Belief In "A Life Controlled By Traffic Signals In The Sky"
The following comment, on one of my column postings -- "Is he a Virgo? He reminds me of one in a very good way" -- inspired me to go hunt for a bit of Carl Sagan on the idiocy that is astrology.
Here's a little test James Randi gave that shows "confirmation bias," a pretty common error in reasoning.
Some alternatives to astrological signs? How about a Parisian sign?
Or this one -- I think it says "Assist The Gullible."
And from closer to home:
And yes, believing in this one would be a sign of stupidity:
Who Killed Bhutto
And the story of how she was, in some way, responsible for her own death. In Lahore, Ahmed Rashid writes for the Telegraph/UK that Bhutto was murdered by extremists she helped create:
Even Miss Bhutto allowed extremist groups to flourish during her last stint as prime minister in the 1990s. The Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan received support from her government, while Pakistani Islamist fighters were given backing as they tried to wrest control of the divided region of Kashmir from India.However, it is President Pervez Musharraf who has done most to undermine efforts to combat terrorism and turned Pakistan into the epicentre for al-Qa'eda, the Taliban and other groups.
advertisementToday, Islamist extremists in Pakistan - rather than in Iraq or Afghanistan - are the main threat to global stability. Since 2004 every fatal or foiled terrorist plot in Europe and elsewhere, has had its origins in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The al-Qa'eda campaign in Pakistan is being spearheaded by the Pakistani Taliban, who in recent months have captured large tracts of territory in the Pashtun tribal belt in the north-west.
Lately, they have occupied the Swat valley, just over 60 miles from Islamabad and the centre of the country's tourist trade.
The Pakistani Taliban are now a major force in every city in the North West Frontier Province.
They are led by Baitullah Mehsud, who warned in October that his suicide bombers were waiting to kill Miss Bhutto when she returned home from exile.
Here's the conversation, released by the Pakistani interior ministry, between Mehsud and another militant, about Bhutto's murder:
Maulvi Sahib (MS): Asalaam Aleikum (Peace be with you).Baitullah Mehsud (BM): Waaleikum Asalaam (And also with you).
MS: Chief, how are you?
BM: I am fine.
MS: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.
BM: Congratulations to you. Were they our men?
MS:: Yes, they were ours.
BM: Who were they?
MS: There was Saeed, there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.
BM: The three of them did it?
MS: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.
BM: Then congratulations.
MS: Where are you? I want to meet you.
BM: I am at Makeen (town in the South Waziristan tribal region). Come over, I am at Anwar Shah's house.
MS: OK, I'll come.
BM: Don't inform their house for the time being.
MS: OK.
BM: It was a tremendous effort. They were really brave boys who killed her.
MS: Mashallah (Thank God). When I come I will give you all the details.
BM: I will wait for you. Congratulations, once again congratulations.
MS: Congratulations to you.
BM: Anything I can do for you?
MS: Thank you very much.
BM: Asalaam Aleikum.
MS: Waaleikum Asalaam.
Brave boys, huh? Not where I come from. Gunning down a woman waving out of a sunroof takes some real guts for the primitives.
And finally, here's a bit of realism on Bhutto. I'm reminded of the Lily Tomlin quote, "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat."
Bhutto was a rat. It's just that her tail was a little less long and ropey than those of the rest of them.
Guess What! Men Won't Like You If You're An Insufferable Bitch
Some girl named Tanya Gold wrote a nasty essay in The Guardian about her experience with speed-dating. In between loving on herself for her clever little bits of man-hating prose, she complains, "Men want us lobotomized."
I disagree.
Okay, some men, even many men, don't want ultra-brainy girls, or women with big jobs. Okay, so if you're an ultra-brainy girl or a woman with a big job...don't date those guys!
I'm reminded of my lone visit to a shrink when I was in my 30's and having little luck finding a guy I wanted to go on more than one date with. The shrink said, best as I can recall, "You have high standards, you understand and accept the consequences of those high standards, this is healthy, I have nothing else I can say to you, don't come back."
What Tanya is missing entirely is what men don't want more than anything: a woman who's a stuck-up, uptight, humorless, workaholic, pretentious, no-fun fight-picker, as Tanya must've come off during her speed-dating sessions.
Here's her account of what went down:
I decided to attend a speed-dating night as a fabulously successful, dazzlingly literate human rights lawyer, and then another as a gibbering idiot who works as a florist. Who would the men fall for?As a lawyer, I walked into a Soho bar. My first date appeared. I smiled at him, and said: "I am a human rights lawyer (grin)." "I work 60 hours a week (grin)." And watched him shrivel up. "I'm an engineer," he said (no grin). And then he was silent, so I told him I was reading Heidegger. He stared at me as if I had told him that I boil men's heads.
Then came Eric, and I invented a PhD in economics from Cambridge. "It was incredibly rewarding. Are you interested in economics, Eric?" He wasn't; he slunk off, and was replaced by Tony. I told him I have two cats and he looked hopeful. "What are they called?" "Roe and Wade, after the United States supreme court case that resulted in the legalisation of abortion." No smile after that, just a chair where a man had been.
I fought about the Arab-Israeli conflict with No 11, and about shoes with No 13. "My shoes are leather," he said, "but they have holes in them." "Don't buy leather shoes," I replied, refusing to pout, while he looked at me as if I'd shot him. And this, from No 18: "You really scare me." Word had spread about the monster on Table 17 - my final date didn't show.
The florist, who I modelled on Melinda Messenger (image via Amy) spliced with a teasmaid, went to a "lock and key" party. Alan approached. "Hello," he smiled. "I'm confused by the game," I told him. "Please explain it." And he did. Happily. "What do you do," I asked (giggle). "I am a geneticist," he said. "What is that," I asked (giggle). He told me, and I looked impressed and uncomprehending. I raised my voice an octave, until it was a squeak. I stared at the floor, twisted my hands, and gibbered at him. "I cut the thorns off roses," I said. "I tie bows. I sweep floors." He replied: "I'll email you." I bagged one with my florist net! Then came Robert. "I'm a florist," I smiled. The reaction was instantaneous, passionate and almost molecular: "Can I buy you a drink?"
Then came Harry. "Let's not talk about me," I said. Bang - he asked me out. Just like that. On the spot.
I never knew it could be like this. Tom suggested we sit down. "Where do you want to sit," I asked. "In a chair? Is that a chair (giggle)?" By the end of our conversation I was opening my own florist's. And he was in love. I went on and on, loving the strange, new attention, saying the sort of things a fish would say if it could talk: "Why is water wet?"
I could have been engaged by 11.17pm. But instead I went home and sifted through the evidence. Only one in 20 of the men I met on the Soho love coalface wanted to date a woman who had heard of Proust (19 of out 20 cats don't prefer it). Yet eight out of the florist's 12 men wanted to be gibbered at again and again and again.
My secret? I'm smart and I giggle. And I truly like, appreciate, and understand men.
And, again, I've always known and accepted that there aren't a whole lot of guys in the world for me (namely because I'm smart [meaning I read stuff like this book I just ordered], weird, don't want kids, don't believe in marriage, don't believe in living together, don't celebrate holidays, and don't believe in The Great Pumpkin). I certainly don't blame men for not being comfortable with all that -- nor would I even conceive of saying something like this, one of Tanya's statements at the end of her piece:
After 40 years of feminism we shouldn't really burn our bras. We should burn our men.
First of all, women didn't burn their bras, Miss Genius Pants. And, I'm somebody who makes light of a hell of a lot, starting with herself, but I don't understand how a statement like "We should burn our men" trips blithely through your thoughts, number one, and number two (hello, editors?), makes it into the paper? Sick, sick shit.
Tanya, when you read of men in the Middle East burning -- or stoning or knifing -- their women in "honor killings," do you shrug it off as no biggie? If a man printed in The Guardian, "Let's burn our women," or, better yet, "Let's burn Tanya for saying 'Let's burn our men,'" would you laugh it off? Yet, mere disinterest on the part of men (after you scowled at them, acted all superior, and made basically every effort to chase them away) makes you advocate violence against them? And you are advocating it, even if you pretend it's a joke.
And, as for a bit of speculation on my part as to why Tanya's so bitter and manhating in general, and probably the real reason she got pitched by some or most of these guys -- here's a photo of her dwarfing Joan Rivers from May of 2007. And, here's another showing that she's not only overweight, but dresses about as sexy as Miss Hathaway. And then, there's the troweled-on makeup in both of these shots...always a winner with the boys.
Women don't want to believe it -- and I get fired from papers every time I say it -- but men, by and large, except for a few chubby chasers, don't want fat girls. But, guys understand fat girl psychology enough to know that fat girls tend to be "easy." They have to be. And I'm not hating on "easy" -- I've always been "easy," and I'm a skinny girl.
I'm guessing those guys who wanted the giggly girl either thought that the fact that she seemed nice made up for the fact that she was a ditz (I'm taking it on faith that what she said is true)...or, they realized fat girls are fuckable girls, and thought, maybe without thinking it in so many words, that they'd go for it, what the hay, and lose her number when it came time for a second date.
If you're a fat girl, go on a diet, or accept that you probably have diminished your choices. If you're bitch, get over it. If you aren't compatible with every man in the world, accept it.
Tanya, men don't owe you a thing, but you owe them an apology for assuming male psychology and male sexuality should bend around the size of your thighs and the enormity of your ego, and for the notion that men are somehow in the wrong -- and even worthy of incinerating -- for not complying.
Evidence-Based Beauty
This started out as a post about not lighting a match and burning up your dollar bills on expensive beauty products, but that left out the guys (except for any tranny readers I might have), so that's at the bottom. First, there's the beauty of going by evidence instead of by hand-me-down nonthink. Tara Parker-Pope writes in The New York Times that even doctors believe in unproven crap:
Turkey makes you drowsy. Dim light ruins your eyes. Drink at last eight glasses of water a day. These are some of the medical myths that even doctors believe, reports the British Medical Journal.Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine made a list of common medical beliefs espoused by physicians and the general public. They included statements they had heard endorsed by doctors on multiple occasions. The result is a seven-item list of medical and health myths that are widely repeated by doctors and in the media, all of which either aren’t true or lack scientific evidence to support them.
The study authors, Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman and Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, said that while doctors realize good medicine requires them to constantly learn new things, they often forget to reexamine their existing medical beliefs. “These medical myths are a lighthearted reminder that we can be wrong and need to question what other falsehoods we unwittingly propagate as we practice medicine,'’ wrote Dr. Vreeman and Dr. Carroll.
The seven myths are:
1. People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.2. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
3. Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.
4. Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker or coarser.
5. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight.
6. Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy.
7. Cellphones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.
Details on each at the link. The best comment on the piece (at the NYT site) is the first one:
The real myth is that people use AS MUCH AS ten percent of their brains. Most people seem to use almost none. — Posted by ACW
You're especially in need of a brain when it comes to interactions with your doctor. While I am certainly not for going by the advice of gray-skinned people at the health food store, too many people operate on the assumption that the people in the white coats have the answers.
Recently, my doctor e-mailed me back (I have Kaiser, so I can e-mail her at any time and get a response back, usually within an hour) about a problem I'd been having, and asked whether I'd have a problem trying "western medicine" for it. I mean, I know doctors these days must deal with all these people who think anything by "Big Pharma" is evil, but please...me?
I told her I don't have a problem with "western medicine" (in fact, I'm pretty damn grateful for it), but I want my care to be directed by evidence-based medicine; meaning, we don't first give me a drug and see if it works, as she suggested, to figure out what's wrong with me. We test me to see if I have a problem, and then give me a drug. Well, I had tests, and they didn't show anything, but my symptoms persisted. I started to get upset and worry that there was something seriously wrong with me.
Luckily, because I'm articulate, pushy, and know how to do research and rough controlled experiments (eliminating stuff from my diet, etc.), I got her to send me to a specialist, who, to my relief, said my symptoms are those of "nothing serious," and then told me we'd do a super-invasive test to figure out what was wrong.
Uh...there's a less-invasive test, right, Doc? Yep. Well, how about we do the less-invasive test first, and then if it doesn't tell us I have what you think I have, we go on to the more invasive test?! And that's what we're doing. Arrrrgh!
And along the way, it seems I may get to Kaiser to change their procedure of handing out self-administered home tests, which they give out with no directions or confusing directions, which causes issues of what's called "access to care." If tests are confusing, people don't take the tests, they put off taking them, or they take them incorrectly.
I told the specialist, who seemed to get that I wasn't the average sheep of a patient who comes to see her, that they need to change their testing protocol at Kaiser. When I detailed how hard the tests were for me in the recent past, and how I held off doing them because of it, and probably did them wrong when I did take them -- and I'm obviously smart, articulate, speak English reasonably, and have beyond a sixth grade education -- she was horrified.
She asked me to report back to her on whether my test this time was equally hard to figure out. It was. Per her request, I'm going to write up what happened and suggestions of how it could be better after I finish this blog item. And it doesn't take a whole lot -- just clear written directions handed out with every test, perhaps coupled with verbal directions from people who know what they're talking about (meaning, the people at the patient interaction windows in the lab may have to be trained and/or moved around).
And nothing serious is wrong with me in case you're wondering. The doc thought I have GERD -- Gastro-Intestinal Reflux Disease. Except that it came on all at once -- the day I ate some cheese that made me violently ill -- and I have almost none of the symptoms of GERD: the pain, the backwash, etc. None of that. Should know in a few days if it's what I thought it was all along, and thought the first doctor had tested me for. Nope. She didn't!
The best was when she suggested I take steps to minimize the GERD; for example, change my diet and lose weight, cut back on drinking and smoking, and exercise. (I'm slim and I don't know how I could eat any healthier than I already do; when I order a glass of wine at dinner, Gregg often ends up finishing it; and I do 20 maniacal minutes on an exercise bike with moving arms every day.)
You know, you've got to monitor these people Every. Step. Of. The. Way.
On to a lack of evidence with less-serious side-effects, Natasha Singer writes in The New York Times that you should "rethink" beauty products that cost more than $30:
The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates cosmetics, does not require beauty manufacturers to publish rigorous studies on the efficacy of their products. So consumers do not have a proven, objective method by which to determine whether more-expensive beauty products work better — or whether they simply look fancier and emit more exotic perfume — than less-expensive items containing similar ingredients.(Manufacturers of prescription products must submit clinical evidence of their efficacy before receiving approval from the F.D.A.)
“Your chances of achieving good skin are not directly proportional to the amount of money you spend,” Dr. Sundaram said. “All too often, what you are paying for is the packaging, the advertising and the celebrity endorsements.”
My skincare regime: An economy-size pumper of Cetaphil face wash from Costco, a tube for the shower of St. Ives facial scrub (which they recently screwed up with some sickening fragrance "improvement"), and Anthelios #50+ sunblock cream "pour la visage" (for the face). Oh yeah, and an umbrella, not for rain, but for when I'll be out in the sun for any length of time. And I take vitamin D to make up for the vitamin D I'm not getting from sun exposure.
Here's the face of a woman a year younger than I am who smoked. (And who probably spent a good deal of time in the sun.) Whether or not her doctor has diagnosed her with GERD, I really couldn't say.
Life From Under A Tablecloth
On Islam Watch ("Islam under scrutiny by ex-Muslims"), Alamgir Hussain contests the often-made claim that honor killings are not Islamic.
Here is a Muslim riddle. When one criticizes the practice of Muslim women wearing the burka or hijab, Muslims quickly respond that their religious symbol or choice is being attacked, but when girls like Aqsa die for refusing to accept the same religious symbol, Muslims quickly respond by saying their religion has nothing do with the death.It is indeed a fact that wearing the burka (not the more liberal hijab) is a religious duty for Muslim women commanded by Allah. The Quran [24:31] commands Muslim women to “draw their veils over their bosoms” so as not to expose their physical assets to unrelated people. Allah says [Quran 33:59]: “O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers [Muslims] to draw their cloaks close round them (when they go abroad).”
No Muslim will deny that Allah’s commands in the Quran are non-negotiable and binding on all Muslims. When someone dies for refusing to comply with those binding Islamic obligations, it is ridiculous to say the Islamic religion has nothing to do with that death.
When I was growing up as a Muslim, my religious teachers at my school and madrasa used to tell us that a righteous Muslim parent must ask his or her children to follow their religious duties at the age of eight and pressure them at the age of ten. If they continue to refuse, beat them at the age of twelve. In many Muslim countries not all parents apply this protocol rigorously, but it remains a widely accepted guide. Some parents do follow it closely in order to bring their disobedient children onto the righteous path. As a result, injuries and even deaths occur, like Aqsa's. These injuries and deaths can in no way be separated from the Islamic religion.
Whether it is for the refusal to wear the burka/hijab, or to follow other religious obligations, deaths such as Asqa’s occur in Islamic countries on a regular basis. The UK’s Sunday Times reported on December 16th that 48 women have been killed in Basra, Iraq in the last six months for “un-Islamic behavior.” The actual number of these incidents is likely to be much higher since many of them go unreported.
Red graffiti in Basra warns women, "Your makeup and your decision to forgo the headscarf will bring you death." In Pakistan, an estimated 1,500 women die from honor killings every year. People in those countries hardly make a fuss about it. That’s a price those women have to pay for violating the Islamic codes. It is well accepted in Muslim societies, and people pay little attention to such incidents. In most cases, they go unreported.
Winter Wonderland
Santa Monica-style.
A Newt Game Plan
I've been meaning to blog these remarks by Newt Gingrich, given at a Jewish National Fund meeting, but they seem particularly timely in light of Bhutto's murder. He calls his talk "Sleepwalking Into A Nightmare." Here's an excerpt, but go to the site and read the whole thing:
I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10 at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called Troublesome Young Men, which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.
And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.
Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually. Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for Al-Qaida and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.
And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?
Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are outbribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.
Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is Al-Qaida. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" - it's very strong language - the answer is 75 percent yes, 75 to 16.
The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.
When asked whether or not Al-Qaida is a threat, 89 percent of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at Al-Qaida and the rise of Islamist terrorism.
And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for Al-Qaida? It's you, recirculated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.
Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.
So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.
It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."
So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.
The piece continues at the link.
Bhutto, The Pictures
Getty Images senior staff photographer John Moore was there as Bhutto was murdered, and just posted his shots, before and after, with audio. Here at CNN.com. In his words, "Gunshots rang out and she went down."
I'm disgusted, but not surprised, at Bhutto's murder.
Turn Your 5-Year-Old Into A Sex Goddess!
Look! It's a 5-year-old tarted up as Holiday Barbie! Here's some vile video from the 2001 documentary Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen. (Some mothers raise children, some seem more interested in raising fame.)
Whored-up screenshots of the poor kid here. Like this one:
What makes me particularly ill is the way they Bette Davis'd up the lips to make a 5-year-old "sexier."
Matt Welch: The Liberace Of Libertarians
If daily paper people were so smart, Matt Welch would be working for one of them.
For some super-prissy daily newspaper reporting about Matt's move to Washington to be editor-in-chief of Reason magazine -- one of my monthly must-reads, and some of the best and most original writing and thinking out there -- there's this goofiness, by Monica Hesse, in The Washington Post.
No, Matt Welch is not gay and auditioning to take over some role from Liza Minnelli -- Hesse just makes him sound that way.
And on Jan. 1, [Nick] Gillespie will leave his print magazine role to bulk up the presence of Reason.tv and Reason.com. His replacement is Matt Welch, a former Los Angeles Times opinion writer who wears pink vests with rhinestone buttons and has a French wife.
Uh, actually, I believe Matt has one vest that's a kind of western dusty rose-ish color, not "pink," and Matt Welch was not just an "opinion writer," but "assistant editor of the editorial pages of The Times." And he also wrote a damn good book on McCain, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. Got Google?
As for the "French wife," referred to later in the piece simply as "Emmanuelle," her name is Emmanuelle Richard, and she writes for Libération, French Vogue, and others, and she's training to be a private eye.
The piece opens with this:
Four minutes into Reason magazine's monthly bash at the Big Hunt lounge, and every Libertarian-as-Bacchus fantasy you've entertained plays out before your widening eyes.Nick Gillespie, the leather-jacketed, Mama-said-you're-dangerous editor of the political rag peers at you intently. "What do you need?" he asks. "Do you need a drink? A cigarette?"
A stranger reaches out to knead your shoulders. Maybe what you need is a relaxing back rub.
My, is that cloying smell in the stairwell . . . marijuana?
Yeah, they ran out of the stuff for the meth lab. Oops, seems I missed the part where they were having an orgy on the floor. Your "Libertarian-as-Bacchus" fantasy is a guy offering you a drink or a smoke? Right.
Jeez! Where'd they find this girl! I mean, I think Nick is probably snickering at both the free press and how he's made out to be "dangerous" for merely being...I guess, dangerously hospitable while wearing a leather jacket...and Matt is probably laughing, but maybe a bit less, since everyone who reads that article will expect him to show up for CNN talking-headers in a big lavender boa and matching feathered mules.
The one bit of trivia I will reveal about Matt Welch is that it's near fucking impossible to take a good picture of him.
I mean, he's a good-looking guy, and I have probably taken 100 photos of him, all told, but here's the single best one I have EVER taken of him, from the LA Press Club Awards, where he's seated next to his "French wife" Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Richard to you, Ms. Hessssse.
Wait! I forgot. Here's one more rare shot that captures Matt accurately, from Maia Lazar's birthday at Cathy Seipp's house (sadly, Cathy didn't make it that long).
