Idiocy Is Global
You don't protect freedom by crushing it. Yet, stupidos around the globe are trying to criminalize free speech. In France, they're trying to jail a rapper for pissing on the Republic. Angela Crisafis writes in The Guardian:
One of France's most popular rappers will appear in court today charged with offending public decency with a song in which he referred to France as a "slut" and vowed to "piss" on Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle. Monsieur R, whose real name is Richard Makela, could face three years in prison or a €75,000 (£51,000) fine after an MP from the ruling UMP party launched legal action against him over his album Politikment Incorrekt.In the video for the song FranSSe, Makela, 30, appeared dressed as a gendarme with two naked women rubbing against the French flag as he rapped: "France is a bitch, don't forget to fuck her till she's exhausted/You have to treat her like a slut, man." At another point in the song, he sang: "I piss on Napoleon and on General de Gaulle."
When Daniel Mach, MP for Pyrénées-Orientales, heard the album last year, he proposed a law making it a criminal offence to insult the dignity of France and the French state. In November, when riots broke out in France's run-down suburbs, another UMP deputy, François Grosdidier, won the support of 152 MPs and 49 senators who demanded that parliament act against Makela's lyrics. But by then Mr Mach had taken a personal action against Makela for making and disseminating "violent and pornographic messages" to which minors could get access.
...Makela, who was born in Belgium and came to France aged 14, told Le Parisien he did not target any particular group but rapped against "the system". "You can have a critical view of the French state without being anti-French or racist."
In America, idiot fundanutter Frist never quite figured out what "freedom of speech" means. Here he is on Fox from ThinkProgress:
Today on Fox News Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) tried to argue that banning flag-burning and same-sex marriage are two of the nation’s most pressing priorities, which is why he put them on the Senate agenda for June:HOST: …Are gay marriage and flag burning the most important issues the Senate can be addressing in June of 2006?FRIST:…When you look at that flag and you tell me that right now people in this country are saying it’s okay to desecrate that flag and to burn it and to not pay respect to it, is that important to our values as a people when we’ve got 130,000 people fighting for our freedom and liberty today? That is important. It may not be important here in Washington where people say, well, it’s political posturing and all, but it’s important to the heart and soul of the American people. … Why marriage today? Marriage is for our society that union between a man and a woman, is the cornerstone of our society. It is under attack today.
What's under attack are our rights and freedoms, you moron. By primitive, homophobic puppets like you. I don't see myself burning a flag -- but I celebrate and defend every American's right to do it. Frist, like radical feminists, seeks to shut people up, as if that's going to make for a healthier republic. Exactly the opposite is true.
Chicken Shit For The Soul
Michael Shermer takes on the bullshit claims of the "self-help" industry:
According to self-help guru Tony Robbins, walking barefoot across 1,000-degree red-hot coals "is an experience in belief. It teaches people in the most visceral sense that they can change, they can grow, they can stretch themselves, they can do things they never thought possible."I've done three fire walks myself, without chanting "cool moss" (as Robbins has his clients do) or thinking positive thoughts. I didn't get burned. Why? Because charcoal is a poor conductor of heat, particularly through the dead calloused skin on the bottom of your feet and especially if you scoot across the bed of coals as quickly as fire walkers are wont to do. Think of a cake in a 400-degree oven--you can touch the cake, a poor conductor, without getting burned, but not the metal cake pan. Physics explains the "how" of fire walking. To understand the "why," we must turn to psychology.
In 1980 I attended a bicycle industry trade convention whose keynote speaker was Mark Victor Hansen, now well known as the coauthor of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series that includes the Teenage Soul, Prisoner's Soul and Christian Soul (but no Skeptic's Soul). I was surprised that Hansen didn't require a speaker's fee, until I saw what happened after his talk: people were lined up out the door to purchase his motivational tapes. I was one of them. I listened to those tapes over and over during training rides in preparation for bicycle races.
The "over and over" part is the key to understanding the "why" of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his recent book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers. While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press (whose motto at the time was "to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better"), extensive market surveys revealed that "the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months." The irony of "the eighteen-month rule" for this genre, Salerno says, is this: "If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us--at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again."
Demanding A Recount Of Those Sheep
The Economist has a bunch of articles on new technology, including one on sleep. I'd never heard of "core sleep" before:
A new, contrarian school of thought is emerging. The eight-hours mantra has no more scientific basis than the tooth fairy, says Neil Stanley, head of sleep research at the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit at the University of Surrey in Britain. He believes that everyone has their own individual “sleep need” which can be anywhere between three and 11 hours. “If you’re a three-hour-a-night person, you need three; if you're 11, you need 11.” To find out, he says, simply sleep until you wake naturally, without the aid of an alarm clock. Feel rested? That’s your sleep need.Core sleep beats deep sleep
The global get-to-sleep industry—pills, lotions, “no-turn” mattresses, foam “memory” pillows and the like—has conditioned us to think we’re not getting enough, adds Jim Horne, director of the sleep research centre at Loughborough University in Britain and author of the new book, “Sleep Faring: A Journey through the Science of Sleep”. What really matters, he says, is the “core” sleep, the first few hours that nourish the higher sections of the brain. Anything beyond that—including deep REM (rapid eye movement) sleep—is “non-essential” and taken for pure pleasure. Consider the domestic cat: feed it well, and it sleeps a lot; withdraw the food, and it’s out hunting.As long as you’re not a zombie the next day, you’re probably sleeping enough, says Dr Stanley. He appeals to the concept of “non-restorative sleep” recently put about by the German Society of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine. In Germany, there has been a shift in emphasis: traditionally, treatment focused on reducing sleep “latency”—the interval between settling in for the night and the onset of sleep—and thus prolonging total sleep time. Now, the focus is on restoring the recuperative value of sleep and ensuring daytime functioning on a social, psychological and professional level.
In truth, however, no one really knows whether ten hours a night is any better than five. The science of sleep has not advanced an awful lot since 1834, when the first book in the English language on the subject—“The Philosophy of Sleep” by a Glaswegian physician called Robert MacNish—was published. Of course, we can now plot brainwaves, track hormones and add new taxonomies to the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (89, at the last count).
We can link sleep problems to driving and industrial accidents; to a higher rate of divorce; to increased risks of heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, colo-rectal cancer and obesity. We’re also confident of the role of sleep in reinforcing memory, learning and cognitive performance. But the real fundamentals—such as why we sleep, and why some people can function on less than others—elude us.
More on this here (including "pure Uberman"), and here, in an article by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs:
There is considerable evidence suggesting that for many individuals, performance on alertness, memory and problem-solving tasks can be maintained for extended periods of time with about 5.5 hours of sleep, or what is called “core sleep”:..Findings on the effects of sleep loss suggest that it is important to differentiate between moderate sleep loss (5 to 6 hours of sleep) and severe sleep loss (4 or less hours of sleep). The latter produces more significant effects on daytime performance.
Core sleep (5.5 hours of sleep) probably maintains performance because it contains 100% of our deep sleep, which is the most important stage of sleep and 50% of REM sleep, which is the second most important stage of sleep. Core sleep does not have to be obtained continuously. In fact, research on soldiers, fire fighters, rescue workers and astronauts suggest that by breaking up sleep into multiple periods throughout the day (for example, 6 30-minute naps taken every 4 hours), sleep can be reduced below core sleep — to as little as 3 hours per day — without significant consequences.
Another important finding about core sleep is that, if it is not obtained one night, the brain will create increased pressure to obtain core sleep the next night. How do we know this? On nights after core sleep loss, the brain compensates by producing an increased percentage of deep sleep and dream sleep, which explains why we don't have to recover all of the sleep we lose. (The fact that we don't need to recover all the sleep we lose argues against the accumulation of a sleep debt). This finding, coupled with the fact that insomniacs average 5.75 hours of sleep, suggests that the brain seems to be programmed to obtain core sleep.
Geeks Against Thieves
via Metafilter, great story about a guy who tracked and caught his identity thieves. Good old brain and shoe-leather detective work. Here's Publius Ovidus' story:
This morning, I found out that thousands of dollars of charges had been made on two of my credit cards in the past two days. Now, the identity thieves are sitting in jail. This is how it happened. It involves identity theft, a careless thief, one pissed-off Ovid and lots of luck.I mentioned earlier that it took me less than an hour to find them, but it really depends on when you start counting. Maybe two hours is more accurate. Eh, who cares? They're caught. And where I have times listed, these are the times pulled off of my cell phone.
The rest is on his site. For a sideline, I'd love to open up a geeks detective agency with my actually-trained-as-a-dectective pal, Emmanuelle Richard, and chase and catch creeps.
How Could "god" Tolerate The Holocaust?
The Pope went to Auschwitz, yet, forgetting to pack Occam's razor in his travel kit, failed to admit the obvious: there's no evidence of god.
Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as "a son of the German people" Sunday and asked God why he remained silent during the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust.Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp.
"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible — and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said later.
"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
Um, because the phone's ringing but nobody's home?
Peace And Thanks
Thank you to all the men and women who fought and continue to fight for freedom on behalf of the rest of us.
Ye Olde Constitution
Don't be too quick to pooh-pooh Alan Uthman's contention that we're on the road to totalitarianism. As the subhead says, "From secret detention centers to warrantless wiretapping, Bush and Co. give free rein to their totalitarian impulses." Here are a couple points from his piece:
5. Touchscreen Voting MachinesDespite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush's "Help America Vote Act," the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public's enduring cluelessness.
In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor's airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn't. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho's ouster before it will resume servicing the county.
Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public's continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don't win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.
Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.
6. Signing Statements
Bush has famously never vetoed a bill. This is because he prefers to simply nullify laws he doesn't like with "signing statements." Bush has issued over 700 such statements, twice as many as all previous presidents combined. A few examples of recently passed laws and their corresponding dismissals, courtesy of the Boston Globe:
--Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.
--Dec. 30, 2005: When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."
Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.
--Dec. 23, 2004: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.
Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ''as advisory in nature."
Essentially, this administration is bypassing the judiciary and deciding for itself whether laws are constitutional or not. Somehow, I don't see the new Supreme Court lineup having much of a problem with that, though. So no matter what laws congress passes, Bush will simply choose to ignore the ones he doesn't care for. It's much quieter than a veto, and can't be overridden by a two-thirds majority. It's also totally absurd.
Here's more on signing statements from this Charlie Savage Boston Globe article.
Despite legal scholars' skepticism about the expansive theory of presidential power Cheney has long promoted, Bush's legal team has used the theory to target every law that regulates the military or the executive branch.Kmiec, one of the only scholars who has testified that Bush might have the authority to set aside the warrant law, said he thinks the administration's use of signing statements has gone too far, needlessly antagonizing Congress. Arlen Specter , Republican of Pennsylvania and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, recently announced hearings into the matter.
``The president is not well served by the lawyers who have been advising him," said Kmiec.
Mind Like A Steel Sieve
I can't remember jokes. This one, however, slipped in under the wire:
Two dyslexics walk into a bra.
Another one:
What's Victoria's Secret?She dresses like a slut.
Hex In The City
"Aidan" meets the fugging Wolfman. As Fug sister Heather writes (photo at link):
The mussed, wavy hair, the deeply crooked smile, the awkward and forced machismo of his snug jeans and bow-legged stance, the open shirt, the hasty leather vest, the unbelievably creepy facial hair... Oh, dear God, it's happening: attention-hungry John Corbett is trying to turn himself into Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise, and Keith Urban all rolled into one.
This Was Before He Grabbed My Camera And Bent My Thumb And Finger Back
I love the employees at Whole Foods on Wilshire in Santa Monica. It’s the customers who are the problem. This is the Whole Foods where, last year, another guy -- an old dude with a personalized plate -- did a hit-and-run on my car and thought he’d get away with it. Ha. Bad idea. I tracked his ass down, got him prosecuted, and still have to take him to Small Claims with the videotape I have of him hitting my car to sue him for the hours off work I spent bringing him to justice. And then, I’ll write about it, naming names.
Saturday, thinking of the hit-and-run, I was going to park on the street, then I remembered they have those yellow, magnetic grocery cart-stopping lines on the sidewalk, so I grudgingly parked in the underground garage. I took a spot on the end in the corner, parking as close as I could to a metal bar thing on the left of my car and still be able to open my door. I thought twice about parking there, worrying that it would be hard to see to get out, but the spaces were small, and the signs noted the spots were for compacts only, and there was a reasonable-sized white Nissan or something parked next to the spot I was taking.
I had a very pleasant little Whole Foods excursion, thanks to all the employees, who were very friendly and helpful, as always; especially the fabulous cheese lady who found me some really good unpasteurized stuff -- plus the Le Marechal I already love, and an alternative to bland pasteurized camemberts (FDA requirement, sigh).
I smiled at everyone (except the lady on speaker mode on her cell phone), and waited patiently as some woman in front of me had to opt for alternate modes of financing (reminding myself to keep smiling…”I’m an ex-New Yorker, not a New Yorker…I’ll read a magazine…the wait won’t kill me”). La dee dah…I pay…very nice cashier…thank you, thank you…time to go home…smiley, smiley…get in the elevator, get out of the elevator…Hey! Get a load of this assclown:
The signs all over the place say that parking area where he landed his massive boat is for compacts. More signs say "Forward Parking Only/No Backing In." Well, this man (closeup here) is clearly...how shall we say it…special? I'm guessing his mommy raised him to think he was the specialest boy in the whole wide world! How special is he? Soooo special…none of the rules apply to him! Naturally, he parks his gargantuan vehicle head out, and in a compact space. Okay, sure, "compact" is relative. Compared to the U.S.S. Nimitz, or maybe the QEII, his behemoth is quite compact. As I'm rolling my cart to my car I’m fuming that I'm not going to be able to see around his hugemobile to safely get out, the narcissistic asshole.
I point out to him that he's parked in a compacts only space, and add, as he’s blowing me off for saying so, "Hey, I'm wondering if your thoughts turn to Marines getting their legs amputated when you get gas. Naw...probably not." He starts telling me I'm obviously angry and miserable. Actually, no, I told him: I just smiled my way through Whole Foods, and had a lovely visit with the cheese lady.
Next, he tells me I'm "insane." Yawn. "No, I'm quite sane, thanks. Highly rational. And rationally angry. See, I have to drive the car I do because I see faces of 21-year-old kids getting killed in Iraq and I can't drive anything else." And then there’s this Michael E. Ruane Washington Post/MSNBC piece about what happens when they come home alive, but missing a few limbs.
Sure, drive what you gotta drive, dude, but I don't see a lot of steel beams back there suggesting you're a contractor. He then told me I didn't know a thing about him...like whether maybe he needed to drive what he did. I told him I knew plenty about him from how he parked and what he drove. He acts like a classic example of the "the rules are for other people" type I call a “Hollyweasel.”
But, back to the reasons he simply must drive this vast vehicle which he must also park in a space for a compact car: “Okay, I'm willing to listen,” I said to him. “Tell me why you neeeeeed to drive this thing.” Suddenly, he was at a loss for all those great reasons he had moments before. “I’m waiting,” I said. “Go right ahead! I’m listening! Anytime now!”
Well, okay, he wasn’t going to say anything. But, since he apparently felt so proud and right about what he drove, I saw no problem chronicling his pride and moral high ground-itude. I photographed him getting into his vehicle and took a few more snaps. A proud man and his vast wheels! Yes, sirreee! He was motivated to move the thing after I pointed out that I couldn't see to get out of my space (considering his prior flagrant lack of concern about where he parked, I'm guessing he was worried about his liability if I had an accident.) By the way, here’s what reasonable visibility looks like -- the lady who parked there after he moved.
Before he moved his mastodon on wheels, he came over to take photos of me…I guess assuming I'd run from his camera. Nope. I smiled broadly and got down by the Insight hybrid insignia on my car and told him to be sure to get it in. I posed for three or four shots, I think. I'm sure he was disappointed that I was not only taking what I dished out, but seemed rather flattered that he wanted a photographic memory of our time together.
Here's a photo of me taken by my neighbor right after I drove home from Whole Foods. Imposing, aren't I?
But, meanwhile, back in Whole Foods' garage...
Suddenly, the big bully, unable to make me scurry away from his phone's camera lens, resorted to violence: He advanced on me, and grabbed my camera. I held onto it. My boyfriend gave me my camera, and I wasn't about to let some creep take it away from me. The creep, who was probably about 6'4", bent back my thumb and finger. It hurt like hell, and I was scared, but I wasn’t going to let him smash my camera or do whatever he was planning on doing with it. The brute told me while struggling with me -- a skinny redheaded girl in a pink ruffly sweater, hair in a bun, and heels -- that I had to erase my photos. Oh really? No. Fucking. Way. I hung onto my camera. I think I started yelling "Help! Help!" at that point, and he backed off.
