The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?

Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.

How could employment among the disabled have declined?

Because the law turns "protected" people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the Overlawyered.com blog, says that the law was unnecessary. Many "hire the handicapped" programs existed before the ADA passed. Sadly, now most have been quietly discontinued, probably because of the threat of legal consequences if an employee doesn't work out.

Under the ADA, Olson notes, fairness does not mean treating disabled people the same as non-disabled people. Rather it means accommodating them. In other words, the law requires that people be treated unequally.

The law has also unleashed a landslide of lawsuits by "professional litigants" who file a hundred suits at a time. Disabled people visit businesses to look for violations, but instead of simply asking that a violation be corrected, they partner with lawyers who (legally) extort settlement money from the businesses.

...Finally, the ADA has led to some truly bizarre results. Exxon gave ship captain Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab. Hazelwood then drank too much and let the Exxon Valdez run aground in Alaska. Exxon was sued for allowing it to happen. So Exxon prohibited employees who have had a drug or drinking problem from holding safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it -- employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their "right" to those jobs. The federal government (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supported the employees. Courts are still trying to sort it out.

James T. writes in the comments:

Some years ago, the city fathers of NYC tired of complaints of people urinating in alleys (and worse) and planned to kiosk rest rooms along the streets. Every so often there would be one that met ADA standards. They were sued. All had to meet ADA standards. Result: Everyone, including the handicapped are still urinating against buildings. It was just too expensive. Project dropped. Another personal knowledge incident. A young couple started a decorating service on the second floor of an old building and prospered for several years. The one or two people who could not climb the stairs were perfectly happy with the youngsters hauling tons of samples, etc to their homes. Along comes the ADA litigation queen. Not good enough, they were a public business, they had to meet ADA standards. Business closed. Five workers, not including owners were out of jobs. The young couple went south, where the could rent a one story building. This is just another example of employment disappearing from the northeast.

I sure agree. I also think health care needs to be available across state lines, that it needs to be untied from the workplace, and that it's not fair, that I (now 46), after paying monthly since my 20s for care, will, in a few years, have to start paying for other people who haven't paid a dime into the system, and who come down with some big disease in their 40s (for example).

At the WSJ, Scherz posts the letter he and his fellow members of Docs4PatientCare are enlisting doctors across the nation to give to their patients -- asking them to vote to repeal Obamacare:

"Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world."

Our doctor's letter points out that, in addition to "badly exacerbating the current doctor shortage," ObamaCare will bring "major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and by bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick that will force delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery."

We cite the brute facts of ObamaCare's passage:

"Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition--up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill--the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicago style threats and is determined now to resist any 'repeal and replace' efforts. This doctor's office is non-partisan--always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this legislation."

Then we address the Democrats' evasive campaign maneuver:

"In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill."

The letter's final lines are the most important:

"Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our health care system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever."

This message is going out to an electorate that is already frustrated over what they see happening to health care. Missouri voters rejected ObamaCare overwhelmingly in August, voting by a margin of 71%-29% to reject the federal requirement that all individuals purchase health insurance. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen has assessed that ObamaCare is "a disaster" for Democrats. And around the country many little-noticed primaries have reflected voter rage--including the Republican primary victory of surgeon, political newcomer, and advocate of repeal Daniel Benishek in Michigan's first district.

Saddam was not a nice man (that business about gassing the Kurds, just for starters). But, I think we shouldn't disproportionately be the world's policeman (that's what the broken United Nations should be for). I'm also against "nation building," as the last occupant of the White House also claimed to be -- just before he sent troops into Iraq to do just that. (Yeah, I know, "weapons of miscommunication"...or something like that.)

About that poop on Iraq coming out of the Obama White House, David Harsanyi writes at reason that:

...The president, who once accused the Bush administration of intentionally sending soldiers to die in Iraq to create a political distraction, now asserts that "America is more secure."

Harsanyi asks, how is Iraq doing now?

Remarkably well, you'll be pleased to learn.

