Finally, A Politician Who Sounds Awake
Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson talks about what patriotism isn't, which is "blind faith in bad leaders"...or "showing blind obedience to a human rights-violating, war-mongering president." He calls that sycophancy and based in fear. He call the Bush presidency "disastrous," and says it "will rank as the worst presidency our nation has had to endure." He quotes Theodore Roosevelt, whom he reminds, was a Republican:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
I dunno, I have to hear more about the guy, but I think I may have just found whom I'm voting for for president next time around. Here's the entire text of his speech. More about Anderson here. And here's more truth-telling, from Keith Olbermann.
Rude Little Shit Of The Day
I answer almost every piece of e-mail I get requesting advice -- regardless of whether it will make my column -- sometimes just to direct somebody to a book they can read that exactly targets their problem. Most people are grateful. I know this because some even thank me. Not this guy. Here's his response e-mail that ticked me off (I'm leaving his name blank because he later apologized...but he was pretty amazed that I tracked him down, down to his photo and his mother's name and phone number in [not Merrick, NY, but] Staten Island!):
In a message dated 8/30/06 5:33:02 AM, xxxxx@gmail.com writes:No offenses, but your advice sucks.
On 8/30/06, AdviceAmy@aol.com
Here's his original e-mail, to which I responded at 4:59 am:
In a message dated 8/29/06 6:08:16 PM, xxxxx@gmail.com writes:I like this girl. She asked me out once but then she dumped me the same day because my cousin is her friend too and got mad at the girl. I want to ask her out but I don't know how under the circumstances. HELP.
Here's my response:
Just ask her out. What do you mean, you don't know how? Just ask, and while you're doing it, don't be too attached to the outcome. See rejection as a sign you should ask out somebody else, not a sign there's something particularly wrong with you.
And here's my later response to his "no offenses" e-mail:
Um, here I am, giving you free advice, at about 4:30 am, rather than ignoring your letter -- even though it will never make my column. I wanted to be helpful even though I was exhausted out of my mind, answering letters that had backed up during my deadline. It's no wonder you have a hard time getting a girl to go out with you with your rude sense of entitlement. You're a badly raised little shit, and I'd like you to forward this e-mail to your mother so I can ask her what she was doing when she was supposed to be teaching you manners. The correct response here was "Thank you" even if you thought it was the worst advice in the world. And frankly, telling somebody not to be too attached to the outcome and to understand that rejection is a sign to go on to the next is very good advice. Your question was not well written, perhaps because, in addition to lack of manners, you're not very literate. Manners are a form of ethics, and so is having the integrity to work hard and learn something in school. At 21, it's about time you made something of yourself -- besides being a rude, ungrateful little shit. Consider yourself lucky that I don't track down your Mommy there in Merrick, NY.
Skeptics' Circle Is Up
For thinking people and irrational people who'd like to start thinking.
Preying For Keeps
There's a perception that single is miserable. It's not true. Not necessarily. But, that mere perception, in the minds of so many, is maybe what makes otherwise content single people miserable. Here's my Advice Goddess column I just posted on the topic:
...The moment your friend got desperate for love is the moment she became extremely unlikely to land any. Ideally, the seduction process should rev up desire in a man, not simulate the experience of a beetle being chased by an entomologist with a giant straight pin.Like a lot of unpartnered types who go suddenly psycho, your friend probably seemed perfectly happy until that night she marched into some crowded bar and shouted, “I’m nothing without you!” (Who “you” is remains to be seen.) Now, maybe she never really was happy, or maybe she just hit that age where “single” becomes an adult form of cooties. In a recently published study, Bella M. DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris blame this bias on “The Cult of the Couple,” and puzzle at “the strange implication that people without a stable sexual relationship are wandering adrift with open wounds and shivering in their sleep.”
DePaulo and Morris aren’t anti-couple; they were just surprised when their data showed most people suspect single equals loser -- even single people. When they asked 950 undergrads to describe the characteristics of married and single people in general, married people were assumed to be “mature, stable, honest, happy, kind, and loving.” Singles got nailed with “immature, insecure, self-centered, unhappy, lonely, and ugly.” Of course, the truth is, sometimes two is the loneliest number. Is there really anything lonelier than feeling completely alone when you’re in relationship with somebody else?
It doesn’t help that award-winning social scientists keep making bold pronouncements about the transformative power of marriage, like E. Mavis Hetherington’s claim, “Happily married couples are healthier, happier, wealthier, and sexier than are singles.” Don’t be too quick to assume they also have bigger breasts, flatter abs, and are less likely to be abducted by aliens. The above quote from Hetherington’s recently published book was just one of many examples cited by DePaulo and Morris of couple-glorifying sloppy methodology and data analysis. DePaulo told me via e-mail, “I think that cultural notions about singles and marrieds are so pervasive, and so unquestioned, that even respected scholars do less than their best work on the topic.” DePaulo and Morris point out the rather obvious flaw in Hetherington’s claim: She compared only happily married people to all single people. Wow, imagine that: Happily marrieds are more satisfied with their lives than, say, suicidal singles.
If this “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You” propaganda isn’t what’s sending your friend over the edge, it’s probably the alluring idea of “the one” as the one-stop-shopping solution to all your existential woes. Of course, expecting to get your every need met by one person makes about as much sense as going to the corner store for a quart of milk and being irate that they can’t also sell you a Persian rug, a baby ferret, and the Hope Diamond. What you can do is be “the one” -- that special person who gives your life meaning -- and then look for the other one: somebody who matches you pretty well on the stuff that matters, and well enough on the rest. In other words, there is no handsome prince. There might, however, be a moderately attractive auto parts store executive.
The rest of the column is at the link above.
