Being Aggressively Stupid: Government Doing What Government Does Best
S.A. Miller writes in the New York Post about a new Department of Homeland Security video with advice for confronting armed would-be mass-murderers:
Is your workplace getting shot up by a crazed gunman?No problem -- just grab a pair of scissors and fight back!
That's some of the helpful advice in a new instructional video from the Department of Homeland Security that was posted on the agency's Web site just a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
"If you are caught out in the open and cannot conceal yourself or take cover, you might consider trying to overpower the shooter with whatever means are available," says the narrator in the video, which shows an office worker pulling scissors out of a desk drawer.
That video:
Yes, your tax dollars paid for this crap. More from the article:
Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, said he has a better option for consideration than a pair of scissors when confronting an armed mass murderer -- a legal firearm."That's why I prefer a gun, and I usually do carry a gun when it is lawful to do so," said Feldman.
More from the article:
The video is part of the Obama administration's ongoing campaign to reduce firearm violence in the wake of the horrific mass murder last month of 20 children and six teachers in Newtown, Conn., said a Homeland Security official.
I would say it's part of the Obama administration's ongoing campaign to separate citizens and their firearms.
NYPD Wants Body Scanners On The Streets; Corbett Files Suit
Jonathan Corbett, a software designer who has learned the law enough to act as his own lawyer in bringing suit against the TSA is -- thank you, Jonathan -- at it again. This time, he's filed suit against New York City:
Now the NYPD has asked us to accept body scanners on the streets, allowing them to peer under your clothes for "anything dangerous" -- guns, bombs, the Constitution -- from up to 25 yards away for, you know, our safety. (And someone please think of the children!)I'm pleased to have filed the first lawsuit against the nude body scanners after the TSA deployed them as primary screening in 2010, and I'm pleased to announce that today I filed suit against New York City for its testing and planned (or current?) deployment of terahertz imaging devices to be used on the general public from NYPD vans parked on the streets -- a "virtual stop-and-frisk." My civil complaint, Corbett v. City of New York, 13-CV-602, comes attached with a motion for a preliminary injunction that would prohibit use of the device on random people on their way to school, work, the theater, or the bar.
It is unfortunate that it seems that government at all levels is always in need of a fresh reminder that the citizens for whom it exists demand privacy, and that each technological advance is not a new tool to violate our privacy. However, as often as proves to be necessary, we will give them that reminder.
Every time we give up another right, we prime the way for ourselves to give up more. Don't wait until we become a police state to do your part in speaking up. (And saying that a few years ago sounded like crazy hyperbole -- all that "become a police state." Sounds less so now, with the NYPD giving the finger to the notion of search of everyone without probable cause, huh?)
Some Jamaicans Seem To Love It; White People Find It Racist
VW shot a Super Bowl commercial with a white guy (supposedly from Minnesota) and his various rather uncool officemates talking in Jamaican accents.
(The notion is that Jamaica is the land of not worrying about things and being happy -- you know, like the Bobby McFerrin song of that name.)
I don't find the commercial very funny, but I sure don't find it offensive.
Bruce Horovitz writes at USA Today:
"It's pretty horrific," says Ricki Fairley-Brown, president of the multicultural marketing agency Dove Marketing. "Why do they have a white guy from Minnesota faking a Jamaican accent?"Even more troubled by the spot is Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, chief hispanic marketing strategist at Walton Isaacson, an African-American, Gay/Lesbian and Hispanic agency. "What happens in this ad is that the culture becomes a punch line, and that is offensive."
Pop cultural guru Barbara Lippert is not amused, either. "It made me uncomfortable to see all of those white people in an office setting doing this," she says. "I found it offensive."
Even then, she says, after offering a similar commentary on NBC's Today Show, "I've heard from thousands of people telling me to lighten up." An online polling of Today viewers concurred with that sentiment. More than 93% said they like the spot.
So does Wykeham McNeill, Jamaica's minister of tourism and entertainment. "We view it as a compliment," says McNeill. "People should get into their inner Jamaica and get happy." He's even negotiating with VW for some sort of co-branding.
As for the actor who stars in the spot, well, he's just hoping it gets to air.
"People are entitled to their own opinion," says Erik Nicolaisen, the 33-year-old actor. But for a second opinion, he asked his brother-in-law, who is from Kingston, Jamaica. "He loves it."
If it isn't "racist" or whatever-ist to have people talk in French, German, or British accents during a commercial -- why is it racist when people talk in Jamaican ones?
Oh, wait -- because Jamaicans are black.
So, we're allowed to make fun of various people, or use their way of speaking in commercials and elsewhere -- unless they're black.
Pulling out a group of people and treating them alone with kid gloves -- isn't that the most patronizing and racist thing of all?
via KateC
The Off-Topic Basket
Post tasteless odds and ends here. More blog items in the morning.
Life Under Islam Is Life Under Barbarianism
Channel 4's Lindsey Hilsum on the barbarism that Islam has visited on Mali -- the same barbaric treatments you see in countries where there's a Muslim majority, like slaughtering gays. Luckily, in Mali, the French intervened before these two homosexual men in the video could be executed for the "crime" under Islam of being gay:
Issa Alzouma made a living from digging gravel for construction companies until they cut off his hand.Arrested last December on suspicion of stealing a motorbike that he says was his anyway, he was brought before the Sharia court in Gao and sentenced to amputation.
Over the last two days, I've had something of a tour of the justice system the Mujao, which is Movements for Jihad and Unity, installed in Gao, Mali, during their nine months of rule. They took over what used to be the mayor's office and turned it into the "justice" centre.
Two men, accused of homosexuality, who were supposed to be executed last Friday, showed me the room they were taken to be tried and beaten. On the floor I found a file with lists of names - these were the women who had been whipped for failing to wear the veil, and the men punished for smoking.
Video here:
Only the blacks in Mali are threatened, said the man in the video who had his hand cut off. Hilsum writes:
One of the most disturbing things I've learnt is that those condemned to these harsh punishments were all black Malians - Sonrai, Peul, Bamba, and Della, traditionally the slaves of the Tuareg. The jihadis were a mixture of Malian Arabs and Tuaregs as well as many foreign jihadis."They would never do this to one of their own," said Issa.
More on Islamic racism against blacks here:
Perhaps the most conspicuous example of overt racism in Islam is the genocide in present-day Sudan by the Arab-Islamic government and the refusal of Muslim organizations around the world to condemn it. Over two million black Africans have died from Arab aggression in the Christian south. And 200,000 more were killed by Arab militias over the last four years in Darfur. The Arabs are known for rampaging through villages and hacking black Africans to death in the name of Jihad while screaming things like, "Kill the slaves!"Although the Darfurians are mostly Muslim as well, there is little to no attention placed on their plight by international Muslim organizations. Despite being repeatedly challenged on the issue, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for example, has never bothered to condemn the Islamic Republic of Sudan for the Arab massacre of Africans.
Compare this to the outrage, sympathy and money that is poured out on the Palestinian people... who are Arab. Yet, the number of Palestinian civilians killed in their relentless conflict with Israel over the last 40 years is less than the average number of Africans killed by Islam each month.
Even in the earliest days, racism against blacks was a fringe part of Islam. At one time there was a law that mandated the death penalty for anyone suggesting that Muhammad was black. Perhaps it is for this reason that quite a few hadith mention the "whiteness of the prophet" - explicitly referring to his skin color.
via @PatCondell
Oh, Those Spammers
I just got an email notifying me that I am receiving a check from the UN for $2,811,041.00 -- which they are sending, how else? By UPS! (I only have to pay a "shipping and handling fee of $95).
Obama: "If You Like The (Health) Plan You Are In, You Can Keep It" (Except If You Can't)
John C. Goodman blogs at The Independent Institute about that oft-repeated pledge by the President -- a pledge that seems to be crap for a majority of people. Here's why:
Your Employer May Be Forced to Switch to Another PlanIn general, if employers make very few changes to their current plan, that plan will be grandfathered. But most plans will be unable to qualify for grandfather status. A government memorandum makes the following predictions:
*More than half of all employees with employer-provided health insurance will have to switch to a more expensive, more regulated plan, and the number may be as high as two-thirds.*Among those who will be required to switch plans, as many as 80 percent are employees in small businesses.
*Within three years, more than 100 million people will be forced into a health plan more costly and more regulated than the one they have today.
*Moreover, grandfathering is only a temporary phenomenon. The memorandum suggests that eventually all plans will lose their grandfather status.
It's also possible that your employer will drop coverage altogether. (Of course, health care should have been untied from the workplace, since few people today stay in a job for more than a few years -- causing a health insurance mess for them when they leave...if they can leave.) Goodman continues:
Most employers will be required to offer health insurance or pay a fine. But since the fine will be as little as one-seventh the cost of the insurance, many employers--especially small employers--may drop their coverage. This will force you and other employees to go to a health insurance exchange for your health insurance. To a modest degree, this has already happened in Massachusetts,[3] with a similar health reform law, and the reaction is likely to be more pronounced in other states.
There's even more Obamacare fun to come that he lays out at the link.
Why Some Men Don't Compliment The Women They're With
I have my thoughts -- and I'm working on a question about this (about an apparently good guy and a woman who seems pretty together). I'd like to hear what you think, and if you have any experience with this.
Guilty Unless You Spend Millions Proving Your Innocence
Gary Hull has an excellent piece at The Fiscal Times explaining the evil nuances of civil asset forfeiture -- a polite name for government theft:
Throughout the country, legions of bureaucrats, DEA agents, and local law enforcement scour the country for lucrative property (and cash) to steal from innocent citizens. They do so under a capricious law known as "civil asset forfeiture" (CAF) - the bizarre notion that a thing or property "acted wrongly," and thus is being charged with a crime.Asset forfeiture is used by federal and state officials to seize cars, boats, cash, houses, businesses - all on the grounds that the asset might have been used or could conceivably be used in the commission of a crime, by someone, somewhere, at some point. The government's take last year from the 15,000 cases: a cool $2.5 billion.
To retrieve that asset, you must enter Kafka's universe. Even if you have the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to mount a defense, CAF reverses the burden of proof and forces on the property owner an impossible standard - to prove that the asset was not used to facilitate a crime, or if it was, that you did not know that the property was being used for facilitation. Further, you have to prove that you did everything possible (whatever that means) to prevent the crime(s).
He writes of the Caswell motel case:
Consider the government's case against Motel Caswell (United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, MA. Note that the named defendant is not a person.) The motel has been owned by Russ Caswell and his family for two generations. Caswell, 68, and his wife (who is gravely ill) spent some thirty years of painstaking effort to create a mortgage-free business that is worth about $1.5 million - money the Caswells hoped would pay for their retirement.But when a statist government needs money, it manufactures a pretext for confiscating wealth. The DEA, in cahoots with the Tewksbury Police Department, alleges in its suit that over the last eighteen years, some individuals have committed drug crimes while staying at the motel. The government is not alleging that Caswell committed or facilitated crimes, or that he even knew about them.
...It is impossible for Caswell, or any other violator of CAF, to know ahead of time what actions he was legally prohibited from taking. The fundamental injustice of CAF is not that the "law" is unclear. It is that it is nonexistent. There is no language in it that even approximates the following: "No individual shall knowingly allow the use of property or other assets owned to be used to facilitate a crime. Penalties may include, but are not limited to, the seizure and forfeiture of said property and/or assets." There is such language in the criminal asset forfeiture laws. But then those laws are not handy tools for legal plunder. (Besides, if crime is so rampant in Tewksbury and at the Caswell Motel, then the Feds should be seizing, not the motel, but the police department for failure to protect its citizens.)
During a deposition, Vincent Kelly (DEA Special Agent in the asset forfeiture division covering all of New England) stated that his job is "primarily just mainly looking for property to be forfeited." And how does he do that "looking?" He trolls the Internet for Registry of Deeds "to find out who owns the property," and "how much equity is on the property." Then he contacts local law enforcement - in this case, the Tewksbury Police - to see if any crimes have been reported on the property.
The incentive for locals in this confiscation racket is called "equitable sharing," which can yield them up to 80 percent of the booty. In the Caswell case, that could mean $1.2 million for the Tewksbury police to spend on new cars, uniforms, hi-tech equipment, junkets to Hawaii. Meanwhile, Caswell and his wife will have been impoverished.
Related: Jonathan Turley writes of "The Obama Administration's Inspector Javert," U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz:
We previously discussed the ignoble role played by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide after being relentlessly pursued by her office in a questionable prosecution. As critics around the world questioned her methods and judgment, Ortiz issued a less than credible defense of the case. Now her office is again the subject of allegations of excessive prosecution of a small motel owner where her staff sought to seize his property.As Ortiz was rewriting history to excuse the conduct of her office in the Swartz case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein of Massachusetts an opinion rejecting the motel forfeiture and castigating Ortiz's office for its poor treatment of the owner.
...In a footnote, the court alludes to the long suspicion that the federal agencies are eager to seize property to acquire proceeds for their own operation. The court notes that "[s]ince the only remedial purpose the forfeiture of the Motel Caswell would serve would be to fund Government programs, this court finds that forfeiture would not be consistent with the spirit of the forfeiture laws."
It will be interesting to read if Ortiz plans yet another post hoc rationalization of the case, as she did after the suicide of Swartz. She may want to read the opinion closely because, unlike Swartz, this defendant is still alive and talking.
The wonderful Institute for Justice defended Russell Caswell pro bono, and won.
"Inconsiderate Shitbag" Wouldn't Fit
There was some parking fun on Sunday afternoon on my street.
A Prius driver parked about one inch from my car and about three inches from the car behind them. Had I needed to leave, it would have been really hard to do, as the car in front of me had parked pretty close (but not terribly so) as well.
I'm pretty sure the bolt on the Prius' license plate left a scrape along my back bumper. (It was at the same level as their bolts.) But there are other scrapes, from previous inconsiderate shitbags, and I didn't witness them doing it, so I can't actually prove it came from them.
Not wanting to let them get away with their rudeness entirely unremarked upon, I left them a purple Post-It note on their windshield, "When there's no room to park, DON'T PARK HERE."
This, I hope, will also have the effect of warning them, "When you park like this, people long to key your car. Consider yourself lucky that my ethics don't allow this."
The car in front of me left while I was posting the note, so I got my keys and moved my car forward a bit, and then got mad again and again pulled out my purple pad.
My first choice of message was "I am an inconsiderate shitbag" -- better sound -- but, sadly, only so many letters fit readably across a Post-It note, which I tucked under the little lip on the trunk of their Prius.
Here's hoping they don't put anything in their trunk on their way out of my neighborhood!
The Rich Were Supposed To Pay Our Overdue Credit Card Bill
Andrew Malcolm blogs at IBD, "Remember Obama's tax hikes on the rich to pay debt? He's already spent every penny":
Well, guess what? That $50.4 billion spending bill for, among other things Hurricane Sandy aid, just ate up every single penny of that tax hike for this year, plus another $10 billion. That will go on the debt tab that the $40 billion in new taxes were supposed to start trimming slightly this fiscal year....The three governors of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut -- all Democrats, although Chris Christie used to feign conservatism -- issued a joint statement, also complaining about Washington legislators thinking twice about spending that much of China's money.
They did express appreciation for the charity and especially thanked their congressional delegations for their "tenacious efforts" to get the money for the populous Democrat Northeast to rebuild.
Now, everyone sympathizes with those impacted by Sandy's devastation. And a growing number also sympathize with the pathetic response of Obama's FEMA, although for some reason the media was quicker to pick up on FEMA's Katrina failures under President Bush.
These days, we're all tightening our belts. We eat at home (Gregg cooks for me) and watch great TV series
The nation's chief executive couldn't sacrifice and do a Virginia photo op today, symbolically saving the minimum $1.5 million his cross-country junket will cost?"Washington just doesn't get the severity of our fiscal condition," the Heritage Foundation's Matt Mayer told the Washington Times.
Americans realize the financial hole these D.C. pols got us in scratching each other's backs. But when will anyone stop bemoaning that hole and start filling it in? Somebody's got to be first to sacrifice their "fair share."
Of course, that would take leadership, not photo ops.
Wedding Psychos Missing The Point -- As Well As The Groom
Alyson Krueger writes in The New York Times of women who've planned their weddings -- long before finding the groom. The way I see it, this is a great way to end up seeing postive things in a guy that aren't there. Krueger:
Kate Owens, a 34-year-old project manager for I.B.M. who lives in Clifton Park, N.Y., had planned her wedding for more than a decade before marrying last June.She began planning in her 20s as a single woman with no boyfriend and no prospects. She watched as her friends were getting engaged and sending photos of dresses and rings. She began daydreaming, looking regularly over the next 10 years at the Maggie Sottero bridal collection online and the Dessy Group Web site.
Ms. Owens did not know if she would ever meet someone and settle down. Still, she printed pictures of hairstyles, flower arrangements and ring settings she found online. She looked up locations like Birch Hill, a serene farm outside Albany, and found a wedding planner, Shannon Whitney, who agreed to speak to her even though she didn't have a ring.
"I had it all planned out," Ms. Owens said. "Just in case."
And she said almost every plan became reality, from the bridesmaids dresses to the outdoor wedding. "The big joke at our wedding was that I had booked the band nine years in advance," Ms. Owens said. "I had gone up to them one night at a bar in 2003 and said: 'I love you guys. I don't have a groom yet, but when I find one will you play my wedding?' They said yes that day and honored that commitment."
This bit is healthy:
Another problem is the not-quite-bride is not taking into account a future partner and what his needs and considerations might be, Ms. Byron said. "Even though you have all these ideas and you've done your homework and you are prepared as a single girl," she said, "you have to understand that marriage is a union and you have to take your other half into consideration."Ms. Prindle, for example, said that if she met someone she wanted to marry, she doesn't think his input would matter. "I figure, this is what it's going to be," she said.
Ms. Owens said that once she was engaged, her fiancé, Shawn Owens, was initially frustrated "because he's like, 'This is not your wedding, this is our wedding.'"
Welcome to a lifetime of being pussy-whipped!
Unlocked Your Phone After Jan 26? You Committed A Crime
Michael Gowan writes at LiveScience.com:
In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.Unlocking a phone frees it from restrictions that keep the device from working on more than one carrier's network, allowing it run on other networks that use the same wireless standard. This can be useful to international travellers who need their phones to work on different networks. Other people just like the freedom of being able to switch carriers as they please.
...The new rule against unlocking phones won't be a problem for everybody, though. For example, Verizon's iPhone 5 comes out of the box already unlocked, and AT&T will unlock a phone once it is out of contract.
You can also pay full-price for a phone, not the discounted price that comes with a two-year service contract, to receive the device unlocked from the get-go. Apple sells an unlocked iPhone 5 starting at $649, and Google sells its Nexus 4 unlocked for $300. [See also: Can I Get a Smartphone Without a Contract?]
Advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questions whether the DMCA has the right to determine who can unlock a phone. In an email to TechNewsDaily, EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said, "Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide."
If you do buy a new phone and want to unlock it before the deadline, you must first ask your carrier if the company will unlock your phone for you. The DMCA only permits you to unlock your phone yourself once you've asked your carrier first.
"Mommy...may I please unlock my phone?"
Government Will Not Protect You (IRS Identity Theft Version)
Molly McCluskey writes at The Motley Fool about the latest in identity theft -- scammers after your tax refund:
During the 2011 tax processing year, roughly 940,000 tax returns were filed fraudulently. This year the number will likely reach 1 million. Even the IRS' own taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, says the IRS is woefully incapable of handling the boom.A recently released report from the National Taxpayer Advocate to Congress says that the IRS "has failed to provide effective and timely assistance to victims of identity theft" even as the number of crimes continues to soar. Olson says in the report that tax-related identity theft has risen some 650 percent since 2008.
...The IRS allows filing of taxes as early as Jan. 19, and prompt thieves will file immediately with the hopes of beating more cautious individuals to their own returns.
Bad Tastykakes
Snack here...
What The Media Gets Wrong About Guns
Three main things, writes Matt Pressberg in Online Journalism Review:
1. Semi-automatic rifles are not battlefield weapons or machine guns.2. Assault weapon bans target guns based on appearance, and not on any higher destructive potential or disproportionate influence on gun violence.
3. States with higher rates of gun ownership do tend to have higher rates of gun violence, but it's important not to confuse this correlation with causation.
Details at the link. For example, from #2, on assault weapons bans targeting guns based on appearance rather than on their destructive potential:
Because, as pointed out above, semi-automatic military-style rifles are functionally the same as semi-automatic hunting-style rifles, assault weapons legislation restricts guns based on their outfits and not on their outputs. To wit, the following language in the California Penal Code was part of its currently active Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989:(a)Notwithstanding Section 12276, "assault weapon" shall also mean any of the following:(1)A semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:
(A)A pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon.
(B)A thumbhole stock.
(C)A folding or telescoping stock.
(D)A grenade launcher or flare launcher.
(E)A flash suppressor.
(F)A forward pistol grip.
The only one of these features that actually impacts the destructive capability of the weapon is the grenade launcher, but explosive grenades have been banned since the same law restricting machine guns went into effect almost 80 years ago. Everything else is essentially cosmetic.
Unscientific Weenie-Think On Why Men Supposedly Want Young Women
I tweeted this after reading yet another post by "gender studies" professor Hugo Schwyzer:
@amyalkon
.@hugoschwyzer @GoodMenProject Hugo, everything you write is like a combo platter of sucking up to women & being ashamed of having a penis.
I usually resist responding to the posts by male feminist and apologist for having a penis Hugo Schwyzer. Sunday, I couldn't help but tweet how asinine and contrary to what the evidence shows was his latest blog item on The Good Men Project, "When Older Guys Lust After Younger Women," arguing that "men's sexual desire is driven by culture, not evolution." Among the paragraphs making up this tripe-fest, there's this silliness:
Spare me the arguments from biology or evolutionary psychology, the ones that excuse predatory old guys from staring at "young firm flesh" because that flesh belongs to a woman near the peak of her fertility. The great lengths to which countless men go to avoid fatherhood suggests that the continued evolutionary imperative to "spread one's seed" is oversold to the point of being illusory.
Guess what: Our genes don't know from birth control. They're still pressing even fatherhood-avoiding men today to go for the firm flesh of the young, fertile woman -- basically urging them to party like it's 1.8 million years ago.
As I write in I See Rude People, we live in "evolutionarily novel" times. It behooved us, 1.8 million years ago, to grab and wolf down berries when we came upon them because it wasn't like there was a 7-Eleven around the block from every campfire. So, we evolved a lust for sugary foods -- one that no longer makes sense at a time when you can pull an 18-wheeler up to Costco and leave with it loaded to the gills with Twinkies (or whatever cakey yummy is still in business).
The same applies to men's urge to have the hot young flesh when they want to avoid being anybody's dad.
Schwyzer, after reading my tweets, and those of some idiot who suggested that I'm "promoting 'rape culture'" by putting out what the science actually says, posted this on Facebook:
Getting in a Twitter spat with Amy Alkon reminds me of our old days debating on the Glenn Sacks show. Where do the years go?
