-you-go service.
Even if you just use it once, you can mail the SIM card to a friend, have them pay 5 eu for a mobicarte, make one phone call and keep it alive. It just needs to be reused every six months, I believe.
I think it's 30 eu to open a new account with Orange -- or for when I screw up and lose my number and need a new one. With the free incoming calls, and the high price of using many US phones in Europe, that may still be a major bargain.
Woohoo!
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Sénat
My Paris-dwelling friend Emily told me that the French Sénat (at le Jardin du Luxembourg) was open Saturday and Sunday to visitors -- a once-a-year event, for two days -- and we had every intention of going on Saturday, our last full day in Paris.
And then, when we left the apartment we were renting in the 4th arrondissement, I remembered the signs I saw for a parade on the way home from dinner the night before at the fab Basque restaurant L'Ami Jean. It turned out to be the Techno Parade, an environmental dealie.
There were a few floats...
(No, me neither. Not a clue.)
...and some marchers with messages...
...but, mainly trucks playing techno music.
(No, no idea why the man on the right is singing into a red and black lace bra. You?)
The parade started at Place de la Bastille, and went to le boulevard Beaumarchais, with throngs of club kids going wild the entire way.
(photos above by Gregg Sutter; most below by Amy Alkon)
There were some odd and amusing sights...
It seems they even let out the nimrod who beat himself in The DaVinci Code.
As for the fashions on the street, the 80's were an ugly decade; no need to bring the fashion back! (Nevertheless, a lot of these club kids were truly adorable.) Here are a few shots of people along the parade route:
G.S.
G.S.
G.S.
I expect the most shaved and wild-haired of them probably live at home with maman et papa in really ritzo suburbs like Neuilly.
Most French girls I see in Paris have the bodies of girls, not of cargo vans, like so many of their overfed, terribly fed, underexercised American counterparts.
Oh yeah, and for some reason, the French are terrible dancers. Luckily, because they're generally very spirited, that doesn't stop them from dancing -- which usually makes them look like they are having some sort of seizure, to music.
G.S.
By the way, we did eventually get to the French Senat.
G.S.
But, we were out of time, and a little low on energy after chasing after all the club kids with our cameras, so Gregg just stopped to take a picture of a naked chick. (Okay, at my behest.)
G.S.
Naturellement, we finished up at Flore
...where we had white wine and rillettes...
...and the lady next to us had this beautiful sunlit Campari and soda.
Just another day in Paris. Oh. La. La.
How Greenspan Is My Valley?
Al bitchslaps the GOP. From CNN.com:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan slams President Bush and today's Republicans, while calling Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton "the smartest presidents" he worked with, according to an advance copy of his upcoming book.He further says the GOP deserved the stomping it took in November's congressional elections -- a ballot that saw both houses of Congress wrested from Republican control -- because the party "swapped principle for power."
His book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, is scheduled for release Monday. CNN obtained a copy Saturday.
In the book, Greenspan wrote that Bush essentially left an unbridled GOP Congress to spend money however it saw fit, and by not vetoing a single bill in six years, the president deprived the nation of checks and balances.
"The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan wrote. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."
Greenspan, an 81-year-old Republican who retired last year after five terms as Fed chairman, wrote that he made no secret of his view that Bush should reject some bills.
"It would send a message to Congress that it did not have carte blanche on spending," Greenspan recalls telling the administration. "But the answer I received from a senior White House official was that the president didn't want to challenge House Speaker Dennis Hastert. 'He thinks he can control him better by not antagonizing him,' the official said."
The White House, however, said that vetoes weren't necessary because Congress "worked with us."
"The Republican Congress stayed within the president's top-line numbers on non-national security appropriations bills. We had veto threats, which were used to good effect to keep spending within the president's numbers," said spokesman Tony Fratto.
Greenspan wrote in his book that the decision was costly.
"To my mind," he wrote, "Bush's collaborate-don't-confront approach was a major mistake -- it cost the nation a check-and-balance mechanism essential to fiscal discipline."
He further wrote that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill "found himself the odd man out; much to my disappointment, economic policymaking in the Bush administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff."
The most dangerous people are usually those who think they're experts, and can do anybody's job. There seem to be so many of that sort in power at the moment (not that I'm a great fan of the nimrod Dems).
P.S. Speaking of more recent Ayn Rand afficionados (Greenspan was one of her young circle of admirers), Kate Coe has it looking like Brangelina want to do the Hank Reardon/Dagny thing together in Atlas Shrugged.
In Amy trivia news, Ayn Rand was a huge influence, and, to my parents' consternation, I read everything she wrote -- including all her philosophy books -- and used to march around as a teenager proclaiming "The Virtue of Selfishness," blah blah blah.
I have a first edition of Atlas, given to me by an actor I used to work with in NYC, the guy who blew his brains out on an episode of CSI.
Les Nerds Amoreux
They were adorable. Lots of PDA. Repeated hugging and smooching while waiting for the Paris Métro.
Dutch Treat(ment)
The health care plan I've been proposing is the one where health insurance is untied from employment, where everyone buys their own, and where everyone has to buy insurance of some kind, just as we do for driving cars.
In other words, you don't get to say, "Oh, fuck it. If I get in an accident somebody else -- or the state -- will pick up the tab." But, that's essentially what people a good many people who don't have health insurance have been saying.
I'm still wondering if the girlfriend Ben Ehrenreich wrote about, Ofelia Cuevas (another photo here, the girl with the long hair who's standing, according to a caption), had to pay anything for the "emergency" care she got (after they apparently hospital-shopped) and she came back from New Mexico and got in line behind the gunshot victims at county USC -- or if the rest of us picked up the tab. If we did...doesn't it seem right that she would pay us back? I mean, what ethical person would want to suck off of other people instead of paying their own way?
Here's the story, from a previous blog item, "Playing Health Care Like Lotto":
As I've said before, I'd like to see a repeal of motorcycle helmet laws, and in their place, a no-helmet option: If you ride without a helmet, either you pay some kind of supplemental insurance that kicks in for your care after an accident, or we just leave you where you fell until the street cleaning guys sweep up what's left of you.The alternative is forcing the rest of us to pay for your stupidity. We've got enough to pay for already, what with all the poor and uninsured -- and then, all the not-so-poor gambling that they won't need health insurance. Then again, why pay $150 a month for an HMO (assuming you're in your 20s) or get a low-cost, high-deductible health insurance plan when the taxpayers can be made to pick up your care?
Yes, that's Ben Ehrenreich and his girlfriend we're talking about. As Kate Coe puts it on Fishbowl LA:
Ben Ehrenreich's op-ed in today's LA Times is meant to point out that poor minorities suffer the most in hospital emergency rooms. His unnamed Chicana girlfriend (her name doesn't matter, but her ethnicity does?) broke her ankle, and being "between jobs and between health insurance plans", had no choice but to shuffle off to County-USC at 4 am, because Ehrenreich took some friend's advice on the best time to go. They waited 5 hours for a gurney. Ehrenreich, his blue eyes and well-known last name "required an introduction to this sort of indignity." Ehrenreich needs an introduction to a dope slap. At 4 am in an urban ER, bleeding takes priority, anything else can wait.Free-lancer Cathy Seipp, who has her own health insurance and with a rather more serious complaint, waited the same amount of time at Cedars. She too has blue eyes, but pain and suffering are no respecters of persons.
...Hospital emergency rooms are burdened enough trying to care for those who have no other choice for medical care. Writers who chose those services just because they'd rather not borrow money, max out their credit cards or work out a payment plan shouldn't be adding to that burden.
Exactly. And don't give me the whine about health insurance being so terribly expensive. I've ALWAYS had health insurance -- even at my most struggling, when I wasn't making enough money writing, and had to take a job one day with Amazon All-Girls Moving Company for $5/hr. And let's just say, I'm not exactly Miss Hercules.
I don't have Cadillac health insurance; more like Ford Focus insurance: Kaiser Permanente HMO. I believe it cost me just over $100 when I was in my 20s, and now, at 42, it's $258 a month. As I posted on Cathy's blog, paying it means I have to forgo a pair of shoes, or dining out every night, but it's just the right thing to do. The personal responsibility thing, you know?
Oh yeah, and back to Ehren-sponge, another good point made by Kate in yet another FBLA entry:
But here's the interesting part, when Ehrenreich writes:
A few weeks later, I was doing a little research to find out where to send a friend who had broken her ankle in New Mexico and needed surgery in Los Angeles.So the girlfriend showed up at an Emergency Room with not much of an emergency, it seems.
I guessed Ehrenreich's e-mail address and wrote to him -- Can you please tell me if your girlfriend paid anything for her care...and if so, what did she pay? -- to get a sense of how much we, the taxpayers, got fucked because his girlfriend didn't have health insurance, and got this back:
In a message dated 2/18/07 3:36:03 PM, behrenreich@laweekly.com writes:I am out of town and will not be able to check email until I return at the end of the month.
Yeah, I bet he is. I wonder if he can get us taxpayers to fund his vacations, too?
This sort of thing would no longer happen if the U.S. opted a plan like that in The Netherlands. From an article in the W$J, Gautam Naik writes:
The Dutch system features two key rules: All adults must buy insurance, and all insurers must offer a policy to anyone who applies, no matter how old or how sick. Those who can't afford to pay the premiums get help from the state, financed by taxes on the well-off.The system hinges on competition among insurers. They are expected to cut premiums, persuade consumers to live healthier lives, and push hospitals to provide better and lower-cost care.
Some are already taking unusual steps. The insurance company Menzis has opened three of its own primary-care centers to serve the patients it insures, and plans to open dozens more in a move to lower costs. Rival UVIT offers discount vouchers to customers who buy low-cholesterol versions of yogurt, butter and milk.
To prevent insurers from seeking only young, healthy customers, the government compensates insurers for taking on higher-risk patients. Insurers get a "risk-equalization" payment for covering the elderly and those with certain conditions such as diabetes.
Results have been good:
Since a new system took effect here last year, cost growth is projected to fall this year to about 3% after inflation from 4.5% in 2006. Waiting lists are shrinking, and private health insurers are coming up with innovative ways to care for the sick.
Oh, P.S. Where the Ben/Ofelia thing really got fun is over on mere Ehrenreich's blog, where I didn't quite fit in with the socialists in the comments section. Here's one of my comments (the italicized part is my copy-in of a previous commenter's remark):
I believe he said the girl friend didn't have either the money or the insurance (several thousand dollars?) to cover the medical care involved. Not much of a mystery there.Why didn't they? Even at my most struggling as a freelance writer, when I was so down and out I was forced to take a job for $5/hr for an all-girl moving company, and when I couldn't afford a bed (I slept in a sleeping bag on a door propped up on two milk crates) I had health insurance. Why? Because I would be horrified at the thought that somebody else would have to pay for me. A pity more people don't feel that way.
An HMO or high-deductible health insurance can be had for not a terrible amount of money. In my 20s, I paid $100-something a month -- maybe $130? -- for Kaiser Permanente HMO. At 42, it costs me $258.
If you're dirt poor, that's one thing. If you decide to gamble the money you could be paying for health insurance on, say, new shoes...well, that's another thing entirely.
Ms. Ehrenreich, as long as you're "blowing the whistle on medical larceny," how about blowing the whistle on those who use the emergency room for apparent non-emergencies and use the rest of us to fund their health care instead of paying for it themselves?
Posted by: Amy Alkon | February 19, 2007 at 02:56 AM
Here's another:
I didn't "introduce the problem," Ben Ehrenreich did by doing an op-ed in the LA Times about it. Furthermore, his premeditated attempt to get non-emergency care at the overburdened county USC emergency room is disgusting. According to his op-ed, her circumstances: "She was between jobs and between health insurance plans."Again, when I was "between jobs," I didn't gamble that I wouldn't have a medical condition, nor did I expect others to pay my way. I worked really bad jobs out of a sense of personal reasponsibility and paid my health insurance, as I do now. See the bit about my $5/hr job as a mover above.