Tinkerhell
Letter To A Young Creationist
Orac does a Rilke in his response to a 14-year-old creationist's comment, posted below:
A 14 year old Creationist (and proud of it!) said... I agree with Frank Peretti and his statements. I also agree with his beliefs on evolution and its "evidence" of mutations. Evolutionists practically contradict themselves by saying that mutations support their theory of evolution. (That's right, evolution is a theory, not a fact!) By definition the word mutation means an error in the genetic code. The word error as defined by the Webster Dictionary means a mistake or inaccuracy with a negative effect (notice the key word 'negative'). It is a scientific fact that negative effects have negative results. Therefore the human race, by the Theory of Evolution, is a negative effect to the universe. I find that a little depressing and inaccurate. Don't agree? Visit www.arky.org and complain some more.
An excerpt from Orac's response:
I'm wondering if you are aware of what the word "theory" means to scientists; in science the meaning of the word is different than it is in colloquial use. To most laypeople, the word "theory" in essence suggests an "educated" guess. Indeed, the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said this about the "just a theory" claim about evolution: "Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being out drunk all night." That they do so (often, but not always, unknowingly) is mainly because of the more rigorous meaning that scientists give to the word "theory" compared to its more common meaning.You must understand that, to scientists, the word "theory" has a much more specific meaning. To scientists, the word "theory" means a supposition or statement of ideas intended to explain a natural phenomenon (such as the "theory of evolution"). But it is more than that. To scientists, the word "theory" implies that the supposition or statement of ideas at present best explains the available data, has utility as a conceptual principle, and makes predictions regarding the behavior of natural phenomenon. To be recognized as a "theory," such a statement of ideas must be supported by an enormous quantity of data, so much so that scientists at present cannot think of a better set of suppositions that explains the data and makes predictions of natural behavior. So it is with the Theory of Relativity, and so it is with the Theory of Evolution. No other set of ideas comes close to explaining the wealth of fossil, observational, experimental, and molecular biological evidence regarding how species adapt and evolve and how species come to be. Creationism, regardless of whether it's the "intelligent design" or Biblical "young earth" variety does not come close and even contradicts much of the known evidence. That is why scientists do not consider creationism to be a theory. Also, to be useful to scientists, theories must be falsifiable. That means there must be evidence that, if found, would prove the theory incorrect. Creationism fails as a theory in that respect as well, because there is no way any scientist could ever prove that there is no God. That is one reason why scientists consider creationism to be religion or philosophy and not science, and thus not properly part of the teaching of biology. The problem with creationism, as far as scientists go, is that the explanation for unanswered questions becomes, in essence, "God did it." That answer may be fine as a matter of faith, but it does not help science progress.
Is That A Bomb In Your Stool?
An online gamer accidentally loses his iPod in the toilet, at first, unbeknownst to him, and the stews call the Canadian version of the TSA and the nimwits there make the pilot land the plane -- even after the guy explained to the stews that the device was just his iPod. Amazing story. Here he is getting interrogated, but go to the link and read the whole dumbass thing:
They took me to a discreet corner. They brought out a tape recorder. I was told to put my hands up on the wall and spread my legs, and I was frisked from head to toe. They removed my wallet, disassembled it completely, and placed each of its contents in its own plastic evidence bag."Now Tim, for the sake of the tape recorder, I want you to state your full name and address." I did. "Now, each of us will state our name and position into the tape recorder." There were two detectives from the police department, a detective from Customs, and two members of the bomb squad.
Then started the questions. They were easy at first. They asked me where I lived. What do I do for a living? Why am I unemployed? How come it's taken me 4 months to find a job?
They asked me why I was visiting Canada. I was to visit a friend I met on World of Warcraft, Cara. They took down her name and what I could remember of her address. They asked me how we met.
"In an online game."
"What online game?"
"Umm ... World of Warcraft," I responded meekly.
"What kind of game is this?"
"It's a fantasy game ... it takes place online."
"Fantasy ... like it's got wizards and warlocks?"
"Well, it's got warlocks." (And they need to be nerfed.)They asked me to describe my relation to Cara. I told them that people meet up in the game and go on adventures together, and that Cara and I were in a guild together that I was the leader of. They confused the concept of a guild with the game, however, and I had them believing that I was the Lord and Leader of all of WoW until I was able to correct them, and explain to them what a guild was.
So, when they put the pieces together; namely, that I was visiting a female person that I had met over a computer game, their next line of questioning went down an obvious path.
"So you and Cara are friends?"
"Yes."
"How long have you known her?"
"About 5 months I think? Maybe less."
"Do you have a romantic relationship with Cara?"
"No."
"Do you want a romantic relationship with Cara?"
"No."
"OK, so ... if you and Cara were drunk together, and she turned to you and said, 'Tim, let's go--'"I interrupted him. "Excuse me ... what's the point of these questions?" The detective hardened. "Let me make things clear. I ask questions. You answer them. Do we have an understanding?"
"Yes." I paused. "I just don't see how this is relevant."
He spoke right in my face. "I've got 5 good men going into that airplane right now. Five of my best bomb squad guys. If there is any reason that I should be concerned for their life, then I need to know now. So just answer the questions, and do as I say."
Truce On Drugs
Seattle Times columnist Neal Peirce writes of the success of Washington state's "sensible take on drugs," saving tens of millions of dollars by cutting back on mandatory sentences for possession, and taking other wise approaches:
"This project isn't for fringy, ponytailed pot smokers," insists Roger Goodman, director of the bar association's Drug Policy Project. "We did it for the courts. We can't get civil cases heard for three years. And the drug cases are mostly so petty."The uncomfortable truth is that despite decades of aggressive government crackdowns, U.S. drug use and drug-related crime are as high as ever. Made profitable by prohibition, violent criminal enterprises that purvey drugs are flourishing. Harsh criminal sanctions, even for minor drug possession, have packed jails and prisons. Public coffers have been drained of funds for critical preventive social services.
