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Like A Bunny To The Slaughter
I love when they accuse me of naivete and lack of "sophistication" for printing the truth about Islam.
In this case, I mentioned in my column the fact that, in Muslim countries, you can be given 100 lashes for having premarital sex (true). And then, that there was a woman in a Saudi Arabian Starbucks who was arrested by the religious police and taken to jail for sitting next to an unrelated male in Starbucks (he was a coworker, and they went there to use the Wifi after theirs in their office went out). (Also true.) (I quoted the Times of London, although there were numerous news reports on this.) Oh yeah, and I also mentioned that "slut can equal death" in this culture. (Also true.)
A reader (who turns out to be a woman, writes):
In a message dated 3/29/08 1:15:41 AM, DELETED@pdx.edu writes:Dear "Advice Goddess",
How about doing your homework before you glibly and unceremoniously perpetuate gross stereotypes of Muslims? First, there are plenty of "Western" Muslims -- ever hear of Bosnia or Chechnya? Second, citing one anecdote from "The Times of London" does not an argument make nor does it tell us anything about those who practice the world's fastest growing religion. Maybe turning the tables would make for some good anti-American humor. Did ya hear the one about the wacko WASP who put his baby in the microwave and how his wife defended him by saying the devil made him do it? Who could ever trust those crazy Christians with kids??!! And, what about that NY governor who couldn't keep his pants zipped and overpaid for hookers? See how sexually greedy and economically stupid politicians really are??!!
My 19 year old students are more sophisticated about religious, political and cultural issues. You should know better!
Dr. C.E. A
My response:
I think you are the one who needs to educate himself on Islam. I am an atheist who saw Muslims the way I see astrology buffs -- as people who believe, without evidence, in some silly stuff. But, astrology buffs don't want to convert, kill, or tax me (dhimmitude) because I don't believe that what Cancer is doing with Capricorn has relevance to my life.After 9/11, which happened just blocks from my old Tribeca apartment, I began educating myself on Islam. Your ridiculous attempt to defend it with by calling it "the fastest growing religion" should be beneath anybody who has a job a professor. Of course, the spread of Islam is of great concern to me, and should be to you and everyone who values free speech, Enlightenment values, and life itself. What I wrote is not the least bit untrue -- which is why you could only offer the lame defense of Islam's growing popularity.
Here's a film you need to see:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8105709395775858867
Here's Fitna, on private servers, since followers of "the religion of peace" put out death threats against the other servers that were showing Wilders' film:
http://www.ajm.ch/wordpress/?p=1028
You dare to compare Spitzer's private behavior or make up some story about a WASP who puts a baby in a microwave to the sickness that is Islam? Do you find that there are preachers and rabbis standing on pulpits around America commanding their flock to slaughter those who don't believe as they do?
Also, in Canada, there was a poll last year that 12 percent of Muslims condoned burning down Parliament and murdering the Prime Minister. That's 84,000 people.
Furthermore, there was much I left out of that column, including the horror in Iran for homosexuals. They are executed, but there is an option -- they can go through gender reassignment surgery (have their genitals cut off) and live with their boyfriends as a "woman." That is, until they commit suicide, as many do, per Arsham Parsi, of the Iranian Queer Organization, who I interviewed for the column on the topic. That didn't make it in, but is more barbaric than what I did include.
I criticize American ways plenty; for example, the way we raise children -- which is much better done by the French. The difference: While I've had readers write me in the past few weeks to warn me that I could be endangering my life by criticizing Islam, for all the virulent criticism I've made of American practices and Judaism and Christianity (for evidence-free belief in god, and the coverup of pedophile priests in the case of the Catholic church) I have never, ever had a Jew or Catholic write to threaten my life or anybody suggest that my life could be in danger from criticizing these religions.
Your lack of education and knowledge about Islam, and your assumption that you know what you're talking about is dangerous and disgusting arrogance. Be glad there are people like Robert Spencer and Wilders and Ayan Hirsi Ali to defend the likes of you from "the religion of peace."
You're a bunny to the slaughter. -Amy Alkon
Wait! There's more! She writes back!
Obama Isn't The Only One Who Needs To Leave His Church
If you go by the standard that sticking around means tacit agreement with what's going on in the place, there should have been an awful lot of people filing out of Catholic churches -- including Sean Hannity. Bill Maher writes:
When Barack Obama didn't hear Reverend Wright say those awful things about America, he still should have rushed the stage, smite Reverend Wright with the cross, and left the church. If there's anything the right wing can agree on, it's that. And that gays are going hell, right after they suck them off in the airport bathroom.But it raises an obvious question, one that I haven't heard asked, which is strange because it's so obvious: If you leave a church when the head of the church says bad things about America, what do you do when your church hierarchy is caught up in a systematic and decades-long sex abuse scandal? And did I mention the people being sexually abused were children? Hundreds of them?
How about when the head of that church, or Pope, associated with and promoted members of the clergy who not only facilitated the sexual abuse and rape of hundreds and hundreds of children, but engaged in a decades-long cover-up of those crimes?
Reverend Wright associated with Farrakhan. The Pope works with Cardinal Law. Which is worse? Isn't it the man who shuffled "priests" like Shanley and Geoghan and many others from parish to parish with the full knowledge of their crimes, and then claimed he had no idea?
Yes, by Sean Hannity's own logic, Catholics like him, en masse, would be expected to abandon their church. Which shouldn't be a problem, because they worship Reagan anyway.
COLMES: Then shouldn't John McCain say he doesn't support the views of a man who makes anti-Catholic statements?
OBENSHAIN: He did, I believe. He said I'm not--I don't agree with everything -- a
COLMES: And Obama says he does not support anti-Semitism, as expressed by Louis Farrakhan.
HANNITY: Leave the church.Well, what about it, Sean? Shouldn't you leave your church? I mean, like, five years ago?
I said the same thing to a priest who commented on another entry. Over and over and over again, I asked how he could continue in the Church in light of how they hid the priests' crimes and moved them around to molest again in the name of public relations and keeping the Church's coffers full.
Oh yeah, and I found, in Googling the e-mail address he posted, that he'd been in Africa; apparently for some sort of missionary work. I asked, again and again and again, if he'd been one who told people there that condoms cause AIDs, etc. Again, he never answered.
Here's one of my comments there:
One of my favorites of your non-responses:Though I'm hardly a worthy spokesperson, I'd says that we both want the end of the AIDS scourage, but how to accomplish this is the question.
Check this out.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/01/archibishop-of-mozam.html
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio, the head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, has been spreading fatal lies about condoms and anti-virals: he claims that condoms and life-saving drugs have been infected with HIV in order to kill Africans."Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," he alleged, refusing to name the countries. "They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time.See, I have the evidence that the church is, yet again, self-servingly evil, and again, you can only accuse me of hanging out at Starbucks.
And again, if you don't read the above and fill with vitriol for The Church, what kind of person are you?
Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 14, 2008 12:03 AM
And here's his response to the comment above:
Did I hear something?Naw, it was nothing, absolutely nothing.
Posted by: epb at March 14, 2008 4:06 AM
The "Ethicist" And The Scumbag Clause
First, a few words on mandatory arbitration from a previous blog item. I quote the National Consumer Law Center:
Companies alone select the arbitration service - often one dependent on them for repeat business. Those same companies often write the arbitration rules, and unsurprisingly those rules often demand complete secrecy about the proceeding and its outcome while limiting what evidence consumers can present. Consumers usually pay more for arbitration proceedings than they would for a public court proceeding. If they lose there's no appeal -- that means even legal errors in an arbitrator's decision are frequently beyond remedy. And if they refuse to participate in this rigged game these clauses often dictate they'll automatically lose the dispute with no further recourse....The business community loudly proclaims that these clauses are merely a private-sector alternative to the courts, a way of streamlining and speeding up the judicial process while controlling costs.
But one party to a public court proceeding doesn't get to pick the judge, write the rules, limit the evidence and demand that testimony and outcomes never come to light. Unlike many arbitrators, judges aren't dependent on one side for future business. And the costs of arbitration proceedings for plaintiffs at least -- according to a report by the consumer group Public Citizen -- are "almost always higher than the cost of instituting a lawsuit." It can cost a consumer several thousand dollars just to have a complaint heard - a situation that remains true today despite industry claims that arbitration fees have fallen. Public Citizen says such costs "have a deterrent effect, often preventing a claimant from even filing a case......high arbitration costs can be used to bludgeon an adversary."
How often do consumers come out on top? A Jim Hightower piece quoting Consumer reports said, in 19,000 cases by First USA, the consumer won only 87 times!
I know this, so I'm on guard against signing these things. I recently went in to Radnet's Tower Imaging (8750 Wilshire Blvd.) for an MRI (just preventive investigative care based on family history and, well, big boobs...nothing wrong with me), in the medical history pages they wanted me to fill out, there was a mandatory arbitration clause to sign.
Randy Cohen, aka "The Ethicist," whose ethics, reporting efforts, and thinking I too often find substandard, writes about this in his NYT column today, about a woman who says her gynecologist of seven years "has begun requiring patients to waive their right to a day in court and to accept binding arbitration to settle any potential disputes, or she will not treat them." She adds that she "sought care elsewhere but discovered that nearly all ob-gyn practices in the area make the same demand." She then asks, "Is this policy ethical?"
Cohen responds:
It is not. The law may allow it, and (except in an emergency) medical ethics permit doctors to choose their patients, but a doctor's criteria for choosing are still subject to scrutiny. Your doctor has instituted a dismal policy that compels patients to surrender a basic legal right in order to receive medical care.If a single physician were so skittish about malpractice suits (or so uncertain of her own skill) that she would see only patients who would forgo access to the courts, no problem: you could walk down the street to another practitioner.
But if all, or nearly all, doctors make the same demand, there's nowhere else to go; a fundamental right is eradicated. Conduct that is merely inconvenient if pursued by a few people can become intolerable when widely adopted.
Your gynecologist might reasonably insist that patients try mediation as a first step. But she may not, even inadvertently, be part of a group action to bully patients into surrendering access to our legal system.
There are some rights we can be pressed into waiving. Confidentiality agreements limit our ability to express ourselves; noncompete agreements limit our employment choices. Other rights are sacrosanct. We may not sell a kidney or work for less than the minimum wage or hire a guy to shoot us in the kidney for $2 an hour.
The right to our day in court should be among the inviolable.
Well, yes, but you haven't really solved her problem, bunwad. Not that she asked you to, but I never let that stop me.
As an advice columnist, I sometimes notice that people are asking me the wrong question; sometimes because they don't know the right question to ask.
In this case, my question would have been whether she really was required to do this, or whether she just assumed she was.
Personally, I don't give up my rights lightly. I find it unpatriotic, first of all. I'm reminded of (what may be) Ben Franklin's quote (which is actually misquoted as it's usually used, and is probably correct like so):
Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY.
Back at Tower Imaging, I glared at the form. I'd already given up half a writing day to drive across town and sit there. Also, I was sent there by Kaiser, my HMO, so I wasn't sure whether I had a lot of other options. Plus, I'd been denied this MRI by Kaiser for a few years. I brought studies to my doctor that showed, due to family history, and what you could call the "big dense boob factor" (my chest, not me, thanks!), that I should have a breast MRI.
She denied not only the MRI (which she called "experimental" -- which it wasn't), but any lookage beyond a mammogram. Which was wrong, especially considering the mammographer herself looked at the boob pix she'd taken and told me it would be hard for a radiologist to see much of anything in there.
I pressed and pressed, and after crying in an appointment out of frustration, writing her two letters and screaming at her on the phone after the second ("Is this the care you'd give yourself if you had my family history?!"), she agreed to send me to a breast surgeon and let that person make the determination.
Well, that person gave me an ultrasound, a biopsy (I'm fine!), and the BRCA gene test, which can cost between $300 and $3,000, and which showed I'm not a carrier.
I still felt an MRI would be wise preventive care. Not that I like getting medical intervention of any kind, since the only medical problems I seem to come down with are iatrogenic -- caused by doctors, like the negative cognitive and memory effects of the anesthesia (Versed/midazolam/"conscious sedation") I suffered after a "let's just make sure" endoscopy.
I switched doctors, and persisted in pressing for a breast MRI, and my new doctor sent me to another breast surgeon. It was several years later, and Kaiser had finally caught up with the studies I'd read on MRI's for breast cancer detection. The breast surgeon was the one who'd sent me over to Tower Imaging, perhaps because Kaiser's facilities were too full to accomodate me.
Again, spending years pressing for this, driving across town in traffic (a big deal for me), and killing half a writing day, I wasn't exactly eager to get up and go away on principle. Still, either you're principled or you're not, and I've decided to live principled, so I looked at the form and tried to figure out what to do: How could I be principled, yet not endanger my health?
Was the best course of action to tell them I wouldn't sign it and get into a discussion/argument with somebody there? Hmmm...probably not. I decided to not sign it and see whether they'd maybe not notice. Also, I felt it was possible that they wouldn't force people to sign the agreement (did they really want the kind of press that could come out of that sort of thing?), but wouldn't tell people it was optional.
I'm not sure which was the case, but I handed my paperwork back in and got my appointment just the same. A sweet elderly couple was across from me, and I talked to them about the paperwork. They said they had been coming there for quite some time and saw no reason to sue. I said that I was not a litigious person, and didn't live life like a frightened mouse, but felt it important to guard my rights and not give them away.
That's the unasked question and the ungiven advice in Cohen's column: Did she really have to give up her rights to get care? Like me, he only writes one column a week. I do that because I put a lot of research and thought into my work. Apparently, he thinks he can get away with a lot less. And, apparently, does.
Steyn On Seipp
Mark Steyn, who, like me, appreciates the great danger to Western life and Westerners' lives from Islam, also had great appreciation for Cathy Seipp. An excerpt from the piece he posted on the year anniversary of her death:
I loved Cathy Seipp's writing, even though much of it was in areas I usually avoid like the plague:1) She wrote media criticism, which is almost always the province of the indestructible ethics bores;2) She wrote about hanging out in a glamorous city with a bunch of vaguely cool people you've never heard of, which grates very quickly on those of us who live in obscure zip codes where nothing ever happens;
3) She wrote droll observational scenes of everyday life, like all those leaden officially designated "humorists" in every newspaper across the land trying to wring 600 words out of the amusing aspects of barcode scanners;
4) And she wrote about the funny things her kid said, which is the kind of perilous terrain that leaves even the most well-disposed reader feeling like W C Fields.
But Cathy was the exception to the rule in all the above and many other areas. The media criticism was much needed in her home state, where she was a welcome disruption to the entertainment capital's industrial production line of the world's dullest journalists. Her analyses of the Los Angeles Times-servers were dead right, but my favorite moments were when some stylistic quirk caught her eye:
I almost didn't finish reading Lopez's column today because in the opening graph he wrote that he "motored about" L.A. to hear what people were saying about yesterday's protests. Motored about? What is he now - Jeeves?
What The West Needs To Know About Islam
Islam is "the religion of peace" like I'm the next pontiff.
The basis of Muslim violence is actually the Koran, which is to be taken literally, and the life of the pedophile and genocidal serial killer Mohammed, which is to be imitated by Muslims without question. Per Bill Warner in The New English Review:
Everything in Islam is based upon the Koran (what Mohammed claimed that his god, Allah, said) and the words and deeds of Mohammed (called the Sunna). A Muslim repeats endlessly, "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." The Koran repeats again and again that Mohammed is the model or pattern for the ideal Muslim. A Muslim is not someone who worships Allah. A Muslim is someone who worships Allah exactly like Mohammed worshipped Allah. So every Muslim is a Mohammedan. There are absolutely no exceptions.
Here's a terrific film, "What The West Needs To Know" (in English, with Dutch subtitles), featuring Robert Spencer and others, detailing how, among other things, Islam mandates violence against non-believers.
The film starts out starts out with bi-partisan lies -- George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Bill Clinton lying to the American people about the nature of Islam, and Colin Powell in a cutaway as bobble-headed yes man.
This is a must-watch, especially for anybody who's brought kids into the world in the past few decades.
In Spencer's words, "There may be peaceful and moderate Muslims but there is no peaceful and moderate Islam."
*Here's a working link to Fitna on private servers.
Fitna: Geert Wilders Film About The Koran
Words and pictures from the death cult that is Islam.
*Here's a working link to Fitna on private servers. But, play the beginning of the video below to see how "the religion of peace" quashes free speech with death threats.
"Stop Islamization. Defend our freedom." -- Wilders' words at the end.
What's sick but to be expected from Islam is that there's a fatwa against Wilders for criticizing Islam, and not for distorting Islam in the least, as you'll see when you see the film. He uses the words from the Koran and the words of Muslim Imams and leaders themselves. He's not making things up. From the Dutch NIS News Bulletin, the intercepted words of the fatwa against Wilders:
"In the name of Allah, we ask you to bring us the neck of this unbeliever who insults Islam and the Muslims and ridicules the prophet Mohammed," the site says about Wilders, according to the newspaper.The message honours Mohammed Bouyeri as a hero. This Amsterdam-born Moroccan Muslim cut Islam-critic Theo van Gogh's throat on 2 November 2004. The message also appeals for readers to "terrorise" the Netherlands to prevent Wilders' controversial film on the Koran from being broadcast.
Remember when Christians didn't like a movie being put out about their religion, Scorcese's The Last Temptation Of Christ? Their protests, by comparison, are almost cute. One site called it "blasphemous and boring," and asked "How low can Hollywood go?" More on that site from angry Christians:
"How is it . . . that the King of the Universe can be subjected to such ignominy and disrespect?!" asked Dr. James Dobson, President of Focus on the Family."The most serious misuse of film craft in the history of film making," was the verdict of Reverend Lloyd Ogilvie, of the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood.
"I have never come across a more blatant attack on Christianity," was the opinion of Dr. Don Wildmon, Executive Director of the American Family Association.
"Absolutely the most blasphemous, degenerate, immoral depraved script and film that I believe it is possible to conceive," concluded Bill Bright, President of Campus Crusade for Christ.
Woooo, scary.
I don't know about you, but I'll take being called "blasphemous and boring" over being beheaded any day. You?
*Here's a working link to Fitna on private servers.
Mohammed Had Sex With A 9-Year-Old
At least the Christians think priestly pedophilia is horrible. Mohammed married a 6-year-old girl, and had sex with her when she was 9. Details at FaithFreedom.org.