I commented:
We're not in a "spat." I finally called you out on the "science" you use to support your contentions. Gad Saad also tweeted about the actual science -- which can be found in Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer's book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. See p. 139 of the paperback for how women in their teens and 20s -- fertile women -- are "highly overrepresented" as rape victims. They reference actual DATA in making this claim. It's by putting out what the science actually says -- not by kowtowing to what the PC would prefer it says -- that you can meaningfully prevent rape. Pretend who rapes and why, ignoring the data, and you simply satisfy your need to confirm what you already think.
I can't retype all this from Thornhill/Palmer, so here's a screenshot from my copy. 
On Twitter, @GadSaad tried to straighten Hugo out. Hugo covers his eyes and ears and tweets the same old tune:
@HugoSchwyzer
@GadSaad @amyalkon @goodmenproject an evo-psych case can be made men's sexual choices driven as much by status-seeking as repro strategy
Gad Saad on how dimwitted this is:
@GadSaad
@hugoschwyzer @amyalkon @GoodMenProject What!? Pursuit of status occurs in the service of reproduction. Biology 101.
In short, despite the bleatings of those like Schwyzer who can sound "science-y" enough to be believed by those who share their thinking (as well as by other naifs), there's a reason that men are hot for young women, and it isn't because of Maxim or Internet porn or any other cultural reasons you can come up with. (And besides, as Gad points out in his work, biology drives culture.) And as I tweeted earlier:
@amyalkon
Men across cultures go for women at peak fertility - & also chosen for majority of rapes (Thornhill/Palmer).
This includes men where there's no Internet, there are no strip clubs, and there's no Hugh Hefner -- men in hunter-gatherer tribes who aren't all duking it out to see who gets the old lady missing a lot of teeth who's wise and has a great personality.
And do note that if our male ancestors did go for grannies -- post-menopausal women -- they would have passed on their genes to ZERO children. I mean, is this really hard for anyone with an IQ over the speed limit, accessorized with an option for functional rationality?
I'll let Gad have the last word -- sarcastically:
It is COMPLETE random cultural learning (fully removed from any possible biological and evolutionary explanation) that on average most men would prefer to mate with Scarlett Johansson rather than Betty White. Frankly, this liberating cultural explanation allows men to explore their otherwise suppressed latent desires for a wide range of octogenarians.Apparently, the only reason that men are attracted to younger women is due to "sexist and inexcusable" cultural learning. How much longer can such nonsense persist? As of today, I shall REJECT the fact that women on average prefer taller men (since I am a shorter man). Instead, I propose that it must be due to a "heightist" form of discrimination promulgated by the media. Bottom line: If an astonishingly universal reality hurts my feelings, I shall reject it and instead argue that the preference that rattles my ego is due to random cultural learning.
Who is Gad? Dr. Gad Saad holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He writes a blog based in actual science! His books are likewise based in all that data stuff. His most recent: The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
UPDATE: You'd think Schwyzer would be popular with feminists for all the sucking up he does. Actually, he's got his detractors -- a whole Facebook page of them filled with links to blog items about what a creep they think he is. ("Creepy" is something I think infuses every piece he writes.)
Theft Isn't Theft When Government Is Doing The Thieving!
As Walter Olson puts it at Overlawyered, "Nice raisin crop you've grown there. Now hand over 47% of it to the state."
He references a pending case, Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, in which the government demanded 47 percent of the Horne's crop -- sans compensation. His Cato colleague Ilya Shapiro writes:
The order -- a much-criticized New Deal relic -- forces raisin "handlers" to reserve a certain percentage of their crop "for the account" of the government-backed Raisin Administrative Committee, enabling the government to control the supply and price of raisins on the market. The RAC then either sells the raisins or simply gives them away to noncompetitive markets--such as federal agencies, charities, and foreign governments--with the proceeds going toward the RAC's administration costs.
Walter explains:
The U.S. government denies that it owes anything to the Hornes under the Takings Clause, and also says that to contest the legality of what has been done to them, the Hornes are obliged to pay the USDA what it demands -- $438,000 for the raisins not handed over, plus $200,000 or so in penalties -- and then sue in the Court of Federal Claims to get it back.
Absolutely disgusting. Imagine if this were your business.
Off Toe-Pick
Hold the jam.
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky--Happiness Myths And The Science For Being Happier
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the most rigorous researchers whose work I follow, has a terrific new book out, The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does
It turns out that we are very poor predictors of what makes us happy or unhappy, and it doesn't help that we've been stuck with a lot of cultural myths about what things and situations should and shouldn't. On this show, which will focus mainly on relationships, Lyubomirsky will lay out the realities shown in the research and also give us simple, practical ways to be happier -- and practical thinking on how to assess when that's just not possible and it's time to get out.
Listen live at this link at 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/28/dr-sonja-lyubomirsky-happiness-mythssci-for-being-happier
Don't miss last week's show with psychologist Jeremy Dean, founder of the popular website PsyBlog and author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick
We are convinced that we are the boss of us -- that we do the things we do because they make sense, because we've got goals, because we make smart choices. Often, that's far from the case. But, by understanding how habits are formed, why we develop them, and what our biases are, we can use habit-forming to our benefit and have some chance of stopping the habits holding us back. And that's exactly what you'll hear on this show.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/20/jeremy-deans-form-good-habits-ditch-bad-make-change-stick
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Stripping Down To Reveal A Chest Full Of Fourth Amendment Protected By First Amendment, Judges Say To TSA Thuggos
David Kravets writes at WIRED:
A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.Aaron Tobey claimed in a civil rights lawsuit (.pdf) that in 2010 he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.
The opinion written in sending the case to trial is by Judge Robert Gregory:
Here, Mr. Tobey engaged in a silent, peaceful protest using the text of our Constitution--he was well within the ambit of First Amendment protections. And while it is tempting to hold that First Amendment rights should acquiesce to national security in this instance, our Forefather Benjamin Franklin warned against such a temptation by opining that those 'who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.' We take heed of his warning and are therefore unwilling to relinquish our First Amendment protections--even in an airport.
Kravets continues:
Tobey didn't want to go through the advanced imaging technology X-ray machines, or so-called nude body scanners, that were cropping up at airports nationwide. Instead, when it was his turn to be screened, he was going to opt for an intrusive pat-down, and removed most of his clothing in the process.Among other things, the federal lawsuit claimed wrongful detention and a breach of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment. Tobey was on his way to Wisconsin for his grandmother's funeral. Despite his detainment, he made his flight.
According to the suit, while under interrogation, the authorities wanted to know "about his affiliation with, or knowledge of, any terrorist organizations, if he had been asked to do what he did by any third party, and what his intentions and goals were."
Yes, it's come to that. Standing up for civil liberties...in fact, doing anything more than bending over and saying "Yes, Sir!" or "Yes, Ma'am!" to the hamburger clerk granted special government powers to humiliate and sexually grope the rest of us in the name of security...is now terrorism.
P.S. The Ben Franklin quote is incorrect.
Forgot this last night: The Rutherford Institute defended him. I got an email from them and here's a bit from it:
"Whether it be construed as different, unusual or bizarre, non-disruptive expressive protest--which is what Aaron Tobey engaged in--is at the core of protected First Amendment speech," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "As the courts have recognized, this fundamental right encompasses not only the affirmative right to speak, but also the right to be free from retaliation by public officials for speaking."
Anand Agneshwar and Alan Veronick of Arnold & Porter and James Knicely of Knicely and Associates assisted The Rutherford Institute in its defense of Tobey. Very important to always credit those who stand up for civil liberties -- because far too few people today do.
I'm forever appreciative to Marc J. Randazza, the First Amendment Lawyer who came to my defense when TSA worker Thedala Magee thought she and lawyer and aspiring reality TV star Vicki Roberts would squeeze $500,000, a written apology, and a blog takedown out of me after I dared use my First Amendment rights to complain about the violation of my Fourth Amendment ones.
via Christopher Buckley
Vegan Cookies And Ridiculous Dietary Asceticism: Just Eat The Brownie, Dude!
Yesterday, at my favorite cafe, this guy in line in front of me picked up one of those round, thick vegan cookie things (a single cookie, plastic-wrapped) that look like they are slightly less appealing to eat than a big sheet of particleboard.
I asked him if he'd eaten it before. He said he hadn't but was weighing getting it. I told him he'd actually be better off getting the brownie -- which also had carbs and sugar but at least he'd probably really, really enjoy eating it.
He blinked at me: Actually, he told me, this (vegan hockey puck) has oats and rice sugar!
Understanding that he hadn't asked me for an analysis, I just smiled a little, thinking to myself, "Idiot!" It's carbs and sugar and it's going to make your blood sugar leap.
Then I realized that "idiot" wasn't quite fair, since the ordinary person (who doesn't read a lot of science or, especially dietary science) has no way to know that they've been sold a bill of goods on diet by both the government (with the utterly unhealthy food pyramid and more recent food plate) and by much of the medical establishment.
Per Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories," which is basically a 600-page meta-analysis (study of studies), it is carbs -- sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes, apple juice and ingredients like oats -- that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. And makes you unhealthy in a variety of ways.
(For an easier read by Taubes, pick up "Why We Get Fat.")
Government Motors Is A Failed Enterprise
Henry Payne writes in the WSJ that much of the auto industry is thriving -- just not the government-subsidized parts. And hey, you GOP voters (and fans of the GOP's pretend small government, which is really just slightly smaller government), Bushie put in some of these idiotic and damaging ethanol mandates, too:
Predicting a breakthrough in switchgrass-based ethanol technology in 2007, the Bush administration mandated that cellulosic, or plant-cell based, ethanol production for American autos increase to 500 million gallons by 2012 and a staggering 16 billion by 2022. Washington then subsidized its fledgling industry with $1.5 billion in federal grants and tax credits. Prodded by Washington, General Motors GM +1.01% used the 2008 auto show to announce investments in cellulosic ethanol companies and flex-fuel vehicles, and a national campaign to add E85 (a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) pumps at gas stations.Five years later and the ethanol market is a bust. Fewer than eight million gallons of cellulosic ethanol were produced in 2012, E85 pumps are rare (most blends are 10% or 15%), and ethanol is rarely mentioned at the auto show.
The electric revolution is muted too. Spending an estimated $10 billion of the 2009 federal stimulus bill on battery power, Team Obama predicted a million electric cars on the road by 2015. Today there are barely 30,000, and federally subsidized auto-battery suppliers like Ener1, A123 Systems AONEQ -7.55% and LGChem are either struggling or bankrupt.
...Poor sales have dogged the electric Ford Focus, Chevy Volt and Fisker Karma as well. A $7,500 federal tax subsidy to electric-car buyers has done little to boost the market, even as it subsidizes One Percenters like Leo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber, who both own $100,000 electric Karmas; and Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, owner of a $40,000 Chevy Volt.
In an ironic twist, one of the showstoppers is the VL Destino, which strips the Karma of its electric drive-train and inserts a fire-breathing, 638-horsepower Corvette ZR-1 gas engine in its place. The result? A lighter, more competitive, four-door sports sedan.
The City Of Chicago Is Your Mommy: Proposed Energy Drink Ban
What's next, they start setting adults' bedtimes?
Baylen Linnekin, the exposer of ludicrous food nannyism at reason, writes about a powerful Chicago Alderman, Edward Burke, pushing for the city to ban trans fats, foie gras, Four Loko, and Red Bull:
Chicago Alderman Edward Burke may be the staunchest elected opponent of food freedom in America whose name you've never heard.While New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg gets all the press--often with good reason--the fact that Ald. Burke commands little or no national attention is likely more a function of his Second City residence and second-banana title ("Dean of the Chicago City Council") than it is of any lack of regulatory zeal.
..."These energy drinks, if they're consumed in large amounts, especially by kids, can have serious health implications," Burke told WGN last week.
That's probably true of energy drinks--but also of coffee, tea, soda, juice, alcohol, water, and any other beverage.
And, in truth, energy drinks look a lot like a lot of other beverages.
...On an ounce for ounce basis, popular energy drinks often contain much less caffeine than coffee and other, more genteel beverages. An 8.5 ounce can of Red Bull, for example, contains 80 mg of caffeine. That's 100 mg less than a comparable (short) cup of Starbucks coffee, which boasts 180 mg of caffeine.
So why didn't Burke propose to ban coffee? Here's one hint: Burke apparently likes coffee.
If Burke's ordinance were to pass, its unintended consequences would be manifold. It would harm Chicago's struggling economy while enriching the coffers of suburban convenience stores, grocers, and other energy drink sellers--which would gain customers who normally bought their energy drinks in Chicago.
The ordinance would also likely result in the introduction and dominance of new players into Chicago's market. City stores that could no longer stock drinks banned under the law would simply switch to selling higher-caffeine products that don't contain guarana or tuarine--like SK Energy shots and others on the horizon that contain oddball additives like "synthetic Asian hornet larvae secretion."
I got dumped by my angry short guy loser psychiatrist at Kaiser (who only grudgingly prescribed me the ADHD meds I'd been taking for years because he doesn't really believe in ADHD) and moved to another. (I got the angry short guy after my sweet old shrink -- a guy who sounded like Eeyore from Winnie The Pooh -- retired.)
Before I thought about it and realized I could trust the young shrink I got moved to on science, I started to go apeshit on caffeine, making coffee that was break-a-tooth black or ordering "black eyes" in cafes (two shots of espresso in a small cup of coffee) because I thought caffeine helped me or would help me slow down and focus. It turned out that Ritalin wasn't really working for me.
When I told my new, science-based young psychiatrist that it had become almost physically painful for me to concentrate, and that I was thinking of taking Mucinex to ramp up the caffeine's effect, he gave me Adderall, which changed my life. (It is not only a dopamine reuptake inhibitor like the Ritalin I was taking, it pushes a little dopamine out into the brain -- which makes all the difference. I can sit and concentrate for long periods of time without my attention flying around the room and my head in six different directions.)
Anyway, the point is, it is entirely possible to get vast quantities of caffeine simply by buying a $14 espresso machine or ordering a double or triple espresso at a coffee shop.
What we need is to keep kids from overdoing it on espresso, donuts, drugs, alcohol, or Red Bull is to raise kids who aren't idiots and drug addicts, and for that we need the secure attachment and firm parenting of wholesome, intact families, not government acting as our mommy. Of course, government, through the welfare state, enabled the flood of single parenting that enables kids to be daddyless and rudderless.
P.S. On a "my shrink is a great guy" note, he emailed me yesterday to see how I was doing. I love that. Unlike the short angry loser shrink who wanted me to come in once a month, he gets that I am not crazy and there's no reason to kill my writing days to make me come in and see him for no good fucking reason. I actually want to see him, because he's smart and great and fun to talk to, but I'm going to make an appointment after I turn in my book.
They Did It For Jesus: LA Church Officials Plotted To Hide Child Molestation Cases
Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan write in the Los Angeles Times that docs from the late 1980s show that Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and another archdiocese official discussed strategies to keep police from discovering that children were being sexually abused by priests.
One strategy, according to internal Catholic church records included keeping the molester priests out of California to avoid prosecution:
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
...One such case that has previously received little attention is that of Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted preying for decades on undocumented children in predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes. After Garcia's discharge from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophile clergy, Mahony ordered him to stay away from California "for the foreseeable future" in order to avoid legal accountability, the files show. "I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors," the archbishop wrote to the treatment center's director in July 1986.
The following year, in a letter to Mahony about bringing Garcia back to work in the archdiocese, Curry said he was worried that victims in Los Angeles might see the priest and call police.
"[T]here are numerous -- maybe twenty -- adolescents or young adults that Peter was involved with in a first degree felony manner. The possibility of one of these seeing him is simply too great," Curry wrote in May 1987.
And people tell atheistic me that you can't be moral without religion.
David Mamet Goes All Real On The Obaman Fantasies
Jay J. Hector sent me this piece by Mamet in The Daily Beast, "Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm." Mamet writes:
Karl Marx summed up Communism as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.'In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama said that he was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other constitutional rights to flourish.'
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called "The State," and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read "The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs." "Needs and abilities" are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to "the State shall take, the State shall give."
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.
Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual's abilities.
As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual's abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the "needs" of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he "needs."
But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining "needs"? And note that the president did not say "I have more money than I need," but "You and I have more than we need." Who elected him to speak for another citizen?
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
Evil For The Greater Good
Quote from excerpt in the WSJ of John Gray, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 2:
Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.
Kingsley Browne: More On Why Co-Ed Combat Will Mean More Dead Men
I reposted on this yesterday -- a post from the single best source on it (and by best, I mean based in solid data and not emotion) -- Wayne State law professor and evolutionary psychologist Kingsley Browne.
I've always had a pretty simplistic view on women in the military: If men have to die for our country, women should not be immune. Well, it seems that it's not that simple, as Browne shows in his excellent book, Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn't Fight the Nation's Wars
Browne has an op-ed on this today on USNews, "Putting Women in Combat Is a Disastrous Decision." An excerpt:
Beyond individual sex differences are the equally important effects of adding women to male combat groups. Combat units are intensely cooperative and placing a scarce resource (women) within them creates a disruptive competition. Moreover, trust is the foundation of cohesion, and men are disinclined to trust women in dangerous situations, worried that they will lack either the will or the wherewithal to back them up. The rough camaraderie that men engage in to build cohesion will lead to sexual harassment charges by women, so women will be excluded from these important activities.Women are now promoted as fast or faster than men. Although there are relatively few female admirals and generals, there are also relatively few female CEOs in the private sector. Sex differences in intense career commitment are more important than the combat exclusion. Men join the infantry to fight, whereas we hear now that women want to join the infantry for their careers. This decision will impose new pressure on the many career military women who do not want to serve in combat, likely discouraging many women from entering the military. Although women have been involved in combat skirmishes, ground-combat service requires sustained combat, sometimes over the course of days or weeks, often under loads substantially exceeding that of the soldier of World War II.
This is a disastrous decision made by people (a re-elected president and an outgoing secretary of defense) who will not have to bear its consequences. Instead theywill be suffered by the soldier on the ground, and in some cases they are likely to be fatal.
As Browne said yesterday on AirTalk on KPCC, in allowing women in combat, there's going to be a tradeoff in military readiness for female careers.
The notion that the ACLU lady (another guest on AirTalk) put forward -- that the "Band of Brothers" will just have to deal (as if they can retool their psychology to not compete for the lone woman in the group) -- is just silly. Real life doesn't work that way.
The real life reason -- that's why women were taken out of the combat forces in 1948 -- "Men overreact to the dangers to their female comrades ... in order to protect them."
You can legislate that women be thought of as men with boobs, but there's really no way to insert a module into human psychology to get everybody to start thinking and behaving that way.
Missed One For The Worst Book Covers Ever
As Tracie Egan Morrissey put it at Jezebel about this attempted chick-lit-ization, "If Sylvia Plath hadn't already killed herself, she probably would've if she saw the new cover of her only novel The Bell Jar."
Check out the horrifying "Anne Of Green Gables" cover in the gallery of photos below the post at the link.
Plastic Bag Bans May Be Making Us Sick
Katherine Mangu-Ward writes at reason:
Are the bacteria living in reusable grocery bags making us sick? A new study finds that plastic bag bans may be be causing an uptick in emergency room visits and even deaths from common foodborne bacteria like coliform and E.coli.The bag bans, which are usually justified on environmental grounds, are increasingly popular around the nation and usually incentivize shoppers to replace plastic with reusable canvas or nylon totes.
The study, by Jonathan Klick of University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Property and Environment Research Center and Joshua D. Wright of the George Mason University School of Law, found that in jurisdictions where plastic bags were banned saw ER visits increase by about one-fourth, with a similar increase in deaths compared with neighboring counties where the bags remained legal.
Basically people were schlepping leaky packages of meat and other foods in their canvas bags, then wadding (up) the bags somewhere for awhile, leaving bacteria to grow until the next trip, when they tossed celery or other foods likely to be eaten raw in the same bags.
Washing your bags reduces the risk, but let's be honest: who does that?
Plastic bag bans are also making a grocery store in Santa Monica a little less profitable, because Gregg now avoids it (and the bag ban in Santa Monica) drives a mile and a half to a grocery store in Venice to shop for our dinner.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: The Naomi Campbell Of Washington, D.C.
Supermodel Campbell, for those who are too busy following NASCAR and Ice Road Truckers to know who she is, has a long history of tantrum- and phone-throwing.
Well, she seems to have met her match in the political world in Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, previously known for being a honking moron, but now also recognized for her emotional instability and epic hissyfits.
Luke Rosiak writes in the WashTimes:
Hiding knives from a member of Congress for fear of your own life. Having cellphones thrown at you. Being cursed at in front of your parents. Being told, "I'm a queen, and I demand to be treated like one."Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Texas Democrat, has a reputation as one of the toughest taskmasters in Congress to have as a boss, and the numbers appear to justify it.
The Washington Times analyzed a decade of congressional pay records to find the offices with the highest turnover rates and found 27 members who -- over a period of four or more years -- lost an annual average of at least one-third of their staff who sought calmer pastures or were fired.
Each year, an average of half of Mrs. Jackson Lee's staff quits, and one year, all but six of 23 staffers left.
Mona Floyd, who served as the congresswoman's legislative director, has monocular vision and has a lawsuit pending against Mrs. Jackson Lee, who was voted the "meanest member" of the House in a bipartisan survey of Hill staffers by Washingtonian magazine last year. Ms. Floyd said she was told by the representative, "I don't care anything about your disability."
Other incidents, including a series of racially charged diatribes, were documented by the Washington-based Daily Caller website after former aides were so taken aback by her behavior that they broke an unspoken Capitol Hill rule not to speak ill of former bosses.
via @AHMalcolm
Power-Mad Cop Tickets Cyclist On Venice Bike Path Because Cop Is An Asshole
Unbelievably great chronicling of a power-mad asshole who thinks he can bring the hammer down on somebody for speaking freely -- and correctly.
The guy in the video apparently told the cop he was blocking the way. And indeed, when somebody -- just somebody on a slim regular bike -- is stopped on that bike path on a weekend day, especially, it can be dangerous for people biking along on the path.
A cop's motorcycle is a big thing -- really blocking the way. (The asshole cop by all rights should have ticketed himself -- and then crumpled up the ticket and stuffed it in his mouth so he could shut himself up before incriminating himself on video for abuse of his position.)
First, here's the news story about the bogus ticket this power-mad abusive weenie of a cop gives a guy on a beach cruiser (bike), but the full video (below this first video) is the cake:
Watch the whole thing:
Why King Cop says he doesn't also ticket a girl on a skateboard: "She isn't being sarcastic."
From InformationLiberation:
On Friday, Detective Gus Villanueva of the Los Angeles Police Department's Media Relations Section said that the "ticket had been canceled in the interest of justice." The department is conducing a personnel investigation into the conduct of the officer involved and would not comment further, Villanueva said.
Guns Or Going Ungroped: Which Right Do You Willingly Give Up?
Karen Cummings blogs at TSANewsBlog:
Dare I surmise that many of those leading the charge against any gun regulation are standing meekly in line at the airport, willingly giving up their rights against unreasonable search and seizure in the name of "safety" (Note: the TSA has not apprehended one terrorist.)
