September 2, 2010

Why The ADA Act Was Bad For People With Disabilities
Stossel writes on TownHall:

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.

You Fix It By Killing It
A doctor -- pediatric urological surgeon and Emory med school faculty member Hal Scherz -- founded an organization called Docs4PatientCare. He and his fellow members are telling voters not to believe Democrats who say they'll "fix" Obamacare; it needs to be repealed.

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.

The Bullshit Smells Prettier When It's Yours
My old line about us invading Iraq and taking out Saddam went like this: Somebody -- not you -- robbed a bank. Somebody should pay. They can't find that somebody who did it, but you'll do. They throw you in jail for the rest of your life for bank robbery.

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.

September 1, 2010

You See Rude People
UPDATED AGAIN: More categories are posted, and I'll try to post the rest by end of day tomorrow. Please drop by to leave your comments, and share the page and the individual entries with friends.

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!

Kids Being Groomed For A Surveillance State
Very troubling news from PogoWasRight on the creep of the surveillance state. In the latest blithe attempt to eliminate kids' expectation of privacy, aConnecticut school district wanted to require students to carry an RFID card-chipped ID so their location could be tracked:

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

The Lobbyist Suckups (aka Legislators) Are The Last To Know
It seems to me that many people in this country have awakened from their long, Rumplestiltskin-like slumber, and noticed that we have a bunch of thieves, idiots and incompetents running the country in Washington. Oh, and make that thieves, idiots and incompetents that a majority of Americans went "Oh, sure!" about on election day. Well, you get what you go, "Oh, I'm a Democrat!" or "I'm a Republican!" and blacken the little circle for on election day.

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.

Taxi To A Forced Marriage
Women in Islam are basically property. They have half the rights of a man, which is why, under Islam, it takes two women's testimony to equal that of one man in court.

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?

August 31, 2010

Enough With The Photoshop Hysteria
Amanda Fortini talks sense on retouching in New York Mag.

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.

Green Eggs And Scam
Turkey-dwelling Claire Berlinski writes on Ricochet.com on the marketing genius of being "green":

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:

A 15-Story Middle Finger To America
That's what Thomas Sowell rightly calls the proposed mosque/Islamic center/monument to jihad around the block from where the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed:

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.

August 30, 2010

Do Unemployment Benefits Keep People Unemployed?
I think so, and so does Robert Barro, writing in the WSJ, "My calculations suggest the jobless rate could be as low as 6.8%, instead of 9.5%, if jobless benefits hadn't been extended to 99 weeks":

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 Choice To Be In Porn
Ryan Schaffer interviews Nina Hartley on "Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography." Here's porn:

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

An Objective Look At The Glenn Beck Rally
A hysteria-free look by libertarian Nick Gillespie from reason.tv:

And no, Nick's not actually an Austrian economist (Hayek/Ludwig von Mises joke.)

August 29, 2010

Were You A Lazy, Syphilitic Peasant?
They're the self-important, goofy fairy tales of our time -- people's pronouncements about who they were "in a past life."

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?

Why Do Wealthy English Women So Often Wear Giant Flying Cockroaches On Their Head?
Fergie's latest. More misadventures in British head here.

The Ugliness Of Multi-Culti Religious Relativism
Self-proclaimed politlcal liberal Susan Jacoby wants to know "Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?"

It is understandable that American liberals, and particularly religious liberals, are wary of anyone who makes negative public judgments about other faiths. There is a long history of disrespect for various minority cultures and religions in America, although the Constitution and the First Amendment -- products of Enlightenment secularism and Enlightenment-influenced religion -- have (usually) stopped the disrespect from turning into bloodshed.

But it is one thing to recognize the legal right of all Americans to believe whatever they want and quite another to maintain that all belief systems are compatible with democracy. In a free society, religion should be no more immune to criticism than atheism, and the First Amendment does not give anyone carte blanche to violate secular law in the name of faith. This crucial distinction applies to all religions, not only to Islam.