Prohibition has failed to stamp out markets and quality, or increase street prices for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The drug war kicked off by President Nixon in the 1970s costs $40 billion or more a year. It is a massive, embarrassing, destructive failure.
But politicians are normally afraid to question the system for fear of being called illegal-drug apologists. So how did the King County Bar get the ball rolling? "It's the messenger, not the message" — the credibility of the bar association, says Goodman. The King County Bar in fact assembled a nationally unprecedented coalition of supporters, ranging from the Washington State Bar Association to the King County and Washington state medical associations, the Church Council of Greater Seattle and the League of Women Voters of Seattle and Washington.
And the first-stated goals weren't scuttling drug laws. Instead, the bar association announced its platform as (1) reductions in crime and disorder — "to undercut the violent, illegal markets that spawn disease, crime, corruption, mayhem and death"; (2) improving public health by stemming the spread of blood-borne diseases; (3) better protection of children from the harm of drugs, and (4) wiser use of scarce public resources.
Now the bar association and its allies are asking the Legislature to establish a commission of experts to design how the state can switch from punitive approaches to a focus on treatment, shutting down the criminal gangs that now control the drug trade.
Almost Hopper
Things Have Changed Since Katrina
So says George Bush, and yes, they sure have.
A friend of mine who's probably never paid a bill late in her life is a case in point. The house she and her husband bought in New Orleans is unlivable, their insurance will only cover a pittance of their losses, they're still paying a mortgage on it -- and rent elsewhere, plus living expenses for themselves and their three kids-- and she says she can't even get return phone calls from the right people in the mortgage department at Bank of America. She told me the other day, she never would have believed it, but they're probably going to have to default.
Here's a photo from a French Quarter shop window from a more frivolous time:
Here's an excerpt from the story about Mr. Bush's remarks by Anne E. Kornblut and David Stout from The New York Times:
Mr. Bush acknowledged that, for some, rebuilding may have been so gradual as to seem non-existent. But, Mr. Bush said: “For a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things have changed.”“I feel a quiet sense of determination that’s going to shape the future of Mississippi,” he continued.
And then, in comments that could have been as applicable to the other main challenge of his administration — Iraq — Mr. Bush said: “As this part of the world flourishes, and businesses grow, people will find work and have the wherewithal to rebuild their lives.”
Mr. Bush delivered his remarks at an intersection in a working-class Biloxi neighborhood against a carefully orchestrated backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. Just a few feet out of camera range stood gutted houses with wires dangling from interior ceilings. A tattered piece of crime scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet seat lay on its side in the grass.
Mr. Bush praised the optimism and grit of the people of Mississippi, and he reaffirmed his belief in neighborly cooperation as well as government help. “A year ago, I committed our federal government to help you,” he said. “I said we have a duty to help the local people recover and rebuild. I meant what I said.”
This reminds me of the cartoon -- I think, by my pal John Callahan -- of what a dog hears when a human's talking:
"Blah, blah, blah, blah...blah, blah, blah...blah, blah, blah..."
Years Later, Kerry Finds A Set Of Snap-On Balls
And takes 'em for a test run. From an AP story on CNN.com:
Sen. John Kerry didn't contest the results at the time, but now that he's considering another run for the White House, he's alleging election improprieties by the Ohio Republican who oversaw the deciding vote in 2004.An e-mail from Kerry will be sent to 100,000 Democratic donors Tuesday asking them to support U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland for governor of Ohio. The bulk of the e-mail criticizes Strickland's opponent, GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, for his dual role in 2004 as President Bush's honorary Ohio campaign co-chairman and the state's top election official.
"He used the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote," Kerry says in the e-mail, according to a copy provided in advance.
This Samantha M. Shapiro piece on Slate about the crisis in Conservative Judaism reminded me of the crisis in Democratic politics (no coherent message):
Take the issue of the ordination of gay rabbis. It's a no-brainer for Reform Jews, who allow it because they place precedence on personal choice above biblical mandates, and for the Orthodox, who bar it because they believe that the Torah strictly prohibits gay sex. But for Conservatives, it's a crisis, because the movement lacks a clear theology to navigate between the poles of tradition and change, even as the gap between them becomes ever wider. As a result, the decision to admit openly gay rabbinical students to JTS has been bitterly contested, tabled, avoided, and fought over for the last half-dozen or so years. Schorsch has said in previous interviews that advocates for the ordination of gay rabbis are bending and manipulating Halakha rather than looking at it honestly. His despair over this issue surely motivated some of the ferocity of his speech.But Conservative Judaism has never adequately explained how its rabbis or congregants should decide which aspects of modern times are worth adjusting the law to, and which aren't. The decision in 1972 to ordain women rabbis at JTS wasn't advocated by the institutions' Talmudic scholars but by a committee of lay people. They made many strong moral and ethical arguments for ordaining women, but they couldn't ground their stance coherently in Jewish law.
Still earlier, in 1961, the Conservative movement issued a ruling permitting driving on Shabbat—but only to synagogue. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, observe the prohibition against driving and build their neighborhoods around their synagogues and each other's homes. There is something powerful about this decision: The foundation of the community is a countercultural value that requires some sacrifice in the name of a higher purpose. While it might be possible to read Jewish law to permit driving on Shabbat or ordaining a woman rabbi, both of those choices seem motivated by a reluctant acquiescence to the demands of the time rather than by a deep and reverent reading of the texts. Orthodox Jews also change the law—you won't find any of them following the Torah's injunction to forgive all loans every seven years, or to stone a rebellious child—but they do so in a way that has internal coherence.