Economically, Iraq is the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world; oil production is back; living standards are improving; about 20 million Iraqis have cell phones. When it comes to political freedom, Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East--which, let's be honest, is like finishing fourth in the weak NFC West.

And what's in it for us? Little that's good, Harsanyi continues:

...If the Islamic radical leadership of Iran--which many experts believe filled the vacuum left by the toppling of Saddam Hussein--is, as many believe, an imminent nuclear threat, we are powerless to stop it.

And if every military action in defense of U.S. interests now comes with an obligatory 10-, 20- or 40-year Marshall Plan, you've made it even more politically unpalatable.

There are other questions that make the claim "we're more secure" highly suspect. If we do leave, where is the evidence that Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter) will blossom into a secular democracy and an ally in the war against Islamic radicalism?

Doubtlessly, it is Islamophobic to bring this up, but Americans are dying not only in the war on terror but also to codify Shariah. Brooks claims that in Iraq, "the role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed." Surprisingly? Actually, that's just a polite way of saying--and I quote directly from the Iraqi Constitution--"Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation."

That's one reason many of us regret our support of the Iraq war. Though I am not reflexively isolationist, I am reflexively suspicious of social engineering. And nation building is social engineering on the grandest of scales.

And feel free to include really great episodes of good manners, too.

UPDATED: I posted a few more entries -- I'm on deadline now, but I'll continue to post them today and over the next few days. As soon as I have them all up (all I need your help on -- there will be more categories, and fun surprise categories in the book), I'll also post a "Miscellaneous" and a "Suggest A Category," but please wait until I do. (There's a good chance I'm covering the one you'll suggest.)

That isn't the title of my next book, but it's a big part of it. I've got the proposal written, and most of one chapter. My agent loves it, and as soon as I finish the other chapter, sometime in the next few weeks, she'll take it to publishers.

I need your stories -- the rudeness you see that makes you grind your teeth into a fine powder.

I've started a blog for this (Rude People -- it's listed over there under "Main Menu") and will be adding entries in the next week or so. Here's the URL:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/you_see_rude_people/

Oh, and by the way, right now, I especially need comments on The Sidewalk, one of the two chapters I'm including with the proposal.

So...come on over, and please vent!

The surveillance capability included locating the student if they were off school premises and in town. Today, I came across another news story from earlier this month that also involves tracking students. KTVU in California reported that the Contra Costa County School District began introducing a tracking system for preschool students that would alert staff when a student leaves school premises. In order to accomplish that, students will reportedly be required to wear a jersey that contains the RFID tag that uses Wi-Fi to send signals to sensors located throughout the school.

I realize that some might argue that these are just little pre-schoolers and of course, we want to protect their safety, etc., but keep in mind that one of the major justifications for the program is to save staff time in terms of having to manually record attendance, etc. In exchange for that time and cost-saving, what price do we pay psychologically as a society? It strikes me that schools are grooming our youth to simply accept being tracked and monitored wherever they go and that anything they do, anywhere, can be used against them in school or elsewhere.

Is this really how we want to raise our children? To be sheep who accept being tracked and who have little sense of privacy or entitlement to privacy?

@glukianoff

Brent Budowsky writes at TheHill.com:

I stand with the vast majority of Americans, who believe that Washington has become a fossilized town that is sickeningly out of touch with an America that hungers for leaders who lead, a Congress that acts and a president who stops telling voters they need teachable moments from him and starts listening to what voters, including many of his friends, are telling him.

The president has gone rogue. And Democrats. And Republicans. And everyone in this capital with eyes that don't see and ears that don't hear what an unhappy nation is telling them. Voters pray for action, but all they hear is self-praise from those who don't listen, and all they see is vanity and self-indulgence from those who don't care.

The American economy is becoming a factory of economic unfairness. Those whose greed almost caused a depression make giant fortunes, demand gargantuan bailouts and gorge on gluttonous bonuses paid for by hard-hit Americans who find their jobs destroyed, their hopes crushed, their dignity insulted and their voices silenced.

In this audacity of greed, the few with the most demand even more, while the many who pay the bills and suffer the pain are sold the great big lie of our times: that the cruel and unusual economy that is a factory of pain for patriots is "the new normal."