...Furthermore, the fact that some traditional religious and cultural practices are technically legal does not make them right. An 80-year-old friend of mine -- a woman of forceful intellect who used to teach Renaissance history -- now lives in a Florida retirement community where many of the part-time staff are teenaged children of recent Afghan immigrants. When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women -- a high school senior -- weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. "Oh, madam professor," the girl replied, "my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted."

My friend replied gently, "You know, Yasmin, you don't have to marry anyone in this country because your parents say so. There are organizations to help girls like you think these things through. There are college scholarships. I can give you the names of people to talk to." Another resident of this community sharply reproved my friend, saying, "We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family."

Wrong. This type of "interference" -- telling a troubled young woman that she has choices other than an arranged marriage -- is exactly what a true liberal ought to be doing. The idea that someone should ignore the tears of a 17-year-old who says she is being pushed to give up her education is utterly perverse.

Perverse isn't the half of it when it comes to the Hadith-commanded practice of stoning -- of rape victims, gay teenagers and others who are powerless before the brutality of Islam. Phyllis Chesler writes at PJM:

What does it mean when a mob of men, numbering anywhere from 50 to 200, stone a female child to death -- as happened in October of 2008 in Somalia? That poor soul was not only a 13-year-old child, she had also just been raped. Indeed, that was her sole "crime" and the reason for her torture-execution. She was forced into a hole and buried nearly up to her neck. She took a long time to die and kept crying out for her life. In addition to the 50 active stoners, 1000 more men cheered them on.

via aldaily

August 28, 2010

Critical Ass
I'm all for sharing the road with bicyclists and motorcycles. In fact, when I'm in my car, I go out of my way to do it -- waving at bicyclists so they know I see them, moving over so motorcycles have more room to get by, etc.

There's this dumbass protest ride, Critical Mass, that takes place the last Friday of every month. At around midnight, dozens and dozens of people on bikes ride through my neighborhood, whooping in unison, waking up people's kids and setting dogs barking. Asshole move.

And last night, they showed, once again, that they aren't at all about sharing the road, but taking it over. La Brea was pretty empty near Wilshire, but they took up all the lanes on one side of the road, and screw anybody in a car who wanted to get by.

Does Music Make You Exercise Harder?
John Cage makes me run away screaming. Fat black women make me run faster, and dance in place at the traffic lights, or used to when I was still running seven miles. You?

Here's the New York Times piece on the rather expected finding that music influences the effort people put into their exercise.

These days, I exercise only a little, in front of the TV. Little weights, little cardio. And I stand on one leg with my eyes closed, then the other leg, for 15 seconds each while I scramble my eggs. Balance exercise, so I'll be less likely to take a tumble when I'm an (eccentric) little old lady.

An Honor Killing In Algeria
A moving and tragic tale, "A crime against my neighbor in Algeria. June 1986," by Kahina:

Sara was 20, just finished her first year of collage in Batna. She was in love with a boy from school. But as her father had arranged a marriage for her with a Muslim man. Sara was to be married as soon as she turned 20 to this man who was 53 years old. His wife had died giving birth at home.

...The day came for the marriage of Sara to General Djbar. Sara was preparing herself in her room, crying the whole time. Her mother was tormented that she had no say in her daughter's marriage or life because Sara's father had already arranged the marriage.

Sara's mother went down to start to prepare the henna for the festival. Sara packed her bags and jumped out the window. She ran to our house, where I would transport her to Constantine. I drove so fast, I felt like my heart was going to explode. We met her lover in the center of the city, where he had gotten papers for him and Sara saying they were married in order to get Sara into Tunis and then into France. They papers were forged, but were the only way we could get her out safe.

I drove home so that no one would miss me. It was a good 3 hour drive back to the mountains of Aures. Once I arrived everyone questioned me. I used the excuse that I went to get a gift. They saw the gift in the auto and did not question me any more.