Of course, the other crisis in Democratic politics is their penchant for putting up wimpy bunwads as candidates who seem more interested in being liked than in contesting skanky smelling elections.
The Sequel To "Yeast Infection, The Play"
Are You $piritual?
Welcome to The Kabbalah Center. Jocasta Shakespeare meets "Tinseltown's high priestess" Karen Berg for The Observer:
In her book God Wears Lipstick she says that what most women want is 'to eat chocolate, party, have sex, dance ... We want those diamond earrings and Jimmy Choo shoes', and the mundane nature of her desire is her charm. She is warm and friendly and I can't help liking her.These days she lives a millionaire lifestyle, surrounded by servants and adored by beautiful and powerful celebrity icons. Her manicures are no doubt better than they used to be, but her values have not changed. Unlike her female followers, Berg herself wears a beautiful diamond bracelet as well the cheapo red string thing. Housewifely common sense has its compensations.
But it only goes so far. Berg says she met the Rav in a past life. 'In my last life, I was in the Spanish revolution. I was with the Rav and he refused to change his religion. I scooted off and left him [she winks again, to punctuate this girltalk moment]. I didn't have what it took to stay because the Spanish would have killed me and he said, "I'd sooner die than change what I am," and I said, "No, I'm leaving."' I ask how she knows this to be true and she shakes her head and laughs: 'Because you couldn't have the kind of chalk-and-cheese relationship we do and have so much love between us unless there was some kind of karma connection that happened before, you know?'
Anyone know the Hebrew for "Whatta loada crap"?
In this life, Karen met the future Rav when she was 16 years old and worked as his secretary in an insurance firm in Queens, New York. 'At first I didn't like him,' she says now. 'He was a different person.'In fact, he was an orthodox Hasidic Jew and insurance salesman, born in Brooklyn in 1930, called Shraga Feivel Gruberger. He was also married with eight children.
Karen left the insurance firm to marry a builder at the age of 17 and had two daughters, Leah and Suri. Eight years later, when she was divorced, Karen met Gruberger again and felt 'strangely flustered' when asking him 'a little breathlessly' about his Kabbalah studies.
They met for dinner and, she says, 'I have to tell you, at that meeting it was all over. We knew instantly that we were meant for each other.' Gruberger abandoned his wife and children soon after this meeting with Karen and reinvented himself as 'Dr Philip Berg'.
...Kabbalah is Karen's invention: a vast money-minting, non-profit, tax-exempt 'charity'. She has claimed copyright to the name 'Kabbalah Centre', retails the Zohar at £420 a set, and has successfully repackaged a 4,000-year-old Judaic tradition. Berg says now, 'I insisted that this wisdom be made available to the peoples: to everyone, of any age, gender or religious belief. I like to give myself a stripe for that.' She polishes an invisible badge on her left shoulder. 'I said, "If I can understand it, then anyone can." He said, "Do you realise this has never been done before?" I said, "So What!"' And so the Kabbalah Centre - and the Rav himself - was created.
Part of this story reminds me of what's wrong with atheists as a group. Ben Akerley (author of the hilarious X-Rated Bible) invited me to the Atheists Alliance conference a few years ago, and some woman complained to me that Christian groups on campuses threw "pizza socials." Well, duh! Atheists should be throwing them, too. "We don't want to bribe people, she said." "Why not?" I asked. College kids are hungry. Feed them, and they might listen to what you have to say.
And another point atheists miss: People find it comforting to be in groups -- so comforting, in fact, that they'll snort out their money to these Jewish R.L. Hubbard types above. Atheism, to attract people, needs to be less like current atheism and more like religion, in that people have a need to belong to something. Groups of no-godders, say, with an ethical framework, or at least, offering discussions about rationality and ethics, and why so many people believe in Santa Claus.
And finally, there are too few hot atheists. The public voice of atheism tends to be Julia Sweeney. Wow, whatta hottie. Look at the public voice of nonthink, Ann Coulter, note how she made her bones, so to speak -- on Politically Incorrect and other shows. But for her blonde, leggy, televised controversy-mongering, she'd be bent over a law book -- and maybe by some sex-starved Supreme Court justice.
Looking A Gift Horse In The Ass Again
News on Cingular's illegally expiring gift cards soon.
What does it take to make Cingular respond? Not a call to customer service. (They said a customer service supervisor would get back to me in 24 hours. Over a month later, I'm still waiting for that person to call.)
Even after three calls and at least as many e-mails to Glenn Blumstein in their legal department, I heard nothing. Even after Mr. Blumstein told me he was in intellectual property, but he'd get my complaint to the proper person in their legal department. Zeeeero!
Nope, I had to make a complaint with the California Attorney General to get anybody at Cingular to care. Hmmm, if Cingular hired people like Melissa Weikel, of the Attorney General's Public Inquiry Unit, who hopped right on my complaint, maybe they'd have happier customers.
Well, to all the unhappy Cingular customers holding expired gift cards, dig 'em out, because I'll have news for you later in the week.
P.S. They're crediting the $50 to my Cingular bill, but say that's a courtesy being extended only to me. Yeah? I don't think so. Because I believe it's California law that applies here, not Cingular's (cough!) "generosity." Relevant passages to be posted after my deadline. Unfortunately for them, you can pay me off, but it still won't shut me up.
UPDATE: Monday, August 28, 2:53 pm, PST, Angela Craft from Cingular just called me and said I'm right and they read the (California) law wrong. "We could've had a lawsuit on our hands," she said she told one of the higher-ups. I told her they need to make good not just for me, but for all customers who have these cards. I'm on deadline now, but I'll blog about this when I'm done with this week's column.
Note: This may only apply to California Cingular customers holding expired Cingular gift cards. Residents of other states holding expired Cingular gift cards may simply be screwed.