"We couldn't afford the thousands of dollars the surgery would have cost at a private hospital." Translation: "We'd rather not pay the price of her gamble that she could go without paying for health insurance, so we're going to sneakily make other taxpayers pay instead by going to an emergency room for trauma patients with a pre-existing condition."
I'm guessing Ehrenreich didn't mention the girl's name in the paper because he doesn't want them to send her a bill, which they should. How is what they did not theft?
What's most disgusting is that his own mother apparently thinks nothing of this. The day I brag to my parents that I've gotten my significant other free medical care "on the dole"...well, I'd be hearing about it for decades, and not approvingly.
Posted by: Amy Alkon | February 19, 2007 at 07:53 AM
And another:
"You've got the money, you just chose to spend it on something else."Exactly. Kaiser Permanente is very affordable.
Many people just choose to gamble, then expect others to pay for them. Like you, my health insurance is what I've always paid first.
Posted by: Amy Alkon | February 20, 2007 at 05:17 AM
Another:
"And believe me, this young woman has not been "choosing" to spend her money on things other than health insurance -- what a privileged perspective!"Why doesn't she get a job? Maybe she can't get a great job -- maybe not in "Ethnic Studies," if she is who I think she is -- but there certainly are jobs for those who can work. See above, when I wanted to work as a writer, but was forced to take a job as a mover.
Again, it's a personal responsibility thing.
FYI, Anarcissie's not taking the facts into account. Here's a little more info: I made $5/hr when I was in my 20s, and it was an anomaly, and I'm now in my 40s, so it was about 20 years ago. During that time, I worked my worst job ever -- dressing up as a chicken and handing out flyers to hostile NYC pedestrians.
Furthermore, I didn't have a bed at that time -- I slept on a door propped up on two milk crates with a sleeping bag on top. I rode my bike to get around to save money on transportation, and ate beans a lot. But, I paid my health insurance, and I'd never expect anyone else to pick up after me.
So, why can't this girl work? Or is she just too cool to take a job as a barista? I believe Starbucks pays health insurance for their employees who work over 20 hours a week.
Posted by: Amy Alkon | February 21, 2007 at 08:08 AM
More bulldog-on-a-bone-ing from me at the Barbara Ehrenreich link. And yes, in case you're wondering, I e-mailed both Cuevas and Ehrenreich in hopes of finding out whether the taxpayers indeed paid for her care, but neither ever e-mailed me back.
Food Porn
Comin' atcha from Paree, the food porn capital of the universe. I love this term, which Don at VisitParis.com used recently when he sent me a link to his photo of this cheese.
Here's more -- a shot of the fish ordered by the Belgian girl seated next to us at an out-of-this-world incredible Basque restaurant Don recommended, L'Ami Jean, in the 7th arrondissement (Métro: Invalides, not far from the Eiffel Tower. 27 rue Malar, 75007 Paris, 01.47.05.86.89, closed Saturday and Sunday).
L'Ami Jean is not expensive, either -- 32 eu prix fixe menu for dinner (appetizer, dinner, and dessert), or you can order à la carte. We got a half carafe of good dry white for 12 eu.
The only problem is the ambience -- especially for a big American man like Gregg. Very small, very tight, and he was grouchy about it at first, but he came around when he got one look at the food. By the way, everything we had (soup with foie gras in the base in my case, and the duck with wild mushrooms, rare, just the way I like it) was thrillingly good -- and like eating art.
Here's a really good review from January by Christine Muhlke from The New York Times:
If in Paris a friend tells you that he’s taking you to a Basque rugby pub in the opposite-of-bustling Seventh Arrondissement, don’t whimper about wanting to try somewhere on your list of Places to Go — Le Comptoir, say, or Le Sensing. He’s taking you to L’Ami Jean, and soon you will be grateful.The four-year-old restaurant has a lot working against it: location, décor, a kitchen the size of a crèpe stand. Even the menu seems like a letdown, with its 30-euro prix fixe, seasonal additions — game in fall, stews in winter — and traditional plats that bring the daily dish tally to about 60. The wine list recently added a page of historical offerings from the dealer across the street. But who would want an 1,020-euro ’86 Pomerol to accompany her head cheese?
Once the first dish arrives, you’ll understand. Not just the smart presentation on stylish plates that don’t quite fit on the table but also the quality of detail: cream-of-cauliflower soup with horseradish — poured table side from an iron tea kettle — with microscopically precise rye croutons; a langoustine from Brittany under a translucent sheet of crisp pig skin (the world’s best potato chip) dotted with orange-infused oil; a rich gratiné of game with a timely puff of foam.
Basque rugby pub? What Basque rugby pub? The room hasn’t changed since the 1930s, but the food will silence those who claim that French cuisine has ossified and that the culinary torch took the Eurostar to Spain. Perhaps silence isn’t the right word: L’Ami Jean is boisterous. While in a starred environment this food would invite hushed attention, Stéphane Jégo, the 35-year-old chef, stokes a rollicking room where it’s common to exclaim loudly over a dish or be offered a spoonful of pork belly and lentils from a neighbor’s casserole; where tables of four order magnums, and there’s a wait for 11:30 p.m. reservations. Try that at Taillevent.
Jégo is part of the next wave of gastro-bistro chefs. The self-taught cook spent 12 years with Yves Camdeborde at La Régalade, one of the revolutionary “Why here?” bistros that brought excited diners to featureless locales. Camdeborde, who now owns the more accessibly located Le Comptoir, made his name with generous hospitality, democratic prices and reworkings of classic fare built on a base of quality ingredients and rigorous French technique — all lessons that Jégo absorbed. Along with Parisian restaurants like Chez Michel, L’Os à Moelle, L’Ourcine and L’Acajou, L’Ami Jean serves food that is adventurous while sticking close to home, like an airy, deconstructed rice pudding that Tante Marie could have only dreamed of.
Hilariously, there's a television playing in the toilette, and a jail-style peephole in the door, too.
But, back to the other end of business, here are a few shots Gregg took when he went out to get us food.
Last but not least, here is the egg Gregg makes me every morning. This morning's version:
Not bad food art for a guy referred to by his bud Lowell Cauffiel as "Detroit ornery." (And he is, and I have to say, it's one of the great things about him.)
About the French eggs -- they really are different. I don't order eggs in America because they generally taste like nothing. This tastes like...well, with every bite, you can see faint images of the chickens running around the farmland, wind fluttering their feathers, and sun glinting across their tiny beaks.
And while we're on the subject of birdies, we went to Beauborg yesterday, aka Georges Pompidou Center, and saw the regular collection of arte moderne, and also the Annette Messager show.
The woman has to be mentally ill, and I mean that in the nicest way: Decapitated stuffed animals all over the damn place, and a pile of fabric carcasses of stuffed cows in the corner but without much of the stuffing. Really loved some of her work; specifically, the near-life-size cow made out of polar fleece being dragged around the outside of an exhibit by an electronic pulley of sorts, and especially, the case of what looked to be about 75 dead birds, each in a tiny little pastel crocheted sweater. Death becomes...adorable!
We couldn't photograph that exhibit, but Gregg did sneak a photo of me inside the art of one of my favorites, Jean Dubuffet:
If I ever built a house, I'd have a room just like this, with a desk built into the ice floes and one little ice floe made of down cushions with a little cushion for Lucy for my afternoon between-writing nap.
Finally, here I am on the way down the groovy outdoor escalator of the museum:
all non-restaurant photos by mon hombre, Gregg Sutter
Not Exactly Dearfoams
Slipper, window at Laure Sokol, Paris (a lingerie store that sucks up my limp dollars-into-euros with some regularity). Here's a link to the American slippers, Dearfoams, for anyone who doesn't know what they look like.
Here's the window of another lingerie store -- most adorably, getting into the Scottish spirit that's been taking over Paris.
(The World Cup was in Paris this week, and so was half of Scotland, drinking, singing, cheering, and standing on grates and letting their kilts fly up à la Marilyn).
Gregg, who is about as enthusiastic about shopping as he is about having white-hot needles inserted into both eyes, was very encouraging when I wanted to go in this lingerie store, and even stuck around to photograph me shopping. For a moment or two, anyway.
About this photo, Gregg said, in inimitable Gregg style, "Those French broads, even from behind, they look great."
And here's a bit of Paris street fashion by Gregg, who says, "When Amy shops, Gregg's lens wanders. Left alone on the street to his own devices, he soon finds comfort in the legs of a French schoolgirl up to thar. Ooh la la."
Wiping The Floor With Tariq Ramadan
Finally, here's the audio of Hitchens crashing Tariq Ramadan's session at Festivaletteratura in Mantua (after Ramadan wriggled out of debating Hitchens, probably knowing Hitchens would make quick work of his po-mo bullshit claims about the kumbaya-ness of Islam). Sadly, we left Mantua on Sunday, so we missed the live-action floor-wiping. More about this from Hitchens' Slate piece on their exchange, linked in my blog item here.
I'm With The Libertarians
Yank the troops out of Iraq. From the Libertarian Party, "The moral solution is not more war":
"The President was correct when he stated that, 'there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people.' At this moment, the people of our great nation are calling for a return to a moral foreign policy that begins with an end to the occupation of Iraq," stated Shane Cory, executive director of the Libertarian Party. "Rather than positively respond to the people of our republic, President Bush continues to see no fault in his decision to invade a nation that posed no risk to the United States and held no direct responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2001. Instead, in order to justify an indefinite occupation, our Commander in Chief has reverted back to the same misleading, fear-mongering tactics that allowed for the military invasion of Iraq."A free and stable Iraq is something that the world would benefit from. However, the Libertarian Party believes there are other ways in which to achieve this goal. The Libertarian Party recognizes that the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations is not the moral, appropriate or most effective way to bring liberty to the oppressed people of the world."
Cory continues, "President Bush paints opponents of his plan for staying in Iraq as people who are against freedom and American security. He calls for all political parties to come together to support his plan and says this plan is one that is appealing to everyone. Our president chooses to avoid reality and seeks shelter behind images of 'good and evil' while liberally quoting lines such as 'freedom is not free.' I'll personally choose to stand behind the words of General George Washington who wisely stated: 'Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.'
"The Libertarian Party renews its call to begin the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, which should be orchestrated by American commanders on the ground to ensure the safety of our troops. While we certainly respect General Petraeus' recommendations for Iraq, his suggestions are still based upon the premise that we should remain in the country. The time has come after four years of no substantial progress to finally admit that war is not the right solution to Iraq. Unfortunately, this is a realization that should have been made before more than 3,800 brave American soldiers lost their lives.
"The moral solution to Iraq is not more war. A free and prosperous Iraq is a very real possibility for the future. A free and prosperous Iraq will come when that society is ready for this liberty, but liberty will never flourish under the auspices of war."
I have real doubts as to whether democracy can flourish under Islam, a collectivist religion that has no respect for the rights of the individual, and where the greatest temptation and desire is to impose the religious rule of Sharia law.