This topic is to be covered in the next Dutch film on Islam, a cartoon featuring Mohammed as a pedophile, by Ehsan Jami. From the Dutch NIS News Bulletin:
Jami, born in Iran, announced that his film, The Life of Mohammed, is due for release on 20 April. On TV programme Netwerk, the young politician (22) showed a screen-shot in which the Prophet, with a visible erection, takes a child to a mosque to have sex. On the mosque is a swastika.The fragment is a reference to the relationship between the prophet and the 9 year old Aisha as described in the Koran, according to Jami. His cartoon portrays all kinds of other perverse and violent verses, he added.
Jami set up a committee last September that aims to encourage leaving Islam and protect apostate Muslims. Shortly before the launch, he was attacked by Muslims in his home town of Leidschendam, where he was a local councillor for the Labour (PvdA) party.
Screenwriting Work Drying Up? Become A Pentagon Contractor
Clearly, the only requirements for supplying arms to the troops in Iraq are having a pulse and being able to invoice into the hundreds of millions. C.J. Chivers writes in The New York Times:
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan's army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.
Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company's president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company's purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.
This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY's performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.
Man Still Working And Working
The installation of new software -- MT 4.1 -- has been rather bumpy these past few days, but Gregg soldiered on, day and night, night and day. The problems are almost solved. Right now, comments are still posting verrrrrry slowwwwwly, but they are posting. (Yay!) Please bear with us. There's light at the end of this tunnel. It's just that we've been in the other tunnel much of the week.
Is It Because Women Supposedly Don't Have Quickies?
I sometimes feel kinda dense when presented with some image or phrase that's supposed to be terribly offensive to women, because it sometimes takes me a while to figure out what the problem is.
It's happened again, this time in my old college town of Ann Arbor. Somebody opened a joint called Quickie Burger, and put up signage with a cartoon image of a burger-riding hot chick holding a beer. (Photo at the link.)
Jillian Berman, who wrote the story for the college newspaper, The Michigan Daily, calls her "a busty woman in a tight shirt," but she looks like a C cup to me, tops, for whatever that's worth. Well, it's enough to get the PC people testy. Berman writes:
The Stonewall Democrats, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender caucus of the University's College Democrats chapter, has taken offense with the restaurant's logo and recently began circulating a petition to sway the owners to change the logo.LSA senior Kolby Roberts, a member of the Stonewall Democrats who has led the effort, said he finds the logo's message inappropriate and offensive.
"I have a problem that you take a women riding a hamburger and you put it next to the word 'quickie,' " he said. "It just seems like it's not putting a good message out there for the objectification of women."
Oh, eat me.
(How's that for objectification of women?)
Clearly, Kolby spends his nights curled up with Andrea Dworkin (the printed version, that is, since the old cow mooed her last not long ago).
But, back to the dreaded "O" word that so many nitwit feminists toss around.
Let's all turn in our syllabi to today's biology lesson, courtesy of Donald Symons, author of The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Who objectifies women? We all do. Men fantasize about women as sex objects, and women fantasize about themselves as sex objects. To put it more bluntly, when women see porn, they imagine themselves as the fuck object. Men imagine themselves fucking the fuck object. It's parallel to how men's and women's bodies are physically. The guy does the entering, the woman gets entered. Unless, of course, she wears the strap-on in the relationship.
Back to Berman's story:
Maria Arman, whose family owns the restaurant, said the logo was meant to invoke a cowboy theme."We were thinking beef, rodeo, so instead of putting a cowboy, we just picked a cowgirl," she said. "It's a rodeo-style cowgirl riding a bull, but instead, it's a burger. It was put together to be funny and different. No offense was meant to anyone."
Before selecting a logo for the restaurant, which features a maize and blue color scheme with televisions tuned to ESPN on the interior, the owners showed the logo to more than 100 people and none of them objected, Arman said.
"The people who we talked to told us, 'It's a college town and the kids will think its funny,'" she said.
LSA freshman Dan Yeomans said while he wasn't personally offended by the logo, he could see how others might interpret it in a negative way.
"I could see the same people who were offended by the South Quad T-shirts taking offense to this," said Yeomans, referring to a batch of dorm-sponsored shirts that featured lyrics from the popular, but controversial Soulja Boy song "Crank That."
Roberts said he believed the image was distasteful, regardless of the person.
"Basically, what it has is a provocatively dressed woman straddling a hamburger, and she's very busty and its kind of really horrible," he said.
Uh...why?
via ifeminists
UPDATE: Kolby is big on "diversity" -- except if you're a...(eeeeuw!) Republican. Roberts writes in The Michigan Daily:
For the first 19 years of my life, I lived in Bryan, Ohio. You may ask, "Where?" To which I say, it doesn't really matter. The point is that I lived in a small podunk where Wal-Mart was the place to be seen. To make matters worse, Bryan is a haven for racists, homophobes and Republicans.
Why is it that the "tolerant" people who are so often the most bigoted, and the least able to identify it? This guy's just Archie Bunker with "Spice Girls, ponies and glitter."
Jack Shafer Rips Up The Pharm Reports
According to news sources from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times to The Washington Post to ABC News, kids across America have these parties where they pour pills from their parents' medicine chests into a big bowl, grab a handful, and swallow them "like trail mix." Yeah, right. As champion news bullshit debunker Jack Shafer puts it on Slate:
But what I found preposterous in 2006 and still find preposterous today is the notion that having gotten their hands on drugs, today's users would randomize both their drugs and their dosages. Today's Journal reports that kids "mix the drugs up in a big bowl and eat them like candy" and attributes the detail to the Drug Enforcement Administration.The Journal isn't alone in pharm-party reportage. "Teenagers scoop everything they can find out of a medicine cabinet, pile it all on the table and then just start swallowing stuff," a California medical worker tells the Sacramento Bee. Kids swallow the pills "indiscriminately," writes the Birmingham News. Noted drug authority Marie Osmond told Larry King that kids--not her kid in rehab, mind you--dump the drugs "in a bowl and they just take them until they pass out."
Yet pharm parties fail to pass my stink test. As dumb as kids may be, they know how to read the labels from the vials they boost from their parents' medicine cabinets. If the drug labels don't provide sufficient information, the thieving little bastards can always consult the Web for effect and potency data. So upon arriving at a hypothetical pharm party, how many young pill-poppers are going to throw their fistfuls of pilfered OxyContin in the bowl on the chance that a random scoop will yield several over-the-counter antihistamine tablets?
Man Working And Working
Gregg upgraded my software to MT 4.1 and it's turned out to be a nightmare.
Comments are posting extremely slowly, and there are error messages. He's going to be working to fix this in the morning. Please bear with us. If you comment, just wait and let it post. It may look like it didn't post. Just wait and refresh your browser, even if you got an error message -- chances are it did post.
And if you're thinking of installing MT 4.1 on an existing site, think twice until they've worked out all the bugs, especially the comments bugs.
The Death Cult Known As "The Religion Of Peace"
I know a bunch of people who've converted from one religion to another; for example, Luke Ford, who left Seventh Day Adventism and became an Orthodox Jew. Now, I have heard Luke express many things, but never the fear that the Seventh Day Adventists would, say, slit his throat in his sleep for leaving their fold.
Next, we have prominent Italian editor, Magdi Allam, a Muslim, who converted to Christianity right there in the Vatican, supervised by the Pope. Here are a few words on what he has to look forward to from Colby Cosh in Canada's National Post:
As a high-profile apostate, he has a harder path to tread now. Already his biting editorials against Muslim terror and feeble Western multiculturalism have required him to travel with security guards and take other precautions against assassination. Hamas is said to have issued a death sentence against him in 2003, and in 2007 he published a book entitled Viva Israele, a title guaranteed to infuriate.Now he becomes an even more visible target, singled out for the special opprobrium that all varieties of mainstream Islam reserve for those who abandon the faith. This was a rarely acknowledged factor behind the Muslim world's powerful reaction to the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1988; Rushdie's Muslim upbringing and instruction made his "crime" of insulting the Prophet and the Koran an offence not only against God, who is considered free to punish evildoers at leisure, but against the umma within which the novelist was raised.
In the eyes of Islamists, Rushdie was still under their geographically unlimited jurisdiction, and the fatwah against him was a form of self-defence. Allam is in danger of having the same rules applied to him.
And more, in the WSJ, from Peter Hoekstra, on Islam and freedom of speech.
Criticism of Islam, however, has led to violence and murder world-wide. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie over his 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses." Although Mr. Rushdie has survived, two people associated with the book were stabbed, one fatally. The 2005 Danish editorial cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad led to numerous deaths. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the country for the United States.The violence Dutch officials are anticipating now is part of a broad and determined effort by the radical jihadist movement to reject the basic values of modern civilization and replace them with an extreme form of Shariah. Shariah, the legal code of Islam, governed the Muslim world in medieval times and is used to varying degrees in many nations today, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Radical jihadists are prepared to use violence against individuals to stop them from exercising their free speech rights.
...There may be a direct relationship between the radical jihadists' opposition to democracy and their systematic abuse of women. Women have virtually no rights in this radical world: They must conceal themselves, cannot hold jobs, and have been subjected to honor killings. Would most women in Muslim countries vote for a candidate for public office who supported such oppressive rules?
Not all of these radicals are using violence to supplant democratic society with an extreme form of Shariah. Some in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are attempting to create parallel Islamic societies with separate courts for Muslims. According to recent press reports, British officials are investigating the cases of 30 British Muslim school-age girls who "disappeared" for probable forced marriages.
While efforts to create parallel Islamic societies have been mostly peaceful, they may actually be a jihadist "waiting game," based on the assumption that the Islamic populations of many European states will become the majority over the next 25-50 years due to higher Muslim birth rates and immigration.
...A central premise of the American experiment are these words from the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are similar statements in the U.S. Constitution, British Common Law, the Napoleonic Code and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, hundreds of millions in the U.S. and around the world enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and many other rights.
These liberties have been won through centuries of debate, conflict and bloodshed. Radical jihadists want to sacrifice all we have learned by returning to a primitive and intolerant world. While modern society invites such radicals to peacefully exercise their faith, we cannot and will not sacrifice our fundamental freedoms.
Some Western Muslims won't kill you, but they will try to muzzle you, as is evidenced in the campaigns to use Canadian laws against Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant and columnist Mark Steyn, who correctly wrote about the militant Islam spreading across the globe:
"Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way."
A copy of Steyn's piece is here. Ezra Levant speaks before the Canadian kangaroo court here.
Hillary Calls The Bosnia Thing "A Mistake"
As in, "Whoops! I got caught." Jeff Mason writes for Reuters:
GREENSBURG, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday she made a mistake when she claimed she had come under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady.In a speech in Washington and in several interviews last week Clinton described how she and her daughter, Chelsea, ran for cover under hostile fire shortly after her plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia.
Several news outlets disputed the claim and a video of the trip, showed Clinton walking from the plane, accompanied by her daughter. They were greeted by a young girl in a small ceremony on the tarmac and there was no sign of tension or any danger.
"I did make a mistake in talking about it, you know, the last time and recently," Clinton told reporters in Pennsylvania where she was campaigning before the state's April 22 primary. She said she had a "different memory" about the landing.
"So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation."
"This is really about what policy experience we have and who's ready to be commander in chief. And I'm happy to put my experience up against Senator Obama's any day."
Well, it seems he lied about his grandmother, and about his half-sister's entry to America (not at the airport, surrounded by Africans and many other foreigners, but at the Greyhound bus station). Still, I think Hillary's experience as a liar trumps his many times over.
Speak English, Not Spanish? You're Fired
In Oregon, firefighters who are crew bosses are being laid off or demoted simply because they are supervising firefighters who can't speak English -- even if there's just one firefighter on a 20-person crew who speaks only Spanish. "No clear answer" from the state on why they don't just require the workers to speak English.
Sign Of The Times
This note was pasted to the counter at Groundworks in Venice, where I buy the coffee filters for my Chemex. Naturally, I buy all my coffee by mail order from Ristretto Roasters, where the beans are roasted by a coffee psycho -- and I mean that in the nicest way. No word on Ristretto's cell phone policy, but I wish more businesses would have signs like Groundworks'.
I also wish more people would suggest to more cafes and restaurants that they adopt "no cell phones" policies. Okay, I understand that, if you live on the Arctic Circle, or if you're in Chicago in January, in an emergency, you might need to talk quietly indoors for a moment or two.
In California? Go the fuck outdoors. And that doesn't mean sit outdoors, next to people in an outdoor cafe who are trying to have conversations with people across from them, and yammer into your phone.
When The Criminal Serves Less Jail Time Than Her Innocent Victim
Via Wendy McElroy, a shocking story out of Seattle. A woman who falsely accused a man of rape ended up serving eight days in jail while he served nine. It gets even more sickening. Peyton Whitely writes for the Seattle Times:
(Judge) Nault accepted a guilty plea from Katherine M. Clifton, accused of making false statements to a public servant.Those statements led to the rape charge last summer against the professor who subsequently spent nine days in jail and was placed on leave from his job.
Clifton declined to comment at the hearing but filed a detailed statement saying that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather, who was convicted of rape of a child in 1994.
"In order to understand why, I have to explain what has happened to me in my past that has forever affected me," she wrote.
Clifton, who now lives in Ellensburg, was sentenced to serve 365 days in jail, with 357 days suspended, and to pay a $5,000 fine, with $4,750 suspended, plus other conditions that include probation and community service. Nault also ordered her to pay the professor's attorney fees.
The professor declined to discuss the charges, saying he wants to put the past behind him, and asked not to be identified.
The King County Prosecutor's Office concedes a mistake was made in the original prosecution but said it was acting on the best information available at the time.
"In hindsight, what was presented to us was an allegation of a violent rape," said Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff. "That doesn't mean the investigation stopped."
Clifton was "an extremely articulate and credible victim," said Sgt. John Urquhart, Sheriff's Office spokesman. "There was no reason to suspect she wasn't telling the truth."
She accused him July 5. Detectives talked to him on July 10. He was charged July 12. But, per the story:
But as detectives continued working, it became clear that the text in the e-mails had been changed. None of the professor's fingerprints were found at Clifton's house. A sexual-assault examination found no evidence of rape.
Whoops! Sorry, prof, did we scar you for life? Maybe ruin your life? Guess we shoulda checked into this a little further before we threw you in the pokey for nine days.
Uh, yeah.
Especially in light of how little punishment there is for those who make false accusations of rape -- as this case, once again, shows.
Clifton's attorney, Kelly Faoro, said her client has "extremely deep remorse" for the false statements and realizes that "none of this makes it any better" for the professor.
I'm guessing she'd have much deeper remorse if Washington State followed my suggestion: Make proven false accusers serve the jail time and pay the attorney fees and fines the falsely accused would have, had that person been convicted.
On the bright side, if you could call it that, the falsely accused didn't hang himself.
People Who Should Use Condoms
Those of reproductive age who are likely to name their children in SMS-speak. From Thaindian News in Australia:
Sydney, March 6 (ANI): The popular SMS and email phonetic spellings have not only corrupted the English language, but have also sparked a trend of unusually spelt baby names.Most parents these days are drawing on the cool SMS and email spellings, by eschewing traditional spellings for versions such as Alex-Zander, Cam'ron, Emma-Lee, Ozkah, Thaillah and Ameleiyah.
Social analyst Mark McCrindle looked at Australian births in 2007 and discovered that the name Jayden was registered spelt in 12 ways, Aidan in nine ways, and Amelia and Tahlia in eight ways.
...He added that the increasing trend could be attributed to the phonetic spelling in email and text messaging and to parents wanting their children to be prominent.
"Gen X parents were the first generation to grow up themselves with mum not staying home with the kids or their parents divorcing, and they hated their parents not being around to show them love, he said.
"Knowing they will probably recreate some of those sins, they now are naming their kids uniquely to show how individual and special they are to them.
via Popgadget
Government By The Stupid, For The Stupid
The retards in charge in Washington just spent my money to send me a note to tell me something I already know (as does anybody not in a coma): that, very soon, we'll all effectively be getting a cash advance on a credit card -- one of the stupider financial moves a person can make.
Of course, it looked like one of those scam junk mail pieces. And it is a scam. As for all the people who are reacting with glee at the prospect of getting a $300 or $600 tax "rebate" -- as if it's free money -- they've failed to process where, exactly, that money is coming from.
This is...our money! Taxpayer dollars. They're throwing them back at us -- word has it, because it's supposed to stimulate the economy, keep us from going into a recession.
The problem is, we already have a ginormous national debt. I read that it grows $5,000 a second just in dollars to the Iraq war alone. And then there was the prescription drug bill Bush signed, and a bazillion other entitlements, past and new.
Hey, all you people who are so thrilled about the check soon to be in the mail: we're going to have to pay this money back, and with piles of interest.
Can we please get a few people who can do basic math in government?
Now, it's possible I'm just not a sophisticated enough thinker on economic issues, and this is a deceptively wise course of action.
But, on a personal level, if I had some vast pile of credit card debt, the last thing I'd be doing is taking out a cash advance on the ole Visa, hitting Vegas and trying to gamble my way out of it. Then again, I do call myself a fiscal conservative -- a creature rarer than the dodo these days.
Oh, and what's next? The goverment will tell us that the patriotic thing to do is to spend that money. Go out and buy a $600 handbag, or a Louis Vuitton car bra for the Lincoln Navigator you can't afford to gas up. Do it or...the terrorists win. Whoops, sorry...wrong message.
To me, this makes about as much economic sense as rewarding people who make risky investments by bailing them out when those investments fail.
The way I see it, if the government's going to give out cash prizes, it should be to people like me who pay off their credit card in full every month and save money by buying off-brand toner on eBay, and getting their clothes there, too -- "like new" instead of "new." That won't help Macy's...but, why is the fate of Macy's, or Bear Stearns, or any other business the problem of anybody but those who gambled on it, hoping it would pay off handsomely as an investment?
Sorry, I warned you I was kind of dim on the economics thingie.
Semi-Colon Oscopy
A quote, down to the punctuation, or lack thereof, from hilarious Mark Leyner's novel, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist:
trudy says you're creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun
I Won't Be "Going To A Better Place"
When I'm dead, I'll just be dead and be eaten by worms. Well, that's all there's evidence for, anyway. No evidence there's a heaven, no evidence there's a hell.