I bet he thought he'd blackmail me into erasing my photos of him by taking photos of me that he thought I’d want erased. Yeah, guess what, some of us don’t have to hide our behavior, so we don’t give a shit if you photograph it. Go ahead, put ‘em on the Web, asshole, and then confess how you behaved afterward…which, by the way, is probably on tape –- cameras in Whole Foods’ parking garage, dear. I know, because the last guy who fucked with me (via his hit-and-run on my car) was first photographed by their cameras –- a prelude to his mugshot taken by the cops. Your physical assault on me was also witnessed by a number of people. Bad idea. I could probably press charges. Instead, I think I’ll press HTML. Ashamed of yourself yet? Yeah, I know. Probably not. Work on it.
Garbage In...Lights On
We need more thinking like this. From a Daniela Chen CNN story:
The trash you toss in the garbage could end up powering your lights, computer and washing machine, because in the world of alternative energy, one man's trash is another man's treasure trove of fuel.With the growing concern for U.S. dependence on foreign oil and recognition of shrinking fossil fuel reserves, new attention is being focused on renewable sources of energy.
One such source that already is being converted to electricity is landfill gas.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, every person in America produces an average of 4.5 pounds of garbage per day. Much of that trash goes into landfills, which are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States.
In 1994, the EPA formed the Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. LMOP Team Leader Brian Guzzone said since methane is both a pollutant greenhouse gas and a source of energy, it offers a good opportunity to reduce greenhouse emissions and provide energy.
About 50 percent of all of the waste that we generate as a society today is put into municipal solid waste landfills, Guzzone said. The EPA encourages the capture of the resulting landfill gas and the energy produced from it.
One thing I've learned from spending time in France is to be more conservative with resources whenever possible. This doesn't mean we all have to stop living, but maybe take one napkin, not four (or more), don't take that cardboard carrying tray for your coffee if you don't really need it, and bring your own bag to the supermarket. I use reusablebags.com providing I remember to put them back after the last time, but you can bring any kind, even old plastic ones. Maybe people will look at you a little funny (not that that's an issue for me!) or maybe they'll look at you a little funny the first time, and then, the next time around, look at you like maybe they should follow your lead.
Fire-Starter Home
Another on the Gregg Sutter Homes & Gardens Tour of Detroit, Michigan. Photo and photo concept ripped off with love from Gregg Sutter.
More Whine
According to some, women should be able to drop out of the workforce to care for their kids, and pop back in at exactly where they were before they left! Oh, and sorry, but career mommy will have to leave at 4pm, and you single or non-mommy workers will have to stay 'til 7 to pick up the slack...but we don't want to see an iota of difference in career mommy's pay! Yawn. That's what Momsrising.com founder Joan Blades is saying over at Huffington Post:
The real issue is will Elizabeth (Vargas) be able to return to her career without it being forever diminished by her choice to take time off to be with her young children? Data shows that most mothers never economically recover from taking time off. Their career path is henceforth constrained. Look in the halls of power. How many women are in boardrooms, in the Senate, in leadership? And how many of the women leaders there are mothers? The fact is, we need mothers in leadership. They provide a very important voice and understanding. Corporations that have women in leadership are the stronger for it. Legislatures that have more women in leadership have better family policies. It is not a given that careers must be linear, it is a tradition.Traditions change. Now most women work. It is time to use our understanding of the problem to remove the barriers for mothers. Example: The vast majority of tenured professors at universities are men. There is a logical explanation for this. It just so happens that traditionally the time when professors work for tenure, a time of intense work, coincides with the time most women must choose to have children or not. 82% of women become mothers by the time they are 44. One can see how this system might strongly select against women gaining tenure. Seeing the consequence of traditional tenure-track policies some universities have decided to make it possible for parents to take time off to have children without giving up their ambitions for full professorship. It is good for the university, good for the children, and good for the parents.
Having children is a choice, and if you make it, it's going to have an impact on your career. As the first commenter below her piece, luaxanaevila, points out:
What about non-mothers? Single women suffer as much or more because we're left to pick up the slack, and then we're looked upon with suspicion because "it's only a matter of time".If you want to be a breeder, great, but people need to take responsibility for their choices (which having a baby is), and not expect everyone else to help them get by. You think we should pay mothers for having kids? What about women who can't or choose not to have kids? We have FMLA for a reason so as to give everyone a chance to take time off, without losing their jobs, for whatever family situations may arise.
Women want to have their cake and eat it too. Therein lies the downfall of the feminist movement. Women say they want equality, but they don't. They want to get treated better. What about paid time off for new fathers? What about paid time off for single people or couples without children after picking up the slack? Are you for those measures too? While I agree that women (mothers or not) are an integral part in business, having a child is a personal choice and everyone else should be beholden to pay someone for a specific choice they've made.
He Ain't In The Backyard
Gregg looked.
I remember when they dug up a backyard in Franklin, Michigan, when we were playing at a friend of my parents' a few doors down. Now, 31 years later, why are they still looking for the guy? Point of honor for the FBI? They wanna finally nail it down? Well, fine, but don't waste my tax dollars on it, ya bozos.
Days Of Whiney And Roses
Why are there so few women op-ed columnists? Maybe it's not due to discrimination, but self-discrimination, as in, women like Heidi Schnakenberg just can't take the heat. Here's an excerpt from her sniffle, "Hating The Hate Mail," on Alternet:
As a young woman, I stepped out into the treacherous waters of opinion journalism, and was amazed by the lack of civil discourse and the intensity of personal attacks that I received via e-mail, letters to the editor and on Web postings.Subjects such as women's issues, racism, anti-war politics, environmental matters and virtually any topic deemed "liberal" inspired some vitriolic comments from readers that I will mention here. I was called everything from "bitch" to "whore" and was often addressed as "sweetie" or "honey" before a launch of expletives. Most attackers took the position that I was just a cute, dumb, college student (even though I was in my late 20s) in an effort to discredit me and I was most reliably attacked by a collection of right-wing Web sites and right-wing men who sent me letters.
Needless to say, I ran out of the gates, trail-blazing, and came back a wounded animal. The experience solidified my "attack and retreat" explanation of the low numbers of women in opinion journalism.
The presence of female opinion journalists has remained virtually unchanged over the past 25 years, with only 10 percent to 20 percent of all op-eds in the country being written by women. Only about a quarter of nationally syndicated columnists are women and they tend to be white and right-wing.
While numerous professions--science, medicine and even journalism--have seen a sharp rise in female participants, opinion journalism doesn't seem to budge. In my case, I was attacked, and then retreated into self-censorship for a period of months and in that darkened room I found no mentors and little support from editors.
Oh, boo frigging hoo. I started out giving free advice on the street corner, syndicated my column myself, and heard from editors only when they didn't get my column some week or wanted to drop it. When I started earning a living, I started paying an editor. I turn to my writer friends when I'm having a hard time. One phone call to Nancy Rommelmann or a breakfast hearing how Cathy Seipp bitchslaps editors who try to take advantage of her, and I'm good to go.
My hate mail is one of the highlights of my job. One of my favorites is when somebody begins their letter or e-mail with "Dear Bitch." Okay, "bitch," I get it -- but maybe you want to lop off the "dear" just this once?
Here's the pussyboy hate-mailer of the week, who uses an anonymous e-mailer to send me this message, complaining about my (research-based) contention that straight men who want tail that doesn't have a penis attached on the front should avoid wearing thong underwear:
In a message dated 5/17/06 9:48:11 PM, anonymous@panta-rhei.dyndns.org writes:You're just a feminest who probably hasn't been fucked by your boyfriend in the past several years, or just couldn't convince him to put on a thong, so you have to take it out on the rest of us men who wear them.
You'd probably like it if I sat my bare thonged butt on your face and made you suck my big fat juicy cock!
Woman do love they guys in a thong, otherwise they wouldn't be buying them for their boyfriends.
In the comments below Whiney Girl's piece, here's what I posted:
I'm a syndicated columnist, and I get lots of hate mail, calling me "bitch," "cunt," and more for my non-traditional views on love, sex, dating, and relationships. My attitude about the hate mail? Big whoop. I laugh at it and send some snarky reply; typically making fun of them and correcting their spelling for telling me to "sit on my 'cok'." My reply: "Um, that's 'cock,' and no thanks."In short, if you can't stand the heat, go back to the kitchen.
UPDATE: I left a couple more comments below Schnakenberg's piece. In response to some other commenter's remark:
"She writes that other women journalists have been followed - and for a woman, that is particularly threatening. "
I wrote:
Yeah, I write love advice, and I've gotten death threats. When I get one, I call the FBI and try to duck if I see barrel flashes. As they said in The Godfather, "This is the life we've chosen." For goodness' sake, stop whimpering about it.
Art Buchwald Death Watch
What an amazing guy. He's left the hospice and is running around:
In a Tuesday column syndicated by Tribune Media Services, Buchwald wrote: "In February I was warned that if I didn't take dialysis I wouldn't survive more than two or three weeks. Since I didn't want dialysis, I decided to move into a hospice and go quietly into the night. For reasons that even the doctors can't explain, my kidneys kept working, and what started out as a three-week deathwatch has turned into nearly four months."..."I never realized dying was so much fun," Buchwald wrote in today's column. "Then a few weeks ago, my doctor said I had to change course. He advised me to go to Martha's Vineyard. Things I didn't care about because I was going to die, I now had to care about. This included shaving in the morning, buying a new cellphone that works, rewriting my living will, and scrapping all the plans for my funeral. I also had to start worrying about Bush again.
"Alas, the people who come to visit me now look at me with great suspicion. They want to know if the whole thing was a scam. They can't believe, after I said goodbye, I'm going to Martha's Vineyard instead of Paradise. I called up the TV stations and the newspapers and asked them if they would make a correction and retract the original story. They said they never correct stories about people who claimed they were dying and didn't."
Buchwald concluded: "So, dear reader, I hope you don't feel you were duped. The moral of this column is: Never trust your kidneys."
Thanks, Apple
Jerry's, Jerry's, Quite Contrary
There are those times when Gregg and I get hungry after the senior citizen dinner hour (which is what we consider normal LA dining times), and are forced to dig deep to find a place to eat. (Once, we got to a "French" restaurant in the Valley at about 9:03pm, and they told us we could only stay if we ordered and ate in 20 minutes.) When we're really, really desperate, like last night, at 10:44pm, we sometimes end up at Jerry's Deli.
Turns out the Jerry's in Marina Del Rey was redecorated since we were there last. And perhaps the prices have always been this odd, but we just noticed exactly how odd they are. Check out the $8.15 hot dog. Eight fifteen? First of all, it's absurdly expensive, yes...but what's with all the weird increments in change on their menu? Was this the result of some marketing genius who thought people would order more, or they'd make more, or absurdly expensive prices wouldn't seem so absurdly expensive if they were simply weird?
And come on, grilled cheese, $7.65? And then...grilled cheese and ham, $13.45? So that's a $5.80 slice of ham? I would go hungry a long time not to pay that $5.80.
If you want real deli food, at prices that don't make you want to hurt the people who came up with them, go to Canter's.
Canter's chicken soup could heal you from SARs. And since Kaiser Permanente is stockpiling Tamiflu, the bunwads, but won't give any out -- if I get bird flu, it may be my only hope.
What's Wrong With Wearing A Prom Dress To Prom?
Absolutely nothing. If you're a dude in a dress, you're a little unusual, sure, but why should you be excluded? Well, that's what happened to Kevin Logan, a male student who has worn women's clothes to school all year, when he showed up in a pretty pink dress to his prom:
Logan, who is gay, received an $85 refund for his prom ticket Tuesday but was not satisfied. He said he is considering filing a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.Sylvester Rowan, assistant to Gary Schools Superintendent Mary Steele, said school policy bans males from wearing dresses. Excluding Logan from the prom was based on "the dress code, not the student's homosexuality. That's his personal preference."
Tyrone Hanley, the youth program coordinator for the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition in Washington, D.C., said he often sees cases like this and called it gender-based discrimination.
"Prohibiting really short skirts for everyone is a fair dress code; prohibiting them for males is not," he said.
Logan said he had spent years defining and exploring his sexuality. This year, he took a major step by dressing as a female every day, wearing makeup, a hair weave, nails and girls' fitted jeans to school.
His mother, Donnetta Logan, said she was not surprised by what she called the ignorance of school administrators.
"I tell Kevin that in society there will be those who accept him and those who won't."
He's lucky to have the mother he does.
Here's my Advice Goddess column about cross-dressing.
Fugabella Rosselini In Drag As The Dalai Lama
Either that or she went out the wrong door at a medical exam and it's real drafty up the back.
And then there's Monica Belluci, who got caught in a bunch of fishermen's lines, but was running too late to pull off all the fishing tackle before she hit the red carpet.
No, Driving Up My Tailpipe Won't Make Me Go Faster
New York Times business travel columnist Joe Sharkey writes about Mika Larson's answer to assholes on four wheels -- one I've considered myself:
On her Web site, Roadrage.com, Ms. Larson markets an alternative — a spiral-bound book of 8- by 11-inch cards carrying 43 messages in bold letters ($19.99). On the flip side of each card, the message is printed in reverse image so it can be read in a rearview mirror.Warning to readers who might scurry to this Web site. Some of the messages contain very bad words. (You know the words). Most, however, are merely insulting or insinuating, like "The gas pedal is on the right" and "Stop tailgating." Others are more blunt: "Get out of the fast lane, moron!"
Others are extreme and arguably provocative, like this one, aimed at drivers who weave around while applying makeup, combing hair or tying a necktie: "You're still ugly."
Ms. Larson, who sounds like a nice person cursed with a wicked sense of humor, says she never uses the more extreme texts. "Not for me, no," she said.
"I'm a pretty good driver myself, and I just got tired of driving around and seeing horrible drivers making annoying or stupid mistakes," she said, adding: "I used to yell out the window quite a bit at these people, but then I realized that's ridiculous, they're not getting the message and I'm just getting angry and upset. So one day, I wrote down on a piece of paper, 'What's wrong with your blinker?' People laughed and waved."
...Ms. Larson's Web site prudently contains cautionary advice about using the flip cards, which, a disclaimer says "are intended solely for entertainment purposes." Actual use on the road "is at your sole risk and is not recommended," it says. Incautious use, the disclaimer goes on, "may give rise to physical or verbal retaliation, which may result in injury or death."
Death? As I said, I don't like those odds. Just let it go.
My approach, so far, has been immortalizing the mobile assclowns on my blog.
Third World George Bush
And Congress, too. Lou Dobbs on the priorities of this president and Congress:
Illegal aliens are more important to this Congress than securing our borders and our ports, more important than those legal immigrants who have waited in line and who follow the law. The Senate has added to the litany of lunacy that makes up what it calls reform: Illegal aliens would only have to pay back taxes on three of the past five years, they will not be prosecuted for felonies such as identity theft or purchasing or using fraudulent Social Security cards, and unlike millions of visa holders who have to leave the country to have them renewed, they may simply remain in the United States while this Congress and this president give away all the benefits and privileges of American citizenship.This is an outright assault in the elitist war on the middle class. And working men and women who've already borne the pain of losing good-paying manufacturing jobs and having middle-class jobs outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets are faced with the onslaught of more illegal immigration and cheap labor into the American economy. This president and Congress talk about bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows while they turn out the lights on our middle class.
President Bush and his most trusted advisers tell us how well our economy is doing, how many jobs have been created and how so-called free trade will enrich the lives of the same people whose livelihoods these policies are destroying.
It's hard not to think of the trusted adviser to Catherine the Great who sought to hide from her the embarrassing and shoddy condition of Ukrainian and Crimean villages by having elaborate facades built to divert her attention and to mask an uncomfortable reality. I don't know whether Karl Rove is President Bush's Grigori Potemkin or whether George Bush has created Potemkin villages all by himself. But the facades are cracking, and phony fronts of failed policies are quickly crumbling.
Six thousand unarmed National Guardsmen working as adjunct rear support to our undermanned, under-equipped Border Patrol is not border security. Three million illegal aliens continue to cross our borders and depress wages by hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The millions of manufacturing and middle-class jobs lost over the last five years have been replaced by lower-wage employment.
The president's faith-based commitment to so-called free trade will likely lead to a $1 trillion U.S. current account deficit this year and a trade debt of $4.5 trillion after 30 years of trade deficits. And while the president and Congress point to No Child Left Behind as a solution to our educational crisis, we're failing an entire generation of Americans whose test scores continue to fall and whose high school dropout rates would be embarrassing to a third-world country.