Rebecca Bynum does a great job explaining the difference between our version of freedom and the Muslim version, in the New English Review:
Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people. The word itself conjures pride and patriotism and is an integral part of our national myth. It involves the idea of unlocking human potential, of opportunity, individualism and self-reliance. Freedom and the American ideal of individual self-realization are one and the same in the minds of most Americans. Freedom is that intangible thing we defend when we fight.Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined. According to the Muslim philosopher Sayyid Qutb,
This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men. (Milestones* pg. 47)In Islamic terms, the western concept of political sovereignty resting with the people is a form of idolatry, for Allah’s word, as given through Muhammad, is regarded as the only legitimate source of legislation, and in addition, obedience to Allah’s law is the only form of worship Islam allows. These two ideas: that the divine is a law giver, and that obedience to that law is what constitutes worship, are the two most alien concepts confronting the western mind when analyzing Islam. They combine to create the Islamic requirement for territorial sovereignty, something entirely unique among the world’s religions. According to Islamic doctrine, if a Muslim obeys the laws of man, as he must while residing in a modern western state for example, he actually worships man and becomes an idolater guilty of shirk – worshipping other than the one god, Allah. This is a grave sin for a Muslim and so to atone he must engage in the struggle against jahiliyya, which is to say, all non-Muslim culture and ideas, as these are thought to arise out of ignorance of the truth of Islam. And since Islam disallows criticism of itself, it forms a completely closed system of thought with all definitions, including the definition of freedom, self-contained.
Like Romeo And Juliet
We are separated by forces we cannot control. In R&J's case, a bunch of feuding idiots. In my case, I am separated from the boots I fell in love with at first sight -- red patent leather numbers with white stitching from Freelance Shoes -- by the fucking U.S. economy.
Freelance are normally not cheap, and I typically buy them in February, when the Paris sales are on. But...439 eu...plus the extra 40 percent or so added by the saggy baggy U.S. dollar? Beyond obscene.
(And yes, I could get the 10 percent off with a discount card I have for Galeries Lafayette, where I saw them -- go to the Welcome desk and ask for one, for non-Paris-dwellers only. And then, I could get another 12 percent off for the detaxe at the border...but please...439 plus only 20 percent still sounds more like half a month's rent than the price of a pair of boots. Even for somebody like me, who typically only buys a couple of beautiful things a year, not piles of cheap crap, and keeps shoes and boots for eons, thanks to "Alex," the shoemaker on Main at Pico in Santa Monica.)
A Parisian friend texted me on my Paris mobile phone while I was riding home, dejected, on the Metro:
What boutique are you in right now and what are you buying?
I texted back:
I was in Galeries Lafayette where I learned how much the dollar is like the fifty cent piece...boohoo
All you economists and economist wanna-be's out there...who the hell is responsible for what's become of the dollar? Long list, please. Be precise. Name names.
P.S. Here's a little kick start on your name-naming from a piece in the W$J by Simon Kennedy and Lisa Twaronite:
The dollar marked a new record low against the euro Wednesday amid growing expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut U.S. interest rates next week and fears that the credit crunch is threatening the health of the U.S. economy.The euro was up 0.5% against the greenback, at $1.3903, after earlier touching $1.3913 -- its highest level since the European currency was launched in January 1999.
The dollar has been in decline for the last several sessions amid a growing consensus that the central bank will cut its key federal funds rate, after the collapse of the subprime- mortgage market sent shockwaves through global credit markets.
Sunday In the Park With Mohammed
Houssein Zorkot, a Muslim third-year medical student residing in Dearbornistan, as Debbie Schlussel calls this heavily Muslim section of Detroit, Michigan, was allegedly hanging out in a park there in camouflage and black face paint, and toting an assault rifle. Robert Spencer at Jihadwatch writes that this behavior...
...recalls the recent Doctors' Plot in the UK, and the news that came out at that time of large-scale attempts by jihadists to recruit doctors and other professionals.But let us not rush to judgment. Maybe he was hunting squirrels.
Yes, I'm sure he was. The metaphorical kind.
I just love it -- via the comments on Jihadwatch, the guy's got a website. The opening page, if you clip off his name from the end (which I did in this link) says "Welcome to the land of resistence and freedom," and goes on to "The Divine Victory" page, with links to Khomeini and other scumbags. There aren't a lot of words on his personal pages, but the pictures say a lot. Note that there are no women on his friends page. And then there's this Lebanon visit from 2005, with a big phallic love note to Hezbollah.
photo via Detroit's WXYZ TV
If It Quags Like Osama...
From what I've read about Islam on sites like Jihadwatch.com since September 11, 2001, I disagree with Radley Balko that Osama and Co. are operating according to a bastardization of Islam. But, in this Foxnews.com piece, Balko's right that Bin Laden is free, Bush dropped his promise to go after him about 20 minutes after making it, and that Bin Laden has succeeded into drawing the USA into a giant, no-win quagmire in Iraq:
Wright explains that Bin Laden's goal was to goad the United States into a long, drawn-out war with Isalmic mujahadeen, the same way he did with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Soviets left a decade-long war battered, dejected, and demoralized, and though the real victors were the Afghan resistance fighters themselves, Bin Laden was able to claim credit for helping to stave off a world super-power, despite being outmanned and outgunned.He had hoped to lure the United States into the same sort of protracted quagmire, where U.S. troops would have no choice but to occupy a tattered, dangerous country, while—as in the Soviet-Afghan war—radical Muslims would come from all over the world to help humiliate another world power.
The thing is, Bin Laden thought this second war would also be in Afghanistan. He hoped first to lure the U.S. through the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. When President Clinton didn't react, Bin Laden went about planning the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. had to act after Sept. 11. And we initially thwarted Bin Laden's plan with a decisive, overwhelming victory in Afghanistan.
Wright writes that Bin Laden was dejected at the ease with which U.S. military power dispatched with the Taliban, which then sent him into hiding. But instead of seeing that operation through to its logical conclusion—the capture of Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and the rest of the Al-Qaeda leadership—we turned our attention to Iraq.
We have created in Iraq the exact type of scenario Bin Laden was hoping (but failed) to lure us into in Afghanistan—an unwinnable war where we're isolated from the world, our troops are walking targets for guerilla terrorists, and our only options are bad (pull out and hope for minimal carnage) and worse (stay in, where our troops will continue to die, and where there's no prospect for stability in the near future).
A loosely-connected, (relatively) poorly funded, backward-thinking organization like Al-Qaeda could never inflict significant harm on the United States, at least not in a straightforward war. Their best hope is to scare us into rash, ill-considered actions like overextending our military, alienating our allies, and doing away with the open society and civil liberties that define who we are.
Six years have passed since Sept. 11. That's enough time and distance for us to take a couple of steps back, look at that horrible day with some perspective, and reevaluate if the course we've charted is the correct one. We should bear in mind that Al-Qaeda could never defeat us on its own. It can only frighten and trap us into defeating ourselves.
Some Like It Scot
(Yes, I know Marilyn did the grate scene in The Seven-Year Itch, but it sucked as a punny title.)
If you're going to invade another country, this is the way to do it: Wear skirts, sing silly songs day and night at the top of your lungs, and drink all their beer. And, at the end of the day, leave the streets of Paris awash with the stuff (no, that isn't water).
And, finally, do your best Marilyn Monroe for the seemingly harmless American girl with the camera.
There was actually a guy who did a near-perfect Marilyn imitation, but we were too far away to catch it at night, without light, or so Gregg said. Never mind "too far"...I bolted across about four lanes of traffic on the rue de Rivoli to ask these guys if I could take a picture of them.
Poor lads were terribly shy and retiring.
Pissing On Virgil
God is not great, but Hitchens sure is. This past week, Gregg and I were in Virgil's birthplace, Mantua, Italy, for the Festivaletteratura, and so was Christopher Hitchens -- to debate slippery Muslim sophist Tariq Ramadan.
Ramadan must have realized his po-mo blather was no match for the mind of Hitchens, and snaked out of the one-on-one. I guess Ramadan thought he'd have an easy time doing the usual: soft-pedaling the real Muslim goals -- laying waste to western culture and secular democracies, converting or killing the "infidels," and instituting Sharia law.
Luckily, Tariquie didn't get off so easy. Hitchens crashed Ramadan's solo speaking event and had at it from the audience. Here's an excerpt of his account, from Slate (but be sure to go to the link and read Hitchens' dissection of slimey Ramadan's post-modern wrigglings):
In Mantua, (Ramadan) was trying to deal with the question of dual loyalty, as between allegiance to Islam and allegiance to the democratic secular European governments under which Muslim immigrants now choose to live. He redirected the question to South Africa, where, he said, under the apartheid system there was a moral duty not to obey the law. After sitting through this and much else, I rose to ask him a few questions. Wasn't it true that the Muslim leadership in South Africa had actually endorsed the apartheid regime? Wasn't it evasive of him to discuss the headscarf in France rather than the more pressing question of the veil or niqab in Britain? Wasn't it true that imams in Denmark had solicited the intervention of foreign embassies to call for censorship of cartoons in Copenhagen? And was it not the case that he owed his position as an informal cultural negotiator to the fact that his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, had been the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization of which his father had also been a leader in Egypt?He described my last question as too "offensive" to deserve an answer. He gave quite a good reply on the Danish point, saying that the imams in question had been a minority and should not have received support from foreign governments. He completely dodged the question of the veil in Britain, ignored my request that he give any reason to believe that women were wearing it voluntarily, and he admitted that the Deobandi Muslim leadership in South Africa had indeed been a pillar of the old regime. On the other hand, he added, some Muslims had been anti-apartheid, and these were the "real" ones. Indeed, on everything from stoning to suicide-murder to anti-Semitism, he argues that the problem is not with the "text" itself, or with Islam, but with misinterpretation of it. How convenient. Ramadan often relies on the ignorance of his Western audiences. He maintained that there was no textual authority for the killing of those who abandon their fealty to Islam, whereas the Muslim hadith, which have canonical authority, prescribe death as the punishment for apostasy in so many words.
When I went to Ramadan's event in the Palazzo d'Arco, I had just finished reading Osama Bin Laden's latest anniversary prose-poem. Here, too, are signs of an act being cleaned up. He brags of the murders of Sept. 11, of course (thus inconveniencing all those who attribute them to Mossad or some mysterious other agency), but he does not forget to cite Noam Chomsky, CIA maverick Michael Scheuer, and the Oliver Stone theory of the JFK assassination. He also exhibits concern for the global-warming crisis, the fate of American Indians, and even the recent collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Everything he says about the war in Iraq, right up to the affected concern for the civilian and military casualties, is presented as if he had hired one of Michael Moore's screenwriters as a consultant. Most unctuous of all, he reminds his audience that the Quran has a whole section in praise of the Virgin Mary, an ecumenical point that I had noticed before. (It is typical of monotheisms to plagiarize each other's worst features, from Abraham onward.) I think that this pitch is probably too crude and crass to work, but it's exactly the crudeness and crassness of Bin Laden that require the emergence of more "credible" middlemen to allay anxiety and offer reassurance. Only six years on, and already the soft mainstreaming of Islamic imperialism is under way.
Presidential Power Grab
The current administration's traces back to the Nixon years. Charlie Savage, author of the new book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, digs into Dick Cheney's past:
I kept asking the question why. What was driving Dick Cheney and the other “presidentialists” who were so relentlessly and systematically pushing this agenda, about which they had said nothing to voters when campaigning for the office? Where was this coming from? This question took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, where the National Archives houses a bookcase full of documents in gray boxes titled “RICHARD CHENEY FILES.” From that pile of memos, written when a 33-year-old Cheney had become the youngest White House chief of staff in history, the answers emerged. Day upon day in the Ford White House, after Watergate and Vietnam had brought Nixon’s “imperial presidency” crashing down, Dick Cheney had confronted a Congress that was determined to re-impose constitutional controls on White House power. He was outraged. It felt like a siege – a siege that would weaken the commander-in-chief, and hence America. He and those who felt like him, abandoning the traditional conservative suspicion of concentrated government power, would spend the next 30 years working to roll back the changes of the 1970s and restore presidential power to the inflated levels it had briefly reached under Nixon.It was clear that the signing statements story, as amazing as it was, was in fact just the proverbial tip of the iceberg – one tactic among many toward achieving a hidden agenda 30 years in the making. To explain what has happened to executive power over the last seven years, and where all this came from, I needed to write a book. It is one thing to report, in an 800-word newspaper story, that the administration has expanded secrecy and tightened its control over the flow of information to Congress and the public, and it is another thing to demonstrate how this has happened on a dramatic scale by taking a full chapter to examine dozens upon dozens of ways that this has happened, a steady accumulation that is staggering when piled atop one another. It is one thing to report that the Bush legal team advanced a controversial view of executive power, and it is another to tell the full story of players such as John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith, Alberto Gonzales, and David Addington, in narrative form, and to take the time to explain to non-lawyers in plain English what their theories are all about. It is one thing to give a headline, and another to tell a story.