But then I heard screaming coming from Sara's house. Everyone went to see what happened. We found Sara's mother black with bruises on her face and arms. Her husband had beaten her because Sara was gone. How was he going to explain this to the family and the man whom she was to marry? It was a disgrace to his honor.

Read the rest at the link.

About honor killings, they are not to be punished under (barbaric) Islamic law. Robert Spencer writes:

"...a manual of Islamic law certified by Al-Azhar as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy [over 80% of the world's Muslims are Sunni] says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2)."

In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

...Why does it matter that the practice of honor killing has Islamic sanction? Because if the roots of honor killing are never discussed and always ignored, the practice will never stop. Until the Islamic roots of the practice are discussed openly and human rights groups begin calling for reform, honor killings will continue in the Islamic world -- and in Muslim communities in the West.

And the idea that this is a racial issue or racial term is absurd. Islam is not a race, and the victims of honor killing are Muslim women. It is racist now to want to protect Muslim women from being murdered?

August 27, 2010

Terrorist's Wife Wants Victims' Benefits
Rebecca Camber writes in The Daily Mail/UK:

The widow of a July 7 suicide bomber yesterday launched a High Court bid to be represented at the victims' inquest - saying she had also suffered the loss of a loved one in the atrocity.

Hasina Patel, whose husband was terrorist mastermind Mohammad Sidique Khan, is seeking legal aid to challenge the coroner's decision to exclude Khan's death from the hearing for the 52 victims of the 2005 London bombings.

If the mother of one's application is granted, October's long-awaited inquest could be delayed by months of legal wrangling, to the distress of those who have waited more than five years for it to take place.

Lawyers for Miss Patel claim there should be 'no material distinction' between her and the families of those killed, because she 'equally suffered the loss of a relative'.

Oh, did she? Like the old joke goes, "They blow up so fast."

Let's just hope some clever barrister finds a way to prevent mass murder from becoming mass murder for hire -- with the British citizens doing the compensating.

Because Men Go To Hooters For The Food
From the WSJ Law Blog, Ashby Jones writes:

Hooters remains potentially on the hook for alleged weight discrimination.

A Michigan judge today ruled that two former waitresses who filed a weight discrimination case against the restaurant chain could proceed with their cases.

Hooters had said the defendants signed agreements to arbitrate any discrimination claims rather than take them to court. The company has said it does not impose weight requirements on employees.

...Cassandra Marie Smith, one of the plaintiffs, alleges in her complaint that she began working at a Hooters in 2008. At the time, she weighed 145 pounds.

In a performance evaluation this earlier year, she claims in her complaint, a restaurant manager advised her "to join a gym in order to lose weight and improve her looks so that she would fit better into the extra small-sized uniform." She alleged she was put on a 30-day "weight probation" and resigned.

The official uniform for Hooters waitresses, she claims, comes in 3 sizes: extra extra small, extra small, or small.

According to this story from the Grand Rapids Press, the suit cites Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by employers based on a number of factors. Height and weight discrimination were added in a 1976 amendment by then-state Rep. Thomas Mathieu.

Hooters' response from a UPI story:

Mike McNeil, Hooters of America Inc. vice president for marketing, said at a news conference outside the Roseville restaurant that waitresses at the chain are entertainers and must keep up their "image," The Detroit News reported. But he said Cassandra Smith, 20, of Roseville said in her complaint that weight loss was not explicitly demanded of her.

...Leanne Convery, 23, of Harrison, who also worked at the Roseville restaurant, filed her own suit Wednesday.

The chain is known for its waitresses, who wear short shorts and low-cut tops. Both Smith and Convery said the manager put them on "weight probation."

Convery told the newspaper in a phone interview she used diet pills after she had a baby last year and exercised so hard she would come close to losing consciousness. She said many of the waitresses take pills to keep their weight down.

"I was bound and determined I wasn't going to lose my job," she said.

You know, all jobs should not be open to all people, and that's perfectly okay -- or should be.