The Federal Reserve Board rewards massive hoarding of money from bailed-out banks that refuse to lend, while Mount Olympus from Washington to Wall Street tells Americans to downsize the dream.

Throughout the nation there is outrage in the land, revolution in the air, insurrection in the wind from the left, right and center. The political ground is shaking from gale-force winds of a national demand for powerful change in the way our corrupted and tone-deaf capital does business.

I'm a fiscal conservative, and a libertarian, so I don't see eye to eye with Budowsky on policy. (When he writes "the few with the most demand even more," I'm guessing he isn't including unions in that or the public "servants" breaking California and other states with their outrageous pensions.)

But, I sure am against welfare -- for the GMs of this world, and the kind that's supposed to help poor people, but mainly helps keep poor people poor, and keeps them pumping out more generations of poor people into the welfare system...like the classroom of daddlyless 11th graders I spoke to a couple months ago who read at the first, second and third grade level. And no, it wasn't a special ed class.

Capitalism grows an economy. Socialism kills it.

Many Muslim women, as the property of their fathers and families, are forced to marry men not of their choosing. Primary under Islam is not the women's wishes, but the public relations picture of the family: do they have an obedient little doggie of a daughter, who will marry the old man she's never met that Daddy has picked for her?

That's what Ayaan Hirsi Ali was told to do. Her father ordered her to marry a much older Canadian relative that she'd never met. She ran away to The Netherlands to avoid this forced marriage, and stayed free. Others aren't so lucky -- especially those who get picked up by this taxi driver in the UK, Zakir, a forced marriage bounty hunter. Nadeem Badshah writes for The Hindu:

Zakir's job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their "destiny" of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: "I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn't about the money.

"It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the 'taxi driver network', so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.

"I didn't harm any of the girls: among aapnes [the Asian community; literally 'ours'] discipline is up to their families. Only a couple of occasions I had to speak forcefully to them because they wouldn't come home. But it is obviously not a career, so I stopped. I got tired of chasing people around." Zakir prowled the streets of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds and Sheffield.

According to women's groups, bounty hunters are more common in places such as Yorkshire and Lancashire because the large south Asian populations are more closely knit, entrenched in conservative values, and there is a better chance of finding women who disappear in the north than in London. The community grapevine is a powerful tool in those areas; word spreads quickly about a person's whereabouts and welfare. And while this can nurture a closer community and ensure everyone looks out for one another, it can also be used to patrol the behaviour of those who do not conform to the unwritten rules -- meaning young women may be ostracised by disapproving elders for wearing "western" clothes or speaking to a boy.

Immanuel Kant said that people are not means to an end but ends in themselves. This is an example of classic Western values -- autonomy for the individual, and equal rights for women. Do we really want to be so welcoming of people who stand for spreading Sharia law?

I'm not talking about ripping up the Constitution. What I think is urgently necessary is that everybody start educating themselves about the realities of Islam -- as I have been since 9/11. Once you do, you'll understand that it's not "Islamophobia" to fear the spread of Islam.

I mean, can any of you stand up and say we should be tolerant of what Badshah writes about above?

Is anyone else weary of the media's hunt for retouched images to ridicule? A little more than a week ago, blogs were abuzz over unretouched photos of Jennifer Aniston, outtakes from a 2006 cover shoot for British Harper's Bazaar, in which the ever-tan actress looked less sun-kissed than sun-abused, a mere human not yet buffed to a celebrity gloss. Two weeks earlier, the pressing issue was whether Jessica Simpson -- whose career has lately consisted of public proclamations of her newfound détente with her zaftig figure -- was airbrushed to slimness on the September cover of Lucky.

...The issue, many critics of Photoshopping claim, is one of social ethics and emotional sensitivity. Retouched photos set an unrealistic bar for suggestible young girls, and therefore cry out to be exposed.

...But how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines -- artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching -- at face value? "Our readers are not idiots," Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, "especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23." Most of us who read fashion magazines don't feel we're confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it's not because they damage our self-esteem, nor -- let's be honest -- because we're constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it's also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, "objectively," without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you're bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.