That sort of thinking is probably what motivated Arthur C. Clarke to order up a funeral without the mumbo-jumbo. I'd like the same, thanks. Ideally, later rather than sooner.
Affirmative Action Can Kill
The LAPD is seeking to bring more women and blacks into SWAT, although SWAT already is 12.6% black -- in a force that's 12% black (not that I think that should matter). If I'm in some situation where SWAT has to come, I don't care what sex or race the person is, as long as they have the strength and skills to get me out.
What's dumb is that now they're instituting a new, broader selection process for SWAT, which is expected to go into effect next year, writes Robert C.J. Parry in the LA Times:
The report goes on to say that "there is no task in SWAT that a woman could not perform" and that the selection criteria has "underemphasized negotiating skills, patience, empathy and flexibility while overemphasizing physical prowess and tactical acumen."
Empathy? Are they rescuing hostages or preparing to open a nursery school? Sure, look for a range of skills, but don't lower the bar because most women probably can't reach it. Parry concurs:
...SWAT officers who have actually entered houses to rescue hostages from killers (as they did Feb. 7 in Winnetka, resulting in the death of Simmonsand the wounding of Officer James Veenstra) say there is no such thing as overemphasizing tactical acumen or physical prowess for such assignments.Yes, they say, there are probably women on the force who could and should be admitted to SWAT, but they should be required to meet the same standards as other applicants and should be chosen for skill, not for diversity. The reality, SWAT members say, is that the standards for tactical success apply to everyone equally. Upper-body strength is vital to holding a 12-pound rifle stone-steady to hit a deranged killer while avoiding his hostage in a whirlwind of chaos.
In general, the final board report offers little or no persuasive evidence as to why SWAT should change. "SWAT performs in a disciplined and exemplary manner consistent with its fine reputation," the report acknowledges. "It has been and remains a source of great pride within the LAPD."
...Instead of picking cops on the basis of their ability to handle weapons and stress, the new standards specifically exclude video-based shooting simulator evaluations and "Hogan's Alley," a daunting series of pop-up targets representing armed crooks and hostages. A simulated raid with flash-bang devices that previously disqualified many candidates who accidentally shot the "hostage" is also gone.
The new test's only physical challenges are a modest physical fitness qualification and a modified obstacle course. "My preteen daughter could pass that," one officer said. Applicants' scores will now largely come from an oral interview conducted by non-SWAT and non-LAPD supervisors. In essence, the test is largely subjective.
...(I)t is the change in the selection process and the opening up of SWAT to applicants from outside Metro that have motivated SWAT officers' wives to launch an unusual e-mail campaign directed at Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, stating in part: "We are concerned with the safety of our husbands ... if they are expected to go into these highly dangerous situations with someone who got in under a compromised standard."
...SWAT is too important to this city to be weakened in the name of political correctness. Unless the Police Commission or other officials act, the LAPD will make social experimentation a higher priority than tactical excellence.
UPDATE: Here's more on this from Jack Dunphy.
How To Make Me Forget I'm A Libertarian
And make me want to hurt you. Just use this euphemism for vagina, as they did on the HuffPo:P.S. Kate Beckinsale did make a remark along those lines, but she didn't say that idiotic word.
A World Without Cathy Seipp
It was so hard to believe that anybody or anything, even cancer, could beat Cathy, that she got very sick before a number of her friends, me included, came to understand and accept that she might not make it.
I think about her all the time, and talk about her, too, which is a little like visiting with her in some small way. For example, I was in Paris in February, and tied mention of Cathy to gum-chewing, which she found vulgar and unacceptable in public, and probably even in private, too. And then I mentioned that I mentioned her on my blog:
On a side note about Cathy, she's often in my thoughts -- randomly, when there's something in the media that she would've written about (in her sharp, biting, Seipp-ian way), or when I think of something she chastised people for.Just last night, on the way to dinner, I mentioned to my friends Richard and Vincent that Cathy said something along the lines of "Gum chewing is vulgar!"...and any time I thought of popping a piece in my mouth, her words came echoing back to me. I enjoy this -- it's like a little visit from Cathy, although it doesn't do much for the economics of the Trident company.
Whenever I get interviewed by somebody (like I was on Wednesday), somehow her name finds its way into the interview. I don't consciously plan to do this; somehow it just comes up, probably because it feels so wrong that she's gone that it's just something I'm obligated to do. But, she was so strong and smart and funny and wise and brave and cranky (and usually about just the right things), there's usually a good reason to mention her, something that ties in well, some wise thing she said or did.
She was one of my first friends in Los Angeles. I was traveling monthly from New York to L.A., and writing a column for the New York Daily News when Cathy was writing "Letter From L.A." for New York Press. Now, I don't find many newspaper writers who are truly funny, but I found Cathy hilarious. And very smart, of course. So I did something I rarely do: I wrote her a fan letter, and said I was going back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, and I was a columnist, too, and here's a copy of what I write, and how about we get together when I'm in L.A.?
And she did something that people who get fan letters rarely do: she wrote back, and we talked on the phone, and we had the first of our writergirl breakfasts, where she introduced me to her friends, who became my friends. And then we did the first of our book parties, for Ron Rosenbaum, at my house. (Here's one Emmanuelle and Cathy and I threw for Toby Young, less than a year before Cathy died.)
But, it turns out this writing back and welcoming some stranger or near stranger into her life and her circle was just matter of course for Cathy. Unlike so many people, she wasn't snobby about "the little people." If she liked something about you or your writing, you were no longer little, you were invited in. Well, the truth is, you were always somewhat little, because Cathy was queen, but as long as you were clear on that, there would be no problems.
And, jokes aside, she was a good friend, vocal supporter, and fierce defender of whomever and whatever she thought was right, no matter how unpopular. She used her sharp wit to criticize the LA Times for their features sections' ban on me in a piece on Mediaweek, and supported me in my pranks and ragings against the ill-mannered, where others would have shunned me as ridiculous or a nut. I am a bit ridiculous and a nut, but that was never a problem for Cathy. In fact, "Revengerella," the nickname she gave me for these pranks and ragings is now the title of a book I'm completing (REVENGERELLA: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society), a good bit of which I wrote at her kitchen table.
Here's a similar Meeting Cathy story from Nancy Rommelman's beautiful piece from yesterday on Cathy:
I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one."This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article, and it's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"
Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."
I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.
Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo McGee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.
"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.
During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.
I just loved and admired Cathy for not being one to shy from contact with even the biggest weirdos and misfits around. She talked about how Republicans had the bigger tent. Well, Cathy was the Republican with the biggest tent of all. She couldn't abide stupid people, or smart people who did stupid things, but who wants to be around those people anyway?
Cathy actually wrote for Penthouse; I wrote for Hustler; but we both laughed at how it was the women's magazines that'll screw you over every time. Penthouse paid Cathy super-well, and Hustler paid me well, and right on time. Ed Rampell, the former features editor at Hustler, was especially kind when I was a mess before and after Cathy died for quite some time. (If anybody has Ed's e-mail address, please pass it on).
Also, I didn't actually take Cathy to chemo since I was in Venice and she was coming from Silverlake. Emmanuelle or Cathy's dad, or Debbie Gendel would bring her and then hang out with her, and I'd come meet her or them there with cookies and Pellegrino, and hang out and talk, when her chemo wasn't on my deadline days.
Cathy's last days.
My piece on Cathy for her roast.
I'm sorry I can't write anything better about her right now. Just too hard. Read Nancy's piece, which is beautiful. Here's one with some great quotes from Cathy by Jackie, yet another terrific person I never would have met but for Cathy's "C'mon in!" approach to the world. Here's another blog item on Cathy by Jackie. More here from Mickey Kaus, Andrew Breitbart, and others from right after Cathy died. More Cathy, including her writing and writing about her on NRO.
I hope you got to know Cathy while she was alive, or at least read her articles and her blog, and if you didn't, Google her name and read her writing and maybe you'll get a taste of the person you missed.
Reforming Campaign Finance "Reform"
To me, true campaign finance reform is not only lifting the McCain-Feingold restrictions that are referred to as "campaign finance reform," but refusing those who are now whining for full public funding of elections. Sorry, you want to run, you pay for it, don't ask me for money so you can persuade me you're not the crook or sellout you seem to be. Ayn Rand Institute's Dr. Yaron Brook has a terrific piece in Forbes on the consequences of all of this:
A wealthy individual can spend lavishly on ads, even buy an entire newspaper or broadcast station, to convince Americans of his viewpoint; he cannot force us to listen or agree. At the same time, a candidate lacking money is free to seek financial support from citizens who agree with him, whether it be a few wealthy individuals or millions of like-minded Americans who are willing to put their money where his mouth is. This is what explains the unexpected financial success of Ron Paul's and Barack Obama's campaigns--and note that current restrictions actually make fund-raising for this type of outside candidate more difficult.It's true that in a free system, money does give you a greater ability to get your message out; this is precisely one of the reasons it's desirable to earn wealth. If this is what campaign finance advocates regard as corrupt, which system would they regard as uncorrupt? One in which a person's ability to promote his viewpoint is unrelated to the financial resources he's earned (whether personally or through voluntary contributions).
This is why campaign finance advocates have not been appeased by McCain-Feingold, and are calling for complete public financing of political elections. Under such a system, candidates would no longer have to financially earn the platform from which they speak; instead, the government would furnish candidates with your tax dollars. Of course, not every potential candidate could receive public funding under such a system: Only "serious" candidates would.
Who decides which candidate is serious? Those presently holding government power. There is no surer way to create a political aristocracy in America.
...And current campaign finance restrictions already seem to be moving us toward a political aristocracy. Incumbent politicians typically go into elections with massive advantages in name-recognition and fund-raising ability. To have a hope of unseating them, challengers often need large cash infusions from a small number of donors--something expressly forbidden by campaign finance laws. The Center for Competitive Politics notes that "since contribution limits were first enacted at the federal level, successful challenger campaigns have plummeted by 50%." Campaign finance reform has done nothing to get corruption out of politics, but it has been effective at keeping (corrupt) politicians in politics.
Yet despite all this, you might still be wondering: Can't large contributions buy political favors? They can--when politicians have power to grant special favors to special interests in the first place. In today's Washington, it's not just money that purchases favors. Politicians dispense favors for the sake of prestige (say, their name on a bridge), for the purpose of appeasing vocal critics lobbying against them, for the attempt to win your vote (say, a pet project in your district that will create jobs), etc.
It's not money that corrupts--it's the lure of arbitrary political power. A true crusader against political corruption would not strip American citizens of their right to free speech; he would seek to put an end to the government's power to grant special favors to any group.
Sen. McCain was once asked whether McCain-Feingold abridges freedom of speech. He implicitly admitted that it does: "I would rather have a clean government than one where quote 'First Amendment rights' are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government." We should tell Sen. McCain and those who agree with him that a government which strips us of our right to free speech is by that very fact corrupt.
A Black "DC Fem" Speaks
I think that means "Washington, D.C. Feminist," but that's just a guess. Here's her comment on my blog item about Obama throwing his granny under the campaign bus:
Why is it always OK for older white people to be racist? This notion that Obama threw his grandmother under the bus by mentioning her in a speech about race in America is ridiculous. He brought up her racism to remind us that we all harbor some resentments and that some people (like his grandmother) are able to transcend those and wholeheartedly embrace people who don't look just like them.People continue to accuse him of maligning Granny and Geraldine Ferraro keeps insisting that she is the real victim here and everyone sympathizes and feels sorry for them. But this loud mouthed pastor said some truly prejudiced things and people are acting like he's Hitler. Why is there never any slack cut for old black people? These are the folks who lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Sometimes they shoot off their mouths and say things that are truly ignorant and divisive. In the black community, we tolerate their tirades because of the systematic racism they endured in their lives. And we realize that the time has come to rethink that tolerance.
That, to me, was the point of Obama's speech. That there is plenty of blame to go around but we need to move past that. Those of us in the black community need to stop letting our elders say whatever they want to and apologizing for it because of their unfortunate life experiences. And white Americans need to come to the table with the realization of white privilege in America and the willingness to listen (really listen) to what's going in the black community. Maybe then we will finally end the two America's and just have one the way it should have been all along.
No, the government did not create AIDS to kill black people -- that's ignorant and ridiculous. But they did infect black men with Syphilis to study it's effect on human beings. Anyone who doesn't believe that can look through Bill Clinton's records to see the day where apologized on behalf of the government for that despicable act. So unfortunately, because of the true experiences of one group of people, you can manipulate a few gullible members of our society into believing that even worse things have occurred. The way Republicans have manipulated so many into thinking that unregulated free market economy is the greatest thing in human history. Now that your house is in foreclosure, do you still believe that?
Posted by: DC Fem at March 21, 2008 7:29 AM
Here's my reply:
There's are so many distortions in what you wrote above, I don't know where to begin. Also, I haven't had coffee yet, so I'll just take on a few:Was she even racist? Or did that idea suit Obama's needs vis a vis his need to slink out of the Wright controversy. I've blogged before about his, uh, memory issues, vis a vis his "forgetting" that his sister got off a Greyhound bus from Africa and didn't come off a plane.
I was talking to my boyfriend last night about the idiotic idea that it's racist to avoid some questionable character on the street. I live in a neighborhood where there are some, let's say, ruffians. If I see a young, thuggish looking guy in a hoodie coming down the sidewalk toward me, black, latino, or white, I'm going to feel a little scared, and I'll walk in the street like I'm going to get my car. Furthermore, black men are in prison disproportionate to their number in the population. Jewish people have also had a tough time throughout history. The prison isn't filled with guys named Moishe, Max, and Schmuel. Tell me that you're about to cross paths with a young, thuggish looking black guy on the streets there in DC and you just walk past him like it's an old lady carrying a bouquet of lilies home. (Or a young thuggish looking guy of any race.) It's prudent, as a woman, to be street smart and to be "better safe than sorry."
Furthermore, Jews, throughout history, have plenty more than blacks to complain about, and while some do have a persecution complex, they aren't sitting around saying "The Holocaust is the reason we can't make it in the world." And neither, frankly, are my friends who are black and who are achieving things.
Furthermore, I don't see people high-fiving Geraldine Ferraro. She's been pretty roundly criticized.
I don't think racism by anybody is nice. I experienced anti-Semitism as a kid -- kids chasing me around, calling me dirty Jew, etc. And then I went to college at the University of Michigan, where I was thrilled to be in an environment where not everybody was white, like where I grew up, and I sat down at the end of a lunch table of black girls one of my first days in Alice Lloyd dorm, and they looked at me like I just squatted and left a turd in the middle of the floor of the lunch room.
What Obama did, if his granny was even "racist," was wrong because you don't reveal private people's private conversations or actions publicly. Note that there are no photos of my boyfriend on my blog, and if I refer to him, I just call him "Gregg." I am a public person, and he is not. While it's not a secret who he is, and it's pretty easy for anyone who reads here to figure out his last name and read about him, I didn't need him to even ask me before I decided that I would not "take him public" in his association with me by posting photos of him.
The point of Obama's speech is the point of every speech by each of these three sleazebags who are running: To get elected.
PS What are you actually DOING to change things besides leaving blog comments? I see lots of wind from people like Wright, but how about starting a program like I have. I go talk to kids at inner city schools to demystify making it. My next talk is next week (although we're waiting to hear back from a teacher on Spring break so it may shift), and I'll be there after that on April 16th, and I'm starting to bring in other speakers, too. My goal is to do one talk a month, although I got sick in January, and that screwed things up a bit.
Oh, and I'm whiter than a sheet of typing paper, see above, but Jesse Owens came and talked to my elementary school class, and I was very influenced by a woman my mother knew, and decided that kids in inner city schools would be helped by positive role models who show the step by step process of doing something cool and meaningful with your life.
Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 21, 2008 8:19 AM
And then another reply from me with the bit I forgot:
Forgot this bit. Corrections to your quote follow:The way Republicans have manipulated so many into thinking that unregulated free market economy is the greatest thing in human history. Now that your house is in foreclosure, do you still believe that?
1. We don't have an unregulated free market, but if we did operate in a more capitalistic way we'd probably be doing much better (George Bush is the biggest big Democrat we've had in office in a long time, starting with that prescription drug bill he signed that will break us all...and handouts for Bear Stearns are the antithesis of free market capitalism).
2. My house isn't in foreclosure because I was taught by my dad never to sign anything without reading and understanding it first. If you can't understand it, you get somebody who can understand it (a lawyer) to read it and explain it to you until you can.
I don't own a home because, much like all those people who took out those insane loans, I can't afford one (at least, not in the community I want to live in). I'm what's called a Personal Responsibilitarian, a term I made up. I'm also a fiscal conservative. Don't spend money I don't have, and all that. Shocking concept, I know. And if I do buy something, I buy in bulk from Costco, if possible, and I buy my clothes and jewelry slightly used on eBay, on the 75% off rack at the designer resale store, or on clearance in January and August at Loehmann's. I use my credit card like a debit card, and pay it in full every month. And I bought my first new car ever, which I paid off at a rate of about 30% over the rate I was supposed to pay on my loan, to build my already excellent credit. If do someday buy a house, the loan officers will be chasing me down the street and begging to me to go with them.
Posted by: Amy Alkon at March 21, 2008 8:28 AM
Oh, and I'll pile on a comment from Crid, who got it exactly right, and in about one-tenth the number of words:
DC Fem, follow the fucking links.Amy's item ("Obama Rats Out His Racist Granny") is deceptively titled: OBAMA'S GRANDMOTHER WASN'T A RACIST, and the (revised) anecdote by which he implies that she is horribly twists the facts.
*That's* what you need to know about this guy. That's how horny he is for the White House. Maybe American voters need this extremely weird racial psychodrama in their lives... I personally don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong. Nonetheless the fact that he's willing to pander this way doesn't make him more admirable.
Quite the opposite. He's not into the truth, and he's not into his own loving flesh and blood.
I Just Don't Understand Welfare For Bankers
I haven't blogged on Bear Stearns because I've been just so dumbfounded about it. If we killed welfare, how come we're still giving welfare to the very, very, very, very rich?