The Portland Pooch
I liked Portland a lot. Amazing food, some of my favorite people in the world, and then, if I lived there, there’d be no need to get a house or an apartment, as I’d be moving into Powell’s Books.
There’s one area it’s lacking, and it's in feminine scenery. We sat outside Friday night at Typhoon, the excellent Thai restaurant at our hotel, and not one woman we saw in the span of a couple hours was without a pot belly of some sort –- from pooch to pouch to paunch to pregnant-esque, and beyond -- and almost all wore these very tight shirts that really hugged their fat rolls.
Then, of course, there’s the problem of "lack of interesting" in terms of fashion. There’s rarely a piece of eye-candy to be had on Portland’s streets.
Finally, I came upon this girl. Now, her style isn’t my style (even when it was in, during the Desperately Seeking Susan era when I first got to New York), but at least she has style.
I thought she was adorable, and told her so, and she let me take her picture. One tasty eye morsel for a style-starved Paris-obsessed Angeleno in Portland.
Nancy Rommelmann, of course, is in fabulous shape, despite the fact that she’s not only writing her ass off, but baking it off, too. She made all this stuff in the span of about 30 minutes, baking not included.
By the way, if you haven't eaten Nancy's baked goods, it's worth a trip to Portland, and a visit to Ristretto. (And no, she hasn't been there long enough to be blameable for the Portland Pooch.)
Unfair Use
Via LAObserved, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, who's on a US-Canada Fulbright fellowship at USC, got a USC memo from a student accused of file sharing, which Doctorow fact-checked. Here's the bit from Doctorow's fact-checking that LAO's Kevin Roderick excerpted:
> > > Copyright infringement occurs whenever someone makes a copy of any copyrighted work -- songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels -- without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner, or obtaining permission some other way.Wait, wait, wait. Doesn't USC have a law program? This is just utterly wrong. Copyright infringement occurs when you make a use without obtaining permission, provided that your use doesn't fall under the banner of fair use and other user-rights under copyright....
> > > USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property.
This is the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university. The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship. To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping -- if we're to take this at face value, we'd measure USC's success by the number of patents filed and copyrights registered, rather than the caliber and quality of the research and work done by our students and faculty.
Now, I'm all there with Doctorow on "fair use" and the purpose of a university. But then there's unfair use, which is a different story. The accused student admits to apparent unfair use on his blog:
Although I admit to downloading content I wish to view for entertainment purposes (i.e. [TV show]), my primary purpose in using file sharing networks is research, not entertainment.
Then, one of his commenters was right there to justify it:
If students had the money, maybe there would be more incentive to pay.
Here's the comment I posted in response:
Fair use is one thing, but the justification above is just ridiculous. Here's a comparable one: "If bank robbers had more money, maybe there'd be less incentive to rob banks."I'm a newspaper columnist and I create copyrighted material for a living. You can copy part of my column and link to it for purposes of discussion, but you can't reprint the whole thing. That's stealing, same as it would be if I downloaded a copyrighted TV show without paying for it, or walked out of your house with your TV without your permission and some exchange of cash.
I'm always stunned by the people I know -- especially those who are themselves copyright holders -- who steal music and other content over the Internet. They always say, "Well, such and such rock star has so much money, and the CDs are so expensive." Yeah? Well, it's their content, and they can sell a CD for $5,000 if they want, and if you don't have the cash, or think that's too much money, don't buy it. But, certainly don't steal it.
If you download copyrighted material off the Internet without paying for it, you are, quite simply, A THIEF.
WriterGirl Tail
Another in a series. Following Welder Wife Tail, we have Brainy Girls' Back Ends. These two happen to be the writer booties of Nancy Rommelmann and Hillary Johnson. To the right of Hillary is Nancy's Dad -- in two parts (sorry about that!)...and, in the hat, Nancy's husband and Hillary's brother, Din Johnson, who is fast becoming famous for his artisanally roasted Ristretto Roasters coffee. (I get it mail-order because have a very hard time drinking anything else [my review: "like drinking velvet"], and I had it made by the maestro himself the other day.)
We had some truly superb food that night -- like this goat cheese flan -- at Nancy's favorite Portland restaurant, Park Kitchen.
And later in the evening, we shook our WriterGirl booties good.
Our Puppet-In-Chief
The Bush Pilot speaks:
via LAFrog
I Brought A Balm On The Plane
Who says there's no profiling at the airport? It's just not terrorist profiling. I got searched twice -- once at the metal detectors and once right before the flight. I'm going to try looking like a hag on the way back, not like a girl who'd be carrying a handbag of contraband Chanel cosmetics!
I went through my purse and computer bag before I left home and cleaned out all the Anthelios XL 60 sunblock, Chanel lipgloss, and hand lotion. I could easily have dumped $60 worth of lotion and makeup in the trash without my home search. When I got to Nancy Rommelmann's house, I had to dig for my Ritalin in my purse and I, oops! found what they missed when they searched me twice at the airport -- Kiehl's LIP BALM #1.
Hmm, there's a good chance they missed it because it was at the bottom of my purse under a pair of thong underwear. Two guys missed it: One TSA guy and one army private doing a secondary search of select passengers (ie, girls not in Birkenstalks and no makeup).
So, in order to get stuff through the airport, all you have to do is carry something embarrassing to a guy at the bottom of your bag? Or is it that they're just THAT crappy at searching? It's my belief that they could have Osama Bin Laden himself come through and not catch him. Are we safer or just more annoyed?
And finally, just remember why we're being inconvenienced: Because people believe in god! (Of course, not the best point to make while some man's examining your lipsticks and missing the very dangerous tube of five-dollar lip balm at the bottom of your bag.)
