You Don't See This Every Day
A Range Rover that looks as if it may actually have roved a range in its time:
Dimwits In Big Jobs
Today's Jell-O For Brains award goes to the Washingon Post's Sally Jenkins! For this idiotic column on "Intelligent Design." Here's an actually intelligent person's dissection of it. And here's a long list of other bloggers who find her ignorant.
How About A Conference Preventing Fundamentalist Asswads?
These people are sick. Anybody on this blog who says religion isn't damaging, tell me how you work out this twisted shit in your equation:
Focus on the Family is promoting the truth that homosexuality is preventable and treatable — a message routinely silenced today. We want people to know that individuals don't have to be gay. That's why we've developed a one-day conference for those looking for answers on this often-divisive issue. Whether you are an educator, parent, concerned citizen or even a gay activist, Love Won Out will inform, inspire and offer you hope.
"Love Won Out"? No, clearly rabid irrationality did. Is heterosexuality also preventable and treatable? Because I've got it bad.
On the front of their site, I especially like the guy at the bottom of the page who looks like the movie star version of Sex And The City's flamer, Sanford Blatch. But not to worry, all you fag-fearers. He says he "left homosexuality in 1991." (Alan and his wife Leslie live in Orlando.)
And don't forget Joe. Joe is the program director of Genesis Counseling in Tustin, California. He currently directs a monthly five-day men’s retreat on sexual purity titled, “Every Man's Battle.” Every man's battle? What, exactly, would that be? Hmmm...well, for men who haven't slammed themselves in the closet in the name of Jesus, I would imagine it to be something like not farting loudly in mixed company.
Then, poor Anne Heche, her momma's in on the act: "As a single parent who experienced the international media rush during her daughter Anne Heche’s highly visible relationship with Ellen DeGeneres, and a widow who endured her husband’s diagnosis of and subsequent death from AIDS, Nancy brings a spiritual focus to the effects of homosexuality in a family." Honey, your daughter ate pussy for a few years, she didn't boil babies.
UPDATED: Here's a link to a site with the truth about "Love Won Out." And here's an excerpt:
The facts on this subject are clear. Every leading medical and mental health organization says therapy designed to change a person's sexual orientation is ineffective and can sometimes be dangerous. The American Medical Association, The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics all have policy statements questioning the efficacy of such treatments. The APA says that attempts to change sexual orientation can lead to "depression, anxiety and self destructive behavior."History seems to reinforce the policy statements of these esteemed medical and mental health organizations. Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, co-founders of Exodus International, the nation's largest "ex-gay" group, denounced Exodus after divorcing their wives and holding a commitment ceremony together. Colin Cook, founder of Homosexuals Anonymous, was exposed as a fraud for giving nude massages and having phone sex with the very people he was supposed to be changing.
Love Won Out also faced a scandal after the program's director, John Paulk, was found lounging in a Washington, DC gay bar. Conveniently, this important fact is omitted from Paulk's biography that is currently being used to promote the upcoming Kansas City conference.
The truth is, the more people know about the techniques that are commonly used in reparative therapy the less credible it seems. For example, one commonly used method is the "rubber band technique" where a gay person wears a rubber band around his or her wrist and snaps it when he or she sees someone attractive of the same gender.
Another bizarre method reparative therapists use to cure homosexuality is called "Intrauterine Memory Recovery". This method involves helping a person recover a traumatic memory that supposedly occurred while living in his or her mother's womb. Of course, memory experts dismiss this technique pointing out that human beings can't remember specific memories before two years of age.
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, President of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and a prominent Love Won Out speaker, has a few strange ideas of his own. For instance, he postulates that "non-homosexual men who experience defeat and failure may also experience homosexual fantasies or dreams." He also encourages his clients to act more masculine by drinking Gatorade or calling friends "dude." Another leading NARTH member, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, M.D. believes that anti-depressants such as Prozac may help cure homosexuality.
With such peculiar ideas, it is no surprise that groups such as Exodus and NARTH scrupulously avoid documenting their work. When asked by Newsweek magazine why he kept no statistics, Nicolosi replied that he "didn't have time." These groups continue to exist, not to help people, but to help religious political leaders like Focus on the Family's James Dobson and former Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell deny gay people equal rights. Their message is simple: Since gay people can "change" they do not deserve protection from discrimination.
Rand Simberg Teaches "Intelligent Design"
In a great column by Cathy Young. It takes him only a paragraph:
''Intelligent design" boils down to the claim sarcastically summed up by aerospace engineer and science consultant Rand Simberg on his blog, Transterrestrial Musings: ''I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer." Simberg, a political conservative, concludes that this argument ''doesn't belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what's not science."
Here's the rest of the paragraph from Rand's blog:
How science works is by putting forth theories that are disprovable, not ones that are provable. When all other theories have been disproven, those still standing are the ones adopted by most scientists. ID is not a scientific theory, because it fails the test of being disprovable (or to be more precise, non-falsifiable), right out of the box. If Hugh doesn't believe this, then let him postulate an experiment that one could perform, even in thought, that would show it to be false.
And a bit more:
The point is that ID isn't science--it's a copout on science and the scientific method, and as I said in my post a couple years ago, creationists attempting to get their views into science class, whether explicitly as the 6000-year-old solution or dressed up as science, as in ID, is a failure of their own personal faith in their own beliefs. They seem to think that if science doesn't validate their faith, then their faith is somehow thereby weakened, and that they must fight for its acceptance in that realm.But that's nonsense. Faith is faith. It by definition requires a suspension of disbelief. If their faith hasn't the strength to withstand science, then they should reexamine their faith, not attempt (one hopes in futility) to bring down a different belief system that is entirely orthogonal to it.
This stuff is dark chocolate ice cream for the head.
The FDA Kisses The Ass Of The Religious Right
While trying not to look like it's kissing the ass of the religious right. While delaying a decision on whether the morning-after pill can be made available without a prescription. While pretending to care about science and data, and not just a lot of people's primitive belief in the big Imaginary Friend. Here's an excerpt from a New York Times editorial:
Such issues will require a 60-day comment period, when opponents of the pill will barrage the agency with reasons why the pill should not be made available without a prescription, followed by an indefinite period of thumb-sucking within the agency. All we have is a pledge from the agency's commissioner, Lester Crawford, that he will expedite the decision, but after the agency's past refusals to act, that pledge must be taken skeptically.The agency's justification for the delay is that Plan B supposedly raises unprecedented policy issues, including whether age can be a criterion for determining whether a drug should be available only by prescription or sold over the counter, and whether the same package and dosage can be used for both versions. That explanation is hard to accept at face value. The agency has known for more than a year that the manufacturer, to surmount previous F.D.A. objections, is proposing that age be such a criterion. If profound issues have been raised, the agency has had plenty of time to grapple with them.
The morning-after pill has been safely used by millions of women in this country and abroad, and an F.D.A. advisory committee overwhelmingly recommended that it be made available without a prescription. If the F.D.A. ultimately uses age-criterion issues as an excuse for blocking easy access, the manufacturer should apply to sell the pill over the counter to any woman, regardless of age.
Guess what: As I've written before, you can walk into a pharmacy in France and buy it just by asking for it, and the streets aren't filled with teenagers using it as primary birth control. In fact, when I've bought a few packages at a time in France (to save time and aggravation of going to the doctor if I need them in the USA), they always summon the pharmacist who comes out with a worried look on his face to instruct me it's only to be used in emergencies. "Je sais, je sais, monsieur," I reply. "I live in a backward, fundamentalist nation, so I buy them here where it's easy, and keep them in the medicine chest."
This Month's Invented News
Don't we have enough news without turning non-issues into issues? I used to have a book bag with the message, "You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny." Yes, sometimes I might seem to be dancing on the cusp of sanity, but I don't think these shirts will cause any children to go over the edge.
via Ken Layne's Sploid
Tying Off The Vain
A letter to the editor in the St. Petersburg Times:
A suicidal madnessAfter the first 500 American soldiers died in Iraq, we were told that we had to "finish the job or those deaths will have been in vain."
After 1,000 American soldiers died, we were told we had to "stay the course or those deaths will have been in vain."
Now, nearly 1,900 American soldiers have died, and we are told we "cannot cut and run or those deaths will have been in vain."
Next year, no doubt, after 3,000 American soldiers have died, we will be told that yet more lives must be invested so that those already dead will not have died in vain.
To sum up, the more who die require yet more to die so that those already dead will not have died in vain.
This is not logic, nor is it patriotism. This is suicidal madness.
Rafe Pilgrim, Crystal River
Amy Alkon, Manners Fascist
I love Bob Morris. He's always right on about what's wrong and what's right with people. Here's his column, from today's New York Times, on dinner guests gone wild:
It was high season on a tony New England island. I was the guest of friends in an exquisite home above the sea. Life seemed perfect. Then half a dozen of my college friends entered the picture and everything fell apart. It wasn't my fault. They were all on the island with their families, and my hostess invited them for a dinner in my honor.An hour before it began, two of the women, both serious, anxious mothers, informed me that they were going to bring their children to swim while we dined. I didn't know what to say. Dinner was to be seated with place cards, not a poolside cookout.
By the way, they added, the children would get fed too, right?
I wasn't even the host, and this had turned into a nightmare. But then, so often these days, getting people together is more "War of the Worlds" than "High Society."
Once they've accepted an invitation, guests seem to feel they can call every shot, especially at a time when customizing everything to suit individual needs is so common. Many guests seem so self-absorbed that they don't see that their needs aren't the only ones of a carefully planned evening.
...This is not to say that a host shouldn't be flexible. Even in her day, Emily Post predicted the more relaxed entertaining we know today. Still, I wish my friends (one showed up in a T-shirt) had understood their parameters before that dinner last month.
Fortunately my hostess did. She jotted down the drill so I could make things clear. "Children upstairs, watching television, with sandwiches on trays. Adults seated at dinner." Which meant no getting up and down to check on the children.
It all worked in the end. The dinner was an enormous success.
Did the hostess receive thank you notes or calls from all the guests?
No. That would be far too much to expect.
Bob brings up a good point. Somebody invites you to a party, especially a sit-down dinner party, the least you can do is write them a little note the next day. I generally remember to do that -- even just for regular parties -- and it's amazing how many people thank me and tell me I'm the only one who did, or who ever does. Perhaps some people would see this just as an obligation, but I think it's nice to think back on the party and then just take two minutes to write down that the host's efforts were appreciated. Also, it really is nice to get the occasional message that doesn't come via e-mail.
On a related note, a friend gathers various writers for monthly dinners at an LA restaurant. He's very successful -- the showrunner of a primetime TV show. Of course, this doesn't mean he should be expected to act as anyone's bank. Most horrifyingly, his assistant was forced to let people on the invite list know, en masse (so as not to single out the rude assholes), that our host had to shell out $150 last time around, thanks to people who ate and ran. This eating and running business happens every time, I believe, though not to that degree. Disgusting.
Remember civility? I think it went out with the catalytic converter and socks with toes. Well, socks with toes are back, but unfortunately, I think there's little hope for a resurge in manners.
Godless Geeks Dot Com
This is one of the best, most comprehensive arguments on why it's absolutely idiotic to believe in god. It was written by a guy named Mark Thomas, who, it turns out, is a fan of my column, which he reads in the San Jose Metro. Well, the admiration is mutual. Read what he's written, and if you still believe in god afterward, feel free to comment on why below. Rational arguments, please. We already know everybody believes just because they believe, which is proof of nothing, but lazy thinking.
Science For Morons
While the FDA is being wound more and more tightly around the little finger of the fundanutters, and stalling more and more on approving the morning-after pill, the fundanutters are putting out joke science to warn their "flock" (what an appropriate word!) not to use the stuff:
The emergency contraceptive/morning-after pill has three possible ways in which it can work:1. Ovulation is inhibited, meaning the egg will not be released;
2. The normal menstrual cycle is altered, delaying ovulation; or
3. It can irritate the lining of the uterus so that if the first and second actions fail, and the woman does become pregnant, the tiny baby boy or girl will die before he or she can actually attach to the lining of the uterus.In other words, if the third action occurs, her body rejects the tiny baby and he or she will die. This is called a chemical abortion.
Abortion is an act of direct killing that takes the life of a tiny human being-a life that begins at fertilization.
Tiny baby boy or girl? Didn't any of these nutwads take biology? Sure, there's potential for life there, but I don't think the fertilized egg is going to be rushing out to play ball with daddy just yet.
Why Lowfat Food Makes You Fat
This is empirical, not scientific -- but there's plenty of the science behind the sense of eating food with fat in it if you just search "Gary Taubes" on this blog.
I had an appointment at 3pm, so I went to a Starbucks halfway between my house and my appointment to write. Their pastry is just dreadful -- it's an insult to particle board to say it tastes like particle board. I was hungry, but I couldn't bear to have one of their chewy, tasteless croissants, so I ordered a piece of blueberry coffeecake. There was no sign on it, so I didn't know until two hours later what I'd eaten.
Now, if I'd eaten a croissant, I could go to my appointment and come back and then eat something at home. But, not even two hours after eating that blueberry coffeecake, I was RAVENOUS. I haven't felt hungry like this in years. Not just hungry, not even hungry like I am after I run seven miles (which is not that hungry, actually, just time to eat a little something). No, for the first time in years, I was "GET OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY SO I CAN GET TO THE COUNTER AND GET SOMETHING ELSE TO EAT!" hungry.
Now what makes the difference between very hungry and HOSTILE ANGRY BITCH hungry? Bien sur, dietary fat. I asked the girl at the counter if my suspicions were correct that the blueberry thing was reduced-fat. Sure enough: "Oops, I guess we forgot to put out the little sign."
Yeah? Easy for you to say. Gimme my Cobb salad before I reach across the counter and throttle you for it. I mean...thank you very much! Have a nice day!