And a third-world country is what we will be if our elected officials don't soon come to their senses.
More on the costs of legalizing the illegals here.
Should Women Ask Men Out On Dates?
The short answer: No.
The longer answer, from "The Missing Wink," my Advice Goddess column I just posted:
Men are most attracted to what’s slightly out of reach, not what’s throwing itself in their laps, crushing their yarbles. Sure, they’ll say they love it when women ask them out. They also love women who’ll have sex with them 20 minutes after meeting them in a bar, but they aren’t going to make them their girlfriends. In the unlikely event they ask for a second date, it probably won’t be “Can I take you to a movie?” but “Meet me in section P3 of the parking garage.”The question is, do you want to be politically correct or romantically successful? There are those who insist men and women are exactly the same -- perhaps prompted by all the good ole boys they see breast-feeding babies at Denny’s, or by the proliferation of NFL logo-imprinted Kotex. Data does show that men and women are cognitively very similar. Additionally, notes evolutionary psychologist David Buss, both sexes get skin-protecting calluses, have taste preferences for fat, sugar, and salt, and developed sweat glands for bodily cooling. Where men and women diverge, writes Buss in a 1998 analysis of sex differences, is in domains in which they’ve faced “different adaptive problems over human evolutionary history.”
Few people truly understand how far we haven’t come. While it’s only a matter of time before you can nag your robo-vacuum via e-mail, psychologically, you’re still the cave girl next door. Back in the Pleistocene era, when birth control meant being a fast runner, having sex could yank a woman off the mating market for nine-plus months, then stick her with a hungry kid -- long before readily available frozen pizza replaced readily diggable crawly grubs. A man, on the other hand, merely gave up a few minutes of his time and a teaspoon or so of sperm.
Now, there are a lot of really bad places to be a single mother, but probably one of the worst ever was 1.8 million years ago on the savannah. The ancestral women who successfully passed their genes on to us were those who were choosy about who they went under a bush with, weeding out the dads from the cads. Men had a different genetic imperative -- to avoid bringing home the bison for kids who weren’t theirs -- and evolved to regard girls who give it up too easily as too high risk for anything beyond a roll on the rock pile.
Sure, these days, you can slap a medicated sticker on your back and run around having lots of pregnancy-free fun. Unfortunately, as evolutionary psychologist Don Symons writes in The Adapted Mind, “Natural selection takes hundreds or thousands of generations,” so don’t count on our genes getting the message to upgrade to Cave 2.0 anytime soon.
Forget worrying about what’s equal or unequal, and stick to what works: A woman targets the guy she wants and flirts to let him know he’s got a shot. If he doesn’t ask her out, he’s either a weenie or not interested. Either way, if she tries to force a relationship, it’s unlikely to end well. As for accusations that the “old-fashioned” (see reader's question) approach is a form of “disempowerment” practiced by women who secretly hate women -- if anything, it’s the disempowerment of women who secretly hate women who have dates.
The entire Q & A is here.
Don't Worry, Be Happy, Potheads!
Salynn Boyles writes on WebMD that pot smokers don't appear to be at an increased risk for developing lung cancer:
While a clear increase in cancer risk was seen among cigarette smokers in the study, no such association was seen for regular cannabis users.Even very heavy, long-term marijuana users who had smoked more than 22,000 joints over a lifetime seemed to have no greater risk than infrequent marijuana users or nonusers.
The findings surprised the study’s researchers, who expected to see an increase in cancer among people who smoked marijuana regularly in their youth.
“We know that there are as many or more carcinogens and co-carcinogens in marijuana smoke as in cigarettes,” researcher Donald Tashkin, MD, of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine tells WebMD. “But we did not find any evidence for an increase in cancer risk for even heavy marijuana smoking.” Carcinogens are substances that cause cancer.
...The more tobacco a person smoked, the greater their risk of developing lung cancer and other cancers of the head and neck. But people who smoked more marijuana were not at increased risk compared with people who smoked less and people who didn’t smoke at all.
Studies suggest that marijuana smoke contains 50% higher concentrations of chemicals linked to lung cancerlung cancer than cigarette smoke. Marijuana smokers also tend to inhale deeper than cigarette smokers and hold the inhaled smoke in their lungs longer.
So why isn’t smoking marijuana as dangerous as smoking cigarettes in terms of cancercancer risk?
The answer isn’t clear, but the experts say it might have something to do with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is a chemical found in marijuana smoke.
Cellular studies and even some studies in animal models suggest that THC has antitumor properties, either by encouraging the death of genetically damaged cells that can become cancerous or by restricting the development of the blood supply that feeds tumors, Tashkin tells WebMD.
Smart Deco
Will Smart cars launch in the US? DaimlerChrysler will decide next month, says Forbes.
Nanny Of Us All
Ayn Rand Institute's Yaron Brook reacts against our government appointing itself our governess and fining media companies that violate "indecency" standards, calling it "an ominous attack on the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment":
Just as the government doesn't fine newspapers that publish cartoons that Muslims deem indecent, it shouldn't fine broadcasters that air shows that viewers deem indecent. Viewers are free to change the channel or turn off their TV set if they do not like what they see. They can't be forced to patronize a station they find indecent.Moreover, it is the parents--not the government--who should be responsible for determining what their children are allowed to watch on TV.
If people can't parent their kids, perhaps it's indecent of them to have them. Perhaps, as long as we're deleting freedoms, we should sterilize everybody until they pass an anti-assclown test, and prove themselves qualified to parent.
Yeah, Bullshit Me Right From Word One
A girl e-mailed me wanting advice, and started with this:
Hello Amy. I took a look at your website and I am really impressed by your credentials.
My credentials? You mean, how I, with two friends, set up three folding chairs, a magazine rack for a table, and a cardboard sign on the corner of West Broadway and Broome, and dispensed free advice?
I guess you could say I earned a few credits toward a degree in psychotherapy at Harvard On The Highway. But, after that, I got to work.
I used to be somewhat defensive about not having traditional credentials. But, frankly, I read, study, and think my ass off; probably a whole lot more than a lot of people with psychiatry and psychology degrees do. And I think I'm better off not having been indoctrinated into a particular line of thinking, which allows me the freedom to take a sort of Sizzler buffet approach to problems: a lot of psych and ev psych data, a little sociology on the side from time to time, washed down with reason and worship of the absurd.
There are plenty of people who are plenty smart who didn't go to college: Wendy McElroy, for example. The people I feel sorry for are those who are quick to feel all squishy and secure that they're getting good psychotherapeutic and/or medical advice just because some doctor or shrink managed to avoid flunking out of college.
Caveat emptor: Don't be too quick to assume they're reading JAMA instead of John Grisham's latest.
Motown Is No Town For Starbucks
Jim Romenesko asks on his Starbucks blog why Detroit has only five Starbucks -- 41 fewer than San Jose, which has about the same population. I responded in the comments:
The Starbucks in the Detroit area are mostly in the nice, safe suburbs -- in places like Birmingham and Grosse Pointe. Why? The guy who mentioned the Kevlar vest above makes exactly the right point. I dunno about you, but I'm not sitting out with my laptop in the middle of murder row.And frankly, Detroit just isn't the kind of creative town (a la Richard Florida's Rise Of The Creative Class) where there are the same level of independently employed creative types like in NYC, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other places, who use Starbucks as a meeting place/workplace/resting place on weekdays.
Starbucks in Detroit is basically a place where white collar workers grab their coffee enroute to the office, and where people hang out on the weekends. And even then, the weekend crowd there is way different than the people you see in urban creative centers, and not in a good way.
The last two times I was in the Grosse Pointe Starbucks, I was the only one with a laptop, and the same three religious nutters tried to convince me I'd burn in hell if I didn't believe in Jesus. (Don't ask -- I guess I just have that 666 look tattooed across my godless harlot forehead.) Anyway, the point is, Detroit's not exactly the gay-friendly, creativity-fostering environment Richard Florida talks about...hence, no need for many Starbucks.
It's sad...I see from my boyfriend's research on the old Detroit that it used to be a pretty interesting, vibrant city. I did love what was still left of downtown in 1982 -- like the big old J.L. Hudson department store -- when I worked at WDIV Channel 4 during my senior year of high school. But, mostly, Detroit, for me, was just a place to leave ASAP.
Buttcrack Chic
The latest in red carpet overexposure. Just a thought, but especially for the premiere of a film called "The Wind That Shakes The Barley," an asscrack with a little more coverage seems in order. Uh-oh...there's more. And even more. Is it just me, or is there a bit of anal/vaginal oneupmanship going on lately?
Bush's Base Wakes Up
Richard A. Viguerie writes in The Washington Post that the honeymoon is finally over:
Sixty-five months into Bush's presidency, conservatives feel betrayed. After the "Bridge to Nowhere" transportation bill, the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the Dubai Ports World deal, the immigration crisis was the tipping point for us. Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that Republican disapproval of Bush's presidency had increased from 16 percent to 30 percent in one month. It is largely the defection of conservatives that is driving the president's poll numbers to new lows.Emboldened and interconnected as never before by alternative media, such as talk radio and Internet blogs, many conservatives have concluded that the benefits of unwavering support for the GOP simply do not, and will not, outweigh the costs.
The main cause of conservatives' anger with Bush is this: He talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative.
For all of conservatives' patience, we've been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response, headed by an unqualified director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved that the government isn't ready for the next disaster. We've been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We've been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of "nation-building" that Candidate Bush said he opposed.
Republicans in Congress and at the White House seem oblivious to the rising threat of communist China and of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Despite the temporary appointment of conservative John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the current GOP leadership keeps shoveling money to the world body despite its refusal to change.
As for the Supreme Court, Bush's failed nomination of Miers, his personal lawyer, represented the breaking of what we took as an explicit promise to appoint more Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases, and it was an inexcusable act of cronyism.
Bush isn't the only one they're on to:
For years, congressional Republicans have sold themselves to conservatives as the continuation of the Reagan revolution. We were told that they would take on the Washington special interests -- that they would, in essence, tear down K Street and sow the earth with salt to make sure nothing ever grew there again.But over time, most of them turned into the sort of unprincipled power brokers they had ousted in 1994. They lost interest in furthering conservative ideas, and they turned their attention to getting their share of the pork. Conservatives did not spend decades going door to door, staffing phone banks and compiling lists of like-minded voters so Republican congressmen could have highways named after them and so there could be an affirmative-action program for Republican lobbyists.
If you're a fiscal conservative who's also socially libertarian like me, you can't happily vote for a Democrat either. It's always the lesser of two weevils, as I like to say, until there's a viable third party.
Illegal Immigrants Make You Fat!
I think employers (household or corporate) should be heavily fined for hiring illegals. I also think people who violate our borders should be punished -- in a way that makes it extremely unattractive to them to cross. That said, via Sploid, get a load of this idiotic column from former econ prof Alfred Tella:
As the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has steadily grown in the last two decades, so has the number of obese Americans. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection?...Though they can be found in various industries and occupations, illegal workers are employed in large numbers on household tasks that most Americans once did for themselves, such as cleaning the house and taking care of the yard. Some are employed directly by householders as maids, house cleaners and yard workers, and others work as employees of companies that provide services to residential customers.
A number of the householders who hire illegal workers can be counted among the more than 60 million obese adults in America.
Ken Layne fact-checks his ass:
Tella's bold theory doesn't quite explain away how low-paying jobs have traditionally gone to ultra-low-cost black slaves and then to successive waves of ethnic immigrants -- German, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, etc. -- and will soon go entirely to robot slaves. But surely there's a scientific reason to explain how only illegal Mexican laborers make American citizens so horrifyingly obese....By removing a labor supply, Americans will have no choice but to quit hiring help and getting on a low-fat, low-sodium diet with the constant supervision of doctors. Just as the steady de-legalization of cigarettes has stopped cancer and heart disease in the United States, de-de-legalizing undocumented Latino workers will end the tragic obesity epidemic that has left most Americans outrageously fat and absolutely powerless to do anything about it.
Just Because You Have Nice Legs Doesn't Mean We Need To See The Spot Where They Meet Your Torso
Eva Fugging Herzigova dresses like she doesn't have two brain cells to rub together, and looks like tacky crap, despite being gorgeous.
As Heather from Go Fug Yourself writes:
I especially enjoy that she has to clutch that piece of fabric between her legs, or tape it there, so that a brisk wind doesn't make her ladyparts a matter of public record. And yet, at this point, why even bother with the modesty flap? Just get Fred Leighton to bling it up and call it jewelry.
Fuck You And Your H2
Of course, I give them the finger when they're actually in the vehicle. I also like to ask them if their thoughts turn to Marines getting their legs amputated when they get gas.
link fixed
Purple Party People Are Popping Up Everywhere
Increasingly, people are sick of government as usual; all the out-of-touch sleazebags left and right, and what they're leaving us with. From a comment on a ThinkProgress entry about Hastert claiming a family of four with earnings of $40,000 pays no taxes:
I’m sure glad Bush took care of that whole social security poblem he promised. I make slightly under 40k a year, I am 24, and I am paying into a program that I will never use. I have a very big problem with this. Most intelligent people will not rely on social security, but those that are in fine physical and mental health that think that social security is going to pay for the rest of their elderly lives are stupid. I agree that social security programs are needed for mentally and physically handicapped, but the program can’t continue to pay for every elderly person. It’s mathematically impossible. Furthermore, with corporations not raising pay slashing pensions and healthcare for their retiring, we are going to continue sliding down this slippery slope.My Solution:
Get every politician in Washington, and around the country, round em up. Make them work for $5.15 an hour at a shitty fast food place for the rest of their lives. Replace congress, etc.. with people who have a grasp on what a life in the real world is like. Not all Ivy League D-Bags, who got everything handed to them.. No Kennedy’s, Bush’s, Rockafellar’s, Roosevelt’s or any of those elitist families that could give two shits about this country. It’s time for a goverment overhaul in my opinion.
We are way overdue for a viable Purple Party, what Kurt Anderson calls people like me (and him) who are neither Democrats nor Republicans. While I don't agree with everything he proposes, I'm all for electing what I call "common-sense" moderates to run this country, for a change.
Are You In TeleVone Hell?
I'm not hearing good things from friends of mine who switched to Vonage. One just sent me an e-mail saying she has "a new number for two weeks only." Why? Because, after spending "about 11 hours" (like the guy in the article by Shawn Young and Li Yuan in The Wall Street Journal) on the phone with Vonage customer service, that's still how long it will take to transfer her phone line back to her old land-line phone company. Transferring her mental health back to what it was will, apparently, take much, much longer.
Who Says Friends Can't Be Bought?
Lucy has a new one. A gift from a friend of ours.
Best sex she's ever had.
Oops. I guess Lucy's off smoking a cigarette now.
We Don't Want No Bleeping Bleeping
Somebody posting a comment here the other day thought I was silly to say there was a chill on free speech. Well, I've personally experienced the chill, when I've gone on non-internet radio shows in the past, and I was told they couldn't have me saying the word..."blow job"! This, specifically, was Glenn Sachs radio show...and I can't really blame him. He was just trying to protect the station, himself, and me from thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
And here's the latest, from a Wall Street Journal article by Amy Schatz, on the FCC and their propensity to fine broadcasters...as egged on by senaturds and congressturds in an election year push to "clean up" the airwaves (clean up, of course, means remove all traces of human sexuality, but not the human tendency to blow each other away:
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who took over in 2005, has shown little patience for questionable programming. Consequently, the FCC is expected to continue proposing multimillion-dollar fines, and industry executives say it now makes financial sense to challenge them in court. They also worry Mr. Martin's FCC will expand its efforts to dictate standards, pointing to the commission's willingness in March to propose fines for graphic sexual content or the use of expletives that it deemed not "essential" to a show. Industry executives argue that the FCC is injecting itself deeper into content decisions than has historically been the case.Enforcing indecency laws ultimately comes down to a judgment call, but two cases demonstrate how inconsistent the FCC's indecency decisions can appear. One involved U2 singer Bono's use of an expletive during NBC's live broadcast of the 2003 Golden Globes Awards. The FCC initially deemed the singer's swearing acceptable but later reversed itself amid political pressure. The other case involved a $1.2 million fine for an episode of Fox Television's "Married by America," which featured scenes of partygoers licking whipped cream off strippers. In that case, the FCC diverged from previous policy and fined every Fox affiliate that broadcast the show, instead of just those stations that drew complaints.
In March, however, FCC officials reverted to fining only stations that drew complaints. FCC officials said its more "limited approach" was made to show its "commitment to an appropriately restrained enforcement policy."