Answering Machine With Some Really Good Answers
Hilarious answering machine message that supposedly really ran at an Australian school. It didn't. Nor did it run at Pacific Palisades High School or any other school. But, it should. Welcome to school in the Age of the Entitled:

A New Wrinkle In Paternity Fraud
Find a good guy, have sex with him, tell him you're pregnant, and keep out of sight. Robert Franklin blogs at GlennSacks.com about a woman named Carmen Johnsen who told her ex-boyfriend that he was the father of the child she was having. Being a responsible sort, he started forking over $700 a month to help Johnsen with medical expenses and so she could buy toys, clothes, and furniture for his child:

But then, five months and $3,500 later, he happened to see her in the flesh and, lo and behold, she didn't look pregnant. When he confronted her, she claimed she'd miscarried, a fact she apparently didn't deem worthy of mentioning to him.

Unconvinced, he went to the police, but Johnsen produced hospital records that showed she had in fact been pregnant. But when police checked further and obtained their own records from the hospital, they determined that Johnsen's "records" were fakes.

...Backed against the wall, Johnsen played the abuse card, claiming that her ex was in some way abusive even though the two hadn't set eyes on each other in months. She attempted to get several restraining orders issued, but all were denied.

In the face of almost certain proof that she's been lying all along, Johnsen has changed her story yet again, claiming her ex had given her the money as a gift. Yeah, right. Let's see. The two broke up, he started paying her money only after she told him she was pregnant, she fabricated documents to 'prove' that she was, as soon as he learned she wasn't, he stopped paying and now she wants us to believe that he just gave her $3,500 out of the goodness of his heart. Please.

Carmen Johnsen is charged with forgery, perjury and theft. The boyfriend would like her to repay him the money she scammed. My guess is that she will. Somewhere somehow she'll find that money and repay him. That'll be called "restitution" and she'll make it rather than go to jail. That's my prediction. We'll see how it shakes out soon enough.

For years now I've been arguing for laws that require women to identify the father of any child they carry to term. If there's more than one possibility, both or all should be informed so that genetic testing can sort out the child's actual paternity. That's always seemed one of the simplest ways in which fathers can protect their parental rights. But now I'm forced to add a caveat; when the mother identifies the father, she needs to actually be pregnant.

Restitution should also be made in cases where the mother lies to a man and says children are his when they are not. Don't you think so? And if you're a man, and you want to be sure you're raising children that are actually yours, get a DNA test.

Behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuk says paternity fraud doesn't happen as often as people think. Well, perhaps not. But, it happens.

Notes From A Clinton Pollster
It's time for the guy in The White House to get real, writes Douglas Schoen in the WSJ (from a public relations perspective, unfortunately):

I first met with Mr. Clinton privately in early 1995, after the Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1954. I warned him that he could not be re-elected in 1996 unless he turned around his administration's reputation: from one of big-spending liberalism (represented by his attempt to massively overhaul the health-care system) to one of fiscal discipline and economic growth.

Mr. Clinton did just that, and now Mr. Obama must do the same--and quickly. Yet the White House seems to believe its approach should be to blame George W. Bush for everything. Polls suggest that this approach is likely to have only the most limited success.

...This means that Mr. Obama should seek to persuade voters that he has, at the very least, taken steps to stabilize the economy, the banks, the financial system and the auto industry. He must emphasize that he has turned around month after month of massive job loss; to do so, he can use the just-released Congressional Budget Office report that estimates the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs. And Mr. Obama should forcefully explain how the job-promotion plan he launched has the potential to create the kind of private-sector jobs he has promised.

Moreover, he must compellingly make the case that his administration has a consistent plan and policy agenda--something it has not had to date.

Mr. Obama and his Democratic colleagues also need to stop their phony populist campaign emphasizing that they have taken on the banks and Wall Street. Populism--particularly of the left-wing type that seeks to expand the role of government with redistributive fiscal policies and increases in government spending, intervention and ownership--rarely if ever works. In the absence of a successful argument for the administration's overarching policy approach, a populist campaign would be as fruitless as blaming George W. Bush for every ill America now faces.