Here's more on the blueberry food that is not food:
STARBUCKS REDUCED FAT BLUEBERRY COFFEECAKE VERSUS CHOCOLATE FILLED CROISSANTSurprisingly, the Chocolate Filled Croissant at 350 calories is a better choice than the 380-calorie coffeecake. Plus, the coffeecake is made with trans fat and has 500 milligrams of sodium. Neither is a healthy choice (doughnuts, croissants, muffins and scones aren't necessarily part of a good diet), but if you're going to have one anyway, at least choose the better option.
The writer is wrong about croissants not being healthy. (Search "Will Clower" on this blog for more on that.)
Wanna lose weight? Have a croissant with some brie and jam on it for breakfast. Toast it so the brie melts. Yum. Or eat a couple pats of butter if you're in a rush to get out the door. Do not eat low-fat or no-fat crap (in which they replace the taste removed with the fat with six pounds of sugar)...not unless you're a hired killer and you have a rampage on your calendar.
No-fat, low-fat...what idiocy. Jeez. If I have a 250-calorie yeast-filled, glazed donut at 9am, I sometimes have to remind myself that I'd better eat lunch when the clock strikes 2 or 3pm. Don't even get me started on those attempted foods called Snackwells. Ever see any dental-floss-thin people eating them?
What's Next, Douching With Janitor In A Drum?
Lysol?!!
via Metafilter
Should Your Doctor Tell You You're "Pleasingly Plump"?
Well, maybe he should if he doesn't want the state to come down on him for being a big meanie!
ROCHESTER, N.H. - As doctors warn more patients that they should lose weight, the advice has backfired on one doctor with a woman filing a complaint with the state saying he was hurtful, not helpful.Dr. Terry Bennett says he tells obese patients their weight is bad for their health and their love lives, but the lecture drove one patient to complain to the state.
“I told a fat woman she was obese,” Bennett says. “I tried to get her attention. I told her, 'You need to get on a program, join a group of like-minded people and peel off the weight that is going to kill you.'"
He says he wrote a letter of apology to the woman when he found out she was offended.
Her complaint, filed about a year ago, was initially investigated by a panel of the New Hampshire Board of Medicine, which recommended that Bennett be sent a confidential letter of concern. The board rejected the suggestion in December and asked the attorney general’s office to investigate.
Bennett rejected that office’s proposal that he attend a medical education course and acknowledge that he made a mistake.
I don't know about you, but the only reason I have health insurance is so I can go to the doctor once a year and hear how radiant I look. Next thing you know, some criminally rude dentist is going to be telling me my teeth will fall out if I don't brush and floss.
Feel Hungry Your Whole Life, Live Longer
Lisa Walford touts Calorie Restriction for life extension. I knew her dad, Roy, the UCLA gerontologist who came up with CR (and knew Lisa, a well-known yoga teacher, in passing through knowing Roy). How much longer you actually live, nobody's too clear. The problem is, you get the extra two weeks or two years, or whatever it is, when you're 90, not when you're 39. Here's more from an article by Joanna Glasner in Wired:
Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University gerontologist, recently wrote a paper (.pdf link at the Wired story link above) concluding that CR is unlikely to add more than two or three years to the mean or maximum life span. De Grey said he is skeptical of CR's potential for radical life extension in part because he sees no reason why it would be advantageous from an evolutionary perspective."Basically, there has been insufficient selective pressure for us to retain the ability to live 20 years longer than normal in response to nutrient deprivation," he wrote in an e-mail. De Grey added that he has no objection to moderate CR for health reasons, so long as practitioners don't expect to live a few decades longer as a result.
But moderate health benefits hardly seem to justify the effort of a CR diet, noted one contributor on the website Fight Aging, who wrote:
"What a trade-off: Feeling hungry your whole 80+3 years, or just enjoy your meals and die at 80."
Not even ardent CR supporters can accurately estimate how many years the diet might add to their lives, but most CR followers believe the diet offers potential for life extension much greater than two or three years.
Studies of mice, worms and other animals fed a restricted-calorie diet support the notion of radical life-extending benefits. A study of Labrador retrievers published in 2002 also found that a 25 percent restriction in food intake increased median life span and delayed the onset of signs of chronic disease in the dogs.
When I was friends with Roy, and went over there for dinner, my motto was always "eat beforehand." You'd get a piece of polenta and two spears of asparagus. Okay, you'd get more than that...but not much more. What I did learn from Roy was to eat a "high-nutrient" diet -- ie, the best, most nutrient-rich food available. I think I'll stick to the French diet: small portions of high-nutrient, high-fat food that makes you feel happy you're eating...as opposed to three lettuce leaves and two beans, which must make you feel like an anorexic bunny.
Send Your Letter of Support for DISH TV
I read on Metafilter that Mullah Wildmon (aka Reverend Wildmon) is at it again, calling out the flock to protest use of the word "suck" in current advertising by the Dish Network to describe their competitor, cable TV. Here's their complaint:
DISH Network commercial teaches kids to use crude languageDISH Network (EchoStar Communications) is airing ads that repeatedly use the phrase "sucks" to describe how cable TV compares to their DISH Network. Here's how one customer described it:
The [ad] campaign is simply a constant reiteration of the phrase "TV SUCKS". My children were not allowed to speak like that in our home, and they are following suit by instructing our grandchildren in the same manner.
Another supporter said:
I am very offended by a current commercial of Dish Network where two women are in a living room and the television is acting like a magnet and pulling things towards it. The dialogue goes something like this: First woman: "What's that?" Second woman: "My TV sucks." First woman: "Your TV sucks?" Second Woman: "Yeah. . .doesn't yours suck?" This commercial is such a problem because my two-and-a-half year old will stop what she's doing to watch it and I have to desperately fumble for the remote.
You can view the ads for yourself at www.suckfreetv.com
We believe the DISH Network ads are teaching children imitative behavior and language most parents disapprove of.
Please send an email to DISH Network (EchoStar Communication) and let them know you are offended at their casual use of crude and inappropriate language.
Send Your Letter Now!NOTE: If you see a commercial or program which is offensive, email us the information. Many of you have done this, and it is very helpful.
Note from Amy: If you see a commercial program which is offensive, email me, so I can be sure to watch it. Sexually offensive only, please. Violence makes me squeamish. I do find it hilarious that they're accusing DISH of teaching kids crude language. Hello? Been around any kids lately? They don't need anybody's help.
Protest letter link is here, but they make you register for fundamentalist spam, so you can also email this address (executivecustomerservice@echostar.com). I encourage you to write DISH chairman Ergen in support of free speech, and protesting the fringe nutwads who seek to control the lives of the rest of us. Here's the email I wrote:
Dear Chairman Ergen,As a fierce advocate of free speech, I wholly support the use of "suck" in your advertising, and encourage you not to bow to American fundamentalists who seek to use their irrational belief in god to control the lives of the rest of us.
By the way, I have Dish, and get a nice package of cable channels, DVR, and TV5 from France, and just love it.
Keep up the great work!
-Amy Alkon
Where Are The American Car Companies?
The Honda Insight (the car I drive) has been on the road since 1998, yet American car companies are churning out enormous, gas-hogging vehicles, and have made no substantial progress in fuel efficiency or anti-pollution technology since the fuel crisis in the 70s. Meanwhile, inventors, professors, and tinkerers are getting beaucoup miles by building or further converting hybrids:
Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 mpg by using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new company, EDrive Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for about $12,000 starting next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen said.University of California, Davis engineering professor Andy Frank built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban.
Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each vehicle's price tag.
Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations.
"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially."
How many soldiers had to get their legs amputated because of American companies' lack of technological innovation?
The Culture Of Life!
The Religious Right is all for it -- except when it seems easier to just go in there and off somebody!
Is the former Republican Presidential Candidate a Christian terrorist?Popular U.S. televangelist and conservative Christian Pat Robertson has called for the murder of democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Robertson has not publicly retracted his call.
Speaking on "The 700 Club," the 1988 Republican presidential candidate and staunch Bush supporter claimed that Chávez was trying to make Venezuela a launching pad for Muslim extremism all over the continent. Citing Chavez's close ties with Venezuela's significant supply of oil, Robertson said the need for his elimination is justified.
"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel criticized the US and said, “It's deeply hypocritical to talk about fighting terrorism while at the same time, within that country, there are obvious terrorist statements.”
Commenting about President Chávez, Robertson had said, "I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.” The conservative Christian continued, "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."
The White House vehemently denied trying to kill Chávez but accused the President of trying to transform Venezuela into a Cuba-style state. At the same time, administration officials were quick to denounce Robertson for his extremist Right-Wing views. Sean McCormack, a US State Department spokesperson, referred to Robertson’s statements as “inappropriate.” McCormack also said, “Calling for terrorist homicide against a democratically-elected president is not appropriate; it is illegal, immoral, must be condemned in the strongest language possible, and must be investigated for potential violations of federal and international law.”
The Miami Herald makes an interesting point:
The Federal Communications Commission should find this wretched episode of interest, as well. If Janet Jackson's ''wardrobe malfunction'' merits a $550,000 fine, what about an open appeal to commit murder?
UPDATED:
Now, Robertson reveals himself, not just as a thuggish advocate of murder, but a sleazy liar. Oh, were his remarks "misinterpreted"? You be the judge:
Conservative religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Wednesday that his remarks about the removal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez were taken out of context and that he never called for the killing of the Latin American leader."I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should 'take him out.' And 'take him out' can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP [Associated Press], but that happens all the time," Robertson said on "The 700 Club" program. (Watch video)
The controversy began Monday when Robertson called Chavez "a terrific danger" bent on exporting Communism and Islamic extremism across the Americas. (Full story)
"If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it," said Robertson on Monday's program. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war." (Watch Robertson's comments)
"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," he said. "We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Alone And Lonely Are Not The Same Thing
Here we have a rather simplistic little wail in the WSJ, about the recent Census figures, showing that that the largest chunk of American society is people living alone:
We've long worried about trends, including single parenthood, that seemed to threaten the well-being of children. But 27 million lonely grown-ups probably isn't great for society either.
It's about time we stopped assuming anybody who isn't in a relationship or who lives alone is some miserable loser. I'm in a very happy relationship, but live alone -- by choice. Here's why, for people who'd like to stay in happy relationships, that choice is the wise one (from a recent column I wrote):
I wrote the chapter "How to Be a Good Houseguest" for The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do (Random House, $19.95). At 611 words, it was 609 words too long. The best way to be a good houseguest? Two words: Stay home.People who seek to share living quarters, even as guests, are people with illusions about people. I have none. My chapter opens with a helpful stomp on everybody's rose-colored glasses: "People are annoying. All people. Including you, me, Jennifer Aniston and people living in dishwasher cartons on the street corner. Like the rest of us, you're loud, messy, demanding and unsightly, with numerous irritating habits -- which degenerate from irritating to excruciating the longer you're around." On the bright side, "by acknowledging the ugly realities of human nature, you might not only retain your hosts as friends but find yourself invited back."
Where people in relationships go wrong is by assuming "fish and guests stink after three days" doesn't apply to anyone they're sleeping with regularly. Not only do you think you're exempt from this rule, you think moving in with somebody you love is the key to nonstop nookie. Why? Because he's always there? Denny's is always open, but you probably don't find yourself flailing around in bed in the middle of the night aching for a Grand Slam.
Desire runs on the economics of scarcity. That's why diamonds, not speckled gray pebbles, "are forever," and why special occasions are celebrated with champagne and caviar, not tap water and a scoop of tuna. You want what's rare, or seems rare, not what's there 24/7, gassing up your couch.
For the biology behind why, read on at the column link above.
A Difference Between Important And Self-Important
Important: Can't be reached.
Self-Important: Leash by Nokia. (Coming soon to disrupt a cafe, bar, restaurant, elevator, bus, or subway car near you.)
Smart article by Christine Rosen on cell phones in The New Atlantis.
Certain public interactions carry with them certain unspoken rules of behavior. When approaching a grocery store checkout line, you queue behind the last person in line and wait your turn. On the subway, you make way for passengers entering and exiting the cars. Riding on the train, you expect the interruptions of the ticket taker and the periodic crackling blare of station announcements. What you never used to expect, but must now endure, is the auditory abrasion of a stranger arguing about how much he does, indeed, owe to his landlord. I’ve heard business deals, lovers’ quarrels, and the most unsavory gossip. I’ve listened to strangers discuss in excruciating detail their own and others’ embarrassing medical conditions; I’ve heard the details of recent real estate purchases, job triumphs, and awful dates. (The only thing I haven’t heard is phone sex, but perhaps it is only a matter of time.) We are no longer overhearing, which implies accidentally stumbling upon a situation where two people are talking in presumed privacy. Now we are all simply hearing. The result is a world where social space is overtaken by anonymous, unavoidable background noise—a quotidian narration that even in its more interesting moments rarely rises above the tone of a penny dreadful. It seems almost cruel, in this context, that Motorola’s trademarked slogan for its wireless products is “Intelligence Everywhere.”Why do these cell phone conversations bother us more than listening to two strangers chatter in person about their evening plans or listening to a parent scold a recalcitrant child? Those conversations are quantitatively greater, since we hear both sides of the discussion—so why are they nevertheless experienced as qualitatively different? Perhaps it is because cell phone users harbor illusions about being alone or assume a degree of privacy that the circumstances don’t actually allow. Because cell phone talkers are not interacting with the world around them, they come to believe that the world around them isn’t really there and surely shouldn’t intrude. And when the cell phone user commandeers the space by talking, he or she sends a very clear message to others that they are powerless to insist on their own use of the space. It is a passive-aggressive but extremely effective tactic.
Such encounters can sometimes escalate into rude intransigence or even violence. In the past few years alone, men and women have been stabbed, escorted off of airplanes by federal marshals, pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, ejected from concert halls, and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of their bad behavior on their cell phones. The Zagat restaurant guide reports that cell phone rudeness is now the number one complaint of diners, and USA Today notes that “fifty-nine percent of people would rather visit the dentist than sit next to someone using a cell phone.”