I know there's some complex equation here that I'm just not economically intelligent enough (in the political sense) to understand, like that if Aunt Ethel and Uncle Bob lose their collective shirt it'll be such terrible P.R. for the country, and cause, I dunno, a run on the banks (despite FDIC insurance) that we must give the poor dears at Bear Stearns a big taxpayer handout. But, here's an editorial in The New York Times on this that gets into a little of what I think about this:
The Fed is probably right to be doing all it can think of to avoid worse damage than the economy is already suffering. But if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street's wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.Financiers, of course, dispute that they are being insufficiently penalized. "I received no bonus for 2007, no severance pay, no golden parachute," E. Stanley O'Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told a House committee recently. That doesn't seem like much of a blow to Mr. O'Neal, who was removed earlier this year following gargantuan subprime-related losses.
Indeed, the pain that is being inflicted on financial-industry executives as a result of their own actions and decisions is not proving much of an encouragement. Rather, the knuckle-rapping seems only to encourage bankers to make up for any losses they may suffer by finding another way to navigate their companies, the financial system and the economy into the next maelstrom -- from Internet stocks to what the industry calls zero-down, negative amortization, no-doc, adjustable-rate mortgages.
(Translation: derivatives based on incomprehensible mortgages with unpredictable interest rates given to people who have no reasonable chance of understanding them, let alone paying them back. )
Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad. They might have to forgo a bonus if investments turn sour. They might even be fired. Their equity might become worthless -- or not, if the Fed feels it must step in. But as a rule, they won't have to return the money they made in the good days when they were making all the crazy bets that eventually took their banks down.
Our hearts go out to E. Stanley O'Neal, who will have to make ends meet with the $14.10 million bonus he got in 2006. D'ya think he'll have to sell the jet?
In other CEO news, by Christina S.N. Lewis in the WSJ:
Bear Stearns Cos. Chief Executive Alan D. Schwartz has taken off the market his suburban New York house, listed for $4.5 million, and is renting it, the real-estate agent who had listed the home says.Meanwhile, Bear Chairman and former CEO James Cayne closed last month on a $27.4 million purchase of two adjacent apartments at the Plaza condominium in New York, according to public records.
Both moves came before Bear's fire-sale deal Sunday to be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase. Under the terms of that deal, Mr. Cayne's Bear holdings, once valued at $1 billion, would total roughly $13.1 million, less than half the cost of the Plaza units.
Sad, huh? To see these men, if not losing their homes, losing money on their homes.
By the way, like poor Mr. Schwartz, I, too, am renting. Of course, that's because I can't afford to own a home in the pricey Los Angeles market.
I could move to, say, Cincinnati, where Jackie Danicki says real estate is shockingly affordable (she didn't say "shockingly," but you get the idea). Or, every taxpayer in America could send me a dollar out of pity that I can't afford a mansion in Bel Air and a biodiesel-powered jet to go with my Honda Insight.
Wright Was The Clintons' Pastor, Too!
Well, not exactly. Actually, it seems Bill Clinton was once photographed with the guy when Clinton spoke to a bunch of clerics at a "prayer breakfast." And how nice that the Obama campaign fights dirty enough to provide the picture to the press, plus what was most certainly a form letter written by some, sorry, intern at the White House.
Clinton looks real attentive to Wright in that photo, too.
In short, not impressed in the slightest by the way Obama behaves under pressure.
An Empty Vessel Makes The Most Noise
Cramer On Bear Stearns three days before the collapse:
via Wendy McElroy/This Modern World
Obama Rats Out His Racist Granny
Just saw this online in Taranto's column in the WSJ, but I actually thought the same thing Taranto did when I read Obama's speech about Wright this morning in the print edition of the LA Times. But, first, an excerpt from Obama's speech:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
And my thoughts on this: Private people will say things privately that they would never say publicly. Like Obama's granny, who he threw under the wheels of the campaign bus as a defense for his failing to run in disgust from Wright.
Taranto, likewise, writes:
Our first thought was that it was pretty low of Obama to exploit his (still living) grandmother in this way. Is it really necessary for the whole world to know about her private expressions of prejudice? Doesn't simple decency dictate that a public figure treat embarrassing facts about loved ones with discretion?Obama was trying to accomplish something very specific by dragging his "white grandmother" into this political mess. He was trying to diminish Wright's hateful theology by implying that it too is a private matter.
Yeah? Well, it's not. The way I see it, you are who you associate with. What you can stomach. Or, at least, it says something about who you are.
And in Taranto's words, it's this:
So here we have, on the one hand, an old white woman who would be completely ordinary and anonymous but for her grandson's astonishing political success, and who harbors some regrettable prejudices; and, on the other, a leader in the black community who uses his pulpit to propagate an ideology of hate.Obama said this morning, "I have asserted a firm conviction--a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people--that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union."
But if he cannot speak out unequivocally against the public, organized bigotry of his spiritual mentor, how can he possibly live up to this promise?
Hillary Praises That Helpful Heather Mills
Heather Mills, this century's biggest shrew, has helped (herself, to a fortune in Paul McCartney's money).
Here's the tape Hillary Clinton's handlers have to be dying to erase: Hillary Clinton endorsing Mills a few years back -- pretty much a commercial by Hillary for Heather for her land mines' work -- but, especially at the end, in light of the vile Mills' ugly divorce from McCartney, it's unintentionally hilarious. (Very SNL.)
Equal Slime
In the name of equal, uh, time; since I've posted blog items about both of the Dimocrats today, it's only fair that I put up a link to what a sleazebag McCain is. Here, from a guy who was blogging in back cave days, and looks like it, too (and I mean that in the nicest of ways)...Ken Layne on John McCain's Long Career Of Sleazy Lies, Semi-Affairs & Total Corruption:
While Grandpa Straight Talk was running for the presidency in 2000, all his aides were going nuts because he was constantly traveling with a good-looking lobbyist gal who was, at the time, in her early thirties.Whether or not McCain and Vicki Iseman were having sexytime on the corporate jets he used to fly around the country, McCain did do the bidding of Iseman’s clients.
At this point, he had barely cleared his name from the Keating Five Savings & Loan scandal.
In one of his few acknowledgments that the Arizona senator has ever been to Arizona, McCain made a point of not flying direct from National Airport to Phoenix because he had some part in opening up that commercial air route — but because he always flies in luxury private jets provided by the Corporates, it didn’t much inconvenience him.McCain helped launch some campaign-ethics group, but the group ended up doing the exact same corrupt things it was supposedly against, so he quit in shame.
Corrupt banker/developer Charles Keating was, obviously, an immediate supporter of McCain’s long congressional career. Keating showered dirty money and fancy vacations on McCain, who loves all that shit.
Then McCain tried to get the government off the back of Keating’s failing corrupt Lincoln Savings and Loan, because McCain really wants to get government off the backs of his corrupt millionaire friends.
McCain got caught, but somehow clung to his senate seat.
But McCain can still pretend to “wince” at the memory of getting caught, so who cares if the bailout cost American taxpayers $3.4 billion?
He also got caught having a big lobbyist fund-raising deluxe luxury fancy party in 2000. So he ran and hid like a little girl.
Lobbyists control his entire miserable, corrupt life.
He loves lobbyists, both in the figurative and literal sense, because he was probably screwing that one lobbyist.
And when the lobbyists need a quick letter to the FCC or whatever to help their clients, John Maverick McCain is always quick to help, the end.
McCain info from NYT story
Ladies, You're Just A Vagina In Islam
Retired Muslim (okay, apostate) Abul Kasem explains a few things about the status of women in Islam on Islam-Watch:
The method of securing such sexual/physical pleasure, as per Islam, is very similar to a commercial/business transaction. In Islam, a woman has no right to get married on her own accord if she has a guardian. In all cases of marriage and sex she is treated merely as a sexual object, much like the provider of a service for which she must be paid some compensation. In Islamic parlance, this compensation for sexual service is known as mahr or dower. All Muslim men must agree to pay an amount of money before marrying a woman. This payment can be immediate or it can be deferred to a future date. Now you know what a mahr is.No Islamic marriage is valid without the agreement for a dower. In reality, however, this dower is nothing but the payment for the possession of a female body for sexual gratification by the male. It is a very blunt statement, I have made, you may think. To check the veracity of such a direct and outrageous statement, please open any Sha'ria book, such as reference 8. Here is an excerpt from this authentic Sha'ria (the divine law of Allah) book.Ownership of a woman's body to do as he likes including beating
m5.4 (ref: 8, p.526) husbands rights
A husband possesses full right to enjoy his wife's person (A: from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet, though anal intercourse (dis: p75.20) is absolutely unlawful) in what does not physically harm her.
He is entitled to take her with him when he travels.
Let us also look into a book of Islamic jurisprudence that was used(during the British Raj in India) as a textbook for Hanafi laws at Inns of Law (London). It is the book, (reference 11) which even the Sha'ria lawyers consult regularly in the interpretation of Islamic laws. In page 44 of this book, it is written:
Full dower is the payment for the delivery of woman's person, Booza, meaning Genitalia arvum Mulieris.
The wife entitled to her whole dower upon the consummation of the marriage or the death of the husband. If a person specify a dower of ten or more Dirms, and should afterwards consummate his marriage, or be removed by death, his wife, in either case, has a claim to the whole of the dower specified, because, by consummation, the delivery of the return for the dower, namely the Booza, or woman's person,* is established, and therein is confirmed the right to the consideration, namely, the dower; and, on the other hand, by the decease of the husband the marriage is rendered complete by its completion, and consequently is so with respect to all its effects.
(* Literally, Genitale arvum Mulieris)
Yes, you read it correctly. The meaning of Genitalia arvum Mulieris is woman's vagina. The above few sentences clearly meant that a woman sells her vagina in return for the mahr. It is a commercial transaction. Make no mistake about it! Period.
This is the real meaning of sex in Islam; that is, a man buys a woman's sex organ for enjoyment through the payment of mahr, which is the Islamic dower. Whether a woman really enjoys this kind of 'forced' sex is completely irrelevant in Islamic concept of sex. A man's orgasm becomes absolutely a necessity when a woman is contracted in marriage through the payment of Islamic mahr (or its deferment to a future date).
If you thought that I am exaggerating too much and speaking 'out of context' then there is more surprise for you. In the same book it is written that the possession of object of contract is the actual coitus or enjoyment and the right to dower is not confirmed without enjoyment. Enjoyment of what? Please read the full text for the answer.
More at the link. Kasem is a contributor to Ibn Warraq's book of essays, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out.
Finally, A Sensible Ruling On Drug Testing
If your work vehicle is a rolling cart of books, do we really need to urine-test you? Bob Egelko writes for the SF Chron of the Ninth Circuit's ruling against the city of Woodburn, Oregon, which argued that it was allowed to maintain a drug-free workplace by making prospective employees be screened for drugs and alcohol:
The city was sued by Janet Lanier, whose job offer as a part-time page at the city library was withdrawn in 2004 when she refused a drug and alcohol test. A federal judge ruled the policy unconstitutional and awarded Lanier $12,400 in damages and $44,000 in legal fees, her lawyer said.The appeals court said Thursday that the judge's ruling went too far, because the city may be able to justify drug-testing of applicants for some jobs. But the court found no basis to test applicants for library positions.
Federal courts have upheld mandatory drug screening for jobs in which performance "may pose a great danger to the public," the appeals judges said. They cited Supreme Court rulings allowing drug testing of railroad crews after accidents and of customs agents who search others for illegal drugs.
Another appeals court has upheld drug testing of applicants to teach school in Tennessee, noting teachers' duty to look after students' well-being.
But the Ninth Circuit court said Woodburn's rationale for universal screening - that drug use is a serious social problem affecting the performance of any job - was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1997 when it struck down Georgia's requirement that all candidates for public office undergo narcotics testing to show their commitment to the war on drugs.
The Supreme Court said the state was requiring testing for purely symbolic reasons, which was not enough to avoid the constitutional requirement that a search warrant be based on evidence of wrongdoing.
How To Get People To Watch TV News
Make it more like Family Feud. Check out this little anchor vs. reporter exchange:
America's Going Bankrupt
U.S. Comptroller David M. Walker goes on a "fiscal wakeup tour." In the words of 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft, "The US has spent, promised and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn't act now."
I don't spend more than I make. And I just don't understand why nobody seems to care that our government is run with all the wisdom of a subprime loan department, or maybe less.
From the 60 Minutes program above: Walker says we have massive entitlement programs we can no longer afford. The Baby Boom is about to become a big problem. From next year on, 78 million people will be eligible for entitlements. And there won't be enough wage earners to pay for the benefits of the baby boomers.
But, Walker says the Medicare problem is "five times greater" than the Social Security problem. Instead of dealing with the problem, the President and the Congress expanded the program to include prescription drug coverage -- "probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1950's."
According to Walker, we can't afford the promises we've made, let alone further promises. "We'd have to have 8 trillion dollars today, invested at Treatury rates, to deliver on that promise." And we have zip.
(And, hear this Hillary Tse Tung) Walker says we have promised almost unlimited health care to senior citizens who never see the bills. And the government is borrowing money to pay them.
He says the system is unsustainable. We have to dramatically reform our health care or we could bankrupt America.
...Whoops...and after all that transcribing and describing, it seems there's a print link:
"I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility," Walker tells Kroft.David Walker is a prudent man and a highly respected public official. As comptroller general of the United States he runs he Government Accountability Office, the GAO, which audits the government's books and serves as the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. He has more than 3,000 employees, a budget of a half a billion dollars, and a message he considers urgent.
"I'm going to show you some numbers…they’re all big and they’re all bad," he says.
So bad, that Walker has given up on elected officials and taken his message directly to taxpayers and opinion makers, hoping to shape the debate in the next presidential election.
"You know the American people, I tell you, they are absolutely starved for two things: the truth, and leadership," Walker says.
He calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn’t act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake.
"What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous," he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
Gotta Love The Title Of This Study
Well, the headline, anyway: "Email from Nancy Nutsucker"
The rest of it (snore!) is here:
Representation and gendered address in online pornographySusanna Paasonen
University of JyväskyläThis article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender difference. It seems that limited female agency is central, especially in messages advertising reality sites structured by gendered relations of control. Arguing that such displays of control should not be automatically translated as displays of power, this article investigates the representational logic of mainstream pornography as one based on binary differences, juxtapositions and easily recognizable types.
Yeah, whatever. I actually just started collecting funny spam lines. A few recent favorites:
•Eat a pill and your dick will become a hill.
•turn your trouser mouse into a monster schlong.
Your faves?
Who's The Criminal Here?
Okay, it's one thing if your 15-year-old daughter is doing it with some 26-year-old drifter from the gas station. But, a 15-year-old girl has sex with her teenage boyfriend...and he faces jail time and/or sex offender status? Just nuts. But, it's happening. From an ABC piece by John Stossel, Gena Binkley, and Andrew G. Sullivan:
In one respect, Hadley was fortunate because he wasn't put on New Hampshire's sex offender registry.Jeff Davis -- who also ran into an angry dad -- wasn't so lucky. He was an 18-year-old with a 15-year-old girlfriend, and they were having sex.
"It was the norm," Davis said. "It really was. There are a lot of teenagers these days that are having sex. We thought we were very much in love, we were in high school."
His girlfriend's father, Mark Putorti, didn't think the relationship was good for his daughter Alexis. Her grades at school had slipped and he thought Davis was a bad influence. "All I wanted was him away from my daughter," he said.
Putorti had the law on his side because Alexis was 15 and the age of consent in Connecticut is 16. He warned Davis to stay away from his daughter, or else. But Davis didn't believe him. "Thinking there was no legal recourse, I figured it was a dad who was angry and couldn't really do much about it," Davis said. But he was wrong.
Putorti went to the police, and they arrested Davis. "I was processed, fingerprints, photos," Davis recalled.
At the time Alexis was furious with her father, but today she says that her dad was right and that Davis took advantage of her.
"I don't want to say he directly pressured me, but I think that you can definitely, as an older person, put indirect pressure on somebody to do something they may not be ready to do," she said.
Branded for Life
Davis was convicted of sexual contact and risk of injury to a minor. He's on the Connecticut sex offender registry right there along with Douglas Simmons who kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered a 6-year-old (the details of the murder conviction don't appear on the registry because of a plea deal in his home state) and James Sullivan who sexually assaulted a handicapped woman. Looking at the registry, it's tough to know how Davis is different from those dangerous men. And, Davis says, some people look at him like he's a pervert.
"They come across as if I were sitting in the bushes in the park waiting for someone to walk by," he said. "They don't understand I was in a relationship with a girl in high school."
The police warn his neighbors that he's a sex offender and vigilantes make sure his neighbors know. "They'll print out copies of my page from the registry. They'll drive around the neighborhood, throw it out the windows," he said.
Today Davis is a volunteer firefighter. He used to dream of working full time as a firefighter, but because he's a registered sex offender, he says he'll never get that job, even though he's certified.
"I can't become a paid firefighter," he said. "I can't even apply at some places because they ask you before they even give you an application. They see it on the applications and it doesn't go any farther than the hiring process. I get put into a basket and put [by] the wayside."
Putorti has little sympathy for Davis, who he says should have stayed away from Alexis when he told him to. And, he says, having Davis arrested was just what his daughter needed.
"Wasn't something I wanted to do, and it wasn't something I'm proud that I did, in a way. But looking back on it, I don't regret having done it, either," he said. "The proof's in the pudding, really. She went back and really knuckled down in high school and graduated."
Putorti says the statutory rape law saved his daughter. "Oh yeah. No question," he said.
And Alexis agrees. "I think this is a good law for these situations. If Jeff had gone to jail, I would have thought that was way harsh," she said.
Uh, nothing a little parenting and personal responsibility on the part of these girls wouldn't fix. A guy has to get arrested, and potentially go to jail or be branded a sex offender so you can get your grades up? Just sick.
And just guessing here, but how often do you think teenage boys' parents sic the cops on their somewhat older teenage girlfriends?
And as a commenter on the ABC site pointed out, doesn't the sex offender registry violate the Fifth Amendment?
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Believe me, I'm no friend to actual sex offenders, but we need to reform the laws to differentiate between the real sex criminals and horny teenage boys making out with their horny teenage girlfriends.
Breaking News: Daily Newspaper Dude Discovers...
...Hookers on Craig's List!