Crowdfunding Is A Polite Word For Assholish Mooching
First of all, I fucking hate being messaged on Facebook, where mail is slow and I can't log it. (Friends know that I've had the same email address since 1993 or '94, and occasionally make fun of me for being the only one under 90 who's still on AOL.)
Second, if you haven't talked to me in 10-plus years, don't make your first contact hitting me up for money, pretending you give half a shit about me. (If, however, you are my actual friend and you need something, you know I'm there for you -- time-, energy-, shared interests- and money-permitting.)
Third, if you were my actual friend, you'd know times have been tough for me.
Fourth, if I had money, I'd give it to FIRE, reason, the Institute for Justice, or the homeless-helping organization on Hampton in Venice, whose name escapes me at the moment.
The above thoughts came to mind in reference to this message I got on Facebook Wednesday evening. The name of the film and name of the mooch have been changed so as not to give him any publicity:
How the heck are you? How many years has it been? Do you still have the pink Nash?I am excited to report that my new film, "I Am A Big-Ass Mooch," opens in theaters on Presidents Day Weekend.
With passion and innovation we made an epic film on an indie budget. Now we're applying that same approach to film distribution. We're using a new platform called Kickstarter to launch "I Am A Big-Ass Mooch" into the world by connecting directly with our audience.
You can join us for as little as $1, or pre-order the DVD for $25 (including shipping). At higher pledge levels, you can get your name in the credits and there are a limited number of tickets left for the Red Carpet Premiere.
But there are only A FEW DAYS LEFT! Our goal is 1000 backers, and we are more than halfway there. Please support the underdog "I Am A Big-Ass Mooch" film, and join us!
Click here!
I'd be honored to have you on board!
All the best,
Guy You Have Neither Seen Nor Talked To In 10 Years
My response:
I would like to get a new pair of boots. Please send me $200 via PayPal.
On the bright side, I want to rewrite my Internet chapter for "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," and I needed to do a bit on Moochstarter, and I'll use this instead of needing to start from scratch.
Any churlish comments you want to include are welcomed, and may make it into the book. (Not to worry, I won't use your actual name unless you want me to.)
Oh, and regarding a bit in the message above -- Kickstarter is not a "new platform," unless you've got some people's grannies' email addresses so you could try to get them to shake out their changepurses for you.
And finally, the answer to the question "Do you still have the pink Nash?": No, not since 1999 -- 14 years ago.
And it was a Rambler.
And if you'd bought the book I published in 2009, you'd know all that.
Of course, that would require you to see me as more than a mark to hit up for money, you classless turd.
Repost: Co-Ed Combat
The ban on women serving in combat positions is supposed to be lifted, word has it. Pasted in just below is a previous post from me about that referencing a professor I respect who's given that topic a serious, science-based look.
I've always had a pretty simplistic view on women in the military: If men have to die for our country, women should not be immune. Well, it seems that it's not that simple.
Kingsley Browne, a Wayne State law prof I know from evolutionary psych conferences, has written an excellent book, Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn't Fight the Nation's Wars
His viewpoint -- that women are physically and psychologically ill-suited for combat positions -- is going to be very controversial, but his claims in the book are well-supported by psych and military data on male-female differences.
An example from the book -- page 67, from the section, "Many Noncombat Tasks Also Require Strength":
A 1985 study found that "while clear majorities of women (more than 90 percent in some cases) failed to meet the physical standards for eight critical shipboard tasks, virtually all the men passed (in most cases 100 percent)." One percent of women but 96 percent of men, for example, could carry water pumps to the scene of a fire or flooded compartment. As one former Navy officer with damage-control experience sardonically noted, "When your air-conditioned seat in front of a radar console is a smoking hole in the deck, you grab some shoring or a pump and apply some serious strength and stamina to the problem at hand." If the ship has a crew that is 20 percent women, the damage-control enterprise starts off in nearly the same position it would be in if the initial emergency rendered 20 percent of the crew incapable of assistance.
Yes, these are generalizations in these studies -- but they are generally true, and thus worthy of attention vis a vis what women's role in the armed forces should be. In short -- and forget your personal prejudices, because Browne's got the data -- more men are likely die if women are in combat situations. (More about that in the Newsweek link at the bottom of the post.)
Browne's blogging about the book this week at Volokh.com. Here's most of his first post:
Co-ed Combat starts from the premise that policies concerning sexual integration of combat forces should be measured first by their effects on military effectiveness. Other goals, such as expansion of women's opportunities, must give way to the extent that they impair combat effectiveness. Although the premise is contestable, it is a foundation upon which virtually all political discussions of the role of women in the military rests. Advocates of sexual integration of combat forces seldom argue that military effectiveness must be traded off against equal-opportunity concerns; instead, they contend that there is no tradeoff at all.Under policies in place since early in the Clinton administration, women are permitted to serve on warships (other than submarines) and in combat aviation. They are still barred from "direct ground combat," however, including positions that "collocate" with (that is, operate side-by-side) ground-combat units. The Army seems to be violating the collocation rule routinely in Iraq, a practice that results in increased combat exposure for women, and some argue for completely scrapping the bar on women in ground combat.
I argue that those who believe there are no substantial tradeoffs involved in including women in combat roles are wrong. Inclusion of women in those roles results in a segment of the force that is physically weaker, more prone to injury (both physical and psychological), less physically aggressive, able to withstand less pain, less willing to take physical risks, less motivated to kill, less likely to be available to deploy when ordered to (partly, but not exclusively because of pregnancy), more expensive to recruit, and less likely to remain in the service even for the length of their initial contracts. Officers and NCOs must reassign physical tasks (or do them themselves) because women cannot get them done fast enough, if at all.
The fact that women, in general, are less effective warriors is only part of the problem. The more fundamental problem comes from the mixing of men and women in combat forces, which creates a variety of problems for reasons rooted in our evolutionary history. Women frequently are placed in units with men who do not trust the women with their lives and who do not bond with women the way that they do with other men.
The groups into which women are introduced become less disciplined and more subject to conflict related to sexual jealousy and sexual frustration, and men receive less rigorous training because of women's presence. Officers and NCOs must divert attention from their central missions to cope with the "drama" that sexual integration brings. Men, who traditionally have been drawn to the military because of its appeal to their masculinity, now find that the military tries to cure them of it to make the environment more comfortable for women.
Against these impairments of the military's ability to wage war, what are the benefits to the military of full combat integration? One possible benefit is an increase in the recruiting pool. Contrary to rhetoric, however, the pool is not "doubled" in any meaningful sense. Sexual integration of the military generally has increased the pool by only fifteen to twenty percent. Expansion of the potential pool of combat volunteers (in the ground forces, at any rate) would probably be more on the order of one percent at most.
If it is not numbers that women bring, then it must be something unique to women, but it is not obvious that women qua women would bring much in the way of specific benefits to the combat forces. In short, no one argues that eliminating the combat exclusion would unleash the whirlwind on America's enemies.
I should emphasize that my arguments are not an indictment of military women, although I do not believe that many women are suited to combat, especially, but not only, ground combat. But, in researching my book, I was struck by the high regard that most military men I spoke with have for military women outside the combat context - even though most of these men opposed women's participation in combat. One can simultaneously appreciate military women's service to their country and also believe that all-male combat forces are more effective than mixed-sex ones.
The argument that full integration would be effective rests on a number of assumptions, including:
• That the high-tech nature of modern warfare means that the sexes no longer differ much in combat-relevant ways
• That as long as a woman possesses the individual physical and psychological attributes of an effective soldier, her inclusion in a combat unit would not impair its effectiveness
• That the primary obstacle to integration are men's "masculinist" attitudes, which can be overcome with adequate training and leadership.
All of these assumptions are flawed, in my opinion, and, as a result, the costs and difficulties of sexual integration of combat forces are often substantially underestimated.
Here's Browne's Newsweek interview with Martha Brandt.
When Detained By Cops: Ask If You're Free To Go
"Unless you say you want to leave, the law considers the encounter voluntary," says Flex Your Rights Associate Director Scott Morgan. Morgan discusses how to deal with the some of the situations that can develop after you initially refuse consent to a police search.
Learn more about your rights when dealing with the police in traffic stops and in general by watching this video:
Another video from the same people (on traffic stops):
I'm not sure whether he should have answered the Tek9 question.
James Duane, I think, would argue against that.
Islamic Honor Killings In The West
Horrible to see all the women murdered by their Muslim relatives -- including their fathers, mothers, and brothers:
World Of Wonderfully Awful
Awe us.
Dangerous Terrorist Nabbed By Police Combing Through Cruise Ship Passenger List
That is, if you consider having unpaid court costs from a 22-year-old warrant for shoplifting ciggies from Wal-Mart a sure sign that a person is a jihadist.
From HuffPo:
Robin Hall, 41, was greeted by Brevard County Sheriff's deputies Thursday as she exited the Disney Dream cruise ship in Port Canaveral. Police say the Connecticut woman -- who was vacationing with her husband and two children -- failed to pay the $85 in court fees on proceedings surrounding her shoplifting a pack of cigarettes from a Wal-Mart back in 1991."I take full responsibility for what I did but I do not believe I deserve this," said Hall, who was 18 years old at the time, according to NBC Connecticut.
Police discovered Hall's outstanding warrant when they probed the cruise ship's passenger list for potential terrorists.
Since her first brush with the law, Hall earned a degree in architecture.
After the shoplifting incident, she put herself through college, the USNews/NBC story said, and now helps design jet engines for aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.
Wow, am I ever glad she's off the streets. She might whip out a slide rule or something and use it on a piece of paper, and you know how many thousands of people die when that happens.
via Lisa Simeone
"Security"-Minded Morons In Flight
Yes, you idiots, terrorists typically wear shirts spelling out their intentions.
A man on a Quantas flight from Australia to New Zealand wore a "Hello, My Name Is..." t-shirt with the Inigo Montoya line from The Princess Bride, "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
Dan Amira writes at NYMag.com:
While the flight was boarding, a flight attendant asked Mullins if he could change his shirt, as it was making some of his fellow passengers ... not nervous, but maybe a little bit concerned.Instead of arguing that the shirt does not mean what they think it means, Mullins, being a decent fellow, and not wanting to mock anyone's pain, told the flight attendant he would do as she wished.
Without much time for dilly-dallying, "[t]he flight attendant left in search of another T-shirt," however, she "never returned."
Putting a damper on their relationship, the flight attendant "didn't make eye contact with Mr Mullins again," not even to ask if he wanted a peanut.
TSA And Freedom To Travel Without Being Sexually Groped
Renee Baker emailed from Freedom to Travel:
I am sure you have all read the news that the backscatter scanners are being pulled from the airports. However, Freedom to Travel USA reminds everyone that ALL scanners violate the 4th amendment and lead to privacy violations and criminal touching of private parts. So, removing the X-Ray scanners, never tested by independent parties, is just a minor, but important first victory.The remaining scanners do NOT detect explosives, weapons, or incendiary devices. So, any "alerts" are followed by "pat downs", which touch one's private parts or other parts of your body. The scanners cannot tell the difference between an explosive, a medical device, or a mastectomy scar. The coercive physical touching by the TSA violates criminal laws in all 50 states if performed by anyone, at anytime, anywhere else.
The false positive rate (not counting the actual alarms which have never detected a working non-metallic bomb on any of the 1.3 billion passengers from 2010 to 2012) of the remaining scanners likely leads to at least 10 million plus pat-downs every year, many of which involve criminal touching of private parts, such as experienced by mastectomy patients, those with medical devices, and those with artificial limbs.
If you are fortunate enough not to be "profiled" by the TSA, please consider those who do fit these categories and voice your concerns to "restore liberties" for all. We must keep the pressure on to end the abusive and illegal inch by inch searching and touching of our bodies as requirement to travel in this country.
One Boob Is Bigger Than The Other
I know, it sounds like I'm describing much of the population of Washington, D.C., but it's actually a question from and about a woman. She wrote to me and I'm looking for some opinions, especially from guys.
She's considering getting implants to even out her breasts. One is a fuller C while the other is a small C/fuller B depending upon the bra brand and/or style. She doesn't want to look stripper-y, but doesn't like the lopsided look either.
We've been corresponding and she wrote back, in part:
The specialist did recommend putting a falsie or getting bras custom-made with extra padding built in on the smaller side. There is about (a little less than) a half cup size difference.
If she has to choose (for implants), she prefers the slightly bigger size.
Her boyfriend says he sees a difference in size but claims he doesn't mind this.
I did mention this:
An epidemiologist who coaches me (but who didn't want to be named in my column) noted the possible side-effects, which I wrote about here:You're unlikely to die getting a little more junk in the top bunk, but you may suffer complications like a buildup of scar tissue, which can cause painful tissue contraction and -- whoops! -- deformed breasts. Mmmm, sexy! And then, like toupees and car tires, implants eventually need to be replaced. Maybe every 10 years; maybe more often if you're one of the lucky ones who springs a leak. (Are we having funbags yet?)
The 10 Worst Book Covers Ever
At SoBadSoGood.com.
I rather like the ships one. I love Tarzan looking amorously at his monkey. (And what color is your vagina?)
This link comes via Nancy Rommelmann, who has a brand new book out, Transportation: Stories
From Amazon:
Description of the contents: Short stories by the author of THE BAD MOTHER and THE QUEENS OF MONTAGUE STREET"Nancy Rommelmann's startling stories are as compelling as they are unsettling. The worlds she creates are recognizable but also completely and wonderfully unfamiliar. She writes close to the body, and we are made to feel each uncanny detail. Transportation is a fascinating, fierce, and original collection of stories." --Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
No More Corporate Welfare! (Congress Keeps The Fiscal Sleaze In "Fiscal Responsibility")
Sheldon Richman writes at reason:
When Congress and President Obama came up with their beyond-the-last-minute deal to put off addressing the coming fiscal crisis, The Wall Street Journal turned the spotlight on a little-noticed, yet too typical aspect of Washington's machinations: "The bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout," the Journal reported.So a bill that was represented as the first steps toward fiscal responsibility (try not to laugh too hard) contained billions of dollars in corporate welfare. And it was a bipartisan affair.
How sad. How Washington!
Beneficiaries of the various special tax treatments and exceptions includes owners of NASCAR speedways, companies in American Samoa, rum producers, businesses on Indian reservations, railroads, Hollywood moviemakers, and green-energy firms, including wind-power equipment producers.
As the Journal commented, "The great joke here is that Washington pretends to want to pass 'comprehensive tax reform,' even as each year it adds more tax giveaways that distort the tax code and keep tax rates higher than they have to be."
Read the whole piece. He explains very well how this rigging of the market hurts consumers and violates equal protection under the law.
Corporate welfare from Congress is a sneaky form of theft without a clearcut victim but plenty of profits for those who hire the right lobbying firms.
Do-Gooder Releases City Mouse In The Country
It doesn't end well -- unless you're the hawk getting lunch delivered.
via @DrEades
How's That Barbarianism Working For You, Iran?
Kevin Roderick blogs at LAObserved about a public hanging of two young muggers in Tehran -- a gruesome spectacle staged to deter street crime, with two cranes suspending the muggers to their death in a residential neighborhood.
But, Roderick notes, there was a surprise at the end of the LA Times piece on the event -- one that suggests the strategy is not necessarily working:
A Los Angeles Times correspondent covering the event had his iPad, a $1,000 item here, stolen from his shoulder bag while speaking with distraught relatives of the condemned.
Martin Amis On British Anti-Semitism
Martin Amis interviewed in Haaretz by Maya Sela:
I live in a mildly anti-Semitic country, and Europe is mildly anti-Semitic, and they hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors. If you bring up Israel in a public meeting in England, the whole atmosphere changes. The standard left-wing person never feels more comfortable than when attacking Israel. Because they are the only foreigners you can attack. Everyone else is protected by having dark skin, or colonial history, or something. But you can attack Israel. And the atmosphere becomes very unpleasant. It is traditional, snobbish, British anti-Semitism combined with present-day circumstances.
Knoxville Police Chief: You Can't Sell Wine In Grocery Stores Because Students Will Drink It Out Of Their Butts
Betsy Phillips blogs at The Nashville Scene that Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch, along with other law enforcement officials morons is opposed to the sale of wine in grocery stores because, well, there's this example of UT frat party where a student nearly died from ingesting box wine through his rectum ("butt chugging").
A quote from the Chief: "I was asked, 'well they got it from a liquor store?' Well yeah, but if you're going to make it even more accessible, that incident is not going to be isolated."
Betsy writes:
This is hilarious. Apparently we're supposed to believe that there's some huge amount of young people in Tennessee who would love to butt-chug but, for some reason, they can't go into a liquor store, so they are refraining from butt-chugging until they can shop at Kroger? Like there's a bunch of college students who are all, "Oh, I was going to butt-chug, but if I can't use my Kroger card, forget it"? I mean, how does Chief Rausch even say this with a straight face?
via @radleybalko
"We The Government"
That chilling headline is the apt way the WSJ refers to Obama's inaugural speech, which it calls "inaugural address of striking liberal ambition and partisanship":
Mr. Obama was laying down a marker that he has no intention of letting debt or deficits or lagging economic growth slow his plans for activist, expansive government.Inaugurals usually include calls for national unity and appeals to our founding principles, which is part of their charm. With the election long over, swearing in a President is a moment for celebrating larger national purposes. But Mr. Obama's speech was notable for invoking the founding principles less to unify than to justify what he called "collective action." The President borrowed the Constitution's opening words of "we the people" numerous times, but his main theme was that the people are fundamentally defined through government action, and his government is here to help you.
On that theme, the speech was especially striking for including a specific defense of the federal entitlement programs that everyone knows must be reformed. Mr. Obama cited "Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security" by name as "the commitments we make to each other."
A citizen commenter, "William Jones," dashing off a thought in the WSJ's comment's section fact-checks the president's big talk:
Did he explain how Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, " free us to take the risks that make this country great"? Medicare you get for turning 65; no effect on risk taking. Social Security actually rewards risk aversion since benefits are based on years worked and accruals are capped above a certain income level; so better to stay the course in a middling job rather than try to strike it rich. As for Medicaid, I highly doubt there is significant overlap between failed entrepreneurs and Medicaid beneficiaries.
The Mummy's Coarse
A pyramid scheme...
If You Ladies Sign Up For Salemail From This Site, I'll Get Ugly Shit Free
For example: A bracelet that looks like it was made by a kid at camp, a fake candle in an ugly glass, or a really tacky phone cover. 
So, don't sign up to help me get free shit; sign up because they have brand-new, quality-looking leather purses that are wildly cheap (like for $20 or $39) and you might see one you like.
Here's the link: http://www.23rd.com/?ruid=21789
Frozen Paris
Photo of the Tuileries by Eric Tenin -- used with permission.
Cops Nab 5-Year-Old For Being Too Poor To Afford The Right Color Shoes
No, really, not a case out of The Onion. I should come up with a macro for that -- "not a case out of The Onion" -- because civil liberties violations, even of small children, of the most wildly absurd kind, are becoming so frequent that I get tired of typing that.
This one, via @radleybalko, is from Mississippi. From Yahoo News:
In Mississippi, if kindergarteners violates the dress code or act out in class, they may end up in the back of a police car.A story about one five-year-old particularly stands out. The little boy was required to wear black shoes to school. Because he didn't have black shoes, his mom used a marker to cover up his white and red sneakers. A bit of red and white were still noticeable, so the child was taken home by the cops.
The child was escorted out of school so he and his mother would be taught a lesson.
What, that it's criminal to be poor?
Unsustainable: The Debt Up 60 Percent Since Obama Took Office
"Unsustainable" is the song (to the tune of "Unforgettable") that anybody who can add, subtract, and understand how financial debacle brings down nations should be singing.
Apparently, rudimentary math and the simplest knowledge of world history are beyond the scope of our rock star president and his aides (as well as the losers we elect to the Senate and House).
Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in USA today about how we can't go about increasing the debt by 60 percent every four years:
President Obama has what Politico is calling a debt problem: "The staggering national debt -- up about 60% from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 -- is the single biggest blemish on Obama's record, even if the rapid descent into red began under President George W. Bush. Obama has long emphasized Bush's role in digging the immense hole. But he owns it now."...So does that mean that the ballooning debt is all Obama's fault? No. Most of those spending bills got Republican votes, too. But it does mean that, as Politico notes, Obama now owns the 60% increase in the debt that has occurred on his watch, and can no longer credibly blame Bush (under whom plenty of Democrats voted for spending bills).
Economist Herbert Stein observed that something that can't go on forever, won't. The United States can't go on forever increasing its debt by 60% every four years. Therefore, it won't. The only question is how things will stop -- smoothly or catastrophically.
As we head into the next debt-ceiling debate, it's worth considering these words from a patriotic senator concerned with America's future:
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . . It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. ... Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit."The senator? Sen. Barack Obama, in 2006.
I wish that guy was President now.
That makes a few of us.
Doesn't Pinterest Me, Thanks -- And Don't Message Me On Facebook!
Feel free to speculate: Why would someone message me on Facebook and ask me to join Pinterest?
Is this some auto email that goes out to irritate everyone in their address book on FB?
Do you think this person thought I had never heard of Pinterest and was looking for one more way to have my day eaten online?
I'm sincere in asking this. I'm going to revise the Internet chapter of the book I'm completing now and I will include this sort of thing.
P.S. I HATE getting FB messages. Their message system is slow and I have a widely available public email address -- as many columnists and bloggers do. There, I can log mail and answer it fast. Which is important to me because I'd like to spend more time living and less time waiting for FB's annoyingly slow messages to come up.
I was polite to the person who sent this to me, telling him advice requests are "always welcomed" at adviceamy at AOL dot com, but PLEASE: NO FACEBOOK MESSAGES!
These days, I try to be careful about not messaging people unnecessarily. We're all deluged.
On a related note: What is it that makes people feel that they can just throw up long posts about their political beliefs or pet causes on near-strangers' walls? I just deleted one of these. I do this with some frequency, asking the person politely to refrain from doing that in the future. Posts that people are sure relate to me are okay -- and shares of my column from papers are always appreciated.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I just post links to posts here on Facebook -- I do not post pictures of my underwear, details about my boyfriend, or pictures of my food or coffee. (Christopher Buckley posts pictures of his food, but he's a gourmet cook, so that's different.)
Flying Is A Right, Not A Privilege
Sommer Gentry posts at TSANewsBlog:
It's become a cliché among those who support the TSA's unprecedented intrusions into and under the clothing of innocent travelers: "Flying is a privilege, not a right."This cliché is contradicted by numerous court rulings. In Kent v. Dulles (357 US 116), the Supreme Court wrote these words, which appear three times in the decision:
The right to travel is a part of the 'liberty' of which a citizen cannot be deprived without the due process of law of the Fifth Amendment.
The cliché is also contradicted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration, written in the hope of preventing the Holocaust's horrors from ever happening again, states in Article 13 that "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Current U.S. Code addresses air travel specifically. In 49 U.S.C. § 40103, "Sovereignty and use of airspace," the Code specifies that "A citizen of the United States has a public right of transit through the navigable airspace."