Beyond that, the administration must emphasize that it understands the electorate's concern about fiscal prudence, the deficit, the debt and the need to balance the budget. The independent voters who hold the fate of the Democrats in their hands are looking for candidates who champion, in a bipartisan context, fiscal discipline, limited government, deficit reduction and a free market, pro-growth agenda. If Democrats don't offer this, they will be branded liberal tax-and-spenders.

They are. Same as the Republicans -- with too few exceptions. The Democrats are somewhat worse than the Republicans, but don't kid yourself; the Republicans weren't much better, aren't much better. And until people get mad enough to stop voting in the same spend-and-spend types, little will change.

I do hear something now I didn't hear in the Bush days (and I was not a Bush voter, nor did I like George Bush). I hear -- with some frequency -- anger and disappointment at Obama from so many of the people who voted for him thinking he was The Answer (perhaps because they projected their wishes onto what largely seemed to be a blank slate; admittedly, one that spoke with some charisma while making empty promises).

August 26, 2010

A Plus-Sized Manicure
When does a business get to pass along its costs to a customer?

Because I'm frugal, I usually get my hair cut at Fantastic Sam's in Marina Del Rey ($17, if you don't have them blow-dry), but I was in a hurry before an appearance I was doing, so I went to a unisex barbershop on Main Street. The sign on the window said $24 haircuts, but they charged $30 for long hair, which I had to pay...just for a little trim on my ends.

Well, there's a nail salon that's charging fat people $5 extra -- a kind of "you might break my $2,500 chair" fee.

Lisa Marsh writes for MSNBC:

Michelle Fonville went from being pampered to put down, with one swipe of a pen.

When this DeKalb County, Ga., woman received the bill from Natural Nails, a local nail salon, for her manicure, pedicure and eyebrow shaping, there was a $5 surcharge.

"I said, 'I've been overcharged,' " Fonville told WSB-TV in Atlanta. "[The manager] broke it down, then told me she charged me $5 more because I was overweight."

The salon manager, Kim Tran, told WSB-TV that she added the surcharge to compensate for chairs broken by overweight customers. Her pedicure chairs have a weight limit of 200 pounds and cost $2,500 to fix.

"Do you think that's fair when we take $24 [for manicure and pedicure] and we have to pay $2,500? No," Tran told WSB-TV.

While it's debatable whether obesity is a disability protected by the law (it is in health-related cases), on the face of it, there's not a chance Tran would have been able to know the reason for Fonville's being overweight. And without that knowledge, any kind of discrimination is a problem and potentially legally actionable.

Weighty issue
However, the incident raises practical issues related to dealing with bigger people. When is it unfair treatment for them to pay extra, as opposed to being charged more because they are getting a greater degree of product or service?

Most airlines will give a larger passenger a seat belt extender free of charge, but for the safety of other passengers in an evacuation situation, the larger passenger cannot be seated in an exit row. If the larger passenger cannot fit comfortably between armrests, they will be given another seat, if available, or be asked to pay for a second seat.

Where do you...sorry...weigh in on this? Per the legal noises they're making above...should airlines just have to suck it up and give fat people two seats in case it's a "metabolic issue," which very well might be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act"?

And let me just say, I think it's the polite thing to do, buying two seats when you're fat, even if the airline doesn't make you -- rather than "annexing half my seat like you're Germany and I'm Poland," as I wrote in I SEE RUDE PEOPLE.