The working title of the book was “The Cheney Project.” The title changed, but the final book closely follows that framework. The book leave gave me the time to gather and organize an enormous amount of additional research and interviews to demonstrate what has been happening. Early responses have been flattering. The San Francisco Chronicle called the book “a masterful work of investigative journalism” and the conservative columnist George F. Will described the book as “meticulous reporting and lucid explanations of audacious theories invented to justify novel presidential powers.”
One final opening thought: I want to emphasize that I do not think that presidential power is a partisan issue. Although we are having this discussion in the context of a Republican administration, we have had Democratic presidents in the past and we will have them again in the future. These future Democratic presidents will be able to invoke the same novel powers that the Bush administration has pioneered in order to unilaterally impose their own agendas. Thus, preserving the Founders’ system of checks and balances is in the long-term interest of all Americans, regardless of their party affiliation or policy preferences. Despite its aggressive title, it was very important to me in writing this book to maintain a detached tone in “Takeover” and to let the facts quietly speak for themselves. I knew I had succeeded when well-known conservatives such as George Will, Richard Epstein, Mickey Edwards, and others endorsed the book, along with John Dean, Larry Tribe, Harold Koh, and Norman Ornstein.
Whatever your politics, I hope that you, too, find the book both enjoyable to read and valuable as a guide to understanding better what has been happening beneath the headlines in recent years – and its implications for the future of American democracy.
via Romenesko
The World Cup Runneth Over
Paris is teeming with Scots, and I think they're all on our block. Gregg went to Franprix (the grocery store), where these three lads and a bunch of their countrymen packed the place.
(I wouldn't go there anytime soon expecting to find even a drop of alcohol left on the shelves.)
Gregg literally ran a gauntlet of Scotsmen on his way there. On his way back, he said, some were even laying down in the street, blocking the buses.
Gregg asked how they all got to Paris, and a kid -- a young, apple-cheeked blond in a kilt -- rapidfired, "We got here by train, by plane, and by automobile. Some of us kayaked, some of us swam, and some of us walked."
One guy projected that there would be 12,000 Scotsmen here by Wednesday night; a lot of them by the Eiffel Tower.
Gregg said:
It's like there are drunken male locusts sucking up all the beer in town, and if they get desperate enough, drinking the wine.But, it's not like they're annoying. It's just amazing that they have this permanent sense of celebration. It's not like somebody who paints their face blue on Sunday for a Dallas Cowboys game in hopes that the camera moves in on them.
These guys have this singular passion. They're laying down in front of buses, they don't care...the way locusts rub their little feet together, these guys scream at the top of their lungs every song they've learned.
It's 20 to midnight right now, and they're still out there, and the cops just stay away.
photos by Gregg Sutter
Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic -- And Refraining
That would be refraining from blowing the rest of us up. Dipesh Gadher writes in The Times Of London that new citizenship lessons in Britain will focus on pointing out to Muslims why they shouldn't blow other people up and should instead resort to non-violent means of protest:
Young Muslims will be asked to consider the impact of the 7/7 bombings on their victims; encouraged to report terrorist plots to the police; and women advised not to wear the full Islamic veil to “avoid confrontation”.Drawing on the Koran to counter extremist ideology, pupils will be taught to channel any anger against British foreign policy into legitimate forms of protest, such as the ballot box.
The curriculum is already being used in up to 200 Islamic schools, or madrasahs, as well as some mainstream state schools, mainly in West Yorkshire. Now, the government, which has part funded the initiative, wants to see it rolled out nationally in madrasahs and schools, though there are no plans to make it compulsory.
Officials estimate that about 100,000 Muslim children attend madrasahs or religious classes at mosques each day, normally after school or at the weekend. But the instruction they receive has traditionally focused on reciting the Koran and learning Arabic.
The new citizenship classes have been introduced by the Bradford Council of Mosques, which has trained about 50 imams in the “Nasiha” (good advice) curriculum.
Sorry, but if you're inviting somebody to dinner, and you need to first instruct them in why they shouldn't smear your walls with food and feces...do you have them in your home at all?
There's freedom of religion, which I'm for -- not prohibiting silly people from exercising their belief, sans evidence, that there's a big man in the sky who gives a shit about their daily doings. And not keeping them from digging into all the rest of the ludicrous trimmings of the business that is religion.
That said, I'm particularly amazed when somebody thanks god for sparing their 4-year-old when somebody else's 4-year-old got squashed; according to their belief system, by god's big thumb. Of course, when their kid gets iced, they like to think of it more kindly ("It was his time to go, blah blah blah," as opposed to "How unfortunate that he wandered into the street," or better yet, "Mommy should have been keeping an eyeball on her spawn instead of paying all her attention to mixing her martini").
There was some college kid this week who lived after his car crashed in a wooded area. I read about it on CNN. Naturally, his survival was attributed to god, and more specifically, his father's prayers being answered -- not the fact that he finally realized he wasn't going to get found and got his ass out of the car and crawled to the road. But, if he was saved because Daddy prayed right...college boys who die in similar incidents do so because their parents' prayers were faulty?
This sort of thinking can be exceptionally cruel in close quarters. Christopher Hitchens, who sat with me at the Einaudi dinner at Festivaletteratura, reminded me of a Primo Levi story about Auschwitz, probably from The Drowned And The Saved, where a guy is thanking god aloud for sparing him from death where the guy next to him is slated to go to the gas chambers. I'm reminded of the bumper sticker: "Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you're an asshole." Except in this case, "god" apparently thinks the guy going to the ovens isn't worth a shit. At least, that's the message the praying guy was sending.
Believers like to use god in a way that serves their superstitions and their egos. And in the case of Islam, their god belief, and following their religion, serves their nasty-little-fourth-grader-on-the-playground psychology: "We're really cool and you suck and we're going to take you over and make you all do it our way!"
Of course, there's violence against others advocated in the texts of all primitive god belief systems -- Judaism, Christianity, and more obscure religions -- but you don't see or hear rabbis or ministers standing up in their houses of primitive worship and encouraging their (aptly named) "flock" to go out and kill anybody who doesn't do it their way.
So, fine, if these nonthinkers, and astrologers and the like are part of free, western, democratic societies -- but why are we letting in religious nutters whose stated goal is killing or converting all of us and turning our societies into places where women have the rights of dogs, and we're all governed by Sharia law?
What Elmore Leonard Really Thought Of 3:10 To Yuma
One of the things I love about Elmore is that he's strictly no bullshit. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop PR people from trying to extract bullshit (by ambushing Elmore after a screening of James Mangold's "3:10 to Yuma," and counting on him being too nice a guy to refuse to talk to them)...and then trying to turn no bullshit into serious bullshit. In short, in the electronic press kit, they cut out pretty much everything he said, and left only "It's a good-looking picture."
Here's the part that ended up on the cutting room floor:
Q: After watching this film, was there anything that particularly stood out; the landscape, the action, the themes?EL: Well I think it’s a very good looking picture; the way people were dressed and the landscape, I did object to the boy who says “you don’t know shit”, which to me is a very current expression. He wouldn’t have used that term back [then]. And also when Charlie Prince says “listen up,” [trying to get the townspeople’s attention] because “listen up” was not used until World War 2. And the stuff about the Apache Indians attacking at night. [They never attacked at night] They believed if they were killed at night then their spirits would wander around in darkness eternally.
Q: And there were other key differences from the 1957 version. What did you think about these changes?
EL: I thought it was cluttered in certain places with characters and people. I wondered why at the end, [Russell Crowe] shot all of his guys. You know and he says, well I have been to Yuma before and escaped both times, which reminded me of the end of “Out of Sight” when [Samuel Jackson] gets into the same van with [Clooney], [and] we find out [he] is an escape artist. He escaped from nine different federal prisons, which then puts Clooney in a position where he can smile and then the audience says “good, he’ll escape.” You know, [a] happy ending.
Q: And you felt the changes in this one…
EL: I didn’t understand why [Russell Crowe] shot his own men. Because he was all for them before. Why [did] he have the change of heart? I don’t think Bale was effective in what he was doing. You could feel sorry for him but why? Because every time Bale said “well I have this problem I have that problem,” [Crowe] never sympathized with him ever….and then he shoots his own guys.
Q: Right. What did you think of the performances with Russell Crowe as Ben Wade?
EL: Oh I thought he was great. Yeah, I thought all the acting was fine -
Q: And how about Christian Bale?
EL: Christian Bale was good, but it was a tough part. It was a very tough part. I did not understand why the son, in the very beginning was so down on him? I don’t think a fourteen year old boy would be that knowing to criticize his dad.
Q: What was it like in your initial meetings with James Mangold?
EL: I haven’t met him. I like “Walked the Line” a lot.
Q: There is some historical detail added to this film, like the building of the railroad. What did you think about these details that were added to the film?
EL: Well, I didn’t get that.
Q: Is there something about James Mangold that you admire about him being a director now and making a Western film?
EL: Well I wonder why he wanted to remake this one? That would be my first question. He should have remade one that didn’t work.
Q: Well thank you. Is there anything else that you want to share about “3:10 to Yuma?”
EL: Well I think it’s a good picture and I hope it’s very successful.
My particular favorite remark from Elmore is "Well I wonder why he wanted to remake this one? That would be my first question. He should have remade one that didn’t work."
And now, word is Kevin Costner wants to remake Hombre -- at least per what Elmore told the audience that at Festivaletteratura in Mantua. And then, he asked why Costner or somebody doesn't make one like Cuba Libre, that hasn't been made. Or Gunsights. Elmore has so many amazing western novels and stories and all these Hollyweasels are hot to remake one...and then they choose something like Hombre, a film by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman. Sorry, but how do you remake that one better than the original?
Idjits.
Don't even get me started on The Big Bounce, Elmore's first crime novel, which they shot on the beach in Oahu because they got a tax break. (The film was so bad the director, George Armitage walked off the movie, and the producer, Steve Bing, apologized to Elmore at the premiere.)
Elmore sometimes says at book signings that the original The Big Bounce was the second worst movie ever made -- because he figured there had to be one that was worse. And then, he said, when he saw the remake, he finally knew what was the worst movie ever made. And that, apparently, was even worse than the movie version of Be Cool, which was pretty damn terrible, and nothing like the book. Word to directors attempting to bring Elmore Leonard to the screen: Stick to the book, and stick to the dialogue.
Barry Sonnenfeld asked Elmore for advice before he made Get Shorty, and Elmore said, best I can paraphrase: When somebody says something funny, don't cut away to other characters for their reaction. Just let it play out, because they don't know they're being funny. Sonnenfeld did that, and the movie worked. And then some.
P.S. Apparently, Travolta asked if he could dance. Sonnenfeld said no. The day before production started on Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty, F. Gary Gray, the director, asked Elmore if he had any advice. And Elmore said the exact same thing he said to Barry Sonnenfeld.