...One possible solution would be to treat cell phone use the way we now treat tobacco use. Public spaces in America were once littered with spittoons and the residue of the chewing tobacco that filled them, despite the disgust the practice fostered. Social norms eventually rendered public spitting déclassé. Similarly, it was not so long ago that cigarette smoking was something people did everywhere—in movie theaters, restaurants, trains, and airplanes. Non-smokers often had a hard time finding refuge from the clouds of nicotine. Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend. Yale University bans cell phones in some of its libraries, and Amtrak’s introduction of “quiet cars” on some of its routes has been eagerly embraced by commuters. Perhaps one day we will exchange quiet cars for wireless cars, and the majority of public space will revert to the quietly disconnected. In doing so, we might partially reclaim something higher even than healthy lungs: civility.
...Cell phones provide us with a new, but not necessarily superior means of communicating with each other. They encourage talk, not conversation. They link us to those we know, but remove us from the strangers who surround us in public space. Our constant accessibility and frequent exchange of information is undeniably useful. But it would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life—an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and tolerable.
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people seem to base their public behavior on a concern for others. It's amazing to me that "no cell phones" signs like the one at a Santa Monica café I go to are necessary, and that I actually had to stop going to one place for a while because it's very small and I just couldn't take the cellular rudeness of some of the patrons (I constantly had somebody shouting at the back of my neck). When I ran into one of the servers who works there, and she asked me why I hadn't been around, she said she was going to ask the owner to put up signs banning use of cell phones inside.
Now, it's one thing if you live in the Arctic Circle, but it's about 65 degrees, year round, in Santa Monica. Is it really such a hardship for people to walk outside? And moreover, if you're going to go outside, and it's an outdoor cafe, maybe, just maybe, you should toddle down the block so the people at the outdoor tables don't have to become privvy to the details of your urinary tract infection.
Why is this not obvious to everybody? Sigh, I guess I answered that question above. Still, as I said once to a man shouting into his cell phone in a restaurant who responded to my entreaty to pipe down by snapping that there was no sign posted banning cell phones in the place: "There's no sign here either, saying you shouldn't urinate in the middle of the floor, but somehow, you manage to find your way to the toilet, now don't you?"
I guess I have to apply my favorite quote about common sense to common courtesy: "If it were so common, everyone would have it."
Sisterhood? Sister-Hah!
Barbara Ellen writes in the Observer about the new "sisterhood" -- in which Rod Stewart's daughter Kimberly, says she likes Jennifer Aniston because she's "homely," and obviously must have something else besides looks going for her:
Of course there are those out there who would argue that 'sisterhood' per se is a myth. One man I know observed: 'Sisterhood only happens when a man walks into a room.' This, he believes, is when we all gang up against the common enemy - men - flouncing around calling each 'girlfriend!' and dispensing high fives like some long-lost episode of Sex and the City. However, when men aren't around, women hover around each other like vultures at the last carcass in town: competitive, sneaky, ready for the kill. What rubbish, you scoff - and rubbish it is. Most of the time. Then you notice how in magazine culture 'too-fat watch' has been joined by 'too-skinny watch': ostensibly a stab at social responsibility but really just another excuse to tear other women's bodies apart. You realise that women mainly buy these magazines. You notice yourself rifling through them unable to resist another shot of Tara Palmer-Toastrack. Then we get comments like Stewart's on Aniston. 'Homely'? 'Not exactly beautiful'? And finally you have to admit to yourself: men just don't do this.Let's face it, it's not all down to our gender simply 'enjoying a bit of gossip'. Men don't have entire magazines devoted to famous men looking awful. You wouldn't get Josh Hartnett sighing faux-sympathetically over Colin Farrell's beer gut. In fact, men rarely criticise each other on those terms.
Note to Barbara: That's because men are hard-wired to want beautiful women. We girls are hard-wired to want men who are "providers," and to care a bit about tallness and symmetry, but, to not be so laser-focused on men's looks as they are on ours. And now, after this tiny anthropological correction, back to Barbara's words on girls knocking girls:
Moreover, where women are concerned, a man will think it 's punishment enough that he doesn't find you attractive and leave it at that. By contrast, when women think other women are looking unattractive they will analyse the reasons endlessly, either with a forensic brutality or, worse,with the kind of cod-empathy ('But she is such a nice person') displayed by Stewart. A sentiment coming from the same place that once made it law that everyone had to compliment fat girls on their 'pretty faces'.It's like 'sisterhood' is alive and well, but in a bad way. In the New Sisterhood, the sisters are more like some real-life adolescent sisters - digging at each other, criticising and relishing each other's downfall. And you can't help wondering - why does this happen so often, why does it happen at all, when women are the more nurturing, supportive gender? Maybe it's simply the case that female empathy and celebrity cancel each other out (after all, we might snicker at Tara in a tank top but we wouldn't really enjoy seeing our own friends publicly humiliated). Ergo: what happens on the pages of Heat magazine might not be happening in our true feminist hearts. Whatever, all this certainly undermines the notion that Aniston somehow has 'women on her side 'over the Brad-Angelina business. With friends like this, who needs publicists?
Bitchslapping The Man-Hating Bitches
81-year-old feminist icon Doris Lessing, author of The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook, comes out against the ugly mess feminism has become. In the beginning, feminism was about campaigning for equal rights for women. Then, it degenerated into campaigning for special rights for women. Now, it's still about the latter -- but it's also morphed into a coalition promoting the hatred and humiliation of men. Here it is in Doris Lessing's words:
Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy that could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men."I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men that is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed," the 81-year-old Zimbabwean-born writer said.
"Great things have been achieved through feminism. We now have pretty much equality at least on the pay and opportunities front, though almost nothing has been done on child care, the real liberation. Why did this have to be at the cost of men?
"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
"This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. It is time we began to ask who are these women who rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man, and no one protests."
I'm with Doris. And, in fact, I've been getting a nice little pile of hate mail about my own recent criticism of feminism. It's my response, in my column, to a girl who'd always dreamed of living in London, but, as she wrote, "the feminist in me says I shouldn't just pick up and move to be with a man." Grrrrr. An excerpt from my reply follows:
Yes, leave it to the women's movement to turn itself into something that keeps women from moving. It was supposed to be about sensible stuff like equal pay for equal work - fantastic idea - and giving everybody the vote. Then, a bunch of rad-fem loonies like Sheila Jeffreys (England's Andrea Dworkin) jumped into the fray: "When a woman reaches orgasm with a man, she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression."In other words, maybe the ism that you need most right now is not feminism, but what-works-for-me-ism - which appears to be moving to London and seeing more of this man. Maybe, like rock and roll photographer Sue Rynski, from Detroit but living in Paris for 19 years, you'll want to make London home. Maybe not. But, maybe you shouldn't wait until you're 45 and have five kids, three dogs, and a knocked-up hamster to figure that out.
Go. You can always come back. But keep in mind, the wisest relationship decisions are not based on a desire for cheap rent. Save money before you leave, stay with him just long enough to find your own place, and the two of you can just date - which should prove much less romantically stressful than vaulting straight from time-zone-crossed lovers into Mr. Bloke and The Missus.
Sure, you're taking a chance in going - just as you would be in staying home. After all, a replay of "The Vagina Monologues" could pop up on HBO at any moment, perhaps causing you to die of embarrassment at what a cartoon certain factions of feminism have become. Of course, maybe the mark of real progress is real women feeling perfectly comfortable living however and wherever they're happiest - not a bunch of movie stars showing how comfortable they are getting up on stage and shrieking about their genitalia.
Susan Spano Reports From Paris. Well, Sort Of Reports.
Crack travel reporter Susan Spano, "blogging" from Paris, discovers a street named for General Jacques Camou. She is curious. Who is Jacques Camou? She looks in one book. To be fair, the book was separated into two volumes:
To solve these questions, I consulted the two-volume "Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris," by Jacques Hillairet and Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, in the reference section at the American Library in Paris, which happens to be on the Rue du General Camou. It was only marginally de-mystifying about the general, who was born in 1792 and died in 1868, when the street was given his name.
Far be it from Ms. Spano to lift a finger to open, say, a second book, to research it further. Or, gasp!...perchance, hop on Google.fr? Not to worry, Ms. Spano, I'm on the case.
Now, my French isn't the hottest thing in the world, so I may have made some errors translating and summarizing this page from my search on Google.fr. I welcome your corrections.
Jacques Camou was born May 1, 1792, in Sarrance, to a peasant family. They wanted him to become a priest. But, he enlisted in the Army of Aragon, then became a sergeant. When he was just 17 years old, he became a second lieutenant. In 1813, he fought in Italy and was wounded. Then, in 1823, he fought in Spain, as a captain, and was wounded again. Then there’s Algeria, and more Algeria, the guy’s whole life is in the damn army. From 1841 to 1854, he’s still fighting away, and gets promoted from lieutenant-colonel to general of the division, more fighting still. It sounds like the guy spent about every waking moment in the army, only leaving it in 1862, having reached the age limit, then kicking the bucket in 1869. From a letter Le Maréchal Bosquet sends to Camou’s maman after his death: "...Camou is the best type of soldier, the simplest, the bravest, the most well thought of, the most loved...” (In other words, the man was a war machine...early Ahhhnold, with Camembert on the side. Or something like that.)
I guess it's a little uncreative of me to expect that a reporter would actually do some...reporting! Luckily, for our favorite overaged slacker in Paris, the LA Times appears to have stopped printing reader comments; perhaps because so many of them sneer that she might occasionally leave the moneyed womb of the seventh arrondissement and actually do a little reporting. Awwww, but that takes so much woorrrrrrk!
Take The "Dress Like A Girl!" Challenge
Yet another woman popped by my table at my favorite So Cal breakfast café to lament how hard it is to meet a man. Well, yes it is, and it's especially hard for women who look like they're a little underdressed to be on call to repair people's septic tanks, as she's typically attired. (In case you're wondering, she doesn't read my blog.)
Today was not a special occasion for me; just an ordinary day, where I went off to my café for a little breakfast, newspaper reading, and a few hours of work on next week's column. Then again, not to be to queer about this, but I see every day as a special occasion, and I dress accordingly. This is how I dressed today to go to breakfast. I put the same outfit back on to go to dinner with Gregg, who took this photo in my kitchen after we came back.
Now, piece for piece, this outfit takes no more effort to throw on than a pair of sweatpants, a smelly old shirt and sweatshirt, and a pair of grimy sneakers.
In fact, it's kind of an easy uniform: black skirt, nice jacket, little pair of heels, matching earrings and hair torture device. I do have to admit, the red lipstick takes a bit of management. But then, you don't need socks with the shoes, so that's a step saved right there! (And yes, I know the shawl jammed in the purse looks messy, but I was in a hurry, and thought it might be cold in the restaurant.)
And in case you think it's expensive to look girly, cost of my outfit:
*skirt, discounted, from DNA in Venice, $35
*Carlos Falchi kitten heel pumps, Loehmann's clearance, $25
*black Ralph Lauren stretchy tank, Marshall's, $8
*jacket, Benetton, Third Street Promenade, half-off at summer clearance sale, $79
Here's a challenge to all of you women out there who wonder why men don't pay attention to you. You really don't have to look like Angelina Jolie. Just put a bit of effort into looking feminine. It's a really important quality men look for in women. If you dress just like the guys they throw one back with at the corner bar, maybe minus the 5 o'clock shadow...well, why should they give you a second look? You can have the most beautiful personality in the whole world, but nobody will ever know.
So, really, try it: Dress up like you're going someplace special, where you'd want to look really feminine. Then go walk the dog, go to the grocery store, pick up the your package at the post office...and report what happens in the comments section below.
NOTE: The unshy are welcome to submit "before" and "after" photos, or just "after" photos to post, or send links to photos.
Slim Gets Real Shady
Eminem took sleeping pills and woke up a black man? Or somebody at Google was sleeping on the job?
via Treach, at his new blog, Blowing Smoke
Dumbest Product Name Of The Week
That would go to the Subaru Tribeca, a new SUV/station wagon. Now, Tribeca is my old neighborhood in New York. (Lived there before the movies stars came in and ruined the place.) Why is it called Tribeca? Well, because it's the TRIangle BElow CAnal (Street). And what's it best known for, transportation-wise? Blocks and blocks of fume-spewing, Jersey driver traffic jams enroute to the Holland Tunnel!
President Gore
Krugman on Andrew Gumbel's new book, Steal This Vote -- at $10.85 on Amazon.com, a democracy-rebuilding bargain:
In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.
But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.
Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.
And what about 2004?
Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.
He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."
..We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?
Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.
To The Manners Rented
Mireya Navarro writes in The New York Times that some of the curs among us are being sent back for etiquette lessons. Well, to their credit, they're sending themselves:
Although there are no hard numbers on this, the etiquette industry (if that is the proper term) appears to be enjoying a sort of renaissance, if not a neo-Victorian age. Instructors, many of them working individually with clients as "etiquette consultants," almost uniformly say there is a growing demand for their services.The upsurge, they say, is being driven not just by parents who want their children to eat without repulsing dinner guests. More adults are also signing up for etiquette instruction. It is even a subject of higher education; colleges are increasingly offering etiquette seminars.
Motivations vary. Some clients believe that sharpening their social skills - how they hold a fork, enter a room, make conversation - will make them feel more confident. Others hope that a bit of social grace will give them an edge in the competition for jobs and dates, help them stand out among the barbarians.
Then there are those who see mastery of etiquette as another step in a tireless quest for self-improvement. One 35-year-old assistant movie producer, who took private etiquette lessons in March to help advance her career, said the move had already paid off. Rather than sitting in the car while her boss holds court over lunch in the Beverly Hills Hotel, she says she now joins the business meetings with the self-assurance of a Donald Trump.