...The age-old game of glamour creation, from Renaissance portraiture to Playboy centerfolds, has always been one of frank enhancement. Retouched pictures simply claim the traditional prerogatives of illustrations: to exaggerate, accentuate, and improve upon their subjects -- basically, to lie. For much of the last century, models and movie stars in fashion magazines and advertisements were often rendered as drawings or paintings. In The Girl on the Magazine Cover, journalism professor Carolyn Kitch explains that magazines were "dealing in ideals rather than reality," and the vaguer contours of an illustration "could represent both a specific type of female beauty," as well as more general "model attributes," like "youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility," etc. Of course, illustrations also appealed to their vain subjects, who were usually portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. In the ads of illustrator Gil Elvgren, for example, the women are libidinous fantasies -- a busty girl-next-door seductively rides a carousel to sell Coca-Cola; another, for whom busty is an understatement, shills for a Certa mattress. His pinups were even more outlandish in their homogenized well-endowedness. Not surprisingly, Hollywood starlets were eager for Elvgren to elevate them with his magic paintbrush. Similarly, Alberto Vargas, the famous creator of Esquire's Vargas girl and numerous Playboy illustrations, was favored by many Golden Age movie stars (Betty Grable Jane Russell, Ava Gardner) of his day. The melon-breasted, small-waisted sameness of his images invented something of a new pulp genre: physiological science fiction.

I've stored up so many mental notes about the way the United States looks to me after a long period away that I'm not sure where to start. So in keeping with my universal advice to people who aren't sure where to start, I'll start small. For now, a quick observation: Whoever thought of this "Green" business is a marketing genius. I just can't believe what people are willing to buy, accept, and enthuse over on the grounds that it's "Green."

I stayed at a hotel the other night that proudly offered normal-sized bars of soap with a big, oblong hole cut out of the middle of the bar. The shape, according to the corrugated, earth-brown wrapper, was "Green." Green how? Well, this shape (topologically identical to both a donut and a coffee mug, incidentally) reduced waste, thereby saving the planet. I know, I know: How would this reduce waste any better than, say, offering guests a mini-bar of soap of exactly the kind that has been a hotel-room staple since the Second World War? Obviously, all you have to do is call something "Green" to draw a veil of smug satisfaction over the consumer's every higher cognitive function. It's amazing.

I know I'm not reporting from abroad now, and you've all probably seen this before, but I was more than a little taken aback to learn that if I wanted clean sheets and towels, I had to leave a card on the bed (a rough-hewn brown corrugated card, dyed to look eco-friendly) requesting that the planet be fouled. Does it occur to no one that giving into this blackmail and swilling about in dirty sheets will do nothing whatsoever to save the planet (certainly not so long as coal plants and cows keep pumping their emissions into the atmosphere), but will surely save the hoteliers a few bucks and put a few chambermaids out of work in the process? I guess not.

Nick Gillespie on reason.tv on why I'm starting to hoard light bulbs:

What may surprise some people is that the American taxpayer is currently financing a trip to the Middle East by the imam who is pushing this project, so that he can raise the money to build it. The State Department is subsidizing his travel.

...Our betters are telling us that we need to be more "tolerant" and more "sensitive" to the feelings of Muslims. But if we are supposed to be sensitive to Muslims, why are Muslims not supposed to be sensitive to the feelings of millions of Americans, for whom 9/11 was the biggest national trauma since Pearl Harbor?

It would not be illegal for Japanese Americans to build a massive shinto shrine next to Pearl Harbor. But, in all these years, they have never sought to do it.

When Catholic authorities in Poland were planning to build an institution for nuns, years ago, and someone pointed out that it would be near the site of a concentration camp that carried out genocide, the Pope intervened to stop it.

He didn't say that the Catholic Church had a legal right to build there, as it undoubtedly did. Instead, he respected the painful feelings of other people. And he certainly did not denounce those who called attention to the concentration camp.

There is no question that Muslims have a right to build a mosque where they chose to. The real question is why they chose that particular location, in a country that covers more than 3 million square miles.