"There are two theories of appealing a content-related decision. One is on the First Amendment, and the other is that the FCC is acting in an arbitrary and capricious way," says John Crigler, a Washington-based First Amendment lawyer who isn't involved in the networks' lawsuit. "The [indecency] standard is getting so contorted that this is a pretty good time to challenge just based on consistency."
Of course, in the past, for reasons utterly unrelated to the FCC, after coming off the air after telling some joke about my hate mail that made the announcers (Mark Cooper and Cathy Gori) go white, I asked the engineer what the problem was. He quipped: "We don't have rectums on NPR."
Booking Buddy
Who's got the absolute lowest airfare? Well, Booking Buddy, which I just used to book a flight, is a great place to find out. It opens a new Web page with each company's offer for your dates, so you can hold the multiple windows open on your computer. They do hotels and stuff, too, and have travel specials. Love, your economic Advice Goddess
Dumb Things I Just Stopped Doing
Just one in a very long series.
A few weeks ago, I called Cingular and stopped paying insurance on my phone. I have one of the first Bluetooth phones, the Sony-Ericsson t68i, which was supposed to work with Macs to get on the Internet via cell. "Supposed to" being the operative phrase.
It was pricey when I bought it, so back then, for a little while, the $3.99 phone insurance seemed to make sense. I just realized I was an idiot to be paying it still, and stopped.
Now, perhaps due to my midwestern girl roots, I see no reason to buy something new when I have something old that works perfectly fine, for my purposes. I have rather limited cellular telephonic needs: My phone must have a ringer which goes to vibrate (because I almost always leave it in vibrate, not wanting to bother other people). It must make and receive calls. It must store a few numbers. It must have call waiting and voicemail. Period.
No, no MP3 player, camera, or any other hoohah, thank you. And thanks, but I'll pass on the "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" ringtone. If you have it on yours, be glad I'm a libertarian atheist who doesn't believe it's right to kill another human being, because I will want to bludgeon you to death with your Treo when I hear it, but I will do my best to restrain myself.
Back to my phone, I am a bit annoyed that the cute red button on it fell off almost immediately -- bad design, Sony-Ericsson, that will make me hate you a little bit always. And just recently, I bought a mismatched battery from CellPhoneShop.com, so my phone uglier than ever.
Now, I don't like ugly, and I normally go out of my way to avoid having it in my life. I really miss my old American Motorola flip, which didn't have all sorts of crap on the hood like all the newer flips, and was tiny and cute, kind of like a silver OB tampon.
But, keeping this old Sony-Ericsson is a protest; first, against paying for a ugly new phone -- since phones available in America are ugly and not that high-tech, compared to phones available in Europe and Asia. Even my French cell phone, which is in France at the moment, being lent to a friend, is cuter than American cell phones, and it's about six years old! Here it is in a Melrose Ave. store window.
Not replacing my old Sony-Ericsson is also a protest against this culture where everybody's so up-to-the-minute with their phone; often because they're unable to detach themselves from it to actually relate to what's in front of them; and typically, while they're annoying the crap out of me at some high decibel. My favorite recent comment to some assclown doing this: "I just wanted to point out that I exist." (People around him clapped.)
Regarding whether you should insure your own phone, new or old, here's an article by Tim Harford on Slate debating whether it makes sense to buy insurance at all:
There is plenty of overpriced insurance around, always bundled with some other product. A popular cell phone retailer will insure your $90 phone for $1.70 a week—nearly $90 a year. The fair price of the insurance is probably closer to $9 a year than $90. Economists are rarely tub-thumping consumer-rights activists. We tend to believe that people are smart enough to fend for themselves. But the commercial success of this kind of insurance is perplexing. The pricing is grotesquely inflated, but something more fundamental is also going on. A rational consumer should scarcely look at this kind of insurance, even at a fairer price.Most people like insurance because they dislike risks. Economists used to think that this tendency was rational: Your first million dollars is worth more to you than your second million dollars, so you should be reluctant to wager your first million on a coin toss. What you might win (your second million) is worth less to you than what you might lose (your first million).
That explains why people would want insurance for million-dollar risks, but not $90 risks. It is not at all clear that the $90 that you might lose if your phone is stolen is so much more significant than the $90 you might "win" by not paying for a year's insurance.
You might protest that not all of us are millionaires. But a million dollars is just $25,000 a year for 40 years—less than most of us make in a lifetime. And since we can borrow or save to spread the cost of windfalls and disasters across the years, the million dollars is the relevant figure. Compared to a million dollars, a coin toss for $90 is trivial.
Oh yeah, and one last thing: a warning. When Cingular shut off my insurance charge, they also shut off my voicemail. I didn't know that until it was too late -- after I'd missed my boyfriend's phone notification of his arrival at the airport, so I was sitting around at Yamashiro wondering why I hadn't heard from him, while he was sitting around at my house wondering how the hell he was going to reach me.
Any Woman Could Get Knocked Up At Any Time
That's the new plan from the government for the philosophy behind medical care for all women. January N. Payne writes in the Washington Post:
New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.
While most of these recommendations are well known to women who are pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, experts say it's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed.
The recommendations aim to "increase public awareness of the importance of preconception health" and emphasize the "importance of managing risk factors prior to pregnancy," said Samuel Posner, co-author of the guidelines and associate director for science in the division of reproductive health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which issued the report.
...Preconception care should be delivered by any doctor a patient sees -- from her primary care physician to her gynecologist. It involves developing a "reproductive health plan" that details if and when children are planned, said Janis Biermann, a report co-author and vice president for education and health promotion at the March of Dimes.
"The recommendations say we need to be opportunistic," or deliver care and counseling when opportunities arise, said Merry-K. Moos, a professor in the University of North Carolina's maternal fetal medicine division who sat on the CDC advisory panel. "Healthier women have healthier pregnancies."
But, what about poor women, who can't afford health care? I am completely against socialized medicine for all, and for employer-paid health care (I think anybody who isn't poor should do what I do -- pay for their own health care). It's completely wrong that an employer pay your health care -- especially in light of the fact that some people choose to get married and extrude five rugrats, and others remain...independent. (I don't really like the word single, as it means "not married," as if being married is the gold standard. Listen to a couple of married people arguing in Target, and I don't think you'll think it is either.)
Getting back to the issue at hand, it's inhumane and fiscally very stupid to not give preventive care to the very poor. But, no...we prefer to pay thousands upon thousands for dialysis when the diabetes or other disease gets full blown. And now, what...while we're all psycho that some smoke-sucking 15-year-old is going to get knocked up at any moment, we're just going to let the poor potential children rot?
Strong-Arm Others To Join Your Bad Trip!
Sorry, but I'm undercharmed by Renaissance Faires. I can't help but side with the guy who is equally undercharmed by the order to come dressed for one for his brother's wedding. Here's an excerpt from "Malcolm In The Middle Ages," my Advice Goddess column I just posted:
My fiance and I are having a costume wedding. We thought having everyone dress Renaissance/medieval would be a fun alternative to stuffy black-tie. The problem is, my fiance wants his brother to be his best man, but the guy simply refuses to come in costume. How can I get over the resentment I feel toward his brother for not wanting to fully participate in our wedding?--Maid Marian
It’s no surprise you long for days of yore, when it was much easier to get the peasants to follow orders. Unfortunately, like most people these days, you only got engaged, not coronated. All you can do is hint how pissy you’ll be for the next 50-some years if you don’t get your way -- which, as a motivational tool, doesn’t have quite the same punch as the power to flick your scepter and screech to the palace guards, “Off with his head!”
It’s your party, and you’ll make him dress like Friar Tuck if you want to! Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But, look where it’s gotten you. Suddenly, what should be a celebration of love is degenerating into petty infighting over who wears the pants in the family -- and if they can demand the rest of the clan wear knickers, curly-toed shoes, and tights.
Ask yourself what really matters: whether your wedding is the epitome of medieval accuracy, down to guests who smell like they bathed once (back in 1434) -- or whether everybody feels included. (“Well, having a historically accurate wedding, of course!”) If that’s how you see it, you’re probably feeling relieved you’re marrying your fiance, not his stuffybutt brother. Um, not so fast. You don’t just marry a person, you marry into a person’s family -- which means you’re vowing to spend at least part of the rest of your life with everybody from the groom’s brother to his flatulent Aunt Frieda.
In other words, it would behoove you to stop stamping your feet and insisting everybody meet your needs and start smiling and inquiring about theirs. But, wait, isn’t this supposed to be your wedding, that “most important day of every girl’s life”? That thinking is not only vomit-inducing, it’s what gets the mother of the bride chasing the mother of the groom with one of those spiked balls on a chain -- typically, over life and death issues like whether the centerpieces should be calla lilies or bud roses.
The rest is here.
Avant Goddess
Avant Guide's interview of me is up. I think it was done last year, which is why I mentioned Terry Schiavo and a few other things in the news at the time. Here's an excerpt:
DL: What are your top 5 pet peeves?Amy Alkon: People who believe in god or in anything without proof. Especially people who try to make laws based on their irrational belief in god. Have your imaginary friends and a rich fantasy life if you want; just leave Terri Schiavo and me and my ovaries out of it.
"Lunar landing behavior," my name for what people shouting into cell phones in cafés, driving USS Nimitz-sized SUVs, and the like are practicing...as in, yoo-hoo, buttwad, unless you just came in for a lunar landing, chances are, you're on earth, where there are a lot of other people who are very f**ing disturbed by your behavior.
People who dress as if they just rolled out of a dumpster. Looks are important. Denying it is just silly. Epitomizing this silliness is feel-goodery like the "fat acceptance" movement. You can accept your fat all you want, but that doesn't mean anybody else is going to. Accept the truth and you might improve your lot in life - and avoid adult onset diabetes, to boot.
People who refuse to believe valid data because they don't like what it says. Political correctness. Anything that gets in the way of freedom of speech. I still can't believe Bill Maher's show, "Politically Incorrect," was canceled after Maher spoke his mind. Actually, I can. There's a real chill on free speech in America, and it terrifies me.
Prudery and the nonthink that goes along with it. The fact that daily newspapers refuse to allow use of words like "butt" or "sucks," and will only run pieces that rubberstamp the status quo view about drugs, relationships, etc, really bothers me. Most idiotically, they prefer docile readers to those who engage; who might even write a nasty letter or two to the newspaper. All the while, editors are obsessed with the prospect of luring "young people" (which they have no idea how to do - the fact that they call them "young people" says it all). They are stuffyassing their papers to the grave.
Likewise, there are ridiculous bans on "dirty words" and a flash of nipple or sexual activity on TV...but machete-ing off somebody's head is A-OK! I see a connection from the ridiculous sexual abstinence movement and bans on alcohol and drugs to binge behavior in kids. It's easier to tell your kids "Just say no" (i.e., "don't think") than to help them parse the differences in drug use and drug abuse - and they ARE different. I know a highly successful professor and inventor who comes home every night (after working 8am to about 8pm, plus weekends) and smokes a big joint. Why is this a bad thing? The government should have no say over what we put in our bodies; only say over whether we can drive afterward, etc, which might impact the health and welfare of others.
Amy On Tammy Bruce Today
I'll be on Tammy Bruce's radio show on Talk Radio Network, streamed on the Internet, at 10:30 a.m. PST. Click here to listen live.
The Smug S.O.B. Forgets He Works For Us
Karl Rove dodges David Corn's question on why he gave Scott McClellan false information about his involvement in the Plame leak. On video link here. Watch it through the end for when he thinks he's cute for being smug.
Tariff On Terrorism
Palestinians want to play with violence? Starve the bastards. Yaron Brook of Ayn Rand Institute has it right:
Palestinians Should Suffer the Consequences of Electing TerroristsIRVINE, CA—"The United States, Israel and the European Union should not resume financial aid to the Palestinians," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Through the years, Western governments have given billions of dollars to the Palestinians and their leaders. This drain on Western wealth has been used to promote anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Palestinian schools, mosques and media--and to finance suicide bombings in Israeli streets, restaurants and malls. It is disgraceful that Western aid has helped create a terrorist culture and maintain a terrorist regime.
The election victory of Hamas--an Islamic terrorist group committed to the destruction of Israel--further demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians deserve no aid or sympathy. They should be left to suffer the consequences of electing terrorists to rule them.
No state which is run by elected terrorists should be getting American aid.
Susan Spano Gets It Wrong/Frania Sweeps Up
Here's Marie Antoinette by Susan Spano, a paid travel journalist for the LA Times, who remains employed despite what frequently seems to be a relaxed attitude about the facts. (I'll have a post up soon about her recent DaVinci/Louvre article.) And here are the corrections to Susan Spano's piece by a commenter on Spano's also error-ridden blog, Frania Wisniewska. If only Frania had written the original article!
thanks for pointing it out, S!
Buttman's Big Butt Backdoor Babes
Um, er...or something like that.
The 'Nutters Are Restless
In their increasingly scary push to turn the USA into a big church, the fundanutters are putting pressure on The White House, writes David D. Kirkpatrick in The New York Times:
Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion....Midterm Congressional elections tend to be won by whichever side can motivate more true believers to vote. Dr. Dobson and other conservatives are renewing their complaints about the Republicans at a time when several recent polls have shown sharp declines in approval among Republicans and conservatives. And compared with other constituencies, evangelical Protestants have historically been suspicious of the worldly business of politics and thus more prone to stay home unless they feel clear moral issues are at stake.
"When a president is in a reasonably strong position, these kind of leaders don't have a lot of leverage," said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan political analyst. "But when the president is weak, they tend to have a lot of leverage."
Dr. Dobson, whose daily radio broadcast has millions of listeners, has already signaled his willingness to criticize Republican leaders. In a recent interview with Fox News on the eve of a visit to the White House, he accused Republicans of "just ignoring those that put them in office."
Dr. Dobson cited the House's actions on two measures that passed over the objections of social conservatives: a hate-crime bill that extended protections to gay people, and increased support for embryonic stem cell research.
So, scientific progress should be held back, and gay people should be denied rights because some people have primitive beliefs? These people are free to avoid partaking of medical discoveries that offend their religion, or to huddle together in little homophobic circles, but they have absolutely no right to legislate my life or anyone else's based on their religion.
Again, I loathed Kerry with pretty much every fiber of my being, but it's just too dangerous to vote for many Republicans these days. And for all you real conservatives out there (like me), don't give me that crap about the Democrats handing it all to welfare queens.
As I've said before, George Bush is the biggest big Democrat we've had in The White House in years. And, don't kid yourself, he, too, loves welfare queens -- the kind who get millions of dollars in tax money from the rest of us. (I believe you've met Mrs. Halliburton? Oh, and then there's Mrs. Faith Based But Unproven Sex Ed. Mr. AIDS will be right along.)
What sick mess have we all let this country fall into? And again, I'm no bleeding lefty, but with McCain so busy blowing Jerry Falwell, and Hillary very likely without a chance in hell of being elected, somebody please tell me where we're all going to turn.
It's The Slime Talking, Not The Drugs
Clever, clever Patrick Kennedy. Here he was, all drugged out of his mind, but mindful enough to say just the right thing to stay out of jail. John Tabin writes in Reason:
Say what you will about Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI): He knows just the B.S. for the occasion. After ramming his green 1997 Ford Mustang convertible into a security barrier on Capitol Hill at 2:45 AM 11 days ago, he explained to Capitol Police that he was "late for a vote." Even in his impaired state (which we'll get to in a minute), Rep. Kennedy knew that he had a Constitutional get-out-of-jail-free card: Article I, Section 6, which says that "United States Senators and Representatives shall in all cases, except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective houses, and in going to and returning from the same." Congress had been out of session for hours, but that didn't stop the Capitol Police from extending special treatment to a staggering and bleary-eyed Kennedy: Instead of the ride to the station for a night in lock-up that the average impaired driver gets, they gave him a ride home.Kennedy issued a statement that he'd been in a car accident, adding, "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident." But then police officers involved in the incident complained through their labor union about the special treatment afforded Rep. Kennedy, whose "eyes were red and watery," according to the police report, which added that his "speech was slightly slurred and, upon exiting his vehicle, his balance was unsure." Rather than cop to drinking, Kennedy claimed he had no memory of the incident because of an interaction between "the prescribed amount of Phenergan and Ambien." The former is an anti-nausea drug which Kennedy was taking for gastroenteritis. The latter is a sleep aid, and is at the center of a panic over "sleep-driving" that Kennedy rather fashionably invoked.
Fairer than blaming the Ambien is blaming the Rhode Island voters for giving this guy a job.
Grating Cards
From Australia, where else? "Because," as they say, "Nothing says I love you more than a hot cup of tea in the face."
photo used with permission, as always
How Do We Know Lettuce Doesn't Scream When We Pick It?