The producer, who spoke on condition of anonymity - "How does it look that I had to pay for manners?" - said she aspired to be as elegant as the actress Grace Kelly and as prepared for company as if she were to meet the Queen of England. She said her boss now treats her more as an equal.
"If you think of all the money you spend on clothes and makeup, why not have a manners makeover?" she asked.
In two two-hour sessions, the producer said, she learned to sit properly by locking "your ankles so your knees are not spread apart" and resting her hands on her lap.
"What comes with all these techniques is a certain confidence, that confidence that says you're as good as anybody else," she said. "You walk taller. You command respect. I can drink my tea and be comfortable and not have that nagging thought in the back of my head that I don't belong here."
Yesterday, I waiting in line at a store while a guy yammering into a cell phone deigned to hand his credit card to the girl behind the register, not ever speaking a word to her throughout the entire transaction. When I said something to her about it (after saying, "Hello, how are you?" etc.), her response: "You're not from around here, are you?" Apparently, about half her customers are that rude. Scary.
How Kelo Can They Go?
by Jonathan O'Connell writes in the Fairfield Weekly, that the Kelo seven, who lost their fight to keep their homes after the city planned to replace them with a luxury business and housing center, haven't even begun to get screwed:
Those who believe in the adage "when it rains, it pours" might take the tale of the plaintiffs in Kelo v. New London as a cue to buy two of every animal and a load of wood from Home Depot. The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the city's original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit and owe back rent. It's a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.In some cases, their debt could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moreover, the homeowners are being offered buyouts based on the market rate as it was in 2000.
C'mon! Everybody sing along with me (to the tune of "My Country 'Tis Of Thee): "My banana republic 'tis of thee..."
Excuse me, but this is America, and we're nationalizing private property in the name of business improvement districts?
The “Animal Rights” Movement’s Cruelty to Humans
Alex Epstein writes in a press release from AynRand.org:
The “animal rights” movement has pulled off a deadly deception: promote a vicious, anti-human policy, while feigning benevolent, compassionate motives. The deception takes the form of opposing life-saving medical research--in the name of opposing cruelty to animals.Consider PETA’s ongoing campaign against Covance, a company that conducts vital medical research on animals to fight diseases such as breast cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. PETA is staging an elaborate, heavily backed PR effort claiming that Covance engages in gratuitous and unnecessary torture of monkeys. The centerpiece of the campaign is a 5-minute video allegedly proving PETA’s accusations.
In fact, PETA’s effort is a classic smear campaign. Many of the “abuses” it documents--such as the use of restraints or delivering drugs through nasal tubes--are necessary to effectively administer drugs to animals. And the few examples of seemingly inappropriate behavior they find, such as the bizarre taunting of monkeys by a few Covance employees, are treated as pervasive industry practice--even though it took a PETA operative (operating illegally within Covance) over 10 months to cull a mere handful of such instances.
No sane person seeks to inflict needless pain on animals. Such practices, where they exist, should be condemned. But anyone concerned for human life must unequivocally endorse the rightness of using animals in medical research.
Animal research is absolutely necessary for the development of life-saving drugs, medical procedures, and biotech treatments. According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Murray, M.D.: “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacements, and all vaccinations.” Explains former American Medical Association president Daniel Johnson, M.D.: “Animal research--followed by human clinical study--is absolutely necessary to find the causes and cures for so many deadly threats, from AIDS to cancer.”
Millions of humans would suffer and die unnecessarily if animal testing were prohibited. But this is exactly what PETA and other “animal rights” organization seek. They believe that all animal research should be banned, including research conducted as humanely as possible (the declared and scrupulously practiced policy of most animal researchers).The founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, has declared unequivocally that animal research is “immoral even if it’s essential” and that “Even painless research is fascism, supremacism.” When questioned what her movement’s stance would be if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, Newkirk responded: “We’d be against it.” Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: “If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
The goal of the “animal rights” movement is not to stop sadistic animal torturers; it is to sacrifice human well-being for the sake of animals. This goal is inherent in the very notion of “animal rights.” According to PETA, the basic principle of “animal rights” is: “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”--they “deserve consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans.” This is in exact contradiction to the requirements of human survival and progress, which demand that we kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them to fight disease. To ascribe rights to animals is to contradict the purpose and justification of rights: the protection of human interests. Rights are moral principles governing the interactions of rational, productive beings, who prosper not in a world of eat or be eaten, but a world of voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation and trade.The death and destruction that would result from any serious attempt to pretend that animals have rights would be catastrophic--for humans--a prospect the movement’s most consistent members embrace. Newkirk calls human beings “the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” Freeman Wicklund of Compassionate Action for Animals declares: “We need a drastic decrease in human population if we ever hope to create a just and equitable world for animals.”
The central issue in the “animal rights” debate is not whether it is acceptable to torture animals, but whether it is proper to use them for human benefit. The “animal rights” movement’s emphasis on the senseless torture of animals--in the rare cases where it actually exists--is a red herring. It is a way of promoting opposition to life-saving animal research companies, and sympathy for themselves--so as to further their evil agenda of subjugating human beings to animals. They must not be allowed to get away with such dishonesty. What is needed is a principled, intellectual defense of the absolute right of animal experimentation, against the deadly notion of “animal rights.” Anything less is cruelty to humans.
President Bush's Big Fat French Vacation
I heard a report on CNN that George Bush is taking five weeks...five weeks!...of vacation. Now, I'm sure they slip him a bill or two to sign, and I believe he did pop off to Illinois the other day...but his job is clearing disasters and such from Washington, not clearing brush in Crawford, Texas. Just doing what I do, I work six or seven days a week, year round. I'm sorry, but if you're the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, maybe you don't get vacations until you're out of office...or maybe you should take a week...not five?
Hmmm...I bet some of those men and women on stop-loss orders in Iraq would love five weeks vacation!
Cellulite Cream Works!
...At improving cellulite cream-selling companies bottom lines. Jessica Seigel writes in The New York Times:
THE marketing campaign generating so much free publicity for a giant cosmetics company shows real women, rather than anorectic teenagers, in white bras and panties posing next to the slogan, "New Dove Firming. As testedI personally love the images, but woe to Neanderthals like Richard Roeper, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who derided the Dove gals as "chunky," igniting apoplexy over how much of a male chauvinist pig he is. With the ink flying, Mr. Roeper defended himself as just being honest - something we never doubted.
If only Dove would also come clean about its firming lotions. The truth is that anticellulite creams don't work.
That's why Dove, which is owned by Unilever, makes the campaign about images, not facts. Perhaps that explains why the multinational company's elaborate marketing includes a 48-page report on women's attitudes about beauty, but not one sentence giving information about how its firming ointments were "tested on real curves," reducing flesh dimpling in just two weeks.
Despite my repeated requests, Dove declined to release testing data - not surprising considering the pseudo-scientific babble driving this more than $40 million market, according to figures from research firms NPD Group and Information Resources.
Of course, snake oil isn't all bad. The Dove lotions largely contain glycerin, an old-fashioned moisturizer that your grandmother might have used. And studies show that women see improvement from fake creams with no active ingredients - a visual placebo. Considering today's pressure to be beautiful, women may need that.
But according to 27 years of medical literature recently reviewed in the Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy, scientific proof that creams make a real, lasting difference does not exist. "There is no evidence to show that any topical medications improve cellulite," says Dr. Mathew Avram, the study's author and a Harvard Medical School faculty member.
Yet marketers and even some doctors promote the idea that lumpy flesh is a shameful but treatable condition caused by aging and obesity. That is, if you call puberty "aging," because that's when skin dimpling first appears, likely connected to the release of female hormones. (For that reason, oral contraceptives may worsen skin puckering, and males who lose testosterone after prostate surgery may develop it.)
Cellulite is a concocted idea imported from France. Hardly a disease or condition, it is how fat is arranged inside the female body, especially on thighs, hips and rear. And it affects some 90 percent of adult women. To change it, says Dr. Avram, you'd have to rejigger underlying body architecture, which is why exercising and losing weight helps some. But only some. "What you have here is normal female physiology," he says. "Skinny women have it too."
How do women not know that this stuff is a crock? I never buy any of that stuff -- not that I have cellulite, probably thanks to my running -- but I just ignore all that wrinkle-repair cream ads, too. It's all crap. Black women I know put vaseline on their skin for moisturizer. That seems to work. The cheapest stuff, in fact -- like Ponds cold cream -- works best. Anything else, you're paying for marketing lies and coverups -- which is like paying a fine for being stupid.
Is Your Muff Buff?
Spotted on aldaily.com, this article by Jill Mahoney about the doctor behind the designer cooch:
Los Angeles — Women from around the world flock to David Matlock's marble waiting room carrying purses stuffed with porn. The magazines are revealed only in the privacy of his office, where doctor and patient debate the finer points of each glossy photo.The enterprising gynecologist sees countless images of naked women, but none are more popular than Playboy's fresh-faced playmates. They represent, he says with a knowing smile, the perceived ideal.
“Some women will say, ‘Hey, you take this picture and hang it up in the operating room and refer back to it when you're sculpturing me,'” he said in an interview in his clinic overlooking hazy Los Angeles. “I say, ‘Okay, all right, fine.'”
Dr. Matlock is a colourful pioneer in a controversial — and growing — frontier of plastic surgery: nipping and tucking vaginas. Patients from the United States and more than 30 other countries pay thousands of dollars for his “designer vagina,” a purely esthetic procedure that includes shortening or plumping up the labia, or vaginal lips. He attracts even more women for an operation he claims improves sex by tightening, or “rejuvenating,” the vagina.
“There's a need for this,” he said. “Women are driving this. I didn't create this market, the market was there.”
While doctors have long known how to enhance women's genitals, demand for vaginal surgery has mushroomed in recent years because physicians — led by Dr. Matlock — market it as enhancing sexual satisfaction.
...“I think it's appalling and frightening and one more way in which perfectly normal, beautiful women are terrorized by the possibility of being less than a perfect 10,” said Joy Davidson, a certified sex therapist and author in Seattle.
Michael Atkinson, a sociology professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, says the increasing popularity of cosmetic vaginal reconstruction is partly the outcome of the West's obsession with plastic surgery.
“This is essentially a cultural problem that we fix medically,” said Prof. Atkinson, who studies cosmetic surgery. “We have this notion the body's a problem to be worked and if you slightly deviate from a supposed norm you should do something about it, which is really a market logic. That's how we make a lot of money in our culture, to plant these cultural ideals in people's heads and then try to enforce them.”
However, women who have had their genitals surgically enhanced say it has transformed their lives. While some patients have genuine health problems, such as incontinence, many also ask their doctors to perform additional procedures while they are on the operating table. Others are solely driven by cosmetic or sexual reasons.
...But gynecological experts say there is no proof that vaginal tightening improves sex and warn the procedure risks harmful side effects, including infection, hemorrhaging, loss of sensation, nerve injury, formation of scar tissue as well as becoming too tight. (Dr. Matlock says he has been reluctant to submit studies for publication in medical journals because he does not want to reveal his techniques.) “There are definite potential downsides to this,” said Dr. Young, adding that any possible benefits of tightening are not permanent.
There is no textbook outlining the ways and means that doctors can beautify the vagina. So Dr. Matlock, as he likes to say, gets all of his ideas by listening to women.
If they repeatedly make the same request, the man who has been called the Picasso of vaginas will attempt to turn wish into reality. He is currently developing what he calls a “lip tuck,” a facelift of sorts that would shrink sagging skin around the vulva and create a more “youthful appearance.”
He hones new techniques on animal parts — chicken thighs, turkey legs and pig's ears — until he is ready to work on women.
I can just hear the guy at dinner: "Another labia, uh...leg, dear?"
When Heterosexual Men Marry (Each Other)
That's the title of a Men's News Daily piece by Tom Purcell about what gay marriage in Canada has brought. I don't have a problem in the world with gay marriage; in fact, as the magnet on my refrigerator says, "Let gay people marry. They should suffer like the rest of us." (Well, I'm not for the suffering part -- and I actually don't think making a lifelong commitment to somebody at, say, 22, makes sense for our times...but if straight people get to marry, gay people should get the same rights.) What I am, however, opposed to for everyone, is "marriage privileging" -- giving people who are married special tax incentives. And, maybe, only when this guy (who, to me, sounds anti-gay marriage) lays out how it works when two heteros marry, does the unfairness of marriage privileging for anyone who marries really come clear for people:
The law of unintended consequences always produces interesting results. Here’s a doozy.Two heterosexual fellows in Canada, invoking their rights under Canada’s recently passed same-sex marriage legislation, have announced their intentions to marry. Drinking pals Bill Dalrymple, 56, and Bryan Pinn, 65, intend to marry not because they are gay but for the tax breaks.
News of the pending engagement didn’t sit well with same-sex marriage activist Bruce Walker, a Toronto lawyer. He complained that marriage should be for love.
Well, who is Walker to criticize? He used to argue that if two consenting adults of the same sex wanted to marry, it was nobody’s business but theirs. Now that two fellows of the same sex want to marry – perhaps to qualify for family discounts at the neighborhood pub -- what business is it of his?
Where Canada is concerned, marital preconditions are over, and good riddance.
It used to be that marriage was sacred. A man would leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife as one flesh. It was a powerful commitment, a duty, an institution. What’s worse, it meant you weren’t allowed to see another woman naked for the rest of your life.
It used to be that governments gave breaks to married folks because it was ultimately good for society. The family has always been the building block of a healthy society, and encouraging family life was good for everyone.
It’s true that heterosexual men and women have made a mess out of traditional marriage. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce – and that only pertains to folks who bother marrying. Many heterosexual folks prefer cohabitation, as it provides many of the goodies of marriage without the hassles.
But cohabitation frequently fails and men and women become so suspicious of each other, they end up living alone. That means millions of single women spend their free time playing with their two cats, while millions of single men are slumped over a bar stool.
That’s why those two heterosexual Canadian fellows may be on to something. Perhaps more people should marry their buddies.