Anyone who trots out the tired catchphrase suggesting that flying is a privilege should remember the history of the distinction between privileges and rights. While reading "When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield," I came across a passage describing the genesis of the American Revolution:
It was a question of privileges versus rights. The language of rights was new, and it was important that the Parliament understand it. The first colonists had believed that liberty lay in the privileges that royal grants, charters, and other documents conferred . . . A settler could claim certain so-called liberties - the right to follow a trade or vote in an election - as a privilege granted by law or custom . . . But every privilege could be rescinded by the same power that granted it. Even ownership of land in the colonies could be revoked, for the privilege of private property in the king's American domains was not absolute. Thus, petitions to the Crown invariably referred to the colonists' 'privileges.'In quite contrary fashion, the American protestors had come to think of liberty as a natural quality of life, a right, that government could not constrain or deny. For the protestors, guarantees of fair trial before local juries, barriers to illegal searches and seizes, and private property ownership were all rights that government could not diminish, and that included taking property by taxation without the consent of the owners. In the continuing constitutional convention that would be the revolutionary era, American political theorists even began to assume that one of the foundational purposes of government was to protect rights rather than to grant and define privileges.
Our country exists because people demanded their rights, and were no longer groveling before a king begging for privileges.
Our country will not continue to exist as it as if people, in large numbers, continue to remain docile in the face of having their rights taken from them.
"Tolerance" Looks A Little Different When Muslims Are In Power
A quote from Mali from a man from the Catholic community in Mali after the church was destroyed by Muslim militants:
"They said they didn't want to harm us, but that we should all live under Islamic law."
In Iran, an American pastor is targeted for death. He says:
"I am told I will hang for my faith in Jesus."
Meanwhile, here's how they're selling a wackier, gentler idea (lie) of what jihad's really about to Americans with ads from terrorist supporting Islamic PR group, CAIR: 
As Robert Spencer posts at Jihadwatch:
As Hamas-linked CAIR assures us that jihad means staying fit despite one's busy schedule, the jihad has claimed twenty-five more victims in Algeria.
New Year, New You: Storage, Organization, Cleaning Essentials
At Amazon
Especially don't miss out on this right-out-of-Pippi Longstocking item: Slipper Genie Microfiber Cleaning Slippers, Pink
And the even cuter version: Evriholder Slipper Genie for Women 6-9, with Bow (Assorted Colors)
Of course, what I'd find truly adorable is having a bunch of people wearing them to mop for me while putting on a Busby Berkeley routine.
ON EARLIER: Advice Goddess Radio, Sunday, 1:30-2:30pm PT, 4:30-5:30pm ET: Psychologist Jeremy Deans -- How To Control Your Habits Instead Of Letting Your Habits Control You
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
*Slightly different time again this week to accommodate guest from the UK.
Psychologist Jeremy Dean, founder of the popular website PsyBlog, is the author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick
We are convinced that we are the boss of us -- that we do the things we do because they make sense, because we've got goals, because we make smart choices. Often, that's far from the case. But, by understanding how habits are formed, why we develop them, and what our biases are, we can use habit-forming to our benefit and have some chance of stopping the habits holding us back.
Listen live at this link at 1-2pm Pacific, 4-5pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/20/jeremy-deans-form-good-habits-ditch-bad-make-change-stick
Don't miss last week's show with psychologist and researcher Dr. Richard Wiseman on how it is not positive thinking but positive action that is the fastest and most effective way to change. His book, just published in America, "The As If Principle."
This is not only a fascinating show, but an extremely valuable and practical one, with Wiseman laying out how this principle, well-supported by research, can easily be used to increase motivation, overcome depression, lose weight, stop smoking and even slow aging.
The research shows, for example, that you can measurably improve your mood by smiling and laughing, and that you can improve your relationship simply by acting loving. You can even cure phobias by practicing behaving, physically, as if you are not afraid -- not grimacing at a spider, for example.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/13/dr-richard-wiseman-action-not-brooding-changes-yr-life
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
DiCaprio: "I Will Fly Around The World Doing Good For The Environment"
Um, check your logic, Leo. Especially if you'll be doing it on a private jet.
Now, this was originally published in German, so it's possible he said he was going to hoof it and somebody mistranslated it, but I'm guessing "fly" isn't a word that often goes wrong in translation.
via @drudge
Imagination Now Officially Illegal
A 5-year-old was suspended from school after a remark she made about her Hello Kitty bubble gun. Rick Dandes writes in The Daily Item:
MOUNT CARMEL -- A 5-year-old kindergartner who told classmates she was going to shoot them, and then herself, with her pink bubble gun, was grilled for three hours by Mount Carmel school officials without her mother's knowledge, then suspended, a family attorney said.The girl was initially kicked out for 10 days in what the school categorized as a "terroristic threat," according to the kindergartner's mother and confirmed by the family attorney. That suspension was reduced to two days and labeled as a "threat to harm others."
...According to Robin Ficker, of Bethesda, Md., the parents' lawyer, the kindergartner was playing with two friends and spoke about her Hello Kitty Bubble Gun, which shoots bubbles.
Ficker said the girl mentioned that she was going to shoot one of her friends and then herself with the bubble gun, so that they could all be together. Then, she was going to shoot herself again when she got home.
"This logic, which was not said in malice, came from the mind of this beautiful 5-year-old child who was playing with her friends, whom she hugs every day," Ficker said.
Someone at the school became aware of the conversation and words used, Ficker said, "because the next day, this student was questioned by people at school and suspended."
via @arrington
Pretend Safety: The FDA's Costly New Rules That Won't Make Our Food Safer
Baylen Linnekin writes at reason of new "food safety" rules the FDA is imposing that will cost small farms about $13K a year and big farms about $30K, with varying fees for other food producers:
But will the proposed rules make America's food supply--already quite safe and getting safer thanks to conscientious farmers, producers, and sellers of all sizes, vigilant watchdog groups, and eagle-eyed food-safety lawyers--any safer?Before its passage, the FSMA had its predictable supporters in big business, academia, public health, the media, and government.
Another camp--one in which I was a charter member--argued against adopting the rules because they were likely to be costly and ineffective.
For examaple, in a Northeastern University Law Journal article published last year, "The Food Safety Fallacy," I argued that the FSMA would increase the FDA's power and budget but questioned whether the new law would have any impact on food safety.
Now that I've seen the key rules the agency has proposed to implement the FSMA, the facts appear to support my contention. How can I be so confident?
In pushing for passage of the law, the FDA and its supporters billed the law as a necessary solution to a problem of great magnitude.
Indeed, some 48 million Americans suffer from some form of foodborne illness each year--a figure the FDA cites at several of its FSMA web pages.
The agency claims the FSMA will "better protect public health by strengthening the food safety system" and helping to eliminate the "largely preventable" problem of foodborne illnesses.
But if we can largely prevent foodborne illness, we won't have the new FSMA regulations to thank. In truth, the law's real impact on food safety will be minimal.
The FSMA would permit the FDA to hire about 2,000 new food-safety inspectors in order to increase the frequency of food-safety inspections. Specifically, the proposed rules would require that "[a]ll high-risk domestic facilities must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years, thereafter." Given that the FSMA rules are just now open to public comment and won't be final for another year or two, this translates into a likely total of exactly two inspections of what the FDA refers to as the most "high-risk domestic facilities" over the next decade.
How's that for impact?
Obamacare Killing Professor Jobs Along With Private-Sector Ones
No, not those of the tenured bigwigs but the little guys -- adjunct instructors. Their hours are being cut to avoid insurance rules in that wonderful bill that our legislative morons famously said they had to pass so they could figure out what was in it.
I wonder how many of those adjunct instructors are regretting their vote for Obama about now?
From the WSJ, Mark Peters and Douglas Belkin write:
The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees who work 30 hours a week or more starting in 2014, or face a penalty. The mandate is a particular challenge for colleges and universities, which increasingly rely on adjuncts to help keep costs down as states have scaled back funding for higher education.A handful of schools, including Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania and Youngstown State University in Ohio, have curbed the number of classes that adjuncts can teach in the current spring semester to limit the schools' exposure to the health-insurance requirement. Others are assessing whether to do so, or to begin offering health care to some adjuncts.
In Ohio, instructor Robert Balla faces a new cap on the number of hours he can teach at Stark State College. In a Dec. 6 letter, the North Canton school told him that "in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act...employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week."
Mr. Balla, a 41-year-old father of two, had taught seven English composition classes last semester, split between Stark State and two other area schools. This semester, his course load at Stark State is down to one instead of two as a result of the school's new limit on hours, cutting his salary by about a total of $2,000.
Enlarge Image
Stark State's move came as a blow to Mr. Balla, who said he earns about $40,000 a year and cannot afford health insurance.
"I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law," Mr. Balla said. "In education, we're working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example."
Mr. Ball, meet fiscal reality -- a poor partner for the dreamings of those in government that others will have their way paid by the rest of us.
Large employers in the private sector also are examining the cost of insuring more employees. Some companies, particularly restaurant operators, have been moving to cut hours to reduce the number of workers to whom they would be required to offer health insurance. Others are preparing to expand health-benefit offerings to more such employees.The Department of Health and Human Services doesn't expect the law will have a substantial effect on employment, citing the experience of Massachusetts, which has a similar requirement on the state level, as well as a Congressional Budget Office report on the Affordable Care Act.
Of course it doesn't predict it -- that would take sense. And as for it not having a "substantial" effect, I'm sure that's a great comfort to all the people whose jobs it does cut back.
Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
Overheard at cafe, woman advising a guy about his business idea, "You can get chefs for free."
How To Get People To Quit Smoking (Cigarettes Bought In NY State, That Is)
Jazz Shaw blogs at Hot Air about what happens when you enact a sin tax -- with 60.9% of all cigarettes in NY going untaxed by that state.
Apparently, many New York residents buy their smokes in New Hampshire, a state that, in 2011, cut its tax rate on a pack of smokes by 10 cents to $1.68.
The idiots in Los Angeles who voted in a half-cent sales tax increase essentially voted that the building trades would shift their business from Los Angeles to Pasadena. The measure to force porn actors to wear condoms is being fought in court, so the porn business has yet to pick up and move to Vegas.
via @EdMorrissey
H&R Blocked! Big Government, Big Tax Prep Bullies Squashed By IJ
The fantastic Institute for Justice won an important victory -- with a federal judge barring the IRS from imposing a bunch of new regulations, including a competency exam, on thousands of mom 'n' pop and other non-corporate tax preparers. From the WaPo:
Since 2011, in response to what it says has been a growing problem of poorly done returns, the IRS has sought to impose a series of new regulations on tax preparers. That included a requirement to pass a qualifying exam, paying an annual application fee, and taking 15 hours annually of continuing-education courses.Attorneys and certified public accountants would have been exempt from the regulations.
The Institute for Justice argued that the IRS lacked the statutory authority to impose the regulations and said they would put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop tax preparers out of business, because the regulations were onerous and create a competitive disadvantage to the attorneys and CPAs who were exempt.
The problem of "poorly done" returns perhaps links back to how utterly disgustingly complicated our tax code is.
The Gap Between The Government And The People
Jay J. Hector sent me an excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
But Then It Was Too Late"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
..."...You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. 'One had no time to think. There was so much going on.'"
"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your 'little men,' your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had.
Race Coarse
He or she who posts the most links...well, that's not making it, but it's 5:54 am as I'm posting this and I am semi-conscious. Please accept that as my excuse.
TSA's Actions Are Ethically Indefensible: Lisa Simeone On Pre-Check And More
Lisa articulates it well in this Huff Post segment -- noting how civil liberties are taken from us, not by some dark knight all at once, but in many small steps:
Your Tax Dollars At Waste: TSA Finally Junks Rapiscan Scanners
Lisa Simeone blogs at TSANewsBlog:
As we reported here on September 3, 2012, the TSA last year started quietly removing the radiation-emitting backscatter (x-ray) scanners from airports and replacing them with millimeter wave scanners.This news was kept quiet, of course, only until the press found out about it. Even then, media reports often got the story wrong, implying, or stating outright as this Bloomberg story does, that all "naked-image scanners" are being removed, which is not true. Scanners will still be used at airports, only they will be millimeter wave scanners (also untested), with a generic outline of the body, not backscatter scanners.
While the TSA at first tried to palm off the backscatter scanners onto smaller airports (don't you know that big-city slickers are more important than small-town peons?), it later became known that the agency was collecting the clunkers in a warehouse. Hey, your tax dollars at work.
And still the story continued. One of the TSA's favorite contractors, Rapiscan, was accused of falsifying its scanner data. Now it appears that the TSA can no longer pretend that Rapiscan's machines are viable and will junk all of them. The claim is that the removal of the backscatter scanners has everything to do with their lack of "privacy-enhancing software" and nothing to do with the possibly falsified safety data.
Yet even while the agency is getting rid of one set of machines, it's busy buying others.
If you're still not familiar with the two different types of scanners, you might think that a millimeter wave (MMW) scanner is a machine that magically "protects your privacy." And that's the story the TSA is pushing.
In fact, as we've reported umpteen times, the MMW scanners have a 54% false positive rate. They alarm on seams. On pleats. On sweat. That means that even though you go through a scanner, you can still be hauled aside for a grope.
And the upshot -- on the scanners and the compliant American sheep, who are all too-polite as their rights are yanked from them:
Regardless, scanners aren't leaving U.S. airports. Compliant passengers are still stepping into them and raising their arms in a pose of surrender.
Bering In Mind: Viagra And Honesty
Psychologist Jesse Bering wrote:
Actually, serious ethics question here: Should we consider it cheating for a man to take Viagra as a "performance-enhancer"? Is he obligated to tell his partner?
Jesse's book: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human
Lance Armstrong: Why Give It Up Now?
It seemed odd to me that Lance Armstrong was suddenly willing to spill about doping; then again, I don't follow cycling (or really any sports).
Here's USA Today on Armstrong's Oprah spew. LA Times. Business Insider, with the video.
In the WSJ, there's an article by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell, "Behind Lance Armstrong's Decision to Talk." This bit makes it sound like he was motivated by arrogance:
Last month, Lance Armstrong boarded a plane for Denver to do something several of his lawyers had advised against: sitting down for a private conversation with the head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.Travis Tygart had given the star cyclist no reason to believe that USADA would soften the lifetime ban from elite competition for what the agency called the "most sophisticated doping program on the planet." But Mr. Armstrong hoped he could change that.
At the meeting near the Denver airport, Mr. Armstrong talked openly about doping, arguing that cheating was rampant in all pro sports, including the National Football League, according to someone familiar with the meeting. He complained that he was being singled out for punishment. As the discussion wound down without Mr. Tygart budging, the seven-time Tour de France winner seemed ready to walk out.
"You don't hold the keys to my redemption," he said, according to the person familiar with the meeting. "There's one person who holds the keys to my redemption," he went on, pointing at himself, "and that's me."
This week, Mr. Armstrong is launching a public campaign to restore his image. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey taped Monday and scheduled for broadcast Thursday, Mr. Armstrong admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs.
This rehabs his image how? Before, I think there was a sense something fishy might have gone on; now it's definite.
Would people really forgive a guy who cheated his way to Olympic bronze and lied and lied and lied and then some? How far does our forgiveness go?
And does he seem reformed to you or just like he wants a shot at a new sport?
And finally, what about the argument that everybody in sports is doping?
And then, a question about all of it: Why is doping wrong? Is doping wrong?
Related -- from reason's Jacob Sullum: "Should Steroid Use Exclude Players From the Baseball Hall of Fame?" (More on the subject from other reason writers, including baseball psycho Matt Welch, at the bottom of the page at the link.)
The Simplest Math On Birth Control
From a tweet:
@GrandadJFreeman
$2.75 Trojans or $19.99 Huggies? You make the decision.
I am not a social conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I am for gay marriage, legalizing prostitution and drugs.
As a self-employed writer, I have also paid for my own healthcare every month, out of my own pocket, since I joined an HMO in my 20s. A major mistake (of countless mistakes) of Obamacare is not untying health care from the workplace.
This leaves the problem of having your employer mucked up in what your health care will be. Although I am an atheist, as a civil libertarian as well, I support religious freedom, and the freedom to not do things your religion is against (within reason -- I don't think you should get to have some pork barbeque restaurant stop serving pork because it's forbidden in your particular superstition system).
What I don't understand is why anyone would think it's okay and right to force Catholic employers to fund birth control. Also, birth control is not very expensive, and also, if you can't afford it, you can go to Planned Parenthood and get it cheaper or maybe even free.
And organizations and people who support the use of birth control could also do that amazing thing and fund birth control for poor women.
Of course, along with birth control, there needs to be a values system of not having babies out of wedlock.
I laugh, looking back at how my mother, a number of times in my teen years, gingerly told me it was best not to have premarital sex. Premarital babies? Not even in the universe of possibility.
"Who Are They All Talking To?"
That's a comment crime novelist Elmore Leonard
And a tweet by my boyfriend from Elmore's Twitter account, which he runs:
@elmoreleonard
Elmore thinks the smartphone is dumb. "Why is communication so important to everybody now? Everybody making calls you'd never make before."
The Imperial Prosecutor: Too Much Power, Too Many Laws, Everything Is Criminal
Radley Balko writes at the Huff Po on The Power Of The Prosecutor. An excerpt:
We have too many laws.There have been a number of projects that attempted to count the total number of federal criminal laws. They usually give up. The federal criminal code is just too complex, too convoluted, and too weighted down with duplications, overlapping laws, and other complications to come to a definite number. But by most estimates, there are at least 4,000 separate criminal laws at the federal level, with another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. Just this year 400 new federal laws took effect, as did 29,000 new state laws. The civil libertarian and defense attorney Harvey Silverglate has argued that most Americans now unknowingly now commit about three felonies per day.
But you, citizen, are expected to know and comply with all of these laws. That isn't possible, of course. It would probably take you most of the year to understand them all, at which point you'd have the next year's batch of new laws to learn. You'd probably also need to hire a team of attorneys to help you translate the laws into terms you can understand. After the McCain-Feingold legislation passed in 2003, for example, both parties held weekly, three-hour classes just to educate members of Congress on how to comply with the bill they had just passed. This is a bill they wrote that applied to themselves, and they still had to bring in high-paid lawyers explain to them how not to break it.
Most of us don't have that option. And it's absurd that someone should have to hire an attorney or tax accountant merely to pay their taxes, run a business, run for office, or start a political organization without fear of getting hit with exorbitant fines, or going to jail.
Worse, while we citizens can go to prison for unwittingly breaking laws of which we weren't aware, prosecutors and law enforcement officers who wrongly arrest, charge, and try citizens based on a misunderstanding of the law generally face no sanction or repercussions. Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, a police officer who illegally arrests someone because he wasn't aware of the law can only be held liable if the law in question was "clearly established" at the time he violated it. Prosecutors are protected by absolute immunity, which basically shields them from liability no matter how egregious their mistakes.
We need to move away from the idea that every act we find immoral, repugnant, or unsavory needs to be criminalized. Every new criminal law gives prosecutors more power. Once we have so many laws that it's likely we're all breaking at least one of them, the prosecutor's job is no longer about enforcing the laws, but about choosing which laws to enforce. It's then a short slide to the next step: Choosing what people need to be made into criminals, then simply picking the laws necessary to make that happen.
Related: Owen Kerr at Volokh on the Aaron Swartz case. (Via @WalterOlson.)
Am I Krazy (Glue)? Do-It-Yourself Wound-Closing
Wednesday morning, I sliced my thumb open on the razor edge of a saran wrap box as I was rushing to put something away. The cut was pretty long and not exactly shallow. I worried that I might need stitches, but then I remembered something about Virginia Postrel cutting her thumb, and somebody's suggestion that she close it with Krazy Glue.
I looked it up. And that's what I did. Seems to have worked. Here's blogger Terrierman on the details of the SuperGlue solution (Krazy, Super...I'm guessing they work just as well):
Dog men, construction workers, and midwives know that common off-the-shelf SuperGlue works well to close most small flesh wounds.Superglue was first used by battle-field trauma surgeons in Vietnam to glue the edges of lacerated livers together (ever try to SEW a liver together?), and to stop bleeding in chest wounds that other wise could not be staunched.
Since then, it's been used in hospitals, dental offices and veterinary clinics around the world, and is now so common as to be unremarkable, though most just-plain-folks don't know about it.
...To begin with, flush all dirt and grime out of the wound with fresh water in a squeeze bottle. Once the wound is clean and moist, pull or push the wound closed while you "spot weld" the edges together with SuperGlue. You do not want to put the glue inside the wound -- you are closing up the top, not putting in deep sutures. Repeat your application of glue between the spot welds until the entire thing is closed up.
I squeezed some on a piece of paper, held the wound together, and touched my finger to the glue to cover the area. So far, seems to have worked!
Muslims Enforcing Sharia On The Streets Of London
Here's a screen-grab:
They're telling people they can't be in a "Muslim area" of London with alcohol or if they aren't dressed according to Islam:
Muslims have a problem with "inappropriately dressed" women -- i.e., women who are dressed in a way that doesn't correspond to the sick Sharia laws:
News story below:
Scary and disgusting.
Vulgarian Rhapsody
All the off-topickery you can post...
Love Note
I think I know which "neighbors" dumped this board in front of my garage door, but I can't be sure, so I left a prominently placed shaming note hoping they'd see it. Always satisfying! 
UPDATE: Either there are old, termite-eaten wood rustlers in the neighborhood or my note worked. Just saw my (nice) neighbor, and she said her son laughed at the note in the morning. ("That's so Amy!" he said.) And then, when they came home later in the day, the board was gone.
Yay! Positive shaming!
Paper, Scissors, Gun
Shaun Randall interviews Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America's Gun
"I don't think there is a bill you can pass that will stop the next schizophrenic, self-hating, evil, 20-year-old misfit who has access to guns today and will have access to guns tomorrow, no matter what's enacted in Washington."
TSA Thug Raymond D. Evans Thinks He Can Violate Man's First Amendment Rights, Too
This video was posted anonymously on CopBlock by a man who chose to use his First Amendment rights at the airport, a behavior which often causes the rights-violating hamburger clerks doing pretend security to get testy. (Much of the transcript is pasted in below.)
The issue is the man's shirt, which I just love. It references the "Fuck the draft" case, in which the Supremes, via Justice Harlan, said that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric." (Sometimes the "wrong" words are just the right ones to get a message across.)
In the case of the TSA, polite complaints and mewlings about our constitutional rights being violated to our congressdonothings have done precisely that. So, stronger language is absolutely called for -- and it is our right, whether others are offended or not.
Note that TSA thug Evans lies about the man -- audible on the tape at around 5:35 mark -- telling a colleagues to call the cops and tell them that the man is "harassing the public"...even though the video makes it clear the man is doing nothing of the sort.
Here's most of the transcript from the CopBlock link:
Before entering the security checkpoint, I was wearing a sweatshirt over my yellow t-shirt. I removed my sweatshirt and put it in my suitcase about 30 seconds before the video starts, right before I entered the line to the screening area.[0:00] I entered the security line wearing my shirt, started filming.