Matt's in the middle. Roman Genn is on the left, Andrew Breitbart is the one (in the shower shoe!) on the right.
Yeah, them Converse with them-there black socks; clearly the footgear of the Liberace of libertarians. (We may have to call him that from now on. In fact, I'm retitling this post that...it was, up till now, entitled, "If Daily Paper People Were So Smart...")
There's more:
The crowd is more guys than gals, and the women who do arrive look gamine and mischievous, and like they wouldn't say no to a cigarette.
Oh. Please.
Does anyone else find use of the word "gals" by anybody who isn't eligible for Social Security a powerful emetic?
And then there's this about Emmanuelle:
At a recent event, Emmanuelle, Welch's wife, wears black leather pants with a yellow racing stripe running up each leg.
And? Is this code for something, Ms. Hesse? She probably made them look better than an Oscars dress on most women. For example, here she is on her way to your fuddyass town:
And then there's this on the rug:
Five months ago, Reason leased a space in Dupont Circle. Those high on the masthead had decided a 202 area code was necessary for clout; the new location is low on office equipment but high on sex -- flat-screen TVs, granite countertops and a large shag rug. Beige, yes, but shag.
Yes, libertarians are strange, near-extinct animals grazing between the shag. Silly, silly piece.
Oh yeah, and in typical daily paper fashion, the comments on the piece, which came out December 23, are already closed.
link via Kate Coe
Gary Taubes, Live (ish)
Well, it's about as live as you can get him without living down the block from him in Manhattan. He's talking at Berkeley on obesity, and all the bad science on it, or, as he calls it, "the pseudo-science of obesity," and you can watch and listen to him explode all the fallacies on a tiny download of a webcast that got right up and played on my computer, no trouble at all, and I'm one of the minority on a Mac. Recommended!
Gary's book: Good Calories, Bad Calories. Also recommended!
And don't just take it from me. Here's a recommendation from a commenter the other day, on my blog item, "American Pie: Is Fat The New Normal?"
Gary Taubes helped save my life. I was 5'4", 297 lbs. and probably would've had diabetes by now or worse if not for his Times article. I've lost 125lbs. and feel better at 33 than I did at 23.Everyone here has made great points about HFCS, portion size etc. However, a person who is morbidly obese is that way not just because of what they put in their mouth, but also why they put it there. Carbs just allow you to get fatter faster.
The first step to conquering obesity is mental reprogramming. You have to deal with whatever is making you self-medicate with pie.
That being said, losing a large amount of weight is easy if you eat a natural human diet as opposed to the low-fat, low-calorie nonsense that we've been force fed.
Posted by: nightwitch at December 26, 2007 1:33 AM
It's A Café Table, Not Phone Booth
I’m guessing you were held hostage today. Maybe three, four times. Then you finished your latte and shuffled back to your car. Here's my itsy bitsy teenie weenie op-ed on all the jerks on cellphones we all encounter every day, from today's LA Times:
Every day, across Los Angeles, boors on cellphones drag us into their lives. We need to tell them our attention doesn’t belong to them. That their right to have loud, dull cellphone conversations ends where our ears begin.Sometimes, I do this with a polite suggestion. Other times, I’m too irritated, either by the last 10 people telling me where to stick that suggestion, or by the need to instruct another adult, “Please use your inside voice.” That’s when I help them see a downside of overshare.
A woman at the Rose Café shouted her eyeglass order into her cell -- going into detail about her family’s medical plan (they have flexible spending, they’ll pay after the first of the year). After I blogged her conversation, including her phone number, she got calls from around the world: “Eva, your glasses are ready!” I’m guessing she has newfound respect for others’ profound disinterest in her life.
Barry sure does. He shouted his number across a Venice Starbucks. I went home and called it: “Barry, I know everything about you but your blood type.” Next time I saw him, he took his calls outside.
Maybe you’re too timid (or too sane) to do what I do, but please do something. Shush the rudesters. At least glare. Ask restaurants to post “no cellphones” signs.
Peace on earth might not be doable, but we could try for peace and quiet. For civility, not technology, to be our guide. Perhaps the manners of the future are best informed by our pre-wireless past. Think about it: There’s a reason nobody installed a phone booth right at table five.
This is just one of many modern rudenesses I cover in the book I'm writing, REVENGERELLA: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society.
Are You An Innie Or An Outie?
I just posted another Advice Goddess column -- a response to a question from a woman who's seeing a guy who...really isn't a people person:
I’ve been seeing this wonderful man for three years. I’m 29, he’s 41. Although he says he loves me immensely, and deems me the person most important to him, I mostly feel single. He never accompanies me to functions (weddings, Christmas parties, etc.). I’m independent, and love hanging solo with friends, but sometimes I’d like him to be my date to something. His response: “I just don’t do functions.” I get that. He’s an introvert. In his defense, he threw a big birthday party for me, and says I’m always welcome to invite friends to his place for drinks. Still, I feel I’m kept low-profile, and it hurts. My friends have pronounced our relationship dysfunctional. So, despite all the fun we have, I wonder if something’s very wrong and I’m compromising my needs.--Unaccompanied
Here's an excerpt from my response:
You know those party games where people ask, if you were an animal, what would you be? Well, if your boyfriend were a party animal, he’d probably be something between a deer in headlights and roadkill.There are people who need people and there are people who need fewer people. Or, as Bukowski put it, “No [I don’t hate people]. But, I seem to feel better when they’re not around.” The image of the introvert is negative: Norman Bates, Ted Kaczynski, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Howard Hughes with Kleenex boxes on his feet. But, for many, being introverted is merely a social preference, not a disorder. This probably goes for your boyfriend -- unless it stops him from getting to the grocery store and he starves to death, or he’s so “not a people person” that he’s compelled to get them out of the way with an ax. >>cont'd>>
The rest, including comments, is here.
And a comment for those who'd like to read me in their local paper -- please write and ask the features editor of the daily and/or the editor of the alt weekly to run my column.
What Eugene Said About Will
Bloggers have their panties in a wad over the report that Will Smith supposedly said Hitler was a good person. But, as Eugene Volokh points out, it seems he actually didn't, and it was the reporter's context that mainly made it look that way. Eugene quotes the actual interview in the Daily Record (Scotland):
Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good."Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.
"I wake up every day full of hope, positive that every day is going to be better than yesterday. And I'm looking to infect people with my positivity. I think I can start an epidemic."
And then Eugene writes:
It seems that "Will believes everyone is basically good" is just the reporter's characterization of Smith's statement. Nothing in the quoted material suggests that Smith was saying that Hitler was a good person. Rather, the quoted material simply reports Smith's quite plausible view that Hitler, like many other people who do evil (Smith must have used Hitler as a referent precisely because Smith acknowledges that Hitler did do evil), believe that they are doing good. I'm hardly a Hitler scholar, but my sense is that Hitler did indeed believe that he was doing good, as did Stalin, Bin Laden, and various others.At most, given the upbeatness of the rest of Smith's message, Smith might be saying that everyone has the potential for good, if only they can be "reprogramm[ed]" away from their "twisted, backwards logic." This is not clearly true; perhaps people can't be so easily reprogrammed even in theory, certainly they often can't be in practice, and there's also the question of how they should be held accountable for what they did before their reprogramming. Sometimes stuff like that needs killing, as in Hitler's case and quite a few others. But surely Smith's message isn't outrageous, either, at least unless he said something stunning that the reporters for some reason decided merely to paraphrase rather than quote -- possible, but in my view far from certain. What Smith is actually quoted as saying doesn't seem like a statement that Hitler is a "good person," evidence of "liberal fascism," something that should "stun[] the world," or even particularly "nice things about Hitler."
Of course, if I want to ponder good and evil, I'm not going to turn to a Hollywood philosopher. And I think the real concern here is the word "reprogrammed," which suggests Smith's brain has been willed to Scientology -- while he's still alive.
Here's a view from my trip with Andrew Gumbel to Scientology's anti-psychiatry museum, a museum which is actually titled "Psychiatry: An Industry Of Death."
Sure, there are and have been abuses by psychiatry; some, terrible abuses. But, I believe Scientology's real beef with it is how a second opinion from a psychiatrist tends to muck up the parting of a fool and his dollar.
In case anyone's wondering, I took my Ritalin before we went to help me pay attention. Better living through chemistry, that's me!
By the way, at the museum, those nutty scientologists connected the Holocaust and 9/11 to psychiatry! Another view from within:
Here's the 9/11 display. The caption mentions that one of Bin Laden's top aides was the Egyptian psychiatrist al-Zawahiri. Woooo!
If one of the hijackers was a dentist, would we say dentistry was to blame for 9/11?
What Brought The Arabs To Israel
This letter in The Wall Street Journal inspired me to do a little research:
No, Jews Were There Before Most PalestiniansGoing up against world-renowned Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis is daunting enough but especially so when your "facts" are so wrong (Letters, Dec. 10, responding to "On the Jewish Question," Nov. 26). Contrary to Steve Feldman, Jews did not "take land away from the Palestinians." They bought low-value land at a high price and reclaimed it. The resultant economic boom, moreover, drew a large Arab influx into what had been an underdeveloped and underpopulated landscape. Contrary to Gary Goldman, far from Arabs then "dominating that part of the world," the entire region had been under the Ottoman thumb for four centuries. In the Empire's breakup, Jews were allocated but a tiny sliver. Nor was Arab opposition to their presence monolithic. Some important figures, such as "Arab Revolt" leader Emir Faisal, welcomed it and looked forward to a positive, symbiotic relationship. Violently opposed, however, was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Sadly for both peoples, he and his ilk prevailed.
Richard D. Wilkins
Syracuse, N.Y.
The history is here. And here's an excerpt:
A Population BoomAs Hussein foresaw, the regeneration of Israel, and the growth of its population, came only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The Jewish population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000. In fact, the permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and 1947.
This rapid growth was a result of several factors. One was immigration from neighboring states--constituting 37 percent of the total immigration to pre-state Israel--by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher standard of living the Jews had made possible. The Arab population also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945 and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.
The Arab population increased the most in cities with large Jewish populations that had created new economic opportunities. From 1922-1947, the non-Jewish population increased 290 percent in Haifa, 131 percent in Jerusalem, and 158 percent in Jaffa. The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus, 78 percent in Jenin, and 37 percent in Bethlehem.
Jewish Land Purchases
Despite the growth in their population, the arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the beginning of World War I, part of Israel's Land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. About 80 percent of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins.
Jews actually went out of their way to avoid purchasing Land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought Land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and, most important, without tenants. In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as "the most important asset of the native population." Ben-Gurion said "under no circumstances must we touch Land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." He advocated helping liberate them from their oppressors. "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," Ben-Gurion added, "should we offer to buy his Land, at an appropriate price."
It was only after the Jews had bought all of this available Land that they began to purchase cultivated Land. Many Arabs were willing to sell because they were migrating to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.
When John Hope Simpson arrived in Israel in May 1930, he observed: "They [the Jews] paid high prices for the Land, and in addition they paid to certain of the occupants of those Lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay."
In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of landlessness and eventually offered new plots to any Arabs who had been "dispossessed." British officials received more than 3,000 applications, of which 80 percent were ruled invalid by the Government's legal adviser because the applicants were not landless Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted the Government Land offer.
In April 1936, a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews was instigated by a Syrian guerrilla named Fawzi al-Qawukji, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army. By November, when the British finally sent a new commission headed by Lord Peel to investigate, 89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded.
The Peel Commission's report found that Arab complaints about Jewish land acquisition were baseless. It pointed out that "much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased....there was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land." Moreover, the Commission found the shortage was "due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population." The report concluded that the presence of Jews in Palestine, along with the work of the British Administration, had resulted in higher wages, an improved standard of living and ample employment opportunities.
In his memoirs, Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote:
It is made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping.Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938, the British High Commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.
The Jews were paying exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of arid Land. "In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Israel, mostly for arid or semi-arid Land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre."
How To Respond When A Man Gives You A Plane Ticket To Europe
Assuming it isn't a one way ticket (and even then...) maybe you could work your way up to a wee bit of enthusiasm...maybe even a little gratitude?
Gregg called me last spring and started going into detail about some conference in Italy (turned out to be the Festivaletteratura). It would be in September, blah blah blah...Gregg sounded like he was trying to sell me on the idea of going. I stopped him. "Honey, you should just know, if ever the question is 'Do you want to go to Italy with me?' you don't even have to ask; the answer is always 'Yes!'"
We celebrated our five-year anniversary in December, and as one of my presents, Gregg gave me a trip to Paris this winter. Alone, yes, but hey! (Gregg has only one Paris visit in him a year, and I prefer to go with him when the weather is nicer.) Again, somebody says, "Here's a plane ticket to a fabulous European city you love, and get on the Internets and rent yourself a nice apartment, too," do you hop in their lap and plant a big kiss on them -- or hop on your broom?
Well, apparently, your response is all broom if you're the wife of a Hollywood writer/director; specifically, actress Leslie Mann, who's married to Judd Apatow. Now, perhaps this piece was meant to be funny (and perhaps it actually should have been funny) -- from The New York Times, a slice of Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow's marital life:
JUDDOne year, as a present, I got Leslie a trip to Italy. We had never visited Europe together, and it was something I knew she would love to do.
So I had a basket made with Italian bread, airline tickets to Rome, a guidebook. Stuff like that. Here is the shocking part: When I gave it to her, she got mad at me.
LESLIE
Why is that shocking? It was a terrible present.
JUDD
It was a great present.
LESLIE
Let me rephrase that. It wasn’t even a present. A trip is something we do together. It is something we would do whether or not it was a present for me. You get to go, so it is for you also. That means it is not a present. It is an activity that would happen anyway.
JUDD
That makes no sense at all.
[snip]
JUDD
But we had never been to Europe before.
LESLIE
And we could have gone, but not as my present.
[snip]
JUDD
But you are impossible to buy presents for, because you don’t like anything.
LESLIE
I told you, I would be happy to tell you exactly what I want.
JUDD
But that is not a present because then you might as well just buy it for yourself.
LESLIE
But I feel less guilty if you buy it for me.
JUDD
Why don’t we just give more money to charity this year and not give each other presents?
LESLIE
How about we give more money to charity this year and still get each other presents? Now you are just bailing.
JUDD
Well, what exactly do you want?
LESLIE
After 10 years you don’t know me well enough to know what I would like?
JUDD
Fine. So, what are you going to get me?
Do the humane thing, honey, and give him a divorce.
Gay Non-Rights
Here's what happens when you don't allow gay marriage and/or rights for people like me, in committed relationships. There are more and more of us, committed but non-married partners, straight and gay. This Newsweek piece is entitled "Reshaping The Gay Marriage Debate," focusing on gay partners, but I don't see how the debate has really changed. J. Michael Kennedy writes for Newsweek (hit reload to get rid of the damn ad) of a woman whose partner died in a flood at their home -- a woman whose partner happens to be a woman:
Charlene Strong was on her way home in a pounding Seattle winter storm when the call came from her partner, Kate Fleming. Sounding stressed, Fleming told her that a rain was flooding down a hillside and into the couple's basement, where Fleming, an audiobook narrator, was at work in her recording studio. What happened over the next half hour cost Fleming her life and changed Strong's forever. As the rain poured down, a flood of water cascaded down the slope in their wooded neighborhood and into the house. The basement began filling with water. Fleming called again a few minutes later to say that she was stuck in the windowless studio, with water rising rapidly. Something, she said, must have fallen and blocked the door.When a panicked Strong arrived minutes later, she couldn't force open the studio door, which was clamped shut by the force of the water. She tried to slash into the plaster wall with a knife, forgetting that the couple had added an extra layer of sheet rock for soundproofing. As Strong struggled outside the door, Fleming called 911 on her cell phone. But the water was rising so quickly that in a matter of minutes, Strong was submerged and had to grope for the safety of the stairwell.
"I knew she was underwater by then," said Strong. "And nothing would budge." Long minutes passed before rescue workers arrived and cut a hole in the bedroom floor. A fireman jumped into the black water below to retrieve a comatose Fleming.
Frantic efforts produced a pulse. An ambulance raced Fleming to the hospital, with Strong close behind. At the door of the hospital emergency room, a social worker informed her that only family members were allowed inside. When Strong protested that she was Fleming's partner, the social worker said that under Washington state law, same-sex partners did not qualify as family. Only an urgent call to Fleming's sister in Virginia cleared the way to get Strong through the doors. Ninety minutes later, Fleming died, with Strong at her side.
The nightmare didn't end there. The next day the man handling the funeral arrangements insisted on dealing with Fleming's mother, though Strong told him she was Fleming's spouse. "He said, 'You don't have any rights in the state of Washington'." says Strong. "I left the room and started crying."
Together for 10 years, the couple had held a commitment ceremony that was not officially binding but a symbol of their relationship. "Kate was my wife, and I was her wife, and that's the way we always thought of each other," said Strong.
The second night after Fleming's death, an anguished Strong lay awake, replaying the harrowing scenes in her mind—the flood, the hospital, the funeral home. Though still in shock, her rage was mounting. "I could handle someone calling me a homo," she told NEWSWEEK. "But saying you don't count, that's something that had to change."
The first few comments on the site when I read the piece made great points. The first is by a nurse:
Posted By: C. MacLean @ 12/22/2007 12:42:04 PMComment: As a nurse who is too familiar with the American sick care system, (don't bother to call it health care) please be assured that all of the legal documents mentioned above are worthless in an emergency - they are only useful in situations were the process of dying drags on.
Ironically, if Charlene had lied and claimed to be Kate's sister, instead of her spouse, she might have been allowed to remain with her. Telling the truth and following the rules when involved in a hospital setting does not, unfortunately, help people stay with their loved ones.
Please do not expect the broken bureacracy that is American medicine to rely on the broken bureacracy that is the American legal system if you wish to be at your loved one's side while they are dying.
Here's another, who shows the argument for what it is -- religion encroaching on secular life:
Posted By: debatenotberate @ 12/22/2007 12:27:51 PMComment: The fact that the debate here seems to be centered on religion rather than the role of government in the recognition of defining and categorizing relationships in a modern society quickly reveals that at the religion, and not law, is the center of resistance to civil liberties and fairness in the United States - this is nothing new. Religion was used to defend slavery and segregation, the oppression of women, and such practices as witch burning in this country and in the colonial past.
And the nurse again:
Posted By: C. MacLean @ 12/22/2007 12:24:48 PMComment: As a nurse involved in the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980's, I saw dozens of men barred at the hospital door, unable to sit at the side of a dying loved one, because they were not the "legal next of kin." I heard stories of hundreds more. The awful suffering brought by the physical aspects of the disease was nothing compared to the horrendous grief generated when loved ones died alone, and partners were forbidden to say goodbye.
The real tragedy here is that 20+ years later, we are still having the same discussion, with the same bigotry and the same devastating consequences. The real tragedy is that 220+ years later, we are working so hard to un-do the basic tenet of separation of church and state.
The current American reality is that the divorce rate is at 50% - it is heterosexuals that are destroying the institution of marriage, not gays. The American family is much more likely to involve step-parents, step-siblings, and cohabitating couples of various sexual orientation, not to mention grandparents and adoptive parents, than it is to have a biological father, mother and birth children. Evidently, father didn't know best.
For most of recorded history, arranged marriages were the norm, and were designed to do two things: consolidate property and allow for the orderly inheritance of that property. Love and God had nothing to do with marriage, and divorce had everything to do with maintaining power - just ask Henry VIII, the father of modern divorce.
In modern times, the State's interest in marriage has remained unchanged. Organized religion, however, has cleverly deduced that marriage is an excellent way to maintain organized religion - support marriage in a narrow and rigid manner and you guarantee that the religion stays strong. The Church's role in perpetuating an exclusionary thing called "marriage" in reality only perpetuates the power of the Church - do it our way or you can't be part of the Church, (and oh by the way you will also burn in hell) bring you children up our way, and pay us while you're doing it - the Church stays strong, the "family" stays mired in fear, and anyone who tries to do things differently is ostracized and forced to suffer.
There is a reason our country was founded on the idea of separation of church and state - anytime you allow the church a say in how to run the state, the people suffer. There needs to be an orderly and legal way to protect accumulated property and the rights of children - ALL people's property, and ALL people's children - that is the State's job.
Should you wish to declare your love for another in front of God and these witnesses, that is organized religion's job.
Helping a grieving partner attend their loved one's funeral - that should be everyone's job.
I just think we should go by The Constitution instead of The Bible in allocating rights.
Poor, Persecuted Christians
Oops, sorry! Like Mano Singham, did I forget to start a war on Christmas?
My, how time flies. What with one thing and another, I realized that it is already past mid-December and my fellow atheists and I have forgotten all about starting our annual war on Christmas. I really do apologize. I have had a lot of things on my mind lately but I'll get on it right away.You know what war I mean. All of us for many years have been plotting secretly in our underground cells with just one goal in mind: to destroy Christianity by undermining the very foundation of that religion: the Christmas holiday. The way we do that is by sending greeting cards or wishing people well with religiously neutral phrases like "Happy Holidays" or "Compliments of the Season" or simply wishing for peace on Earth and goodwill to all, without invoking Jesus or Biblical verses. By using such language our goal was to try and create a time of year when the whole world might be united around the secular ideas of peace and goodwill, anchored by a celebration that originated in a pagan celebration of the winter solstice.