Here's the video:

There Are Good Regulations And Bad Regulations
Great post by somebody who just calls himself M.S. at The Economist, who the state won't let swim beyond the designated swimming area in Massachusetts, and whose daughter swims in the Amstel River in Amsterdam, right in the city limits, with no problem or hassle from anyone:

So, here's a regulation I hate: you're not allowed to swim across the lake anymore in Massachusetts state parks. You have to stay inside the dinky little waist-deep swimming areas, with their bobbing lines of white buoys. There you are, under a deep blue New England summer sky, the lake laid out like a mirror in front of you and the rocks on the far shore gleaming under a bristling comb of red pine; you plunge in, strike out across the water, and tweet! A parks official blows his whistle and shouts after you. "Sir! Sir! Get back inside the swimming area!" What is this, summer camp? Henry David Thoreau never had to put up with this. It offends the dignity of man and nature. You want to shout, with Andy Samberg: "I'm an adult!"

...The park officials in Massachusetts aren't really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They're trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn't simply over-regulation as such. It's a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.

Why does he let his daughter swim in the Amstel?

...I'm pretty sure that in a well-regulated country like the Netherlands, the water is reasonably free of heavy pollutants and raw sewage. (I would not, for example, let her swim in the Mekong.) This, I think, outlines a useful distinction between different kinds of regulation. I am perfectly capable of assessing for myself the risks of swimming across a small pond in Massachusetts, or the risks of swimming in the Amstel when lots of boat traffic is around. I don't need regulations to protect me; I have common sense. What I can't assess for myself is the risk that the water is contaminated by raw sewage. For that, I need a regulatory agency that stops households and businesses from polluting the river. To generalise: for risks I can assess myself, I don't want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please just because I might end up suing the government. For risks I can't assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. One kind of regulation stops me from swimming in a pond in Massachusetts. The other kind lets me swim in a river in the Netherlands. One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer.

Commenter bonafides has a niggle or two:

First, the regulation about the swimming area is a straw man. A libertarian would note that this "regulation" is really a "rule" imposed by the owner. That is, if I own a lake (unlikely, but let's suspend disbelief) and you want to swim in it, I might allow you to, but insist that you stay in the safer shallower water near the lifeguards.

A "regulation" would be a State law that says that all owners of lakes must impose "safe swimming areas" with annual inspections, certifications and taxes (etc) on "public safety" grounds. Such a regulation would also state that it cannot be contracted out of by a responsible willing adult.

Secondly, your counterpoint (the clean water regulation) is something a libertarian could agree to, as preventing a provable negative externality.

via @WalterOlson

In Praise Of Government Gridlock
David Harsanyi, in reason, hopes we get a special gift in November -- government gridlock. He makes the case for divided government:

There is no greater check on power in Washington than two strong political parties.

...Washington is stocked with folks who possess the extraordinary gift of believing that they have the ability to manage and organize complex economic systems--and our behavior in them.

The one thing that they won't accept is that businesses, consumers and citizens can "figure it out for themselves."

We need gridlock to help them. And us.

Blogging The Quran
What many Americans (even Muslim Americans) don't know is that being a good Muslim, according to the Quran, requires that one take the Quran literally, as the word of God, and follow all its teachings. If, like me, you read the Quran, which commands that Muslims convert or kill the infidel, you may find this...um...problematic!

Jihadwatch's Robert Spencer has been blogging the Quran for quite some time. Here is an excerpt from one of his blog items of some of the stuff I talked about on the radio, on John Phillips' show on KABC 790 am, Los Angeles, Monday night:

Sura 4, "Women," is another Medinan sura, containing laws for the conduct of women and Islamic family life.

Verses 15-16 lay down penalties for sexual immorality. V. 15 prescribes home imprisonment until death (unless "Allah ordain for them some (other) way") for women found guilty of "lewdness" on the testimony of four witnesses. According to Islamic law, these four witnesses must be male Muslims; women's testimony is inadmissible in cases of a sexual nature, even in rape cases in which she is the victim. If a woman is found guilty of adultery, she is to be stoned to death; if she is found guilty of fornication, she gets 100 lashes (cf. Qur'an 24:2). The penalty of stoning does not appear in the Qur'an, but Umar, one of Muhammad's early companions and the second caliph, or successor of Muhammad as leader of the Muslims, said that it was nevertheless the will of Allah: "I am afraid," he said, "that after a long time has passed, people may say, 'We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book,' and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed." Umar affirmed: "Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession." And he added that Muhammad "carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him."