No! Who woulda thunk it?!
Steve Lopez writes in the LA Times:
Modern call girls now turn their tricks on Craigslist.Midafternoon on a workday, and what am I doing?
Surfing the Internet for hookers.
But it's not what it sounds like, I swear. The Eliot Spitzer scandal back East made me wonder how a lonely politician might get into trouble here in the land of milk and honey. So I'm with the vice squad at a downtown Los Angeles police station, tracking suspicious ads on Craigslist and other websites.
Yes, Craigslist, which offers much more these days than used sofas and 1997 Subarus.
"College Girl Available for Naughty Fun All Day And Night," says one ad.
"Independent Hottie," says another, one of hundreds in Los Angeles offering something for every conceivable gender and sexual preference.
"This is the new age of streetwalking," says Officer Manuel Ramirez, who answers the ads and sets up sting operations with his colleagues. "It's not as conspicuous as standing on a corner."
Jody "Babydol" Gibson, the Hollywood supermadam who served 22 months when her Hollywood operation was busted, told me the job she and Heidi Fleiss used to perform has been made obsolete. Her new book, "Sex on the Internet," is a guide to the websites the cops now peruse.
"There's no need for a madam or a brothel today," Gibson said.
Some of the ads on those sites are fairly discreet, while others let it all hang out, so to speak, complete with photos no mother or child should ever see.
Sorry, but is the LA Times supposed to be a newspaper or a really old news that everybody already knows-paper?
And newsflash, about the last line from the excerpt above (about what no mother should see): I think it's safe to assume most mothers have had sex. What will happen to a mother if she should see some kinky sex act? Hmm, might she perhaps get an idea or two to spice up the old marriage?
He ends the piece with this:
So the police went back to working the darkest alleys and corners of the Web galaxy, where the oldest profession is using all the newest tricks.
"The newest tricks"? I guess we should all write Steve and congratulate him for waking up from his long coma.
Mr. Dilbert Talks Turkey About Islam
Scott Adams did a Dilbert cartoon with a Jesus joke in it and some Christians got offended. A pastor wrote to him about it:
Hello! Mr. Adams,
Mr. Adams I just want to tell you that I don’t really appreciate you making a mockery of my faith. I used to think that your comic strip was funny, now I think it is very disgusting and not funny at all. I have found your last comics strips in reference to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ very offensive. There is a place for everything and there is a place for humor and humor has its limits, especially when it comes to those things and issues that some of us hold as sacred. I will pray for you and that some day you may come to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Otherwise you will find Him some day as your judge, and He will justly judge you for your sins and whether or not you believe in Hell that day you will believe and you will repent when you see Him face to face, but then it will be too late. Repent from your wicked ways and stop making fun of my Savior.
Adams explained about the strip:
As you might imagine, I got a lot of e-mail about this strip. Comments were about evenly divided between people who are deeply offended and people who think it was my best work yet. Interestingly, the people most amused often described themselves as religious, and those offended often noted that they were not especially religious.My favorite rhetorical question, which I received an alarming number of times, was “Why don’t you mock Mohammed next? Huh? Why not?”
Well, aside from the blindingly obvious reason that I prefer life over death...
Now, there's an offhand remark that pretty much says it all:
Make a Jesus joke, and some Christians will send you angry e-mail suggesting you're destined for hell. Woooo!
Make light of Jews, more angry e-mail, and maybe a call from the ADL.
Make a Mohammed joke, and you're liable to get your throat slit.
*This post was made in memory of Theo Van Gogh, who was shot and killed while riding his bicycle by a member of "The Religion Of Peace."
The translation of the letter his murderer stuck with a knife into his body after shooting, killing, and then nearly decapitating him, is here.
Hey, Retards...Denmark Is In Europe
Palestinians fired rockets on southern Israel as payback for the Danish cartoons. Ali Waked writes for ynetnews:
After the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip and the targeted killings, the Palestinian organizations have found a new reason for firing Qassam rockets on southern Israel: Cartoons published in Denmark denouncing Prophet Muhammad.
Six Qassams were fired from the northern Gaza Strip towards the western Negev since Sunday morning. All the rockets landed in open areas, without causing injuries or damage.
The Salah al-Din Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees' military wing, claimed responsibility for firing the rockets. The organization's spokesman, Muhammad Abed al-Aal, told Ynet that the firing operation, dubbed "the lines of fire", was a response to the "crimes of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinians," but also "in response to the cartoons published in Denmark degrading the memory of Prophet Muhammad.
"The Palestinian resistance has committed to respond to the cartoons, and this is our initial response," he added.
Perhaps if their children spent less time as human shields and more time in school, they'd have a better grasp of geography.
What Kind Of Man Uses Escorts?
A former booker for an escort agency answers the question, "Why would a rich, powerful and handsome man pay for extra-marital sex?," and gets into what I've been telling people about Spitzer's wife, that you don't know what kind of bargains people make to keep their marriage together:
Aren’t there tons of women waiting to throw themselves at him for free? Yes, there are. But those women always want something: they want attention, intimacy and romance. They want to enjoy the high of sleeping with a powerful man. Escorts don’t want or care about any of those things. At least one of the articles about the 22 year-old escort who slept with Spitzer implied that she didn’t even know who he was. Based on my experience, I think it’s highly unlikely that she knew or cared. She was in it for the money, and she had as much to hide as he did.One high-powered New York attorney explained it to me like this: “Of course I love my wife. Escorts have nothing to do with that. She comes to my hotel room and I don’t have to know her name, because they all use fake names like Amber and Kimberly. I don’t have to worry about how she feels or what she wants. It’s a simple exchange: I give her a thousand bucks, we have a good time for a couple of hours, she goes away and we never have to see each other again.”
A thousand dollars is nothing for these men. Money has little value; because no matter how hard they try they will never be able to spend their hundreds of millions. And if you are about to say that for a thousand bucks those girls must supply the best sex in history, then you really do not understand this world. Because it is not about sex; it is about power. And the simple act of ordering up an anonymously pretty 22 year-old girl to do your bidding in the salubrious confines of a luxury hotel suite is an act of power.
So, how common is this escorts plus rich-and-powerful men phenomenon? Really common. So common, that one aspiring model who worked for my agency told me she was leaving her midtown apartment, which was located near the luxury hotels, white shoe law firms and hedge funds of Manhattan, and moving downtown because she could not poke her head out her front door without running into a client. The aspiring model, by the way, started working as an escort because, as she put it, “I have sex with photographers and agents for free, just because they promise that they might get me a modeling job. At least with the escort agency clients I know for sure that I’ll get paid.”
...And so, we come to Spitzer’s wife. Apparently, she urged her husband not to resign. I can understand her. They may have stopped having sex years ago, as many high-powered couples do. If so, she knew he had not stopped having sex altogether — just with her. And if so, she stayed with him because she enjoyed being the wife of the attorney general, and then the wife of the governor. She liked the social perks, and the money. And she may have loved him, despite it all.
As long as they kept up appearances, everything was fine. She had her life, he had his, and they had the kids. But now, the mask of hypocritical social propriety has been ripped off. Her female friends are all looking at their husbands, knowing that they dodged a bullet. And Mrs. Spitzer must figure out how to maintain her dignity in the face of mainstream America’s hypocritical opprobrium.
A Gas Station Called "Conserv Fuel"?
Naturally, it's in Brentwood, where they like to take the Prius to the private jet. What's next, a fur coat store called "Fur Is Murder"?
1700 Miles Per Tank, Free!
Unfortunately, there could be a big problem with biodiesel if its use becomes widespread; ie, more than a few eccentric guys taking used French fry oil from the school cafeteria for their souped-up cars. From a piece in Engineering News Online, by Esmarie Swanepoel:
The biggest disadvantage of biofuels is its potential to compete with food production, said University of Cape Town senior lecturer in economics Jeremy Wakeford, during the September Biofuels Africa 2007 conference. "This is most obvious in the case of maize- ethanol, considering that maize is one of the world's major staple foods. Maize forms the basis of the diet for the majority of South Africans. However, this concern also extends to other feedstocks that are also food products, such as sugar, wheat, and soya, as well as nonfood feedstocks that are grown on land, which could otherwise support food production."Wakeford said the global biofuels boom is already a contributor to rising world food prices. "This is particularly acute in the case of maize, on account of nearly 30% of US production now being converted into fuel ethanol. This poses a potentially severe threat to food security among the world's poor, especially in Africa."
And then there's this, from the same piece:
While biofuels is seen as potential competition for food production by some, blaming food inflation on the increased demand for grains to produce biofuel is simplistic, says Southern African Biofuels Association (Saba) president Andrew Makenete. In the latest ‘Agricultural Outlook' report, the Food and Agricultural Organisation highlights the factors contributing to higher agri- cultural commodity prices. These include lower world market opening stocks, an unprecedented demand for agricultural products from China and India in particular, drought, and market inefficiencies. Makenete says the relative weights of these factors have not yet been determined and the Outlook report warns it is premature to attribute a long-term rise in commodity prices to biofuels."The true impact of maize-to-ethanol production on international markets is also distorted by the peculiar characteristics of the US maize industry. A study by the US's Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development concluded that maize-to-ethanol production would increase US food retail prices by 10%, and, hence, also world prices," says Makenete.
However, the underlying assumptions of such conclusions must be taken into consideration, says Makenete. "One assumption is that US ethanol import tariffs remain in place. Such tariffs prevent US refineries from sourcing [more cheaply] produced ethanol from, say, Brazil. They also don't encourage US ethanol plants to use a range of feedstocks, which could reduce the acute demand for maize."
Makenete says biofuels present a valuable opportunity for sub-Saharan Africa to attract significant investments into rural areas, promote agricultural development at an unprecedented scale, and provide for import substitution of oil with savings for the national fiscus. The industry can also provide ethanol exports primarily to the north, and overcome the trade distorting effects created by subsidised agricultural commodities.
He adds that Saba is of the opinion that the proposed fuel blend in the draft strategy is inadequate, and that South Africa indeed has the resources to support a 10% bioethanol blend, and a 5% biodiesel blend, and that supplying fuel to captured fleets in South Africa is a realistic expection.
Biofuel crop production, if it prioritises the procurement of feedstock from emerging farmers, presents a unique opportunity to commercialise farming in depressed rural areas and so can contribute to food security, says Makenete. "This is particularly true if biofuels offtakers include existing oil companies who are able to provide a guaranteed offtake for the feedstock produced by emerging farmers."
The Economist points to "The End Of Cheap Food":
But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America's reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.Dearer food has the capacity to do enormous good and enormous harm. It will hurt urban consumers, especially in poor countries, by increasing the price of what is already the most expensive item in their household budgets. It will benefit farmers and agricultural communities by increasing the rewards of their labour; in many poor rural places it will boost the most important source of jobs and economic growth.
Although the cost of food is determined by fundamental patterns of demand and supply, the balance between good and ill also depends in part on governments. If politicians do nothing, or the wrong things, the world faces more misery, especially among the urban poor. If they get policy right, they can help increase the wealth of the poorest nations, aid the rural poor, rescue farming from subsidies and neglect—and minimise the harm to the slum-dwellers and landless labourers. So far, the auguries look gloomy.
...According to the World Bank, the really poor get three times as much extra income from an increase in farm productivity as from the same gain in industry or services. In the long term, thriving farms and open markets provide a secure food supply.
However, there is an obvious catch—and one that justifies government help. High prices have a mixed impact on poverty: they hurt anyone who loses more from dear food than he gains from a higher income. And that means over a billion urban consumers (and some landless labourers), many of whom are politically influential in poor countries. Given the speed of this year's food-price rises, governments in emerging markets have no alternative but to try to soften the blow.
Where they can, these governments should subsidise the incomes of the poor, rather than food itself, because that minimises price distortions. Where food subsidies are unavoidable, they should be temporary and targeted on the poor. So far, most government interventions in the poor world have failed these tests: politicians who seem to think cheap food part of the natural order of things have slapped on price controls and export restraints, which hurt farmers and will almost certainly fail.
Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world's wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.
Everything You Need To Know About A Restaurant You Can Learn From Their Bathrooms
Broadway Deli, Santa Monica, a restaurant we won't be hurrying back to.
Incomprehensibly, you now need a token to get into the bathroom, which I most inconveniently had to go back from the bathroom and get.
First, I tried the counter. "Get it from your server," one of the guys behind the counter told me. Our server was nowhere to be seen, and we were about to be late to the movies, so I marched up the aisle through the city block-length restaurant, probably to the tune of the Margaret Hamilton-on-the-bike music from The Wizard of Oz (Gregg was silently laughing at the sight of me), and I got a token from the maitre d'.
Oh yeah...I guess the cleaning and toilet paper-replacing people were out of tokens.
Win Ben Stein's Brain
You thought he was giving away his money, huh? Well, in listening to him, it becomes evident that he gave away all the good parts of his gray matter.
Here's Ben Stein hosting the creationist movie, Expelled.
As their press release says:
He quickly found that evolutionists would rather believe we are “nothing more than mud animated by lightning” than to believe humankind carries “the spark of the divine.”
Evolutionists would "rather believe"?
Yoohoo, Ben...science is about seeking the evidence-based truth, not preferring to believe in a particular thing.
And no, because you don't know all the answers doesn't mean you can do as the creationists do and just make shit up: "Don't really know how we got here, and that makes us way nervous, so we'll just say it's god!"
Stein actually contends that some "scientists" are persecuted for their belief in god.
Uh, if you're a scientist, and you say the earth was created by Tinkerbell (and there's as much evidence that Tinkerbell created the universe as there is that god did) you should be ostracized. Not for "questioning Darwin," as Dim Stein puts it, but, again, for pushing evidence-free beliefs.
No, Ben, it isn't people "not tolerating free speech," or Darwinists "hiding something." I particularly loved this bit of hysteria from Ben:
Some of you may lose your friends watching this film. Some of you may lose your jobs.
Oh, please.
If you're a science teacher who tells his students the earth was created in five days, and believes man saddled up the dinosaurs, you should lose your job.
Being a scientist who clings, sans evidence, to unscientific beliefs is like being a butcher who marches for PETA.
I have no respect left for Ben Stein.
Whoopie! Our Children Are Expendable!
Even an animal defends its young. The Palestinians pretty much eat theirs. From MEMRI TV, We Used Women and Children as Human Shields, excerpts from a speech delivered by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad (Al-Aqsa TV, Feb 29, 2008):
Fathi Hammad: [The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: "We desire death like you desire life."
via JihadWatch
"You Can Make Prostitution Illegal...But You Can't Make It Unpopular."
From a Steve Chapman column on reason.com:
Even the prospect of arrest and public humiliation doesn't deter a lot of people on either side of the business. What should be obvious by now is that they are willing to spend far more effort achieving these encounters than the rest of us are to spend preventing them.Outlawing this commerce serves mainly to make things worse, not better. It assures income to criminal organizations with long experience evading the law. It makes prostitutes vulnerable to abuse. It prevents measures to protect the health of providers and patrons.
It exempts an industry from the taxes and fees that legitimate businesses have to pay. It squanders police resources that could be used to fight real crime, while clogging jails and courts with offenders who will soon be back plying their trade.
Supporters of the status quo say the sex industry is filled with victims of human trafficking—foreigners forced to work in servitude. Whether such modern-day slaves amount to more than a tiny fraction of hookers, however, has never been proved.
Similar claims have been made about migrant farm laborers and domestic workers—which is not taken as grounds to ban fruit picking or home cleaning. Someone whose very job is illegal, in fact, is an ideal candidate for such exploitation, since she is unlikely to go to the cops.
But all this is secondary to the priority of human freedom. We no longer believe the government has a right to prevent homosexuals or heterosexuals from engaging in sexual practices. In 2003, the Supreme Court had the wisdom to strike down a Texas sodomy prosecution against two homosexuals caught in the act.
"The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives," asserted the court. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government."
Some brilliant lawyer ought to ask the courts why the state may ban one type of sex between consenting adults but not another. Maybe Eliot Spitzer would like to take it on.
"Why I Am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'"
My old pal Tony Ortega is doing a great job as the editor of The Village Voice, turning a tired old rag into an interesting read. And yes, the quote above is actually the headline on a piece in The Voice by David Mamet, who writes:
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
He then writes that, at the same time, he held the worldview that "everything is always wrong."
...But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
...I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
...I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Who who's reading here has changed their worldview, and why, and how?
P.S. Regarding "Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher)"...betcha thought you'd never read those words in The Village Voice!
"Is It Safe?"
That's a line from an old favorite movie of mine, Marathon Man, from Dustin Hoffman's great scene with the sadistic Nazi dentist (Lawrence Olivier). I was reminded of it by this line from one of The New York Times articles about Spitzer -- now forever to be known as "Client 9":
After her encounter with Client 9, the prostitute told the booker for the agency that it had gone well, and the booker told her that he, in an apparent reference to Client 9, sometimes asked the women “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.”
My question for you...what sort of "things" do you think they're talking about?
Letter From Iraq
Actually, it came by e-mail, from one of the soldiers who reads my syndicated column in the Stars and Stripes, and has started reading and commenting my blog.
Dear Miss Alkon,By the by in many respects I would agree with you, Islam as a religion is not suited for democracy. And were we attempting to do as we are in most of the rest of the middle east, I would laugh at the very notion of planting democracy in them.
But I found something very interesting when I arrived in this country for the first time in 2003. If a few anecdotes will not drive your brain to committing hara kiri out of boredom, then do feel welcome to read on.
I arrived in Baghdad in 2003 as part of 141 Signal BN, 1st Armored Division otherwise known as "Old Ironsides", after a very short period of time I was put to guard details, assigned to watching local nationals hired to work on post for our unit. This entailed spending many an hour next to strangers of a strange land, most of whom spoke little to no English. Thankfully I've a gift for pantomime as well as language, and we managed to learn something of each others languages when the workers who doubled as translators were on other duties. While on my guard rotation I noticed something very unexpected.
Even though most of them professed to be Muslims, they were not what one would call "devout". For example, when some mischievious person sent a care package to me that included a large (unsolicited) bottle of southern comfort, the workers were falling all over themselves to offer items in trade for it. As I was prohibited from alcohol, and southern comfort is not really my brand anyway, I was happy to trade it for tea and backlava (a delicious honey flavored local food). Such eagerness, though it was plainly and uncompromisingly prohibited. Too, on another occasion, a different set of workers under the same manager was assisting us by setting up a sattelite dish so we could watch the armed forces news network...well we set up a t.v. on the roof where I was guarding them so we could tell immediately if it worked...and lo and behold we had accidentally hooked up to a French adult channel...for the fanatic, well you know. But these men were like kids in a candy store.