If single heterosexual women married their female friends, they’d avoid the loneliness of single life, while enjoying the benefits of marriage. If one was a member of a country club, for instance, the other would be able to join as her “spouse.” The only downside of women marrying their friends would be a significant increase in four-cat households, but then you can’t have everything.
Single heterosexual men could enjoy similar benefits from marrying their buddies. They would never spend their weekends window shopping at the Crate and Barrel with their “spouse,” but business would be brisk at the Keg and Barrel.
The guy is onto something -- an issue I haven't brough up for a while. Marriage, no matter how popular it is with the optimistic, is a lifestyle choice, so is having kids. If you want to have kids, you should wait until you can afford it, then support them yourself -- which includes paying, fully, for their schooling. Sorry, but there should be no such thing as publicly funded education except for poor children. You have a child, you educate it -- and teach the kid some manners, will you? More parents feel entitled to let more little brats tear around screaming and banging things in adult places these days. Then they're suprised, hurt, and angry when adults trying to enjoy coffee and a newspaper in an environment that doesn't sound like a poorly run nursery school turn and give them funny looks.
But, beyond the fact that the generation of children being underparented now are likely to have some serious issues related to the lack of rigidity in manners and etiquette training by their best friends/"parents," there's no reason anybody should be getting tax incentives for any kind of lifestyle. Let's support gay marriage (how weird to judge people on how they have sex -- do we get to rate straight people in bed to decide if they do it right before they get rights and privileges?)...but let's end the idiocy of tax breaks for straight people and gay people who marry.
Back To The Burkha?
Maureen Dowd writes of one of the possible unintended consequences of "liberation" of Iraq:
Americans like it when the president talks up women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he does it often. It helped him sell the invasions of those two countries. But W. the fundamentalist Taliban are recrudescing in Afghanistan, young girls in Iraq are afraid to leave the house because there are so many kidnappings and rapes, and women's groups in Iraq are terrified that the new constitution will cut women's rights to a Saudiesque level.
Some Shiite politicians are pushing to supplant civil courts with religious courts operating on Shariah, or Islamic law. One of the crucial articles in various drafts of the constitution is: "The followers of any sect or religion have the right to abide by their religion or sect in their personal affairs, and a law should organize this."
That little provision could jeopardize any chance for women's equality. Clerics running religious courts based on the Koran could legitimize polygamy, honor killings, stonings and public beheadings of women charged with adultery, and divorce by "talaq" - where all a husband has to do is declare, "I divorce thee," three times.
Saddam Hussein repressed Islamic politics, so under him, Iraq was one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. It has become far more fundamentalist since the United States took over.
The back-to-burka trend has been widely reported throughout Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, and young women activists told The Los Angeles Times that their mothers had more freedom in the '60s. Najla Ubeidi, a lawyer in the Iraqi Women's League, agreed: "During the 1960s, there was a real belief in improving women's conditions. We could wear what we liked, go out when we liked, return home when we liked, and people would judge us by the way we behaved."
If W. liked exercising his mind as much as his body, he could see that his mission to modernize Muslim countries is backfiring on women. The most painless way for Muslim men to prove that they have not abandoned Arab culture and adopted Western ways is to tighten the burka.
To us, the "liberated" but repressive Iraq is a paradox. To the women, it's a prison.
My Dog, Your Commodity
Yesterday, Gregg took me down to Balboa Island for lunch, and we stopped, for an hour, at Newport's Fashion Island mall on the way back.
Lucy has been all over New York City, Los Angeles, and Paris, but she's never garnered the kind of attention she did there -- and it wasn't positive. Where, in cities, people are content to coo or appreciate her from afar, many people there seemed to want a piece of her -- adults, who grabbed at her without asking while she was in my arms or on my shoulder, and children, many of whom ran at her or tried to chase her. Okay, so she's cute, but if you grab her without asking me, there might be some biting involved. Of course, she'd never bite you -- but I might. And I just went to the dentist and had my teeth sharpened, so watch out!
Lucy loves attention -- to a point. And at a certain point -- after about 45 minutes there, she'd reached it. Gregg was reading on a bench while I went to Lululemon Athletica to see if they had any running tops on sale.
After we came out of Lululemon, and had yet another encounter with roaming toddlers running at her while she was trying to pee, it was time to get out of there. I picked her up, and I was murmuring something soothing to her when a purposeful hard-faced blonde, probably in her early 30s, marched toward me, followed by her dark-haired girlfriend. "Can I see your dog?" she asked/demanded.
I demurred. "Sorry, but she's really had too much attention today...kids chasing her all day...she's a little upset. Nothing against you, but she just needs to be alone for a little while."
The woman snarled at me (memory of exactly what fails me, but it was something indicating that she felt entirely entitled to do whatever the hell she pleased regarding my dog)...then called me a bitch! And scurried away.
Not so fast, chickie! Being me, I walked after her. Cowardly vulgarian that she was, she ducked into a restaurant...RD something. I couldn't follow because I had Lucy, and nothing to hide her in, but her friend was still outside, clearly embarrassed by the other girl's behavior, and apologized for her. I explained again, that Lucy was just over the top in terms of human attention -- and what's with the blonde's sense of entitlement? I mean, come on, I said about Lucy: "She's a little animal, not a zoo!"
Pretty disgusting, huh? Well, I know Lucy can make it on 42nd Street, but a mall in the wilds of suburbia? It's a killer! What's with these people? Do they not get out much? Why did so many of these people feel entitled to have a piece of my very, very tiny little dog?
Our Noble Cause
Tom Tomorrow's right on it today:
I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan--who has paid the biggest price a parent can pay--will continue to be attacked by people who think they're doing all they can by putting ribbon magnets on their SUVs. (And isn't that ultimately the pefect metaphor for this war and its supporters? Think about it: it's a magnet. Peel it off and it's as if it was never there. You can support the troops and not even risk the slightest damage to the finish of your car. That's real commitment.)
Here it is in Sheehan's own words:
People have asked what it is I want to say to President Bush. Well, my message is a simple one. He’s said that my son -- and the other children we’ve lost -- died for a noble cause. I want to find out what that noble cause is. And I want to ask him: “If it’s such a noble cause, have you asked your daughters to enlist? Have you encouraged them to go take the place of soldiers who are on their third tour of duty?” I also want him to stop using my son’s name to justify the war. The idea that we have to “complete the mission” in Iraq to honor Casey’s sacrifice is, to me, a sacrilege to my son’s name. Besides, does the president any longer even know what “the mission” really is over there?Casey knew that the war was wrong from the beginning. But he felt it was his duty to go, that his buddies were going, and that he had no choice. The people who send our young, honorable, brave soldiers to die in this war, have no skin in the game. They don’t have any loved ones in harm’s way. As for people like O’Reilly and Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh and all the others who are attacking me and parroting the administration line that we must complete the mission there -- they don’t have one thing at stake. They don’t suffer through sleepless nights worrying about their loved ones
Before this all started, I used to think that one person couldn’t make a difference... but now I see that one person who has the backing and support of millions of people can make a huge difference.
That’s why I’m going to be out here until one of three things happens: It’s August 31st and the president’s vacation ends and he leaves Crawford. They take me away in a squad car. Or he finally agrees to speak with me.
If he does, he’d better be prepared for me to hold his feet to the fire. If he starts talking about freedom and democracy -- or about how the war in Iraq is protecting America -- I’m not going to let him get away with it.
Like I said, this is George Bush’s accountability moment.
What Goes In Must Go On
Why are fat people fat? It's not all that mysterious if you look at this woman's story. She got miffed at Morgan Spurlock's film about how he got fat eating McDonald's for a month -- and she showed just the opposite could be true:
The problem with a McDonald's-only diet isn't what's on the menu, but the choices made from it, she said."I thought it's two birds with one stone -- to lose weight and to prove a point for the little fat people," Morgan said. "Just because they accidentally put an apple pie in my bag instead of my apple dippers doesn't mean I'm going to say, 'Oh, I can eat the apple pie."'
Spurlock, who turned his surprise-hit movie into a TV show on the FX network, isn't talking about Morgan or the many other McDieters who have criticized his film and found success losing weight by eating healthy foods off the McDonald's menu, said his publicist, David Magdael.
One person went so far as to make her own independent film about dieting at McDonald's. "Me and Mickey D" follows Soso Whaley, of Kensington, New Hampshire, as she spends three 30-day periods on the diet. She dropped from 175 to 139 pounds, eating 2,000 calories-a-day at McDonald's.
"I had to think about what I was eating," Whaley said. "I couldn't just walk in there and say 'I'll take a cinnamon bun and a Diet Coke.' ... I know a lot of people are really turned off by the whole thought of monitoring what they are eating, but that's part of the problem."
As might be expected, McDonald's also objected to the impressions left by Spurlock's film. Walt Riker, the company's vice president of corporate communications, said Oak Brook, Illinois-based company is pleased -- but not surprised -- that some customers have lost weight eating only at the fast-food giant.
Spurlock's film "really spurred a backlash based on common sense," Riker said.
Morgan used nutritional information downloaded from McDonald's Web site to create meal plans of no more than 1,400 calories a day. She only ate french fries twice, usually choosing burgers and salads. Those choices are a stark contrast with those made by Spurlock, who ate every menu item at least once.
At the end of the 90 days, she had dropped from 227 to 190 pounds.
"It feels great," she said. "Because, the truth of the matter is that beauty is power, and if you're fat, or your overweight, then people don't really take you seriously."
Hmmm...that sounds familiar!
Here's a link to the fat-and-(supposedly)proud ladies railing on about yours truly and Miss Seipp, who responded with helpful diet hints for the overfed:
...thanks for calling me a "thin supremacist," because at this point "thin" anythying is pretty flattering. Now I would have pointed this out to you over there, but I see that the community rules don't allow real names or any favorable talk about weight loss. For the record, however, here are the cold, hard facts: I am not a pill-popping Hollywood anorexic, much as I appreciate that glamorous "Valley of the Dolls" image. I normally weigh, like in the headshot above, a relatively slim 130 pounds. When it's hot outside (which means I slack off on the daily 1 to 1 1/2 hour hike in the hills), and I indulge in too many second (and third) helpings, I can creep up to what I am now: about 142. So then I cut down on desserts and portion size and make myself get back in the old exercise routine before things get out of hand. Also, I'm a fidgeter, which helps, but not to the point where I can eat 3,000 calories a day, like I have been, without repercussions (2,000 calories is maintenance.) So there you have it, the amazing Silver Lake miracle diet! Do with it what you will...
I must say, I'm green with envy that only Cathy rated a Margaret Hamilton Photoshopped hate link -- perhaps because she wrote a whole column called "Fat Chance" for IWF, that started "I believe your right to overeat ends where my airplane seat begins." I tend to agree. But, I also think the fat-and-proud movement is doing women a disservice by promoting "fat acceptance" instead of healthy eating, exercise, and weight. (You can accept your fat all you want to, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world's about to.) Here's a terribly tragic photo, taken at an airport, by a friend of mine, of a pretty young woman (she looks to be about 23). I've blurred the face so she can't be recognized.
Come on, should she really be accepting her fat...or feeling terrified she's going to get diabetes...like, tomorrow?
Dinosaurs For Dumbshits
Dinosaurland..."Where Dinosaurs and the Bible Meet!"
Keep Your Mouth Shut So We Won’t Know What An Idiot You Are
Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica on Bush’s promotion of “Intelligent” Design:
I have some sympathy for President Bush. Despite attending some pretty good schools, he evidently was not taught science in any meaningful way. On the other hand, he's had ample time to supply the defect in his education. But it is a rule of human behavior that we supply only those defects that we recognize and feel to be such. The President, like all of us, has attended to some defects and left others alone.
One of the defects of democracy is that we usually have quite ordinary persons as our leaders. Sometimes this doesn't matter; their particular defects don't bear upon public affairs, or the times are sufficiently placid that it just doesn't matter that they drink, or play too much poker, or cultivate friends of doubtful character, or whatever.
These are not such times. The President's ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and "intelligent design." This is a great pity.
Science -- from the loftiest of theorizing (like that of Einstein or, oh, Darwin) through the conducting of painstakingly difficult experiments to the application of new knowledge to the improvement of human life -- science, I say, is the chief engine of our society. The great bulk of business entrepreneurs so celebrated in certain circles as the movers and shakers have made their marks by exploiting the knowledge gained by scientists.
Even its opponents grant the prestige and accomplishments of science by pretending to do science themselves, whether in the form of "e-meters" that turn galvanic skin responses into signs of mystic energy flows in the body or in that of ID, which artfully turns "unknown" into "unknowable" in a flourish of bad math and illogic.
It is the case that some people don't like where the engine is taking us, indeed, don't want to go anywhere at all. History affords examples of such people and offers a proper model: the Amish. They made their decision in the 17th century to get off the train, and they have lived peaceably ever since, surrounded but largely unaffected by the Industrial Revolution and all that has followed. Unfortunately, our present-day reluctant passengers seem not to want simply off the train. They want the train to stop and for the rest of us to accept their terms. If President Bush has not taken quite so radical a position, he has certainly decided to take a turn walking down the tracks in front of the train, waving a little red flag.
Here is where we must rely on the strength of democracy. A minority, however vocal, cannot impose its will on the rest of us if we decline to permit it. Not even if the President seems to side with them; he is, after all, merely the first among equals, and he will not own that flag much longer.
Alternative Theories of Evolution
Such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory.
We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.
Under Construction Again
Pardon our dust. We're working on some technical issues.
It's Just Like American TV!
Perish forbid we should see a bit of Janet Jackson's titty, but A-OK to see people blowing people's heads off! Arianna notes the difference between a firing offense and a promotable offense in the American military:
Four-star General Kevin Byrnes, the third most senior of the Army’s 11 four-star generals, was sacked over allegations that he had an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal, is being considered for promotion to, yep, four-star general.Talk about your utterly perverted priorities.