Unfortunately, F. Gary Gray either had a lot of ear wax that day and didn't have the good sense or the balls big enough to tell Travolta no when he asked to dance. Even worse, together, Travolta and Uma Thurman had all the sexual chemistry of two dancing planks of pressed particle board. Of course, Uma typically has zero sexual chemistry with anyone on screen, and Travolta probably would rather have been dancing with Fabio.
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Street Where We Live
This week, anyway.
We're in Paris, renting a lovely apartment in the Marais, around the corner from the Maison Européene de la Photographie, and not far from Musée Picasso, Place des Vosges, and Beauborg. It's the old Jewish section of Paris, but now, it's becoming kind of a gay section of Paris -- not with porno stores like on rue St. Denis, but fashionably gay, like Christopher Street or WeHo.
And yes, it is true, what they say about gay men.
(They have much cuter dogs.)
The Scumbag Responds
Robert Sexton is, as we know, a bald-faced liar. For those who aren't in the know, or haven't clicked the above links, Sexton is the guy who was repeatedly spamming me and numerous other people; in my case, from February through the end of August, despite my entreaties by e-mail and phone for him to stop.
Of course, the guy, who's supposed to be an Internet business expert, was too dim to Google my name and his to see if maybe his rebuttal to my complaint at the Better Business Bureau wouldn't quite fly...vis a vis the lengthy posts I'd made on my site, complete with screenshots. In his BBB rebuttal, he started out with this, intimating that I'd contacted them about doing business with them:
Ms. Alkon contacted our company about three weeks ago after having found our site ... and when we told her the cost of what we do,
He never told me the cost of what he did because I didn't ask, or frankly, give him a chance to talk about the merits of spamming the fuck out of people who want to be left alone. He went on to pretend that he thought I could be some chick who worked for a California-based spammer (a supposed Internet worker who doesn't exist on Google, with a name [Amy Alcon] that doesn't exist much of anywhere). Hence, I posted this rebuttal on the BBB site:
This guy is lying. I'm a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, published author, and blogger. I don't work for spammers, I didn’t contact this guy after having "found (their) site," or ask for prices. Like many people, I have been being spammed by him for months on two different e-mail addresses, and complained because Sexton ignored my repeated e-mails asking him to stop. All the documentation to refute what he says above is here: http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2007/08/how_do_you_feel_1.html Or just google "Robert Sexton" and spammer -Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist, advicegoddess.com
Well he's done it again. Here's his BBB rebuttal to my rebuttal:
Her response has zero to do with the fact she contacted us three weeks ago, and everything else I said was in fact true. I still have her shrieking voicemail where she said 'all companies like yours should be forced to donate their money to the homeless' etc etc. All she has to do, per Federal regulations, is simply click on our opt out link or reply saying 'remove'. We're fully CAN-SPAM compliant. The fact she's a nationally known columnist has zero to do with what I am saying. We have no desire to sell her our product, nor any desire to be in contact with her.
What a moron. I guess he figures people will just shell out bucks to him, and not be the least bit curious about copy/pasting my link into their browser, and maybe searching my site for "Robert Sexton" or just "scumbag."
Sexton's e-mails are anything but CAN-SPAM compliant, as they do not post an opt-out link at the bottom, do not respond to directly e-mailed responses to be removed from their list, do not post their street address, and slimey Robert Sexton only responded to my requests to be removed when I made them to Kathryn Bishop, one of the people mentioned in his e-mail, who's a real business genius herself (would you use a real estate broker mentioned in every one of the numerous spam you've been getting -- since February -- from some slimebag? I sure wouldn't, and told her so on the phone -- the one thing that seemed to jolt her into action, and the one thing that got Sexton to finally e-mail me back after all the entreaties from me, asking him to stop spamming me, that he ignored).
Oh, and yes, even here in Paris, on my laptop, there's evidence Robert Sexton is a bald-faced liar. Here's a screenshot of one of the five e-mails he sent me on August 29. See that opt-out link he claims is in there?
I find it scary that the guy just flips lies off like they're nothing. FYI, there's never been an opt-out link in any e-mail he's sent me, and they aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on anyway.
What makes me happiest is that this is now yet another post, if you Google "Robert Sexton" spam or spammer that will come up on the Internet, showing that this man makes money by stealing others' time. And, as time is money, Robert Sexton is no less a thief than a crack junkie who breaks into your house and steals your TV.
P.S. Sexton, so sorry you seem to have the intelligence of a retarded Rhesus monkey, but if you don't want to do business with somebody (per your comment, "We have no desire to sell her our product, nor any desire to be in contact with her") the best way to accomplish that is to respond to that person's repeated e-mails to be removed from your spam lists before that person gets her back up and starts posting complaints about your business practices at the BBB. (Note that I don't appeal to your sense of fairness and decency, since it's clear they left those on the floor at the factory.)
"Opt-Out" Increases Spam
Those little buttons at the bottom of spam e-mail, telling you to click to opt out of having your time thieved by spammers? Don't click 'em.
StopScum.com has it here:
Spam Tricks: Don't click the opt-out (Remove Me) link or pay money for a do not Spam remove listSpammers are clever con artist, scam kings, criminals, low life, and all of them belong in jail. In this installment we document a couple of procedures which guarantee that you will receive even more Spam and in other cases part with your hard earned money.
Just Trash the Spam: DO NOT opt-out
I'm sure you've seen the Spam selling pills, mortgages, porn, get rich schemes, etc. This junk often includes a link to remove your email address from the Spam list. This opt-out is a scam to verify your email address and rarely removes you from the list. What it does do is tell the Spammer that the email address works and a real life person is reading the email. If you do click the opt-out link the Spammer uses your address to not only send more Spam but sell it a zillion times to other Spammers. This will definitely increase the amount of Spam you receive so NEVER opt-out.
And here's a study that proves what StopScum contends above:
The efficacy of CAN-SPAM rests largely on its opt-out provisions. All commercial e-mails must offer recipients the opportunity to opt out of future e-mailings, either via e-mail or an Internet-based mechanism; e-mailers are required by law to honor these requests.Did opting-out make a difference? Yes, it did. It attracted more spam. As Figure 2 illustrates, the opt-out addresses received 1,153 messages, while the comparison addresses received only 745 e-mails. The two groups showed little difference until week 11. When the amount of spam began to increase, so too did the gap between the Opt-Outs and the No Responses (see Figure 3). The persistent gap in Figure 3 demonstrates that CAN-SPAM’s opt-out provision has had the opposite of its intended effect.
All The News That's Fit To Wear
And other stuff from the papers and my head, too, coming soon.
We just got to Paris this afternoon, and I was too bone-tired tired to put up a blog item. Well, a coherent and meaningful blog item. More words on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures.
Here's one of Gregg's chess partner, Boris Spasky.
Here are two Leonards -- Elmore and his son Peter, who just got a two book deal for his suspense novels.
Gregg read Peter's first book and said it was "very good, very suspenseful." Elmore likes it, too, which means a lot, since, as Peter said, if Elmore didn't, Peter would hear about it.
And here's a kiss from the most interesting dinner companion in the world, who I was lucky enough to sit next to at the Einaudi dinner.
Amy/Hitchens shot by Gregg Sutter
What “Priority” Means To Air France
Apparently, not a fuck of a lot. They just stick it on your luggage when you fly business class, as we did, lucky us, so you have some false sense that somebody gives a shit about what happens to your luggage vis a vis all the people unlucky enough to fly cattle class.
Now, not only am I not a girl who leaves the house in typical Los Angeles attire (an outfit perfect for cleaning out the garage or picking lettuce), I am a girl who, about once a week, wears an fishtail taffeta evening dress skirt to pick up the dog at the groomer or to write at a coffee shop. Going on crash glamour diet -- in other words, wearing the same clothes on Saturday that I was wearing when I got on the Air France jet Tuesday night in Los Angeles -- is definitely not my thing.
After we flew out from Los Angeles, we had a night in Paris before getting on the plane to Bologne, but we had nothing but our carry-on bags in France, as some genius at the airline checked our bags through to Bologne, an hour-and-a-half car ride from Mantua, where we arrived Thursday. My bag apparently stamped its little wheeled feet and refused to get on the plane (either that or some lazy asshat at Air France/Charles de Gaulle didn’t check the tag and forward it to my final destination).
Here’s the beautiful little street where our hotel is located, and where my bag was repeatedly not delivered (and thanks, Air France, for not calling and not calling and not calling to let me know it wouldn’t be delivered when you said it would be, and said it would be, and...you get the idea).
Making matters worse, I’m not exactly camping in Italy (not that I camp at all). I’m attending the Festivaletteratura, accompanying Gregg who is accompanying Elmore Leonard, who just did his session with wildman Italian Journalisto Paolo Zaccagnini.
Making matters even worse, the Air Francies keep telling me and telling me my luggage is with the courier and will be delivered. Problem is, we leave for Paris tomorrow morning, and I have zero confidence it will actually get here before we leave. Marella, who’s running the festival, and is just wonderful, offered to send a courier to the airport or to the courier who supposedly have it, to pick it up. No dice. The people on the “customer service” line at Air France (and I use that term VERY LOOSELY) say they do not have the name or number of the courier service and simply send an intranet message to the people in baggage services at the airport who deal with it. Luckily, when I got out of college, I produced commercials for Ogilvy & Mather in New York, and I know to get the number of such people in advance lest such issues arise. Unfortunately, it seems such people -- in this case, a woman named Natasha in Air France baggage services at the airport -- know better than to answer their fucking telephone. Ever, it seems.
Note to Natasha: It is my sincerest wish that you travel to America, and lose your luggage in Cleveland, with all your best clothes in it, and are thus forced to attend some important event in your underwear (which you’ve been wearing for five days straight [not to worry, they have underwear stores in Mantua, and I’ve been a repeat customer]). Anyway, I’m envisioning numerous promises being made that your luggage will be returned to you, causing you to trek across town on foot, missing the events you were in town to attend, and then, at the end, you will return home and the courier company will throw your luggage in the Cuyahoga River, which Gregg always reminds me once caught fire, and then I will happen to be traveling through Cleveland at that very moment, and happen, for no reason whatsoever, to light a match and throw it in the river, reducing your dearest belongings to a tiny pile of soggy ash.
Meanwhile, in case you Advice Goddess Blog readers are holding your breath wondering how I’ve been making out on my glamour diet, the first night, I tried to be a sport about it and bought a clean eggplant-colored tee-shirt at Benetton. Luckily, I do not travel looking like I’m on my way to gym or the bed -- although, in anticipation of situations like this, my airplane pants are made out of recycled plastic milk bottles or something, and look none the worse for wear. Because Gregg got his luggage, including all his fresh-from-the-Detroit dry cleaner’s shirts, I’ve improvised a little fashion today out of an XL Geoffrey Beene number I nicked from him.
I’m going shopping again this afternoon with Elmore's son Peter, because I am most certainly NOT wearing the same clothes I’ve been wearing since Tuesday evening, plus my boyfriend’s shirt, to the banquet tonight. Air France, expect a skirt and shirt or a dress on your bill, thanks. Plus some new underwear, to say the least.
There is one bright spot on the horizon. Well, on my ears, actually. Yesterday afternoon, not feeling quite my self (on a typical day I go through clothing changes like Cher, along with generally favoring a look that’s a little more glam) I bought a pair of giant jeweled earrings, which do glitter things up -- at least to the point where I look in the mirror and recognize myself. Phew!
Welcome To Benetton
Air France lost my luggage for a few days, so this wonderful woman, Luciana, who was just supposed to drop Gregg and me off at our hotel in Mantua, took me shopping and on a little tour. It so happened that the Benetton where I went to buy a shirt used to be the oldest cinema in Europe, opened in 1905, says Luciana.
There really isn't a bad view in the town.
By the way, we're here with Elmore Leonard for the Festivaletteratura. Here's Elmore with Russell Banks after Banks' session this morning.