Then along came Ramadan, the holy month of fasting and prayer, and what did I see lined up outside of the burger king? Lengthy lines of local supposed Muslims ordering food & skipping prayers.
These are just a few incidents.
To skip to the broad strokes, what I have concluded about Iraq is that they are likely a Muslim nation in the same way that the United States is a Christian one. True there are fanatical Muslims in Iraq, arguably there are proportionally more fanatical Muslims in Iraq than Fanatical Christians in the U.S. However as recent years have shown me, their culture has strong tribal elements, and Islam is very much part of the culture, however there is a powerful secular element to Iraqi society that you will never see covered in the news. I will not say that they are as liberal or progressive as we are.
But ask yourself this, how progressive were our own ancestors in the 16th & 17th centuries? The Christianity of that era is not dramatically different than Islam today. Can Iraq manage? Only time will tell, but it will be that much harder, and the consequences that much more dire, if they have to manage without us.
A pleasure once again Miss Alkon, many pleasant days to you and yours,
SGT Robert H. Butler
Only In Russia
A couple months ago, I talked to an elderly guard at Kaiser about his former life in Russia (he'd emigrated 15 years prior), and he explained it by holding up a sheet of white typing paper. "See this paper? They tell you eet ees black, eet ees black..."
Well, I heard a few of his stories of the absurdity of life there, and a few of my pal Roman Genn, and now, another Russian-born friend has just sent me a few pictures. I particularly loved the door built around the radiator.
Did Spitzer Get Caught Because He Was A Cheapskate?
The cost of hookers these days, by Sudhir Venkatesh, on Slate:
At the lucrative end of the market, I have found it useful to think of three tiers of women (men constitute only about 10 percent of high-end prostitutes). Spitzer was paying for "Tier 1" sex workers: Fees usually range from $2,000 to $5,000 per session; women come in all ages and ethnic stripes; they rigorously guard their health and watch for STDs; and most have a high-school degree but have limited work experience. They can promise you discretion, but most work through escort services that are routinely under surveillance. In practice, this means buyer beware."Tier 2" includes women who charge up to $7,500 for a session. These women tend to be white, they may have a college degree (or be actively enrolled in school), and they usually require a referral before they will take on a new john. They also have a small, exclusive clientele, sometimes as few as a dozen men whom they service. Unlike Tier 1 workers, they do not rely on escort agencies, so they keep all of their money.
Finally, there are the "Tier 3" sex workers, who can charge in excess of $10,000 per rendezvous. They may have only four or five clients, and they typically charge their clients an additional monthly surcharge for their various needs—rent, clothing, medicine.
Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client's privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john "date" them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable—psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.
What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York's sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That's one helluva conversation. But it's what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day.
Another Twit Thinks Discrimination Makes Right
In the wake of Charlotte Allen's piece in The Washington Post, Debra Howell, ombudsman of the paper, wrote of the complaints. I took special note of this paragraph:
Outlook editors sought rebuttals for washingtonpost.com and in print. Writer Katha Pollitt did one for the Web site. In it, she said, "Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation's clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media. . . . Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers and half the regular columnists, too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women)."
I dunno about you, but I want smart and talented editors, not editors with vaginas.
And the fact remains, women are much less interested in polictics, as a group, than men are.
Sound outrageous? See how many women are much more interested in Britney's doings than Cheney's.
I haven't taken a poll, but that's my experience.
As somebody who doesn't use her oven, let alone get to the grocery store, and who has zero desire to have children (although I do have six who I care very much about in my life), I found Charlotte's piece over the top and the shrillness of it a sign that she had maybe a week or two where she really came unhinged.
That said, many, many women do seek to have lives that are more home-and-hearth based. Even women with high-powered jobs and educations. Many eventually chuck it for "what's important." And how great when people who have children see it as the obligation it really is.
I had dinner with a friend last night, who works part-time (in a job where you make piles of money), and drives an old car and doesn't have a lot of luxuries in her life because everything she and her husband earn goes to their daughter. (The daughter goes to an expensive private school, where she just took her SAT's a year early, and ranked in the 99th percentile, and she seems happy and well-adjusted -- a real feat for a private school kid in Los Angeles, let alone kids anywhere in America these days).
Anyway, I do generally find more men than women to be rigorous thinkers and to have "real" jobs -- to do the hard stuff, whether it's construction work or science stuff, rather than taking those some man will eventually pick me up on his white charger and pay for me jobs in P.R..
Men have to have real jobs or they'll never score chicks. Data shows they're more interested than ever in women who pull their weight in the career department, but men will go for women who are work-world helpless in a way that women you don't see women going for men.
Why not? Well, probably because men evolved to care very much about a woman's looks, and women evolved to care very much about a man being a provider. Guys who have jobs in, say, retail, are going to be out of the running for a whole lot of women. A girl who works in Macy's is going to have an easier time with a whole lot of men.
This isn't to say there aren't women -- like me, in fact -- whose job not only means more to them than building a home and family, but who, like me, really couldn't care less about that.
Women do have biology that drives them to reproduce and nurture. I guess I got the thinking bitch gene, what can I say? (The truth is, I take care of people in my life -- I just find children annoying on more than a part-time, entertainment basis, and in that case, only select children.)
But, coming back to Allen and Pollitt, while I think Allen came a bit unhinged, I'm not going to shriek that it's misogny to state your opinion that women are, as a rule, the lighter sex (calling it misogny is kind of a discussion ender, anyway, as I think feminists intend it to be). I'm just going to disagree with this bit from Allen's piece as a blanket statement for and about all women:
"So I don't understand why more women don't relax . . . and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. . . . Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and . . . not mind the fact that way down deep, we can be . . . kind of dim."
A Sex Worker On A Sex Buyer
Former sex worker Tracy Quan writes in the IHT about what an idiot Spitzer was for using an escort service, which she calls "the riskiest form of indoor prostitution I have ever experienced":
Escort agencies are constantly being investigated, infiltrated and spied on.I worked for two escort agencies when I first started in the sex trade, and both were closed down - not by Spitzer, but under circumstances that he would recognize. I was terrified when the police raided the apartment that served as a booking office for the second agency. Those of us who were not arrested endured petty racist comments from the officers for about two hours.
I chose to work for an escort service because I was young, starting out in a precarious industry, alone in the city and, like those hapless customers who are arrested in street sweeps, without connections. Working for an escort service was a way to earn my living and keep a roof over my head.
But when the chance to work for a madam with a steady supply of reliable clients arose, I was relieved.
That someone like the governor of New York would shop for sex through an Internet escort service is mind-boggling.
...Well-connected men . . . have typically sought out sex workers who have been recommended by their friends and who don't have Web sites. Escort agencies are supposed to be out of the question for old-school rakes who want to protect their marriages and careers.
Islamic Rites Of Spring
This is from last year, but it's a perennial -- the spring crackdown on women in Muslim countries who don't run around covered in big coats and black blankets with little peepholes -- in the desert heat. Being a woman is such fun under Islam! Nazila Fathi writes for the IHT:
Three women who have been stopped gave accounts of their run-ins with the police. All three refused to give their last names because they feared they could be identified by the police and punished.Nazanain, 28, a reporter who thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, said she had been stopped in Vanak Square in Tehran and told her coat was tight and showed her body shape.
"I just joked with them and tried to stay calm but they told me to sit so that they could see how far my pants would pull up in a sitting position," she said.
Nazanin was told by the police that they were trying to help her so that she would not look awkward and attract the attention of men.
She received a warning for her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which they said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter saying she would not appear in public like that again.
But a friend, Niloofar, who responded angrily to the police when she was told to fix her head scarf, was kept in a bus for five hours.
"They want to intimidate us," said Somayeh, 31, who was crying after she was stopped at the Mirdamad subway station. She was asked to call home and get her national ID number for the letter she was asked to sign.
...The government's publicity campaign has been larger this year, with the security authorities stressing on television that people are happy with the clampdown and that they consider women responsible for the chastity of society.
All the responsibility, few rights!
New 9/11 Conspiracy Theory!
The World Trade Center was apparently not brought down by a handful of nutbag Muslims, but by two guys sodomizing each other so hard in a loft on Greenwich Street that the buildings imploded. At least, that's what must've happened if Oklahoma embarrassment Sally Kern is right. Ann Turner writes on Gaywired:
Oklahoma House representative Sally Kern is under fire after an audio recording was leaked of her comparing gays to terrorists and telling fellow Republicans the "homosexual agenda is destroying this nation." The recording and accompanying YouTube video have sparked outrage from many, but Kern defends her words, telling the press: "What I'm saying, I believe in."The YouTube video posted this weekend by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund featured Kern speaking out against gays to a group of Republicans who had invited her to express her views about homosexuality. Leaked audio of the speech is accompanied by images of people holding signs such as "Words matter," "I am listening" and "You don't represent me."
In the speech, given privately to a group of about 50 Republicans, Kern says homosexuality, "according to God's word, that is not the right kind of lifestyle. It has deadly consequences for those people involved in it." Although she claims she is "not gay-bashing," Kern continues by saying gays "have more suicides… there's more illness, their life spans are shorter… studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades."
Kern also accuses homosexuals of pushing a "gay agenda" and trying to "indoctrinate" children as young as 2-years-old through tolerance education and gay-straight alliances. "This stuff—it's deadly," Kern says, "and it's spreading, and it will destroy our young people. It will destroy this nation."
The infiltration of gays into city councils also seems to be of major concern to Kern, who speaks out on this perceived problem at length. Kern said that city councils from Pittsburgh to West Palm Beach, FL are under the "control" of gays.
The Oklahoma representative's hate speech extends several times into another sensitive arena as well, religion. A staunch Christian, Kern says in the speech that "Not everybody's lifestyle is equal, just like not all religions are equal" and believes gays are an even bigger threat than "terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat."
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Personally, I have a gay councilman. He's done more than the last two put together, and it's just his first term. Oh, sorry...is road paving just another part of the "gay agenda"?
"The Iraq War Will Pay For Itself"!
That's what Wolfowitz said, anyway. So...has it started paying for itself?
And then there was the matter of troop levels. Don't listen to those silly generals!
Meanwhile, back here at Mission Still Very Expensively In Progress, Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz write for The Washington Post:
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can't spend $3 trillion -- yes, $3 trillion -- on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.Some people will scoff at that number, but we've done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate "baloney." Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on "Nightline" that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq's oil would pay for the damages.
The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly -- surpassed only by World War II.
Why doesn't the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month -- $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we'll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.
But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S. government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a "death gratuity") -- far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. The stark "budgetary cost" of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life -- and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them.
But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that's a conservative estimate.
Meanwhile, over at the second link, a commenter posted this old thing -- old but good:
“You can support the troops but not the president.” –Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years.”
–Joe Scarborough (R-FL)“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”
–Sean Hannity, Fox News,“[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”
–Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”
–Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”
–Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today”
–Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”
–Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)Oh, wait, did I mention these were Republicans denouncing Clinton for committing troops to Bosnia?
As for explaining the exit strategy, I believe the president has. Something along the lines of "Exit strategy? We don't need no stinkin' exit strategy."
Don't you feel all warm and cuddly inside about the peaceful democracy we've bought in Iraq? Expensive, but worth it, huh?
And if you actually think so...do tell us why.
Only Idiots Rob Banks
In Foreign Policy, a reformed stolen art dealer talks:
FP: What typically happens to famous or iconic works of art after they are stolen?AH: When they get them, they can be exchanged for an amount of drugs which can then be sold. They can be sold to what’s called a “criminal venture capitalist” who might, let’s say, give $1 million for the painting, and then there’s a $5 million reward for them. Even if it takes five years [to sell], that’s a 500 percent return on investment. Say I’m a drug importer and you come to me with those pictures and I give you $1 million worth of Class A drugs to sell. I would then pass them on to a criminal venture capitalist or to someone else to settle a debt, and that’s how they change hands. Sometimes, they’ll put it away as a bargaining chip and then later on they might offer it back to get a lesser sentence for something else.
Click Here!FP: So stolen art is like a form of currency?
AH: Yes, it is. I mean, the mainstream media whores always run out the same line that, “Oh, they’ll never be able to sell it. There’s no market.” I understand why they do that, but it’s a bit disingenuous. Sure, they won’t sell famous art for market value. But if you’ve got four men who steal four pictures in a half-hour heist, plus planning, and sell it for a million, that’s $250,000 for a very small amount of work. Robbers that used to go into a bank or hold up an armored truck found it very difficult to escape and found that they would get very big sentences. But if an armed robber goes into a museum and makes off with art, he can get a similar type of return for a lot less risk, and if he gets caught, the actual penalties are a slap on the wrist. Those guys who took The Scream in Norway? One guy got six years, and one got four years. That’s not really a deterrent, is it?
FP: Back when you were in the business, were you ever approached about buying art of that value?
AH: Well, there was one painting that was stolen that was valued at £5 million. I paid $20,000 for it and sold it for $100,000 within two days. I made $80,000 in two days, and I didn’t care that it was worth £5 million. To be honest with you, the kind of stuff we’re talking about now, Vermeer and all that, I would put that in a class I call “headache stuff.” I’d much rather deal with a $100,000 piece of silver or $20,000 bits and pieces, but lots of it.
How Dumb Is Our Mayor?
Okay, so Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa hasn't been caught with a hooker -- at least, not as of midnight on Monday.
And don't blame me, I voted for Hertzberg. But, I heard on Larry Elder's radio show the other day that Villaraigosa failed the bar FOUR times, and still has yet to pass. Now, maybe he's not dim, just lazy as fuck, but either way, I'm disgusted.
What kind of dumbshits are we electing in this country?
So, Spitzer Saw A Hooker
While, in his position, he's supposed to be fighting crime, not partaking of it, and while there are prostitution rings that are part of the organized crime rings he's supposedly fighting...I'm of the mind that prostitution shouldn't be illegal in the first place. It's your body, sell it if you want to.
Of course, more than anything else, this calls into question the guy's intelligence. Or, suggests vast arrogance in his apparent thought that he could get away with it. Or, suggests he has some huge sex compulsion.
Like Clinton, who should've stuck with women who had something to lose, like the married Kathleen Willey, Spitzer's biggest problem seems to be that he's an utter moron in relation to his zipper.
The Difference Between The Israelis And The Palestinians
A commenter, calling himself DoyleLonegan, writes on a Guardian/UK article:
The following are from the HAMAS charter, or covenent:"Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement."
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
The HAMAS covenent also features several quotes from the Kuran, like this one:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."
Now, contrast that with the Israeli Declaration of Independence which says:
"We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East."
Is it really so hard to determine the monkey wrench in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process? Peace could be had if the Palestinians were in any way inclined to compromise. Both have ancient claims to that land and it's pointless to debate who has a right to be there, it only matters that one side has been willing to live side-by-side in peace and the other rejects such overtures unconditionally.
Also, let's not forget that the land in question was captured by Isreal during a war that the Arabs brought on themselves.
A translation of the Hamas charter is here. The Israeli Declaration of Independence is here.
The Slipping Point
Duncan Watts says there's no such thing as "the tipping point" -- Malcolm Gladwell's idea that a small group of influentials kicks off trends into the gen pop. In Fast Company, Clive Thompson writes:
Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
The Vatican Comes Around On The Earth Revolving Around The Sun
They recant on Galileo and even put up a statue of the guy. No word on how sorry they are about all the people they murdered in the name of Catholicism.
Reality Bug Bites
Hilarious NYT piece by novelist/screenwriter Mark Leyner, author of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, on the Margaret "Jones" scam:
IN a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.
“The story is true. Kafka simply wrote a completely verifiable, journalistic account of a neighbor by the name of Gregor Samsa who, because of some bizarre medical condition, turned into a ‘monstrous vermin.’ Kafka assured us that he’d made the whole thing up. We now know that to be completely false. The account is 100 percent true.”
In the wake of recent revelations concerning Margaret B. Jones’s memoir “Love and Consequences” and Misha Defonseca’s “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” the disclosure that Mr. Kafka’s work was based on reality has embarrassed editors and scholars.
“I’ve been teaching ‘The Metamorphosis’ for years, said a professor of literature at Princeton, who insisted that he be identified as P. “I’ve called it one of the most sublime pieces of literature ever written. Elias Canetti called it ‘one of the few great and perfect poetic works written during this century.’ To find out that it’s actually true is devastating.”
The actual condition of Kafka’s neighbor, a Prague salesman who didn’t return our calls or e-mail messages requesting comment, is known as entomological dysplasia, and is somewhat rare. It results in the development over time of a hard carapace, a segmented body and antennas.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Kafka was contrite and tearful. “I know what I did was wrong,” he said. “I’m very alienated from myself, but that’s no excuse to lie. I took someone’s life and selfishly turned it into an enigmatic literary parable.”
The Rite Of Spring, Los Angeles
An annual variation on Stravinsky.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Why Should I Pay For Your TV?
TV is being converted to digital, and some people (sniff, sniff, boohoo) might not have digital TV's. What of them? Will they be forced to pony up for a new set, or maybe (horrors!) forgo TV and read books? From The Wall Street Journal, get a load of a new taxpayer subsidy of up to $1.5 billion:
Federal law requires that, following the Super Bowl on February 17, 2009, all TV broadcasts will be transmitted only in digital format. Viewers relying solely on "over the air" analog programming will lose their signal. The Commerce Department believes there are some 35 million TV sets in America that don't have a digital converter, and their owners (read: voters) might not be happy to have their sets go black.So in 2005 Congress authorized the TV Converter Box Coupon Program. Any family can get a $40 coupon -- or two -- to convert its analog TVs to digital. (This is separate from the economic "stimulus" package.) Six million Americans have already snatched up coupons, and Commerce is even underwriting a PR program so Americans will grab them.