[1:47] My boarding pass and ID (passport) are checked by the TSA agent before the screening area, she is polite.
[2:21] I'm asked if the back of my shirt is the same as the front, I reply that it is. I don't remember who asked and from the video it's not clear.
Between [2:21] and [4:13], I quietly try to make my way to one of the screening lines. I am doing nothing but waiting in line and holding up my phone (recording).
[4:13] TSA agent that confronted me appears
[4:17] TSA agent tells me that my shirt is "offensive" and that I should take it off.
[4:18] I decline, "No, I'm not required to."
[4:18] TSA agent makes a lunge for my camera.
[4:26] TSA agent tells me I "don't have a right to take pictures."
[4:28] TSA agent tells me I don't have the right to wear an offensive shirt "like that"
[4:31] I remind the TSA agent that my right to do so is protected under the first amendment
[4:37] I request that the TSA agent call a law enforcement official
[4:39] TSA agent responds that they're "working on that"
[4:45] TSA agent "It's our right to protect [unintelligible] and we find you offensive."
[4:50] I'm OK with him having his own opinion
[4:55] TSA agent asks if I'm wearing another shirt underneath. I reply that I'm not taking my shirt off.
[5:00] TSA agent says he's going to call the Port of Seattle [Police].
[5:03] TSA agent tells me to turn my camera off. I decline. I reiterate that I have the legal right to record, and that I have a copy of TSA recording policy in my pocket.
[5:23] TSA agent 2 is now visible.
[5:22] TSA agent is speaking into his radio, requests that "Eric" call the Port of Seattle Police, and ask them to come down to the "south checkpoint" (checkpoint 2) Transcription follows:
"I have a passenger in the line here with very offensive language on his shirt, also taking photographs and uh, basically just being uh, harassing the rest of the public here.
[...]
Yeah, it's uh, 4 or 5, 5 6, ... and uh, his shirt is uh, graphic uh, uhh, language and uh, personally I find it offensive and so does everybody else in this area and so I want to bring in bring in uh, bring in the police officers so they can straighten him out.
[...]
Uh, no he's just uh, being a, uh, he's actually even recording and photographing everything as he comes through line and his t-shirt says first amendment uh, F-K TSA security theater, uh, Cohen v. California, whatever versus California.
[Other voice on radio unintelligible]
Uh, he's uh, somewhat. Yeah, Kindall here is aware of it, he's actually watching but I took it upon myself to intercept this guy because of his uh, his shirt and the language. OK, 'preciate. Thank you. OK, thank you.
[7:23] [Radio done] TSA agent says "OK I'm just going to stay with you until they arrive." I agree and comply.
[7:28] TSA agent wonders if he should move me through the line to the secure area.
[7:48] TSA agent explains that the quicker he moves me through the security line, the quicker he can arrest me
[7:49] TSA agent threatens to arrest me, thereby impersonating a law enforcement officer (a crime):
Me: You are not a law enforcement officer, sir, you personally cannot arrest me."
Him: Oh, but I am a federal officer and I do have enough authority in here-
Me: You do not have the authority to arrest me.
Me: I know the law.
Him: (sarcastically) Oh, are you a lawyer?
Me: I am not a lawyer but I know my rights.
Him: (sarcastically) Oh.
[8:11] TSA agent says "If you try to take photographs of anything or of our equipment or any imagers or whatever, then I will stop you." I reply, "Well, you don't have the legal authority to do that."
[8:32] TSA agent confirms that the back of my shirt is the same as the front.
[8:40] TSA agent decides to move me through the security line.
[9:00] TSA agent is indecisive about moving me through the line so I politely wait.
[9:28] TSA agent leaves, leaves me with TSA agent 2
[9:47] TSA agent 2 starts blocking my camera with his hand I try to explain that he legally cannot do that, to no avail
[9:57] TSA agent 2 is visible
[10:37] TSA agent 3 appears (camera is too low to see his face), but this agent is merely curious to know my name and is not confrontational. I politely decline to identify myself, and he is understanding and leaves me alone.
[12:24] I'm still detained, waiting for the Port of Seattle police to arrive, TSA agent 2′s face is briefly visible in the video
[13:32] I say "There they are" to the camera, meaning I can see the Port of Seattle police approaching the security checkpoint (not visible in the video yet)
[13:39] I'm greeted by the Port of Seattle Police
[13:44] Port of Seattle police officer speaks to me and is visible in the video
[13:58] Officer sees that I am recording, and asks if I am going to post the video to the internet. I explain that the video is streaming live to the internet and that I cannot delete the video from my phone.
[14:16] I state my intention to fully comply with the TSA screening process. The officer asks that I state to the camera that I will comply with the TSA screening process, I do so.
[14:47] The officer asks that I stop recording.
[14:49] I decline to the officer.
[14:58] The officer states he does not know TSA procedure on filming.
[15:00] I state that I have TSA recording policy in my pocket.
[15:14] I hand the printout of TSA policy to TSA agent, which he reads.
[15:34] TSA agent claims that "my purpose is disruptive."
[15:36] I disagree.
[15:38] TSA agent berates me and expresses his distaste for the content of my shirt. He's permitted to his opinion.
[15:56] TSA agent tells me that he will make sure that I take off my shirt before I go into the checkpoint. I remind him that that's where he starts violating my rights.
[16:00] Port of Seattle police is seen in the background photographing/filming me. This is their right and I do not mind.
[16:04] I give TSA agent a quick lesson on the first amendment.
[16:16] TSA agent claims I am causing a disturbance by "just being here."
[16:19] I point out that the "disturbance" only started when TSA agent initially confronted me. During this time TSA agent requests my boarding pass. I comply.
[16:47] TSA agent says "We'll let the airline handle it" after determining that I am flying Delta.
[16:56] I inform to the TSA agent that I never intended to wear my shirt on the aircraft (which is true, airlines are private companies and I did not intend to wear a potentially offensive shirt on board)
[17:06] I explain that there is a difference between the checkpoint being public property and the airplanes (owned by the airlines) being private property.
[17:12] TSA agent calls me a smartass.
[17:30] I'm still detained before the security checkpoint. 4 Port of Seattle police officers are conferring near the initial security line.
[18:07] TSA agent claims he has the right to block my camera and starts doing so
[18:12] I cite Fordyce v City of Seattle, (9th circuit, 1995) and am ignored
[18:45] I state TSA agent's name to the camera, "Raymond D Evans" (which is what was displayed on his badge, but not legible in the video)
[18:55] TSA agent asks to see my driver's license. I remind the TSA agent that I have already given him my ID and I will not provide him a second form of identification. TSA agent asks a second time, I still decline.
[19:35] TSA agent asks if he can touch my bags so as to move them through the screening area. I say that I would prefer to escort my belongings myself if possible. TSA agent agrees.
[19:46] Speaking to someone off-camera, TSA agent refers to me as "ignorant person."
I would say he's anything but. The TSA thugs, on the other hand, show that they know nothing of the Constitution; they just know they are petty men and women suddenly given power they never would have had in any other job to grope and intimidate their fellow Americans from every walk of life.
via Lisa Simeone, @TSANewsBlog
What If Black Men Were Murdered At The Same Rate As Everyone Else?
Interesting post by Ari Armstrong at TOSBlog, "Startling Homicide Statistics Among Blacks (and The Cause)":
The blogger Publius makes an extraordinary claim: If in America "black men [were] murdered at the same rate as everyone else, the overall [homicide] rate would drop to 1.9 out of 100,000 population. That would give the United States the 147th highest murder rate in the world." This raises two questions: Is that true, and, if so, what does it mean?...Do Publius's claims about the murder rate pan out? The Census Bureau lists a U.S. population of 311,591,917 for 2011. The number of homicides reported by the CDC, 15,953, divided by the total population, yields the rate of 5.1 per 100,000. If we assume that the FBI's ratio holds for the larger number of homicides reported by the CDC, and take the number of non-black homicides to non-black population, we get 7,980 divided by 270,773,376, or 2.9 per 100,000 population. I'm not sure how Publius calculated his figures for the murder rate, but they seem to be low. And even the rate of 2.9 per 100,000--which is considerably below the national rate--is above that of Canada and western-European nations.
The startling number is that of black homicide victims. Even taking the FBI's lower figures, the number of black victims (6,329) divided by the total U.S. black population (40,818,541), yields a murder rate of 15.5 per 100,000 population. And if we assume that the FBI's ratio holds for the larger number of homicides reported by the CDC, that indicates the murder rate among blacks is 7,973 divided by 40,818,541, or 19.5 per 100,000 population. That is horrific (although still below the murder rates in the likes of Mexico, Brazil, and Uganda).
So what's the source of the problem? As Publius notes, the problem is not among the black population as a whole; rather, it is due to a "small sub-culture that glorifies violence and lives and dies by the gun." It is the gang culture, characterized by widespread criminality, tribalistic warfare, through-the-roof unemployment, extremely high rates of out-of-wedlock births (72.1 percent among blacks in 2010), widespread welfare dependency, and nihilistic art typified by "gangster rap."
Related, from the WSJ: "Overall, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African-American." Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields write:
People who dismiss high homicide rates in poor, mostly black neighborhoods as someone else's problem ignore the cost to society, from police efforts to social services for victims' families, said Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank that conducts research on criminal justice initiatives. His group calculated the national cost for gun homicides alone in 2010 was more than $43 billion. That encompasses victim costs like lost productivity and medical care, as well as costs for police, prosecution, courts and prison. It also includes costs to the offender's family.A 2009 study by Iowa State analyzing other data estimated that a single murder runs up more than $17 million in costs to the police, courts, prisons, social services and to the families of victims and suspects.
"We can and must find a way to stop the killing," New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in May as he announced a new strategy there to combat homicides. It takes a "public health" approach, emphasizing prevention of murder through education, community policing and targeting possible offenders.
You're going to have to target girls who have daddyless multiple children out of wedlock and the culture that enables it.
(Anybody want to suggest gun control is the answer? Feel free to also suggest how we would control all those guns making their way into the hood.)
A comment from Trevor Sutherland at the WSJ:
While I am a Democrat, I do have some fiscally conservative beliefs. However I am far from social conservative. That said, I have come to the belief that there is a very good chance that the "War on Poverty", which began before I was born, has done far more harm than good.In fact, I think there are many examples that I have observed in my life where well-meaning social programs fail miserably to accomplish their stated goals, and what's worse, have unintended effects that are even more destructive that the problem the program was trying to fix.
Up unitl the 1960s, black American families had marriage rates that very closely mirrored that of white Americans'. Even though poor, most blacks boys before 1960 never dared go against their fathers' wishes (or the father figure in the neighborhood). Now, however in the past 40 years that has gone completely off the rails. Most black boys grow up with ZERO guidance and love from an older, wiser male.
Even the current white out of wedlock rate is over 30% and rising steadily---will the same results be seen when 70% of little white boys grow up with ZERO father involvement??
There are a LOT more white men in this country than black men.....if the problems of the latter become the problems of the former we are going to be in a world of hurt...
Circus Offtopicus
There will be midgets...
Big Ugly Government: More On Aaron Swartz Case And Why Obama Is George Bush (And Then Some) With A Tan
For those of you Obama voters who were behind him because you believed he was a shining light of civil liberties (unlike George Bush), have you admitted that your faith in him was misplaced? That he's just another politician, with all the grasping, cronyism, and selling out that comes with that?
Jonathan Turley blogs about Aaron Swartz and what he calls the Obama Admin's "war on public access to information":
In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, for its charging of 10 cents a page for documents. I agreed with Swartz about this charge as being a barrier to public access to our courts and important cases. He argued correctly that there should be free access. He co-founded Demand Progress to seek online access and fought for social reforms. The federal government, at the behest of industry groups, shutdown his free library program.In 2011, Swartz took on JSTOR, the academic repository of papers and research. It is a subscription based service. He broke into the computer system at MIT through a utility closet using a laptop and a false identity. He downloaded 4.8 million documents. Notably, however, MIT chose not to pursue charges -- to its credit. For many years, academics argued that such material should be free to the public as a matter of principle. Two days before Swartz's death, MIT releases all documents publicly free of charge.
However, despite MIT's position that it did not want to bring charges, Carmen M. Ortiz saw her chance. Ortiz is the United States Attorney for Massachusetts and a graduate of our law school who spoke recently at our commencement. Industry groups and lobbyists have long gotten what they wanted from Obama on criminalizing trademark and copyright violations. States have shown the same capture by industry groups. Swartz was a prime target as an advocate of public access and the Obama Administration threw everything that they had at him.
There is no question that Swartz crossed the line and broke into the system. However, given MIT's position against charging Swartz, it would seem a case for prosecutorial discretion or a deal with Swartz. After all, students commit such acts regularly (though certainly not to the size of this download) without charges. Ortiz, however, sought decades in jail and ruinous fines to the great pleasure of the copyright hawks that run throughout the Administration. To the Administration, Swartz was just another felon who needed to be jailed for decades for his crime.
Hey, Don't Be Such A Prissybutt
Odd, straining, and semi-incoherent op-ed by author Karen Stabiner in the LA Times about how horrible it is that people greet people with "Hey":
"Hey" can sound dismissive; in the long ago, it's what people yelled to get the attention of someone they didn't know or care to know, as in, "Hey, you." I remember an adult, possibly my fourth-grade teacher, muttering, "Straw is cheaper and grass is for nothing" when a child said, "Hey." It was a sloppy place holder. Along with its descendants -- "like" and "y'know," or the dread combo, "like y'know" -- it indicated a lazy mind.That's a lot of freight for a little word to have to carry, and I don't mean to give it too hard a time. I'd just like to suggest that we hesitate before we turn our backs on the salutational past and rush blindly off the linguistic cliff, like so many texting lemmings.
To its credit, "hey" aspires to be democracy in action, the same short syllable for everyone regardless of status or class, which has a certain egalitarian appeal; it makes sense if, like me, you're a devout believer in earned, not presumed, respect. A partisan could even argue that we should all start at "hey" and then win the right to be called "sir" or "madam," "dean" or "doctor."
Still, I worry about deeper meaning. There's a prevalent disdain for all authority these days, which seems healthy when we're talking about Congress' behavior but not so smart when the topic is prohibiting the use of cellphones while driving. We need to be able to distinguish, to maintain standards with case-specific vocabulary, and "hey" inadvertently wipes out judgment -- what feels like fair is really just vague.
Is this the most ridiculous thing you've read in recent memory?
I like people who are warm and friendly, and whatever they say to greet me, if it's warm and friendly, that's fine by me.
Even An Elderly, Grieving Husband Is A Potential Drug Criminal
Radley Balko writes at Huff Post about how utterly out of hand the paranoia has become that someone will pop a pill they were not prescribed and get high. He quotes this story from Utah, by Dennis Romboy, in the Deseret News:
A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.Barbara Alice Mahaffey died of colon cancer in her bedroom last May. Ben D. Mahaffey, 80, said he was distraught and trying to make sure his wife's body would be taken to the funeral home with dignity, when he says officers insisted he help them look for the drugs.
"I was holding her hand saying goodbye when all the intrusion happened," he told the Deseret News.
Barbara Mahaffey died at 12:35 a.m. with Mahaffey, a Navy medic in the Korean War, and his friend, an EMT, at her side. In addition to police, a mortician and a hospice worker arrived at the home about 12:45 a.m., Mahaffey said. He said he doesn't know how police came to be there.
"I was indignant to think you can't even have a private moment. All these people were there and they're not concerned about her or me. They're concerned about the damn drugs. Isn't that something?" Mahaffey said.
Mahaffey said he was treated as if he were going to sell the painkillers, which included OxyContin, oxycodone and morphine, on the street.
Balko puts it in perspective:
Note the utter lack of compassion, the inability to see a grieving husband as anything other than a potential drug dealer. Note the priorities on display. The most important thing the cops had to do that day was get those drugs out of that house. Preventing someone from using Barbara Mahaffey's pills to get high, or preventing Ben Mahaffey from--God forbid--using pain medication not prescribed to him at some point in the future, was more important than giving a widower a last moment of dignity to say goodbye to his wife of 58 years.
Related: Bloomberg practicing "legislative medicine" to keep pain pills out of the hands of people poor enough to go to public hospitals.
Islam: Pigs Are Haraam, Pedophiles Are Halal
Haraam means sinful. Halal means permissible.
In other words, pigs are prohibited and pedophiles are a-okay. (WWMD? What Would Mohammed Do?)
Joumana Haddad writes at NOW -- on "a blog about women's rights, human dignity, secularism and sexual freedom in the Arab world" -- about the pedophilia institutionalized as right and even righteous by Islam:
Islam teaches that a girl enters adulthood at the beginning of puberty (as if the onset of puberty equals maturity!), and thus becomes ready for marriage. The Islamic source materials state that prophet Mohammed (who allowed men four wives but authorized himself eleven) proposed marriage to Aisha when she was six. He assumed her silence constituted her consent. Some two to three years later, he consummated his marriage with her. He was fifty-four and she was nine.Allah, conveniently so, inspired him with verses that excuse and promote this practise. After him, numerous Muslim scholars, Sheikhs and muftis also promoted it. It is enough as an example of such abominable support to cite the horrifying words of Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the most famous Islamic clerics of the twentieth century, taken from his book Tahreer Al Wasila:
"A man is not to have sexual intercourse with his wife before she is nine years old, whether regularly or occasionally, but he can have sexual pleasure from her, whether by touching or holding her, or rubbing against her, even if she is as young as an infant. However, had he penetrated her without deflowering her, then he holds no responsibility towards her. But if a man penetrates and deflowers the infant (...), then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life."The scandalising number of child brides in the world today, girls as young as eleven or twelve, who are sold into marriages from Iran to Yemen and from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan proves that the problem is far from being solved. While in Islam there is an overwhelming focus on female chastity, and on girls' morally uncompromised manners and behaviour, the Islamic practice of 'institutionalised' paedophilia is not seen as outrageous, and it is quite normal for men to marry fourteen year old girls.
Women' hair is not to be seen, but it is ok for fathers to give away their little daughters in marriage to decadent men: After all, girls are a worthless burden, so it is best to get rid of them as soon as possible. Obviously, not all these child brides are Muslims, and I am not suggesting that Islam is the only reason for child marriage in the world. Clearly there are other economic, cultural and social issues behind it. But Islam at the very least allows, enables and even encourages the practice of child brides, since prophet Mohammed is the 'best of examples' (Uswa Hasana). Muslim child brides are also reported to be on the increase in Western countries like the UK, Germany and Canada.
If the Sharia isn't institutionalising paedophilia, then what is? It is depravity at its best! Nabokov's 'Lolita' is a benign children's story compared to these atrocities. Filthy pigs are allowed to marry little girls who are still at the age of playing with dolls.In the meantime, pigs' meat is Haram.
Go figure!
Jimmy Hoffa Is Buried Here
In a shallow grave.
With a number of off-topic links.
P.S. I have eaten at the Machus Red Fox where he disappeared.
I Think The Tiny Clams Are Singing
Photo of a Paris lunch by Emily Tarr, who also got to eat this after she took the picture.
A Louse Without A Home
"The Grooming Of Unintended Consequences," by @vodkapundit, about how bikini waxing has pretty much disappeared the poor pubic louse.
UPDATED: Or...maybe not!
Why Is It Not Worrisome Admissions Discrimination When It's Against Asians?
The notion that a college should be as mixed as a box of Crayolas is ridiculous and unfair -- especially to high-achieving Asians. Carolyn Chen writes in a December op-ed in The New York Times that if you are Asian, your chances of getting into the top colleges and universities will almost certainly be lower than if you are white:
Asian-Americans constitute 5.6 percent of the nation's population but 12 to 18 percent of the student body at Ivy League schools. But if judged on their merits -- grades, test scores, academic honors and extracurricular activities -- Asian-Americans are underrepresented at these schools. Consider that Asians make up anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the student population at top public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va., where admissions are largely based on exams and grades.In a 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to selective universities, the sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that white students were three times more likely to be admitted than Asians with the same academic record.
Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like "character," "vigor," "manliness" and "leadership" to cap Jewish enrollment. These unofficial Jewish quotas weren't lifted until the early 1960s, as the sociologist Jerome Karabel found in his 2005 history of admissions practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
In the 1920s, people asked: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Jews? Today we ask: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Asians? Yale's student population is 58 percent white and 18 percent Asian. Would it be such a calamity if those numbers were reversed?
To me, the people who need help are those who are financially disadvantaged, not those who are disadvantaged because they're not as smart and/or didn't work as hard.
Oh, and by the way, she makes this very good point:
It is noteworthy that many high-achieving kids at selective public magnet schools are children of working-class immigrants, not well-educated professionals. Surnames like Kim, Singh and Wong should not trigger special scrutiny.
via @sewellchan
The Future Of Conservatism
Libertarian mag (reason) editor-in-chief Matt Welch writes at Commentary:
Conservatives have long since taught themselves to handle with tongs any political advice from non-Republican libertarians like me. But amidst the depressing-to-some meteor shower of post-Romney headlines about how the GOP needs to "go more libertarian," I come from Planet Freedom bearing unseasonably happy tidings: You don't need to become a heroin-legalizing, amnesty-embracing, blame-America-firster in order to reassert conservatism's electoral and philosophical relevance during President Barack Obama's second term.No, the only two transformations required are re-learning a grand tradition's intellectual commitment to reducing the size and scope of government and recalibrating electoral tactics and even the basic selling proposition around the notion of playing defense, not offense.
But when given the opportunity to choose politicians who actually name and confront the main danger facing us-a government piling up commitments and expenses and debt just before the baby boomers retire and send the entitlements system crashing down-the Keynesianism-hating American electorate these past three years has mostly ignored sideshow utterances and rewarded those brave enough to take on Leviathan. Mike Lee, Scott Walker, Rand Paul: These class-of-2010 politicians might not agree with me (yet!) about deregulating reproductive decisions, narcotics intake, and the U.S.-Mexico border, but on the issue of the day they have shown up for work and given Obamanomics-weary voters a clear alternative to the never-ending bailout.
And yes, taking fiscal policy seriously also requires unblurring the distinctions between military and defense spending and coming up with a more affordable, realistic, and strategic projection of American power abroad. There is no such thing as an orderly retreat during a debt crisis.
The upshot -- and he's exactly right:
More Americans than ever think that government is trying to do too much. All conservatives need to do now is provide those people with a believable place to go.
Even Noam Chomsky Says Obama Has No Moral Center
Al Gorezeera has the interview:
Chomsky sees Obama himself as a man without a "moral centre"."If you look at his policies I think that's what they reveal. I mean there's some nice rhetoric here and there but when you look at the actual policies ... the drone assassination campaign is a perfectly good example, I mean it's just a global assassination campaign."
via @ggreenwald
Off-Topic-Land
Coarse and vulgar links and general off-topickery here!
Find Your Sole Mate
(Sorry, that's terrible, but it's a little early as I'm writing this and my inner editor is still sleeping.)