Meat City bans foie gras, reports Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal.
But, before we get into his remarks, a few words from a few others on the contention it's inhumane to the geese. (And, yes, of course it is, because ducks aren't human, and their lives shouldn't be given the same value.) For more on that, click on this link.
Now, I'm not for willy nilly killing things (in fact, I just carried a spider safely outside rather than squishing it, which I don't like to do). While I'm think it's wrong to kill animals soley for sport (or humans, for that matter, for punishment) I don't have a problem killing animals for food; especially not since meat seems to be the natural human diet; the one on which our big brains evolved, according to testing on skeletons found in eastern Europe.
Sorry, but I used to eat "The Bunny Rabbit Special": a diet based mainly in tofu and beans and all that other supposedly healthy crap. I didn't look or feel anywhere near as good as I do now eating my imitation of the French diet: grass-fed New Zealand beef and lamb; chicken, pork and fish; lots of vegetables (mostly organic), usually bathed in oil; cheese, paté, apple juice, raisins, croissants, doughnuts, Ristretto Roasters coffee, white wine, great chocolate, chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream.
Epstein isn't himself a foie gras fan, so he writes:
The problem with Chicago's banning of foie gras, then, is not a personal one for me, but ultimately a problem of civil liberties: those of fairly high-rolling gourmets versus those of geese and ducks. I've not myself seen these animals force fed to make their livers foie grasable, except in an old Italian movie called "Mondo Cane," a 1963 documentary showing strange rites around the world. The sight in that movie of live geese having grain stuffed down their throats through funnels until their livers swell well beyond normal size has remained with me. But then so has the sight of watching a Jewish ritual slaughter, when I was a boy staying with my parents at a resort in the Laurentian mountains, mutter a brief prayer before slitting the throats of chickens--and thereby rendering them kosher--before flicking them, squawking their death squawk, over his shoulder into the grass behind him.Slaughtering and butchering animals is pleasant neither to witness nor even to contemplate. One reaction to such brutal work is of course the moral response of vegetarianism, which can run from the chastest veganism (eating nothing that has eyes or is itself capable of giving birth to its own species) to that of a woman I recently heard about whose vegetarianism is restricted to refusing to eat only cute animals: no lambs, ducks, rabbits, Koala bears, but bring on the steaks and lobsters.
Yet if there is something repellent about the slaughtering of animals, this is very nearly counterbalanced by the sight and sounds of vegetarians in high moral dudgeon. For a pungent example, at a Chicago City Council committee hearing on the banning of foie gras, the actress Loretta Swit, an animal-rights activist, compared the forced feeding of geese and ducks to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Now that foie gras has been banned from Chicago--the production and sale of it in California is also to end in 2012--the way is clear for banning other meats. My own guess for the next banned meat would be veal. The slaughtering of calves to yield veal has long been an object of moral consternation on the part of the tender-hearted. From there pork might next target of the troops of virtue, for pigs, I not long ago read, are more intelligent than horses. After pork, one can see a general ban on all kinds of sausage. Mencken once referred to hot dogs as cartridges "filled with all the sweepings of the abattoir floor." Butchers, like teachers of Marxism-Leninism after the fall of Communism in Russia, are likely to be rendered supernumerary. And then how long will it be before the government issues a study showing the baleful effects of secondary cholesterol, the results of which will be to force people to eat hamburgers and all other meats, as others may now smoke cigarettes, only out of doors?
Note to Epstein on "secondary cholesterol": it has to be true or pretendably true to be truly funny.
He does pick it up for the close:
A Chicago alderman named Joe Moore, who sponsored the ban on foie gras, after its passage declared that it sends "a powerful message that we [in Chicago] uphold the value of a civilized society." All too easily can I hear one of the red-faced, pot-bellied Chicago aldermen of my youth, reply, "What's he, [epithet deleted] nuts!?"
A Sign Of The Crimes
When I worked at a big company just after college, a guy down the hall had a doormat that read "Go Away." Here's an even better one for only $15.99.
via Consumerist.com.
Ask The Neuroscientist
When does life begin? Let's keep the fanatics out of this, and turn to science. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has the facts in The New Atlantis ("A Journal of Technology & Society"):
Many before Gazzaniga have pondered these terribly difficult and ethically complex issues, but none to his satisfaction. He impatiently dismisses those who lack his scientific credentials: Of a bioethicist with whom he disagrees, “it is clear that [she] has never walked the neurology wards, has never cared for or studied patients with the disease in question.” Of those who come to these issues from a religious perspective, they are “quite simply out of the loop.” Gazzaniga would like to replace such ignorance and quackery with scientific truth. His aim is to establish a new discipline called “neuroethics”—or a “brain-based philosophy of life.” Unfortunately, instead of a philosophic revolution, rooted in new insights from the cutting-edge of brain science, we get arguments that range from the conventional to the confused to the downright silly.Gazzaniga turns to the embryo question first. When is it morally acceptable, if ever, to experiment upon human embryos? Are embryos “one of us,” entitled to at least some rights and protections, or are they closer to the moral status of, say, sea slugs? Countless bioethicists, moral philosophers, scientists, and statesmen have wrestled with this question, but, avers Gazzaniga, “the rational world” still awaits an answer, an answer to be found in the facts of neural development.
Here are those facts, as provided by Gazzaniga: When the egg and sperm meet, the embryo begins its rapid growth, but not until week four is there any sign of the beginnings of a brain, and not until week six does the embryo show signs of electrical brain activity. By week eight, the cerebrum is growing rapidly; by week twelve, the frontal and temporal poles of the brain are apparent; and by week thirteen, the brain’s infrastructure is rapidly developing. Synapses form around week twenty-three, and about ten weeks later the brain is in control of such bodily functions as breathing, though even at birth, the brain is still far from fully developed.
What are we to make of it all? For Gazzaniga, neuroscience tells us that “life begins with a sentient being,” around week twenty-three, or around the same time that the fetus can survive outside the womb with medical support. In Gazzaniga’s view, it is at this point, and not until then, that the fetus becomes “one of us,” with all “the moral and legal rights of a human being.” And thus Gazzaniga holds that we should allow unrestricted experimentation on human embryos up to week twenty-three.
To explain his argument, Gazzaniga uses an analogy: the embryo is like housing materials found at a Home Depot. Says Gazzaniga: “When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not ‘30 Houses Burn Down.’ It is ‘Home Depot Burned Down.’” Similarly, to destroy a fetus is not to destroy a human life, but merely the “materials” of life.
Gazzaniga’s principle that “you are your brain” also has implications for those at the end of life. About 15 percent of those over the age of 65 will develop dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease. It is a terrible and frightful scourge. It is also for Gazzaniga an intellectual puzzle. As he puts it, at what point are people “due less respect because their brains have deteriorated so much that they no longer support cognition”?
Gazzaniga’s sweeping claim is that “demented patients ... are no longer even members of our species.” To demonstrate this, he offers another analogy. Imagine, he says, that you have an old car “Nelly,” your very first car. “Nelly is part of your life and mind and story. You learned to drive her, your first date was in Nelly, and who knows what else happened inside Nelly.” But now Nelly’s motor is broken beyond repair and her body is rusting away.
In Gazzaniga’s view, poor old Nelly is a lot like your demented old grandpa. You may have many fond memories of “Gramps,” but let’s face it, “Gramps” too is nothing but an old rust-bucket, merely a shell of his former self. “Gramps lives in you, not in himself, just like Nelly,” reasons Gazzaniga. The “neuroscientific truth” is “that Gramps is not really with us anymore.” Gramps has all the moral worth of, well, Nelly, and in “our pluralistic society” there should be a right “to euthanize him.”
Here's a link to his book, The Ethical Brain, which I bought Saturday night after reading the article above.
Religious Fanaticism Increases The Spread Of AIDS
From a NY Times op-ed reprinted in the IHT, how the 'nutters in our government are unnecessarily contributing to a world public health crisis:
The elevation of ideology over both science and local needs is deadly in this case. A report by the Government Accountability Office finds that efforts to stem the AIDS pandemic are being undermined by the insistence of Republican congressional leaders and the administration that an unduly large portion of the funds be used to emphasize sexual abstinence and fidelity. The GAO's assessment should weigh heavily on the president's conscience, and inspire a change of policy.Apart from ignoring human nature, the stress on abstinence largely ignores the situation in countries like India or Russia, which have exploding HIV and AIDS problems stemming largely from the intravenous use of illegal drugs and prostitution. The administration has added rules that effectively raise the spending for abstinence-only programs in some countries to well over 33 percent. The result is that some countries have had to cut spending on effective prevention strategies, including programs to prevent the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their newborn infants. That is indefensible.
This dovetails with a Philly Inquirer story by Dawn Fallik about how the CDC allowed a congressman to meddle in researchers choices for a CDC panel on sexually transmittted diseases, bypassing the scientific approval process. The money quote is here:
"We've spent $1.2 billion over a 25-year period on abstinence-only programs. Shouldn't we have one study that shows that they work?" asked William Smith, director for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. He is no longer on the panel.
Warren Farrell On The Wage Gap
All things being equal, women make more money than men, Warren Farrell finds. Well, that is, women who value and risk what men do. He writes about it on MSNBC.com:
When I was on the board of directors for the National Organization for Women in New York City during the 1970s, I led protests against the pay gap. I wore a "59 Cents" pin to reflect my objection to the discrimination I felt was the cause of women earning only 59 cents to each dollar earned by men. Now, since I'm a husband and father, discrimination against women isn't just political, it's personal.But one question haunted me through the years: If an employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman would do for 59 cents, why would anyone hire a man? If women do produce more for less, I thought, women who own their own businesses should earn more than male business owners. So I checked. I found t hat women entrepreneurs earn 50% less than their male counterparts.
It's not that women are less effective or productive — they just have different priorities. A 2001 survey of business owners with MBAs conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology found that money was the primary motivator for only 29% of women, versus 76% of men. Women prioritized flexibility, fulfillment, autonomy and safety.
After more than a decade of research for my book, Why Men Earn More, I discovered that men and women make 25 work-life choices that actually create a wage gap. Men make decisions that result in their making more money. On the other hand, women make decisions that earn them better lives (e.g., more family and friend time).
But what happens when women make the same lucrative decisions typically made by men? The good news — for women, at least: Women actually earn more. For example, when a male and a female civil engineer both stay with their respective companies for ten years, travel and relocate equally and take the same career risks, the woman ends up making more. And among workers who have never been married and never had children, women earn 117% of what men do. (This factors in education, hours worked and age.)
Without husbands, women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Without children, men have more liberty to earn less — that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.
Animals As Antidepressants?
Oh, please. Train your damn dog to be perfectly behaved, like Lucy, so you can sneak it in like the rest of us.
Beth Landman writes in The New York Times of people who claim their dogs are "service dogs" -- but, not Seeing Eye Dogs. "Emotional Support Dogs":
The increasing appearance of pets whose owners say they are needed for emotional support in restaurants — as well as on airplanes, in offices and even in health spas — goes back, according to those who train such animals, to a 2003 ruling by the Department of Transportation. It clarified policies regarding disabled passengers on airplanes, stating for the first time that animals used to aid people with emotional ailments like depression or anxiety should be given the same access and privileges as animals helping people with physical disabilities like blindness or deafness.The following year appellate courts in New York State for the first time accepted tenants' arguments in two cases that emotional support was a viable reason to keep a pet despite a building's no-pets policy. Word of the cases and of the Transportation Department's ruling spread, aided by television and the Internet. Now airlines are grappling with how to accommodate 200-pound dogs in the passenger cabin and even emotional-support goats. And businesses like restaurants not directly addressed in the airline or housing decisions face a newly empowered group of customers seeking admittance with their animals.
Emotional support goats?
Aphrodite Clamar-Cohen, who teaches psychology at John Jay College in Manhattan and sees a psychotherapist, said her dog, a pit bull mix, helps fend off dark moods that began after her husband died eight years ago. She learned about psychological support pets from the Delta Society, a nonprofit group that aims to bring people and animals together, and got her dog, Alexander, last year. "When I travel I tell hotels up front that 'Alexander Dog Cohen' is coming and he is my emotional-needs dog," she said. She acknowledged that the dog is not trained as a service animal."He is necessary for my mental health," she said. "I would find myself at loose ends without him."
Now, I'll be the first one to tell you American health rules prohibiting dogs in public places are a load of crap. Frankly, my dog is cleaner than many of the people I see out in cafés and restaurants. She's certainly quieter and better behaved than almost all of the children I see. Best of all, because I knew I'd be taking her places, I got a Yorkie, so she has hair, like a human's, not fur, so as not to provoke people's allergies.
And, sure, if you have seizures, and your bulldog is trained to jump on your head, we'll deal. But this "emotional support dogs" stuff? And for otherwise functioning adults? Can't these people muster any shame?
Finally, if you're teaching psychology and you can't leave the house without Poopsie, maybe what you need is not an "emotional support dog," but...institutionalization?
God'll Be Right Over, Just As Soon As He Fixes The Dent In Your Neighbor's Car
Some nitwit who's written some religious book had somebody send me a press release -- "God Sends Apostle Edward eHarmony Bride!"
Yeah, right.
I'm sorry, but if there were a god, do you really think god would be busy micromanaging your life? I mean, Sudan, Iraq...there are a few issues in the world that might take priority to your lovelornness, huh?
And how come you never hear about god telling anybody, for example, that they have crappy table manners, they should stop nicking office supplies, and they're a lardass, to boot? Hmmm...maybe because people only make up stuff they want to hear god telling them? Wow...imagine that!
Since we have no more evidence there's an Easter Bunny than we have for the existence of god, let's try the Easter Bunny on for size in all the places "Apostle Edward" says he and his new wife saw god's micromanaging hand:
Palmer began his search for the Easter Bunny's choice of a second helpmate after completing the printing of the book he claims the Easter Bunny gave to him about Christian mythology.Palmer said: "Once the book was in print, the Easter Bunny said it was time to seek out His chosen mate." After a couple of brief social outings, Palmer joined eHarmony on January 22nd at the Easter Bunny's direction.
Marian was the fourth match he received that very evening. Both were seeking a mate chosen by the Easter Bunny. Within a period of eight days, both knew that they had found the mate the Easter Bunny had chosen for them.
On January 30th, Marian wrote: "I know that I am the one the Easter Bunny has chosen to help you." Edward wrote back: "You and I are beyond just a match from eHarmony. Our match was the Easter Bunny using eHarmony to get the two of us together. My spirit confirms that the Easter Bunny is in our match."
Edward and Marian were married April 2nd in New Hope, Minnesota. They believe their new love from eHarmony is a gift from the Easter Bunny and that it sheds new meaning on Mark 10:9 and Matthew 6:33. "What therefore the Easter Bunny hath joined together, let not man put asunder."
Well, he does rival Lucy for cute, I'll give you that!
Gallic Symbols
Hilarious early music vid from France on YouTube. It couldn't be sweeter or less subtle!
Love You Just The Way You Were
I just posted a new Advice Goddess column -- from a guy who doesn't know how he can live with his girlfriend's huge fake titties. Here's an excerpt from my answer:
A lot of guys hate bought boobs, but maybe you could’ve lived with your girlfriend’s if she’d opted for the medium instead of the Supersized. Being with a girl with freakishly huge fake breasts is a bit like being a celebrity -- the negative bit, that is. Just as Cindy Crawford can’t pick her nose in public without it making the international press, you can’t get a cup of coffee without the guy behind the counter asking your girlfriend’s nipples if he can take their drink order.Unless her sweater hippos spring a leak, they aren’t going to get any smaller -- and neither will your feeling that they’re ugly, tacky, and embarrassing. Where you went wrong was in being so eager to make it work with her that you ignored your feelings, pretending that you might someday have the hots for what grosses you out. You may like her, and mostly enjoy being with her, but there’s a part of her you just can’t accept -- the part that paid thousands of dollars for a look that screams “Hooters is hiring!”
The right time to end this was the moment you saw the pontoons bursting out of her tiny top and felt the impulse, not to dive in, but to cover them with a tarp. Well, better way too late than even later. You don’t have to reveal what you really think of Dr. Frankenstein’s work. Just tell her you’re a low-key guy, and you’re always going to feel out of sorts with the crowds she draws with her chest. In the long run, she’ll be happier with somebody whose aesthetic ideal runs more to the circus-sized -- as will you, once you find a woman whose idea of beauty isn’t looking like the gas station attendant stuck an air hose down her bra and went to lunch.
The guy's question and the rest of my answer are at the link above.
Grapefruits photo hijacked from Gregg Sutter.