Technological change routinely makes consumer items obsolete, but the feds don't pay people to upgrade their computers, microwaves, or home heating systems (not yet at least). Uncle Sam didn't provide coupons so people could exchange their record turntables for CD players. For several years now all new TVs have been sold with digital capability and consumers have had ample time to adjust.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez says digital TV will "improve our quality of life" and "we want every American to be ready." Consumer Reports finds that the average American family has 2.6 TV sets, and the typical American adult now spends an average of four hours a day watching those TVs. Just what America needs: a taxpayer incentive to spend even more time on the couch.
Hey, a few pairs of my boots are a little past their prime, style-wise. Come on, taxpayers! Fork over!
French Women Are Fuck Bunnies!
Oops, or maybe not. I keep seeing a headline about this all over the damn place. The big news? French women have an average of five sex partners to a French man's 13. (Yawn.)
Yet, that didn't stop some guy named Henry Samuel from writing an article for the Telegraph/UK on how French women are the new "sex predators." From Paris, Samuel reports on a French AIDS agency's study on sexuality that was just released:
The proportion of French women who claim to have had only one partner has dropped from 68 per cent in 1970, to 43 per cent in 1992 and 34 per cent in 2006. A woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.
Hoors, I tell you! These women are all hoors! Samuel continues with the shocking news:
French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970.
The thing that interests me about sex in France is how it's just part of life to them -- part that, yes, can sometimes get them screwed up -- but people in France don't seem to think an exposed titty or having sex is going to ruin you forever like in too many parts of the USA.
And then there's this:
Men found it easier than women to disassociate sex from love, but the research suggested this was due to nurture rather than nature. The study said: "Young women are still educated to consider their entrance into sexuality as a sentimental-relationship experience."
Uh, educated by millions of years of evolution, that would be. As are the men. What a bunch of asshats -- those who did the study, and this guy who "reported" on it.
Giving It All Away
Billionaire Chuck Feeney has been giving away his fortune anonymously for years. A very interesting story from Saturday's LA Times, by Margot Roosevelt:
NEW YORK -- One by one, speakers rose to toast the elderly gent with baggy pants and a shy, gaptoothed smile."Of course, he didn't wear a tie tonight," teased one. Another called attention to the honoree's cheap watch and the plastic bag that serves as his briefcase.
The joshing at a Manhattan gathering would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that the man pulling a worn blue blazer over his head in mock modesty was none other than the onetime billionaire, Chuck Feeney.
Never heard of him? No surprise there.
Over the years, the frugal 76-year-old has made a fetish out of anonymity. He declined to name his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, after himself, registering the $8-billion behemoth in Bermuda to avoid U.S. disclosure laws. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on universities and hospitals but won't allow even a small plaque identifying him as a donor.
"We just didn't want to be blowing our horn," he explains in a rare interview at his daughter's Upper East Side apartment.
The party was to celebrate a biography of the elusive tycoon by Irish journalist Conor O'Clery, titled "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune," published last fall.
Feeney said he cooperated with the book and submitted to an interview because he is driven by a new public mission: nudging hedge fund heavies and silicon scions into "giving while living."
It is the latest trend in philanthropy and one that he, more than anyone, jump-started several years before billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett followed suit.
Feeney, a founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, said he wants to "set an example" to address "that layer up there of people," the ones, as he puts it, who have "a jillion dollars. . . . I mean, honestly, if you ask them, 'Tell me what you're doing with your money this week?' they couldn't spend a fraction of what they're accruing."
Most foundations, set up after the donor's death, dribble out barely more than 5% of their assets each year, the legal minimum.
But Feeney, raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, quietly transferred the bulk of his fortune to his foundation when he was 53. Then, eight years ago, he instructed his board to pay out every last dollar by 2016.
...In the tiny world of stratospheric wealth, Feeney is a man of yin and yang: extravagant charity coupled with personal penny-pinching. "It's the intelligent thing to be frugal," says the erstwhile billionaire, who jokingly refers to himself as "the shabby philanthropist."
Paris, Los Angeles
Sometimes there's no place like home.
The sky as I was leaving for dinner the other night. And, I must say, driving across town on a Thursday night instead of the usual Friday was downright civilized -- some traffic, but not a lot, and not parked traffic. I called Gregg to ask why: "Is it a holiday, or maybe a nuclear winter?"
Protecting You With Less Choice
"Freedom Means Responsibility" is the headline on the George McGovern op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and he talks about the detriments of removing choice -- which politicians do, supposedly in the people's best interest. It's actually not so simple. McGovern writes:
Buying health insurance on the Internet and across state lines, where less expensive plans may be available, is prohibited by many state insurance commissions. Despite being able to buy car or home insurance with a mouse click, some state governments require their approved plans for purchase or none at all. It's as if states dictated that you had to buy a Mercedes or no car at all.Economic paternalism takes its newest form with the campaign against short-term small loans, commonly known as "payday lending."
With payday lending, people in need of immediate money can borrow against their future paychecks, allowing emergency purchases or bill payments they could not otherwise make. The service comes at the cost of a significant fee -- usually $15 for every $100 borrowed for two weeks. But the cost seems reasonable when all your other options, such as bounced checks or skipped credit-card payments, are obviously more expensive and play havoc with your credit rating.
Anguished at the fact that payday lending isn't perfect, some people would outlaw the service entirely, or cap fees at such low levels that no lender will provide the service. Anyone who's familiar with the law of unintended consequences should be able to guess what happens next.
Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York went one step further and laid the data out: Payday lending bans simply push low-income borrowers into less pleasant options, including increased rates of bankruptcy. Net result: After a lending ban, the consumer has the same amount of debt but fewer ways to manage it.
Since leaving office I've written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don't operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
Ending Affirmative Discrimination
They call them "diversity fellowships," but they're anything but, since the money and opportunity is only dispensed to blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. So, maybe the rich kid gets a handout, as long as he or she is the right color, and the poor white kid is left out in the cold. And people "of color" who make it on their merits are often, most insultingly, thought to be beneficiaries of handouts.
There's good news on the horizon for people like me who think this is ugly stuff. From CNN:
Ballot initiatives have been proposed in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma that would give voters the chance to decide whether they want to do away with affirmative action in government-funded projects and public schools.Ward Connerly, who heads the American Civil Rights Coalition -- a nonprofit organization working to end racial and gender preferences -- and the main backer of the ballot initiatives, says the 37 word initiative would read: "The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."
"It would forbid any state or local agency or special district from engaging in preferential treatment," Connerly said.
Connerly, who is of African-American and American Indian descent, said affirmative action causes resentment. He criticized cases in which a Caucasian student might be denied a college slot in favor of a black student with a lower grade-point average.
"It's foolish not to think that the kid who is turned away is not going to ... resent that," Connerly said.
Connerly, who grew up in Leesville, Louisiana, said he experienced oppression because of his skin color during his youth.
"If it was wrong when I was born in '39 ... it's wrong now," he said. "If it was wrong to do it against a brown-skinned man, it's wrong to do it against a white man."
Yay, Ward!
You don't resolve past discrimination by discriminating. And no, I don't want a black president, or a woman president; I just want a good president.
Why We're Losing This War
My evolutionary psychologist friend, Satoshi Kanazawa, author, with Alan S. Miller, of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, is blogging over at Psychology Today. Here's his take on the difference between us and those we're currently fighting:
Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. Now we are in the middle of what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman aptly calls World War III, a global clash of civilizations with localized struggles against enemies ranging from al Qaeda in the Middle East, to Jemaah Islamiyah in the South East Asia, to the Chechen rebels in Russia, to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel, to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. Compared to our enemies, we have much more money, much more technologically advanced weapons and machinery, and better organized and trained armies (although far fewer actual combatants). Why isn’t this a slam dunk?It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” (As I explain elsewhere, we are not really fighting terrorists.) We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.
This has never been the case in our previous wars. We have always hated our enemies purely and intensely. They were “Japs,” they were “Krauts,” they were “Gooks.” And we didn’t think twice about dropping bombs on them, to kill them and their wives and children. (As many commentators have pointed out, the distinction between combatants and civilians does not make sense in World War III, and the Geneva Convention -- an agreement among nations -- is no longer applicable, because our enemies are not nation states.) Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.
Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running.
It Was A (Miller) Lite Night For Crime
They call them "quality of life offenses," and I'm all for having the police stop people booming their bass right outside of your house so loud it practically shakes it loose from the foundation, but if you're drinking beer out of a paper bag and you're not urinating on my shoe or throwing up on my purse, I really don't see what the problem is.
Here's the story of the Gawker girl who went to jail for brown paper-bagging it in the subway:
Sheila didn't come into work yesterday... as it turns out, she had a good excuse. As I was led through the subway station in handcuffs Tuesday night, a young girl called after me, "Oooh, undercover got you, didn't they? What you did, ma?" Good question! All I did was drink a beer from a paper bag while waiting for the F train. Trashy habit, and technically illegal, but who cares, right? In fact, the NYPD cares very much. What followed was twenty-four hours in two jails, hours in handcuffs, and eventual dismissal in that three-ring circus known as Night Court. Everything I need to know about life, I learned in the female prisoner holding pen in the Tombs.
How To Cut Crime And Solve The Fiscal Crisis
Legalize coke (and other drugs), tax them, and sell them at the corner drugstore. Camilla Cavendish writes in The Times/UK:
The benefits of legalisation could be enormous. Overcrowded prisons would be relieved of people needing treatment rather than punishment (about 15 per cent of prisoners are in for possession or supply). Addicts would not be forced into associating with criminals. Children could be safe in Britain's playgrounds again.Something similar happened in 1933, when America repealed Prohibition. The ban on alcohol had corrupted the police, increased the number of hard drinkers and created a whole new criminal class of bootleg suppliers. Britain's equivalent of Prohibition was the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971. Up to that time we had treated addiction as an illness, heroin addicts got their fix on prescription, and there were only 5,000 problematic drug users, according to Transform, the drug policy group. Thirty years on there are 280,000. That is a direct result of Drugs Inc, which makes more money from pushing harder substances. Our laws have created crack, a concentrated form of cocaine, and skunk, a concentrated form of cannabis, both of which are devastating.
The prohibitionists fail to distinguish between recreational and problem users. The vast majority of people stick to recreational use of cocaine, Ecstasy and substances that even the Strategy Unit has classified as low-risk. There are tragic cases, of course, but they are often caused by impure supplies. Cocaine and Ecstasy can be cut with other substances. Glass has recently been found in cannabis - another nasty aspect of Drugs Inc that would disappear if the market went to Boots.
Annual deaths from drug use (about 2,000) are still minuscule compared with those related to alcohol and tobacco (about 160,000). These figures are not precise, because some people abuse all three. But it is arguable that the violence associated with the illegal drugs trade does more harm than the drugs themselves.
Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
Obama Integrity Alert
Roger Cohen interviews Obama's half-sister and finds a discrepancy in his autobiography. It's not even the main point, but an aside, in his piece (ugh!) marveling at Obama's origins in the IHT:
Auma tells me she was worried before she met Obama in Chicago for the first time in the 1980s. "I was not sure it would work out. We got on well on the phone but when your expectation is so special, you can be disappointed."So she hedged. She went to see a German friend in Carbondale, in southern Illinois, and then rode a Greyhound bus to meet her brother. If it didn't work out, she figured, she could return.
But, she tells me, "it was easy, so easy, like being able to exhale at last." And from her, finally, came the key to the mystery: the stories about the "old man," a father who died too young - his problems as a member of the Luo tribe, his drinking, his women, his stop-go career, his tenderness, his agonizing disappearance - for which Obama had quested.
Strangely, Obama places his pivotal first meeting with Auma at Chicago airport rather than the Greyhound terminal, where she says it happened.
"I pulled into the airport parking lot at a quarter past three and ran to the terminal as fast as I could," he writes in "Dreams." "Panting for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowd of Indians, Germans, Poles, Thais and Czechs gathering their luggage." Then he sees "an African woman emerging from behind the customs gate."
This appears to be one of the "lapses of memory" for which he excuses himself in the introduction. I'll excuse him; the courage and intellectual honesty with which he quested for often painful memory are singular. "He can be trusted," says Auma, "to be in dialogue with the world."
Oh, please. But, can he be trusted?
Is this discrepancy a normal flaw in remembering? Or something more?
Oh, and I'm not suggesting the other leading candidates happen to show integrity, because they don't. Once again, I will eventually have to vote for the lesser of two evils...or rather, the least damaging of two weevils.
(McCain integrity alert here. And if you don't know what's wrong with Hillary's integrity, we're so sorry you've been in a coma all these years.)
Buy Your Own Damn Balloons
Wanna see who's paying for Ralph Nader and Lyndon Larouche's campaigns -- among others? Find a mirror. Personally, I think, if you can't raise money for your campaign, you have no business running. Don't make me pay to try to persuade me to vote for you. John R. Lott, Jr., and Bradley A. Smith write in The Wall Street Journal:
Since 1976, taxpayers have shelled out about $3 billion in current dollars to pay for presidential campaigns. That includes campaigns by John Hagelin, Lyndon LaRouche, Lenora Fulani, Ralph Nader, Sen. Alan Cranston, Milton Schaap, Ruben Askew, and other also-rans. Funds have also paid for balloon drops at the party's conventions, negative TV ads, robocalls and more.But this year, most leading presidential contenders refused to take the public subsidy -- and accompanying spending limits -- during the primaries. One exception has been Sen. John McCain. But faced with certain campaign realities, he too is now looking for a way out and is arguing that he has a constitutional right to withdraw from the public funding system for the primaries and, instead, rely on private money. Sen. Barack Obama said last year that he would accept taxpayer financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did too, but he has backed away from that promise.
All this is happening despite the fact that Republicans are nominating their champion of campaign finance reform, Mr. McCain, and a year ago Mr. Obama was lauded in the headlines and media coverage for his dedication to saving public financing of presidential campaigns.
But it was always just a matter of time before the system broke down. No one seriously argues that Mr. Obama's policy, or Mr. McCain's integrity, is determined by their participation in the tax financing system. No one thinks that tax financing has given us better campaigns, or better candidates, or better presidents than we had before taxpayer financing.
Rather, what taxpayer financing has done is to distort campaigns. For example, when an incumbent president doesn't face a serious challenge during the primaries, he can sit on the public funds obtained during the primaries until the nominee from the other party has been determined, and then use those primary funds to attack his general election opponent.
The non-incumbent party's nominee must usually battle for the nomination and typically reaches the spending limit imposed by the taxpayer-funding system by March. These challengers are then severely limited in their ability to campaign until their nominating conventions in August. Challengers Walter Mondale in 1984 and Bob Dole in 1996 were pummeled for months with little financial means to respond.
...Campaign finance regulations and public financing don't promote fairness. They twist and distort. As both Mr. Obama's and Mr. McCain's changing positions indicate, the regulations give an edge to different candidates at different times. The obvious point here is that no one, even the most ardent campaign finance reformers, can agree on how to limit the loopholes in campaign finance regulations.
The ultimate irony is that the tax financing system, and all the other campaign finance laws, haven't prevented claims of corruption from emerging. In fact, they often create the appearance of corruption where it did not exist before.
Democrats are attacking Mr. McCain for what they regard as a violation of campaign finance laws based on his decision to withdraw from the tax financing system. Republicans accuse Mr. Obama of a conflict of interest for placing a "hold" on nominations to the Federal Election Commission. Neither man has done the types of things that people think of when they think of government corruption, but both are placed under a vague ethical cloud. And instead of freeing up candidates to talk about issues, stories about candidates' compliance with arcane points of campaign finance law are sucking up time and space that could go to talking about the war or the economy.
Is 2008 the last hurrah for tax financing of campaigns? We can only hope.
Clueless In New York
Nancy Rommelmann has a great piece up on LAObserved on how ridiculous it was that nobody in publishing spotted the Margaret Seltzer hoax -- but how unsurprising that is, considering the provincialism of some New Yorkers (and Nancy and I have both been "New Yorkers" -- Nancy was a native, and I was a transplant.
For those who haven't read the news, Seltzer is the gang member who wasn't -- the former foster child who wrote a book about her life in the Bloods, but who really was a girl who grew up privileged and private-schooled in the Valley. From Nancy's site:
I figured out at least one of the reasons why those in New York who’d bought and published and lauded "Love and Consequences" were able to do so with a clear-ish conscience: the stories did not sound made-up to them. To a New Yorker, black foster mothers in South Central are, naturally, called Big Mom. Little girls who’ve been sexually abused show up with blood on their panties. And do 13-year-olds buy their own burial plots? In LA, they do. And if those pesky things called “facts” couldn’t be checked, it’s not their fault, but the fault of Jones’s family members and friends all being dead or in prison. Duh.
As I posted on Nancy's site:
I especially loved the bit about the burial plot. Being 13 and being in a gang are both about immediate-think. What 13-year-old thinks of tomorrow, let alone death, let alone sentimentalizes death?
The entire LAObserved piece by Nancy is here.
Paternity Fraud: Crime Usually Pays
All too often, men are forced to pay child support for children who aren't theirs. Even children the mothers admit aren't theirs. All that concerns the state, thanks to slimy legislators like California's Sheila Kuehl, is that somebody's paying.
People don't believe this -- it sounds too horrible and unjust. But, it's true.
But, in a surprising case in Georgia, justice has finally been done. Sandy Hodson writes for the Augusta Chronicle:
Judge David Roper said he felt badly for Kenneth Samuels when he learned the child he had fathered for 11 years wasn't his.Justice was also shortchanged, the judge said, because Mr. Samuels had been paying child support all of those years.
Last month, Judge Roper ruled that Jamie Hope, the child's mother, and Oba Wallace, the child's biological father, would have to repay Mr. Samuels $14,460 in child support he had paid since 1997.
Such an order is unusual, but not unique.
And that's what's most disgusting.
What Kind Of Idiot Doesn't Fear Commitment?
Just posted my Advice Goddess column, "A Wrinkle In Timing." An excerpt:
“Fear of Commitment” gets a bad name. Supposedly, you’re a jerk or psychologically stunted if you express reluctance about throwing yourself into a relationship, yet nobody will diss you for, say, “Fear of Strolling Down a Dark Alley Through a Gauntlet of Gang Members.” Or “Fear of Getting on a Plane with a Guy with a Fuse Sticking Out of His Converse.”Anybody who’s given any thought to the picnic in the park in hell that commitment can be should feel at least a little edgy about it. Committing isn’t saying “We had fun together today. Let’s try to have more fun together tomorrow.” You’re committing to tomorrow, and next Tuesday, and maybe 3,656 Tuesdays from now. The thing is, you can’t promise you’ll keep feeling the same way -- you can only do your best to stick it out after you feel stuck. Bit of a buzzkill, huh? Of course, you want to believe everything will be wunnnderful, sex will only get hotter, and yours is one of those rare, timeless love affairs. But, the truthful answer to “Will you still love me tomorrow?” is something along the lines of “Gee, I dunno.”