...Consider: in modern times, no four-star general has ever been relieved of duty for disciplinary reasons; prior to this incident Byrne had a spotless military record; he has been separated from his wife since May 2004; the allegations do not involve anyone under his command or connected to the DoD; and he was already set to retire in November.
Something doesn’t add up. Would the Army really can a four-star General with 36 years of service, three months shy of his retirement, because he screwed someone other than his wife... in the middle of a war? We are at war, right? No wonder speculation is mounting that there has to be more -- much more -- to this story than is being told.
Was the affair with a man? Was the man underage? Did he not only ask, but also tell? Was, say, one of the Bush twins involved? Did the illicit liaison entail incredibly kinky behavior... something involving a dog leash, women’s panties, fake blood, a Koran, and a Lynddie England mask?
Or was Gen. Byrnes busted for engaging in straight, vanilla, missionary, once-a-week-with-the-lights-off boffing with the slightly overweight neighbor lady down the street?
Is this what it takes for Rummy and company to continue seeing themselves as paragons of virtue who will do whatever is necessary to hold people accountable for their private conduct...while turning a blind eye to the wanton assault on decency and morality that has marked our handling of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Bagram?
In other words, it’s the s-e-x, stupid! The GOP base will eat it up. A little unnerved that Roberts gave a freebie to the gays? Don’t sweat it. The Bush administration demonstrates it will not stand for a leader who breaks his vows (other than vows to fire anyone involved in the Plame leak, that is).
Hummer And Dummer
Dullard noticed it's been at almost 48 hours since I ranted against SUVs, and suggested this tidbit -- a man in a Hummer who tried to pick a fight with cops who stopped him to ticket him for tossing garbage out the behemoth's window:
The passenger, Robert Hurd, 30, of Trask Avenue, climbed down from the truck and officers told him he would receive a littering summons."We'll settle this like men so take off your badge and we'll go in the schoolyard and fight," Hurd allegedly told the officers, and then approached them with his fists waving, according to reports.
Hurd was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, resisting arrest and aggravated assault, police said.
Neanderthal Man!...Prehistoric, yet modern!
Hey, Idiot!
You smoke cigarettes, a pipe, or cigars? Then, yes, I'm talking to you. Peter Jennings is dead, but Keith Olbermann lives to tell the tale:
‘So,’ I thought, as I was hunched over, spitting blood into the garbage can in my office, half an hour before the newscast, ‘this is it — this is cancer.’ It gets uglier, I understood that — so ugly that those who've survived can't even describe how much uglier it gets.Still, that imagery that I want to have stick in your mind, is pretty good: They've just had to cut something out, from inside your body because they think it's cancer. And because it doesn't heal up right away, every couple of hours the coagulation breaks and your mouth fills up with blood — and all of a sudden, hunching over a garbage can, spitting it out, is the best available option.
I'm not doing some sort of bad taste ‘what-if’ on the passing of Peter Jennings — I have had a tumor removed from the roof of my mouth.
It was benign — that makes all the difference in the world, of course.
Except for the part — where it doesn't make any difference. Because, I was in that position — spitting globs of myself into a garbage can in Secaucus, New Jersey, entirely through my own doing, my own fault.
And maybe there's the chance that if the loss of Peter Jennings hasn't impacted you, that maybe if you listen to my story you might get smart enough in a hurry — or scared enough in a hurry — so that you don't wind up spitting blood into the garbage can, and spending five days like me, thinking you had cancer — or actually having it.
There are some things in life you don't have much control over — terrorism, lightning, and even cancer when it runs in your family or when you just get it.
But that's not what this tumor was — the one that for five very long days had me convinced I had cancer. This is from me smoking pipes and cigars for 27 years. And if you work for a company that produces or sells pipes and cigars and you are recoiling defensively and saying ‘you don't know that’... well, let me quote Robert Novak — "bull" — I do too know that.
The place where this thing grew on the roof of my mouth, is precisely above the spot where the end of the cigar, or the tip of the pipe, would sit, nearly every time I've smoked. I've been smoking — with the first place the smoke connects with my tissue, right in this one spot in my mouth — since Jimmy Carter was President.
So, yes, biologically speaking, smoking caused that tumor. Behaviorally speaking, I caused that tumor — period.
So...if you are a smoker, why do you smoke? Just ignoring the science? Even if you don't get cancer, impaired lung function and emphysema can't be anything to laugh at. Do tell...
Oh, and P.S. don't tell yourself you're doing no harm to other people by smoking in their presence. You are. Asshole.
Rock On
Two chairs, Athens, New York, after The War Of The Worlds.
The Big Government Party Of Small Government
Matt Welch over at Reason reviews Cato's new essay collection, The Republican Revolution 10 Years Later, and finds a whole lot of bloat in the boat. Here's a quote from Stephen Moore, who helped draft the Contract with America budget for fiscal year 1996:
"Under President Bush (and a Republican Congress) federal outlays increased 28 percent between FY01 and FY05," Moore writes. "Nondefense discretionary spending increased 34 percent during these four years. That fiscal policy is exactly the opposite of what was promised by Republican leaders when they first came to power in the 1990s," Moore writes. "The tragedy is that many of the Republicans who led the revolution have settled into power, become too comfortable with their perks and authority, and are now mirror images of what they replaced. The Republicans are now spending money faster than the Democrats ever did and have forgotten why voters put them in power in the first place."
But, as Matt observes, "You don't have to cherry-pick to find quotes like that." Here are a few more choice morsels he pulled:
* Cato President Ed Crane: "There are too many opponents of liberty within the Republican Party... Many in the Republican Party have focused exclusively on tax cuts and growing the economy without dealing with the tougher job of limiting government to its proper size....That strategy has sadly oriented the party away from a focus on individual freedom and restoration of constitutional government."* The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr.: "Most people assumed that Republican politicians replacing Democrats on Capitol Hill in 1995 would lead to small-government, anti-regulation policies. That assumption turned out to be wrong."
* Cato representative-government guy John Samples: "The Republicans in power have used partisan gerrymandering to prolong their control of Congress, a practice they denounced when the Democrats held power."
* Cato telecom chief Adam Thierer: "Many Republican policymakers rallied around the cry to get the government's 'hands off the Internet!' If we judge the GOP by those promises, then the last 10 years of Republican rule are generally a failure."
* Cato education analyst David Salisbury: "Recent federal education spending increases have been massive. Gone is the idea that there is no constitutional role for the federal government in the nation's schools. Instead, the Department of Education has been adopted as the Republicans' favored stepchild. The last 10 years have been a great disappointment to people who felt that the 1994 elections signaled an effort to cut the federal government and remove from it areas such as education where it had no legitimate constitutional role."
* Cato criminal justice specialist Timothy Lynch: "With respect to criminal justice policies, the Republicans not only squandered their mandate but now also preside over a burgeoning federal law enforcement bureaucracy....Instead of a revolution, the GOP has turned its back on the Tenth Amendment and embraced a big-government agenda."
Matt further notes:
Few of the big-picture laments will come as a surprise to readers of Reason, but the detail in which these and other authors document the across-the-board betrayal of limited-government principles makes it a must-read even for those whose libertarian cherries were popped long before Terry Schiavo, "intelligent design," and the stem-cell ban.
For the record: I'm a fiscal conservative. The so-called "small government" Republicans are compulsive shoppers with no credit card limits in sight.
Where Your Tax Dollars Aren't Going
Eugene Robinson says our country is falling apart, and we need an extreme makeover in concrete and steel right now:
At first I thought it was just here, in the nation’s capital and environs, where the infrastructure had deteriorated to what sometimes seem like Third World standards. In some cases, make that below Third World standards. In most of the developing countries I’ve visited, for example, they manage to keep the power on during a garden-variety thunderstorm. But here, in the most powerful city in the world – a city of humid summers, where thunderstorms are to be expected all summer long – all it takes are a few flashes of lightning, and inevitably at least a few thousand households are left in the dark.The highways around here are so clogged that there’s no longer a predictable rush hour, just random times when the Beltway is at a standstill and other random times when the traffic is merely oppressive. You could take the subway, but whatever station you use, the escalator will probably be broken. Our engineers can design a cruise missile that will turn a 90-degree corner, knock on the target’s door and say “Candygram!” to bluff its way inside, but we can’t quite master the intricacies of the escalator.
You can just walk, but be advised that occasionally something beneath a heavily trafficked sidewalk will short out and explode, turning innocent manhole covers into Frisbees of Death.
Flying manhole covers aren’t something that most Americans have to worry about, fortunately. But the general situation – nothing seems to work very well anymore, everything seems to be breaking down – ought to concern us all. The good people of New York, for example, should be inclined to pay attention after a 50-foot retaining wall collapsed a couple of months ago, burying part of a busy highway.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which occasionally issues a report card on the nation’s infrastructure, our physical plant is in such need of repair that it rates no more than a “D.” Since the last report card in 2001, there has been modest improvement in the condition of our airports and our school buildings, the group reported in March. Everything else has remained the same or gone downhill.
Roads are rapidly deteriorating. Mass transit has to accommodate more riders while making do with less money for maintenance. The power grid is outdated and vulnerable – not just to local thunderstorms but also to widespread blackouts. More than 27 percent of the 590,750 bridges in the country are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” and for bridges in urban areas that figure rises to one in three. The number of “unsafe” dams has risen by 33 percent since 1998.
I guess, just like with 9/11, we're going to wait until disaster strikes to do something about it.
Fleaing Hell
I'm an urban girl. My idea of exploring the great outdoors is stepping out on my porch.
Unfortunately, it's been a week of flora and fauna gone wild inside here at Advice Goddess Central. I'll spare you the whole ugly tale of mildew scrubbing at 4am, but suffice it to say, bleach just eats the stuff up. Heloise, watch out! Heh.
Okay, so, now, in the middle of my deadline, while I'm reading piles of stuff on body chemistry and desire, and still have piles left to read, I discover that Lucy has become Manhattan for fleas. I suspect she picked them up at the groomer (grrrr!) on Friday.
The Web suggested a using lint remover tape -- which practically picked up Lucy, but little else -- and/or a dip or two in lemon Dawn dishwashing liquid...which, luckily, left the poor dear soft, shiny, and uncolonized. Phew.
Okay, what's next? The homeless vaulting over the fence? I don't think the sticky tape will work too well on them, either. All in all, I think this is about all the domesticity I can deal with in one week.
Supreme Disappointment
Thomas Vinciguerra, deputy editor of The Week, is disappointed in Bush's selection of John Roberts -- but his disappointment has nothing to do with politics, but in Bush's decision to replace one judge with another, instead of, say, with Eugene Volokh:
Where is it written that a Supreme Court justice must be plucked from the bench? Sixty of the high court’s 108 occupants hadn’t been sitting judges, and some of the most notable had no judicial experience at all. John Marshall, easily the most influential chief justice in U.S. history, had been a congressman and secretary of state. Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, had been a Maryland legislator and U.S. attorney general. Charles Evans Hughes, who wrote twice as many opinions as any other justice, previously was governor of New York and secretary of state. And Earl Warren, who revolutionized the court in the 1950s and ’60s, had been governor of California. There’s a lot to be said for candidates who can bring rich life experience to the insulated world of judicial abstraction. At least President Bush will get another chance if Chief Justice William Rehnquist, now battling cancer, steps down. In fact, an off-the-bench replacement would only be appropriate. Before President Nixon tapped him for the high court, Rehnquist was an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. Though he had never donned a black robe before, he now wears one with four gold stripes.
Beyond DNA
Justice Stevens comes out against the death penalty -- because of exonerating DNA evidence and more:
He said the jury selection process and the fact that many trial judges are elected work against accused murderers. He also said that jurors might be improperly swayed by victim-impact statements.Stevens was speaking in Illinois, his home state and a place that has been roiled by controversy over the death penalty. In 2000, wrongful convictions led then-Gov. George Ryan to halt all executions.
It also came just a day after a Virginia jury decided against the inmate whose case led to a 2002 Supreme Court ban on executing the mentally retarded. The jury said Daryl Atkins was mentally competent and could be put to death.
Stevens wrote that 2002 Atkins decision, which was joined by O'Connor. One of the three dissenters was Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who hired Roberts as a law clerk in 1980.
A year later, as a Justice Department lawyer, Roberts wrote in a memo that the availability of federal court appeals, "particularly for state prisoners, goes far to making a mockery of the entire criminal justice system."
Stevens, however, laid out the case for close review of appeals, pointing to "special risks of unfairness" in capital punishment.
According to the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center, more than three dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since 2000.
Said Scheidegger, "I wouldn't say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system."
Um, I would say so if you're one of the 20 or 30. And, surely, more. Sorry, but I'm an atheist, and I don't think we have a right to take away another person's life. Lock them in prison for life, sure. But, it's interesting how the so-called "pro-life" are also the most pro-death -- even when they know they can't always be sure they're killing a guilty person. Well, that's messy, complicated thinking, huh? Let's just assume they're guilty and pull the switch!
What Meth Epidemic?
Jacob Sullum, a voice of Reason in the drug wars, points to a Drug War Chonicle piece that debunks the notion that meth use is on the rise:
"There is no evidence of an increase in meth use. In fact, it's been flat for a decade or more or even declining slightly," said Craig Reinarman, co-editor of the groundbreaking "Crack in America," which debunked many of the myths surrounding that drug, and currently professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "To be fair, 2003 is the last year for which there is good data available, and this flood of meth stories appears to have really taken off in the last six months or so, so it is possible we are missing something. But most of these recent stories appear to be based on little more than anecdotes from law enforcement or social workers. It may be true that there is a small number of meth users who are getting in serious problems, but it looks like the press is falsely extrapolating to create a trend that is not supported by the aggregate numbers," he told DRCNet."This is the beginning of a classic scare where you have horrible anecdotes substituted for epidemiological evidence and the media going with those easy stories," Reinarman explained. "Story-based coverage can be very misleading. They pick the most dramatic story with the eye-catching headlines, but those sorts of stories distort the real picture. You don't want to mistake worst case scenarios for the norm, but that is what happens, and it's true of every drug scare. Instead of solid epidemiological evidence that can be tiresome and boring, you get these dramatic anecdotes."