The deal: Up to 60 percent off shoes, handbags, and more -- for men, women, kids -- at Amazon
Aaron Swartz Atty: Govt's Arguments "Disingenuous And Contrived"
Blogger Patterico emailed me, having done his usual meticulous work to dissect and make sense of a complicated situation:
This post examines PACER filings submitted on Friday, the day Aaron Swartz committed suicide, and discloses evidence that the Government recently revealed which undercut some of their previous assertions in response to a motion to suppress. I don't think anyone else has yet discussed these filings. In addition, I have an exclusive interview with Swartz's attorney, who described the Government's arguments as "disingenuous and contrived." It's a piece of independent and exclusive journalism that I think adds to the conversation regarding this very sad situation.
His post is here.
More at EFF about Aaron Swartz' contributions, the case against him, and his suicide. An excerpt about the trouble he got in and why:
His passion for the written word, for open knowledge, and his flair for self-promotion, sometimes produced spectacular results, even before the events that proved to be his undoing.In 2011, Aaron used the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from the JSTOR database, allegedly changing his laptop's IP and MAC addresses when necessary to get around blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT and sneaking into a closet to get a faster connection to the MIT network. For this purported crime, Aaron was facing criminal charges with penalties up to thirty-five years in prison, most seriously for "unauthorized access" to computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If we believe the prosecutor's allegations against him, Aaron had hoped to liberate the millions of scientific and scholarly articles he had downloaded from JSTOR, releasing them so that anyone could read them, or analyze them as a single giant dataset, something Aaron had done before. While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for -- freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it -- is one that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism, and taking such an act in the physical world would, at most, have a meant he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of a political protest. Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration. This is a disparity that EFF has fought against for years. Yesterday, it had tragic consequences. Lawrence Lessig has called for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them. We agree.
EARLIER TODAY: Advice Goddess Radio, Today, 1-2pm PT, 4-5pm ET: Dr. Richard Wiseman--How Action, Not Brooding, Changes Your Feelings & Your Life
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Psychologist and researcher Dr. Richard Wiseman will be with us all the way from Britain for a not-to-be-missed show on his book, just published in America, "The As If Principle."
He will lay out the science that shows that it is not thinking yourself into new behavior that helps you change but behaving as the person you want to be. In other words, "Behave as if..."
This will not only be a fascinating show, but an extremely valuable and practical one, laying out a simple principle, well-supported by research, that can easily be used to increase motivation, overcome depression, lose weight, stop smoking and even slow aging.
The research shows, for example, that you can measurably improve your mood by smiling and laughing, and that you can improve your relationship simply by acting loving. You can even cure phobias by practicing behaving, physically, as if you are not afraid -- not grimacing at a spider, for example.
Listen live at this link at 1-2pm Pacific, 4-5pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/13/dr-richard-wiseman-action-not-brooding-changes-yr-life
Don't miss last week's show with sex therapist Dr. Brandy Engler. Dr. Engler is unique in that she opened a sex therapy practice for women -- expecting to slowly get get clients -- and quickly amassed a full list of clients: all men.
This is your chance to go inside her sessions -- to see into the erotic minds of men. And not pervos or deviants, but regular guys. Men we all know.
Beyond the men, she takes us inside the minds of the women having sex with these men -- or refusing to -- and find out why, and what it takes to balance love and eroticism in a relationship.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/07/dr-brandy-engler-inside-the-erotic-minds-of-men-women
Engler and New York Times best-selling biographer David Rensin have just published a fascinating book about her sessions and her insights, The Men on My Couch: True Stories of Sex, Love and Psychotherapy
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/07/dr-brandy-engler-inside-the-erotic-minds-of-men-women
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Silly NYT Piece On The Supposed End Of Dating And What's Probably Going On
A silly lamentation on how all the boys want to do anymore is hook up, and all they'll do is text you to come hang with their friends -- no more asking women out on dates. Alex Williams writes in the NYT:
"At 10 p.m., I hadn't heard from him," said Ms. Silver, 30, who wore her favorite skinny black jeans. Finally, at 10:30, he sent a text message. "Hey, I'm at Pub & Kitchen, want to meet up for a drink or whatever?" he wrote, before adding, "I'm here with a bunch of friends from college."Turned off, she fired back a text message, politely declining. But in retrospect, she might have adjusted her expectations. "The word 'date' should almost be stricken from the dictionary," Ms. Silver said. "Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret."
"It's one step below a date, and one step above a high-five," she added. Dinner at a romantic new bistro? Forget it. Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along. Raised in the age of so-called "hookup culture," millennials -- who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down -- are subverting the rules of courtship.
Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other "non-dates" that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.
"The new date is 'hanging out,' " said Denise Hewett, 24, an associate television producer in Manhattan, who is currently developing a show about this frustrating new romantic landscape. As one male friend recently told her: "I don't like to take girls out. I like to have them join in on what I'm doing -- going to an event, a concert."
...Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that "young people today don't know how to get out of hookup culture," Ms. Freitas said. In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. "They're wondering, 'If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say? What words would you use?' " Ms. Freitas said.
That may explain why "dates" among 20-somethings resemble college hookups, only without the dorms.
Actually, it doesn't. It explains "dates" amongst 20-somethings in New York.
University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (@matingmind) explained on his Facebook page:
Yet another NY Times writer complains that in New York, with a highly female-biased sex ratio among singles, males exert little mating effort. Reminds me what my dad said: "There are only two concepts you really need from economics: supply and demand."
And my thought on it:
The truth is, when men become ready for committed relationships (when they outgrow the hookup phase) they will act accordingly. Men who are looking to get married and have a baby will not text a woman to come hang with the gang at some bar.
Welcome To The United Welfare States Of America
The economy of free and the notion that "other people will pay!" have great allure.
Economist Veronique de Rugy writes in reason about the clamor for the Federal government to cover at least 90 percent -- and perhaps all -- of the cleanup and recovery costs from Sandy. This bellowing -- "Daaaadddy, helllp ussss!" -- came from New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey governor Chris Christie:
"This was not a New York disaster, or a New Jersey disaster or a Connecticut disaster, but a national disaster, and FEMA and the federal government should be providing help to the region to the full extent they can," Schumer declared on November 1. "I will continue to push the feds to reimburse the city and state for the full costs of repair and recovery for all aspects of the disaster."These reflexive calls for Washington to pick up the tab underscore one of the greatest shifts of power in American politics during the last four decades: the transition from state and local autonomy to federal subsidy and control. This centralization of government was made possible largely by grants-in-aid, money provided by the federal government to state and local governments or private parties. They have become the third largest category in the federal budget, trailing only Social Security and national defense.
According to the Congressional Research Service, there were 1,724 of these grants in fiscal year 2011, paying for things such as bridges, teachers, Medicaid, farm subsidies, and abstinence programs. The total cost of these federal grants was $515 billion, up 160 percent in real terms since the beginning of the 1990s and nearly 60 percent since 2000.
...Federalizing first-responder programs accentuates the public choice problem that already plagues the political process. A congressman from Wyoming has no incentive to admit that his state is not a likely terrorist target; on the contrary, that would mean turning down "free" money, which almost no successful politician ever does. By contrast, when first-responder programs are the responsibility of cities, counties, and states, legislators have an incentive to more accurately assess risk and the potential benefits from additional spending.What is true for homeland security is also true for most other federal grants to the states, including anti-poverty spending. In fact, there is growing evidence that grants ostensibly aimed at helping the poor or boosting the economy are used by lawmakers as electoral currency to gain or reward constituent support. In a working paper, Vanderbilt University's John Hudak argues that the president and his subordinates strategically direct federal funding to electorally competitive states and that the executive branch delivers more money to swing states than all other states combined.
De Rugy gives Canada as an example of a wiser approach, where only 38 percent of spending is done at the national level compared to 71 percent here:
Far from hurting children, Canada's localized approach to education has correlated with test scores that are typically higher than those of American kids. Some provinces have made great strides in school choice and other innovations.This could happen in the United States too. The federal government should warn states that it is turning off the grant spigot and then do it. When bills come due for regular, predicable expenditures such as education, states and localities should figure out how to make ends meet. If states stop depending on the feds for bailouts and start saving for a rainy day, they will finally be ready for the next hurricane.
Funny, That's Where We Wish They'd Go When We Smell Them Wearing It
AXE is sending 22 contest winners into space.
The Jet Lag Rooster
Type in where you're going, where you're coming from, and when you're going and The Jet Lag Rooster, by Jay Olson, who works in the psych department at Simon Fraser, will tell you when to seek out and avoid light in order to avoid jet lag.
Jet lag occurs when your body clock is out of sync with the environment. It can cause health problems and reduced alertness (Kolla & Auger, 2011).Jet Lag Rooster works by shifting your body clock to the new time zone. It is free, simple, and effective.
Free. Jet Lag Rooster does not cost you any money.
Simple. Just enter your trip details and Jet Lag Rooster gives you a plan to reduce jet lag. You can email this plan to your smart phone, so the guidelines pop up as reminders during your trip.
Effective. Research shows that light exposure can shift your body clock (Eastman & Burgess, 2009; Kolla & Auger, 2011). Light exposure -- for example going outside in sunlight -- at the right times can reduce jet lag. Jet Lag Rooster creates an individual plan suggesting when to seek and avoid light, based on your own trip and body clock. People who follow these suggestions report less jet lag (Lieberman, 2003). In some cases, shifting your body clock before your trip could prevent jet lag completely (Burgess et al., 2003).
See an example jet lag plan, or get started by entering your trip details on the prevent jet lag page.
Here's the jet lag plan I made for a pretend trip to Paris on Sunday:
More here.
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Kate Middleton, Painted: The Duchess Of The Shaker Heights Book Club
In the old days, somebody in the employ of a royal would have gone out to find the painter after a cry of "Off with his head!" This is the extremely unattractive first official portrait of Kate Middleton.
Usually, it's uptight midwestern housewives trying to look like royalty, and not the other way around.
The Race Is To The Swift (In The Hermès Scarf)
Horseracing ad, Paris Métro, Vavin stop.
Their advertising is so much more fun than ours. Also, they are allowed to show naked boobies -- and do.
Line Up For Polio! The Disease, Not The Vaccine.
I got this note in an email from a friend commenting on the anti-vax parents:
Apropos nothing in particular, you know what I want to know? I want to know the addresses of every person in this country would refuses to allow their children to get standard vaccinations. I don't know why no one talks about that. That's Sandy Hook times ten -- children die because there isn't enough herd immunity because of idiots who don't understand science.Posting addresses of those who refuse to vaccinate their children is an idea that makes sense.
The Big Twig
November in Paris. It's just like April, but without the sun or the tourists.
Legislative Medicine
Bloomberg likes to wear himself a lotta hats. He's gone from the New York City Mayor hat to the soda nanny hat, and now he's decided to don the doctor hat, entering the field of medicine with an edict intended to crack down on prescription pill abuse:
Anemona Hartocollis writes in The New York Times:
Under the new city policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days' worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all. And lost, stolen or destroyed prescriptions will not be refilled.City officials said the policy was aimed at reducing the growing dependency on painkillers and preventing excess amounts of drugs from being taken out of medicine chests and sold on the street or abused by teenagers and others who want to get high.
..."Here is my problem with legislative medicine," said Dr. Alex Rosenau, president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians and senior vice chairman of emergency medicine at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Eastern Pennsylvania. "It prevents me from being a professional and using my judgment."
While someone could fake a toothache to get painkillers, he said, another patient might have legitimate pain and not be able to get an appointment at a dental clinic for days. Or, he said, a patient with a hand injury may need more than three days of pain relief until the swelling goes down and an operation could be scheduled.
"Universal" Background Checks For Gun Buyers
Do we have nursery school children running this country?
Sure, as Biden suggests, we can legislate "universal background checks." Do you think they'll comply with those when they sell guns in the hood?
Yes, because banning drugs has worked so well -- banning un-permitted guns should work just as well. Michael A. Memoli and Melanie Mason write for the LA Times:
WASHINGTON -- Requiring all gun buyers to pass a federal background check could be a key part of a White House plan to combat mass shootings, Vice President Joe Biden indicated as he prepared to present recommendations to the president on Tuesday.Speaking to reporters Thursday, Biden said he had found a "surprising recurrence of suggestions" for "universal background checks" in meetings with interest groups. Background checks are not required in private sales by unlicensed dealers, including transactions at gun shows.
Lantz' mother would surely have passed a background check. So, just like the useless scanners our government has installed at the airports, we will have a measure that will not have stopped the Newtown mass murder, and we'll once again tell ourselves we're safer.
On a Biden note: Anyone know why Biden doesn't go around in clown shoes? Because it would be redundant.
Related: Volokh.com's Ilya Shapiro on why he still supports the right to bear arms:
We'd be much better off focusing on improvements we can make in identifying and treating mental illness -- the common factor in all these incidents -- and ensuring that disqualifying records make it into the database used for background checks (which would've stopped the Virginia Tech shooter from buying his guns).That's not to say that we shouldn't have any gun regulations. Cracking down on "straw purchasers" is a good idea and indeed military-grade weapons like fully automatic "machine guns" have no place in civilian life.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable for someone to have a gun to protect herself or her family. That's why the Second Amendment is so important: Americans cherish their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness so much that they instituted a government that protects their right to defend against anyone who would threaten them.
After the 1999 Columbine shootings, Colorado passed a series of laws that should serve as a national model. Some of them consist of what people call "gun control," while others are in the "gun rights" category. The most important one was the Concealed Carry Act, which has already saved countless lives, including at an Aurora church -- three months before the theater shooting -- where an off-duty cop killed a career criminal who was targeting congregants.
These measures are based on an obvious principle that enjoys broad public support: Guns in the wrong hands are dangerous, while guns in the right hands protect public safety.
Autolib´: Electric Car Sharing, Paris
It's in the second part of the video, after the Velib (bike sharing) bit:
More on Autolib´ here.
Rabid Lynx
Meow.
All The World's A Stage
Sèvres-Babylone Métro stop, Paris, a month before Christmas. 
How To Stop The TSA From Stealing Your Stuff
As we see from myriad news reports, the real criminals in the airport are the hamburger clerks the government hires to grope us and search our stuff sans probable cause.
Mike Adams from Natural News has a video showing you how to keep the TSA workers from stealing your valuables:
Related, from Bob Fisher at TSA New Blog, "TSA: No amount is too small to steal."
Government For The Post-Naive
Robert D. McFadden writes economist James M. Buchanan's obit in The New York Times -- a piece that is pretty instructive about his thinking about "public choice theory":
Dr. Buchanan, a professor emeritus at George Mason, in Fairfax, Va., was a leading proponent of public choice theory, which assumes that politicians and government officials, like everyone else, are motivated by self-interest -- getting re-elected or gaining more power -- and do not necessarily act in the public interest.He argued that their actions could be analyzed, and even predicted, by applying the tools of economics to political science in ways that yield insights into the tendencies of governments to grow, increase spending, borrow money, run large deficits and let regulations proliferate.
The logic of self-interest was nothing new. Machiavelli's 16th-century treatise "The Prince" detailed cynical rules of statecraft to extend political power. Thomas Hobbes, in his 17th-century book "Leviathan," held that aggressive, self-serving acts were "natural" unless forbidden by law. Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," published in 1776, noted that people pursuing their own good also produced benefits for society at large.
But Dr. Buchanan contended that the pursuit of self-interest by modern politicians often led to harmful public results. Courting voters at election time, for example, legislators will approve tax cuts and spending increases for projects and entitlements favored by the electorate. This combination can lead to ever-rising deficits, public debt burdens and increasingly large governments to conduct the public's business.
Indeed, he said, governments had grown so vast and complex that it was no longer possible for elected officials to make more than a fraction of the policy decisions that genuinely affect the people. Thus, he said, much discretionary power is actually held by civil functionaries who can manipulate priorities, impose barriers to entitlements and pressure legislators for rules and budgets favorable to their own interests.
Dr. Buchanan did not invent the theory of public choice, an idea whose origins are obscure but that arose in modern economics literature in the late 1940s. But from the 1950s onward, he became its leading proponent, spearheading a group of economists in Virginia that sought to change the nature of the political process, to bring it more into line with what the group considered the wishes of most Americans.
In lectures, articles and more than 30 books, Dr. Buchanan amplified on the theory of public choice and argued for smaller government, lower deficits and fewer regulations.
...Over the years since Dr. Buchanan won the Nobel, much of what he predicted has played out. Government is bigger than ever. Tax revenue has fallen far short of public programs' needs. Public and private borrowing has become a way of life. Politicians still act in their own interests while espousing the public good, and national deficits have soared into the trillions.
Government does not protect you; it parasites off of you. Last night, I had a professor (of biochemstry) message me rather nastily about my post, "Big Government: Run On Embezzlers' Accounting Tricks." He sided with government as a protector of the people.
A few excerpts from what I wrote back:
If you think the government protects you - well, that's a naive position....No need to get nasty, either ("you can learn your nutrition from Monsanto and Pfizer"). If I remember correctly from my reading of "Good Calories, Bad Calories," the obesity epidemic started around the time George McGovern had a bunch of people with no science background put together the food pyramid, and then had the government put it out.
...That's why I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Both parties are corrupt because they are populated by people. Those who think otherwise are the people responsible for getting us in the current civil-liberties-challenged bottomless fiscal bog we're in.
Obamacare No Friend To The Young
Nick Sorrentino blogs at Against Crony Capitalism about the shape of things to come under the "Affordable" Care Act, which seems designed to kill private health insurance by making it beyond unaffordable:
The Affordable Care Act , the president's signature piece of legislation, is a very raw deal for people under 40. It's not very "affordable" for those who have the least to spend.•Younger, healthier individuals could see an increase in the cost of their insurance by over 40 percent.•The cost of insurance for individuals aged 21 to 29 who are ineligible for premium assistance from the government would increase by 42 percent.
The two points he quotes are from the US Senate Committee on Finance.
Home Schooling: "Not Just For Scary Religious People Anymore"
That's a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer with which Glenn Reynolds led off his US Today piece on home schooling, which is increasingly becoming acceptable and palatable to "regular people." Reynolds writes:
The fact is, Americans across the country -- but especially in large, urban school systems -- are voting with their feet and abandoning traditional public schools, to the point that teachers are facing layoffs. Some are going to charter schools, which are still public but are run more flexibly. Some are leaving for private schools. But many others are going another step beyond traditional education, and switching to online school or even pure home schooling....New York's public school system is indeed notoriously inadequate. And, like most public school systems (or public systems of any kind), it's run more for the convenience of the staff and bureaucrats than for the benefit of parents or kids. Some kids do fine anyway, of course, and some parents aren't in a position to pursue alternatives. But for many parents, traditional schooling is no longer the automatic default choice.
That makes sense. Traditional public schools haven't changed much for decades (and to the extent they have, they've mostly gotten worse). But the rest of the world has changed a lot. The public who eagerly purchased Henry Ford's Model T (available in any color you want, so long as it's black!) now lives in a world where almost everything is infinitely customized and customizable. That makes one-size-fits-all education, run on a Fordist model itself, look like a bad deal.
For "notoriously inadequate" public school systems, as I argue in a new "Broadside" from Encounter Books, The K-12 Implosion, the risk is that the outflow of kids will turn from a trickle into a flood. At some point, it's a death-spiral: As kids (often the best students) leave because schools are "notoriously inadequate," the schools become even more notoriously inadequate, and funding -- which is computed on a per-pupil basis -- dries up. This, of course, encourages more parents to move their kids elsewhere, in a vicious cycle.
Does this mean the end of public education? No. But it does mean that the old model -- which dates to the 19th Century, when schools were explicitly compared to factories -- is at risk. Smarter educators will start thinking about how to update a 19th Century product to suit 21st Century realities. Less-smart educators will hunker down and fight change tooth and nail.
More on home schooling from The Economist.
Wow, Look At The Contraband Our Government Seizes
230 pounds of illegal cheese. Aren't you happy to see where your tax dollars are going?
via @radleybalko
Linked Me Alone
I just got a Linked In endorsement request below from some dude I don't know. At all. Not in the slightest.
This is kind of my fault, because I promiscuously yessed all the Linked In requests I got a long time ago, and only stopped doing that a few years ago.
(Linked In isn't really for people like me -- I don't sell pieces of writing because people look me up and see that I worked on the assembly line at the donut factory in 1932, so I didn't much care...just yessed people to make the requests go away, and because it seemed a kinder thing to do.)
Here's the note he sent me:
Dear Amy, I'm sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know.Thanks in advance for helping me out.
The guy owns a cafe in Washington, D.C., that I have NEVER BEEN TO. I don't recognize his name or really know the first thing about him.
Writing to total strangers to ask them to do you a favor does take...I was going to say balls, but "shameless hubris" is probably more fitting. It also makes you someone I would never, ever recommend, even for a job scraping smashed turds off the bottom of strangers' shoes.
UPDATE: A total stranger just messaged me on Facebook to ask me to read and blurb her book on the grounds that I'm a friend of a friend of hers and an atheist and an advice columnist. I was shocked, but responded politely with a no.
It is an imposition to ask anyone but your mother to read your writing. I sometimes ask close friends to read something, but with that understanding. To expect a total stranger to do work for you, and then use their name to advertise it, and ask you to do it off an e-book to boot...wow.
Also, I FUCKING HATE Facebook mail. It is slow to log into and I can't log it or save it. If somebody has an email address I can reach them at, I use that, and wish people would do the same. But, of course, for some people, what's easiest for them is the primary thing.
Off-Topical Itch Cream
Scratch here.
A Raymond Chandler Sky
Photo by Gregg Sutter, Los Angeles, mid-city. 
From Raymond Chandler's Red Wind.
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
How Big Government And Big Ag Made Pork Chops Taste Like Worn-Out Shoe Leather Crossed With Fat-Free Lunch Meat
Karen De Coster explains why in an excellent piece at Mises.org:
...The aggressive marketing campaign titled "Pork. The Other White Meat" made its debut in 1987. This campaign focused on presenting pork as an alternative "lean protein" to help eradicate the public perception of pork as a high-fat meat. Dietary fat had become synonymous with "unhealthy" as varied pop studies were trotted out by the medical establishment linking dietary fat to cardiovascular disease. According to a page from the National Pork Board website, this campaign was aggressively aimed at consumers with the goal being "to increase consumer demand for pork and to dispel pork's reputation as a fatty protein." Accordingly, industrial pork became the politically correct alternative to chicken and turkey, neither of which were demonized by the government's intensifying war on fat.However, the government's food pyramid was not founded on science, but rather, it was based in politics and serving special interests. The food pyramid is a purely political animal developed by politicians to serve political ends. It was Senator George McGovern and his Select Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that gave us these politicized and destructive federal dietary guidelines.
The food politics of the Committee were set in motion as McGovern's Dietary Goals for the United States were hammered out at the hands of federal politicians and a journalist who wrote the final draft. The guidelines were heavily influenced by lobbying from the food industry foot soldiers who vilified animal fat and won, in spite of the numerous, highly qualified scientists who debunked their political agenda with the power of science. The Dietary Goals for the United States (The McGovern Report) were issued in 1977, leading to the 1980 publication of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first edition.
Since that time, the government has had a non-scientific lock on dietary-nutritional central planning. The nutrition central planning model has held steadfast on the notion that dietary fat is the enemy, and thus planted the seeds for the low-fat revolution.