All The Old News That's Fit To Blog
I love the immediacy of blogs. I can see something happen, take a photo of it, and post it to my blog within minutes. So, what's LA Times' travel blogger Susan Spano's excuse? May 9, 2006, at 10:18 AM, she posts about the LA fashion promotion at Galeries Lafayette:
...I did walk by Galeries Lafayette at L'Opera, which has been running an L.A. fashion promotion. Judging strictly from the windows--mannequins in stiletto high heels, blond fright wigs and gold lamé bikinis, not to mention the occasional red electric guitar--the French must think we all look like Halloween in West Hollywood. It's pretty funny. I haven't been back to L.A. since February, but last time I checked, slightly more conservative attire was still de rigueur in Lalaland.
An American friend in Paris (another who, as Emmanuelle posts, reads Spano as a "pet hate"), went to see the display right after reading Spano's post. Lo and behold, the promotion has been over for more than a week!
Perish forbid the lady would give any actually useful information on her blog. Below, I'll post the comment I left on her blog (as insurance she won't erase my comments, as she's done in the past):
That Galeries Lafayette promo was from the 5th to the 29th of April. You posted a blog item about it on May 9. In other words, it's been over for 10 days and you're only posting about it now...as a professional journalist writing on the LAT's site?Here's a link to a blog that's a little more current. Eric, blogging at Paris Daily Photo, posted an entry, complete with a photo of the dates of the promotion, on April 21.
http://parisdailyphoto.blogspot.com/2006/04/los-angeles-takes-over-paris.htm
Jeez, when I blog, I worry about being a day late with information. And for those out there who don't know how easy it is to post on a blog, I can have an entry of this size (meaning the size of Spano's) written in about three minutes and live on the Internet at about five. Then again, I like to take a little extra time to see that the piece is entertaining and has news value.
Do you understand at all the nature of blogs? Or the nature of news? I mean, back in Marie Antoinette's day, it made sense if people heard about stuff 10 days after it happened. But, in 2006? If I knew what sound dinosaurs made, I'd make it now.
P.S. On a content note: "Judging strictly from the windows"? Now, since you're writing on the Web site of an American paper, and there's a good chance your readers are mostly in America, why not put a photo of the windows in your post?
Also, as for what "the French must think" in putting up windows like that -- if you knew them at all, you'd probably suspect they were poking a bit of fun at Los Angeles. Again, here you are a journalist, a professional journalist, and these things do not occur to you?
As for how people in LA really dress, the French cartoon of 80s West Ho is much more fun than the reality: everybody running around in sweat pants, looking like they're about to spend the day cleaning out the garage.
Illegal Immigration Fine!
Well, no it isn't. But, that's the message we're sending with the laughable enforcement efforts on businesses who hire illegals. How many businesses were fined for this in 2004? Three. Yes, in the entire USA, in 2004, only three businesses were fined for hiring illegals. The chart is at the link below, in a Lou Dobbs column from CNN. Dobbs says to the president, "Do you take us for fools?" Apparently so. Dobbs writes:
Reports this week that the Border Patrol is notifying the Mexican government of the locations of Minutemen volunteers are being denied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. True or not, the Bush administration continues to follow absurd policies on both issues of border security and illegal immigration.President Bush continues to push his guest worker program and amnesty for anywhere between 11 million and 20 million illegal aliens, and he insists still that nothing less than what he calls comprehensive immigration reform is acceptable.
And the lies keep coming from both political parties. This president is not enforcing the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and this Congress is failing in its duty of oversight to demand that those laws be followed.
Only a fool, Mr. President, Sen. Kennedy, Sen. McCain, would believe you when you speak of new legislation. You don't enforce the laws now.
Would you do so if the law were more to your liking? Would you secure our borders and ports? Would you halt illegal immigration? Those are rhetorical questions, only, I assure you. The answers are obvious; obvious because of your conduct.
As many as 3 million illegal aliens continue to cross our border with Mexico each year. Enforcement against illegal employers of illegal aliens in this country is all but nonexistent, Mr. President. How do you explain that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have all but ended their investigations and inspections of employers that hire illegal aliens? Again, only a rhetorical question, because we all know the answer.
The Gap Between The Voters And The People Home Watching TV
Scott Adams writes:
I keep hearing pundits whining about the growing gap between the rich and the poor. I have difficulty empathizing with that viewpoint for two reasons:1. Poor people can vote.
2. There are more poor people than rich people.In theory, those unhappy poor people could vote to tax the living piss out of the super rich. Why don’t they do it?
Pimp Grandpa's Ride
According to an article by Jennifer Saranow in The Wall Street Journal, it's "not your father's Oldsmobile" that kids want, but your grandpa's. Literally. People are beating a path to old folks' homes to buy up those cherry Buick LeSabres and all the rest:
From Collins Ave. in Miami Beach's South Beach neighborhood to International Blvd. in Oakland, Calif., teens and young adults are cruising in "grandpa" and "grandma" cars that they have painted bright colors like lime green, outfitted with fancy sound systems and propped up on monster-truck-style wheels. They're sweet-talking their grandparents into giving up old cars and offering to buy them on the spot from strangers.Television shows, such as MTV's "Pimp My Ride," and rappers, including Snoop Dogg, are helping to drive the craze. There's even a new magazine, Donk, Box & Bubble, dedicated to the tricked-out-oldie-car culture.
For U.S. car makers, struggling to lift sales, it's a painful irony that the models striking a chord with young buyers aren't those rolling off the assembly lines today but rather ones made decades ago. Detroit's marketers are trying to figure out how to ride the trend without ruining it.
"The worst thing you can do is start to promote this," says Steve Shannon, Buick general manager. (Still, car makers are embracing the idea of marketing the same model to two generations; see related article.)
Besides the older models' low price tags, young people say they like the challenge of adding features like big wheels to vehicles that weren't designed for them. The cars are easier to work on than newer, more-computerized versions and are sure to stand out. There's also the cool factor of being so "out" you are "in."
...The shift is starting to show up in market research. Brands like Buick still have an average buyer around age 60. But the percentage of used-car shoppers between 18 and 24 who said they would consider a Buick LeSabre jumped 168% in the first quarter of this year from a year earlier, the biggest increase of any model, according to market research firm CNW Marketing Research Inc., Bandon, Ore. And fewer 16-to-24-year-olds think such models are "for an older person" than did in the past, according to a CNW study tracking cars' so-called "stodgy index."
link via Romenesko's Obscure Store
All The President's Flunkies
Jacob Weisberg on George Bush's federal job appointments:
Bush is often charged with undermining federal workers by politicizing what are supposed to be objective and analytic functions. He has done this, among other places, at the CIA, the FDA, and NASA, where a 24-year-old college dropout was until recently in a position to order senior officials to make references to the Big Bang compatible with the possibility of "intelligent design." Politics per se, however, is not the enemy of effective public-sector management. Those presidents who have run the federal government most effectively—I would cite FDR, JFK, and Clinton—have balanced their policy wonks with capable hacks while cultivating youthful idealism and more positive feelings about public service. Politics, more than money, is what creates accountability and motivates performance in the executive branch. But for the government to work, the hacks have to be fundamentally competent. Former FEMA Director James Lee Witt was a Clinton buddy from Arkansas, just as Michael Brown was a Bush crony. But unlike Heckuvajob Brownie, Witt knew how to run the agency in a way that would make his boss look good to voters.Bush's stated management model—appointing good people, delegating authority to them, and holding them accountable for results—reflects some common-sense notions he picked up at Harvard Business School. His actual management practice, however, has not followed that model. In practice, Bush tends to appoint mediocre people he trusts to be loyal, delegates hardly any decision-making power to anyone beyond a few top aides, and seldom holds anyone accountable. These failures are related. If you don't give people real authority, you can't reasonably hold them responsible for what follows. What has grown up around the president as a result is not an effective political machine, but a stultifying imperial court, a hackocracy dominated by sycophants, cronies, and yes men.
Under Bush's actual management system, decision-making is concentrated in the White House political office, with Cabinet secretaries and the heads of agencies functioning as figureheads and mouthpieces. That this disempowers and often humiliates nominally top officials has not been lost on potential recruits, which is why Bush has so far been unable to persuade a top Wall Street executive to replace John Snow as treasury secretary. On Meet the Press, I recently saw one of the administration's interchangeable, largely unknown senior officials defending Bush's inconsistent position on high gas prices. Even Tim Russert, the program's hard-hitting inquisitor, seemed to take pity on this poor shill, recognizing that his role was to be a piñata for a policy he obviously had no control over. Only after some time did it dawn on me that the guest was in fact Bush's energy secretary, Samuel Bodman. I had never seen him before.
Both liberals and conservatives sometimes profess surprise that Bush, who spits out the term "bureaucrat" with as much scorn as Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich did, has increased government spending as a share of the U.S. economy faster than any president since Roosevelt. In fact, Bush has chosen what may be the far more effective strategy for fighting big government. Frontal attacks of the past have failed, but Bush's sabotage seems to be hitting its mark.
As I've said before, Bush is the biggest big-spending Democrat we've had in The White House for years. Of course, appointing morons comes with heavy cleanup costs.
Making Men Pay, No Matter What
Not the father? Tough titty. Except in rare cases, you're gonna pay child support; in some cases, even if you never had sex with the woman. Tresa Baldas writes in The National Law Journal about a tiny ray of hope -- a case recently won in Michigan -- in the paternity fraud arena.
DNA evidence may show a man is not the father, but the courts are still forcing him to pay child support anyway."This is the new underdog," said Michigan family law attorney Michele Kelly, who represents mostly men tangled in paternity disputes. "I was a staunch feminist. I marched with Gloria Steinem. But the new victims in America are working men. All they are is a mule train."
Most recently, Kelly secured a victory for a Michigan man who had paid an estimated $80,000 in child support over 15 years to his ex-wife, despite DNA evidence that proved he wasn't the father of their first son. On March 23, after a bitter court battle, the case settled with the ex-wife agreeing to have all child support canceled. Richardson v. Luria, No. 91-7019-DM (Bay Co., Mich., Cir. Ct.).
Here's my Advice Goddess column on the topic. An excerpt:
In no other arena is a swindler rewarded with a court-ordered monthly cash settlement paid to them by the person they bilked. While you don't mention being forced at gunpoint to have sex without a condom, potentially getting socked with two decades of hefty fines for being a careless idiot seems a bit like being sentenced to 100 years hard labor for stealing a muffin. The law is not on men's side. Matt Welch reported in Reason magazine (2/04) that welfare reform legislation forces some men to pay child support for kids who aren't theirs -- sometimes, kids of women they've never even met -- unless they protest, in writing, within 30 days, that they're victims of a daddy-scam.While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: "Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?" A child shouldn't have to survive on peanut butter sandwiches sans peanut butter because he was conceived by two selfish, irresponsible jerks. Still, there's a lot more to being a father than forking over sperm and child support, yet the law, as written, encourages unscrupulous women to lure sex-dumbed men into checkbook daddyhood.
This isn't 1522. If a woman really doesn't want a kid, she can take advantage of modern advances in birth control like Depo-Provera or the IUD, combine them with backup methods (as recommended by her doctor), add an ovulation detection kit, plus insist that doofuses like you latex up. Since it's the woman who gets a belly full of baby, maybe a woman who has casual sex and is unprepared, emotionally, financially, and logistically, to raise a child on her own, should be prepared to avail herself of the unpleasant alternatives. It's one thing if two partners in a relationship agree to make moppets, but should a guy really get hit up for daddy fees when he's, say, one of two drunk strangers who has sex after meeting in a bar? Yes, he is biologically responsible. But, is it really "in the child's best interest" to be the product of a broken home before there's even a home to break up?
Nat. Law Journal link via Overlawyered
A Religion That Cures The Common Cold!
Scientology makes more wild promises than a late-night infomercial. While religion in general typically requires a lack of skepticism and a sequestering of rational thought, Scientology takes the cake.
Sure, there are those stories from Christianity, like immaculate conception. (If you're 16, and you get knocked up, what do you want to tell your daddy, "the unwashed, long-haired stable boy is the father," or..."God did it!"?) At least those myths in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are thousands of years old. Scientology's unbelievable story is what, 40? And what proof is there of it? Never mind that, it's true because L. Ron Hubbard said so!
Anyway, in my prep to be on Tammy Bruce today, I came upon this article by an American Studies major named Joey Falco, who did a little Scientology test-run, and lays out some of the silliness:
Scientologists supposedly believe that our emotional and physical problems emerged 75 million years ago, when an evil galactic warlord named Xenu attempted to fight interplanetary overpopulation by dumping trillions of bodies into Earth's volcanoes. Eventually, their radioactive souls attached themselves to the spirits of human beings - hence the plethora of modern mental disorders.So no wonder Tom Cruise had the munchies for his tyke's placenta. His soul was actually locked in battle with the tortured spirit of a 75 million-year-old alien! Give the guy a break.
Well, I was going to do just that, and in my quest to achieve true solidarity with the guy who had me from hello in "Jerry Maguire" and the girl who stole my heart while making out to Sixpence None the Richer songs on "Dawson's Creek," yesterday morning I snuck into the Founding Church of Scientology of Washington, DC.
Upon entering, I was not only struck by the lavishness of the chapel which held the Sunday service - mahogany walls and bookshelves, beautiful stained glass covered in esoteric Scientology symbols, a large portrait of the deific Hubbard and comfortable wicker chairs that could have doubled as patio furniture - but also the size of the place. While the overall building was a palatial mansion, only 25 to 30 people could even fit into the tiny chapel itself.
We began the service by reciting a creed, and then followed that with some readings from a massive collection of Hubbard's writings. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the scriptural part of the service - Hubbard's teachings did seem to offer thoughtful insights on how to cleanse one's soul and become a psychosomatically sound individual.
But then things just got weird.
The minister dragged out an E-Meter - a laptop-sized electromagnetic sensor that measures an individual's stress levels - and proceeded to test it out on a member of the congregation. Then, the doors to the chapel were ominously slammed shut as the lights were dimmed, and I grabbed my wicker chair expecting my soul to be sucked out by an alien warlord with an E-Meter.
Instead, we ended the service with an activity called group processing, in which those of us in the congregation proceeded to roll our necks, nod our heads, find the floor, envision the walls, find our heads and bodies and shout words like "Okay!" and "Here!" back and forth with the minister. I literally felt like I was a four-year-old with ADD playing Simon Says with my psychiatrist and therefore had no desire to stick around after the service to sign up for the extremely expensive weekday processing sessions.
Still, with absolutely no mention of aliens, silent births or Tom Cruise, I have to admit I was a little disappointed with the whole Scientology experience - except for the part where I got to watch middle-aged men and women shouting things like, "My head is a part of my body! My body is in the chair! The chair is on the floor!"
If L. Ron Hubbard really did start this whole thing as a lucrative practical joke, then it's safe to say the joke was on these idiots.
Amy On Tammy Bruce Today
Sorry to be a bit late blogging today, but I'll be on Tammy Bruce's radio show on Talk Radio Network, streamed on the Internet, at 11:30 PST. Click here to listen live. More blog items up very soon!
Thinking Out Of The Box
More here, including the I Love Vagina Superstore.
A Ticket To Identity Theft
Don't be too quick to throw away that airplane ticket stub. Steve Boggan writes in The Guardian about what they found out about Mark Broer after he tossed his British Airways stub in Paddington Station:
It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a "Gold" standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer's personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans - and even allow me to fake his passport.
It would also serve as the perfect tool for demonstrating the chaotic collection, storage and security of personal information gathered as a result of America's near-fanatical desire to collect data on travellers flying to the US - and raise serious questions about the sort of problems we can expect when ID cards are introduced in 2008.
Broggan sat down with Adam Laurie, of The Bunker Secure Hosting:
Laurie is known in cyber-circles as something of a white knight, a computer wizard who not only advises companies on how to make their systems secure, but also cares about civil rights and privacy. He and his brother Ben are renowned among web designers as the men who developed Apache SSL - the software that makes most of the world's web pages secure - and then gave it away for free.We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer's name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details - including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.
Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able - within 15 minutes - to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)
Laurie was anything but smug.
"This is terrible," he said. "It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn't enhance our security; it undermines it."
The Advice Bargain Hunter
Are you a member of a union? AFTRA, maybe, like me? If so, you can save 5 percent at Cingular, every month for two years. Click here. More discounts here.
Fasten Your Chastity Belts, It's Gonna Be A Bumpy Ride
When I was growing up, my mother told me I shouldn't have sex before marriage. (Well, that worked!) A similarly effective approach is favored by the primitive religious nutters running our country. Unfortunately, they're trying to turn it into policy for the rest of us:
Mark Kaufman writes in The Washington Post:
Many social conservatives say, however, that contraceptives have limitations and that the only way a woman can ensure she will not have an unintended pregnancy is to refrain from sexual intercourse until she is ready to have a child.Leslee Unruh, president and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a South Dakota-based nonprofit that seeks to educate about abstinence programs, said the growing number of unintended pregnancies among poorer women shows that traditional sex education programs are failing.