"We in the field like to say that a Newsweek cover story is the surest sign the epidemic has ended," laughed Dr. David Duncan, chairman of the National Association for Public Health Policy's Council on Illicit Drugs and head of Duncan & Associates, a Kentucky-based epidemiological and statistical consulting firm.
...But even if meth use isn't on the rise, it's still a highly addictive drug whose users are not amenable to treatment, right? Wrong. "The research shows it's pretty much the same as any other drug," said Duncan. "If you look at usage information, you see that of all the people who ever used the drug, one in 10 used in the past year. Of those, one in 10 used in the past week. And among those past week users, the majority only used it once." It's the same story with treatment, he said. "All the data show the same success rate with meth as any other drug dependence -- except for tobacco, which is by far the most addictive drug. It doesn't matter if you're talking about meth or heroin or alcohol -- in each case most of the people who become addicted wind up getting off the drug."
..."It is not meth use that we need to be so concerned about, but home manufacturing," said Duncan. "It is a serious environmental and public health problem, but it is one that is caused entirely by the war on drugs. If meth users could go to a pharmacy and get pure meth, not only would they be better off, but so would everyone else. This meth lab stuff helps feed the frenzy. It doesn't matter if it's just some guy with a Bunsen burner on his kitchen counter, you still get all these headlines about meth labs."
As for laws aimed at home labs, such as the ones either passed or under consideration in 40 states that restrict the sales of cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine, they are having unintended consequences, said McVay. "If you look at Oklahoma, which led the way with those Sudafed laws, what you are seeing is, yes, a 90% drop in lab busts, but the number of ice seizures has increased five-fold. Ice is the smokeable meth being imported by the Mexican gangs. In terms of overall meth use, these laws really do nothing except protect the market share of the Mexicans."
Always charming when the War On Drugs, yet again, turns into a war on us.
Being And Nothingness
Lucy appears to be experiencing some existential angst. Then again, maybe she's just sleeping.
"The Sum Of All Lobbies"
That's how energy expert Gail Luft refers to the new energy bill in Thomas Friedman's column.
Friedman rightly goes after our best-friend-to-the-oilmen-in-chief, who managed to put out energy policy without so much as a "please come up with more energy-efficient cars" to the auto companies:
The White House? It blocked an amendment that would have required the president to find ways to cut oil use by a million barrels a day by 2015 - on the grounds that it might have required imposing better fuel economy on our carmakers.
We need a strategic approach to energy. We need to redesign work so more people work at home instead of driving in; we need to reconfigure our cars and mass transit; we need a broader definition of what we think of as fuel. And we need a tax policy that both entices, and compels, U.S. firms to be innovative with green energy solutions. This is going to be a huge global industry - as China and India become high-impact consumers - and we should lead it.
Many technologies that could make a difference are already here - from hybrid engines to ethanol. All that is needed is a gasoline tax of $2 a gallon to get consumers and Detroit to change their behavior and adopt them. As Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, noted, auto fuel economy peaked at 26.5 miles per gallon in 1986, and "we've been going backward every since" - even though we have the technology to change that right now. "This is not rocket science," he rightly noted. "It's auto mechanics."
It's also imagination. "During the 1973 Arab oil embargo Brazil was importing almost 80 percent of its fuel supply," notes Luft, director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
"Within three decades it cut its dependence by more than half. During that period the Brazilians invested massively in a sugar-based ethanol industry to the degree that about a third of the fuel they use in their vehicles is domestically grown. They also created a fleet that can accommodate this fuel."
Half the new cars sold this year in Brazil will run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol. "Bringing hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to live happily together in the same fuel tank," Luft added, "has not only made Brazil close to energy independence, but has also insulated the Brazilian economy from the harming impact of the current spike in oil prices."
The new energy bill includes support for corn-based ethanol, but, bowing to the dictates of the U.S. corn and sugar lobbies (which oppose sugar imports), it ignores Brazilian-style sugar-based ethanol, even though it takes much less energy to make and produces more energy than corn-based ethanol. We are ready to import oil from Saudi Arabia but not sugar from Brazil.
The sum of all lobbies.
It seems as though only a big crisis will force our country to override all the cynical lobbies and change our energy usage. I thought 9/11 was that crisis. It sure was for me, but not, it seems, for this White House, Congress or many Americans. Do we really have to wait for something bigger in order to get smarter?
UPDATED: Here's a pertinent link: Why America Is More Dependent Than Ever on Saudi Arabia...complete with a darling photo of Cheney playing kissyface with King Abdullah:
"As the world's largest producer and as the world's largest consumer, our two countries have a special relationship," Samuel W. Bodman, the secretary of energy, said earlier this year after meeting in Washington with his Saudi counterpart, Ali al-Naimi. "We are, at least in certain respects, partners."
Awww...how sweet!
Your Privacy Belongs To ChoicePoint
Check out the difference between data protection here and in Europe. Eric Dash writes in The New York Times about how Americans' privacy is bought and sold:
In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.In the United States, said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, debates over the privacy of personal data generally occurs piecemeal, when a particular abuse causes harm. "In Europe, " Mr. Hughes said. "data is just protected because it is data - information about you."
The telecommunications industry offers a case study in these two perspectives. In the mid-1990's, an unusual alliance here between privacy advocates and national phone companies, which did not want regional carriers to gain an informational advantage, led to restrictions on the commercial use of phone and billing information in the United States. In France, a similar debate in the 1980's caused phone numbers to be kept private in billing documents out of respect for individual rights.
In general, Americans are far more comfortable than Europeans with business handling their information, and far more skeptical of putting it in government hands. The tradition of making government records - like tax records, mortgage information and census data - easily accessible to the public is uniquely American.
This has helped create the world's largest data collection industry by far, with companies like ChoicePoint and AxiCom to collect and analyze those records. The flourishing consumer data industry spends millions of dollars each year lobbying against more restrictive data policies.
Not surprising, the United States has "many more laws restricting the government collection and use of information than laws restricting corporate use of collection and information," said Bruce Schneier, an expert on computer security issues. "Europe is the reverse," he added. Oversight is the United States is decentralized. Data protection is not a core mission of any government agency. Each of them, from the Health and Human Services Department to the Department of Homeland Security, deals with it as a secondary issue. In addition, each agency has its own internal privacy czars, who protect his agency's data as he thinks best. "What we don't have is a general framework that says these rules apply to everybody," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as the Clinton administration's chief counselor for privacy.
Most European nations, on the other hand, begin with the idea that data protection is a human right, regulated by a comprehensive set of principles that apply to both business and government. And where American businesses are given relatively free rein to collect and sell information, European companies are severely restricted from those activities without individual consent.
My suggestion: Just say no -- as much as possible. The other day, some telemarketer hired by The Bottom Line, a newsletter I subscribe to, called me (for the second time in two days -- they just missed me the day before) about my subscription. Well, guess what -- I don't believe I ever gave them my phone number, number one, and if I did, it was just for the purpose of clearing up any subscription issues -- not so I could be awakened from my jetlag stupor to talk to a telemarkter. I told the telemarketer I'm cancelling my subscription -- and only because I was called -- then emailed the same message to the company. Naturally, the only email addresses listed were contact-preventing slushpile ones -- how clever of them!
Hmmm...maybe with Zabasearch.com I can get the head of the company's home phone number. I'm going to try!
Let's see...there's a Martin L. Edelston, born February 1929, at10 Edgewood Drive in Greenwich, CT, and a Marjorie at the same address (his wife?) Then there's a Martin L. Edelston at 4 Old Church Lane, also in Greenwich. From the looks of it (see the photo in the link just above), that's him. Hmm, maybe he's gotten so rich annoying the shit out of his subscribers that he has two homes in close proximity? I really want to get his home number -- but without paying for it -- and wake him from a deep sleep so I can ask him if he'd like to buy a piece writtten by me for one of his publications.
Of course, I could just call him at their editorial offices:
Bottom Line Publications
Editorial/Corporate Offices
281 Tresser Boulevard, 8th Floor
Stamford, CT. 06901-3246
phone: (203) 973-5900 fax: (203) 967-3086
But then, how would he truly know how it feels?
What Noble Cause?
Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, 24, died in Iraq, and she wants to know why:
"I want to ask the president, `Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?'" she said, her voice cracking with emotion. "Last week, you said my son died for a noble cause and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?"
I have no idea. Help her out, Bush apologists. We'd all love to know. (And I say that, not as some tie-dyed, peace sign-toting Birkenstock wearer with a daisy between her toes, but as somebody who thinks we should have flattened Afghanistan taking out Bin Laden.)
The Hybrid Car You Never Hear About
Adventures in biodiesel. Everything you could want to know, and maybe a little more. Especially interesting is the question why aren't the car companies mass-producing more fuel-efficient vehicles -- when they have them designed and "fully functional"?
Wimping Into The War Zone
Cornell University researcher Rob Willer recently did a study that found men whose masculinity is challenged are more likely to support war or buy an SUV:
Their attitudes against gays change, too.Cornell University researcher Robb Willer used a survey to sample undergraduates. Participants were randomly assigned feedback that indicated their responses were either masculine of feminine.
The women had no discernable reaction to either type of feedback in a follow-up survey.
But the guys' reactions were "strongly affected," Willer said today.
"I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle," said Willer said. "There were no increases [in desire] for other types of cars."
Those who had their masculinity threatened also said they felt more ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile than those whose masculinity was confirmed, he said.
Well, the gigundo SUV thing, we already knew. And women who drive them...until there's further research, all we can call them is assholes.
Them Dum People Runnin The Place
On the HuffPo, Sam Harris, who wrote the brilliant book, The End of Faith, knocks the nitwit running our country, who just endorsed "intelligent" design, and argues for fundamental "standards of evidence" before we believe things willy nilly:
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God. There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe -- that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them." Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.
Even Richard Dawkins weighs in in the comments section:
Congratulations to Sam Harris on a characteristically brilliant broadside. His book, 'The End of Faith' is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land.Articles like Harris's are valuable, not because they will change the minds of religious idiots like Bush or those who voted for him, but because they will have a 'consciousness-raising' effect upon the intelligent. There are millions of intelligent atheists out there who are too frightened to come out and admit it, because American society has allowed itself to drift into a state where religious mania has become the respectable norm. But every time a Sam Harris raises his voice in public, it will give courage to other intelligent people to come out. Maybe there are some – intelligent but not well educated – who didn't even realise atheism is a respectable option.
I know, I agree, it is easy for me, living in Britain where religion has no power and it is religious people who feel the need to apologise (despite the paradoxical existence of an established church with the queen as its head). But America will change only when a critical mass of people is prepared to 'come out'. The more that do, the more that will.
I really don't mean to sound presumptuous or condescending, but my appeal to my American friends is this. When you read something like this Sam Harris article, don't just nod in silent agreement and go on keeping quiet yourself. Start shouting, to encourage the others. I am hard at work on my own book, The God Delusion, for precisely this reason.
What's weird, too, is something Dawkins speaks of -- the religious hold that's so strong in the United States, versus Britain and France; France with its laïcité (secularism)...where religion is truly kept out of public life. Take public schools, for example, where you cannot wear a cross, a Jewish star, or a head scarf. In school, everybody's just a little French child; not Jewish-French, Christian-French, or any other kind of modified French. I think I've written about this before, but a man I sometimes speak to in a café once told me how amazed he was that our leader swears to god on a bible when inaugurated. It would just not be done in France. Separation of church and state? These days, to get that, you're going to have to become an expat, and fast.
So, You're On An Expedition, Are You?
To where, the drugstore?
Left Paris Wednesday, 6:30 am. As Gregg drove me home from LAX Wednesday evening, I was stunned, after a month in the land of the Smart Cars, at the size of all the stupid ones.
The tiny, jewelry-box-on-wheels Smart Cars are really pervading in Paris, probably, in large part, due to their ease in parking, but I've noticed a huge difference in the amount of pollution (much, much less). Just two years ago, I used to feel I was sucking in lumps of coal as I jogged around the Champs de Mars.
Yes, I'm back in wackytown, home of Beaver Power...
...and Ladies Who Lunch...uh, Crunch.
At least home, too, has its charms!
Why Looks Matter
Dan Akst has an excellent article on it in the Wilson Quarterly, condensing a lot of the stuff I've been posting on recently (much to some people's chagrin) into one piece:
The problem is that, if anything, looks matter even more than we think, not just because we’re all hopelessly superficial, but because looks have always told us a great deal of what we want to know. Looks matter for good reason, in other words, and delegating favorable appearances to an affluent elite for reasons of cost or convenience is a mistake, both for the individuals who make it and for the rest of us as well. The slovenliness of our attire is one of the things that impoverish the public sphere, and the stunning rise in our weight (in just 25 years) is one of the things that impoverish our health. Besides, it’s not as if we’re evolving anytime soon into a species that’s immune to appearances. Looks seem to matter to all cultures, not just our image-besotted one, suggesting that efforts to stamp out looksism (which have yet to result in hiring quotas on behalf of the homely) are bucking millions of years of evolutionary development.The degree of cross-cultural consistency in this whole area is surprising. Contrary to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at the very least in the eye of the culture, studies across nations and tribal societies have found that people almost everywhere have similar ideas about what’s attractive, especially as regards the face (tastes in bodies seem to vary a bit more, perhaps allowing for differing local evolutionary ecologies). Men everywhere, even those few still beyond the reach of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, are more concerned about women’s looks than women are about men’s, and their general preference for women who look young and healthy is probably the result of evolutionary adaptation.