Guys, especially, are made to feel bad if they aren’t gung ho to commit, with “Getting Him To ‘I Do’” splashed across every other women’s magazine, and nary a piece on “Letting Him Do What Works For Him.” Men are achievement-oriented, and as a man, you probably have to feel set in who you are and what you do before you can feel ready to settle down with somebody else. And yes, even if that somebody else happens to be a physicist who put herself through MIT as a Victoria’s Secret model, took night school classes from the Dalai Lama, and can cross her legs behind her head while predicting the Super Bowl winner down to a 96 percent accuracy on the point spread.
The rest is here.
Steve Jobs' Moronic Approach To Cancer
Here's a tech prince who doesn't understand the difference between science and woo, from a Fortune story by Peter Elkind:
In October 2003, as the computer world buzzed about what cool new gadget he would introduce next, Apple CEO Steve Jobs - then presiding over the most dramatic corporate turnaround in the history of Silicon Valley - found himself confronting a life-and-death decision.During a routine abdominal scan, doctors had discovered a tumor growing in his pancreas. While a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is often tantamount to a swiftly executed death sentence, a biopsy revealed that Jobs had a rare - and treatable - form of the disease. If the tumor were surgically removed, Jobs' prognosis would be promising: The vast majority of those who underwent the operation survived at least ten years.
Yet to the horror of the tiny circle of intimates in whom he'd confided, Jobs was considering not having the surgery at all. A Buddhist and vegetarian, the Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) CEO was skeptical of mainstream medicine. Jobs decided to employ alternative methods to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping to avoid the operation through a special diet - a course of action that hasn't been disclosed until now.
For nine months Jobs pursued this approach, as Apple's board of directors and executive team secretly agonized over the situation - and whether the company needed to disclose anything about its CEO's health to investors. Jobs, after all, was widely viewed as Apple's irreplaceable leader, personally responsible for everything from the creation of the iPod to the selection of the chef in the company cafeteria. News of his illness, especially with an uncertain outcome, would surely send the company's stock reeling. The board decided to say nothing, after seeking advice on its obligations from two outside lawyers, who agreed it could remain silent.
In the end, Jobs had the surgery, on Saturday, July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, near his home. The revelation of his brush with death remained - like everything involving Jobs and Apple - a tightly controlled affair. In fact, nary a word got out until Jobs' tumor had been removed. The next day, in an upbeat e-mail to employees later released to the press, he announced that he had faced a life-threatening illness and was "cured." Jobs assured everyone that he'd be back on the job in September. When trading resumed a day after the announcement, Apple shares fell just 2.4%.
Apple entertained no further questions about Jobs' health, citing the CEO's need for privacy. No one learned just how long Jobs had been sick - or that he had contemplated not having the surgery at all. "It was very traumatic for all of us," recalls one of those in whom Jobs confided, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitivity. "We all really care about Steve, and it was a serious risk for the company as well. It was a very emotional and very difficult time. This was one page in the adventure."
Beam Me Up Already, Will Ya?
Welcome To The Not-So-Free Market
It hits you in the salad bowl, and the fruit bowl, too. Jack Hedin, a farmer, writes in The New York Times about government barriers on what he grows -- barriers that will soon be extended when the new farm bill goes into effect:
Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.
The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.
I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)
In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.
In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.
Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.
That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.
Note how he tosses off the bit about "subsidies," as if it's no big deal that the government is handing out welfare to farmers, including some of them who are quite rich, such as a Rockefeller living on lower Fifth Avenue (scroll down into the comments). Sorry, but if you can't make it as a farmer, don't suck taxpayer dough; get a job as a shoemaker or something. I mean, if you can't just live off your inheritance.
Most Muslims Are Moderates? So Frigging What.
Michael Totten does the math:
My Contentions colleague Abe Greenwald takes a gloomy view of a new Gallup survey that shows 93 percent of the world’s Muslims are moderates. “We need to find out from one billion rational human beings why they largely refuse to stand up for humanity and dignity instead of cowering in the face of fascist thugs,” he wrote.First of all, I’d like to agree with Abe’s point that even this sunny survey suggests we still have a serious problem. If seven percent of the world’s Muslims are radical, we’re talking about 91 million people. That’s 65 times the population of Gaza, and three and a half times the size of Iraq. One Gaza is headache enough, and it only took 19 individuals to destroy the World Trade Center, punch a hole in the Pentagon, and kill 3,000 people.
Oh yeah, and the difference between the Jews living in Israel and the Muslims? Which ones cheer when the others' children die.
Explaining Islam
An interview originally published on FrontPage with a former Muslim, Hossain Salahuddin, editor of the magazine Maverick, which promoties literature, freethinking, and rationalism:
FP: Your interpretation of Islam's holy war?HS: Islam has always been associated with political expansion and that's where Jihad or holy war comes into affect. Quran and Hadith repeatedly say that nothing is greater, so far as goodness goes, than Jihad in the name of Allah. Some apologists will try to tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, Jihad is allegorical, and it does not mean violence etc. But the bloody history of Islam tells us a very different story. And the Quran is actually supposed to be taken literally. Muhammad repeatedly said that the Quran is not poetry or allegory; it is the clear voice of Allah himself so that everyone can understand and take it seriously; it is actually blasphemous even to think the Quran as an allegory.
In Hadith, the collection of traditions, Muhammad asked his followers to stop any un-Islamic practice by force many times. As a religion, Islam has a long tradition of deep rooted hatred towards unbelievers. In the Quran, Allah repeatedly commanded Muslims to engage in Holy war and promised unlimited reward in the afterlife if one becomes a martyr in the war for the glory of Allah.
If you ask a Turkish Sufi Dervish who does that beautiful swirling dance, you won't get the literal picture of Islam. You will rather get a pleasant humanitarian view of the Mystic Sufi philosophy. But, unfortunately, Mainstream Islam considers Sufis heretics and they were regularly persecuted by orthodox Muslims throughout history.
To find out the true meaning of Jihad, you have to look at the life of Muhammad, his companions and the later rulers and thinkers of Islam. You will get an extremely violent picture. Even Muhammad's immediate successors used the term Jihad to refer to the conquest of new territory, so I don't see much scope for misunderstanding here.
No matter what apologists try to tell you about the meaning of Jihad, to most Muslims it simply means Expansion of Allah's Kingdom in the command of Allah himself. If they die in the pursuit they are a martyr or Sahid, someone who is guaranteed by Allah to go to heaven straightway without facing the trial in the judgment day.
Islamic scholars like Taqi al din ibn Taymiyyah, Mohammad ibn abdul Wahhab, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Mawdudi, Hasan al Turabi have a lot to answer for in this matter. Modern Jihadists frequently cite these scholars as their source of inspiration. They argued that Muslims are in a cosmic battle against the force of darkness. These forces of darkness should not be tolerated, and although Allah is ultimately responsible for the destruction of darkness, Muslims are required to fight it. That's why as of today no famous Muslim cleric or Muslim country condemned terrorism. You see, almost everything of the western way of life contradicts Islamic belief - the West automatically becomes the target, hence, Islamic scholars divided the whole world into two different spheres: Islamic World or Land of Peace and Un-Islamic World or Land of warfare.
FP: So Islamic terrorists are not misinterpreting Islam?
HS: No, terrorists are not misinterpreting Islam; in fact they are interpreting Islam very correctly. Theologically, it is a Muslim's holy duty to fight until the whole world turns to one Allah because there can not be any other God. Allah is pretty autocratic among the Gods and he doesn't like to co-exist with any other deity. It sounds funny but its true; how many Muslim countries practice democracy? Liberalism, individual privacy and freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of belief - all of this and any other component of modernity you can think of directly contradicts Islamic belief.
No matter what apologists say, "Islam" and "freedom" are two opposite words with opposite meanings. You see, unlike Christianity and Buddhism Islam is not a personal religion; Islam is very practical, social, highly political, and unspiritual and its goal is to win the world empire. Islam penetrates even very personal aspects of human life and dictates. Islamic law or Sharia is considered divine legislation and it dictates every single aspects of human life, from using toothpicks to how to perform sex; from slaughtering animals to what verse you should recite when you are in a toilet etc. Anything you can think of.
The Way Barack Machine
Where did Barack Obama come from? No, I don't mean his ethnic origins, but his political ones. Todd Spivak, a reporter who knew Obama way back when in Chicago, has the story in Houston Press. An excerpt:
When asked about his legislative record, Obama rattles off several bills he sponsored as an Illinois lawmaker.He expanded children's health insurance; made the state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable for low-income families; required public bodies to tape closed-door meetings to make government more transparent; and required police to videotape interrogations of homicide suspects.
And the list goes on.
It's a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what's interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama's seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.
Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor. Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"
"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"
"Barack Obama."
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."
During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.
It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn't have done it without Jones.
U.S. Mosques Are For Preying
An undercover survey found that 75 out of 100 U.S. mosques and Islamic schools -- three out of four -- are "hotbeds of anti-American extremism." From WorldNetDaily:
Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt.Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that "the vast majority" are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks.
The project, headed by David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and expert on sharia law, has finished collecting data from the first cohort of 102 mosques and schools. Preliminary findings indicate that almost 80 percent of the group exhibit a high level of sharia-compliance and jihadi threat, including:
•Ultra-orthodox worship in which women are separated from men in the prayer hall and must enter the mosque from a separate, usually back, entrance; and are required to wear hijabs.•Sermons that preach women are inferior to men and can be beaten for disobedience; that non-Muslims, particularly Jews, are infidels and inferior to Muslims; that jihad or support of jihad is not only a Muslim's duty but the noblest way, and suicide bombers and other so-called "martyrs" are worthy of the highest praise; and that an Islamic caliphate should one day encompass the U.S.
•Solicitation of financial support for jihad.
•Bookstores that sell books, CDs and DVDs promoting jihad and glorifying martyrdom.
Though not all mosques in America are radicalized, many have tended to serve as safe havens and meeting points for Islamic terrorist groups. Experts say there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade alone.
Some of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, received aid and counsel from one of the largest mosques in the Washington, D.C., area. Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques indentified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism.
It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called "jihad qital," which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S.
Dar al-Hijrah's ultimate goal, investigators say, is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state governed by sharia law.
From the "project" link above:
Many Islamic organizations in America appear to adhere to a peaceful Jihad. Some in fact do adhere to legal and non-violent Jihad to persuade Americans to embrace Islam as a religion and even as a political ideology.Many Islamic groups operate “underground” and explicitly advocate violence and Islamic holy war against America as the Great Satan.
But most Islamic groups and organizations take on what appears to be a legal and peaceful veneer in the English settings, but in fact preach quietly and often in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu a very violent and anti-American Jihad.
The exact number of Islamic mosques, day schools, and social clubs and organizations in the United Stated is unknown. We do know there are approximately 6 million Muslims in the US. This number is growing exponentially from several sources. One, birth rate. Two, conversions, especially among American Blacks, and especially among American Blacks in prison. Three, new immigrants.
Here's more on the call to violence against non-believers that is Islam.
A Big Howdy From The Rive Droit
Bel Costumé, 1973-1998. Sculpture outside musée Jeu de Paume by one of my modern French favorites, Jean Dubuffet And from a previous trip, here I am in the belly of the beast, same artist (scroll down the entry).
Too Much Choice
I heard a presentation at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Berlin a few years ago on why Internet dating may not be such a good idea. No, the problem isn't the way men lie about their income or women lie about their weight, but, actually, too much choice. It turns out, when humans have too much choice, they tend to choose poorly and are dissatisfied with their choices.
Barbara Fasolo, then of Berlin’s Max Planck Instutitute, presented her team’s research about Internet dating, “Shopping” For A Mate: Is Less More? First, she reviewed data from studies of consumer reactions to limited or wide variety of choice, including one comparing the response to two “exotic jam” stands. One stand had 24 exotic jams for sale; the other, only six. More consumers approached the 24-jam stand. But, surprisingly, with more choice, there were, in the end, fewer purchases, and more regrets about the particular purchases made.
Fasolo explained why: The EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness); ie, the Pleistocene, during which we adapted to have the psychology that still motivates us today, “shaped us to deal with very simple decision environments.” “Only a few options, one at a time,” explained Fasolo. The contemporary environment “simultaneously gives us a huge number of options,” she said, and added that too much choice leads to what Grinde called “Darwinian unhappiness.”
John Tierney wrote recently in The New York Times of how poorly humans deal with options:
The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.
He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational, an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.
Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).
The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.
You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.
Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.
Another book on this: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz. Here's the video:
P.S. I have all three of the books above on order: Grinde's, Ariely's, and Schwartz's. This is the stuff I'm most interested in reading now -- stuff on human propensity for irrationality. Of course, perhaps I'm a bit irrational in thinking I'll be able to read all of these in any reasonable amount of time, since I rather recently ordered Science and Sanity, by Korzybzki, which looks like a regular book in the picture on Amazon, but is the size of one of those prison-wall concrete blocks. Still, so far, it seems worth the time!
I'm A "Miserable, Ugly Bitch"
At least, that's what the Israeli woman in Loehmann's told me I was after I had the gall, the absolute GALL!...to give her a look and then shush her when she was shouting into her phone on the other side of the rack where I was shopping.
I restrained myself from saying that a woman whose lipliner was crawling up into her nostrils probably shouldn't be making pronouncements about others' looks, but it wasn't easy.
Oddly, on the way out, I gave the guy at the parking booth my ticket and my $3 for parking, and did my usual...cheery, "Hello, how are you?" when I handed him my ticket, and made a little conversation about having to search for $3, when I thought it would only cost one. "You're the nicest person I've had through here all day," he said, and it was about 8 p.m., which is the sad part.
I think people don't think about people in these booths, or behind the cash register as people, but as necessary annoyances to get through to get on with their day. I find that ugly. Miserable-ugly, in fact.
If you've been doing that -- perhaps out of not thinking too much about the person in the booth or behind the register -- try having a friendly human exchange with them for a change. It actually feels good from both ends.
Confessions Of A College Call Girl
Blowjob tutorial.
Thanks, Deirdre!
Give A Girl Enough Rope
Sunday in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. (From Feb. 16.)
Depressed? Take A Sugar Pill
Sounds like it works as well as Prozac and the others, except for the severely depressed. Sarah Boseley writes for The Guardian:
Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.
When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch. "This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported."
...A spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Seroxat, said the authors had failed to acknowledge the "very positive" benefits of the treatment and their conclusions were "at odds with what has been seen in actual clinical practice".
He added: "This analysis has only examined a small subset of the total data available while regulatory bodies around the world have conducted extensive reviews and evaluations of all the data available, and this one study should not be used to cause unnecessary alarm and concern for patients."
But, it's not just one study. Others have come up with similar findings.
The study by Kirsch and colleagues is here. An excerpt:
What Did the Researchers Do and Find?
The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA for the licensing of fluoxetine, venlafaxine, nefazodone, and paroxetine. They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression. The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants.What Do These Findings Mean?
These findings suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-generation antidepressant medications to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have been ineffective. In addition, the finding that extremely depressed patients are less responsive to placebo than less severely depressed patients but have similar responses to antidepressants is a potentially important insight into how patients with depression respond to antidepressants and placebos that should be investigated further.
Popping a pill is easier than working on thinking more rationally, which may not even take a therapist's intervention. You may be able to do it on your own, or by spending $10.20 (the discounted price on Amazon) for A Guide to Rational Living, by Drs. Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper.
Ellis, with Aaron Beck, originated what's now known as cognitive behavioral therapy, what I see as the shortest-term, most effective type of therapy out there: "Change the way you think and you'll change the way you feel." You're disturbed because you're thinking irrationally. Get rational about whatever's bothering you, and you'll remove or minimize your disturbance, and feel better. It really is that simple.
If you'd prefer a little intervention, you can get a referral to a therapist trained in Ellis' methodology here, at his non-profit institute. You should be able to change your thinking within a few months if you aren't resistant or lazy, and then set that into practice with a little good old-fashioned self-discipline.
What about all those people who spend years and years and thousands of dollars in analysis? They're wasting their money. Freud was, to a great extent, a coke-addled fraud who just made shit up and called it science.
Here's my column on that, Things That Go Bump In The Nightie. And here's an excerpt:
Thanks to Freud, you're prone to believe your dreams are repressed desires for your exes when they could just as easily be X-rated mental lint. A growing body of evidence suggests Freud's famous book, "The Interpretation of Dreams," might be more correctly titled "The Misinterpretation of Dreams," or "I'll Make A Bunch Of Stuff Up Because I'm Sex Mad, And Get Real Famous, And Make A Fortune."...You can read something into anything -- just as Freud decided patient "Dora" must've overheard her parents having sex (an incident she never recalled), and out of devoted love for her father, reproduced his heavy breathing by giving herself asthma.
Here's Frederick Crews debunking Freud: The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York Review Books Collections).
And here's an essay essay by Crews on the controversy surrounding his two New York Review Of Books pieces in the book (just click off the thing asking for a login, and it'll go away). An excerpt:
Then, too, there was my report of what a number of scholars have independently discovered about the birth of psychoanalysis--namely, that Freud, amid the ruins of his untenable 'seduction theory', peremptorily and gratuitously saddled his patients with a repressed desire for the incestuous acts that he had until then been unsuccessfully goading them to remember. (His later contention that they had told him about having been molested in early childhood was a characteristic reshaping of facts to comply with theory.) My readers were thus being invited to confront the unsettling fact that psychoanalysis arose from nothing more substantial than a confused effort on Freud's part to foist his explanatorily worthless hobbyhorse onto the fantasy life of his patients -- patients who, moreover, far from being cured by his revised ministrations as he would eventually claim, had for the most part already lost faith in him and abandoned his practice. My essay left a plain impression that such opportunistic improvising, which was to become Freud's chronic way of handling theoretical crises, could not have been the work of a genuine scientific pioneer.