"Programs for poor women are often so condescending, even degrading," she said. "They teach how to put on a condom rather than how to take control of their lives."
Oh, like by getting married at 19 simply because they're horny?
Kate Zernike writes in The New York Times:
Contraception use has declined strikingly over the last decade, particularly among poor women, making them more likely to get pregnant unintentionally and to have abortions, according to a report released yesterday by the Guttmacher Institute.The decline appears to have slowed the reduction in the national abortion rate that began in the mid-1980's.
"This is turning back the clock on all the gains women have made in recent decades," Sharon L. Camp, the president of the institute, said.
...The researchers blamed reductions in federally and state-financed family planning programs for declining contraceptive use. They called for public and private insurance to cover contraceptives, and for over-the-counter access to the so-called morning-after pill, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after sex.
"We need to really go back to, and redouble, our efforts to ensure that all women are able to obtain contraceptives," Heather D. Boonstra, another author, said.
Of three million pregnancies in the United States each year, half are unintended, according to Guttmacher, and half of those are carried to term. About 14,000 women who carry the pregnancies put the children up for adoption, and 1.3 million have abortions.
Nicholas Kristof tries to talk some sense into the "libido-phobes":
...Contraception generally doesn't cause sex, any more than umbrellas cause rain.The reality is that almost two-thirds of American girls have lost their virginity by the time they turn 18 — and one-quarter use no contraception their first time. Some 800,000 American teenagers become pregnant each year, 80 percent of the time unintentionally.
So we may wince at the thought of a 15-year-old girl obtaining Plan B after unprotected sex. But why does the White House prefer to imagine her pregnant?
Indeed, Plan B may be more important for teenagers than for adults, because adults are more likely to rely on a regular contraceptive. Teenagers wing it.
Granted, making contraceptives available — all kinds, not just Plan B — presents a mixed message. We encourage young people to abstain from sex, and then provide condoms in case they don't listen. But that's because we understand human nature: We also tell drivers not to speed, but provide air bags in case they do.
The administration's philosophy seems to be that the best way to discourage risky behavior is to take away the safety net. Hmmm. I suppose that if we replaced air bags with sharpened spikes on dashboards, people might drive more carefully — but it still doesn't seem like a great idea.
Finally, a slightly overdue special thanks to women's health hero Dr. Felicia Stewart, who died in April at 63. Stewart was the gynecologist who spearheaded the creation of the morning after pill. Joceyln Y. Stewart writes in the LA Times:
Two decades of work as a clinician provided her with the experiences that would shape her views on the need for emergency contraceptives."She, unlike many of us, dealt with women who had been raped or had a condom break or otherwise had a contraceptive emergency," Camp said.
Before the creation of Plan B, Stewart offered her patients a form of emergency contraceptive. She prescribed birth control pills in a higher than normal dose, which worked in much the same way as a morning-after pill.
But Stewart was convinced that availability and awareness would increase with a product designed and marketed for the purpose of preventing unintended pregnancies after sex.
Stewart countered objections that the availability of the pill would cause women to become lax in their insistence that men use condoms, or that women would use the pill in excess.
"Look, people's lives are people's lives, and some of them can't cope or be as organized as some of us might like," she told a New York Times reporter in 1993. "But it's only in the area of sex that we get involved in the ethics of promoting risk taking, the idea that we should withhold information or devices because we don't want people to need them.
"Would you make the same argument about cholesterol drugs? Saying, if we give people a drug that will reduce cholesterol, they won't be as likely to exercise and eat properly like they really should?"
By the early 1990s, Stewart was speaking at conferences and writing on what she called "the best-kept secret" by doctors, but pharmaceutical companies were not interested, Camp said. The issue was controversial and the potential profit seemed slim, given that the young and poor women most likely to need the pill had little money to buy it.
But Camp and many others who heard her were convinced. In the end, it took a private-public sector partnership — and Camp's creation of a pharmaceutical company — to get the pill on the market. It won FDA approval in 1990 and is now available by prescription. Stewart supported efforts to make the drug available over the counter, but that idea has faced opposition and stalled, Camp said.
How To Get Knocked Up
Do I want to have a baby? Typically, I just want to have a baby moved to the opposite side of the restaurant I'm dining in.
But, in an effort to present the other side, a friend who had a baby recommends this book, Taking Charge Of Your Fertility, by Toni Weschler, MPH, for anyone trying to get pregnant. She said lots of her friends who had babies recommended it to her. Here's the Amazon review:
This comprehensive book explains in lucid, assured terms how to practice the fertility awareness method (FAM), a natural, scientifically proven but little-known form of birth control (which is not to be confused with the woefully ineffective "rhythm" method). Author Toni Weschler has been teaching fertility awareness for almost 20 years, and it's only just now gaining in popularity. As the book explains, by using simple fertility signs including peaks in morning body temperature and changes in cervical position and cervical mucus, it's possible to determine when ovulation is taking place. Fertility awareness is therefore useful for not only couples who are trying to conceive, but for those who are aiming to avoid pregnancy without the use of chemical contraceptives. It will be of special interest to those women who have suffered from infertility; many FAM practitioners have told the author that by filling in the detailed charts in the book, they've realized that they were chronically miscarrying, even when their doctors told them they weren't conceiving at all. As the book explains, by charting body temperature, it's simple to tell when pregnancy has occurred--and when there's danger of miscarriage. Taking Charge of Your Fertility also explains how to choose the sex of your baby by timing intercourse according to certain fertility signs. It also features thorough, easy-to-understand explanations of hormones, the menstrual cycle, and menopause, along with fertility tests and treatments and their long- and short-term side effects, plus a topnotch resource section. Recommended for any woman who wants to better understand her body. --Erica Jorgensen
Good News For Gullible Morons!
Yes, it really just was something you ate.
Shooting Poisson In A Barrel
I stopped picking on LA Times travel writer/blogger Susan Spano, mostly because it's too easy, and thus, too boring. But, this is just unbelievable. She photographs tents along the Seine (badly, as usual, so they're practically imperceptible -- perhaps because she's too much of a dinosaur to understand the medium of the blog), and then writes:
This is conceivably the best place to sleep in Paris, except when it rains.
Cute, Suze!
The problem is, these are not tents erected for some winter version of Paris Plage (turning the banks of the Seine into a beach scene in the summer), but tents put out for the homeless. Is she just a heartless bitch -- or an overpaid simpleton with press credentials?
Here's the word on the tents from The New York Times, from a story by Craig S. Smith:
Since the frigid days of late December, Doctors of the World, a French organization that helps the homeless, has been distributing nylon tents to the growing number of people who sleep on the city's sidewalks and beneath its bridges.Not everyone is pleased.
"They're ugly," said a short woman with a large red purse marching past two tents in the affluent Seventh Arrondissement, where four young Poles are living beneath the sycamores with a view of the Hôtel des Invalides.
There are thousands of people living on the streets of Paris, many of them newly arrived immigrants from European Union countries to the east, and Doctors of the World vows to continue distributing tents until the government finds housing.
For now, the city authorities tolerate the tents. But as word spreads among immigrants, the phenomenon could spread. Already, some charitable Parisians are giving the homeless tents, and some of the homeless are procuring them on their own.
That's fine with Doctors of the World, which says the more tents there are, the more pressure on the government to address the problem.
Here's a bigger version of Spano's photo. Let's take bets on whether she'll allow the comment I left to be seen. Here it is:
These are tents put out for the homeless. Are you a journalist or an overpaid simpleton?
For anyone with any knowledge of Paris reading her blog, I think the answer is pretty clear.
Travel journalists/columnists I respect include Chris Elliott and the rest at Tripso. For business travel, I like Joe Sharkey in The New York Times. For Parisian blog items actually worth reading, I turn to Laurie Pike's Paris group blog, The Paris Blog (formerly In Paris Now).
Are You In Your "Intellectual Infancy"?
AC Grayling article in the Guardian, on, among other things, "fundamentalist atheists.":
It is time to put to rest the mistakes and assumptions that lie behind a phrase used by some religious people when talking of those who are plain-spoken about their disbelief in any religious claims: the phrase "fundamentalist atheist". What would a non-fundamentalist atheist be? Would he be someone who believed only somewhat that there are no supernatural entities in the universe - perhaps that there is only part of a god (a divine foot, say, or buttock)? Or that gods exist only some of the time - say, Wednesdays and Saturdays? (That would not be so strange: for many unthinking quasi-theists, a god exists only on Sundays.) Or might it be that a non-fundamentalist atheist is one who does not mind that other people hold profoundly false and primitive beliefs about the universe, on the basis of which they have spent centuries mass-murdering other people who do not hold exactly the same false and primitive beliefs as themselves - and still do?Christians, among other things, mean by "fundamentalist atheists" those who would deny people the comforts of faith (the old and lonely especially) and the companionship of a benign invisible protector in the dark night of the soul - and who (allegedly) fail to see the staggering beauty in art prompted by the inspirations of belief. Yet, in its bleeding-heart modern form, Christianity is a recent and highly modified version of what, for most of its history, has been an often violent and always oppressive ideology - think Crusades, torture, burnings at the stake, the enslavement of women to constantly repeated childbirth and undivorceable husbands, the warping of human sexuality, the use of fear (of hell's torments) as an instrument of control, and the horrific results of calumny against Judaism. Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specialises in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles. It has reinvented itself so often, and with such breathtaking hypocrisy, in the interests of retaining its hold on the gullible, that a medieval monk who woke today, like Woody Allen's Sleeper, would not be able to recognise the faith that bears the same name as his own.
..."Intellectual infancy": the phrase reminds one that religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young. Three-quarters of Church of England schools are primary schools; all the faiths currently jostling for our tax money to run their "faith-based" schools know that if they do not proselytise intellectually defenceless three and four-year-olds, their grip will eventually loosen. Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal. Let us challenge religion to leave children alone until they are adults, whereupon they can be presented with the essentials of religion for mature consideration. For example: tell an averagely intelligent adult hitherto free of religious brainwashing that somewhere, invisibly, there is a being somewhat like us, with desires, interests, purposes, memories, and emotions of anger, love, vengefulness and jealousy, yet with the negation of such other of our failings as mortality, weakness, corporeality, visibility, limited knowledge and insight; and that this god magically impregnates a mortal woman, who then gives birth to a special being who performs various prodigious feats before departing for heaven. Take your pick of which version of this story to tell: let a King of Heaven impregnate - let's see - Danae or Io or Leda or the Virgin Mary (etc, etc) and let there be resulting heaven-destined progeny (Heracles, Castor and Pollux, Jesus, etc, etc) - or any of the other forms of exactly such tales in Babylonian, Egyptian and other mythologies - then ask which of them he wishes to believe. One can guarantee that such a person would say: none of them.
Here's a question, related to my next blog post: Why is Scientology, a religion dreamed up by a mediocre science fiction writer, any more or less ridiculous than all the rest of them?
L. Ron Hubbard...Meets Tony Robbins...At Esalen?
Robert Farley writes in the St. Pete Times about Scientology's soon-to-be-revealed "Super Power":
Matt Feshbach believes he has super powers. He senses danger faster than most people. He appreciates beauty more deeply than he used to. He says he outperforms his peers in the money management industry.He heightened his powers of perception in 1995 when he went to Los Angeles and became the first and so far only "public" Scientologist to take a highly classified Scientology program called Super Power.
Where in L.A. did he do this?
"Just in Los Angeles," is all Feshbach will say. Super Power is that secret.
Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual rollout in Scientology's massive building in downtown Clearwater. That will be the only place worldwide where the program, much anticipated by Scientologists, will be offered.
A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one's perceptions - and not just the five senses we all know - hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell.
...Details of Super Power training have been kept secret even from church members. Like much of Scientology training, details aren't revealed until one pays to take the course.
Asked about Super Power, church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written statement: "Super Power is a series of spiritual counseling processes designed to give a person back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his power of choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities."
"Give a person back his own viewpoint"? Maybe if Scientology hadn't helped remove it in the first place, that wouldn't be necessary. Then again, if this "Super Power" thingie helps Scientologists see that it's a wee bit idiotic to suggest popping vitamins as a curative for a new mother who contemplates driving herself and her newborn baby into a wall...well, maybe it can't be all bad. At the very least, it's got to pull in some big bucks for Scientology.
You know, if you simply want to be a good person, you really don't need to fork over your life savings to anybody. You could, say, just fork over $10.01 for a copy of Krishnamurti's slim paperback, Freedom From The Known. And sure, there are other resources too; many of them, available for free on the Internet, like "The Philosophical Guy's" dissection of Aristotle's concepts, from Nichomachean Ethics, of "friendship of utility" versus "friendship of the good."
Belief in god and adherence to a religion is easy. It usually just requires nonthink. Figuring out a moral/ethical system of your own that makes sense, and then following it -- that's a task for the modern thinker: one who actually thinks instead of letting some guy in a funny suit (or with a funny "clearing" machine) do it for him or her.
Sign Of The Time
Cathy Seipp Calls A Girl A Girl
Fantastic piece by my friend Cathy Seipp in NRO, about Jill Carroll. For the record, I, too, call myself a girl, and my friends, girls, and girls who write to me, girls, except when I change to "woman" or "a woman" to mix things up. Here's an excerpt from Cathy's piece:
Language misuse is one of my own pet peeves, and I've noticed that people get really angry when I refuse to misuse it the way they’d like. Last weekend I was on a Times Festival of Books media panel and made the audience gasp in shock when I called the Christian Science Monitor’s 28-year-old correspondent Jill Carroll—who was kidnapped and later released in Iraq—a “girl.”Some people thought this was comparable to calling her a slut or a chick, which is just nuts. Most people, when referring to young women, naturally call them girls. I’ve noticed that exceptions are children and young men, who I suppose get it beaten out of them by grim feminists and the p.c. police by the time they're out of college.
I used to call myself a girl until, not being Maureen Dowd, it began to feel ridiculous once I got to a certain age. But the word girl is especially appropriate in Jill Carroll's case, since there was something so Nancy Drew-ish about her entire misadventure—based as it was on the adolescent notion that how strongly you feel about something has any connection with your ability to do it.
Cathy, as usual, goes on to ask the question nobody's asking:
...Perhaps the Christian Science Monitor shouldn’t have lent its storied (but increasingly inconsequential) imprimatur to an inexperienced freelancer whose kidnapping got her translator killed and distracted American military personnel from their core mission. All for a newspaper that few people outside Christian Science reading rooms ever even see.The Monitor’s respected old name and fabled international reporting is pretty much irrelevant now that we have free and easy access to almost every major paper in the world, not to mention 24-hour cable news channels. The paper’s circulation is tiny—something like 70,000 readers, most of them geriatric. Much has been made of its free website, which gets about 1.7 million unique visitors per month. But that’s just 56,000 visitors per day, less than the blog Little Green Footballs, which has far more enlightening Mideast information.
So was it really ethical for lives to be endangered and lost because some girl is “passionate” (as Carroll's defenders say she was) about Iraq? Especially when the Monitor doesn't have the money that big news organizations have to make sure she had the proper bodyguards?
Actually, I suppose, they do have the money; they just don't chose to spend it. The left-leaning Monitor will never go out of business because it’s not a business but a missionary activity of the not-exactly-starving Christian Science Church, whose founder Mary Baker Eddy thought the paper’s mandate should be to “injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”
So much for afflicting the comfortable—but still, good for them. Maybe in 2006, though, the Monitor should consider relying on major paper reprints and other wire-service material for dangerous stories. Carroll's translator was, after all, murdered, so it seems to me that her adventure injured at least one man.
There was some discontent about my point of view. Karen protested that Carroll had focused on the civilian suffering in Iraq—but I regularly read stories about that angle in major papers and magazines. Could anyone describe any story—or even an item—that Carroll had reported from Iraq? No they could not. So why was her presence there so important?
She became the story in the worst way—not because she was an especially gifted writer, like Ernie Pyle, but simply because her unfortunate situation made her an international incident. There are many arguments these days about whether or not news is free, news is relevant, news is biased, and so on. But I’d hope we can all agree that at the very least, news should be news.
I felt similarly about Daniel Pearl. While he was a seasoned reporter for the resources-rich The Wall Street Journal, he had a kid on the way, and thus had no business being over there. Although I don't have a kid, and don't particularly like many of them, in terms of my views on parental responsibility, I'm, well, just to the right of Dr. Laura. You have a kid? Guess what: You don't get to be a war reporter.