(You gotta love a country that serves wine before 11 a.m.!)
Here's Gregg's lunch -- meat 'n' potatoes, Mantua-style.
As a culinary adventurer, I chose the veal tartare.
I don't know how to say "incredible" in Italian, but you get the idea.
"They Are Many Funny Rules"
"Funny, how?" as Joe Pesci would ask? In Muslim cultures, there isn't a lot to laugh about -- especially not for women, who have the rights of dogs, and can be killed for having sex before or outside of marriage.
A regular Canadian reader of my blog has been corresponding with a 30-something woman in Iran and here's something she wrote him recently:
i don't got marriage yet , & i don't have any serious relation , i had a lot of men in my friend but not my boy friend. U know in Iran any relation without marriage is not allowed.specially sex. If a woman had it may be killing her, but for men not like woman , it has lower penalty.... about divorce, it is allowable for Muslim but they are many funny rules , men can able to divorce, Evey time without any reason, but women cant, if a women want divorce it is very difficult. If a women got marriage she cant go out of Iran without husband's permit. If a couple divorce, children are belong to their father. and etc.
Civil Rights Versus Silly Stunts
A post I did on LA Times op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan managing to find racism in the fact that Banana Republic came out with a perfume called Alabaster, and never mind that, as commenter Kate posted:
Kaplan can buy Black Orchid, or Eau Noire, Noir Epices, Geisha Noir, Bvlgari Black, Exclamation Noir, Crystal Noir, Narcisse Noir, Magie Noir, Black Cashmere, Black Pearls, 360 Black, Kenneth Cole Black, Perry Black, and so on. The Amber names list is even longer. Kaplan's got one theme, can't write only anything else, and is going to work that trope until she falls down dead, hammer in her hand.
I got linked by somebody, and brought over a lot of huffy commenters accusing me of just about everything short of broiling black babies. Commenter Brian cut to the chase:
Are there people who intentionally hold people's blackness against them? No doubt. The solution is not to turn the entire world into a racialist pissing match where revenge is the only goal. The entire point of this post and subsequent rants is very simply this: if you have nothing better to do with your time than rail against a white chick in a perfume ad then perhaps you ought to reconsider your existence. Because you aren't adding anything to the sum total of human experience.
And from two of my comments there:
It's action that instigates change, but it's a whole lot easier to manufacture problems and pile on on others' manufactured problems instead of taking on the real onesMaybe instead of whining that I don't support affirmative action, and calling me racist for calling Erin Aubry Kaplan on her silly bullshit (she grew up privileged in Los Angeles, unlike me), you should be pressing for parents of children (all children, but that's just me...but you can just press for parents of black children) to foster ambition in their children, teach them the importance of paying attention in school, and work to make schools better in inner-city neighborhoods. My mom was a pain in the ass, showing up at school and demanding things be different. You are...posting huffily on my blog? Right.
Right in line with this thinking is a great op-ed piece in the W$J by Michael Meyers, exec director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistannt national director of the NAACP. He writes that the highlight of this summer's NAACP convention was a symbolic burial of "the n-word," and says the organization has to reform itself, making public education the civil rights issue of our times:
In other words, the nation's oldest, largest and once-fierce champion of civil rights has been reduced to staging publicity stunts....The shifting of its purposes -- from an interracial and integrationist organization to one aimed at airing racial grievances -- threatens the NAACP with oblivion. For more than a decade, no one at the top has uttered the "i-word" for fear of alienating young blacks who were segregating themselves on campuses. Instead the organization began identifying with ghetto blacks who deified skin color, and lashed out at "Uncle Toms" and others whose moral behavior and speech patterns displayed middle-class values.
The NAACP's rank-and-file also seems hell-bent on romanticizing the warped values and mindset of the obstinate subgroup of young blacks that Cora Daniels calls "ghettonation." There has been no general alarm issued, much less a call to arms, to save these very black youths from their patterns of illiteracy, welfare dependency, criminality and social dysfunction. Instead, while an entire generation of young blacks has been weaned on racial difference, racial rhetoric and racial chauvinism, the NAACP went silent.
...the NAACP must make public education the civil-rights issue of our times. Everything else will fall into place if young blacks overcome illiteracy, stay in school, and are inculcated with a love for learning and for the pursuit of excellence instead of trained to accept mediocrity and quotas as a means of social advancement.
Holding school authorities accountable -- including black teachers and black-dominated school boards such as in Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C. -- must be the priority. That means tutoring pupils and coaching teachers so that they pass standardized competency tests, and eschewing notions that such examinations are "culturally biased."
A revamped NAACP should not accept any alibis for blacks' academic underachievement. It would take the lead in answering those black educators and their paternalistic allies who develop ghetto industries for grants and careers explaining blacks' deficits. It would confront separatist schemes such as "black paradigms" of learning and Ebonics as the language of Africans in America.
And the NAACP should urge black Americans, at long last, to drop their hyphenated African roots. We are several hundred years out of Africa, and unless we are recent immigrants our connection to the African continent is not only minimal but mostly pretense and posturing.
Put On Your Red Wigs
Just got an advice request from a guy, and I'm in an airport hotel in Paris enroute to Mantua, Italy, and I'm not sure how much Internet access I'll have there. I had a few questions to ask him, which I e-mailed him, so I have yet to answer. But, hey, how about you have at it?
But first, do your homework. Read my column on crossdressing, Who Wears The Panties In The Family? Here's an excerpt from my answer:
There’s a U.S. senator who can’t speak publicly unless he’s wearing pantyhose. He was a patient of Dr. William Stayton, a psychologist and leading expert on cross-dressing. “Underneath his blue suit and tie he wore pantyhose and a bra and women’s underwear,” Stayton told me in a recent interview. “He was always worried somebody would lift his pant leg and see his pantyhose. But it was the only way he could calmly speak before the Senate.”So, one man’s Prozac is another man’s pantyhose. So what? My boyfriend compared the senator’s cross-dressing to his own penchant for hats. “When I wear my Henschel High Roller I have a totally different outlook. You swagger a bit, you just know you’re cool. I take the hat off, and I’m just another guy.”
Here's the guy's question. (I'm especially interested in hearing how women would feel if they were in this woman's place):
I'm a middle-aged straight guy who has worn ladies, nylon panties for several years with the full knowledge and support of my late wife. We'd often buy matching pairs just for fun. Unfortunately, I lost her about 18 months ago and am just beginning to "date" again, though nothing serious and nothing intimate. However (the word which makes your career possible), a lady with whom I've been spending time seems to enjoy my company and I hers. While I'm a widower, she's divorced; we both have grown children and are in our 50's. My question is at what point do I reveal my prediliction for frilly underwear? I'm straight and, except for a minor dalliance fortified by alcohol and curiousity in college, have never been interested in, or engaged in, sex with a man. I don't dress in women's clothes, except for panties and an occasional matching camisole. I own no dresses, high heels, or bras. I just find your underpants more fun, comfortable, and interesting than whitey-tighteys, boxers, or men's briefs. A nice pastel bikini from Vanity Fair is just fine. I may be presumptious, but I sense our relationship is moving towards intimacy. Any suggestions on what she might find if we move to that level in our relationship? thanks for any help you might provide.
For panties big enough to hold a package, check out manties.net. Here's one of the selections:
Oh, Hurl
I get a lot of press releases, and it would behoove those who send them to first take 20 seconds out to look at my blog, which is, I'd say, the antithesis of the girl-coddling, "feminization of the web" sob-sisterhood promoted in this e-release from Allyson Stinchfield, from atomicpr.com:
Hi Amy,As social networks continue to proliferate, women have stepped to the forefront as dominant web users. What is being called "the feminisation of the web" (The Communications Market 2007, Ofcom.org.uk), women ages 18-34 now account for 55% of time spent online and moreover, are flocking to online communities to socialize and bond with others who share and care about what they find most interesting.
Yes, I call it a blog.
On online community sites such as Experience Project (www.experienceproject.com ), a network that encourages the sharing of genuine life experiences in safe and anonymous spaces, female members are encouraged to join groups focused on life experiences and openly share their personal stories, while meeting and making friends with other women who share the same story.
And women wonder why they can't make it in the big, mean, male work world?
Ultimately, by connecting people that have a common understanding on a set of meaningful, and often sensitive issues, women can support one another through truthful, communal storytelling and positive reinforcement. While men are present and also welcomed at Experience Project...
Leave your dicks at the door, boys!
...the emotionally supportive culture and emphasis on anonymity
Newsflash, dearie: You can post on my site under whatever fucking name you want, including IThinkAmyIsABIgOldTwat, although I prefer to be referred to as "Sugar Tits."
...prevents the site from breaking down into yet another venue for online dating -- providing a safe harbor raved about by female members.
If your "safety" is dependent on not having anyone -- horrors! -- ask you for a date, you need to spend more, not less, time in the company of men. They really aren't bad people, even if, from time to time, they give a glance or two at your titties, and flash on what it would be like to bend you over the cash register. Frankly, without this sort of thing, none of these ladies would be here to participate in all this i-coddling, as their ancestors would never have passed on their genes.
Here are a few women-focused Experience Project user groups with particularly inspiring stories:Women and Pregnancy: I Had Pregnancy Complications // I am a Teenage Mother –Though having a baby is most often pronounced as a joyous occasion, mothers and mothers-to-be, who have experienced complications during pregnancy or feel that they are maybe having a baby too young, are encouraged to join these unique user groups, share their stories and/or listen to those of others. What results is a powerful connection of women struck with similar life experiences and the healing process of sharing with others who truly understand. Links to such groups include:
http://www.experienceproject.com/group_profile.php?g=73
http://www.experienceproject.com/group_profile.php?g=2000
Women and Relationships: I Have Been In Abusive Relationships // I Have Relationships with Married Men // I am in a Long Distance Relationship – "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is one of the most tested piths when discussing relationships in women circles.
Oh, I'm soooo sure it is. But, as Stephen Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate, "Men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our civilization, where they evolved together as a single species." I find a science-focused, rather than a whining-focused, approach is much more helpful in making one's way in the world.
Experience Project users who have been involved in relationships that are not so cut and dry (spousal/partner abuse, extramarital affairs and long distance relationships) are given the space to provide first hand accounts of their experiences and subsequent consequences. This sharing process provides others, who may also feel alone and trapped in a similar situation, a mirror that can both reflect their own circumstances and offer support. Links to such groups include:
Or just write to me, and I'll write you back for free, and slap you upside the head until you start behaving less like a self-defeating, self-pitying asshat, and start taking a little responsibility for what you allow into your life.
(On the bright side, they aren't suggesting you hold a mirror up to your vagina.)
I'd like to offer Armen Berjikly, founder and CEO of Experience Project and by request, Experience Project women members, as resources for any stories you're working on around women and the benefits of the online community and social networking phenomenon.
And I'm ever-so-glad you did, as I needed a time-unsensitive blog item for our trip to Italy.
Have fun holding hands and collectively sobbing, ladies. I'll be over here where the boys are.
Deploy Meets Girl
Just posted another Advice Goddess column -- from an incredible letter from a soldier in Iraq. Here's his question:
I’m a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne, serving in Iraq. My wife of a year, whom I love and adore, has recently begun telling me she’s lonely. It’s understandable, as I’m on month 12 of this tour, which has just been extended. Last week, she confessed she’s become “attracted” to another man. She says she still loves me and wants to be with me, but if she were alone with him and he made moves, she doesn't know how she’d respond. I’m confused, can you love someone and become attracted to someone else?--Heartbroken in Tikrit
My answer, and comments, are here.
Why Straight Men Don't Get It On In The John
One reason, and one reason only: Straight women usually won't participate.