If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society. So the question is whether those who are planning a Ground Zero mosque want to be part of American society or just to see how much they can get away with in American society?

Theunis Bates counters on AOL:

The State Department also tried to dismiss concerns that Rauf might use the tour to raise funds for the mosque. "This is what we tell anyone who participates in one of our expert trips: They're there to provide perspective on behalf of the United States, and they're not to engage in personal business as part of the program that they're participating in," Crowley said. "He has agreed to that."

Oh, and P.S., more from Bates' story:

The trip is expected to cost the State Department about $16,000.

However, this isn't the imam's first government-sponsored tour of the region. He traveled twice to the Middle East during the George W. Bush administration and once earlier this year.

The real Imam Rauf is unmasked here, in a piece on PJM by Walid Shoebat. Read the whole thing.

I want to focus here on another dimension of the Obama administration's policies: the expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to as much as 99 weeks from the standard 26 weeks.

The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion--providing for persons temporarily without work--and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.

In a recession, it is more likely that individual unemployment reflects weak economic conditions, rather than individual decisions to choose leisure over work. Therefore, it is reasonable during a recession to adopt a more generous unemployment-insurance program. In the past, this change entailed extensions to perhaps 39 weeks of eligibility from 26 weeks, though sometimes a bit more and typically conditioned on the employment situation in a person's state of residence. However, we have never experienced anything close to the blanket extension of eligibility to nearly two years. We have shifted toward a welfare program that resembles those in many Western European countries.

The administration has argued that the more generous unemployment-insurance program could not have had much impact on the unemployment rate because the recession is so severe that jobs are unavailable for many people. This perspective is odd on its face because, even at the worst of the downturn, the U.S. labor market featured a tremendous amount of turnover in the form of large numbers of persons hired and separated every month.

99 weeks is TWO YEARS. If you have two years of unemployment, why take anything but the most plum job -- I mean, after you finish writing your novel?

Of course, that's only if you've worked for a company. If you're self-employed like me, go dig a ditch, sucka...you get zippo.

Smart comment from Thomas DePew at the WSJ:

It would seem that the question is whether there are jobs that are going unfilled because people find it more profitable to stay on unemployment rather than accept something that would be lower than unemployment benefits. For example, if unemployment payments are $1500/month, then the question arises whether that floor under wages is sufficient to keep people from looking for work. Assuming that $1500 unemployment compensation is equal to $2000 per month gross wages, that translates into roughly $11-$12/hr in a private sector job.

So, should someone who is unwilling or unable to find work at that wage pass on a lower-paying job, then it would at least lower the unemployment rate but drive up the under-employment rate. Less would be subsidized with government revenue, which can only help the private economy. Further, the incentive-destroying effects of government transfer payments would be eliminated.

In short, while unemployment compensation is probably more "compassionate" in the short-term, the longer-term effects are devastating, both for the private economy, the size of government, and the affected individuals. The problem with liberalism (er, progressivism) in general is that it is a short-term political philosophy, more focused on making the giver of benefits feel better than it does focus on the affected individuals and their long-term benefit. Are there any rational individuals who actually believe that a government handout is better than a private sector job? Really?!?!?

The Humanist: Specifically, would you say many women are not doing it purely by choice?

NH: Absolutely not. Whether or not we agree with or approve of them, the choices made by young women are theirs. If we're to grant autonomy to people over the age of eighteen, then that means accepting their choices as valid, even if we'd never do such a thing. This includes being able to join the army and get shot or maimed, or become a miner or construction worker. Those are deadly jobs (no one has died from making porn in the thirty-seven years it's been legal) and no one thinks to tell a young adult, "Don't do that job, it's dangerous." Or if we do tell them, we accept that, being young people, they may disregard our advice.

If we accept that a young woman can consent to have an abortion or become a parent, then it stands to reason that we must accept that she can consent to make pornography. Of all the branches of sex work available porn is the safest, as it's legal to make and we have an excellent testing program in place (aim-med.org).