The Skinny Hate Whore Walks Off The Set
The Anemic Alan Colmes, whom I knew slightly in New York before he became the bean bag on Hannity & Colmes, is on vacation, and that's not a good thing for our Ann.
Watch the video here, at Crooks And Liars, where they write:
Whenever Ann is faced with the reality that Osama hasn’t been caught yet by this administration–well–Poor Ann. Kirsten Powers actually responds to Coulter’s ridiculous line that Afghanistan is going swimmingly and brings up the fact that Osama is still alive and well. Coulter then plays her usual Clinton card and freaks. "Sean, help me–Sean, where are you? Sean, these mean people are talking…I can’t get my 10,000 words of Liberal hate speech in…I’m melting."
Her most entertaining appearance to date!
Lucy Riccardo Has Been Saved Again
Yesterday afternoon, while being entertained by Nancy's dad, I accidentally erased real comments instead of spam. Gregg has restored the comments I erased -- maybe minus two or three left in the late afternoon (and the entry about the lost comments, which I haven't replaced) -- and I'm really sorry about the few that were lost. I promise to be more careful in the future!
My Version Of Gregg's Version Of Project Runway
I'm in Portland, with Gregg, to visit Nancy Rommelmann and see the place. Nancy invited me over Wednesday night to watch Project Runway with Hillary Johnson and her, and said Gregg could come, too. Gregg sent his regrets, which I conveyed best as I could remember them:
"Gregg's version of Project Runway is a movie with a plane burning."
(Apparently, it was actually the movie with Billy Bob Thornton where the characters frolic in jet backdraft, but I like my version of Gregg's version much better.)
Civilized Disobedience
A handful of Chicago restaurants flout the local foie gras ban by putting it on their menus, writes Monica Davey in The New York Times:
“This ban is embarrassing Chicago,” said Grant DePorter of Harry Caray’s Restaurant, which dreamed up an appetizer of pan-seared foie gras and scallops ($14.95) and a Vesuvio-style entree pairing foie gras and tenderloin ($33.95) just to buck the new ordinance. “We really don’t think the City Council should decide what Chicagoans eat. What’s next? Some other city outlaws brussels sprouts? Another outlaws chicken? Another, green beans?”While Illinois restaurant officials, who say 46,000 pounds of foie gras was sold here last year, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday over the city’s ban, those serving foie gras on Tuesday afternoon said they were unsure, and mostly indifferent, about how law enforcement might punish them for their one-day protest.
As it turned out, the city did nothing — even in one South Side restaurant where the owner reported seeing a table of Chicago police officers at lunch. Tim Hadac, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health, which, unlike the Police Department, is responsible for enforcing the ban, said that although the ordinance went into effect on Tuesday, the city would begin enforcement on Wednesday.
“The city gave them a day of fun, but tomorrow we’ll see what happens,” said Joe Moore, the alderman who proposed the ban, adding that the method by which foie gras is produced — force feeding ducks and geese through a pipe inserted into their throats — is clearly animal cruelty.
Wrong, bunwad. Because you imagine it's cruel, based on some anthropomorphized vision of the birds, doesn't mean it's cruel.
I'll repost an earlier blog item:
If It's Good For The Goose...
Is the foie gras process bad for the ducks and geese? In Wednesday's LA Times Letters To The Editor section, Norm Drexel, in Christchurch, New Zealand, responded to a story about foie gras-inspired vandalism around San Francisco. Drexel doubts that Cem Akin, a PETA researcher mentioned in the story, has actually witnessed the gavage of geese (the feeding process by which foie gras is produced). Drexel explains:
I don't pretend to be able to read a duck's mind, but they show no obvious signs of fear before or distress after feeding. When brought into the pen, they push to be first in line.
Hmmm...kind of like the flabby crowd ill-advisedly shoving to "Supersize It" at 7-11 -- but with webbed feet. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like the LA Times reporter who wrote the story ever left her desk to -- forgive me -- take a gander at any ducks or geese...or (sigh) bothered to phone even one objective expert. (I call this "interactive newswriting" -- where the story isn't altogether told, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. What fun!)
In this case, it leaves the big question -- is gavage cruel or not? -- hanging over the story. I don't know the answer, but I did find a couple corroborations of what Drexel wrote...here and here. So, should PETA change its name?...to PIPA?..."People For The Inaccurate Portrayal Of Animals?" It does have a cute sort of Mexical-Italian ring to it. But does it have the ring of truth? That is the question.
UPDATE: Look what happens when you put a little reporting into the mix! Here are a few words from Andrew Gumbel's story in the UK's Independent:
Mr. Jaubert said his adversaries were picking the wrong target. The Californian duck farm, operating under the name Sonoma Foie Gras, was free-range. Animals spent almost all their lives outside, he said, except for the final period of grain-feeding in air-conditioned buildings. "This is extremely good treatment, certainly compared to the way the big chicken producers behave with their animals," he said.Mr. Manrique, who comes from Gascony, the heart of duck country in south-west France, has been an ambassador for foie gras for years. "Force-feeding is really the wrong word," he told a group of cooking students in San Francisco a couple of years ago. "The geese see the food we offer them and run after us. They say, 'Give me more'."
Such remarks may not sit well with the "meat is murder" crowd, but science is beginning to show that he may not be entirely wrong. An article in the journal British Poultry Science in 2001 found "no significant indication that force-feeding is perceived as an acute or chronic stress by male mule ducks".
What You Don't Watch Won't Hurt Them
Once again, the irrational god believers are terrified that somebody, somewhere, might jerk off in a hotel room. No, I don't want to think too much about how often or how well they clean those bedspreads, but what's with these fundies who not only won't watch porn, but don't want to let anybody else watch it either? Here's an AP story about a coalition of 13 conservative groups trying to keep not only their own eyeballs off porn, but yours, too:
(They) took out full-page ads in some editions of USA Today earlier this month urging the Justice Department and FBI to investigate whether some of the pay-per-view movies widely available in hotels violate federal and state obscenity laws....The leader of the campaign against in-room porn is Phil Burress, a self-described former porn addict who heads the Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values.