We also try to destroy Christianity by encouraging people to not take part in the traditional orgy of spending vast amounts of money and resources on 'gifts' that have ceased to become gifts in the sense of genuine and spontaneous gestures of affection or response to needs, and have now become the obligatory filling of almost extortion-like expectations which often leads to disappointment and anger and resentment because the gift wasn't good enough or not what was expected or because someone else was given something better.
Another part of the atheist plan to destroy Christmas was to discourage people from gluttonous eating and drinking and to simply spend time socializing with friends and family.
The plan was going along well until it was discovered a few years ago. Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson of Fox News, clever people that they are, saw through our plan. They realized that once people start thinking beyond their own religious tribe and in terms of our common humanity, that was the first dangerous step on the slippery road that led inevitably to humanism, agnosticism, and atheism.
Being manly warriors for god, never braver than when they are facing down imaginary enemies, they started a counter-offensive, wreaking vengeance on those stores and shop clerks who do not use the short list of approved language such as "Merry Christmas" and do not festoon every display and image with the nativity scene and Biblical phrases, such shibboleths being necessary parts of proving that they share warrior Bill's fervor for the Christian god and Jesus.
But is it me or have others also noted that O'Reilly and others seem to have run out of steam on this issue? This year I do not hear the same level of hysteria on their part as in previous years. Are they tired from their strenuous efforts of previous years and handed the baton on to others? Have they declared victory and moved on to other issues that promise better ratings?
Lucky for us, Congress, which only had time to patch, not actually fix the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) issue, found plenty of time to stand up for the persecuted majority. Sally Quinn writes for the WaPo:
On Dec. 11, H.R. 847 was passed in the House of Representatives. Just listen to what our lawmakers have resolved:"Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans," it begins, "is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States. . . ." It goes on to state, among other things, that "Christianity [is] the religion of over three-fourths of the American population," that "American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ," and that "Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God's redemption, mercy, and Grace."
ad_icon"Now, therefore be it Resolved, that the House of Representatives . . . expresses continued support for Christians in the United States . . . acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States . . . rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and expresses its deepest respect to American Christians."
For brevity, I have omitted the resolution's references to Christianity around the world.
This resolution passed with 195 Democratic yea votes, 177 Republican yeas and nine Democratic nays. No Republicans voted against it. Ten House members voted "present." Forty were not there, including the bill's sponsor, Rep. Steve King of Iowa.
Among those voting for the resolution was a Jewish member of Congress who has asked me not to print his name. He was outraged and appalled by the bill, he told me. But he was also afraid. He thought it would hurt him with his mostly Christian constituency if he voted against it. He told some of his colleagues about his anguish. They advised him not to be stupid. It would be better for him politically if he voted for it.
It's possible that the 10 who voted "present" also had problems with the bill but decided it was safer not to vote against it. One could also assume that some of those who were absent were not there so as not to have to deal with the problem.
Earlier this year the House also passed resolutions honoring Islamic and Indian holidays but nothing that so equated a single faith with America and Americans.
How could this happen, in what will soon be 2008, in a pluralistic, multicultural, multireligious society, a society based on the concepts of religious freedom and separation of church and state? What were they thinking?
This resolution was as anti-American as anything Congress has ever passed. It disenfranchised and marginalized millions and millions of men and women, reducing them to second-class citizens.
Oh, please. Now she's getting all hysterical, too. Can we just have the people in government attempt to actually govern, and leave the sending of Christmas cards (and/or Reason's Greetings cards, and/or lumps of coal) to the people?
For the record, I will wish you a Merry Christmas. Or a fabulicious Kwaanza, or a joyful Whatever The Fuck I Think You Celebrate. Reasonable atheist broad that I am.
Get your Reason's Greetings cards here, at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?
I was sure this was a parody, and this woman was an actress. Scary. (Yes, darling, France is a country.)
Not only is this a real woman, name of Kellie Pickler, Wikipedia actually has Ms. Pickler graduating from a North Carolina high school.
So...what do you have to do to graduate high school in America these days, prove you have a pulse?
via Appleita
Some Critics Are More Coherent Than Others
Can anybody make out what this man is trying to say? He e-mailed me Saturday afternoon:
When I need advice from the university lab of masters, of 1950's behaviorist...who summarily cast off generations of people who besides legitimacy of other understanding...for other reason...self proscribed phycologists...although behaviorism is very taken for granted in the curriculumn...granted historically with what your popular commentary and conception is that is apparently holding you back from finding your inner astronaut lover scholar live in therapist...but granted the problem of finding a live in therapists...first of all demands the ability to find your better option around the corner in life...because of your own self (not just his)introversion...of which is not gender oriented in it's conceptual realization...explicit not definitaly to any one person...etc etc. But should you in your endeavor to find the perfect intellect and paramour for which you can blantantly expunge the exact extent to your inability to be satisfied...quantitatively I wouldn't necessarily say that it was a latent determination of not being able to be princess supper model actress doctor and porn star all rolled into one...but should you learn to get in touch with your relationships that you conveniently gravitate for unconscious musing of auto seggestion to interpret the exact extent of your own intrinsic knowledge about all things...this uncanny ability to summarily be able to assume the prescriptions for all things mis understand in your personal estimations of leisure intellect...of which is vastly superior...should you find the perfect animus expression to aid in your endeavor for personal expression...I suggest that maybe you should to understand other people's feelings...and learn some communication while you summarily assume all things personal that can't necessarily for everybody be expressed in the mutual feeling of the exclusive rights in life that you enjoy being comparitively the numbers 7 or 8 woman to 1 man...granted your superiority in relationships should take precidence to the ability to find sombody who can sooth your innate sensibilities...but realistically, in a relationship, with someone your supposed to love....of course not the kind of love of cell block d even latently this is what you would like...but I'll tell you, maybe he's..coincidently your own expression tool...yes it's true...granted historically it does present some problems...the real problem when an older gentleman choose to take on a younger protege'...with every good bye yes you learn...if that happens...but unfortunately...when some women ...because of the anxious unconscious drives take on a younger man to educate...it if things get out hand ...end up murdering him...I hope you and you unsuspecting victims find someway to other than plaster it all over the paper...besides a qualify job as such...to vindicate the sad reality of exsistence and the unfortunate reality that yes when you find something and run with...which granted should acceptable...I don't condemn you for it...unfortunately an accepted axiom is basically he doesn't have a built in hepa filter...I'm sure you could write some poetry...about the unrealised and unconscious count down to your next cycle...
I'm thinking somebody's written some program that randomly combines words into sentences -- and it kind of reminds me of the speculation that a roomful of monkeys on typewriters will eventually type all of Shakespeare's sonnets. In this case, I suspect the guy needs a prescription more than he needs a Selectric.
Wow, Thanks!
Somebody left me $50 via Amazon on the 16th. Doesn't say who it's from...so I hope that person will see this thank you. And thanks again to the other reader who left me a big present on PayPal. Really nice! Much-appreciated! -Amy
American Pie
America: Land of the free with a fork, and the home of adult onset diabetes. Or, in other words, witness where your health care dollars will be going. Should there be "bad living" supplements to premiums?
I saw a story on MSNBC.com and other places, "Is Fat The New Normal"? Here's the deal from a ScienceDaily press release:
American women have gotten fatter as it has become more socially acceptable to carry a few extra pounds, according to a new study.Florida State University Assistant Professor of Economics Frank Heiland and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Economist Mary Burke are the co-authors of a paper published in the academic journal Economic Inquiry that argues that the ballooning weight of the population has fed even more collective weight gain as our perception of what is considered a normal body size has changed.
"This is a social force that we are trying to document because the rise in obesity has occurred so rapidly over the past 30 years," said Heiland, who also is affiliated with FSU's Center for Demography and Population Health. "Medically speaking, most agree that this trend is a dangerous one because of its connection to diabetes, cancer and other diseases. But psychologically, it may provide relief to know that you are not the only one packing on the pounds."
The paper, "Social Dynamics of Obesity," is the first to provide a mathematical model of the impact of economic, biological and social factors on aggregate body weight distribution. It also is one of the first studies to suggest that weight norms may change and are not set standards based on beauty or medical ideals.
Many economists believe that people eat more -- and thus gain weight -- when food prices drop, but that's just part of the story behind the nation's dramatic weight gain since the late 1970s, according to the researchers. The full price of a calorie has dropped by about 36 percent relative to the price of consumer goods since 1977, but prices leveled off in the mid-1990s. And yet American women continued to get bigger.
Heiland and Burke's "social multiplier" theory offers a potential reason why: As Americans continue to super-size their value meals, the average weight of the population increases and people slowly adjust their perceptions of appropriate body weight. Given that these changes in perception may come about gradually, Heiland and Burke suggest the nation's battle of the bulge may extend into the future.
...The researchers also looked at self-reports of women's real weights and desired weights. In 1994, the average woman said she weighed 147 pounds but wanted to weigh 132 pounds. By 2002, the average woman weighed 153 pounds but wanted the scales to register 135 pounds, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
The fact that even the desired weight of women has increased suggests there is less social pressure to lose weight, Heiland said, citing a previous study that 87 percent of Americans, including 48 percent of obese Americans, believe that their body weight falls in the "socially acceptable" range.
While it seems thinness is increasingly idealized in popular culture -- images of waif-like models and stick-thin celebrities are everywhere -- there is a gap between the cultural imagery and the weights that most people consider acceptable for themselves and others, according to Heiland.
Does Size Matter?
"As the waiter steps up to read the menu items, let's see how long it takes the ladies to notice his item."
It's A Wonderful Myth
Contrary to popular belief that, at Christmastime, legions of people are lining up to throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, the holidays are actually a lonely time at the suicide hotlines. Yes, the office Christmas tree might be lit up, but the phones probably aren't. Or aren't lit up much. Susan Brink writes for the LA TImes:
It was Christmas Eve when George Bailey stared into the black depths of the river beneath the bridge in Bedford Falls, convinced that the world would be better off without him. That scene from the 1946 movie classic "It's a Wonderful Life" could well have given birth to the media myth that Christmas is a trigger for increased suicides and episodes of depression.It is a baseless notion, according to a body of published studies by statisticians who have examined hundreds of thousands of suicides in the United States and around the world. The number of suicides goes down, not up, over the holiday season, by as much as 40%.
...In one of the most thorough examinations of what researchers call acts of deliberate self-harm, which can be an indication of depression, Helen Bergen, research scientist at the University of Oxford, found that Christmas, for most people, is protective.
Bergen and colleagues reached this conclusion after examining emergency room admissionrecords of 19,346 people in England and looking at daily rates of self-induced injury from 1976 to 2003.
Drug or alcohol overdoses, self-poisoning with gas or other harmful substances and self-inflicted injuries-- with or without the deliberate intention to die -- all decreased from average levels during the week of Dec. 19-26, Bergen and colleagues found, and these lowered levels held through New Year's Day.
The decrease in rates of self-inflicted damage before, on and immediately after Christmas and into the New Year was found regardless of age, family connections or social isolation, the researchers reported in the September issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Even people with family relationship problems were less inclined to attempt to hurt themselves during the holidays. "These findings are contrary to the popular view that Christmas is a time of stress and arguments," Bergen says. Perhaps, she says, problems within the nuclear family ease up instead of intensify when the extended family is around.
Another possible reason why depression and suicide rates fall this time of year is that the season, more than other times, is one of giving. "People tend to reach out over the holidays," says Dr. Douglas Jacobs, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. Elderly people in nursing homes might suddenly get visitors. People who haven't heard from friends all year might get a card or a phone call.
Genius, Inc.
We all get too much e-mail. This goes double, triple, and quadruple for me, since I get e-mail for a living.
If you're going to run a P.R. agency, and send me even more e-mail (in this case, an e-Christmas card -- most annoying -- to which I responded, "Thanks! Same to you!" on the off chance I actually knew the sender) do not, do fucking not, have a spam filter that e-mails me back for authorization.
Subject line: RE: Re: WISH (verification)
Kenn, from Aline Media, you are an idiot. There! You've been verified!
Baby Killer
No, not a killer of babies, but a baby that comes flying through a plane if it takes a drop or a dive, injuring or killing some innocent passenger. Betsy Wade writes for The New York Times about "lap babies," under-age-2 children of cheapskates who hold the kids on their laps rather than pay for a seat and strap them in a car seat:
As to reckless aspects of air travel, I put the situation of the lap babies at the top. And at this time of year, don’t ask how many there are.Lap babies are children under the age of 2 who travel free with adults on planes, but without tickets, with no seats of their own, without identification in the airline files or indeed any safety protection whatsoever. These infants and toddlers are the only passengers or crew members who are exempted from being latched into safety belts on takeoff and landing. They sit in parents’ laps and those parental arms are all that keeps them from hurtling through the air in turbulence or a crash landing.
A United Airlines plane that crashed in Sioux City after mechanical failure on July 19, 1989, was carrying a large number of children and lap babies. With a lot of luck and heroic work, 174 passengers of the 285 survived, and all but one of the 11 crew members. The pilot later wrote, “One of the survivors started climbing out of the aircraft and heard a baby crying; he went back inside, found the baby in an overhead bin where she had been tossed, took her out of the aircraft and brought her to her family that had been driven out by the thick smoke.”
Adults’ arms are no match for gravity, even in moderate trouble. When I was writing the Practical Traveler column for The Times, I visited the Civil Aeromedical Institute, operated by the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma City. In a lab were two dummies, each the size of a 6-month-old. One weighed 17 pounds, about average. The other weighed 51 pounds, what the same baby would weigh at 3G’s, a pull three times the force of gravity.
When Van Gowdy, then head of the biodynamics laboratory at the Institute, handed me the 3G dummy, I tried to imagine holding on to it while I was belted in. When it was handed to a flight attendant in the class, she almost dropped it. “What a projectile!” she said.
Indeed. Think of a good stretch of turbulent air and an infant hurtled into a luggage bin.
Indeed. Or into your head. Nothing like a spinal cord injury to keep you from making your connection.
According to Wade, some lady named Louise Stoll, an asst. secretary of transportation in the Clinton years, came up with a solution for older kids -- a special safety harness. I don't see it as a consistent one, because if it's an older plane, it gets in the way of the tray table, and all of a sudden, the passenger whose seat it's strapped around gets to have their flight and the use of their tray table revolve around the fact that somebody else spawned. Here, from her FAQ page, how it doesn't get in the way...except when it gets in the way:
Q. Does CARES affect the operation of the tray behind the child’s seat?A. No. Ensuring that CARES did not adversely affect the functionality of the tray was an important FAA criteria for certifying CARES. The tray is lowered for only a minute while the red webbing loop is adjusted around the seat, and then is closed and locked in place, covering up the CARES loop. CARES does not affect the functioning or use of the tray.
In some older style seats found occasionally on small planes, the tray fits into a plastic, recessed cavity. In these the CARES red loop, when pulled taut, could prevent the tray from closing securely. In this case, the CARES loop should be installed around the seat and OVER the stowed tray for taxiing, take off, and landing. (See FAA Advisory Circular 120-87A “Use of Child Restraints on Aircraft”, page 13, paragraph 2, which can be found at the top of the News and Links page of this website.)
On taxiing, takeoff, landing, and every time the person behind the kid wants to use their tray table, right? Or am I somehow missing something?
People will gasp and say, "Oh, that person should just deal." Well, should they? Sometimes people like to sleep on flights or to just be left alone. Sometimes, if there's turbulence or not a lot of fresh air on the plane, I don't feel too well, and I just want to put my head down. It's hard enough flying coach, with the miniscule amount of room they give you -- ever-shrinking...just as American bodies are going entirely the other direction.
Frankly, if you spawned, I really don't want it to be my problem.
Secret Santa, 90291
I'm not one of those people who bashes the postal service. Personally, I find it amazing that I can drop off a letter and have it get to somebody across Los Angeles in a day, or across the country in a few days, or to Paris in under a week.
And then, when I was just starting to syndicate my column and negotiating all the complications of mass mailings, Victoria (who I called "The Bulk Mail Goddess"), at the Venice/Windward Circle post office, was endlessly patient with me, and enormously helpful.
Well, now I'm an even bigger fan. Of the post office, and of some good-hearted anonymous person somewhere in Los Angeles.
The most amazing thing happened to my neighbors. They have two young kids, and they mailed off a letter to Santa, just addressed to "Santa, North Pole." They dropped it in a mailbox in Venice, and my neighbor thought that was that -- just a fun thing for the kids to do.
To her astonishment, the other day, an anonymous package arrrived from Fedex with two gifts in it -- the gifts the kids had requested from Santa. And not chintzy stuff, either, she said. Probably $80 in toys. And really nice, since this family isn't poor, but they aren't printing money either, as the dad is a professor, and the mom is taking time out of her career to be home with her kids, although she has a toy company and occasionally does freelance design projects.
"To me, that's the spirit of Christmas," my neighbor told me. "It's one of the reasons I like to make toys -- to make kids happy."
I called the Venice/Windward post office and talked to Charlene there. She said, when they get letters to Santa they take them to the distribution plant in LA and connect them with people who have called in and asked to sponsor a kid or some kids. Those people send the gifts to the district office, and they mail the gift to the kid or kids. (And yes, the postal service apparently uses Fed Ex -- I asked.)
"That's going to stay with me my whole life," my neighbor said.
UPDATE: For people wondering whether we taxpayers were paying for this, the answer is no. Charlene's information about how the kids get the gifts wasn't exactly right.
I called Larry Dozier, the spokesperson for the postal service in Los Angeles, who said "all the letters mailed to Santa, or Rudolph, or the North Pole," go to a center where "people pick up the letters, go purchase the gifts, and deliver the gifts themselves." They "come down to our office and decide which ones they want to fulfill."
Dozier continued, "Even if we were paying the postage, Federal funds would still not be used. We have not received money from the government since 1982. We are self-sustaining through sales of postage and our various products and services that we provide. That's where our revenues come from."
Nice one part of our government is actually self-supporting and in the black.
SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE: My neighbor just e-mailed me...
I'm glad you shared the story. Many more people will read it, and it sounds like some might even take part in the "scheme." I for one am going to return the favor. When my kids get old enough to no longer believe in santa claus we will go pick out some letters ourselves.
Dark Alley
I Don't Think A Book Deal Counts As Punishment
There should be some kind of sentence for ruining a child, and something worse for ruining two. Unfortunately, for some -- like the mother of Britney Spears and her sister, Knockelodeon, uh, Nickelodeon star Jamie Lynn, pregnant at 16 by her 19-year-old boyfriend -- there's a book contract from a Christian publisher. There's values for you (and I guess they value the almighty dollar most of all). From MSNBC, Courtney Hazlett writes:
OK! magazine reports that 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears (sister to the infamous Britney) is expecting a baby. The due date has not been revealed, but TMZ.com reports that the father is Casey Aldridge, whom Spears met at church and has been dating.Spears recently responded coyly when asked if she was returning to her Nickelodeon TV show, “Zoey 101.” “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she told the Associated Press.
"Coyly"? She responded "coyly"?!
Nickelodeon issued the following statement this afternoon regarding the pregnancy, according to TMZ: “We respect Jamie Lynn’s decision to take responsibility in this sensitive and personal situation. We know this is a very difficult time for her and her family, and our primary concern right now is for Jamie Lynn’s well being.”The high school junior also told AP, “I’m going to try to graduate before I do anything else.”
Well, isn't that special. Meanwhile, there may be a "delay" or two with Mom's tome on...Christian parenting! Marisa Laudadio writes in People:
"The book is delayed indefinitely. It's delayed, not cancelled," says a spokeswoman for Thomas Nelson, which publishes inspirational books and Bibles.
Greedy bastards.
...Publishers' Weekly described the book as "Lynne Spears's personal story of raising high-profile children while coming from a low-profile Louisiana community."The publisher declined to comment on whether the focus of the book would change in light of the pregnancy announcement.
A show of hands for who thinks that book will ever come out.
From Amazon, the book -- Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World
And the description:
Lynne Spears was an ordinary mother whose life became extraordinary when the success of her daughter Britney pushed the Spears family onto the worldwide stage. Now, speaking out for the first time in her new memoir, Lynne sets the record straight. In Pop Culture Mom, she reveals a rarely glimpsed view of herself and her family-including celebrity daughters Britney and Jamie Lynn, son Bryan, and ex-husband Jamie. Candid, touching, and richly detailed, the stories Lynne shares reveal the heart of a mother who struggles to keep faith at the center of her life through its many unexpected twists and serendipitous turns.
Here's parenting advice: More time parenting, less time whoring the kids out to Hollywood and the music biz.
Amy Alkon, Bad Fruit/Black Widow Spider
It's time for Retard Of The Week here in AdviceGoddessland!
This week's ROTW, "Dave G," snail-mailed me (letter at the link above) to complain about this column I wrote, Doodie Calls. Some of my favorite bits from Dave G's letter include the way he refers to sex as "the coitus thing," and the part about women who give their shoes names (does anyone actually do that?). Personally, I wear boots, and I just call them all "expensive."
P.S. DaveG, regarding "penis envy," Freud just made that shit up. You'd know that if you read my column more often instead of sitting home marinating in hatred for womankind because you didn't look before you did the 500-yard dash to the altar.
Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux
"Vacuum Kills Fleas As Effectively As Poison, Say Researchers." Via a Consumerist post, there's this, from Reuters:
(Researchers) said a standard vacuum cleaner abuses the fleas so much it kills 96 percent of adult fleas and 100 percent of younger fleas.So no need to worry that a vacuum cleaner bag may turn into a fleabag breeding ground for the pesky, biting creatures, said Glen Needham, associate professor of entomology at Ohio State University.