As a response to the low-fat craze, the pork industry began utilizing new feeding and breeding techniques. Essentially, the animals have been genetically altered to produce a white, lean, dry meat product to adapt to the political-nutritional health models that were sweeping the mainstream media and consumer consciousness. The pork industry's website admits to claims that:
Today's pork has 16% less fat and 27% less saturated fat as compared to 1991. Many cuts of pork are now as lean as skinless chicken.Additionally, the same website page notes that this new pork meets the government's "guidelines" to earn a declaration of "lean." The new "lean" meat is produced not only through the production of a leaner animal with reduced fat, but also a reduction of intramuscle fat that cannot be trimmed.
Consequently, modern pork is artificially pale and unexciting, hence the "white" designation.
At the link, read the real reason we were told to cook pork so it was no longer pink -- the risks of industrially raised pork.
"Small-farm heritage pork" is the answer, as @DrEades tweeted along with the link to this piece.
An Ode To Grease
The world needs more of this. 
Photographed at our friends' house this weekend by Gregg Sutter (so he'd remember to get us some).
Big Government: Run On Embezzlers' Accounting Tricks
From an email from Geoffrey J. Neale, Chair, Libertarian National Committee:
Tax increases and government spending reductions are polar opposites when it comes to their impact.
Tax hikes hurt you. They diminish your family's wealth and hurt the economy.
Government spending cuts are good for your family. They transfer money out of the reckless, irresponsible, wasteful government sector that consumes wealth and into the productive, private sector that creates wealth.
By blending tax hikes with (alleged) government spending cuts, they try to convince you that they're all part of one scary package. That both things are bad.
To add injury to insult, their phony "fiscal cliff" doesn't include a dime of actual government spending cuts. Just pretend reductions in future spending.
Big Government politicians are using embezzlers' accounting tricks to avoid removing waste and truly discretionary spending from today's federal budget. They refuse to balance the budget now -- the way you have to every month with your family budget.
They threaten us with insanely inflated tax increases -- while demanding praise for any taxes that they don't raise.
It's as if a thief breaks into your house and threatens to take your new flat-screen TV, your car, all your precious jewelry, and your kids' favorite electronic games -- and then takes just the car and a few rings. He makes you feel relieved that you still have your TV, the kids' games, and the rest of your jewelry.
On New Year's Day, what did Big Government politicians actually vote for?
They voted to rip you off an average of $800 a year MORE -- a 2 percent increase in your Social Security payroll tax. While they bragged that they were doing you a favor.
They raised a pile of other taxes as well, including taxes on estates, higher incomes, investment income, health care, and businesses.
These Democratic and Republican tax hikes will allow them to rake in a total of $514 billion in new revenue and will destroy millions of private sector jobs. While we have 8 percent unemployment.
While raising taxes, they refused to cut a dime from this year's government spending. They didn't even allow their phony future spending cuts to stand.
But they did slip into the deal loads of new federal spending, adding even more to this year's $1.3 TRILLION deficit.
More government debt = higher taxes for you. Government debt devalues the dollars you earn and save. This hidden tax will gouge you just as surely as a direct tax would. Instead of taking it out of your paycheck, it will cost you in the form of higher prices you will pay for groceries, utilities and virtually everything you buy.
This is what you get when you vote for either Democrats or Republicans. Higher taxes. Higher government spending. More government debt. Higher prices. More unemployment.
It doesn't matter which of the two you vote for. For all the posturing and gamesmanship, both Democrats and Republicans are peas of a pod. Birds of a feather. They are both addicted to Big Government.
Libertarians have the solution, and it's simple. To immediately revive the American economy, we must dramatically cut total government spending now.
Every dollar transferred out of government coffers and back into the private sector creates business investment and jobs.
Libertarian candidates who ran for federal office in 2012 called for big spending cuts and balancing the budget now, including Gov. Gary Johnson for president. He proposed to immediately slash spending by at least $1.3 trillion in 2013 to balance the budget his first year in office.
American voters: Help us help you. Join the Libertarian Party today. Help us run bold Libertarian candidates who will eliminate wasteful and bloated Big Government programs now, dramatically reduce government spending now, stabilize the dollar, and cut your taxes.
As I wrote back:
The Libertarian Party also needs to do its part, and find more electable candidates for president -- as in, libertarians with the charisma of a Sarah Palin or an Obama.No, being right on substance just is not enough.
If I Have Gazillions Of Dollars In Credit Card Debt, Should I Be Sending Friends Gazillions?
The question is about aid to Israel. We are seriously in trouble in this country thanks to the vast debt hole we've spent our way into.
Rand Paul gives this sort of bullshit reason we shouldn't be giving aid to Israel -- like they're a bad welfare mother, and if only they'd lose access to to those welfare checks, they'd stop pumping out children they can't pay for.
From NewsMax, an article headlined "Rand Paul: Less Aid to Israel Would Increase Its Sovereignty," by Stephen Feller:
If financial aid to Israel were slowly decreased over time, it would increase the Jewish state's sovereignty because they wouldn't need to get permission from the U.S. every time they need to defend themselves against aggressive neighbors, Sen. Rand Paul said on Monday.Paul said that while he knows the idea of decreasing any kind of foreign aid is a "minority opinion" in Washington, it will be a lot harder for America to help others "if we are out of money," reported Fox News.
...The Kentucky senator said that first, aid would have to be pulled from questionably friendly countries such as Egypt and Pakistan before considering how and when to start cutting the flow of money to Israel.
Spoken like man who wants to stand up for his principles -- halfway up -- so as not to totally wave goodbye to the Jewish vote.
But should we really be handing out money to any countries, friend or foe? These are your taxpayer dollars.
Where do you stand?
Coarse, Like Sea Salt
Sprinkle liberally. (Classically liberal-ly if you want to get specific.)
I See Rude People: Hoggy Parkers
I can't move your car with my glare when you've parked squarely in the middle of a two-space spot (in a neighborhood with very scarce parking), but I will leave you a shaming note:
If You Want To Have Kids, Why Should The Rest Of Us Pay For Your Breast Pump?
Breast pumps are now covered under Obamacare. Beth Stebner writes in The Daily Mail (via @Drudge):
The Affordable Care Act means many things for women, including birth control for all policy holders with no additional payment from the patient required.A lesser-known facet of the new so-called Obamacare law is a provision that requires insurance companies to cover the full cost of breast pumps without a deductible or out-of-pocket expense for new mothers.
The cost of these devices is covered in insurance premiums, which in turn are paid by policyholders.
The Washington Post notes that it was pumps, not pills, that caught suppliers off-guard after January 1, when this part of the Affordable Care Act went into law.
The catch for all new mothers is that only certain breast pump models are covered, and they have to be ordered through a licensed provider.
I've been irritated for years that I can't opt out of maternity coverage in my health insurance.
And note how only "licensed providers" can get the money from this. Government feeding government. It's one ginormous taxpayer-funded sagging titty.
Don't Become A Parent If You Can't Front The Bills
Certainly, don't have a litter of children, which you leave daddyless, because you have some bizarre urge to excrete children like a rabbit.
Yes, Octomom Nadya Suleman is on welfare again. From the HuffPo:
"My choice to go back on assistance is only a temporary one," she said. "At this time my family needs the medical, dental and food assistance because it is so expensive."
Wow. There's a shocker. (My neighbor, who has three, and a husband employed as a professor and administrator -- to bring home more cash to support their kids -- is worried about paying for the dental work their 8-year-old daughter needs...but will actually manage to pay, because they have three children, not the beginnings of a soccer team.)
Suleman's wholesome example she set for her kids -- masturbating for cash on video -- seems to have been only a temporary fund-producer.
Why Do They Kare About Kim Kardashian?
I just saw a headline, "Kardashian Divorce Takes A Nasty Turn," and I wanted to know who cared and why.
Do you care? And, if so, why? Be honest.
Others should feel free to speculate.
I do admire one thing -- how she's parlayed the interest of all these people into gajillions of dollars and a career in continuing to parlay the interest of all these people into more gajillions.
Plastic Bag Ban: How To Get People To Shop Outside Your City's Zip Code
In case you were wondering why Gregg shops at the Venice supermarket on the big boulevard rather than the Santa Monica one -- the Santa Monica one charges 10 cents a bag, because the government makes them do it.
Being charged for bags pisses Gregg off. He could go to either store, and used to go to the Santa Monica one, but now goes to the Venice one instead, where they still give out bags because Venice is in LA County -- the home to a whole lot of other dipshitted laws.
The news that spurred this blog post: Another OC city is considering a plastic bag ban.
Geniuses! Just the economy to make it a little harder on the businesses that pay the taxes that keep your city's lights on and the cop cars gassed up.
How Western Technology Helps Muslim Men Keep Their Women Down
You can be stuck in the Dark Ages in myriad ways and still take advantage of all the modern advances of Western society, as Muslims have been finding for a number of decades.
Men in Muslim majority countries are finding it far easier to control their women thanks to advances like the "wife tracker" or "digital leash," Isabel Debre writes at Care2.com:
the Saudi government has introduced an electronic tracking system that alerts male guardians when a woman strays too far from home.The "wife tracker" or "digital leash" as some refer to it, reduces women to the legal status of a minor, and is just the latest restriction on the movement of women -- and of the women's movement -- in a culture ruled by harsh sharia law.
As I reflect on a remarkable year of political uprisings and grassroots movements across the globe, I can't help but think about the troubling status quo for women and girls who still struggle for basic freedoms.
In Saudi Arabia, women and girls can't currently vote, date, marry for love, use contraceptives, ride bicycles, talk to men on the phone, sing or dance in public. Unless chaperoned by a mahram (male guardian), girls -- covered in black abayas -- are carted around behind tinted windows to special women-only gyms, boutiques, malls, schools, and restaurants (where they eat in the "family section," apart from single men). The Mutawwa'in, the religious police, fine or even imprison dissenters. Victims of domestic violence and rape are often punished with lashes. Isolation is so intense that some feel that society is split between "two different species."
Just below the surface, desperation percolates. A study at King Saud University reported that out of 100 suicide cases, 96 involved women--many women, wrestling with restrictions on work, travel, and school, attempt suicide to escape Saudi Arabia's strict society. The Saudi authorities actually instituted the SMS tracking system when one Saudi woman tried to flee to Sweden -- the kind of escape most Western women take for granted. Male guardians monitor the women in their custody -- wives, daughters, sisters -- for any attempts to cross the border. They receive a text message alerting them of their female's activity.
Debre is using the right language here -- "their female." Because women, in Muslim society, are possessions of men with few rights and miserable lives.
Crassachusetts
A state of bad taste.
It's A Grind -- And A Great One
Thanks so much to all of you who buy through my Amazon links. It really helps. I appreciate every single purchase, and even the little ones add up, but the big ones -- the Dell computer and the camera equipment purchased the other day -- really made my day today!
I also saw this purchase in my reports this morning -- Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder, Brushed Silver, 8.5-Ounce
It's the most fantastic coffee grinder. I'm a coffee psycho. It's my fuel for writing and I need it to be very dark and I like it finely ground and this is the coffee grinder that does it.
I See Rude People: The Trash Is In The Mail
I was disgusted to see bags and boxes of trash dumped on my street by people who apparently thought they could do this without repercussion.
What was there to do but to mail some of it to the people who left their personal papers in the trash and tell them to come pick it the hell up? 
Oops. It seemed the trash dumpers picked the wrong girl's street.
I spotted a UPS mailing label with a woman's name on it on the outside of one box. I went in, got gloves, went through the trash and found other items with names and a local address.
There was a UAL boarding pass for Eduardo Sitnoveter (coach, from Hawaii to Los Angeles) and a windowcoverings order for Jacqueline Sitnoveter, sent from a Michigan window coverings store to an address (of a $2.6 million house overlooking the ocean) in the Pacific Palisades.
Now, I have to say, I have no video or other evidence that Eduardo and Jacqueline themselves dumped the trash on my street. There could be, say, trash robbers in, say, the Pacific Palisades, hauling trash miles and miles away to my neighborhood in hopes of tarnishing an innocent couple's reputation.
Well, you never know.
Sitnoveter is an unusual name.
I found and messaged both a woman with the name Jacqueline Levy Sitnoveter and a man, Eduardo Sitnoveter, on Facebook -- both of whom are from Brazil. No reply.
Oh, and he seems to be a plastic surgeon -- who studied with the renowned Ivo Pitangy.
Since I had the Pacific Palisades address Jacqueline used, I figured I'd mail a sample of the dumpings from my street -- a varied sampling of the trash in the bags and boxes, plus Eduardo's boarding pass and Jacqueline's window covering order, plus the tracking for it that I pulled from UPS.
I mailed the box Wednesday, for $3.69, First Class, and worth every penny. The lady at the Post Office said it would be there on Thursday. I did wait a few days. I was hoping one of the dumpers would come pick the trash up, but it's still there -- which is why this blog item is now going up.
The point here is not just about those who thought nothing of turning my cute street into their personal dump but to show others that just because you think some bunch of strangers are ripe for the victimizing...well, think again.
The typed message I included in the box:
What kind of lowlife people excrete bags and boxes of their trash on the grass lining a cute street -- as if it's their personal trash dump?Amazingly, there are identifying papers within this trash dumped on our cute street, with the names Eduardo Sitnoveter and Jacqueline Sitnoveter.
This is a nice neighborhood, filled with civilized people -- people who expect other people to behave as civilized people and not like animals, dropping their turds where they may.
What hubris.
Send somebody to (my street name/location here) to pick this trash up.
And here's a snapshot of the box I mailed:
My Favorite Onion Headline Ever
A little inside baseball -- of the batting around words kind, but I hope you are also amused.
Via @sentientist, this news brief:
4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence
Article's funny, too.
And in case you were wondering, you can tear my Oxford comma out of...
Solving The Titty-Twister: Why Men Love Breasts
I know: "Because they're there."
Now think with the other head.
Via Glenn Reynolds, Natalie Wolchover writes at Life's Little Mysteries:
Scientists have never satisfactorily explained men's curious breast fixation, but now, a neuroscientist has struck upon an explanation that he says "just makes a lot of sense."Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University who studies the neurological basis of complex social behaviors, thinks human evolution has harnessed an ancient neural circuit that originally evolved to strengthen the mother-infant bond during breast-feeding, and now uses this brain circuitry to strengthen the bond between couples as well. The result? Men, like babies, love breasts.
When a woman's nipples are stimulated during breast-feeding, the neurochemical oxytocin, otherwise known as the "love drug," floods her brain, helping to focus her attention and affection on her baby. But research over the past few years has shown that in humans, this circuitry isn't reserved for exclusive use by infants.
Recent studies have found that nipple stimulation enhances sexual arousal in the great majority of women, and it activates the same brain areas as vaginal and clitoral stimulation. When a sexual partner touches, massages or nibbles a woman's breasts, Young said, this triggers the release of oxytocin in the woman's brain, just like what happens when a baby nurses. But in this context, the oxytocin focuses the woman's attention on her sexual partner, strengthening her desire to bond with this person.
In other words, men can make themselves more desirable by stimulating a woman's breasts during foreplay and sex. Evolution has, in a sense, made men want to do this.
Attraction to breasts "is a brain organization effect that occurs in straight males when they go through puberty," Young told Life's Little Mysteries. "Evolution has selected for this brain organization in men that makes them attracted to the breasts in a sexual context, because the outcome is that it activates the female bonding circuit, making women feel more bonded with him. It's a behavior that males have evolved in order to stimulate the female's maternal bonding circuitry."
Natelson Eats Seidman For Lunch
Constitutional scholar Rob Natelson, in responding to the dangerously naive and very wrong Louis Michael Seidman (a constitutional law professor who thinks the Constitution is largely to blame for the fiscal crisis), writes:
Did the Constitution cause our present "fiscal chaos?" Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution's limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything--a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution's generous but limited boundaries.
Consider, by contrast, the record of the United States during the 140 years in which the Constitution's limits on federal power were usually respected. During this period of limited government and great personal freedom, the United States became the most successful nation in the history of the planet. Inflation was low. The budget was usually balanced. The foundation of the modern economy was laid. It was a period of unprecedented innovation and unprecedented advances in health, life expectancy, and living standards. It saw the end of slavery and astounding progress for women and even for the most disadvantaged minorities. In other words, it was adherence to the Constitution, not disregard for it, that enabled America (in Professor Seidman's words) to "grow and prosper."
Professor Seidman seems to assume that politicians can be trusted to make "considered judgments" and act "on the merits," and that the public does not need to impose outside constitutional restraints on their power (except, perhaps, through elections). The Founders were wiser. They knew that the entire history of humankind suggests the opposite--as, in fact, does the current fiscal crisis. If Mr. Seidman thinks the United Kingdom is a stronger, freer, less dysfunctional, and more prosperous country because of its unwritten constitution, he should live there for a while, as I have. Britain's relative decline has been precipitous over the past century. Without the support of America, it is doubtful Britain would have survived as a free country.
via @ariarmstrong
Vulgar Wheat
My mom used to feed me bulgar wheat. I know she meant well, but it didn't make it any more appealing. (I wouldn't feed it to your worst friend's dead goat.)
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Sex Therapist Dr. Brandy Engler, Inside The Erotic Minds Of Men (And Women)
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
What do men want? In bed and out? What do women want? How does this all tie together? (And who's getting tied up?)
These are just a few of the questions I'll be asking and sex therapist Dr. Brandy Engler will be answering on tonight's show.
Dr. Engler is unique in that she opened a sex therapy practice for women -- expecting to slowly get get clients -- and quickly amassed a full list of clients: all men.
Engler and New York Times best-selling biographer David Rensin have just published a fascinating book about her sessions and her insights, The Men on My Couch: True Stories of Sex, Love and Psychotherapy
This is your chance to go inside her sessions -- to see into the erotic minds of men. And not pervos or deviants, but regular guys. Men we all know.
Beyond the men, we will also see into the minds of the women having sex with these men -- or refusing to -- and find out why, and what it takes to balance love and eroticism in a relationship.
All this and more on tonight's show. (Live, nude radio!)
Listen live (clothing optional) at this link at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/01/07/dr-brandy-engler-inside-the-erotic-minds-of-men-women
Don't miss last week's show on the power of context.
Context matters, Tufts psychology professor Dr. Sam Sommers explains. What we believe, how we behave, and even how we see ourselves shifts more than we understand, depending on the situation we find ourselves in at a particular moment.
For example, contrary to popular belief, context (like whether we're standing in a crowd), and not moral character, will often determine whether people will reach out and help someone in need.
Dr. Sommers lays out how understanding the surprisingly powerful impact of context can help us combat our biases in seeing and decision-making -- in turn helping us be more effective at work, with our families, in our friendships and relationships, and out in the world.
Sam's book: Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/12/31/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
We Don't Need To Pay Air Marshals
Passengers understand that they need to do their part -- and will. Whether a guy is armed and dangerous or drunk and obnoxious.
Why Should People Actually Be Drunk To Arrest Them For DUI?
Utah officer didn't seem to care whether people were actually impaired -- arresting even teetotallers for drunk driving. Dan Frosch writes in The New York Times that a lawsuit filed claims she falsified drunk driving arrests:
According to the suit, filed Dec. 14 in District Court in Salt Lake County, Ms. Steed made a career of pulling over drivers who she claimed were driving drunk or under the influence.There was only one problem. Some of the drivers Ms. Steed arrested had not been drinking, or at least not enough to be reasonably impaired, according to the lawsuit, brought by a group of Utah lawyers on behalf of two plaintiffs.
In several cases, those who were arrested did not drink alcohol, said Robert Sykes, one of the lawyers who filed the complaint, which names Ms. Steed and the Highway Patrol as defendants.
"We were all separately getting calls about Lisa Steed from people saying: 'I was pulled over. I wasn't doing anything wrong. She told me I smelled like alcohol, but I hadn't been drinking,' " Mr. Sykes said.
"They would pass the sobriety test with flying colors. But Steed would say they were still impaired and arrest them."
Mr. Sykes and the other lawyers involved in the case said that they have spoken with more than 40 people who also claimed they were falsely arrested by Ms. Steed. It was part of a pattern the officer engaged in to burnish her reputation with superiors, the lawyers said.
In all of the cases, according to the lawyers, the charges were dropped or reduced, but not before drivers paid bail, car impound or court-related fees that typically exceeded $1,000.
Ms. Steed is in the process of appealing her firing. Her lawyer, Greg Skordas, while not commenting on specific arrests, said that the allegations were overblown and that the overwhelming majority of her arrests had stood up in court.
"She has made thousands of stops and thousands of arrests. She's had a handful of cases that could really be counted on one hand that have not been supported by evidence," he said.
One wrongfully arrest is three too many -- especially if you're that wrongfully arrested person.
via @MissAmiaSays
Perhaps She Should Have Asked Him Nicely To Leave
A mom hiding in a crawl space in her house with her kids shot a guy who broke in. From Georgia's WSBTV:
The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar.But the man eventually found the family.
"The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he's staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver," Chapman told Channel 2's Kerry Kavanaugh.
The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved.
"She's standing over him, and she realizes she's fired all six rounds. And the guy's telling her to quit shooting," Chapman said.
The woman ran to a neighbor's home with her children. The intruder attempted to flee in his car but crashed into a wooded area and collapsed in a nearby driveway, Chapman said.
UPDATED: Twitter convo follows. @MattSpahn1 first tweeted me back after he saw my tweet of the link to this blog item, and then continued his Planet Unicorn line of thinking on the correct way to greet a burglar:
Doggie In The Center Pocket
Now that I'm back, my three-pound Yorkie, Lucy, is back in place, riding in her doggie convertible -- the front pocket of the fleece thingie I wear to write in at home during the cold months.
She hangs out like this for about four hours while I write in the early morning. And then, after all that exertion, she repairs to the laundry basket for a multi-hour nap.
Ice Cream Cake Skyline
Gregg took me to our friends' house in Palm Desert, where I spent a good bit of time working on my column in front of this painted vista.
Expedia: Bad for the Traveler, Bad for the Hotel
The owners of a small hotel detail the hell they've gone through with Expedia. Adrianne Jeffries reports it for The Verge.
The "War On Terror" (aka The War On Civil Liberties) Will Be Endless
Glenn Greenwald writes at The Guardian:
Last month, outgoing pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson gave a speech at the Oxford Union and said that the War on Terror must, at some point, come to an end:
"Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaida are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: How will this conflict end? . . . . 'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.' Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives. . . ."There will come a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, that al-Qaida will be effectively destroyed."
...The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.
Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent?
All of you who voted for Obama, on the grounds that he was "not Bush" -- how sure are you now that that's true?
via Lisa Simeone
Coarse Race
Winner take all (the nonexistent but very attractive Advice Goddess sun visor).
Hurricane Sandy: Who Should Pay?
This guy says FEMA only gave him money for a ruined washer and dryer:
Crea isn't eligible for much else, not even rental assistance. "FEMA said I make too much money," he said.