V. 16, says the Tafsir Al-Jalalayn, refers to men who commit "a lewd act, adultery or homosexual intercourse." They are to be punished "with insults and beatings with sandals; but if they repent, of this [lewd act], and make amends, through [good] action, then leave them be, and do not harm them." However, it adds that this verse "is abrogated by the prescribed punishment if adultery is meant [by the lewd act]," that is, stoning. The Islamic jurist al-Shafi'i, it goes on, requires stoning of homosexuals also, but "according to him, the person who is the object of the [penetrative] act is not stoned, even if he be married; rather, he is flogged and banished."

Next week: When to beat your wife, and what you should do first.

A WSJ letters to the editor writer explains an important distinction:

A key differentiating factor of Islam compared to the other major faiths is that Islam was not conceived as a "religion" that can be compartmentalized in the spiritual realm separate from everyday life. Instead, it was devised as a total solution to all aspects of life: spiritual, economic, legal, societal, domestic and political. Islam is an entire way of organizing society, as exemplified by Saudi Arabia in the land of its origin.

The structure of their compartmentalized faiths allows Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus to coexist in a multicultural society. The prevailing Islamic understanding of the world is that a person or nation is in the Dar al Islam (the House of Islam where the entire society is organized on Islamic principles) or in the Dar al Harb (the House of War). The Dar al Harb is that part of the world that is not Islamic--yet.

The Muslims understand this. Those who are in the House of War also had better understand it at least as well as the Muslims do.

Patrick Conoley
Houston

August 25, 2010

Guess Why You're Paying 25 Cents More For That Candy Bar
It's all about your health. Because the government knows that you are so dense that you can't figure out that a candy bar has more calories -- and lots more -- than a head of lettuce.

What's next, labeling potato chips "Not a vegetable"?

From the LA Times:

Many chain restaurants and vending machines would have to display the number of calories in their food for consumers under draft guidelines released Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration.

The guidelines require that calorie information be posted in the same size type as the menu item or price, whichever is larger. Vending machines would have to display the information in a "clear and conspicuous" manner so consumers could review it before making a purchase, according to the guidelines, which were authorized by the healthcare legislation passed this year.

Michael Hanlon, senior scientist for Consumers Union, praised the labeling requirement as a useful tool in guiding food choices but warned that it would not be a magic bullet in curbing the nation's appetite. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese.

Americans consume about a third of their calories from food prepared outside the home and tend to guess wrong about the number of calories in such foods.

The calorie disclosure requirement applies only to restaurants and other food chains with 20 or more locations and vending machine operators with 20 or more machines.

So, vending machine food isn't fattening unless the owner is making a nice profit from it?

Good one, Washington! Hey, FDA officials! Who do you think paid for that chair under your surely less-than-petite ass?

Best of all, you seem clueless as to why people get fat. If you knew anything about the science (and not that I support such a thing), you'd make vending machine owners put up signs, per the evidence uncovered by investigative science journalist Gary Taubes, that it's carbohydrates that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat.

Never Mind That All The Perps Are Long-Since-Dead
And that there are loads of untested rape kits piling up in Los Angeles. Forget all that...let's put scarce funds into trying to figure out the case of two babies that apparently died and got packed into a trunk in the 30s.

More here in the LA Times by Kate Linthicum and Andrew Blankstein:

Authorities said they are classifying the discovery as a "death investigation." They stressed that it's too early to tell whether this is a homicide case but vowed to find out what happened to the babies.

I love solving a good mystery (I believe I I just helped an old colleague find her college friend -- she asked on Facebook; it's easy for me; I tracked the lady down, down to her husband's name and their home address and phone number in a matter of minutes).

But, come on -- at this time, and with as squeezed as LA is and the LAPD is for funds? Can we please solve the crimes where there's some chance the perps are still out there endangering the rest of us?