Needham studied the cat flea, or Ctenocephalides felis, the most common type of flea found in households.
"No matter what vacuum a flea gets sucked into, it's probably a one-way trip," Needham said in a statement.
Writing in the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata, Needham suggested that the vacuum brushes wear away a waxy outer layer on insects called the cuticle. Without it, the fleas, larvae and pupae probably dry up and die, he said.
Yes, but what if your dog is so small she'd get sucked up into the vacuum with the fleas? (Not that Lucy has any fleas.)
You Can Buy Skepticism
Here's some mental floss for ya: How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, a Cornell psych professor.
And here's a brain sharpener: Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, director of the Cognitive Science Institute in Milan.
A Single Parent And His Poor, Lonely Penis
Single largest source of hate mail for this month comes from The Entitled Single Parent. He and others of his ilk think they're entitled to have the widest possible pool of hot, young dates to choose from -- and never mind the children and ex-wives they've got running around.
According to my hate mail, those single people on the dating scene who aren't rah-rah-rah about the single parent's whole package -- kids, ex-wives, and all -- are "shallow," "horrible," and lacking in "compassion." (As am I, apparently, for even suggesting that maybe, possibly, the kids should come first.)
I just posted the Advice Goddess column behind the hate mail, Doodie Calls, a reply to a letter from "Single Dad," who wrote:
Your advice for the 25-year-old woman who didn’t want to get involved with a guy with a daughter was disgustingly shallow. In supporting her not wanting to date single dads you’re saying, yes, segregate single parents, remove them from the dating pool! Yes, how dare they try to pass themselves off as people first, not as potentially inadequate mates due to being broke, having the psycho ex, and the bedwetting child?! Here’s advice for you: Compassion. It's developed by seeing and sharing life. Try getting out of the shallow end of the humanity pool and seeing the wider world of relationships!
My response starts like this:
Tragically, it seems you’ve lost your all-access pass to the dating pool.Unlike when you were in nursery school, and teachers aides saw that every kid got the exact same allotment of Jelly Bellys, advice columnists are not standing outside bars making sure everybody leaves with a smiley sticker and a hot 25-year-old. Grownup life is harsh. Actions have consequences. Sorry to bring down the giant fly swatter on your free-floating sense of entitlement, but you gave up your Romeo status the day you let Tommy Trouser Snake out to play without his raincoat.
Parents aren’t people first. They’re parents first. Here in “the shallow end of the humanity pool,” this means the parental agenda precedes all other agendas, as it should. In other words, you’re a wee bit more likely than the single, 25-year-old stud boy to have your date interrupted by a frantic call from the neighbors: “Little Sprogly’s shot the babysitter with the staple gun!”
Now, unless your ex died or ran off with the UPS man, or you worked a deal for some neighbor lady to be the oven for your bun, chances are you’re not just a single dad, but a divorced dad. There is this notion of “the good divorce,” but is there really such a thing? There are better divorces and worse divorces, and there are couples who aren’t doing their kids any favors by staying together and continuing to chase each other around with an ax.
But, let’s be real, even if you aren’t alimony-bled, with a psycho ex-wife and a 15-year-old who’s suddenly wetting the bed, divorce doesn’t exactly simplify a guy’s life or leave a trail of rose petals and cupcakes in its wake. The girl in question, who admitted she wasn’t ready to handle a guy with a kid, could have a boyfriend whose only real distraction is getting his motorcycle rechromed. Or she could have you. So…if you were her, which would you choose? Assuming you’re looking for a boyfriend, not looking to become a one-woman chapter of the Salvation Army. >>cont'd>>
The rest is here, as are a lot of comments.
And oh, to all the nitwits who took the leap that this column is evidence that I hate single dads and men, I'd give exactly the same response if he were a single mother, except that I'd probably make a crack about her diaphragm in place of the bit about Tommy Trouser Snake.
And P.S. If you're going to attack somebody for being anti-male, I'm probably not your girl.
Probable Stupidity
I don't know about you, but it's hard enough to leave enough time to get places I have to be without being late (rude if someone will be kept waiting) and/or without endangering other people on the road. I do manage, ADHD and all -- mainly because I'm generally not being pulled over by well-meaning but dunderheaded cops like the ones in this AP story:
Police are stopping law-abiding motorists and rewarding their good driving with $5 Starbucks gift cards.A traffic officer came up with the idea to "promote the holiday spirit and enhance goodwill between the traffic unit and the motoring public," police Sgt. Tim Curran said.
Local businesses donated money to buy the gift cards.
"They raised a substantial amount of money," Curran said. "They'll be pulling over a lot of people."
Leave me alone. I'll buy my own damn coffee. How about you catch a car thief, a bank robber, or a drunk driver instead?
Separation Of Nuts And State
Do we really want a guy who believes in this wacky stuff running our country?
Oh yeah...and are Mitt's wacky, evidence-free beliefs really that much odder than the wacky, evidence-free beliefs of the rest of the candidates? More on Mormonism here. An excerpt of a few Mormon beliefs here:
God was once a man like us.
God has a tangible body of flesh and bone.
God lives on a planet near the star Kolob.
God ("Heavenly Father") has at least one wife, our "Mother in Heaven," but she is so holy that we are not to discuss her nor pray to her.
Jesus was married.
We can become like God and rule over our own universe.
There are many gods, ruling over their own worlds.
Jesus and Satan ("Lucifer") are brothers, and they are our brothers - we are all spirit children of Heavenly Father
Jesus Christ was conceived by God the Father by having sex with Mary, who was temporarily his wife.
We should not pray to Jesus, nor try to feel a personal relationship with him.
The "Lord" ("Jehovah") in the Old Testament is the being named Jesus in the New Testament, but different from "God the Father" ("Elohim").
In the highest degree of the celestial kingdom some men will have more than one wife.
Before coming to this earth we lived as spirits in a "pre-existence", during which we were tested; our position in this life (whether born to Mormons or savages, or in America or Africa) is our reward or punishment for our obedience in that life.
Dark skin is a curse from God, the result of our sin, or the sin of our ancestors. If sufficiently righteous, a dark-skinned person will become light-skinned.
The Garden of Eden was in Missouri. All humanity before the Great Flood lived in the western hemisphere. The Ark transported Noah and the other survivors to the eastern hemisphere.
Not only will human beings be resurrected to eternal life, but also all animals - everything that has ever lived on earth - will be resurrected and dwell in heaven.
Christ will not return to earth in any year that has seen a rainbow.
Mormons should avoid traveling on water, since Satan rules the waters.
The sun receives its light from the star Kolob.
If a Gentile becomes Mormon, the Holy Ghost actually purges his Gentile blood and replaces it with Israelite blood.
A righteous Mormon will actually see the face of God in the Mormon temple.
You can identify a false angel by the color of his hair, or by offering to shake his hand
My personal favorite: "The Garden Of Eden was in Missouri." Hmmm, why not in Ohio, Rhode Island, or upstate New York?
The Urban Pasture
photo by Gregg Sutter
Suicide Strudel
Indigestion is an ugly thing, but it's rarely deadly. Roger L. Simon quotes Lawrence O'Donnell in conversation with Hugh Hewitt on why he criticizes the Mormons, but not the Muslims:
HH: Okay. And do you believe, would you say the same things about Mohammed as you just said about Joseph Smith?LO’D: Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the…that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.
HH: Well, that’s candid.
LO’D: Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’re not going to ever…
HH: So you can be bigoted towards Mormons, because they’ll just send you a strudel.
LO’D: They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.
HH: They’ll send you a strudel. The Mormons will bake you a cake and be nice to you.
LO’D: I agree.
HH: Lawrence O’Donnell, I appreciate your candor.
Whatever You Do, "Don't Tell"
In peacetime, if you're gay and in the military, you lose your job. These days, a guy could blow his boyfriend on the table in the mess hall and his superiors would just stare into their mashed potatoes. From a 60 Minutes report on gays in the military, featuring Army Sgt. Darren Manzella talking to Leslie Stahl:
Manzella served as a medic with a field artillery unit in Baghdad back in 2005, earning a combat medal for rendering treatment under fire. "I've treated everything from blast injuries to gunshot wounds," he tells Stahl.Manzella was out to his Army buddies and even introduced them to his boyfriend A.J. But then, he started getting anonymous e-mails, saying he was being watched, and warning him to "turn down the flame."
"As in flamingly gay?" Stahl asks.
"Yes," Manzella says.
He went for help to his commanding officer, and in the process, told him - as in don't ask don't tell - that he was gay. The officer in turn told Manzella he'd have to report him.
"He did report me, yes," Manzella says. "I had to go see my battalion commander, who read me my rights."
"So, what you did, in effect, by telling him, was trigger the investigation you feared was underway?" Stahl asks.
"I did. And I felt more comfortable with that. I felt more comfortable bein' the one to say, 'This is the truth. This is what is real,'" he says.
"What a Catch-22. You go and tell your lieutenant the truth and now you violated the Army's rule," Stahl remarks.
"I didn't know how else to do it and keep my sanity," Manzella explains.
Manzella didn't hold anything back in the investigation, submitting photos of himself and A.J., and a video of a road trip, including passionate kissing. But when the investigation ended, Manzella says he was told to go back to work. "There was no evidence of homosexuality and go back to work," he says.
"Wait a minute. You've given them photographs of you and A.J.," Stahl remarks.
"Yes, and then they're like, 'Go back to work. You're not gay," Manzella says.
...Cholene Espinoza was an Air Force Captain who flew combat missions. Now she works with the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group pushing to repeal "don't ask, don't tell."
"Darren is in a critical field. He's a medic. His commander needs him," Espinoza says. "He's a known quantity. He gets along with others. He does what he's supposed to. He goes above and beyond. Why do I want to lose Darren?"
A Tale Of Two Brits
I was in my neighborhood, in my microbe of a car, waiting at a light to make a right turn.
The light turned green, but pedestrians were crossing. The front car stopped for them, per the law and basic good manners, but then the pedestrians had crossed, and the car stayed stopped, and a guy started getting out of the passenger side -- and at a rather leisurely pace. Grrr.
Irate that they were blocking all traffic from getting through the light, I honked. The guy finally shut the car door, and the car scooted through the intersection just as the light turned red, leaving the rest of us to wait for the next light.
The passenger, a tall, ginger-haired Brit standing on the sidewalk, leaned toward my waiting car and started shouting at me for honking. Uh, wrong. I rolled down the window to say something. Couldn't get a word in.
"Did you expect us to run them over?" he berated me, but in more hysterical "mow them down in cold blood in their tracks" language. (Hysteria is very unbecoming to anyone in possession of a penis, I might add.)
"Come on," I said, trying to make some headway over his shouting, "This wasn't about stopping for the people, it was about selfishly deciding everybody else at the light would have to just wait another light because you or the driver were too lazy to pull over in an appropriate letting off place!" And then I called after him, "You're rude, and you're a liar."
His utter unwillingness to even flirt with the idea that it was asshole-ish behavior on their part reminded me of a very interesting book I just started reading, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.
But, back to my day.
Because I'd gotten a note in my mailbox from Gary Musselman, telling me that he needs to see me (if anyone runs into him, tell him I'm looking for him), I went to Starbucks on Main.
Drat. Just missed the table I like. A kid was sitting there. A little girl, about three, I think. Great. Probably more where that one came from. And indeed there were. Daddy came up, with a stroller with a baby in it, and Mommy followed soon afterward. They were Brits, too...and...I don't know if this is common to British children of late, but if it is, we should try to copy whatever it is the Brits do to parent them.
The family sat there, politely, civilly, with minimal squawls and noise from the kids, and minimal mess. Finally, they got up to leave. I wondered if these parents, like so many parents these days, would leave an enormous mess -- crumbs, trash, stuff spilled on the table and floor.
Nope, not them. They cleaned up every bit. Well, almost every bit. And, here comes the amazing part. The little girl was staring at me a bit while she was sitting there, as little girls tend to do. (Red hair? Don't look or dress like a mommy? I dunno.)
Anyway, I'd initially asked her dad to let me know when they were leaving, as I wanted to move to their table. So, maybe it was because she knew I'd be moving over, but there was one tiny scrap of a wrapper on the table -- really just the corner of a wrapper, smaller than a penny -- and as she was walking away with her parents, she looked back at the table, backtracked a few feet, picked it up, and threw it away.
The family had already left before I could think to say anything, but I wanted to run after the parents, tell them what a great job they did raising their kid, ask them how they did it, and basically just throw myself at their feet and thank them.
Amazing, isn't it, how rare this sort of thing seems to be, children who think of somebody but themselves, and actually show it, too.
So you Brits who comment here, or people who have a lot of contact with Brits with kids...is it different over there, the way kids are raised? How? Do you think you're like the French in how you raise your kids? And finally, what do you guys do that we in the USA should be doing?
"Little Mosque On The Prairie"
Fantastic piece by Michael Coren in The Toronto Sun about the the protestations by Muslims that Islam is not to blame, it's never to blame:
It's the episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie that I missed. The one where the father is so angry with his teenage daughter for not wearing the hijab that he strangles her to death. Perhaps it will be in the special features section of the DVD version, released just in time for the holiday that used to be known as Christmas, but not any longer because the word might hurt someone's feelings....Most Canadian Muslim leaders immediately condemned what had happened but it didn't take very long for the usual suspects to explain on radio and television that the tragedy had nothing to do with the Muslim faith and that all religions contain extremism. Islam, we were told, is a religion of peace.
Which is probably just what the owner of a Christian bookstore in Gaza thought three months ago as he was murdered and his shop firebombed. Or Danny Pearl, shortly before the American journalist had his head cut off by Islamic terrorists -- who, naturally, filmed the whole thing and made sure their chants from the Koran were loud and clear.
...Or the women who lived and died under the Taliban. Or the Christians persecuted and killed in Pakistan, Egypt and Sudan.
Or the young women in France, Britain and all over Europe killed by fathers and brothers for leaving Islam, dressing like other girls or dating non Muslims.
Or the teacher who allowed a student to name a teddy bear Muhammad, or Salman Rushdie's translator whose throat was cut from ear to ear, or movie director Theo Van Gogh who was slaughtered like an animal in the middle of a Dutch street.
And on and on. On until the denial is sickening. It's cultural, it's because of colonialism, it's because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islam.
Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.
It is not I who say this but the countless Muslims who take to the streets at the drop of a cartoon to scream for blood and war; or the Muslims who preach jihad in North America and Europe, where they enjoy open societies founded on Christian enlightenment.
They may represent a minority, but the harm they do is incalculable. This dysfunctional venom does not come from Christian, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist and fatuous relativism will only blind the foolish. It is time for free discussion in this free country, whether it offends or not.
Here's an excerpt from another piece "The Inevitability of Genocide," by Yashiko Sagamori, that neatly lays out the problem behind the multi-culti idea of "tolerance" for Islam, a religion started by an exceptionally violent man (more on that here):
“Your peacemongers may sing sweet songs about Islam’s benevolence, but the truth is: Islam and jihad are as inseparable as the two poles of a magnet … The history of Islam is the history of jihad. The purpose of jihad is expansion … (Islam gives you the) choice to accept Allah and His Messenger or die … And if you don’t destroy Islam … Islam will destroy you as thoroughly as it has destroyed everything and everybody in its way during the 14 centuries of unending jihad.”
Meanwhile, an Orthodox Jew might give you a potato latke that's a day or two past its sell-by date. Understand the difference, class?
Feather Duster Guilt
Jeff Opdyke wrote previously that his family life was so hectic that his wife took a day off work just to catch up on the laundry, then just wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
Finally, Amy and I have hired a woman to help us keep our house clean. That's an issue we were debating earlier this year because, as I noted in the original column, our life is often so consumed by job obligations and our kids' school duties and extracurricular activities that "many household chores get punted from one day to the next...and then to the next."Amy is pleased with this arrangement. (Amy Alkon: especially since she, not you, took the day off to play washerwoman.) But I still question whether it's worth the $75 a week we're paying.
I think his indecision here comes from a question he asked in the previous column:
Is domestic help an unnecessary luxury, or is it a modern necessity?
Look, there are a lot of people who can cook and clean. Only I can write my book and column. Why go all angsty about picking up a rotisserie chicken or hiring a few maids (legal, please!) to sparkle up the house?
Opdkyke, who, despite his protestations of growing up in a family of modest means, seems to have a quaint idea of the fun fifties housewife in a polka-dotted apron pushing the vacuum around in a pair of kitten heels, writes:
I realize that paying for a housekeeper is beyond the pocketbooks of many people, and that this whole debate may feel like an indulgent exercise. I've always thought it was off-limits for me, too. Amy and I both come from a background where the only housekeeper we knew was TV's Hazel. Such lavishness fell to a moneyed crowd, and both of us grew up in neighborhoods where Hazel was more likely to live than work.We still find ourselves stuck in that mind-set. While we've reached a point where we can afford a person once a week, at some level it's not really about the cost so much as it is the perception. Isn't keeping your own house clean part of life? And doesn't a housekeeper imply we have no better use for our money than to spend it on the extravagance of hiring someone to handle our mess?
Or is our mind-set simply too dated?
I talked to several people about this, and to my surprise, they all insisted that a housekeeper was either a necessity or something that was well worth considering.
"It is an absolutely essential investment in the sanity and well-being of my family," says Alex, a friend in New York. She and her husband, John, are a dual-career couple. When the workday ends, Alex isn't looking to put her feet up and relax. She wants to cook for her family and spend time with her daughter. But that doesn't leave time for folding clothes and cleaning the bathroom.
"For us," Alex says, "coverage on the home front allows me and John to do what we do professionally, and come home to a clean house, the errands done, so that we can focus on engaging with our daughter." A few hours after talking to Alex, she shot me an email to say that she and her family discussed this topic over dinner and that all had "agreed that we'd trade off vacations for the family benefit of having a housekeeper help us keep things clean and in order."
You're not a better person if you clean your own toilet. In fact, you're probably a better parent if you don't, if it means you're living your life and spending a little quality time with your kids. (And please note, I'm totally for giving kids chores to do. Builds character, as my father would say.)
Maybe It Is Time To Start Feeling Up Grandma At The Airport
"The Religion Of Peace" now seems to be trying to show their love for humanity and tolerance of others' beliefs that is their hallmark by recruiting murderers from the ranks of the aging. Via adnkronos, by Hamza Boccolini in Algiers:
In a major strategic change, the Algerian arm of Al-Qaeda appears to be using terrorists older than 60 to carry out its attacks.That is the finding to have emerged from early analysis of the dual bombings that struck Algiers on Tuesday.
Arab media and analysts have spoken of the "return of the elderly" to describe the strategic change by Al-Qaeda's Branch in the Islamic Maghreb (BAQMI) that claimed responsibility for the bombings in the Algerian capital.
The Algerian government said that at least 26 people were killed and more than 170 wounded by the two bombs. However hospital sources say that more than 60 people died in the attacks.
In a statement posted on Islamist websites, al-Qaeda's North Africa wing said that they had used 800 kilogrammes of explosives in each of the two suicide attacks.
Earlier this year al-Qaeda terrorists in Algeria had decided to use young people to carry out their attacks, but now they have changed their stragegy and appear to have decided to use terrorists aged in their 60's.
To avoid Algerian security at key positions in the city, such as the United Nations building, leader of BAQMI Abu Musa Abdel Wudud and his collaborators used a 64-year-old white-haired terrorist, Rabah Bashla, in the suicide attack.
Algeria's minister for internal affairs, Yazid Zarhuni, who went to visit those injured in the attack said a youth had told him that a security official had stopped the drivers gathering there and asked them to move backwards.
One of them refused and he was reportedly the elderly truck driver who later blew himself up. He was said to be in a hurry and looking for a way to get closer to the building.
"He was considered to be a normal person with very white hair and no-one imagined that he was a terrorist," said Zarhuni.
In addition, reports Boccolini, the barbarians also appear to have stepped up recruiting of "young people." In fact, Algerian police noted last September that al-Qaeda had recruited 50 kids under the age of 16.
Sick fucks. Check your watches. It's 2007, going on 2008. You're supposed to be sending your children to college, not sending them to their death.
Who wants to take bets that the cure for cancer will not come from a follower of Islam?
It's Hard Out There For An Expat
The dollar is well on its way to comparing unfavorably to the 50-cent piece, and friends of mine in Europe (Richard Nahem and Vincent Gagliostro, pictured in Friday's International Herald Tribune) are feeling the pinch. From a story by Doreen Carjaval:
PARIS: Erica Nevins's faith in the dollar was shaken the moment she pressed a crumpled $1 bill into the hand of a little girl begging for money on the streets of Marrakesh, Morocco."I don't want this. This is nothing," Nevins recalled as the scornful reaction of the child, who demanded more.
Since then Nevins, an American fashion executive, has replayed that moment over and over in her head as she confronted the harsh reality of living on a dollar income in Paris and then moving to pricey London. "The absurdity of this is that it's so true," she said. "A dollar really means nothing. It's scary."
With plunging exchange rates, American expatriates whose pensions or incomes are paid in dollars are scrimping. No more dinners out when a bottle of Perrier for €3.50 translates to $5 and no more Christmas shopping binges when a shiny iPod for €159 is the equal of $230.