Naturally, Jonah Goldberg turns this into a left-right issue, suggesting that lefties condone bathroom fucking, where the right is above such a thing. Of course, one of the leftier people I know, who happens to be gay, suggested that the real problem with airport bathroom sex between men is that a 7-year-old shouldn't be exposed to this. (Perhaps somebody should inform him that he's now a neo-con.)
Now, maybe a good deal of America neatly divides into a big block of left and right, but more and more, I think even people who were quite left or quite right are becoming more like me: pretty damn disgusted with all of them, and trying to avoid voting (sorry) for the lesser of two weevils.
I'm really looking for The Smorgasbord Party, a fantasy organization where the policy has a nice thick tether to economic and foreign policy realities, and is informed by history and good data. I'm looking for a candidate who isn't about turning the country into one big church/tax haven for the super-rich, or into a rerun of communism but with McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and health care run -- and run into the ground -- by the state.
Yes, I am a little hard to pigeonhole: I'm a fiscal conservative (no tax dough for NPR, no nationalized health care, no paying for other people's kids to go to school except for the very poor, and no goddam freebies on the taxes for yachts). I'm also socially libertarian: Do drugs if you want, just don't steal my TV to buy them or get behind the wheel after you snort, shoot, or inject. And go ahead sell your body if you want to and/or ask somebody to help you kill yourself if you're so inclined.
Can anybody propose a candidate for the likes of me? They don't actually have to be running. (They do have to have ethics, integrity and all the important add-ons.)
What's Wrong With Daily Newspapers
I chastised the LA Times within the text of a recent blog item for never having links in stories on the web:
The LAT piece is typically link-free (Matt Welch seems to be the single person at the paper who understands how to write for the web),
Welch, the LAT's assistant editorial page editor, responded in the comments:
In defense of my colleagues, the problem isn't lack of knowledge, it's lack of 21st century publishing software, and the organizational will to acquire it. Believe it or not (and I choose not to, in order to maintain sanity), in the NEWLY UPDATED -- as in, updated in the last couple of months -- editing system that the newspaper uses, it is impossible to perform this magical task known as "inserting a hyperlink." The only possibility is to go in there *after* it is published, and hand-install a hyperlink into the publishing software. Since that is about as fun as putting a condom on after sex, it is rarely done, though you've just given me an idea about how we might be able to do more....(Also, Tim Cavanaugh, to name one of many, is pretty fluent at writing on that interweb deal.)
Wow. The LAT actually has NEW publishing software that doesn't allow for hyperlinking. That software had to come pretty cheap, don't you think?
What genius at the paper was responsible for that decision, and how many other such old-school geniuses are there at papers across the country -- just as the management at those papers is mewling pitifully about losing readership?
Mr. Spammer Should Use Mr. Google
What's the big deal about spam? Well, this sort of thing, from The Standard in Hong Kong:
Media professional Vincent Wong says he almost lost a customer when he failed to spot a HK$5,000 order among the 300 junk e-mails he gets daily.
In my case, unless you're a friend, a relative, my boyfriend, or a reader of my blog or column, you don't get my time without paying for it. You don't get to clog my e-mail box with spam to make your marketing cheap and easy. And, when I tell you I want my life back, you'd better remove me from your spam list, pronto.
Robert Sexton wouldn't do that. A few days ago, I posted a detailed blog item about my travails to get off his lists.
In short, Robert Sexton ignored my repeated requests to be removed from his lists until I contacted a woman mentioned in almost all the spam I received from him. Finally, finally, after being spam-blasted by Sexton since as far back as February of this year, I was removed.
After all that, because I'd noted the brag in Sexton's spam, "Proud member of the Better Business Bureau," I thought I'd weigh in at the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau with my experience of Sexton's business practices. Here's my complaint:
Complaint Description - Posted 8-30-2007Sexton spams me daily and calling and e-mailing to ask to be removed from his spam lists was no help. Google his name and you'll see numerous others who have been spammed by him.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Robert+Sexton+spam&btnG=SearchComplaint Summary
Sexton appears to be a notorious spammer -- his way of getting business.
Resolution Sought
Stop spamming
Now, before we get to Robert Sexton's response, a little aside: I love a man who bills himself as an Internet business expert, yet who doesn't seem to be in the habit of Googling before he posts to see who, exactly, he's dealing with, and to see if maybe she'd posted some sort of pesky evidence corroborating her claim. Such as this:
And this:
But, without further ado, here, from the Better Business Bureau site, is Robert Sexton's uh, inventive, response to my complaint:
Initial Response - Posted 8-30-2007Ms. Alkon contacted our company about three weeks ago after having found our site ... and when we told her the cost of what we do, she became extremely irrational and she hung up, and has since harassed not only my company, but my business references as well. Ms. Alkon has already been given a cease and desist letter from us to not contact us, or any of our customers further. We appreciate Ms. Alkon actually providing her full contact info in this BBB complaint .. this will make having her served for her court summons that much easier. We're not sure what Ms. Alkon's issue with us is. I do recall an Amy Alcon who used to work for one of our competitors. Whether she is the same person, slightly misspelling her name, or someone else entirely, is unclear to me. In any event, we are not in any contact with Ms. Alkon, and she'd do well to simply walk away before she's sued for tortuous interference with a business establishment. As for the google link she mentions, it's a common tactic for our less reputable competitors to do that - posting fake emails, posing as disgruntled clients and do on. One such notorious competitor is a man named Charles Lloyd, whom the Amy I knew used to work for. A search on FTC.GOV will outline his fraudulent history, and if she's in fact the person I knew, she'd be well advised to seperate herself from him.
Initial Response Summary
Ms. Alkon needs to calm down.
Guess Sexton thought it would be his word against mine. Guess it didn't occur to Sexton that I might've taken screen shots of the little e-turds he kept hurling over my transom, and posted a detailed telling of my experience with his company.
Oops!
My reply on the BBB site:
This guy is lying. I'm a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, published author, and blogger. I don't work for spammers, I didn’t contact this guy after having "found (their) site," or ask for prices. Like many people, I have been being spammed by him for months on two different e-mail addresses, and complained because Sexton ignored my repeated e-mails asking him to stop. All the documentation to refute what he says above is here:http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2007/08/how_do_you_feel_1.html
Or just google "Robert Sexton" and spammer
-Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist, advicegoddess.com
Sexton's a litigious little fucker -- or likes people to think he is by throwing out terms like "penal code" and "cease and desist" and by threatening legal action. I wasn't scared. Neither was this guy. Or this guy.
Of course, you gotta love a guy who intimates that he's going to come after me for "'tortuous' interference with a business establishment." Hint to Sexton: If you're attempting to seem all legal-like and intimidating, it's best if you spell "tortious" correctly. Furthermore, don't you think it's kind of rich for somebody who's been interfering with my business multiple times a day on some days, for over six months, to whine that I'm the one getting in their way?
Oh, and I almost forgot, about the existence of the mysterious "Amy Alcon"...strangely, for a woman supposedly in the employ of an Internet business, there doesn't seem to be an iota of evidence of such a person on the web! Google that and you get only one entry -- a misspelling of my name. Hmmm...could "Amy Alcon" actually be a figment of Mr. Sexton's hardworking imagination? I'll let you be the judge.
Now, in case anybody is under the slightest impression that I would have any reason to even consider doing business with a company like Sexton's, the way I get traffic is merely by posting stuff people want to read and link, and sending the links to my blog syndicator, Pajamas Media, to put up on their site for more people to read and link. And then, there's the occasional Insta-launch, a number of Breit spots on the horizon, and the occasional Nightline appearance and such. I dunno...something tells me I'm better off writing and gabbing for traffic than I am paying for it.
Yoohoo, Sexton...see the ads to the upper right? People pay ME because I'm blogging. I mean, when I'm not too busy trying to stem the flow of spam from asshats like you.
Finally, Mr. Sexton, out of a deep sense of remorse I hope you'll come to feel for taking my time and mucking up my e-mail with your crap, I suggest you do the ethical thing and go over to the left and click either the PayPal or Amazon link, and send me $1,000.
$1000?!
Well, yeah. You think my time comes cheap? Then again...it seems you do.
The Argument Against The Democrats
The more you see, the less you like. Reason editor Nick Gillespie reviews Matt Bai's book, The Argument, in The New York Times:
With the possible exception of the Republicans, is there a major political party more stupefyingly brain-dead than the Democrats? That’s the ultimate takeaway from “The Argument,” Matt Bai’s sharply written, exhaustively reported and thoroughly depressing account of “billionaires, bloggers, and the battle to remake Democratic politics” along unabashedly “progressive” (read: New Deal and Great Society) lines. Well-financed and influential groups ranging from the Democracy Alliance to the New Democrat Network to MoveOn.org may be taking over the Democratic Party, he says, but they are not doing the heavy thinking that will fundamentally transform politics — unlike the free-market, small-government groups formed in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s historic loss in the 1964 presidential race.Bai has the grim job of covering national politics for The New York Times Magazine, which means his livelihood depends on following closely whether the Tennessee actor-turned-politician-turned-actor-again Fred Thompson will actually run for president (a decision reportedly put off until after Labor Day, allowing an anxious nation to savor the last days of summer) and taking seriously the White House fantasies of Senator Joseph Biden (at least in Biden’s presence). While sympathetic to the new progressives, Bai describes a movement long on anger and short on thought.
...“The Argument” provides plenty of reasons to think that the Democrats, owing to an off-putting mix of elitism toward the little people and glibness toward actual policy ideas, are unlikely to go over the top anytime soon. Or, almost the same thing, to make the most of any majority they hold. The book describes Soros, after Bush’s victory in 2004, coming to the realization that (in Bai’s words) “it was the American people, and not their figurehead, who were misguided. ... Decadence ... had led to a society that seemed incapable of conjuring up any outrage at deceptive policies that made the rich richer and the world less safe.” Rob Reiner, the Hollywood heavyweight who has contributed significantly to progressive causes and who pushed a hugely expensive universal preschool ballot initiative in California that lost by a resounding 3-to-2 ratio, interrupts a discussion by announcing: “I’ve got to take a leak. Talk amongst yourselves.” Bai never stints on such telling and unattractive details, whether describing a poorly attended and heavily scripted MoveOn.org house party or a celebrity-soaked soiree in which the host, the billionaire Lynda Resnick, declared from the top of her Sunset Boulevard mansion’s spiral staircase, “We are so tired of being disenfranchised!”
Moulitsas, the Prince Hal of the left-liberal blogosphere, comes off as an intellectual lightweight, boasting to Bai that his next book will be called “The Libertarian Democrat” but admitting that he has never read Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and social theorist, who is arguably most responsible for the contemporary libertarian movement.
Ultimately, Nick writes, "The argument at the heart of “The Argument” is less about vision and more about strategy."
El Pollo Loco
"Burn Down the Thinkeries!"