Well, a question came up in conversation yesterday, about residences hit by Sandy: Why should other taxpayers pick up costs from people's residences being devastated by the hurricane (including up to three months of rental payments and damage that is not covered by homeowner's insurance)?
Should we be doing that? And if so, why?
I'm not against helping people who have been hit by the hurricane -- and I feel terrible for them. But, should this money really come from the government?
It's Soooo Much Effort, Getting Free Advice.
Some people write me to ask for my help, gratis, as if they're texting their 11-year-old friend. That gets this response from me:
If you can't take the time to put in all the letters, I can't be bothered to answer.
Her email:
Hi i need ur help i realy like a man bt t prblem is his a male escort itsunusual.is ther any chance and if so how d u think i can get him t realy like
me?he gves me discounts a lot off i just meet t talk and we have similar
interests he also phnes.frm Faye.
UPDATE: The woman just wrote me back:
I am typing on my ph.thts t prblem.dnt wory abt replyng in ths world iv learntthat its cald help your self planet.thanks
I responded:
Actually, I write long and involved answers to people free of charge, even when their questions will not make my column -- when they are polite enough to take the time to write me using whole words.We are not 11-year-olds and I am not your friend you are telling you'll be late.
If you can't be bothered to type out whole words on your phone, the answer isn't to text me with half words, but to go on a computer and write a polite, fully worded request for advice.
That's how you help yourself and help me answer your question.
(International) Air Travel Is A Right
Wendy Thomson blogs at TSA News Blog that Judge William Alsup, in December, 2012, ruled against the TSA in a case about the No-Fly List -- Rahinah Ibrahim v. Department of Homeland Security et al. They'd sought to dismiss the case and have a Federal agent show the judge documents without sharing them with the opposing counsel. Denied!
The Judge also sent a strong message as to the hurdle the DOJ would have to overcome regarding air travel:"The right to travel here and abroad is an important constitutional right. To deny this right to a citizen . . . based on inaccurate information without an effective means of redress would unconstitutionally burden the right to travel. While the Constitution does not ordinarily agree the right to travel by any particular form of transportation, given that other forms of travel usually remain possible, the fact remains that for international travel, air transport in these modern times is practically the only form of transportation, travel by ship being prohibitively expensive or so it will be presumed at the pleading stage."This isn't exactly new, as so eloquently stated in Kent v. Dulles (1958):
"The right to travel is a part of the 'liberty' of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment. So much is conceded by the Solicitor General. In Anglo-Saxon law, that right was emerging at least as early as the Magna Carta. Three Human Rights in the Constitution of 1787 (1956), 171-181, 187 et seq., shows how deeply engrained in our history this freedom of movement is. Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country, may be necessary for a livelihood. It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values."So there, DHS. So there, everybody else: the constitutional right to travel by air exists . . . even if (at the moment) it's limited to international travel.
The Coarse Of True Links
Coarse, vulgar, and off-topic.
How To Criminalize Being A Boy
Jonathan Rauch and others have written about how, if you take away a boy's toy weapons, he will make a gun out of a finger or a carrot.
This is because boys are wired to love transportation toys and toys of war. Put two PC-parent-raised toddlers in a room with a toy-chest and the girl will likely pull the doll out of the chest and the boy will pull out the truck. Not every time, but most times.
Well, in the latest in hysterical responses to Newtown and weapons in general, a first-grade boy has been suspended for pointing a finger at someone and saying "Pow!"
There's little information on this in news reports. From the MSNBC piece (a link Lisa Simeone just sent me):
"Generally, in an incident involving the behavior of our younger students, we will make sure that the student and his family are well-informed of any behavior that needs to change and understand the consequences if the behavior does not change," said Montgomery County Public Schools spokesman Dana Tofig in a statement.
The finger I want to raise to Dana is my middle one.
I Get Tired Of The Notion That Men Don't Show Their Feelings
What they don't do is show them like women do, in the Approved Women's Magazine Way Of Doing It.
Think You Can Avoid The TSA By Avoiding Flying? Think Again
Those of you who have been so polite about your Fourth Amendment rights being yanked away, and those who have seen no reason to squeal when others' rights are yanked from them -- well, we have you to thank.
Christopher Elliott blogs about the TSA showing up at a Vikings/Packers game last weekend in Minnesota:
That's right, the agency assigned to protect America's transportation systems was patrolling the Metrodome. Nathan Hansen, a North St. Paul, Minn., attorney, snapped a few photos of the agents before the game, and broadcast them on Twitter."I don't think any federal law enforcement agency needs anything to do with a football game," he told me yesterday.
Turns out the TSA goes to NFL games and political conventions and all kinds of places that have little or nothing to do with air travel. It even has a special division called VIPR -- an unfortunate acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response team -- that conducts these searches.
Few people know that $105 million of their taxpayer dollars are going to fund 37 VIPR teams in 2012, whose purpose is to "augment" the security of any mode of transportation. They don't realize that these VIPR teams can show up virtually anytime, anywhere and without warning, subjecting you to a search of your vehicle or person.
That's not a fringe observation, by the way. Even the most mainstream news outlets have reported on the problems of these random checkpoints. And it's being observed by mainstream news personalities, not just consumer advocates with a long list of grievances from their constituents.
But almost no one noticed when the Department of Homeland Security signaled its intent to broaden the scope of its off-airport searches even more in 2013. Buried deep in the Federal Register in late November was a notice that could dramatically shift the focus of transportation security. It involves the government's efforts to "establish the current state of security gaps and implemented countermeasures throughout the highway mode of transportation" through the Highway Baseline Assessment for Security Enhancement (BASE) program.
Will you finally complain about the rights violation when you are stopped on your way to the supermarket, despite there being no evidence that you are part of a plot any more sinister than having milk for your coffee in the morning?
The Big Top vs. The ASPCA: The Special Interest Group Doesn't Always Win In Court
From the WSJ:
Twelve years ago the ASPCA and other activist outfits joined with a former Ringling employee to sue the company under the Endangered Species Act. The claim was that Ringling was abusing Asian elephants. Perhaps the activists figured the circus would fold up its big top and write a check.Not on Chairman and CEO Kenneth Feld's watch. He's been working in the family business since 1970 and tells us that he's "proud of our animal care and I'll put it up against anyone in the world."
After nine years of litigation, a federal court found that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue under the Endangered Species Act and that the former Ringling employee was "not credible" and "essentially a paid plaintiff and fact witness" whose only source of income during the litigation was the animal-rights groups that were his co-plaintiffs.
The bad news:
Mr. Feld says the $9.3 million payment from the ASPCA represents less than half of what his company has had to spend defending itself against the "manufactured litigation" from the activists. But he seems likely to recover more. His company is continuing its litigation against the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, the former employee and the lawyers who prosecuted the bogus case."This goes way beyond economics," says Mr. Feld. He adds that the "level of harassment" that his elephant trainers undergo from activists is almost "unbearable" and that "the activists are trying to bring down an American institution." The longtime Ringling boss argues that he is the trustee of a tradition "older than baseball" that offers a vanishing commodity for American families: affordable G-rated entertainment.
Crass Appeal
Tickle us with with the worst of the web.
We Get Letters: A Pen Pal From The Pen
I get a lot of letters from prison, but I found this one amusing due to the juxtaposition of the way he addressed me and the inmate informational bit above.
Yes, of course -- he wants a pen pal. And he thinks I'd be a great candidate.
Hint: Very bad person to pick -- person who gets mail for a living.
The Freeloader's Manifesto
See the first tweet about the weird notion that we'd have to have jobs and pay our debts.
The Definition Of Moronic: $1 In Spending Cuts For Every $41 In Tax Increases
Via @WalterOlson, Paul L. Caron's "CBO On Fiscal Cliff Deal."
Idiots! Idiots! Idiots! (And I'm talking about the voters who keep thumbs-upping the legislative turds who passed this measure and others like it.)
The First Amendment Will Now Be Excused Without A Hall Pass
Girl suspended from high school for writing a poem expressing that she understands why Adam Lanza pulls the trigger. Not that she, too, wanted to pull the trigger.
If "grownups" at the school were worried, this would be a talking-to-her moment, but of course, she was suspended.
From The Daily Mail, Jill Reilly writes:
A 17-year old high school student has been suspended for a poem she wrote about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Courtni Webb wrote the poem in a personal notebook about Adam Lanza and what she felt were his reasons for the mass murder at the Connecticut school earlier this month.
...The San Francisco Unified School District are currently deciding about Courtni's future at the school and if she poses genuine threat to the safety to her fellow students.
But for now, she is suspended until further notice.
An excerpt of her poem:
They wanna hold me back
I run but still they still attack
My innocence, I won't get back
I used to smile
They took my kindness for weakness
The silence the world will never get
I understand the killing in Conecticut
I know why he pulled the trigger
The government is a shame
Society never wants to take the blame
Society puts these thoughts in our head
Misery loves company
If I can't be loved no one can
Another bit:
Why are we oppressed by a dysfunctional community of haters and blamers?
Jonathan Turley writes:
Once again, I fail to understand why students are punished for expressing their feelings and thoughts. I would rather address such feelings in a teachable moment as opposed to, as here, teaching students about the constant threat of censorship and discipline for free speech.What is particularly problematic is that the student was not glorifying violence but denouncing the bullying and isolation that often comes with high school. Webb insisted that "Never in my life have I heard that you couldn't mention a tragedy that happened. I didn't say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it."
The lesson from this action is not likely to be received as a matter of responsibility of students as much as the power of authority over students. We should want the students to discuss the massacre, particularly in Connecticut. The students who commit these rare acts of violence tend to be those who did not voice or express their anger and isolation. These disciplinary actions tend to force such students further underground where their feelings of rage and isolation grows. Then there are the much greater number of students like Webb who merely want to discuss the underlying causes for such isolation. They should have not just an opportunity but a right to do so, in my view.
It's easy to act all reactionary about speech, but a looming danger in our society is the erosion of free speech -- always for "good reasons."
The Fucket List
My friend Judy Moore just started a blog, The Fucket List.
She explains, "A Fucket List is the opposite of a Bucket List...things you never want to do."
I'll start.
Things I never want to do: Golf, go to a football game -- unless I am being paid to sing and expose one of my nipples.
When Will Cities Smarten Up? The Bills Milk Buffalo
Cities bend over and burp out tax breaks into the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions.
Buffalo is one of them.
Jon Terbush writes at TheWeek.com that taxpayers are paying big to keep the Bills in Buffalo, and under the stupidest of terms -- terms that pretty much guarantee that they'll be back before long with their hand out for more millions:
Under the deal's terms, the Bills will receive what has become commonplace for teams demanding new or improved facilities: hefty public financing. While most such deals represent long-term investments by local governments, a provision in the Bills' lease could leave taxpayers shelling out big-time for just seven more years of football. And even if Buffalo retains the Bills after that point, taxpayers will likely have to shell out hundreds of millions more to keep their Bills.The new lease's terms call for $130 million in improvements to 40-year-old Ralph Wilson Stadium. Of that total, the Bills will cover just $35.5 million. New York state and Erie County will pick up the remaining $95.5 million.
The total cost of the deal hits $271 million once operating expenses, like rent and upkeep costs, are factored in. The team is in line to cover just $44 million of that total.
On its face, taxpayers are buying the loyalty of their football team, as the lease binds the Bills to Buffalo for the next decade. Yet the lease also includes a one-time opt-out clause after year seven that will allow the Bills to skip town for a marginal fee. This all but guarantees that within the decade, the Bills will be back with a new list of financial demands, telling the state and county to put up even more money or risk losing the team.
Recent history has shown that states and municipalities are all too willing to spend big to keep pro teams in town. This past year, the Miami Marlins inaugurated their new stadium, which was made possible through $409 million in public bonds issued by Miami-Dade County. Just a few years ago, both the New York Yankees and Mets got new stadiums, and taxpayers ponied up nearly $2 billion to make it happen.
Public funding for new stadiums has become as commonplace in the NFL as it has in other sports. Since 2000, public funding for new football stadiums has routinely covered two-thirds or more of the total project cost. In one of the more extreme instances, taxpayers in Marion County, home of the Indianapolis Colts, paid for 86 percent of a $720 million stadium that opened there in 2008.
...The short duration of the Bills' new lease means that negotiations toward a longer, more costly deal, are about to get under way. In one sense, that debate has already begun. The lease established a split public-private commission to research the logistics of a new facility. And with new state-of-the-art stadiums now topping the $1 billion mark, New York taxpayers could be asked to pay for a major chunk of that, on top of the millions they're already due to pay. Toronto has lobbied hard to bring the NFL to Canada. The Bills, who already play one game every year in Toronto, thus have built-in competition for their services, meaning more leverage come deal time.
This is sports welfare, and at the rate municipalities are going broke these days, taxpayers and voters need to wake up and see that this ends.
Unfortunately, people's romantic identification with "local" sports teams (with players who are anything but local -- bought and brought in from all over the world) will surely cause them to push for this cashflow-arrhea to continue.
The Warm Glow Of Multiculturalism
Muslims in France celebrated the dawning of another year with Western freedoms by burning about 1,200 cars.
The Crassy Knoll
Deposit bad taste here.
The Cliff Has Been "Avoided" -- In Favor Of A Newer, Bigger Cliff
Karen De Coster blogs, in a beautiful rage. An excerpt:
First, the legalized gangsters in the nation's toilet raised the debt ceiling at the 11th hour so that the US government can borrow more and spend more, in spite of the looming budget carnage. Then they partied down into the wee hours of New Year's Eve and agreed to further fleece our most productive people in order to keep the spend-a-thon sustained....According to the Wall Street Journal, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: "But I think we can say we've done some good for the country. We've taken care of the revenue side of this debate." And what's wrong with that statement besides the fact that these bastards think they did "good" for the country? I am going to argue that the bona fide definition of "revenue" is a return/yield from property/investment or income earned from the sale of goods, services, assets, etc., and not the modern, revised definition that includes government theft to pay for "expenditures."
...While for-profit businesses seek long-term strategies for bringing in revenue and controlling expenditures, government always acts with high time preferences: raise dough now, even at the expense of long-term "revenue" shortages.
She explains at the link how this is done through slight changes in rules for taxpayers, and then notes how the legislative scum govern with a payday loan mindset:
Always, all problems are pushed into the future to be dealt with when it comes time to cross those various bridges. These last-minute crises always bring rise to media worship for the congressional criminals who dive in at the last minute and "save" our country from yet another fiscal Rubicon.
Occupy Rational Thought
Nick Gillespie, at reason, asks the right question of all of those mewling about the 1 percent:
It is far from clear that inequality is a bad thing when it's the result of market forces. Think about it: Do Bill Gates' billions take bread from your mouth, or have Microsoft products allowed you to put bread in your wallet by making you more productive and the goods and services you buy cheaper?
He winds his piece up with some good advice:
Rather than looking at ways to slice money off the top of the income distribution and funnel it into government programs with spotty records of success, we should address the ways in which government is already stacking the deck against the younger and poorer among us.
Right, Left, And Agenda Driven
Paul Craig Roberts writes at Lew Rockwell about what the right and left have in common -- being all about their agenda at the expense of seeking the truth or balanced solutions. An excerpt:
There are reports (about Sandy Hook) that when emergency medical help arrived at the school, the medical personnel were denied access to the children on the grounds that there were no survivors and the scene was too gruesome. Yet, there is a conflicting story that one six-year-old girl had the presence of mind to play dead and walked out of her classroom unscathed. If the story is true, how do we know that other survivors did not bleed to death from wounds because the emergency medical personnel were denied access? Did police exercise more control over the scene than was warranted?It doesn't seem to matter that questions are not answered and discrepancies are not resolved. The story is useful to the gun control agenda. Progressives, in order to achieve their agenda, are willing adjuncts of the police state. The facts of the shooting are less important than the use of the incident to achieve their agenda.
Probably there are answers to the questions. Moreover, the news reports that are the basis for questions could be incorrect. But why aren't the answers provided and confusions cleared up? Instead, people who ask obvious questions are dismissed as "insensitive to the tragedy" or as "conspiracy kooks." This in itself deepens suspicion.
The Colorado movie theater shooting has its own unresolved discrepancies. One eyewitness claimed that there were two shooters. Apparently, the suspect was captured sitting in a car in the theater parking lot, which seems strange. There are claims that the accused, a graduate student in neuroscience, was involved with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency in mind control research and that he doesn't remember doing the shooting.
Do we actually know? Apparently not. Wouldn't it be preferable to investigate these claims rather than to leave them as unanswered sources of suspicion? The loose ends of the Colorado movie shooting contribute to the suspicions caused by news reports of the Sandy Hook shootings.
A shooting incident occurs. The government puts out a story. Agendas form and take the place of the story. Unresolved issues disappear in heated dispute over agendas. Gun control advocates blame guns, and Second Amendment defenders blame other factors.
When the media permit agenda to take precedence over news, people lose confidence in the media and distrust spreads deeper into society. If the media and the government are opposed to conspiracy theories, they should not foster the theories by mishandling the news.
Neither the right-wing nor the left-wing has an interest in getting to the bottom of things. The right-wing is aligned with the police state in order to make us safe from "terrorism" - Muslim terrorism, not the terrorism of the unaccountable police state.
...American liberals have such an abiding faith in government that they are incapable of believing that beloved government would be culpable in crimes - unless, of course, it was Ronald Reagan's government.
As tyranny envelops the land, the main goal of the left-wing is to disarm the population.
The American left is the enabler of the police state, and the American right is its progenitor.
A Landfill Orchestra
Incredible.
As @DrEades, who led me to the link, tweeted:
If you think you've got it bad... Dirt poor kids in Paraguay make music with instruments made from recycled trash.
Members Of Condensation
What a wonderful life it would be: Wish almost all of the current members of the House and Senate would mysteriously evaporate.
Is A Sperm Donor A Biomatter Donor Or A Father?
Via @WalterOlson, the state of Kansas wants a sperm donor found on Craigslist to pay for the daughter born to lesbian couple -- despite his agreement with the couple that he would have no rights or responsibilities. Tim Hrenchir writes at CJOnline:
Topekan William Marotta sought only to become a sperm donor -- but now the state of Kansas is trying to have him declared a father.Nearly four years ago, Marotta donated sperm in a plastic cup to a lesbian couple after responding to an ad they had placed on Craigslist.
Marotta and the women, Topekans Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schreiner, signed an agreement holding him harmless for support of the child, a daughter Schreiner bore after being artificially inseminated.
But the Kansas Department for Children and Families is now trying to have Marotta declared the 3-year-old girl's father and forced to pay child support. The case is scheduled for a Jan. 8 hearing in Shawnee County District Court.
...Marotta, Bauer and Schreiner each signed an agreement saying he would be paid $50 per semen donation, with the arrangement including a clear understanding that he would have no parental rights whatsoever with the child or children.
The agreement also called for Bauer and Schreiner to hold Marotta harmless "for any child support payments demanded of him by any other person or entity, public or private, including any district attorney's office or other state or county agency, regardless of the circumstances or said demand."
Schroller said that after consulting with his wife, Marotta decided to donate free of charge rather than taking the $50.
...On Oct. 3, attorney Mark McMillan filed a petition on behalf of the Department of Children and Families seeking a ruling that Marotta is the father of Schreiner's child and owes a duty to support her. It said the department provided cash assistance totaling $189 for the girl for July through September 2012 and had paid medical expenses totaling $5,884.96.
Schroller, an attorney with Topeka-based Swinnen & Associates, said the state became involved after the mother fell on hard times and applied for financial assistance through the state.
She said of Schreiner: "My understanding is that after being pressed on paternity of the child, she gave them William's name as a sperm donor. The state then filed this suit to determine paternity."
This is horrible, abusive, and awful and an offshoot of the paternity fraud used by states to collect at all cost for payments for children -- and never mind whether they're collecting from the men who actually fathered them.
If men don't respond within a certain period of time -- perhaps because they're away at war and not getting their mail, or for any other reason -- they are declared the father, and petty inconveniences, like how a kid's DNA doesn't match theirs are considered immaterial.
I Should Sleep More
I just realized I made today's date January 1 on all the blog items. Thank you to everyone who didn't call me a rabbit-brain -- yet.
The good news is, I'm making great progress on my book, my radio show traffic continues to increase, and I love doing the show -- last night's show with psych prof Sam Sommers was really interesting. I'm just not leaving the house much or getting to sleep much!
Here's the link to last night's show.
Dr. Sam Sommers on Advice Goddess Radio: Understand context and live, love, work smarter:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/12/31/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
How Big, Free Market-Meddling Government Milks Consumers
James Bovard writes in the WSJ that milk, which now sells for an average of $3.53 per gallon, could soar to $7 a gallon:
If the price of milk zooms up shortly after Jan. 1, the increase will come courtesy of a venal and feckless U.S. Congress.No grocery store would hire a clerk who insisted on adding up a customer's purchases with an ancient abacus. Yet a similarly archaic standard is about to be inflicted on the nation's taxpayers and consumers.
Current farm programs--which consist of massive subsides, price supports and various marketing restrictions--were enacted in 2008 and expire on Dec. 31. That should be cause for rejoicing, except that the system is rigged against consumers and taxpayers.
Instead of Americans enjoying a bounty after the clock runs out, federal farm policy will automatically revert to a farm bill drawn up in 1949. That will compel the Department of Agriculture to roughly double the price supports for dairy and other farm products thanks to a mystical doctrine called "parity."
The doctrine was concocted by Department of Agriculture economists in the 1920s to "prove" that farmers were entitled to higher prices than the market provided. The official parity calculation was based on the ratio of farm prices to nonfarm prices between 1910 and 1914, the most prosperous non-wartime years for farmers in American history.
If the market price of milk, for example, fell below parity, the Department of Agriculture intervened in markets in various ways to provide a price floor to benefit dairy producers. This mechanism has been in place for generations, gouging taxpayers and consumers, long after full-time farmers became far wealthier than average Americans.
If you can't make it as a farmer without handouts from the rest of us, you should sell the farm and find work elsewhere. We have no business subsidizing farmers or any other business in this country.
UPDATE: The "dairy cliff" sounds like it may be avoided -- for now. From NBC News:
Farm-state lawmakers have agreed to a one-year extension of the expiring U.S. farm bill that, if enacted, would head off a possible doubling of retail milk prices to $7.00 or more a gallon in 2013.The compromise measure resulted from bipartisan discussions in the House of Representatives' Agriculture Committee and talks with colleagues in the U.S. Senate, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, the House panel's chairman, said in a statement Sunday.
"It is not perfect - no compromise ever is - but it is my sincere hope that it will pass the House and Senate and be signed by the President by January 1," Lucas, a Republican, said.
It was not immediately clear whether House and Senate leaders would bring the measure to a vote soon enough to avoid putting the so-called "dairy cliff" milk price spike into action.
Pigs at a trough, fed by dairy industry lobbyists. If you think your lawmaker is better than that, well, we're so sorry about whatever happened to your brain.
Crass Station
Fill 'er up!
10 Craziest Foreign Objects Found Stuck In A Rectum
Pooholes and the crazy shit people stick up there. I have to admit I didn't find any of them all that wild and crazy, although I laughed a little at the phone and the supposed reason it found its way up there.