"Those that can hold out are holding their breath and we're hoping for a return of the dollar, but those that can't are going," said Susie Bondi, an American who has lived in Paris for 12 years, but is moving to Vienna in January with her husband, Fred, to stretch their pension dollars in a city with a lower cost of living.
The past six months have been anxious for expatriates, with the dollar sinking against the euro, the pound and currencies from the Czech koruna to the Costa Rican colón. Those declines are accelerating the flight of expatriates in Europe, according to tax attorneys who listen to the woes of clients who are giving up because they see no relief in sight.
Here's the bit about Richard and Vincent:
Vincent Gagliostro is a graphic designer and freelance video filmmaker who left the New York advertising industry two years ago to settle in the Marais neighborhood in Paris with its promise of cheaper living that reduced his monthly housing costs from a $6,000 mortgage to an 18th-century apartment rental for €1,700. When he first moved to Paris, he said, he worked for a base of clients from the United States, but he is trying to diversify to earn euros."The dollar still heavily weighs on the quality of my life. As long as I continue to rely on at least 50 percent of my income with American clients, it's going to do that," Gagliostro said while dining on a simple €10 brasserie lunch of pasta and chicken.
Gagliostro's partner, Richard Nahem, a Brooklyn native, has also sought to supplement their income by offering customized tours of the Marais, but his new business, Eye Prefer Paris Tours, is dominated by Americans and Canadians who pay him in a mix of euros and dollars. To economize, he has cut back on his own indulgences, such as clothing purchases. But he cannot resist his favorite high-end patisserie, Gérard Mulot, where a chocolate éclair costs €2.80.
"When it comes to pastries," Nahem explained, "there's no price resistance for me."
Yeah, I know the feeling.
By the way, here's the Paris blogger party Richard and Vincent held last year. Met them, and lots of great Paris bloggers, like PollyVousFrancais and Susie Hollands, through my friend Laurie Pike's The Paris Blog ("The Blog With Gaul").
These days, Laurie Pike is now practically landed gentry in Paris. Well, landlord gentry, anyway!
RU Rude?
People are dumping people by text message. According to a survey, one in seven have been dumped that way. Sorry, but the price of a relationship includes the cost of getting out of a relationship -- the civilized way -- by telling people without using the medium for spam. And without simply dropping out of sight. From a Reuters story:
While hiding behind technology might appear a cowardly way of splitting up, it contrasts with the four percent who simply drop all communication with their lovers without notice."Most of us send emails and texts everyday, so it comes as no surprise they are now being used to ditch someone -- however distasteful this is," said Rob Barnes from moneysupermarket.com, which carried out the survey.
"The results show one per cent of the population would use a social networking site to dump a partner. It would be interesting to see how this changes as sites such as Facebook and MySpace become more apparent in our everyday lives."
One of the most high-profile victims of dumping by text was Kevin Federline, who reportedly received news that pop singer Spears was filing for divorce while being filmed for a television show.
The site that did the survey is British. Dumping via text may be more prevalent over there because people in Europe have been bigger texters that we've been, but we're catching up fast...especially among younger age groups.
Santa Was Naughty This Year
Write Santa in Canada and you may get a surprising response. Via Reuters:
Canada's post office and police are trying to track down a "rogue elf" who wrote obscene letters to children on behalf of Santa Claus, a newspaper reported on Friday.The Ottawa Citizen said at least 10 nasty letters had been delivered to little girls and boys in Ottawa who wrote to Santa this year care of the North Pole, which has a special H0H 0H0 Canadian postal code. Return letters from Santa are in fact written by an 11,000-strong army of Canada Post employees and volunteers.
"We firmly believe there is just one rogue elf out there," a Canada Post spokeswoman told the paper.
Canada Post's "Write To Santa" program has been shut down until that bad fucking Santa is caught.
Follow That Pitchfork!
Yes, apparently, there's a guy with a spiked tail up ahead who gives a shit about your life. Well, I guess it sells some books, anyway -- the Bible, an all-time big seller, and now, the religiously based One-Liner Wisdom For Today's Guys. A sample:
Me: "Uh...which direction are you going?" (Wait for answer.) "I'm going the other way."
That's actually something I said to some crack-, smack-, or otherwise-addled guy who was trying to tag along with me as I was going to a brunch in the East Village. See? It's perfectly possible to ditch the bad influences, even if you're a godless harlot like me.
Of course, it helps to be a godless harlot and kind of a bitch at the same time.
Which brings me to today's topic: Sexual harassment. "The hostile workplace." And I'm not just talking about a girl who gets asked out by an ugly guy, as the old joke goes about the definition of sexual harassment. For example, from "Saturday Night Live," this training video:
But, what is sexual harassment really about? Satoshi Kanazawa writes about Kingsley Browne's take on it. (More on that in Kingsley's excellent book, Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality (The Rutgers Series in Human Evolution):
Psychologist Kingsley R. Browne identifies two types of sexual harassment cases: the quid pro quo ("You must sleep with me if you want to keep your job or be promoted") and the "hostile environment" (the workplace is deemed too sexualized for workers to feel safe and comfortable). While feminists and social scientists tend to explain sexual harassment in terms of "patriarchy" and other ideologies, Browne locates the ultimate cause of both types of sexual harassment in sex differences in mating strategies.Studies demonstrate unequivocally that men are far more interested in short-term casual sex than women. In one now-classic study, 75 percent of undergraduate men approached by an attractive female stranger agreed to have sex with her; none of the women approached by an attractive male stranger did. Many men who would not date the stranger nonetheless agreed to have sex with her.
The quid pro quo types of harassment are manifestations of men's greater desire for short-term casual sex and their willingness to use any available means to achieve that goal. Feminists often claim that sexual harassment is "not about sex but about power;" Browne contends it is both—men using power to get sex. "To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money."
Sexual harassment cases of the hostile-environment variety result from sex differences in what men and women perceive as "overly sexual" or "hostile" behavior. Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.
Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men's repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.
In the latter case, where a woman is being bullied by a guy who wants to show dominance, I think the solution, at least some of the times, per what I told a girl who wrote me recently about a situation in her workplace, is to have (or cultivate fast) the demeanor that doesn't advertise to others that you'd make a good victim. And if you are victimized, to get up on your hind legs and get in the bully's face.
In the case of the woman who wrote me, she was young and didn't want to "yell at the guy," lest she come off "the fiery redhead." In contrast, Gregg told the new server company guys (we're thinking of switching to them) that if they don't give us good service, I might "go all redhead on them," and I think, if your demeanor suggests you have that in you, you generally don't get hostile work environment'ed in the first place.
Your thoughts, your experience?
Did You Say SUV or SIV?
Even a "Motley Fool" hadn't heard of the SIV -- the Structured Investment Vehicle -- as little as a month ago. Emil Lee writes for The Motley Fool:
Now I'm sweating buckets that the estimated $400 billion in SIVs outstanding might derail the capital markets. What happened, and what does it mean for the rest of us?At the risk of oversimplifying, an SIV is an entity set up when a bank buys long-term assets and finances them by issuing short-term commercial paper (CP). The bank gets a fee for managing the SIV, but can keep the SIV's debt off the balance sheet because it doesn't take on the credit risk. However, many banks agreed to give the SIV a liquidity backstop -- meaning the bank ensures that the SIV will be able to refinance its short-term CP debt.
Whoops!
That liquidity guarantee is coming back to haunt the banks. Until very recently, it would have been almost laughable to predict that the commercial paper markets would come to a screeching halt. The CP markets are extremely deep and liquid.
However, these are not normal times, and the CP markets, especially the asset-backed CP markets, are very, very unaccommodating right now.
What now?
With many banks facing obligations -- based on contracts or their reputations -- to provide liquidity backstops to their SIVs, it's very important that the banks solve this problem. If the banks can't find CP buyers, they will have to fund the SIVs themselves -- no easy task given the amounts of money in play here.
There's an estimated $400 billion in SIVs outstanding, and according to The Wall Street Journal, Barclays (NYSE: BCS) recently injected $1.6 billion into one of its SIV affiliates, HSBC (NYSE: HBC) had an SIV affiliate with $35 billion in debt, and Citigroup (NYSE: C) manages SIVs with a whopping $80 billion in assets.
Not to worry! The government will bail everybody out! ("The government" being a polite shorthand for "Fuck you, taxpayers!") Here's another "Motley Fool," Seth Jayson, explaining Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's idea of a solution:
Gotta be some way out of this other than the way we came...Now, Paulson -- like all the other politicians in Washington -- is scrambling for a way to fix the mess without any pain for anyone. Obviously, this is absurd. Billions of dollars in fictional equity were created via the housing Ponzi scheme, and these guys are dead set on preserving as much of it as possible, no matter what the cost.
"We must help as many able homeowners as possible stay in their homes," Paulson said. "Foreclosures are costly and painful for homeowners."
Yeah, well, too bad. That's what happens when you allow people who make $50,000 a year to buy $500,000 homes on gimmicky loans that apply a pretend interest rate up front.
Now, Paulson says lenders should work with home owners to refinance these overpriced houses before the interest rates reset and they can no longer afford them. Surely, he knows that the funding for those loans was provided only on the condition that they would someday reset at rates that make medieval usurers look kind.
That's sleazy, but that's what naive, deluded, or greedy buyers signed on for. Take away that reset, and you take away the incentive to lend the money in the first place. If Paulson thinks he's got a credit crunch now, just wait and see what happens in a world that dictates new loan terms as soon as it's politically expedient. Lending will get even tighter and home prices will drop like rocks.
...Someone's gotta pay. And if it's not going to be the debtors leaving the homes, and if it's not going to be Hank's buddies on Wall Street, who does that leave?
Us. The responsible majority of Americans. Remember us? The people who didn't go out and do stupid things with our money?
And here's a great analogy, excerpted from Patrick.net:
SUV Bailout To Keep America Humming
Lawmakers in Washingon are near final agreement on a proposed $400 billion bailout of SUV buyers. The massive amount of debt taken on by drivers in an attempt to ensure that their vehicles are significantly bigger than their neighbors’ vehicles has resulted in millions teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. “We need to keep these people in their Hummers, at whatever cost to taxpayers” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Paulson is expected to announce details of the plan as soon as Wednesday, said sources familiar with the matter. With more than 2 million drivers facing higher interest costs and the possible loss of their oil-company-friendly vehicles if they cannot meet the payments, the future of US overconsumption is at stake.
Step right up for the "foreclosure bus tour"!
Patrick.net link via Consumerist
Shop Til You Drop, Government-Style
Meet California's debt. The march to a $14 billion deficit.
Who They Killed For Allah
I ran into this piece in my web travels -- about a family, Peter, Sue, and Christine Hanson, who were aboard the hijacked United Airlines flight 175 from Boston flown by the Muslim terrorists into the World Trade Center. Christine was two. Here's a letter from Eunice, "Pete's mom":
Dear Peter:Nine years ago we were happily preparing for your wedding to Sue on August 14th. Today, your Dad and I are discussing the One Year Memorial Observance of your death, you, Sue and little Christine Lee on September 11. You and 3000 others were slaughtered, and now we have been asked by so many to describe our feelings. You and Sue and Christine are always in our thoughts and hearts...we miss you so much. Peter, I still feel the terrible pain that went through my whole being when Dad, holding the phone heard your last words. As the plane banked and crashed into that tower and exploded in a burst of flame, I screamed, I knew that all the joys we had together, all the love, care and good times we shared all the dreams and hopes we had were gone...ended by those murderous cowards. The thought of the three of you in each other's arms in that final moment will never leave me. I have been told that there could not have been any pain, but you knew what was happening. How could those murderers have looked at those innocent people on the plane, at beautiful Christine and so cruelly kill? How could their leaders, hidden and protected in a far off land, laugh and joke about their lack of humanity. I want them brought to justice, but my feelings are about you. How can I ever forget you, why would I want to forget you? How could I forget your curiosity and energy. Or those bitter sweet teen years when you would quietly come into my bedroom and ask if would talk with you and you would pour out your experiences of life, not looking for answers, only wanting to talk. And those dreadlocks!! After you met Sue you cut them off and brought them home to me. The Grateful Dead, whose music you loved so much that you convinced your Dad and I to attend some concerts to share the experience. You moved to Boston to attend College, embrace the city then met Sue. I remember your calling me from Boston, and asking me to come and help you pick out an engagement ring because you were going to ask her to marry you. I remember how you encouraged Sue to go for her PhD. We loved her so much. And Christine Lee was love personified. The world would have had no limits for her. She made me feel so special.
She was truly her mom and dad's daughter. To this day, I expect to he phone to ring and hear her sweet voice telling me about her day at day care and always closing with "I love you Namma". Before the trip she told me she was going to visit her great grandmother and then visit Mickey Mouse and Pluto. And then she said, "I want to go to your house Namma". Peter, people have been so kind. Our Church, Easton Community, the people of Groton, MA where you live, Boston University, your friends, our friends, the political community and even the press. The Memorial dedicated to you, Sue and Christine in Groton is so meaningful and the elegy written by Carl Schroeder, "Christine's Lullaby" is so moving, so beautiful. I am sure when Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead called us you were smiling he told us he was dedicated a concert of his new group to you. You all had so many friends, good friends who keep in contact with us, for you and Sue were such good loyal friends. Your love was steadfast. We have all the wonderful memories no one can take from us but oh, how I miss you my beautiful children.
Love Mom
As for why they killed these people? Yeah, Allah is the shorthand version. Maybe they really just wanted to get laid. Here, from a piece by Pepe Escobar in The Asia Times, Arif Jamal, "arguably the leading expert on jihad," explains the rewards of waging it:
Jamal: Prophet Muhamad also offered a lot of incentives for those who would wage jihad in their lives. The mujahideen were assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood fell to earth. The Holy Scriptures of Islam also say that houris [beautiful virgins of the Koranic Paradise] come down to Earth to take the spirit of the mujahid who is about to die before the first drop of his blood falls to earth. The martyrs are promised 72 houris in Paradise. These houris are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of Pakistani mujahideen who were fighting in Kashmir. There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen....ATol: So most mujahideen are single.
Jamal: Yes, most mujahideen prefer to get married in Paradise. Apart from jihad, they do practice namaz (the ritual of five prayers a day) regularly, they very regularly fast, but they ignore other concepts of Islam. They say jihad is the summit of Islam. So if you have found the summit, you have found the whole thing. This is what they are taught. They believe jihad will bring them honor in the world, they will become powerful. The heroes of the mujahideen have always been generals. No Muslim scientist, or intellectual, or artist has ever become a hero. It's a military tradition that dominates the mujahideen.
The Aspiring Terrorist
It's so Letters To A Young Poet, except that this "young poet," a Muslim girl named Samina Malik, wrote notes to herself on the back of used sales slips at the Heathrow W.H. Smith bookstore where she worked -- little memos about murder in the name of Islam that she posted on the Internet. Oh yeah, and she did it while enjoying subsidized health care, free education, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and all the other benefits of being a British citizen.
Are we westerners dim or what? We fork over all these benefits to the people who want us all dead. Or claim to. There are those who mewl that this Samina Malik case is a freedom of speech issue, but that's not what our poetess is actually being sent to jail for. And frankly, while I am a staunch defender of free speech, including a person's right to blather on about how their particular evidence-free belief in god is really cool and everybody else's sucks, etc., etc., I don't see Malik's brand of speech -- inciting violence -- as a right. (Check out the charming bit about how to saw off somebody's head.) Silly girlish stuff, along the lines of some 16-year-old goth girl's diary? Not quite.
Kim Murphy quotes some of this British girl's terrorism-celebrating (or even terrorism-inciting) verse in a piece for the LA Times:
"The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom," Samina Malik, a soft-spoken 23-year-old usually draped in a modest black headscarf, wrote on one receipt. A judge yesterday sentenced Ms. Malik, know as "the Lyrical Terrorist" for her Internet name and her poems celebrating beheadings, to a nine-month suspended sentence and 100 hours of volunteer work. She was convicted for possessing material ranging from a Qaeda manual to a reference work on "mujahedin poisons" and bomb-making instructions, which prosecutors said suggested the British-born woman's linkage to violent extremists."You're 23, of good character 'til now, and from a supportive and law-abiding family who are appalled by the trouble that you're in," Judge Peter Beaumont said. At an earlier hearing, the judge had confessed that Ms. Malik remains "a complete enigma to me." The case comes amid a mounting debate in Britain over where to draw the line between terrorism and those who merely applaud it. Radical Muslim clerics have been sentenced to years of imprisonment for calling for the deaths of infidels. In July, three men were jailed for six years each for statements they shouted during an emotional demonstration over a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad, one of which was "Bomb, bomb the U.K."
Ms. Malik was convicted over her terrorism manuals, not her poetry. But it is her verses that have captivated and horrified the public and sparked the row over when radical statements cross the line into inciting terrorism.
"It's not as messy or as hard as some may think," she wrote in her poem "How to Behead." "It's all about the flow of the wrist. Sharpen the knife to its maximum. And before you begin to cut the flesh, tilt the fool's head to its left. Saw the knife back and forth. No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream. But ignore the donkey's ass. And continue to slice back and forth. You'll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe. But Don't Stop. Continue with all your might."
Ms. Malik sat silent as the judge read out her sentence, twisting a tissue in her clenched fist. At one point, she buried her tearful face in her hands. She has claimed she was seduced by the violent preachings of radical clerics as she began exploring Islam and adopted the Internet moniker "Lyrical Terrorist" because it "sounded cool." Though her writings appeared to revel in violence and condemned the nonbeliever as a "stinking kuffar ape," she never meant any of it, she told the court during her trial. "This doesn't mean I wanted to convert my words into actions," she testified. "This is a meaningless poem, and that is all it ever was. To partake in something and to write about something are two different things."
Here's a much more reasonable, civilized woman on Islam, Gina Khan, 38, who, (via the Times/UK's Mary Ann Sieghart) was born in Birmingham to Pakistani parents, ran away from an arranged marriage, dresses in jeans and dares to speak against the increasing radicalisation of her community. Below, she's interviewed by Ophelia Benson. Khan tells Benson:
Islamic history is important to study and analyse. It wasn't always like this. Islam was frozen in the middle ages: it's time to defrost Islam. The Quran is a magnificent historical record. Even Imams couldn't possibly understand the depth of it. Millions of us read the Quran in Arabic...that doesn't mean we under stand what we read, we are dependent on translations. That's why I call it the biggest con of the century...interpretations and translations imported into this country for 40 years were more to do with Jihadism than with a peaceful Islam that gave equality to women and was plural. There is an American woman, Laleh Bakhtiar, who is a convert and isn't extreme...she still wears jeans - she doesn't wear the hijab as most do, she has interpreted the Quran in English and has had death threats. I'm waiting to read her translation. Jihadists don't want women translating the Quran or women becoming Imams...Yet the Prophet had a woman Imam in his first mosque who preached where men and women weren't segregated.Islamists have almost written Muslim women out of history and their natural rights. I do acknowledge that the Quran has violent edicts, but you have to read the Quran in context and time. To say that what happened in the 7th century must be revived and considered the 'true Islam' is ridiculous to any reasonable thinking human being - that would mean reviving desert Arabic Islam, which is becoming obvious and beginning to look like a cult. Muslims have to revive the spiritual message of the Quran, which is often suppressed by Jihadists. I guess I'll get a lot of hostility, but no one owns Islam. We all can have our own personal relationship with God. I'll do as I damn please. Islamists psychologically suppress us. It never worked on me, but that doesn't mean I'm not a Muslim. I'm against the idea of a revived Calipha...I mean for God's sake, who do these people want as a Caliph, Osama bin Ladin or Omar Bakri??
Benson asks:
It can be hard to reform religious practices and rules, because they are supposed to be 'above' human beings. It's always open to people to tell you 'That's not what Allah says'. Do you get comments like that? If so how do you deal with them?
Khan responds:
Yes all the time; Allah's name is used to put the fear in us and close off debate or logical thinking. I ask Muslims to look within themselves and ask themselves - question their own humanity. What God would want you to behead an apostle or murder a gay or hate Jews? We are all human beings, no one is better than anybody else. The truth is the majority of Muslims like my mother lived through Partition and never wanted to live through it again, but there are signs that Jihadists want to revive Partition again. Indians and Sikhs understand this supremacy better.The reason it is diificult to change is because Islamists have invaded the public domain and media beneath the skin of the nation for nearly 40 years; we have been fed lies and they use the Quran to justify their actions. Watch Osama bin Ladin in videos and you will see he uses 7th century history in the Quran in order to strengthen the cause. Their aim is to spread extreme Islam to 'the four corners of the world'. Their ideology is the cause of terrorism and the young turning themselves into human bombs...brainwashing them to believe they will be blessed with 72 virgins in heaven or that female suicide bombers will sit at the right-hand side of God . What an insult...these guys kill themselves as well as others, in order to be blessed with milk, honey and perfect virgins...so that Isalmists can revive a Calipha and change the order of the world.
...Islam is in crisis...
I don't quite think so, but it sure should be. And we certainly are in crisis -- one of denial, "tolerance," and un-scarved heads buried in the sand. Still unscarved and still connected to our shoulders for now, but give the Islamists time to get the Sharia law thing going. No, it won't happen here in America so soon. But, I wouldn't buy an apartment in Europe unless you eventually plan on trading your western-style clothes for a burkha.
Who Pays On Dates?
Certain men make the mistake of worrying about what's "fair" on dates rather than what works. No, nobody wants some gold digger, but the way to weed out the conniving girls isn't to storm around complaining that a woman doesn't pay on the first date, or to try to divide the check down to the half-penny.