The title of this book review on Skeptic.com comes from Aristophanes' take on the Sophists, from 5th Century Athens, from which the insult "sophistry" comes. Modern sophists like Freud and Stephen J. Gould used their facility with language to lead the gullible astray, as Frederick Crews shows in his new book, Follies of the Wise. Jonathan Gottschall writes:
Follies is a collection of previously published writings, most review-essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. It opens with Crews’s most celebrated and notorious essays that made his name practically synonymous with “Freud Basher” (google this term and you will see what I mean). The first two chapters of the book, along with large sections of the first eleven chapters, describe revisionist analyses of Freud that challenge the hagiographical image promoted by Freud and his devotees. This Freud — Crews calls him “the unknown Freud” — is a megalomaniac, a tireless self-promoter, a hopelessly biased and inept scientist, and a truly dangerous quack with very real victims. Take Crews’s retelling of the famous Dora case study: Dora was a young teenager being sexually hunted by an older man while her father turned a blind eye to her peril; for his part, Freud puzzled over Dora’s failures to become aroused by the man’s attentions, tracing her frigidity back — where else? — to the predictable infantile traumas. But for all of his bumbling as an investigator of the mind, Freud also had a tragic facility with language, an ability — like the Sophists in The Clouds — to make a weak and baseless claim seem compelling (to his everlasting chagrin, even Crews was once seduced by Freud’s literary charisma). Consider Crews’s gloss of one of Freud’s most famous case studies, that of the Wolf Man, Sergei Pankeev:Freud was determined to find a primal scene to serve as the fountainhead of Pankeev’s symptoms. He made it materialize through a transparently arbitrary interpretation of a remembered dream of Pankeev’s from the suspiciously young age of four, about six or seven white wolves (actually dogs, as Freud was later compelled to admit) sitting in a tree outside his window. The wolves, Freud explained, were the parents; their whiteness meant bedclothes; their stillness meant the opposite, coital motion; their big tails signified, by the same indulgent logic, castration; daylight meant night; and all this could be traced most assuredly to a memory from age one of Pankeev’s mother and father copulating, doggy style, no fewer than three times in succession while he watched from the crib and soiled himself in horrified protest.This is despite Pankeev’s protestations that he could not have witnessed this event: due to the customs of his social class, his crib would never have been located in his parents’ bedroom. Crews makes it clear that, far from being exceptional, the Wolf Man case is a typical foundation stone upon which the whole “ramshackle edifice” of psychoanalysis was set to wobble. And, in the first eleven chapters of Follies, he shows that Freud is still very much with us today. In chapters on the recovered memory movement, the Rorschach test, hysteria, and alien abductions, Crews shows that elementary Freudian concepts underlie them all — especially the cornerstone concept of the “recoverability” of repressed memories by canny therapeutic sleuths. The two chapters on the recovered memory movement are especially powerful, and they demonstrate one of Crews’s most effective points: “pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.”
In short, it seems Freud made a whole lot of shit up.
Hearts, Minds And Penises
The way to a sex-starved Islamist's heart is through his hard-on? (Islamist hard-ons courtesy of the Israelis.) From the LAT op-ed page from Saturday:
According to a recent report in Daily Variety, when executives at Ratuv installed software that could track where their users were logging in, they found that the site was getting thousands of hits a week from such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though some of these governments block the ".il" domain address on Israeli websites. So Ratuv responded by translating the entire site into Arabic, and traffic quickly skyrocketed.What makes this more than a tale of clever entrepreneurs making a buck off Middle Eastern sexual repression is that Ratuv isn't an ordinary porn site. It's a clearinghouse of political parody porn, making fun of Israeli affairs such as sex scandals and often featuring Mossad agents or army soldiers getting out of uniform, thus providing a view of the Israeli military seldom seen in the Arab world. The next step, says Ratuv's manager, is to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.
This may not be as wacky as it sounds. Author Salman Rushdie, in his 2004 essay "The East is Blue," pointed out that even though pornography is ruthlessly suppressed in many Muslim countries, it is still ubiquitous. What's more, it can have political ramifications. "Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it's difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need; and, while doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even for civilization," Rushdie wrote.
Expecting Arab men to be swayed by Ratuv's political content might be a little like expecting American men to read the articles in Playboy, but the site can't be any less effective in changing public opinion than U.S. media efforts to date. After pouring millions into the Al Iraqiya TV station to create an unbiased news outlet in Iraq, the U.S. handed the channel to the Iraqi government, and it soon became a Shiite propaganda arm for blasting Sunnis and coalition forces. Our Arabic-language satellite TV network, Al Hurra, is thought to attract only a fraction of the viewers of Al Jazeera.
The LAT piece is typically link-free (Matt Welch seems to be the single person at the paper who understands how to write for the web), so here's the Daily Variety piece, by Ali Jaafar:
The most popular movie on the site is "Code Name: Deep Investigation," an X-rated parody of the arrest of dissident Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu, who spilled the beans on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. He was eventually caught by Mossad agents, who sent a beautiful female agent to trap him."Arab people usually see female Israeli soldiers in a bad situation, so there's a lot of curiosity to see what Israeli girls look like without any uniforms," says Shahar. "We don’t make regular porn films. Our films parody the situation in Israel, so we look at issues like the elections here and Mossad. There is a lot of relevance to the Arab-Israeli situation."
Given that Israeli law precludes Shahar from accepting credit card payment from some Arab countries, he plans to set up a site registered in either Europe or the U.S.
"We are also interested in making films with Arabs and Israelis in them," Shahar says. "It's something we can do to speak about the connection between the two people, but its not going to be easy."
Vroom With A View
Doubting Teresa
Andrew Greeley gets all boo-hoo-ey that somebody dug up Mother Teresa's diaries and discovered that even she found the notion that there is a god a bit hard to believe. (It seemed she had no problem believing in being rich and famous -- but that would be news to our doe-eyed boy Greeley.) Greeley writes:
Now, as the poor battered Catholic Church tries to recover from a bushel basket of scandals, it must cope with the Mother Teresa scandal. Someone has found the poor woman's private letters in which she confessed how weak her faith and love seemed. Spread around the world by Time magazine, the letters are taken as evidence that she was not the saint we all thought she was. On ABC Evening News on Friday night, an itinerant atheist offered the opinion that she was a hypocrite.
Well, gee whizakazzoo! Whatever is the world coming to? Well, for a better grasp on its realities, here's Brother Hitch on Mother T -- on the stuff Greeley should be upset about:
One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.It's unexamined journalistically - no one really takes a look at what she does. And it is unexamined as to why it should be she who is spotlighted as opposed to many very selfless people who devote their lives to the relief of suffering in what we used to call the "Third World." Why is it never mentioned that her stated motive for the work is that of proselytization for religious fundamentalism, for the most extreme interpretation of Catholic doctrine? If you ask most people if they agree with the pope's views on population, for example, they say they think they are rather extreme. Well here's someone whose life's work is the propagation of the most extreme version of that.
That's the first motive. The second was a sort of journalistic curiosity as to why it was that no one had asked any serious questions about Mother Teresa's theory or practice. Regarding her practice, I couldn't help but notice that she had rallied to the side of the Duvalier family in Haiti, for instance, that she had taken money - over a million dollars - from Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings and Loans swindler, even though it had been shown to her that the money was stolen; that she has been an ally of the most reactionary forces in India and in many other countries; that she has campaigned recently to prevent Ireland from ceasing to be the only country in Europe with a constitutional ban on divorce, that her interventions are always timed to assist the most conservative and obscurantist forces.
FI: You point out that, although she is very open about promoting Catholicism, Mother Teresa has this reputation of holiness amongst many non-Catholics and even secular people. And her reputation is based upon her charitable work for the sick and dying in Calcutta. What does she actually do there? What are her care facilities like?
HITCHENS: The care facilities are grotesquely simple: rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind any modern conception of what medical science is supposed to do. There have been a number of articles - I've collected some more since my book came out - about the failure and primitivism of her treatment of lepers and the dying, of her attitude towards medication and prophylaxis. Very rightly is it said that she tends to the dying, because if you were doing anything but dying she hasn't really got much to offer.
This is interesting because, first, she only proclaims to be providing people with a Catholic death, and, second, because of the enormous amounts of money mainly donated to rather than raised by her Order. We've been unable to audit this - no one has ever demanded an accounting of how much money has flowed in her direction. With that money she could have built at least one absolutely spanking new, modern teaching hospital in Calcutta without noticing the cost.
The facilities she runs are as primitive now as when she first became a celebrity. So that's obviously not where the money goes.
FI: How much money do you reckon she receives?
HITCHENS: Well, I have the testimony of a former very active member of her Order who worked for her for many years and ended up in the office Mother Teresa maintains in New York City. She was in charge of taking the money to the bank. She estimates that there must be $50 million in that bank account alone. She said that one of the things that began to raise doubts in her mind was that the Sisters always had to go around pretending that they were very poor and they couldn't use the money for anything in the neighborhood that required alleviation. Under the cloak of avowed poverty they were still soliciting donations, labor, food, and so on from local merchants. This she found as a matter of conscience to be offensive.
Now if that is the case for one place in New York, and since we know what huge sums she has been given by institutions like the Nobel Peace committee, other religious institutions, secular prize-giving organizations, and so on, we can speculate that if this money was being used for the relief of suffering we would be able to see the effect.
Sam Harris writes:
And now we learn that even Mother Teresa, the most celebrated exponent of this dogmatism in a century, had her doubts about the whole story—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of heaven, and even the existence of God:Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undatedTeresa’s recently published letters reveal a mind riven by doubt (as it should have been). They also reveal a woman who was surely suffering from run-of-the-mill depression, though even secular commentators have begun to politely dress this fact in the colors of the saints and martyrs. Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be. Her doubts about God’s existence were interpreted by her confessor as a sign that she was sharing Christ’s torment upon the cross; this exaltation of her wavering faith allowed Teresa “to love the darkness” she experienced in God’s apparent absence. Such is the genius of the unfalsifiable. We can see the same principle at work among her fellow Catholics: Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, having been interpreted as a further evidence of God’s grace.
Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?
Hitchens' book: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Sam Harris' book: Letter to a Christian Nation. And then, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Greeley's still stuck on this old thing, poor dear.
Why Israel Isn't Like Ireland
People keep telling Zion Evrony, the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, that the Israelis and Hamas should simply sit down like the factions in Ireland did and talk to each other. He politely explains in the IHT how ridiculous a suggestion this is, vis a vis the parties involved:
One of the main differences between Hamas and the IRA is the role played by religion in their ideologies. While most IRA members were Catholic and religion was a factor, its political platform and vision was the unification of the island of Ireland, not defined in religious terms. The religious beliefs of its members did not block the way to a political compromise.By contrast, the ideology of Hamas is defined in absolutist religious terms, that of a radical version of Islam, which is not open to influence or change. The political vision and religious belief of Hamas are one and the same; therefore, change is unlikely.
At the core of this belief is the desire to create an Islamist state based on Islamic law over all the land, not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel as well. There is no acceptance of the notion of coexistence, no support for the idea of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, but an exclusive demand, based on fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts, for control of the entire territory.
The Hamas Charter, adopted in 1988 and still very much in effect, defines the land of Palestine as "an Islamic Waqf" (trust territory) consecrated for future Muslim generations. It adds: "Until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it" (Article 11).
The Charter's preface states "Israel will arise and will remain existent only until Islam eliminates it as it has eliminated its predecessors." Furthermore, it defines the enemy explicitly as an ethnic-religious group - the Jewish people. Hamas officials continue in their refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist. In contrast, the IRA never questioned Britain's right to exist.
The difference also applies to the practical level. After the IRA ceasefire of 1994, U.S. Senator George Mitchell, called in as a mediator, laid down ground rules for participation in the Northern Ireland talks. All the parties to the conflict then agreed to a code of conduct. The first principle was a commitment by all sides to "democratic and exclusively peaceful means" of resolving political issues. The second was a commitment to "the total disarmament" of all paramilitary groups. Sadly such principles cannot be reconciled with the Hamas Charter, its religious ideology and the concept of the duty to wage holy war (jihad), which will inherently always take precedence.
In fact, the whole idea of a peace process and the use of mediators are ruled out by the Charter. Mediators would not be welcome, since "those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the unbelievers as arbitrators in the lands of Islam" (Article 13).
...Instead, Middle East peace would better be served by supporting the moderate Palestinian leadership in their effort to lead their people to a reasonable compromise - a path which Israel as well is willing to take.
Which sounds good, but I suspect, would play out like a restraining order against a psychopath with a lot of guns. Is there anybody who believes there's any possibility for peace in this area?