The evidence for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology. Whatever one’s view of this burgeoning branch of science, one thing it has produced (besides controversy) is an avalanche of disconcerting research about how we look. Psychologists Michael R. Cunningham, of the University of Louisville, and Stephen R. Shamblen cite evidence that babies as young as two or three months old look longer at more attractive faces. New mothers of less attractive offspring, meanwhile, have been found to pay more attention to other people (say, hospital room visitors) than do new mothers of better-looking babies. This may have some basis in biological necessity, if you bear in mind that the evolutionary environment, free as it was of antibiotics and pediatricians, might have made it worthwhile indeed for mothers to invest themselves most in the offspring likeliest to survive and thrive.
The environment today, of course, is very different, but it may only amplify the seeming ruthlessness of the feelings and judgments we make. “In one study,” reports David M. Buss, the evolutionary psychologist who reported on the multi-generational study of mating preferences, “after groups of men looked at photographs of either highly attractive women or women of average attractiveness, they were asked to evaluate their commitment to their current romantic partner. Disturbingly, the men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partners to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness. Perhaps more important, the men who had viewed attractive women thereafter rated themselves as less committed, less satisfied, less serious, and less close to their actual partners.” In another study, men who viewed attractive nude centerfolds promptly rated themselves as less attracted to their own partners.
Even if a man doesn’t personally care much what a woman looks like, he knows that others do. Research suggests that being with an attractive woman raises a man’s status significantly, while dating a physically unattractive woman moderately lowers a man’s status. (The effect for women is quite different; dating an attractive man raises a woman’s status only somewhat, while dating an unattractive man lowers her status only nominally.) And status matters. In the well-known “Whitehall studies” of British civil servants after World War II, for example, occupational grade was strongly correlated with longevity: The higher the bureaucrat’s ranking, the longer the life. And it turns out that Academy Award-winning actors and actresses outlive other movie performers by about four years, at least according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2001. “The results,” write authors Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh, “suggest that success confers a survival advantage.” So if an attractive mate raises a man’s status, is it really such a wonder that men covet trophy wives?
He calls for a "democratization of beauty," which...sorry!...doesn't mean everybody should get to get lazy, but that everybody should dress up and take better care of their appearance.
...To a bizarre extent, looking good in America has become the province of an appearance aristocracy—an elect we revere for their seemingly unattainable endowment of good looks. Physical attractiveness has become too much associated with affluence and privilege for a country as democratically inclined as ours. We can be proud at least that these lucky lookers no longer have to be white or even young. Etcoff notes that, in tracking cosmetic surgery since the 1950s, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports a change in styles toward wider, fuller-tipped noses and narrower eyelids, while makeup styles have tended toward fuller lips and less pale skin shades. She attributes these changes to the recalibration of beauty norms as the result of the presence of more Asian, African, and Hispanic features in society.But what’s needed is a much more radical democratization of physical beauty, a democratization we can achieve not by changing the definition of beauty but by changing ourselves. Looking nice is something we need to take back from the elites and make once again a broadly shared, everyday attribute, as it once was when people were much less likely to be fat and much more likely to dress decently in public. Good looks are not just an endowment, and the un-American attitude that looks are immune to self-improvement only breeds the kind of fatalism that is blessedly out of character in America.
As a first step, maybe we can stop pretending that our appearance doesn’t—or shouldn’t—matter. A little more looksism, if it gets people to shape up, would probably save some lives, to say nothing of some marriages. Let’s face it. To a greater extent than most of us are comfortable with, looks tell us something, and right now what they say about our health, our discipline, and our mutual regard isn’t pretty.
The Art Of War Vs. The Art Of Housekeeping
If you didn't read Hillary Johnson's Inc.com article upon publication on how she developed her management style as editor of a small paper, read it now. Brilliant stuff:
One year ago, I became the editor of a small newspaper. I had never managed a staff before; in fact, I had never even worked in an office, and the only people I'd ever been in charge of in any sense were the members of my immediate family. The very term "in charge" implies a military sense of duty, but I ran my small household on a more typically maternal model, relying more on the feminine arts of negotiation, persuasion, consensus building, and reward than on anything resembling force or intimidation.In my new job, I found an office environment that was about as welcoming and friendly as an encampment of Confederate conscripts in the waning days of the Civil War. The long-established management style at the paper was based on aggressive, militaristic, alpha-male behavior. Staffers told me they were rarely praised (praise, of course, fosters weakness), they were frequently set against one another (divide and conquer), and rudeness and humiliation of one's inferiors were considered the prerogatives of rank (a periodic dressing down was good medicine). One young writer even complained that she had been made to fetch coffee for her female boss every day, a version of KP duty to be sure.
Still, finding myself suddenly in charge of several employees and a weekly production schedule, I dutifully took the advice of a friend who is a veteran manager and picked up a copy of the modern manager's bible, Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Everybody knows that the only valid model for behavior in the workplace is the battlefield, right? Look at the recent popularity of The Apprentice, wherein men and women alike slaughtered each other in the ring to win Emperor Donald Trump's thumbs-up -- a management model that isn't merely militaristic but downright gladiatorial.
Cracking open The Art of War, I expected to find kernels of wisdom translatable to the workplace; what I found instead scared me almost as much as the movie Heathers had back when I was still recovering from high school.
"All warfare is based on deception," I read. So much for the Good Fight. "Speed is the essence of war," I read later on. "Take advantage of the enemy's unpreparedness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack him where he has taken no precautions." And my favorite, as a newly minted manager of a staff of six: "Throw your soldiers into a position whence there is no escape, and they will choose death over desertion."
I would never be a general. And really, I thought crossly, why should I be?
But it wasn't until the day I happened to spill mango juice on my favorite Brooks Brothers blouse that I happened upon the tool that showed me I had the power to be a brilliant manager all along, and that all the know-how I needed was to be found even closer than my own backyard.
The Culture Of War
Not only is this whack-case creating a cartoon about the "thoughts" of an unborn fetus ("Umbert The Unborn"), the unborn fetus happens to be pro-war. I suggest the guy put down his crucifix and pick up a biology textbook.
thanks for the tip to Xenia, of the fab French/Korean American rap group, Laco$te -- download free MP3s here
Add Pounds, Remove Salary
People are just committed to refusing to admit that looks are important; just witness the rage of some commenters on the post I did about the large ladies in the Dove ads. (The "it's sad" quote is mine; Ysabella's response follows directly below it):
"It's sad, too, because being a heavy women diminishes your opportunities in jobs, life, and love."Dang me! I'd better give back the dreamy and loving husband, the six-figure salary, the year on the Cote d'Azur, the two years in Holland, the glassblowing skill, and the three triathlon finisher's medals. I'd better hurry up and stop achieving, because I'm an enormous US size 20.
I'd better drop the triathlon training, since it doesn't seem to make me skinny. I'll call around to some surgeons instead, before my life tanks - since I'm obviously not worthy of it. Meanwhile, I'd better hide at home, lest I offend the sensitive eyes of the angelic, wonderful, slim humans.
I agree, it surely is sad...that a fellow woman like yourself has to stick her foot on my neck.
My response, in part?
Sure, there are exceptions -- but to be overweight tends to diminish a woman's opportunities.
Evolutionary psychologists data say looks (i.e., adhering best one can [within reason, I'd add] to standards of beauty) are of surpreme importance, especially for women. Look up the work of David Buss, Todd Shackelford, Devendra Singh, Nancy Etcoff, and others for more information. And look at the results of this recent study out of NYU, included in a LA Times article by Daniel Costello about the costs of obesity:
While both men and women who are severely obese make less money at work than people of normal weight, women suffer a bigger wage penalty. This summer, researchers at New York University found that an increase of 10% in a woman's body mass decreased her income by 6%. The study also found that overweight women are less likely to be college graduates and more likely to work in less-skilled industries."There's no single smoking gun to explain it," said economist Roland Sturm of Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. "But it's clear that for obese people, especially the morbidly obese, their weight can affect how well they do financially."
The sad thing is, people don't really know how to eat in America. Starving oneself (yoyo dieting) actually puts on pounds. I highly recommend the book The Fat Fallacy, by neurophysiologist Will Clower, about how the French manage to bury their faces in plates of foie gras and not gain weight...and, despite all their smoking, have a third of the heart disease Americans do. Another very smart book is Diets Don't Work, by Bob Schwartz. You also might want to check out the discussion here, at Jack&Hill, where Hillary Johnson has posted on the topic. I'll post about her new blog very soon, but I want to do it justice, so mum's the word for now!
Bacalling It As She Sees It
Classy dame Lauren Bacall weighs in on the out-of-control Scientology-bot Tom Cruise:
...The 81-year-old Bacall – a star since the 1940s – says of Cruise in the latest issue of Time magazine: "His whole behavior is so shocking. It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness."
A Reaganite Republican Calls Bush On The Carpet
In the face of cries from Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman for apologies from the Democrats to Karl Rove, Doug Bandow, former special assistant to President Reagan, currently a senior fellow at Cato (after a stint at the Heritage Foundation), points the finger at the Republican side -- very high up on the Republican side:
President Bush took the United States into war based on a falsehood. His appointees talked about mushroom clouds, Iraq's stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and unmanned aerial vehicles that could hit America.Vice President Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11. Various administration officials, from the president on down, declared that the Saddam regime was a "threat," a "significant threat," the "most dangerous threat of our time," a "threat to the region and the world," a "threat to the security of free nations," a "serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies," a "unique and urgent threat" and a "serious and mounting threat."
None of these claims was true. Bush and his appointees had ample reason for doubt. Indeed, as John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic pointed out, "Unbeknownst to the public, the administration faced equally serious opposition within its own intelligence agencies." The CIA, the State Department's intelligence bureau, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, the Air Force and the International Atomic Energy Agency all disputed particular administration claims.
If the president's insistence on believing what he wanted to believe had only cost America $200 billion, it would be bad enough. But more than 1,750 servicemen and women have been killed, nearly 14,000 have been wounded (many of them maimed), and Iraq, as even President Bush admits, has become a vortex of international terrorism. The president should apologize.
... The result of the administration's war of choice has been to make America far less secure. The president has involved the nation in a conflict that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld now warns could run a dozen years. Yet the military is badly stretched, with no relief in sight. The reserves are breaking, and recruiting is off even for the active forces: "We are getting toward the end of our capacity," warns retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey. It is hard to imagine the volunteer military surviving many years more of this war.
Unfortunately, Bush gives no evidence of recognizing his mistakes, let alone admitting his responsibility. The Republican-controlled Congress is unwilling to hold him accountable. Even longtime conservative activists have been largely quiet. Other than a few courageous souls at small publications such as the American Conservative and Chronicles, most conservatives have said nothing publicly. They apparently hate the Democrats too much or fear the loss of power too greatly to break ranks.
Political apologies tend to be cheap, exacted only under duress and offered to quell criticism rather than to right a wrong. But as Republicans busily demand public repentance from their adversaries, they should look in the mirror -- the president most of all.
Self-Portrait With Hat
Marlboro Country
I'm blogging from it, a place otherwise known as Paris, France. I swear, the woman next to me in the café just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes in the span of about two and a half hours. I don't know how she does it, considering the exertion this town sometimes takes, thanks to its consistent mechanical semi-functionality.
Friday, for example, the elevator was out. I ran up seven flights of stairs to get Lucy, down them to take her for a walk, then back up them to leave her in the apartment (I was going to a museum, one of the few places in France dogs are not welcome). Maybe this woman lives on the first floor (the rez de chaussée) which is actually floor zero here (the second floor is considered the first floor). I dunno where she lives, but I think she'll be accessorizing her apartment with an oxygen tank rather soon!
Regarding what does and doesn't work in France, one of the most functional entities here is the post office. A letter gets across Paris practically before you sent it. I mailed a postcard to a friend late Thursday afternoon...she got it early Friday morning. At .53 for a stamp, that beats Fedex Priority by what (just guessing), about $34.50?
The Facts Don't Agree With You?
Make up your own! Despite the fact that there's plenty of good data (by my pal Judith Stacey and others) that shows there are no meaningful differences between children raised by gay vs. heterosexual parents, the funda-nutters are determined to keep claiming otherwise. They even set up a "research" "college" of just one employee and perhaps 150-200 members -- contrast that to the 600,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics -- and gave it a big name, the American College Of Pediatricians, in hopes of giving the employee's opinions an aura of respectability. Michael Kranish writes in the Boston Globe:
President Bush had a ready answer when asked in January for his view of adoption by same-sex couples: ''Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman," the president said.Bush's assertion raised eyebrows among specialists. The American Academy of Pediatrics, composed of leaders in the field, had found no meaningful difference between children raised by same-sex and heterosexual couples, based on a 2002 report written largely by a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Ellen C. Perrin.
But Bush's statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. Cameron has published numerous studies with titles such as ''Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest" -- a conclusion disputed by many other researchers.
The president's statement was also welcomed at a small organization with an august-sounding name, the American College of Pediatricians. The college, which has a small membership, says on its website that it would be ''dangerously irresponsible" to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The college was formed just three years ago, after the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics issued its paper.
That pediatric study asserted a ''considerable body of professional evidence" that there is no difference between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.
The Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatrics are part of a rapidly growing trend in which small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day.
Created as counterpoints to large, well-established medical organizations whose work is subject to rigorous review and who assert no political agenda, the tiny think tanks with names often mimicking those of established medical authorities have sought to dispute the notion of a medical consensus on social issues such as gay rights, the right to die, abortion, and birth control.
...In several interviews and e-mail exchanges, Cameron made no effort to hide his view of gays and lesbians.
He said his research is meant to warn that gays and lesbians and those sympathetic to them are people he calls ''death marketers." ''I am not sure how long they will take to destroy the US from within, but sufficiently weakened, the US will probably fall to another state before that occurs," Cameron wrote via e-mail.
''Those of us at FRI are determined to do our best to oppose these death activists. As you see, the Internet has given us far more clout than our limited budget and efforts could otherwise hope for."