Sure, things are confusing out there. Some girls do pay because they think it's the fair thing to do. Some girls don't pay because it's how they're raised. Some girls do pay because they don't want to "owe" the guy sex. Some girls don't pay because they're looking for free dinner. What to do, what to do?
I just posted another Advice Goddess column, a response to this letter:
As a single male, I find something extremely repulsive. More and more, women are making as much or more money than men. Yet, on dates, when the check comes, these career women conveniently disappear to the bathroom. I smell a scam. I’m sick of this ugly “What's mine is mine/what's yours is mine” mentality. So, a little philosophical consistency here, or else I give up.--More Than A Wallet
An excerpt from my answer:
Life isn’t fair, Bucky. Deal with it. Or, if you’d rather, bow out of the dating game, and spend your nights on men’s movement blogs posting rambling screeds about the “feminazis” and this new set of filet mignon mercenaries. Sure, men and women are now equal under the law, but that hasn’t made them the same biologically. Because women are the ones who get knocked up and stuck with mouths to feed, they evolved to seek “providers’” -- guys who show signs they’ll stick around to fork over gifts and grub after the fun is done. Modern women are still getting this directive from their genes -- even staunch feminists, chicks with six-figure incomes, and women who think of themselves as “Barren!” In short, there are about 1.8 million years of evolutionary hard-wiring standing between you and any clever notions that you’ll wax your legs and Nair your mustache if she’ll just pick up the tab.We aren’t the only species that goes on dinner dates. Anthropologist Helen Fisher calls gifts of food one of the “universal features of wooing” -- and guess who’s almost always responsible for the check? Fisher writes in Anatomy of Love that the boy black-tipped hang fly plies his crush with aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies. (Hard to say which wine goes best.) “The male common tern often brings a little fish to his beloved. The male roadrunner presents a little lizard.” And then, of course, there’s the ultimate courtship gift, the male praying mantis letting the female praying mantis eat his head during sex.
You don’t have to go that far, but you could maybe buy a girl a glass or two of wine without making out like you’ve fallen victim to one of the greater injustices of our time: “I have a dream…that one day men and women will go halfsies on dinner…” Actually, a glass or two of something-or-other, not dinner, is all you should be buying on the first date. You don’t shell out big for a near-stranger. The point is getting to know a girl, not getting to know whether she prefers Kobe beef to lobster. And yes, the person who does the asking out -- usually the man, poor dear -- should do the paying. On at least the first and probably the second date. Beyond then, if a woman’s wallet seems welded shut, have a little talk and suss out whether she worries you’ll think ill of her for paying (some men do), or whether she’s just a leech with lipgloss. >>cont'd>>
The rest, including comments, is here.
Barbarians On Our Side Of The Gate
Yet another loving Muslim father murders his daughter for not wearing a hijab. This time, in a Toronto suburb. Oh yeah, she was 16. And daddy may have been helped along by her brother.
Where's Curly?
Larry and Moe go at it. From a story by the AP's Libby Quaid:
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"The article, to be published in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, says Huckabee asked the question after saying he believes Mormonism is a religion but doesn't know much about it. His rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is a member of the Mormon church, which is known officially as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The authoritative Encyclopedia of Mormonism, published in 1992, does not refer to Jesus and Satan as brothers. It speaks of Jesus as the son of God and of Satan as a fallen angel, which is a Biblical account.
A spokeswoman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said Huckabee's question is usually raised by those who wish to smear the Mormon faith rather than clarify doctrine.
"We believe, as other Christians believe and as Paul wrote, that God is the father of all," said the spokeswoman, Kim Farah. "That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children. Christ, on the other hand, was the only begotten in the flesh and we worship him as the son of God and the savior of mankind. Satan is the exact opposite of who Christ is and what he stands for."
I'm guessing there's one thing these two could probably agree on: that rational thought -- expecting to see evidence there's a god instead of just believing blindly, as they're instructed to do by the church -- is eeeeevullll!
Yes, it's 2007, and the men and women running to be the leader of the free world all believe in The Imaginary Friend. And it sells.
P.S. Surprise, surprise, from a link by Mickey Kaus, it seems a good many of the Huckter's speeches from when he was a pastor are lost. Did the dog eat them with your homework, Hucky? Did you smear them with raw hamburger to get him to do it?
I Loathe Comcast/Time-Warner
The problem has now been fixed, but I want you all to see what I went through thanks to these fuckbags at Time-Warner. And it's the people in charge who did it -- not giving a shit who they put out; who, like me, just stayed up from midnight to 1:22 am in hopes of fixing my cable when I actually needed to be in bed at midnight because I have to wake up at 4 am to write.
Forgive me if this little tale/plea for help below is a bit repetitive and semi-incoherent. I'm tired, and pissed out of my skull, and I don't mean drunk, but drunk with rage. Here's what I wrote before the cable got fixed, thanks to Brian, a TW Tier 3 tech support guy:
I'm on double deadlines, and then some, for the holidays, and I'm supposed to be up at 4 am. I should be in bed now, but I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my cable. Time-Warner's secret tech support number isn't answering (at 12:51 PST) -- or there are a lot of other people with fucked up cable waiting to get helped. Maybe they're closed, maybe they're not, the asswipes.You'd think they'd leave a message on there telling you they're closed, but their unprofessionalism is legendary with me. I live about a mile from the beach, and about once a year they let the lines degrade until my cable goes out, and then they come fix it. Maintain the lines? Why would they do such a thing? Just wait till we complain! Much cheaper, easier, much less manpower.
Worse yet, while I'm waiting (for Godot, I think -- it's now been 19 minutes and 28 seconds) they have these ads I have to listen to...plus these recorded apologies that make me want to throw my desk out the window -- at the exact moment the president/CEO of Comcast or Time-Warner or whatever it's called is walking by.
"We're very sorry you're still on hold. We appreciate your patience and ...some more insincere crap...be of service to you." Yeah? Fuck you. If you were sorry I was on hold, you'd have answered my call. Better yet, you'd have maintained my cable.
Oh, I love a monopoly. But for theirs, I'd be with anybody, anybody else. Satanic Cable, Inc? I'm there.
"Thank you for holding. One of our representatives will be with you momentarily."
I'm guessing I'll have to go to bed, and one of my blog commenters, not one of your representatives, will come up with some idea of what's wrong.
To that end, here's the modem.
Only the light on the far right is lit, and I keep shutting down my computer and pulling the modem plug and reinserting it, to no avail. Sorry the type isn't clearer, but the text under the light says "Internet." The others, from left to right, are Messages, Cable Activity, Cable Link, PC Link, then Internet, the lit one. I'm on an iMac G5.
Wait -- now the light just to the left of the light on the far right, PC Link, is lit, too. Perhaps this will clear itself up by morning.
Oh, "We're very sorry you're still on hold. We appreciate your patience and look forward to being of service to you." Yeah? Eat me.
Again, no need for volunteer trouble-shooting, problem has been solved, and here's a bit about what caused it:
Brian, Time-Warner Cable Tier 3 Support (who was great, really knew his stuff) said: "Servers are down. Servers will be up no later than 6 am."
Why would they do such a thing? Brian said: "Don't know why the servers are down. They just decided 'We're taking down our servers and making changes to them.'"
Charming.
Brian said they had 20,000 customers calling them, and six people to take their calls.
These scumbags in charge at Comcast/Time-Warner could've called, e-mailed, put out a press release. Instead, surprise, surprise, they just took down their servers, no warning, no explanation.
To the president of Comcast/Time-Warner: Have a really shitty day. And the day after that, another really shitty day. And so on, and so on. And if I had the energy, and I could find your home number, at 1:30 am PST/4:30 am EST, there's nothing that would give me greater joy than to wake your ass up and scream obscenities into your ear.
Is that crass and vulgar of me? Sorry, I was hoping for extra-crass and extra-vulgar, but I'm a little low on steam.
For Or Against? The Modern-Day Stocks And Pillories
Here's a sketch of what stocks and pillories were from about 820 A.D. on. Now, writes Jennifer Steinhauer for The New York Times, an Arizona county attorney has a modern approach to public shaming:
A conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol is something many people try to conceal, even from their families. But now the bleary-eyed, disheveled and generally miserable visages of convicted drunken drivers here, captured in their mug shots, are available to the entire world via a Web site.The hall of shame is even worse for drunken drivers convicted of a felony. A select few will find their faces plastered on billboards around Phoenix with the banner headline: Drive drunk, see your mug shot here.
The Web site and billboards, which began last month, are the brainchildren of Andrew P. Thomas, the county attorney here who has served as the prosecutorial counterpart to the county’s hard-edged sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who has been known to force inmates into pink underwear.
The purposes of the billboards and the Web site, Mr. Thomas has said, are to inform the public about drunken-driving laws, and to serve as a deterrent.
“People tend to like it, and it gets a message across to the offender,” said Mike Scerbo, a spokesman for Mr. Thomas, who declined to be interviewed. “We haven’t heard any complaints.” There are five billboards near freeways in the Phoenix area, with Mr. Thomas’s name in bold letters, and more will be up soon, Mr. Scerbo said.
While other states have used shame tactics like forcing convicted drunken drivers to use special license plates or pick up roadside litter wearing a placard announcing their crimes, defense lawyers and the spokeswoman for the national chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving said they had never heard of billboards or the Internet being used as scarlet letters.
The billboards will only feature convicted felons, whose crimes, which almost always involve someone’s death, are explained in detail on the Web site, StopDUIAZ.com. But those convicted of misdemeanors can be found on the site if the localities where they were convicted are willing to provide the mug shots and conviction information.
For it? Against it? Indifferent?
When Guns Stop Gun Tragedies
The mall thing in Omaha could've been very different -- had there been somebody armed in the vicinity. Just days later, here's how it played out in a church in Colorado Springs. Electa Draper writes for The Denver Post:
Amid deafening cracks of gunfire, smoke-spewing canisters and the flight of thousands of New Life Church members, Jeanne Assam said she suddenly saw the hallways clear and a gunman come through the door."I took cover. I identified myself. I engaged him. I took him down," the 42-year-old former law officer and volunteer church security guard said Monday at a news conference in the Colorado Springs police station.
"I just said, 'Holy Spirit, be with me.' I wasn't even shaking," Assam said. "I give the credit to God. I say this very humbly. God was with me."
Assam, a member of New Life for only a few months, admitted she had been without sleep since Sunday's midday shootings at Colorado's largest church.
The episode left two injured and ended the lives of two teen sisters and the gunman, 24-year-old Matthew Murray.
Police declined to confirm Monday whether Assam's weapon, which she reportedly emptied in the exchange, inflicted Murray's fatal wound or whether it was self-inflicted.
Police also wouldn't describe how close Assam had been to Murray or exactly where they were in New Life's long hallway.
The church's senior pastor, Brady Boyd, said Assam was a real hero to him and to the whole church. He said she acted as his personal bodyguard.
"We will be holding a funeral for two very precious young women who were shot and killed on our campus," Brady said. "Three people are needlessly dead, but many more lives could have been lost."
Church spokesman Rob Brendle called Assam's clear-eyed, swift action the "good news" of that horrible day.
"It was scary," Assam said at the news conference. "I tell you it was scary. It was loud. I'll never forget. The gunshots were so loud."
Assam said she had drawn her weapon countless times in her prior law enforcement career, but she had never shot anyone until Sunday.
Lady's kinda hot, too.
via Drudge
How Long It Takes To Get To Tokyo By Plane
About as long as it takes to get across town in Los Angeles at rush hour.
Traffic in L.A. has gotten so bad that I left at 4 pm for a dinner at Yamashiro that starts at 6 pm. Took me only 42 rather pleasant minutes to get there (at which time I took this picture, then sat in the bar and wrote for an hour) -- as opposed to when I leave at 5:30 pm, and it takes me an hour and a half, plus, by the time I arrive, the first person who so much as steps on my toe I'm likely to singe into a small pile of ash with a mere glare.
Profound unthanks to Henry Waxman, the asshat who stopped the subway; at least, from 1985 to 2005. Oh, goody...perhaps they'll build one now -- one that the attendant who helps me fasten my lacy thong Depends can eventually ride to my senior citizens' group home.
I Dislike Mike
Is this 1622? Because a few of the nitwits running on the Republican side make it sound like it. (Not that I'm enthralled by the Democrats, either -- especially not with Hillarycare.) Here's the latest from Hucky, from a story by Linda S. Caillouet inthe Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
SALT LAKE CITY -- Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night. "The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," he said. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior."
The reason we have so much broken humanity is that's the nature of humanity, and always has been, and the reason we have so many people sucking off the taxpayer hog is because our elected panderers to their constituents and the lobbying industry toss around handouts, corporate and public, like popcorn.
FDR did much of the breakage in the last century, causing many in this country to believe they can spend, spend, spend, and somebody will pay for them in the end. Problem is, Social Security runs out of money in 2017. And why should some struggling kid in their 20s pay the monthly expenses of some rich old bag?
You want to have money in your old age? Save it. You haven't saved money, well, maybe you should kill yourself so as not to be a burden to others. And I'm just sort of kidding. The thought has crossed my mind, as has making sure nobody leaves me a turnip attached to a machine when the health care dollars could be going to giving some kid with possibilities a chance at a life.
Yoohoo, Hucky, I'm a godless harlot, and I'm for personal responsibility (over handout-ism) as a form of government -- although I'm for health care for the desperately mentally ill and desperately poor. I'm also for paying for school for the children of the desperately poor. The rest of you can pay for your damn selves and your families. Go without a plasma screen or two if you have to, okay? Or use a condom.
I live an evidence-based life (i.e., I see no evidence there's a god, therefore I don't believe in god) and I'm also quite moral, imagine that. I chose my ethics carefully, look all the time to see when I've been an asshole so I can do better, and not because I'm afraid of hellfire and brimstone, but because I've committed to being an ethical person and, well, leaving the campground better than I found it.
link via Drudge
Gideon's Bible Is Being Replaced By Trojan's Raincoats
I have yet to see it, but Marty Klein reports that upscale hotels are yanking in-room Bibles and replacing them with condom-containing "intimacy kits." (Ugh, the name alone is hurl- not "intimacy"-inducing. Can't we just fuck?)
Personally, with the latest news about hotel drinking glasses, I'd love to have a condom to cover the hotel's remote. The fundies out there will have to forgive me if I take a wild guess that the last guy who stayed in the room wasn't jerking off to "The Song Of Solomon."
Klein writes of the American Family Association's latest hissyfit (and then lays it on a little thick in parts..."disgusting, patronizing," blah, blah, blah, but he's got a few good points):
The American Family Association, noting that the number of luxury hotels with in-room Bibles has dropped 18% since 2001, is predictably outraged: "Without action now, it is simply a matter of time before other chains remove the Bibles."And the problem with that is…what?
The AFA press release is just the latest reminder by the religious-industrial complex: organized religion deserves special privileges everywhere. Why a religious text in every hotel room? And why a Christian one? As the Sofitel chain explains, they're removing Bibles because guests are asking for other religious texts. This threatens to dwarf the whole smoking/non-smoking room thing; "will that be a Bible room, Koran room, Book of Mormon room?" Knowing the sex habits of many tired travelers, perhaps hotels should offer the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Of course, it's exactly the AFA and their fellows (Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, etc.) who demand that hotels eliminate pay-per-view in-room porn. They say people just can't ignore the stuff, which apparently leads viewers to rape, murder, and pillage.
Of course, many people are offended by finding an unwanted Christian Bible in their hotel room. They are supposed to just ignore it and celebrate America's religious diversity, while anti-porn crusaders can't imagine anyone just ignoring the in-room porn that a person has to pay for. What hypocrites. What a disgusting, patronizing view of human beings these "decency" groups have.
I guess atheists' ability to resist the sex and violence in the Bible (for free) is better than the sex-o-phobes' ability to resist it on-screen (for ten bucks).
Suggestion: keep the Bible (and dozens of other religious texts) in hotel rooms, but charge for them, like hotels do for porn or diet coke. And as with porn and diet coke, people can bring their own; pay for them; or do without. This would put the Good Book on a level playing field with the Good Orgasm.
In case you're interested, this week marked the 99th anniversary of Gideons International placing their first Bible in a hotel room. For all their effort, I don't notice the world becoming a better place, although hotel rooms have gotten much better.
Anyway, why regret replacing Bibles with condoms? Despite their claims, Bibles are obviously not preventing unwanted pregnancies. Condoms do. And we all want that, right?
Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, © Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexualIntelligence.org).
Klein's book: America's War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty
Freedom From Religion
There's a terrific unsigned piece in the IHT about the way the doofuses pining away for the Republican nomination are falling all over themselves to emphasize their belief (sans evidence) in god, and going into all sorts of religio-patriotic "let's pretend" (let's distort, really). Here's an excerpt:
Romney filled his speech with the first myth - that the nation's founders, rather than seeking to protect all faiths, sought to imbue the United States with Christian orthodoxy....Romney dragged out the old chestnuts about "In God We Trust" on American currency, and the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, conveniently omitting that those weren't the founders' handiwork, but were adopted in the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism.
...He didn't mention Thomas Jefferson, who said he wanted to be remembered for writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia and drafting the first American law - a Virginia statute - guaranteeing religious freedom.
In his book, "American Gospel," Jon Meacham quotes James Madison as saying law was "meant to comprehend, with the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."
The founders were indeed religious men, as Romney said. But they understood the difference between celebrating religious faith as a virtue, and imposing a particular doctrine, or even religion in general, on everyone. As Meacham put it, they knew that "many if not most believed, yet none must."
The other myth permeating the debate over religion is that it is a dispute between those who believe religion has a place in public life and those who advocate, as Romney put it, "the elimination of religion from the public square."
That same nonsense is trotted out every time a court rules that the Ten Commandments may not be displayed in a government building.
We believe democracy cannot exist without separation of church and state, not that public displays of faith are anathema. We believe, as did the founding fathers, that no specific religion should be elevated above all others by the government.
The authors of the Constitution knew that requiring specific declarations of religious belief (like Romney saying he believes Jesus was the son of God) is a step toward imposing that belief on all Americans. That is why they wrote in Article VI that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
And yet, religious testing has gained strength in the last few elections. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has made it the cornerstone of his campaign. John McCain, another Republican who struggles to win over the religious right, calls America "a Christian nation."
CNN, shockingly, required the candidates at the recent Republican debate to answer a videotaped question from a voter holding a Christian edition of the Bible, who said: "How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?"
The nation's founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate's fitness for office. It's tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation's moral standing - not one who happens to attend a particular church.
For Thomas Jefferson's far more modern views on religion, see my blog item on Mitt The Twit from the other day.
Take That, Apple!
Microsoft Surface, with a more realistic voiceover:
What Success In Iraq Looks Like
Forget the fact that there were no WMDs; ask yourself whether there could ever be a possibility for longterm democratic rule in a Muslim country. The Brit army will hand Basra back to the Iraqis in less than two weeks, and they say they've done all they can to stabilize the city during their four years there. From the Times/UK, here's what they're leaving in their wake -- murderous militias giving, not just Muslim women, but Christian women, a choice...cover your heads or die:
On her first day at Basra University this year a man came up to Zeena, a 21-year-old Christian woman, and three other Christian girls and ordered them to cover their heads with a hijab, or Islamic headscarf.“We didn't listen to him, and thought he might just be some extremist student representing only himself,” she said. The next day Zeena and two of her friends returned to class with uncovered heads.
This time a man in the black clothes of the Shia militia stopped them at the entrance and took them aside. “He said, 'We asked you yesterday to wear a hijab, so why are you and your friends not covering your hair?'. He was talking very aggressively and I was scared,” Zeena recalled.
The girls explained that they were Christians and that their faith did not call for headscarves. “He said: 'Outside this university you are Christian and can do what you want; inside you are not. Next time I want to see you wearing a hijab or I swear to God the three of you will be killed immediately',” Zeena recalled. Terrified, the girls ran home. They now wear the headscarf all the time.
In the past five months more than 40 women have been murdered and their bodies dumped in the street by militiamen, according to the Basra police chief. Major-General Abdul-Jalil Khalaf said that some of them had been killed alone, others gunned down with their children. One unveiled mother was murdered together with her children aged 6 and 11.
And, hey, all you multiculties singing Kumbayah and preaching "tolerance," here's what these barbarians are going for, in the words of a commenter below the Times/UK article:
When it is forcefully banned in the schools in many countries of the world it is law!
Farhan, Riyadh
Remember, per the warnings of George Mason, Islam is in drag as a religion; it's really a political movement, bent on the totalitarian rule of the rest of us.
Are We Really Going To Hire Another Fundamentalist Nitwit?
Mike Huckabee gives an example of where being anti-science takes a guy -- to call for quarantining of homos, despite it being common knowledge at the time that AIDs was not spread by, say, sneezing. Must have felt all squishy and good for Hucky, as a pretense for being all public health'y, to find an excuse to hate on the homos (per his evidence-free belief in god, and the made-up story that homosexuality is sinful).
Now, Mr. Morality is trying to weasel his way out of his 1992 remarks -- perfect pandering for his state's fundy electorate, but not so perfect now that he's trying to have wider appeal; like, to people who don't believe the creationist story that man saddled up T-Rex and yippeekiyay'ed off to go spear a mastodon. Here's the AP story:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous public health risk."As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.