Burress and his allies have had some success regionally, pressuring about 15 Ohio and Kentucky hotels to stop offering adult movies. But he says a nationwide pressure campaign would be difficult because nearly all the big hotel chains have similar policies — porn is available at some but not all of their affiliates.
Though unable to cite specific cases, Burress contended that the availability of in-room porn is making hotels more dangerous.
“As more and more of these (hardcore) titles become available, we’re going to have sexual abuse cases coming out of the hotels,” he said. “Hotels are just as dangerous as environments around strip joints and porn stores.”
Oh, please. I just returned a book to the library with pages of meta-analysis that says quite the opposite; for example, in one study, in countries where porn is available, crime stats went down commensurate with the increase in availability of pornography. Of course, if you believe in god without evidence, why should you quote statistics based on evidence? Your imagination should work just as well!
Respectful Insolence
One of my everyday blog reads is Orac's. Who is Orac?
Orac is the nom de blog of a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. That Orac has chosen his pseudonym based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of an old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their early 1980's BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction for television ever produced, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)Respectful Insolence is a repository for the ramblings of the aforementioned pseudonymous surgeon/scientist concerning medicine and quackery, science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, politics, and anything else that interests him (or pushes his buttons). Orac's motto is: "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." (OK, maybe it can be just a little bit insolent.)
Orac tries to keep his insolence respectful most of the time, but admittedly sometimes fails in the cases of obvious quackery and pseudoscience, personal attacks on him, very poor critical thinking skills, bigotry or racism, and just general plain stupidity.
Finally, Orac's "real" identity is an open secret, but he nonetheless keeps using the Orac pseudonym because (1) he doesn't want his blog to be the first thing that comes up when patients Google his name; (2) he has a long history on the Internet under this particular pseudonym; and (3) he likes it.
Here are a few words from Orac on denial:
I've been thinking about denial again.It started a couple of weeks ago, when, inspired by a couple of patients I had seen or heard about, I wrote about denial in cancer, specifically how it can lead to horrific delays in treatment. I described a couple of recent patients and a patient from my residency, all of whom presented late with locally advanced breast cancer. In one of the cases, the tumor was bleeding, necrotic, and rotting. Yet these women somehow managed to hide their conditions from their families and in one case her husband. I had thought I had seen or heard it all--until last week. When it rains, it pours, I guess.
This is a story that shows that it's not always denial that leads to a delay in diagnosis until the cancer is very advanced. The specific details have been altered a bit to try to make sure there's no patient-identifiable information, but the basic story is true.
I was in clinic with a patient. Like many patients whom I evaluate, she presented with an abnormal mammogram. While I was taking her family history, she told me her sister had had breast cancer. In evaluating patients with breast abnormalities, family history is a very important piece of information, as having a first degree relative who had breast cancer before menopause is a strong risk factor for developing cancer. When I asked her how old her sister was when she got cancer (to find out if she was premenopausal or not), she told me around 46. When I asked her what happened, she told me she had died.
Then she told me more than I really needed (or probably wanted) to know.
It turns out her sister had collapsed and been taken to the hospital. In the course of her evaluation for her collapse, the diagnosis became painfully obvious.
Breast cancer.
Further evaluation demonstrated that the patient's sister had widely metastatic disease, including brain metastases, which had led to her collapse. She lived only a couple of weeks, and then succumbed to her disease. The patient told me that, after her sister's collapse, she had gone to her home. There, she had found large quantities of bandages, many of them bloody. Her sister had been hiding a large, fungating, bleeding breast cancer for many months, if not years.
I found out more. Her sister worked a low wage job and didn't have health insurance. Not only had she managed to hide her condition from her family, but also from her coworkers. After her hospitalization, she told my patient over and over that she didn't want to be a burden.
That's right. She died what was probably an entirely preventable death at a relatively young age because she didn't want to be a "burden." No doubt she suffered from that fungating mass on her breast for many months. Very likely, once the cancer progressed to metstastic disease, she suffered other symptoms that she somehow managed to hide, perhaps bone pain, neurlogic symptoms such as weakness or dizziness, perhaps abdominal pain. Although there is no way for me to know, I speculate that denial might have played a role early on in her disease. However, given what happened and what her sister told me, I have to conclude that, at some point, she realized what was wrong with her and consciously chose to hide it from her family, friends, and coworkers. She chose death over life, all because of a desire not to be a "burden."
"We Like To Think People Obey The Law"
That's what the customs guy said about the self-service border check-in (!!) for boaters coming from Canada to the US. Susan Taylor Martin writes in the St. Pete Times:
ST. LAWRENCE RIVER, U.S.-Canadian border - Call it the "honor system" of combating international crime and terrorism.When private boaters enter U.S. waters from Canada, chances are there won't be any U.S. Customs officials there to meet them. Instead, they are supposed to go to a videophone - like the one at the city marina in Ogdensburg, N.Y. - and give the home port, boat registration number, the names and citizenship of all passengers and a list of alcohol or anything else acquired outside the country.
It's even more basic on the Canadian side.
At Rockport, a picturesque village west of Ogdensburg, the tiny Canadian customs office is open only in summer and only in daylight. Private boaters arriving from the United States at other times are directed to a nearby pay phone booth where they are supposed to report in using a toll-free number.
If this sounds like a system a smuggler, or terrorist, could easily exploit, that's because it is.
"We like to think people obey the law," says Kevin Corsaro of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But, he acknowledges, "it's hard to guarantee it."