The American Rejection Of Science
A Center For Inquiry lecture by Dr. Marcia Angell, on why we're hurtling backward, who's responsible (the fundanutters and gender feminists, to name a few), and the consequences. It's in PDF, but opens up at the link.
Abs Of Steal
Okay, so I don't approve...but I still think it's funny.
"We're People Without A Party"
We're not red-staters, or blue-staters, we're more...purple. Kurt Anderson writes in New York Magazine about people like me (and him) who are neither Democrats nor Republicans:
We are people without a party. We open-minded, openhearted moderates are alienated from the two big parties because backward-looking ideologues and p.c. hypocrites are effectively in charge of both. Both are under the sway of old-school clods who consistently default to government intrusion where it doesn’t belong—who want to demonize video-game makers and criminalize abortion and hate speech and flag-burning, who are committed to maintaining the status quos of the public schools and health-care system, and who decline to make the hard choices necessary (such as enacting a high gasoline tax or encouraging nuclear energy) to move the country onto a sustainable energy track. Both line up to reject sensible, carefully negotiated international treaties when there’s too much sacrifice involved and their special-interest sugar daddies object—the Kyoto Protocol for the Republicans, the Central American Free Trade Agreement for the Democrats....“Centrist” is a bit of a misnomer for the paradigm we envision, since that suggests an uninspired, uninspiring, have-it-both-ways, always-split-the-difference approach born entirely of political calculation. And that’s because one of the core values will be honesty. Not a preachy, goody-goody, I’ll-never-lie-to-you honesty of the Jimmy Carter type, but a worldly, full-throated and bracing candor. The moderation will often be immoderate in style and substance, rather than tediously middle-of-the-road. Pragmatism will be an animating party value—even when the most pragmatic approach to a given problem is radical.
Take health care. The U.S. system requires a complete overhaul, so that every American is covered, from birth to death, whether he is employed or self-employed or unemployed. What?!? Socialized medicine? Whatever. Half of our medical costs are already paid by government, and the per capita U.S. expenditure ($6,280 per year) is nearly twice what the Canadians and Europeans and Japanese pay—suggesting that we could afford to buy our way out of the customer-service problems that afflict other national health systems. Beyond the reformist virtues of justice and sanity, our party would make the true opportunity-society argument for government-guaranteed universal health coverage: Devoted as the Purple Party is to labor flexibility and entrepreneurialism, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to change jobs or quit to start their own businesses, and to do that we must break the weirdly neo-feudal, only-in-America link between one’s job and one’s medical care.
But the Purple Party wouldn’t use its populist, progressive positions on domestic issues like health to avoid talking about military policy, the way Democrats tend to do. We would declare straight out that, alas, the fight against Islamic jihadism must be a top-priority, long-term, and ruthless military, diplomatic, and cultural struggle.
We would be unapologetic in our support of a well-funded military and (depoliticized) intelligence apparatus, and the credible threat of force as a foreign policy tool. We would seldom accuse Democrats of being dupes and wimps or Republicans of being fearmongers and warmongers—but we would have the guts and the standing to do both.
And as we defend our country and civilization against apocalyptic religious fanatics for whom politics and religious belief are one and who consider America irredeemably heathen, we will be especially keen about adhering to the Founders’ (and, for that matter, Christ’s) ideal concerning the separation of religion and politics—to render to government the things that are its and to God the things that are his. Our party will enthusiastically embrace people of all religious beliefs, but we will never claim special divine virtue for our policies—we’ll leave that to the Pat Robertsons and Osama bin Ladens. Where to draw the line is mostly a matter of common sense. Public reminders to honor one’s parents and love one’s neighbor, and not to lie, steal, or commit adultery or murder? Fine. Genesis taught as science in public schools, and government cosmologists forced by their PR handlers to give a shout-out to creationism? No way. Kids who want to wear crucifixes or yarmulkes or head scarves to those same schools? Sure, why not? And so on.
Our new party will be highly moral (but never moralistic) as well as laissez-faire. In other words, the Purple Party will be both liberal and American in the old-fashioned senses.
So: Are you in?
Jazz In Public Records
More news on Gary Musselman, a talented artist who happens to be homeless, and does his artwork out of the Santa Monica Starbucks at Hill and Main (his story is here, along with more shots of his work, which I call "Jazz On Paper.")
The Latest: Thanks to the Patriot Act, it turns out it's impossible to get a bank account without two forms of ID. Gary has...no forms of ID. Well, that's about to change. Wednesday night, I went to Starbucks with my laptop, and got on the Internet, and we ordered an expedited copy of his birth certificate from the State of Illinois.
The order was processed through those data-losing assholes, Choicepoint. (No, I didn't have a choice.) I gave my mailbox address for the mailing place to send it to. They asked multiple-choice questions to have some computer-generated assurance it isn't some scammer getting his certificate, like "Which of these four or five streets, named below, did you NEVER live on?"
He was pretty sure he got them right, and we were moving right along...and then...they gave four names of people, and asked if any of them do live or have lived with him at 171 Pier #280?...(which happens to be, not a home, but the 5 x 8" metal canister where I get my mail)! I'm pretty sure they were looking at it as if it were an apartment building, not a room with very small locking steel boxes.
I called the guys who run the mail place, but they'd just closed, and were probably gone. I got on the Internet, pronto, and Googled all the names in the question (within quotation marks to narrow the field), and none of the people came up as getting their mail there (you have a time limit from Choicepoint to how long you can take to answer the questions before your order is voided)! Well, I guess we got it right, because it should be here on the 11th! I got this back via e-mail:
ILLINOIS DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH estimates an average of at least 5 business days to process a request. According to the estimated processing time provided by ILLINOIS DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH, your order should be shipped no later than 5/10/2006.
Once he gets it, he can apply for a copy of his social security card, and California non-driver's ID...and get a bank account once he has two pieces of ID. In the mean time, I think his friend -- who seems like a great guy who cares about him -- in Illinois, is going to open a joint bank account so Gary can take PayPal. In the mean time, if you're local, and want some art, please drop into Starbucks and pay him cash.
And, finally, thank you sooo much, Deja Pseu, for doing just that on Wednesday.
Here are a few more pictures by Gary Musselman. Please excuse the lame-ass photography. They're much better in person. Oh yeah -- and they're on white paper in real life.
Oh, and P.S., to tell any doubters who posted on the earlier story a little more about what kind of guy Gary is, I gave him $20 this past Friday night, and told him he could pay me back when he started making a bunch of money. Because Deja came today and bought a couple of pieces from him, he handed me the $20, saying "I owe you this." I told him no, he should wait, he needs the money, but he wouldn't hear of it, and made me take it.
Who's On Third?
Thomas Friedman says we need a third party. I'm with him. One not brimming with sleazy dimwits like the other two. Here's an excerpt from his column:
What would OPEC do if it wanted to keep America addicted to oil? That's easy. OPEC would urge the U.S. Congress to deal with the current spike in gasoline prices either by adopting the Republican proposal to give American drivers $100 each, so they could continue driving gas-guzzling cars and buy gasoline at the current $3.50 a gallon, or by adopting the Democrats' proposal for a 60-day lifting of the federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon. Either one would be fine with OPEC.
So, to summarize, we now have a Congress proposing to do exactly what America's worst enemies would like us to do - subsidize our addiction to gasoline by breaking into our kids' piggybanks to make it easier for us to pay the prices demanded by our oil pushers, so that we will remain addicted and they will remain awash in dollars.
With a Congress like this, who needs Al Qaeda?
What do we need?
Today's third party has to be big, strategic, centrist and forward-looking - something like the "American Renewal Party," something that frames the energy issue as critical to restoring U.S. strength and wealth, not just conservation.
Energy really is key to American renewal - from stimulating more young people to study math and science, to bringing down the trade deficit by decreasing our dependence on imported oil, to bringing down the fiscal deficit by raising gasoline taxes, to improving U.S. competitiveness by making us leaders in clean technologies, to restoring global respect by leading the fight against climate change, to advancing democracy by finding alternatives to oil and thereby weakening some of the world's worst regimes, who are using their oil windfalls to halt the spread of freedom.
"There is an opportunity here for someone who will seize it," said Micah Sifry, author of "Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America." That someone would have to be a more emotionally stable and energy-focused Ross Perot type. Because, added Sifry, "if the issue of the day in 1991-1992 was the ballooning budget deficit that we were not dealing with, then the issue today we are not dealing with is the energy and environmental catastrophe that awaits the next generation. It is as much a mortgaging of our children's future as the deficit issue. It needs the right leader, though."
I've always called (former Reason mag editor and recently hired LA Times assistant editorial page editor) Matt Welch a "common-sense moderate" -- somebody who's not really on either "team" (nor am I), but just for whomever is doing whatever's the least sleazy and dumb...or...if we're lucky, actually doing something ethical, that makes sense.
Unfortunately, we have an unengaged, uninformed electorate, voting the same old assclowns back in, again and again -- if they do vote. (To think we actually wonder why pot is still illegal, but people like this man are still losing their entire family to drunks behind the wheel.)
And, don't forget the question of the $2,000 we've all already paid for a fiber-optic Internet connection that we'll never get. Yooohoooo! Lawmakers? Oh...sorry...please call us when you crawl out of that lobbyist's pocket. If ever.
"People Believe In Belief Of God"
Philosophy professor Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea has pretty novel ideas about believers. He talks to Robert Wright on Slate:
I have a feeling that not that many people actually believe in God. Many people believe in belief of God. That is, they think it's a good thing, and they try to believe in God, they hope to believe in God, they wish they could believe in God and they say they believe in God, they go through all the motions, they try very hard to be devout. Sometimes they succeed and for some periods of their life they actual do, in some sense, believe that there is a God and they think they are the better for it. Otherwise, they behave like people who probably don't believe in God. Very few people behave as if they really believe in God. A lot of people behave as if they believe they should believe in God.Wright: How would you behave if you believed in God?
Daniel Dennett: You would, perhaps -- and some people do this -- be prepared to take what other people would call suicidal risks because you believe God is going to be there to save you. You would be prepared to give away everything that you own because God commanded you to do it and so forth.
Wright: Although there you are talking about a specific conception of God.
Daniel Dennett: Yeah, right.
Wright: ...any conception of God that would make you think you could take risks without fear of death, and I guess that's ...
Daniel Dennett: ... that's one of the problems with belief in God is that it is so amorphous and undefined.
Wright: ... what I am saying is that there can be different definitions and they can also be amorphous but I'm just referring to the problem of there being many different definitions.
Daniel Dennett: Sure, many different definitions.
Wright: But, along those lines, are you rejecting the idea of any higher purpose of any kind?
Daniel Dennett: Higher than our purposes? Yes.
I'm with him. My life has meaning because I live it meaningfully. I don't see any evidence that there's anything beyond what we have here. (Neither, for that matter do any of you. No, wanting to believe, or being told to believe or having a strong sense you should believe do not count as evidence.)
My assistant and I were talking yesterday about all the people who don't have sex because they think it's "a sin." Ridiculous. These prohibitions against premarital sex in many religions are like the prohibition against eating pork in Judaism: created for a reason in primitive times, and idiotic now.
Eating pork, for example, was a really bad idea before we had refrigerators. Having a lot of sex was a bad idea before we had reliable birth control. Did this stem from evidence of "god" -- or was it about girls' daddies not wanting not to have eight knocked-up daughters on their hands?
Frankly, if there were a god, don't you think god would want you to have a good time?
Who Wears The Panties In The Family?
I just posted my Advice Goddess column on crossdressing. Here's an excerpt:
There’s a U.S. senator who can’t speak publicly unless he’s wearing pantyhose. He was a patient of Dr. William Stayton, a psychologist and leading expert on cross-dressing. “Underneath his blue suit and tie he wore pantyhose and a bra and women’s underwear,” Stayton told me in a recent interview. “He was always worried somebody would lift his pant leg and see his pantyhose. But it was the only way he could calmly speak before the Senate.”So, one man’s Prozac is another man’s pantyhose. So what? My boyfriend compared the senator’s cross-dressing to his own penchant for hats. “When I wear my Henschel High Roller I have a totally different outlook. You swagger a bit, you just know you’re cool. I take the hat off, and I’m just another guy.”
The rest is here.
Happy Birthday, Exbrayat!
Who is Exbrayat?
He invented the genre of the humorous detective novel and wrote more than 100 books (plus several plays and films), on which his first name, Charles, never appeared.
You can read more about him at the Exbrayat blog that my good friend Jackie Danicki, and her boyfriend, Antoine Clarke, Exbrayat's grandson, set up in honor of Exbrayat's 100th birthday, May 5th. Exbrayat's blog is here. More news here about the various Exbrayat centenary celebrations.
End Marriage Privileging
Consider this: Marriage, as it's currently practiced in our society, is a violation of the separation of church and state. Gays and lesbians can't do it, why? Because it isn't in keeping with a lot of people's religion, that's why.
Moreover, if we are passing out tax breaks, it's unfair that they don't go to everyone; only the people who get married under religiously acceptable terms. Check out how it works for people who can't get married even if they want to, via an e-mail from a gay man received by Andrew Sullivan:
In my own case, my partner and I are selling my house here in California - and I will have more than $600,000 in gains. We've been together 4 years. If I gifted him half the house - he would be taxed. A couple who could have married however, would get a $500,000 flat excusion for gains under the tax code. As a single, unmarried man I get only a $250,000 exclusion - meaning that I am paying in just this one instance more than $100,000 penalty in taxes that a married couple would not have.
Next, let's look at the health insurance issue. First of all, I don't think employers should be paying people's health insurance at all. Reason's Tim Cavanaugh has a very good point:
If it's unreasonable to expect a boss to insure multiple spouses, why is it reasonable when we force her to insure just one? Single people already subsidize their married co-workers and fellow taxpayers in numerous ways; perhaps it's worth reconsidering the social engineering arguments that created this situation.
In short, gays and lesbians, and people like me, who don't believe in marriage, but are in longterm relationships, get fewer rights and protections, and fewer benefits than any straight taxpayer -- and a heavier tax burden to boot. So much for the guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Christy Fugging Turlington
Apparently, mugged by a security guard, who stole the top half of her outfit and left her with his.
Massive Transit
LA Times writer Steven Hymon takes stock of our LA pols' "Do as I say, not as I drive" efforts to clean up the air in Los Angeles:
Q: What is Jaime de la Vega, the deputy mayor in charge of transportation and mass transit policy, doing to help Los Angeles reduce greenhouse gases?A: Driving around town in a shiny Hummer H3, which sure looks a lot more comfy than a seat on the bus.
The 5,850-pound H3 is actually the runt of the Hummer litter — the other models are larger. It gets 16 miles per gallon in the city and 19 on the highway and belches an estimated 10.6 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, according to government estimates.
The Environmental Protection Agency gave the H3 an air pollution score of 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best.
Of course, De la Vega has every right to buy whichever vehicle he chooses and, in this case, he has forgone a taxpayer-subsidized vehicle. And, in fact, there are many types of SUVs and regular cars that guzzle more gas.
But … please.
The Hummer has come to represent excessive consumption, and what message does it send, particularly when working for someone who is positioning himself politically as Mr. Clean?
De la Vega declined to comment.
Of course, as deputy mayor in charge of mass transit policy, De la Vega could take mass transit to work. Hint: Try the trip planner at http://www.mta.net.
Q: How are some other city officials working on climate change?
A: Driving big SUVs.
Villaraigosa often tootles around town in a city-owned GMC Yukon that, like the Hummer H3, gets bad mileage. City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo also uses a city-owned Yukon, the perfect truck to navigate Los Angeles' frequent blizzards. Also driving city-owned SUVs that drink gas in the same manner that Homer Simpson quaffs beer are council members Tony Cardenas (2002 Chevy Tahoe) and Dennis Zine (2005 Mercury Mountaineer).
There is good news. Four council members are trying to control their emissions — Wendy Greuel, Janice Hahn, Jan Perry and Bill Rosendahl all drive hybrids owned by the city.
Council President Eric Garcetti whizzes around in an electric-powered Toyota RAV that the city owns. The tree-hugger actually kicked the gasoline habit back in 1998 after purchasing an electric car.
Here's my own policy: if you drive a Honda Civic or a city bus, I'll go out of my way to let you in. If you drive a Hummer, you're gonna wait.
By the way, about the dumb $100 gas rebate they're talking about, that would be about half of what I spend in gas a year driving a Honda Insight hybrid, at last year's prices. I guess I could pay up to $300 in gas this year, if gas prices keep soaring. I'll try not to grouse too much.