Huckabee said Saturday that his comments came at a time when the public was still learning about HIV and AIDS and promised to do "everything possible to transform the promise of a vaccine and a cure into reality."
...Huckabee said in a prepared statement released by his campaign Saturday afternoon that he called for quarantine when there was a lot of confusion about how AIDS is spread. He said he wanted at the time to follow traditional medical practices used for dealing with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
"We now know that the virus that causes AIDS is spread differently, with a lower level of contact than with TB," Huckabee said. "But looking back almost 20 years, my concern was the uncertain risk to the general population — if we got it wrong, many people would die needlessly. My concern was safety first, political correctness last."
When Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact. In late 1991, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were 195,718 AIDS patients in the country and that 126,159 people had died from the syndrome.
The nation had an increased awareness of AIDS at the time because pro basketball star Magic Johnson had recently disclosed he carried the virus responsible for it. Johnson retired but returned to the NBA briefly during the 1995-96 season.
Since becoming a presidential candidate this year, Huckabee has supported increased federal funding for AIDS research through the National Institutes of Health.
Buttlick.
For more on how the nitwit creationists think, laugh along here:
Dinosaur Mummy Another Flood Artifact?As a young boy, Tyler Lyson grew up with a playground that scientists could only dream of – his backyard contained a treasure of dinosaur bones. And in 1999 at the age of just seventeen, he stumbled upon an extremely rare find while out searching for bones on his family’s North Dakota farm. What he accidentally discovered is a piece of history, a mummified dinosaur, which he fittingly named Dakota.
Lyson actually unearthed a hadrosaur - and one of only six mummified dinosaurs ever found. But the finding is even more remarkable because it is the remains of an entire dinosaur – skin and bones, petrified into stone. Evolutionary philosophy dates Dakota to nearly sixty-seven million years.
But are sixty-seven million years really necessary? Paleontologists studying Dakota say this rare preservation of skin and mummification means that the creature had to be buried very rapidly, in flash flood conditions, to petrify in this way. The common-sense, biblical worldview would agree. Not millions of years, though; but yet another result of the Flood in the days of Noah just 4,400 years ago.
If the Flood happened as the Bible says, we should see many leftover artifacts. Rock layers, Grand Canyon, the formation of oil, and even these petrified dinosaur bones are more evidence that God’s Word is scientifically accurate.
Hey, silly fundies, heard of radiometric dating? And no, it's not something they sell on eHarmony.
The Joan Collins Of Dogs
She even seems to know her good side (whichever side the camera is pointed).
Freedom Requires Faith?
Sorry, am I actually less free because I'm rational? Because I live an evidence-based life? More nitwittery from the depressing collection of heehaws running for president; this time, from Mitt The Twit. Via CNN.com, Mitt said:
"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
I'll take my wisdom from Thomas Jefferson, thanks:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.letter to Danbury Baptists
Here's another good one from T.J.:
N]o man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779), quoted from Merrill D Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (1984), p. 347
Jefferson wasn't exactly religion's best friend:
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Woods (undated), referring to "our particular superstition."The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.... what has no meaning admits no explanation.
-- Thomas Jefferson, to Alexander Smyth, January 17, 1825We find in the writings of his biographers ... a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.
-- Thomas Jefferson, to William Short, August 4, 1822, referring to Jesus's biographers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Don't Ever Drink From Hotel Glasses
Unless they're single-use plastic cups.
Did You Know The Omaha Mall Was A "Gun-Free Zone"?
I'm sure that will provide great comfort to the relatives of all the people who thought they were picking out their Christmas presents, not lining up to be fitted for coffins. From the FoxNews story by John R. Lott, Jr.:
Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.The same was true for the attack at the Trolley Square Mall in Utah in February (a copy of the sign at the mall can be seen here). But again the media coverage ignored this fact. Possibly the ban there was even more noteworthy because the off-duty police officer who stopped the attack fortunately violated the ban by taking his gun in with him when he went shopping.
Yet even then, the officer "was at the opposite end and on a different floor of the convoluted Trolley Square complex when the shooting began. By the time he became aware of the shooting and managed to track down and confront Talovic [the killer], three minutes had elapsed."
There are plenty of cases every year where permit holders stop what would have been multiple victim shootings every year, but they rarely receive any news coverage. Take a case this year in Memphis, where WBIR-TV reported a gunman started "firing a pistol beside a busy city street" and was stopped by two permit holders before anyone was harmed.
When will part of the media coverage on these multiple-victim public shootings be whether guns were banned where the attack occurred? While the media has begun to cover whether teachers can have guns at school or the almost 8,000 college students across the country who protested gun-free zones on their campuses, the media haven’t started checking what are the rules where these attacks occur.
Instapundit makes a great point:
It seems to me that we've reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in "gun free" zones is well-established at this point, and I don't see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.
UPDATE: In the comments, Nancy Nall asked a question:
I thought you were a libertarian, Amy. (I thought Instapundit was, too.) Just as you're free to disapprove of a yogurt shop in your neighborhood by standing on the sidewalk and shooting pictures through the window, why aren't gun advocates free to disapprove of gun-free malls by shopping elsewhere?
I e-mailed Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds), who wrote me that he responded in a post. Here it is:
MY EARLIER POST ON liability for places that ban guns led to some objections: Malls are private property, so why can't the owners exclude guns if they like?Well, malls are only sort of private property. You can, for example, exclude people from your home because you don't like their race or religion; mall owners can't do that because it's against public policy, and a mall is a place of public accommodation. In addition, business owners generally take on a higher duty of care for customers on their premises, including a duty to protect them from the violent acts of third parties if those acts are reasonably foreseeable. The question is, given the tendency of mass shootings to occur in places where guns are banned, and given that gun bans take away customers' ability to defend themselves -- and other customers -- does this result in liability of shopping malls when such shootings occur? Or, at least, produce a duty to have more armed security than they otherwise would have (the Omaha mall appears to have had very little) in order to make up for the increased insecurity created by the gun ban? The question isn't open and shut, but it seems to me to be ripe for litigation.
Only As Good As Your Word
My friend Susan Shapiro just published another book, Only as Good as Your Word: Writing Lessons from My Favorite Literary Gurus, her wise/crazy/funny memoir of becoming a writer, told through her interactions with her mentors, with a chapter of straight-on practical tips at the end.
The mentors she focuses on include Ruth Gruber, one of the old pro writers who came to the free writers' workshop Sue used to hold on Tuesday nights at her New York apartment. (Used to for 18 years, that is.) Probably a quarter of the people now writing for magazines in New York city came through her door, no exaggeration.
Sue is insane, and I mean that in the nicest of ways. Unstoppable is another word for it, and she accepts no less from her students -- in the flesh, or in the book. Again, it is a memoir, but you learn by example from just how fucking nuts she is and was (and I have a similar quality) about learning, writing well, and selling her work.
Now, Sue also has the patience of a flea on coke. And again, this is a positive quality. Well, mostly. If you want to get Sue to chew you out fast, just whine or exhibit the tiniest bit of self-pity. When I was working on my book proposal and changing agents, I let a little "poor me" seep through in a phone call with Sue, and she practically took my head off -- and I almost immediately stopped feeling sorry for myself and started feeling the keyboard under my fingers.
Sue, along with my left coast friend David Rensin (whose book on Miki Dora, All for a Few Perfect Waves, will be out April 8), is one of the people in my life who, for years, I've felt breathing down my neck for me to publish books, and I'm totally grateful.
What I like about this book of Sue's is what I tried to convey to the kids I talked to at Uni High (and yes, I started my program two weeks ago -- went great; more about it soon): I tried to demystify the process of how you become a writer, and how you make something of yourself in general. Sue does a great job of this in her book.
My favorite quote from the book, which is slightly different in the e-mailed-from-Sue version I'll paste in below, is her mantra from her "well-known Communist cousin" Howard Fast, "the best selling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine." Sue writes:
When I told him I had writer's block he said, "Plumbers don't get plumber's block. Don't be self-indulgent, just get to work. A page a day is a book a year."Sue
If you do want to be a writer, while I'm not usually one to recommend workshops, I highly recommend going to one of Sue's MediaBistro nights; either in NYC or in LA. She's simply the best on writing and selling articles and writing and selling books, and she's just thrilled every time a student of in one of the college writing classes she teaches makes a sale big enough to cover their $1000 (per semester) tuition (perhaps, in part, because she makes them buy her dinner, and she's had "hundreds." Toldya she's no dummy!)
He's Such A Loser Candidate There's Only One Explanation
Yes, Mike Huckabee has an Imaginary Friend working hard on his behalf! Here's Hucky, in response to a student's question about his apparent surge in polls:
HUCKABEE: There's only one explanation for it and it's not a human one. The same power that helped a little boy with two loaves and five fish feed a crowd of 5,000 people and that's the only way that our campaign could be doing what it's doing. And I'm not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There are literally thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much and it has, it defies all explanation. It has confounded the pundits and I'm enjoying every minute of their trying to figure it out. And until they look at it from a just experience beyond human they'll never figure it out. And that's probably just as well. That's honestly why it's happening."
Not surprisingly, Hucky wants "schools to acknowledge that there are views that are different than evolution." Yes, but none that are based in science. Perhaps that chick from The View can run as his V.P.
And maybe they can ride together to the inauguration on one of those dinosaurs the early Christians were saddling up.
Cheap sarcasm aside, let's not let "the science gap" start at the top. (Again.) Physics and astronomy prof Lawrence M. Krauss writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.Apparently many Americans agreed with him, according to polls taken shortly after the debate. But lack of interest in the scientific literacy of our next president does not mean that the issue is irrelevant. Popular ambivalence may rather reflect the fact that most Americans are scientifically illiterate. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that 25% of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun.
...This coming week another group I am a part of, ScienceDebate2008, is issuing a public call for a U.S. presidential debate devoted to science and technology. Eight Nobel Laureates, the heads of several major scientific societies, several university presidents, the chairman emeritus of Lockheed Martin and several congresspeople have already signed on to call for the debate, which would cover three broad categories: the environment, health and medicine, and science and technology policy.
Even if the American public is not currently focused on these concerns, decisions made by the next U.S. president on issues such as climate change, energy research, stem cells and nuclear proliferation will have a global impact. We owe it to the next generation to take ownership of these issues now. In spite of the ambivalence reflected in some polls, there is a popular understanding that science and technology will be essential to meet the challenges we face as a society. When reports began to surface warning that the avian flu might become a threat to humans, for example, everyone from the president down called for studies to determine how quickly the virus might mutate from birds to human beings. No one suggested that "intelligent design," for example, could provide answers.
We as a nation desperately need a more scientifically literate electorate and leadership, and a presidential debate on these subjects would be a good first step in this direction.
Krauss' most recent book is Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond.
Co-Ed Combat
I've always had a pretty simplistic view on women in the military: If men have to die for our country, women should not be immune. Well, it seems that it's not that simple.
Kingsley Browne, a Wayne State law prof I know from evolutionary psych conferences, has written an excellent book, Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn't Fight the Nation's Wars, which I recommend.
His viewpoint -- that women are physically and psychologically ill-suited for combat positions -- is going to be very controversial, but his claims in the book are well-supported by psych and military data on male-female differences.
An example from the book -- page 67, from the section, "Many Noncombat Tasks Also Require Strength":
A 1985 study found that "while clear majorities of women (more than 90 percent in some cases) failed to meet the physical standards for eight critical shipboard tasks, virtually all the men passed (in most cases 100 percent)." One percent of women but 96 percent of men, for example, could carry water pumps to the scene of a fire or flooded compartment. As one former Navy officer with damage-control experience sardonically noted, "When your air-conditioned seat in front of a radar console is a smoking hole in the deck, you grab some shoring or a pump and apply some serious strength and stamina to the problem at hand." If the ship has a crew that is 20 percent women, the damage-control enterprise starts off in nearly the same position it would be in if the initial emergency rendered 20 percent of the crew incapable of assistance.
Yes, these are generalizations in these studies -- but they are generally true, and thus worthy of attention vis a vis what women's role in the armed forces should be. In short -- and forget your personal prejudices, because Browne's got the data -- more men are likely die if women are in combat situations. (More about that in the Newsweek link at the bottom of the post.)
Browne's blogging about the book this week at Volokh.com. Here's most of his first post:
Co-ed Combat starts from the premise that policies concerning sexual integration of combat forces should be measured first by their effects on military effectiveness. Other goals, such as expansion of women’s opportunities, must give way to the extent that they impair combat effectiveness. Although the premise is contestable, it is a foundation upon which virtually all political discussions of the role of women in the military rests. Advocates of sexual integration of combat forces seldom argue that military effectiveness must be traded off against equal-opportunity concerns; instead, they contend that there is no tradeoff at all.Under policies in place since early in the Clinton administration, women are permitted to serve on warships (other than submarines) and in combat aviation. They are still barred from “direct ground combat,” however, including positions that “collocate” with (that is, operate side-by-side) ground-combat units. The Army seems to be violating the collocation rule routinely in Iraq, a practice that results in increased combat exposure for women, and some argue for completely scrapping the bar on women in ground combat.
I argue that those who believe there are no substantial tradeoffs involved in including women in combat roles are wrong. Inclusion of women in those roles results in a segment of the force that is physically weaker, more prone to injury (both physical and psychological), less physically aggressive, able to withstand less pain, less willing to take physical risks, less motivated to kill, less likely to be available to deploy when ordered to (partly, but not exclusively because of pregnancy), more expensive to recruit, and less likely to remain in the service even for the length of their initial contracts. Officers and NCOs must reassign physical tasks (or do them themselves) because women cannot get them done fast enough, if at all.
The fact that women, in general, are less effective warriors is only part of the problem. The more fundamental problem comes from the mixing of men and women in combat forces, which creates a variety of problems for reasons rooted in our evolutionary history. Women frequently are placed in units with men who do not trust the women with their lives and who do not bond with women the way that they do with other men.
The groups into which women are introduced become less disciplined and more subject to conflict related to sexual jealousy and sexual frustration, and men receive less rigorous training because of women’s presence. Officers and NCOs must divert attention from their central missions to cope with the “drama” that sexual integration brings. Men, who traditionally have been drawn to the military because of its appeal to their masculinity, now find that the military tries to cure them of it to make the environment more comfortable for women.
Against these impairments of the military’s ability to wage war, what are the benefits to the military of full combat integration? One possible benefit is an increase in the recruiting pool. Contrary to rhetoric, however, the pool is not “doubled” in any meaningful sense. Sexual integration of the military generally has increased the pool by only fifteen to twenty percent. Expansion of the potential pool of combat volunteers (in the ground forces, at any rate) would probably be more on the order of one percent at most.
If it is not numbers that women bring, then it must be something unique to women, but it is not obvious that women qua women would bring much in the way of specific benefits to the combat forces. In short, no one argues that eliminating the combat exclusion would unleash the whirlwind on America’s enemies.
I should emphasize that my arguments are not an indictment of military women, although I do not believe that many women are suited to combat, especially, but not only, ground combat. But, in researching my book, I was struck by the high regard that most military men I spoke with have for military women outside the combat context – even though most of these men opposed women’s participation in combat. One can simultaneously appreciate military women’s service to their country and also believe that all-male combat forces are more effective than mixed-sex ones.
The argument that full integration would be effective rests on a number of assumptions, including:
• That the high-tech nature of modern warfare means that the sexes no longer differ much in combat-relevant ways
• That as long as a woman possesses the individual physical and psychological attributes of an effective soldier, her inclusion in a combat unit would not impair its effectiveness
• That the primary obstacle to integration are men’s “masculinist” attitudes, which can be overcome with adequate training and leadership.
All of these assumptions are flawed, in my opinion, and, as a result, the costs and difficulties of sexual integration of combat forces are often substantially underestimated.
Here's Browne's Newsweek interview with Martha Brandt.
Smoked Out
What happens when, in an apartment building or condo, the smoker next door becomes the smoker in your apartment? Bradley Hope writes for The New York Sun:
Benjamin Zitomer lived happily with his family in a two-bedroom apartment at 99 Jane St. in the West Village for six years before a new tenant moved in next door and brought an unexpected menace: It wasn't rats or cockroaches or even noise; it was secondhand smoke."It came in through the bedroom wall and permeated in through the front door," Mr. Zitomer, 49, a database administrator, said. "Our apartment was filled with smoke almost every night. We had to have the windows open in the middle of the winter."
Secondhand smoke is overtaking noise as one of the most common complaints coming before condo and co-op boards. While the issue isn't new, real estate lawyers say that with New Yorkers prohibited from smoking at work, in bars and restaurants, and even directly in front of buildings, the battle against secondhand smoke is increasingly taking place at home.
"This is the hot controversy in condos and co-ops right now," a real estate lawyer who gets a new smoking-related case about once a month, Aaron Shmulewitz, said. He added that with more science confirming the dangers of secondhand smoke and fewer people picking up the smoking habit, homeowners are more sensitive to the problem.
"We were really upset and frustrated," Mr. Zitomer said of his experience. "We couldn't go out to escape it. My son had to go to sleep just as it started up at night, and it lasted until 4 or 5 a.m. This guy was something of a night owl."
The president of the board at 99 Jane St., Salvatore Rasa, declined to comment. He said secondhand smoke "is an issue we are all learning about."
For Mr. Zitomer, the problem wasn't so much the initial assault of the smoke on him, his wife, and his 3-year old son as it was his lack of legal recourse.
All told, it took him 10 months to resolve the issue — the condo board eventually rejected the smoker's request to renew his lease when it came up in August — but it could have dragged on for years.
The issue of secondhand smoke represents murky legal territory for lawyers, with little case law on which to base a claim. Essentially, condo and co-op boards must make a reasonable effort to determine the source of the smoke and attempt to mitigate the effects. If they fail to do that, homeowners and tenants can refuse to pay maintenance fees or rent, Mr. Shmulewitz said.
"A board that ignores complaints like this is acting at its own peril," he said.
There are several difficulties for building boards. Namely, secondhand smoke is subjective, with some people sensitive even to the suggestion of smoke, while others are not bothered unless it is happening directly in front of them.
"Another interesting question comes down to payment," a partner at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan who is the chairwoman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Cooperative and Condominium Law, Eva Talel, said. "Does the smoker pay to fix the problem or the tenant or the board? Or do they share the cost?"
I really don't understand how it can be considered civilized behavior to emit foul -- and even possibly deadly or health-impairing -- odors which seep into your neighbors' apartment. If you were doing something in your apartment that gave off sulfuric-smelling gas that spread to the rest of the building, how fast would the "warrant of habitability" people be on you to stop? Why is cigarette smoke different? You want to foul your lungs and the place you live with the stuff, fine. Just don't smoke me out. Oh yeah, and put away a little money for your emphysema and possible lung cancer -- and the same goes for people who eat themselves into obesity and diabetes. You break it, you pay for it, thanks.
via Obscurestore
It Seems I'm A Garden Implement
You gotta have a soft spot for a guy who's working really, really hard to insult you, but spells "ho" like he's got big plans for potato planting over the weekend.
Yes, it's our newest blog commenter pal, "Muslim Guy," or "Muzzieguy," as he sometimes refers to himself, who signed off his e-mail to me yesterday with "YOU STUPID HOE!!!"
(I'm guessing the desired effect wasn't to make me snort my coffee.)
By the way, in case hoe work gets a little slow, I think this'll be my next incarnation:
Below, we have a screenshot of the latest in e-mailed spew from our genius commenter on my blog item, "The Religion Barrier." I'd pulled text from a piece by the late George Mason about how Islam masquerades as a religion, but it's really a political movement -- and one bent on totalitarian rule of the rest of us on the planet, the likes of which has yet to be seen. An excerpt:
No other movement, not even Fascism or Communism, has been so determined to conquer the world and rule with such rigid, detailed, complete control over the day-to-day activities of the lives of everyone on the planet. Islam has a multi-pronged plan in place to accomplish this goal, and it is being implemented with increasing success throughout the world. Islam seeks to make the rest of the world become just like it: squalid, backward, and primitive.Wherever it interfaces with populations it has not yet conquered, Islam destroys buildings, blows up men, women, and children, and imposes tight controls on people's lives. Islam is nihilism personified. Most of the worlds wars and conflicts are due to aggression caused by Islamists, fueled by Islam's evil doctrines. Islam brainwashes its own children, as well as the children of the conquered, in order to assure that future generations will continue carry out Jihad. This has been going on for 1400 years, yet the movement remains unopposed in any meaningful way anywhere in the world to this very day.
In the comments section on the post, Muslim Guy/Muzzieguy tries (and fails) to dispute the points of the piece and commenters on the piece, and then, attempts to build support for the ludicrous idea of Islam as "The Religion Of Peace."
Unable to accomplish this with logic and reason, or by calling me all sorts of names (the kind that got me banned from Dell's servers, or I'd quote them here), Muzzieguy enlists his version of Larry, Moe, and Curly; i.e. Muzzieguy in the role of Me, Myself, And I. Oh yeah, and amazingly enough, all of these dudes happen to be posting from the exact same Kaiser Permanente I.P. address!