These are ambitious, competitive young people, strivers, if you will. Most are not college-educated, nor do they plan to be. Porn is highly paid blue-collar labor and, for many performers, beats the heck out of wearing a paper hat. As entertainers, as well as simply being young people, performers have a high need for excitement and attention, and porn fits the bill.

The Humanist: What do you think could be done to improve the industry?

NH: The widespread notion that legal porn production is a sink hole of abuse and coercion that takes advantage of poor, innocent women, is the biggest smack leveled against the business. It's almost entirely a function or projection of people's fears and discomfort about women, gender relations, sex, sexuality and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The idea that a woman could choose, on purpose, to perform in pornographic videos for her own reasons still goes deeply against the notion that women are somehow victims of male sexuality, that they're delicate flowers who need the protection of a good man, or the law.

The best protection for women everywhere, especially in the sex trades, is full decriminalization of all consensual sex work. Porn is legal to shoot in California. We pay taxes, buy permits, and the like. Any woman can pick up her phone and call her agent, or the police, and get full support if anything happens on a set.

My biggest complaint these days is how the anti-sex work camp has, for the purpose of public confusion, conflated legal, consensual sex work, specifically pornography, with illegal, non-consensual trafficking of women for forced labor (some of it of a sexual nature). There is no connection between the legal material we make here in California and any trafficking of women. Full stop.

Are there some directors or agents with less-than-stellar reputations? Of course. This is not a business of selfless do-gooders (of course, the entire entertainment business is not run by selfless do-gooders). But the world can't be made a child-safe day nursery. We either accept that performers are adults making their own choices (no matter how we may feel about those choices), or we go back to pre-Women's Liberation days, when women couldn't get credit in their own names, obtain birth control without their husband's permission, or wear pants in the work place. Do we really want those days back?

via Norm

Unfortunately, there seems to be a sudden dearth of embarrassment at proclaiming, entirely sans evidence, that you were previously, oh, I dunno, a lazy, syphilis-spreading peasant (only it's always something more interesting and aggrandizing than that, and nobody ever claims to have been the ladies' shower room matron at Auschwitz).

Lisa Miller writes in The New York Times:

IN one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office -- leather couch, granite-topped coffee table -- makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.

In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.

Belief in reincarnation, he said, "allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human."

What I want a sense of is how you say that with a straight face.

My advice? Be interesting and live an interesting life instead of making up shit about how interesting you've been for centuries.

Loved Kate Coe's comment on Facebook about the DeBell nitwit's remark that he was a caveman in a past life:

Everyone was a caveman, dude. Distressing that a guy with a medical degree believes in this.

More from Miller's piece (of course, the "separating fools and their money" aspect continues!):

Peter Bostock, a retired language teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba, says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate -- possibly Chatsworth -- in Derbyshire, England.

In a twist that would make Jane Austen blush, he thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife, Jo-Anne, then embodied as a cook in the estate's kitchen. Married to someone else, Mr. Bostock could not act on his feelings.

He says he and his wife share the kind "of attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the familiar." In that spirit, the couple traveled last month to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of America's pre-eminent proselytizers on the subject of reincarnation, Dr. Brian Weiss.

On this second, sweltering day of the seminar, Dr. Weiss, a 65-year-old Florida resident with a hawk-like visage and placid blue eyes, was wearing a polo shirt the color of robins' eggs. He took a break from teaching and, over a healthy lunch, reflected on the rise of interest in the West in reincarnation. Like Dr. DeBell, he is a psychiatrist with an Ivy League pedigree (Columbia University and Yale Medical School).

Dr. Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published "Many Lives, Many Masters." In it he details his work with a patient he calls Catherine, who, under hypnosis, the book says, remembered multiple past lives, relieving her of paralyzing phobias. It has sold more than a million copies.

Now, Dr. Weiss said: "Doctors are e-mailing me. They're not so concerned with their reputations and careers. We can talk about this openly. And it's not just psychiatrists, but surgeons and architects."

Let's be open about who they are, shall we, so we'll know who's too dim to get our business.

I mean, if a doctor doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, how can he possibly find his way up yours with that latex glove?