Amy Again FUCK YOU!!!! Muzzieguy 2007.12.04 162.119.64.112Again Amy FUCK YOU!!! Muslim other guy 2007.12.04 162.119.64.112
Again Amy FUCK YOU!!! Muslim Guy 2007.12.04 162.119.64.112
Here's the e-mail he sent Tuesday afternoon:
For the aging eyeballs, here it is again, regular size:
In a message dated 12/4/07 2:12:12 PM, amyisaracistbitch@yahoo.com writes:Amy,
I just read your blog and I have to say your a really fucken racist bitch!! Shit is what gets people hurt and attacked by other racist bastards like yourself. Do you know how many hate crimes and discrimations happen because of shit like this? I was born here in a america just like your ugly ass. You should be more careful before you go off attacking a whole group of people. You information is all wrong and is the opinon of some fucken idoits. You should do real research before you go off spewing this false shit. My friend was badly hurt by some racist fuck like you. I thought we were free to beleive what we wanted and all that shit, what happen to that. You guys just want to kill us all and convert us to your way of seeing shit. Well fuck that and fuck you!!! I will do what I want and you be a stupid slut and do what you want. This shit is 100% false and untrue. You mine as well say some stupid shit like the sky isnt blue. This is not true!! We're not after controling anyone or that shit. I really speaking as regular muslim guy your attacking just want to really live in peace like your slutty ass. So whats the big deal, leave me and my billion or so brothers and sisters the fuck alone!!!
PS. FUCK YOU YOU STUPID HOE!!!
My reply:
Hey, genius, what do you do at Kaiser Permanente?And where's the article about what supposedly happened to your friend? Are you sure he actually exists? Are you sure he was actually attacked because of his Muslim religion? Usually it's Muslims visiting violence on non-believers. Do post evidence of your claim -- a link to a news article about his plight, for example. If it happened, and if there was religiously motivated violence, that would be news in this country. In Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries, it's just business as usual.
Regarding your silly contention that we "guys" want to convert or kill all of you; only uncivilized people want to kill others. Also, unlike in Muslim countries, in America, we have freedom of religion guaranteed us by our Constitution. Neat, huh?
Personally speaking, besides being generally civilized, I'm politically a libertarian, which means I specifically do not believe in violence to another person or another person's property. In short: My right to punch you in the nose ends where your nose begins. (It's a metaphor - look up the word; I'm not just talking about noses here, but being anti-violence in general.)
I do, however, believe we must defend ourselves against the uncivilized who seek to convert or kill us because we don't believe as they do. 9/11, perhaps, rings a bell?
It's Muslims who are murdering their own people and others in the name of their religion. All the vulgarities in the world you toss at me don't change that.
I suggest you stop wasting your time swearing at me, and start speaking out to the violence-advocating Muslims, and like Wafa Sultan, Ayan Hirsi Ali, and others, encourage them to eschew violence for democracy, freedom of speech, and Enlightenment values. -Amy Alkon
PS Isn't it amazing how a person can write an entire message without saying "shit," "fuck," or "slut" -- well, except when quoting you.
PPS You'd better thank whatever god you believe in, sans evidence that god actually exists, that I am such a passionate believer in freedom of speech that I don't give in to my temptation to drop an e-mail to abuse@kp.org with your IP address and the contents of your posts and this e-mail which you seem to have written while on the job. Do a little something for me, though, won't you dear? Do tell me what you do there at Kaiser. (I'm hoping you're a security guard, not on the medical staff.)
Photo of a real hoe here.
And kudos to Martin for calling Muzzie's bluff.
Serfs Up
The serfs are the parents of far too many kids these days. I just posted an Advice Goddess column I'm particularly proud of -- with a few of my ideas about what's wrong with parenting as of late, plus a suggestion or two about what can be done. But, first, the woman's question:
I'm a stay-at-home mother of two young kids. Come Saturday, I want nothing more than to fade into the back bedroom with a 2-liter of Pepsi and the remote...leaving my saint of a husband to handle requests for food, more food, different food, a checkers partner, a Lego partner, and someone to read "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" for the 40th time since breakfast. My husband's 14 hours of kid-wrangling pale in comparison to my 70, and although he gives me no grief (saintly, remember?), I feel guilty for wanting alone-time so badly, and taking it on his only off days.--Tapped Out
An excerpt from my answer:
The parental "no" has officially joined the ranks of chronically missing items like The Holy Grail, Atlantis, and Britney Spears' underpants.You're supposed to be your kids' mom, not their full-time birthday clown. This means meeting their needs, as opposed to falling prey to their ransom demands; i.e., "Send in the chopper and the cupcakes or I'll scream my lungs out until spring!" If you're keeling over from reading "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" 40 times, it's because you didn't say no 39 times. "No" is also the correct response when besieged with requests for a chunky peanut butter sandwich with all the chunkies removed. But, children can be such finicky eaters! Correction: American children can be such finicky eaters, because their parents tend to confuse parenting with working room service at a five-star hotel. In France, on the other hand, the kids' meal is whatever the parents are eating; brains, livers, kidneys and all. And while the kids can pick out bits they don't like, their choice is clear: eat or starve.
Saying no to your kids will not turn them into meth-smoking, liquor store-robbing carjackers. Actually, throwing up a few boundaries might even serve to prevent this -- and less dire but extremely annoying outcomes (just what society needs, another 35-year-old snot who was denied nothing during childhood). Kids need to feel loved and secure -- and that doesn't take hours of mommy-and-me Lego. In fact, psychologist Judith Rich Harris writes that "anthropological data suggest...there may be something a little unnatural about adults playing with children." Anthropologist David F. Lancy notes that, beyond Western society, one "rarely" sees it. Regarding this apparent lack of a parental instinct for parent-child play, Harris writes, "This implies that children do not require play with an adult in order to develop normally."
I know, I know, that's not what The Cult Of The Child tells you -- when its proponents aren't too busy checking Amazon to see whether anybody's published "The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Children." The reality is, your family is better served by a stay-at-home mother than a stay-at-home martyr. Take the advice of the late British pediatrician Donald Winnicott, and avoid trying to be the perfect mother -- micromanaging your little darlings' every move ("Harvard or bust!") -- and just be a "good enough mother." Your kids can entertain themselves -- and will, if you suggest they do. Likewise, forget going for the Good Housekeeping Seal and just resolve to keep the health department from sealing up your house. Your kitchen counters don't need to be operating-room sterile. Just see to it that nothing walks across your lasagna. >>cont'd>>
The rest, and comments, are here.
The Religion Barrier
The late George Mason writes of how Islam cleverly disguises itself as a religion, when it's actually a political movement:
Islam is a global movement, the goal of which is to bring every living human being on the planet under its crushing totalitarian rule, the likes of which has never before been seen. Some of Islam is obvious and easy to identify. Some of it, however, lies beneath the surface, like an iceberg. The true nature of Islam sports a remarkable disguise.No other movement, not even Fascism or Communism, has been so determined to conquer the world and rule with such rigid, detailed, complete control over the day-to-day activities of the lives of everyone on the planet. Islam has a multi-pronged plan in place to accomplish this goal, and it is being implemented with increasing success throughout the world. Islam seeks to make the rest of the world become just like it: squalid, backward, and primitive.
Wherever it interfaces with populations it has not yet conquered, Islam destroys buildings, blows up men, women, and children, and imposes tight controls on people's lives. Islam is nihilism personified. Most of the worlds wars and conflicts are due to aggression caused by Islamists, fueled by Islam's evil doctrines. Islam brainwashes its own children, as well as the children of the conquered, in order to assure that future generations will continue carry out Jihad. This has been going on for 1400 years, yet the movement remains unopposed in any meaningful way anywhere in the world to this very day.
Why is Islam meeting with so little effective resistance?
The most important reason for its success today is that it has a very clever "cloaking device." It calls itself a "religion." The evils of Fascism and Communism, the one passively allowing Christianity, and the other openly rejecting all religion, were much more visible to the world. These clearly political movements were content to call themselves just that: "Political movements." They did not attempt the intellectual fraud of calling themselves "religions."
For most of the world's population, a religion is an institutionalized set of beliefs relating to the divine, and its purpose is to act as a spiritual guide in the personal lives of its followers. Most of the world's religions embrace, at least to some degree, the laissez faire attitude of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Judaism and Christianity do not serve as action plans for world conquest; their sacred documents are not war manuals that describe some of the cruelest, most inhumane strategies and tactics ever devised; they receive no divine marching orders to bring the world's population into submission.
Most of us subscribe to the principle that whatever philosophy we choose as roadmaps for our lives, be it related in some way to a divine source or not, is a matter of our personal choices. We can talk to each other about the pros and cons of each others belief systems; we can try to persuade each other to adopt our views. That is where it ends. Force plays no role here. For Islam, there is just one acceptable religion and way of life: Islam. Force is indispensable to the implementation of Islam's agenda.
Since Islam claims about one billion adherents, it is often called one of the "three great religions," along with Judaism and Christianity. Americans, accepting Islam as one of the big three, accord Islam the same respect they give to Judaism and Christianity.
I once shared some of these confusions about Islam. Stripping Islam of its "cloaking device" that makes it fully visible to everyone has made it easier for me to see Islam clearly. For example, I feel no self-consciousness about thinking about Islam divorced from any association with a deity. Freed, I cannot stand by, seeing so many good, patriotic Americans utterly paralyzed in so much of their thinking about Islam, simply because they cannot cross this "religion barrier."
His claims that there's more or better substantiation for Judaism and Christianity don't hold, but I don't care what nitwittery you believe in, sans evidence, as long as your ultimate goal isn't converting or killing the rest of us, or legislating our lives based on your evidence-free beliefs.
He is right about this:
Start calling Islam what it is.Call it a toxic ideology, a death cult, even your death sentence. In fact, Islam, among other things, is a vicious political movement, which gives itself a mantle of respectability and gets away with its actions only by providing itself with the "cloaking device" of religion. Islam is totalitarianism. It wants to conquer you, and kill you and yours. It wants to destroy everything you value.
If you do not withdraw your sanction of Islam, you will play right into the Islamists' hands. This is happening right now at the highest level of government. We watch our highest officials bowing and scraping to their future Muslim killers, while reassuring our people that Islam is peaceful, that Islam is a great religion, that Islam is wonderful, and worst of all, that Islam has been hijacked by some bad guys who twist it to their uses. Don't be played like a Wurlitzer. Islamists are selling you sanitized Islam while practicing the real thing. It is terribly important to remember that lying and deceit are among Islam's most valued weapons.
Jump over the religion barrier. Keep your own peaceful religion, which teaches that the initiation of force is wrong, but that self-defense is right. Recognize and reject Islam, which has as a central commandment to erase the Infidel -- that's you -- from the face of the earth.
The Gift That Keeps On Taking
It's possible for a man to get fucked without ever having sex. Just ask a New York man, a doctor at a hospital where a female resident wanted to have a baby with her female partner. The man donated his sperm -- but, dumb, dumb, dumb -- failed to put an agreement about rights and responsibilities in writing. Now he's being held up for child support. Sophia Chang writes for Newsday:
...He took the unusual step of allowing his name to appear on the child's birth certificate because he thought it was in the child's "best interests that he would have an identity when he grew older," he said in court documents.Before the mother, her partner and the child moved to Oregon in 1993, the man had contact with the child, he said. He also sent the child money, gifts and cards and letters signed "Dad" or "Daddy," and spoke to him by phone about seven times in the past 15 years.
That correspondence, coupled with an affidavit from the child stating that he "has never known anyone other than [the man] to be his father," is enough for a parental relationship, according to Herbst.
"The fact of the matter is that he held himself out as the child's father for 18 years until he asked for DNA testing," Herbst said.
When it comes to artificial insemination by a known donor, the best protections are to have everything in writing and "do your homework," said reproductive lawyer Melissa Brisman of Park Ridge, N.J.
"You can't be half a father, and half a not, under the law," she said.
But the man's trust was abused, his lawyer said.
"The doctor was told this is how it's going to be," Kelly said. "And 18 years later, you end up dealing with something that you didn't know you were going to deal with. Sometimes people aren't really thinking about the legal ramifications."
...The next step is a meeting with a support magistrate to determine the amount of child-support payments — if any — the man would have to pay until the child turns 21, Kelly said.
via Obscurestore
"The Paris Of The Midwest"
They used to call Detroit that. Gregg and I spent Saturday in Detroit, staying at my favorite place, the Westin right in the airport, and took a little detour while enroute to visit his mom. But, first, here's the parking lot at our hotel:
Next, there's the périphérique, the road on the way into the city (I guess, in Paris, they could have a big croissant):
And here are a few shots in passing from Detroit's Left Bank ("in passing" because we were in a hurry, and because Gregg wouldn't let me get out of the car, lest I get shot). First, here's the decaying Montparnasse train station:
Here's the view along Boulevard St. Germain.
Rue du Bac.
And, finally, a view from Neuilly-sur-Seine, aka Chesterfield Township.
To be fair, Neuilly would be more like Birmingham, where we ended up later for dinner with Elmore and his wife, but I was too cold then to take pictures, so you'll have to make do with Chesterfield's finest miniature golf.
Going Under In A Lexus
The mortgage crisis is, again, a crisis of responsibility -- both on the part of the lenders, who gave loans to people who weren't likely to be able to pay, and, of course, on the part of the borrowers. Here's a borrower lady with some messed-up priorities -- from a Wall Street Journal story, "Citigroup Feels Heat To Modify Mortgages," by Laurie P. Cohen:
In Granada Hills, Calif., Natalie Brandon is fighting to keep the three-bedroom ranch house she bought in 1985 for $105,000. Mrs. Brandon, 51, does medical billing for doctors; her husband is a dispatcher for a local gas utility. Last year, she got a $625,500 mortgage from Argent, now owned by Citigroup. Her 7.99% interest rate isn't set to rise until next June, but she already is behind on payments.Over the past five years, she has refinanced her home five times, each time taking out cash and paying prepayment penalties. Last year, all she had to do to refinance was state that she and her husband earned a combined $100,000. She says she used the proceeds to pay off $30,000 owed on her white Lexus.
This year, she says, their income fell after she suffered a short-term disability. Mrs. Brandon figures if she sold her home today, she wouldn't get more than $450,000 -- what a nearby home sold for in foreclosure.
She has tried for months to get her loan modified, and missed her June and September payments. Last month, Damien Gutierrez, a Citi Residential home-retention manager, offered to fix her interest rate at 6% for 40 years, she says. One week later, she says, he said he was authorized only to offer her a five-year fixed rate. Earlier this month, Citigroup offered her a six-month trial at 6%, saying it would extend the modification to three years if she keeps up with her payments, she says. Mr. Gutierrez didn't return calls seeking comment.
Here are two letters about the story, aptly billed on the WSJ's op-ed page under the header, "Who Is to Be Left Holding the Empty Bag?":
If I understand correctly, mortgage lenders, urged on by non-profits such as Acorn Housing Corp., made loans to sub-prime borrowers who had inadequate income to meet their mortgage payments, either from the outset or after the expiration of low initial rates ("Citigroup Feels Heat to Modify Mortgages," page one, Nov. 26). These borrowers were really only qualified to have less pretentious homes or to rent rather own. Now, after getting the loans and living in homes they weren't qualified to own in the first place, they and the non-profits who encouraged them to do so, assert that the mortgage owners or mortgage servicers, such as Citigroup, should accept a loss and enable these borrowers to live in homes that they cannot afford. "You loaned me too much money and put me into too good a house; therefore you should subsidize me so that I can continue living over my head."As a shareholder of Citigroup, I am supposed to take the fall? The logic and equity of this escape me.
Ebert Weidner
Chagrin Falls, OhioThe efforts of Acorn amount to a massive redistribution of wealth from those who make sound economic decisions to those who don't. It's difficult to have sympathy for Natalie Brandon, who bought her home in 1985 for $105,000 and has managed to borrow her way up to $625,000. Imagine, instead, if she would have kept her initial 1985 mortgage. Her payments would be on the order of a few hundred dollars and her house would be nearly paid off. However, this so-called victim has managed to increase her mortgage debt by a factor of six, and she seeks to force the rest of us to pay for her toys. Surely her white Lexus had nothing to do with this largess, as the loan officer must have forced her to buy it.
John F. Sevic
Los Gatos, Calif.
Sure, some people fell on hard times, but I'm mostly reminded of "Leslie," the girl arguing that the Wirkkalas, with their $70,000 in income, their ocean-view, $535,000 home, and their THREE children, and the mother who chooses to home-school them rather than work, are "awesome parents" -- despite their failing to be able to cover their kids' healthcare (with a $450/month family policy). To me, anyway, the essence of being a parent is digging ditches if you have to -- whatever it takes to avoid burdening your kid with "Hey, kid, whatever you do, don't fall of that skateboard -- we don't have health insurance!"
Likewise, somebody should tell the Granada Hills lady that a Lexus is supposed to be a luxury car; meaning it's what you buy with all the extra money you have after you pay your mortgage and all the rest, and put away money for your retirement.
Hell Is Other People
Introversion is a personality type, not a psychiatric disorder. I've long realized this, and I just came upon a piece on it by Jonathan Rauch in an old issue of The Atlantic. An excerpt:
What is introversion? In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."
A State Gone MADD
Mothers Against Drunk Driving has far too much power. Here's their latest, from WRAL.com in North Carolina:
...As of Saturday, people can lose their driver's licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.
There's No Negotiating With A Grizzly Bear
Or a mountain lion, or with some of the more savage humans on the planet -- those in Muslim countries.
Condoleezza Rice really thinks she's going to have some sort of reasonable negotiation with the Palestinians? Right. First, let's explore the general level of reasonableness in Muslim-based societies around the world. Most recently in the news there's Sudan, where thousands of people have taken to the streets, calling for British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons to be shot for insulting Islam."
Yes, this hardened criminal let her classroom name a teddy bear, not quite comprehending how many Sudanese Muslim adults have emotional evolution of a rage-filled six-year-old.
Our next stop is Iran, where use of the word "women" is now banned from TV:
The word 'women' must now be replaced on Iranian state television by 'family', reformist Norouz news agency reports.In programmes broadcast throughout the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against women last Sunday, Iranian state TV used the world family instead.
In recent weeks, Iran's Centre for the Participation of Women changed its name to the Centre for Family Matters.
Hey, women in Muslim countries have so few rights...why mention them at all?! Just chop them up and be on your way! Or sell them into sex slavery as children, a "crime" for which one girl, 18, was nearly sentenced to hang by an Iranian judge. (A human rights group intervened.)
Meanwhile, while we westerners are encouraged to show "tolerance" of those whose religion commands them to convert or kill all of us who don't share their beliefs, Muslims are waging a mob attack on a "suspected church":
About 30 self-appointed Islamic vigilantes are alleged to have raided a house suspected to be a Christian place of worship in Citeureup Village of Bandung in the Indonesian province of West Java, on Monday.
A "suspected church"? Is that like running a suspected meth lab or being a suspected child molester?
Of course, child sexual abuse is a serious crime in western society, but it is and has been common in Muslim societies -- from Mohammed's 9-year-old wife to the boys the Taliban turn into fuck toys.
Things do change, however -- once one of their playthings grows a little facial hair. Here's an example of how friendly Islam is to adult homosexuals:
Last month two gay men in the Saudi city of Al-Bahah were convicted of sodomy and sentenced to 7,000 lashes each...."In the sentence a judge will specify three things: One, the amount of lashes; two, whether the flogging will be held in the prison or publicly; and third, what portions are to be administered at one time," Wilcke said. "No more than 60 to 70 lashes are administered at any one time with usually one to two weeks between floggings. Women will get 10 to 30 lashings a week; a man might get 50 to 60 per week."
If a complete sentence was administered at once, the accused could potentially die. Doctors in Saudi Arabia examine prisoners before each flogging to determine if they are healthy enough to withstand the lashes.
In 1993, British citizen Gavin Sherrard-Smith received 50 lashes for allegedly breaking an alcohol ban in the Gulf country of Qatar.
He recently recounted his punishment in the Daily Mail, saying, "The blows were raining down on my body, from the shoulder blades to the calves, then back up again. But with each blow, the skin softened and the pain grew and grew to the point that my whole back felt like it was on fire. Soon it was unbearable, but they kept coming, mostly on my left shoulder and calf. I had to summon up all my control not to move. I didn't realize the human body could generate and tolerate such pain. I had never felt anything like it before, and I hope I will never feel anything like it again."
Lashing is a common penalty under Wahabi interpretations of sharia law, the Islamic religious laws that underpin the legal systems in Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
And finally, here's an excerpt from an NRO interview with Carolyn Glick, a senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy:
...In the interests of bringing about the declaration of a sovereign state of Palestine, Rice and her associates are advancing policies that smack of moral dementia. They insist that Israel make security concessions to Fatah, release Fatah terrorists from prison, and arm Fatah militias. They insist that Israel transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to Abbas's bank accounts in the interest of promoting peace in spite of the fact that Abbas and Fayad transfer those funds to Hamas and Fatah terror operatives.
Is Rice really the Secretary of State -- or some small-town real estate agent's bubble-headed secretary?
The Ugly Americans Are Right Here At Home
Here are the hosts of "The View" on where the schoolteacher the Sudanese went after went wrong. Justin McCarthy writes:
All the co-hosts of "The View," a show intended to advance women’s voices, do not get offended by women’s persecution in the Islamic world. On the November 30 edition, in discussing the British woman charged for naming a class teddy bear Muhammad, the co-hosts did not direct any anger at the Sudanese government, but rather blamed the woman for not adapting to their culture.Co-host Sherri Shepherd opined "you would think that with her being in Sudan, she would know the rules and customs." Whoopi Goldberg said Europeans and Americans are "not as anxious to learn the customs before we go places." And of course that’s why we’re called "ugly Americans."