Kevin, a little prediction: Good little American girls like me will pick up the phone and declare their purchases -- down to their last piece of Bubble-Yum. People named Osama, Al-Waasi, and Mahmud will not -- down to their last suitcase of anthrax and detonators.
Women In Relationships Don't Have Dirty Pictures?
For a long time, people (even researcher people) have seen male sexual arousal and female sexual arousal as pretty much the same. It turns out that women in long-term relationships tend not to have the spontaneous sexual pictures, thoughts, and fantasies that men do, which in men, trigger sexual arousal. Ladies?
Dirty Kitty Things
A cat-hater takes up with the cat-obsessed in my Advice Goddess column I just posted. Here's his question:
My girlfriend of eight months is so attached to her cat that she takes it with her when she goes to the toilet. She also lets it sleep in the bed and drink out of the bathroom sink. She has cat knickknacky things everywhere, and worse, cat hair everywhere -- on the bed, on counters, on clothes and food. To me, cats are filthy animals that cover themselves with spit, lick their behinds, track used kitty litter all over, and shed hair and dander. I think about our future together, and wonder whether she'd give up a cat to be with me. You may think this sounds unreasonable, but I equate living with a cat to asking a woman to move into a house with a dirt floor. --Catastrophe
And here's an excerpt from my answer:
...Here she is, an adult woman who decorates like she got drunk and went on a spending binge at Hallmark, who seasons her food with cat hair, and who can’t pry herself away from little Poopsy to take a private trip to the john. And here you are, a guy who sees the housecat as the next best thing to an open petri dish of typhus. Yet, somehow, this doesn’t stop you from wondering whether you can have a future together. And maybe you can; most likely, the Hobbesian kind: “Nasty, brutish, and short.”Hey, wait, don’t all relationships take compromise? Sure they do. But, making “Filthy Animal Seeks Good Home” signs isn’t a compromise; it’s a declaration of war. She clearly sees this cat as her furry, four-legged child. Ever let a mother know you find her child vile and ill-behaved, and only fit to live under the porch? Okay, maybe you were tempted once or twice, as we all are, but came to your senses. In this case, if you just weren’t keen on cats, or you like them, but have allergies, maybe you could stay together by living apart. But, as odious as you find cats, not to mention her relationship with her cat, you two are about as sensibly paired as a Buddhist and a gun nut, or a vegan who mutters “Murderer!” every time his partner takes a bite of steak.
Love has its limitations; among them, its failure to double as turbo Febreze, not only making persistent pet odors go away, but making persistent pets disappear with them. For future reference, while it’s important to figure out what you want in a woman, it’s kind and responsible to figure out what gives you the dry heaves. In other words, you aren’t wrong for being a cat-loathing germ freak, just for taking eight months to determine that the only way you two could live happily ever after is with the intervention of a taxidermist.
The entire thing is here.
"Osama" Has Some Of The Same Letters As "Saddam"
"If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here."
--George Bush in his press conference on CNN about staying the course in Iraq
Excuse me, but before we went into Iraq, were the Iraqis really jonesing to "get us"? The enemy that followed us here is in Afghanistan, no? Unfortunately, we've committed our troops to Iraq.
A Midwestern Girl's Approach To National Finance
I practice some pretty simple economics: save money when possible, don't buy new stuff when the old stuff still works, and don't spend what you don't have.
If only we practiced a similar sort of economics as a nation. Unfortunately, the nimrods running our country spend taxpayer dollars like a spoiled teenager who has a rich daddy but who's never had a job. Ba-trillions in national debt? Let's spend, spend, spend attacking Iraq, a sovereign nation that had...absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Of course, it won't just cost us bigtime in dollars -- but in whatever shreds of international trust and respect we still had. Yes, so, here's this enormous purchase we can't afford, and to this day, nobody's been able to give me an answer that makes sense as to why we're there -- well, that is, one that sounds like more than just speculation and justification in hindsight.
Now, in midwestern girl economic terms, it would seem prudent spending if you live in a dangerous neighborhood, to get an alarm system, or some sort of protection from the danger at hand. Yet, while George Bush is telling us how hard he's working to protect us, we're hearing more than a few stories about exactly how lax our national protection is. How lax? Well, kind of like living in a gang-infested neighborhood and leaving your doors and windows wide open and a plate of freshly-baked cookies and a pile of money on a table right inside the front door.
Meanwhile, what did we get for our trip to the Baghdad Barneys? Well, not the democracy we supposedly paid for...and keep paying for, plus outrageous interest on our national credit card.
Now, maybe my midwestern girl approach is too simplistic. Or...maybe it's just the simplistic we need.
The Big Thumb
Many who believe, without evidence, in god, defend their beliefs with a number of silly arguments; for example, the notion that without this irrational belief, the world would descend into a hotbed of crime. Heather Mac Donald clears a few things up:
It may be the case that what prevents most people from running red lights at 5 A.M. or stealing from their neighbor is the fear of hell. That is an empirical question. But I bet that another reason why most people in Western cultures obey the law is that they fear anarchy and realize that if they start taking the law into their own hands, everyone else might as well. We all operate with an innate broken windows theory. Most of the cultures where anarchy reigns are even more religious than ours. What they lack is not the fear of God but the many traditions of civil society, including a respect for rule of the law, a stigma against corruption, and a conception of society beyond tribe and family.
Can you really call yourself moral for behaving well out of fear of going to hell -- or should you just call yourself extremely self-interested?
The Right Way To Read The New York Times
Hilarious. (Click on the newspaper to make the white message go away.)
Heinie Happy People
I forgot, I've been meaning to post some of the shortie questions from my Advice Goddess column. Here's one:
I’ve been seeing a 25-year-old woman for a short time. She isn’t overweight by any means, but she definitely has a booty. I really like that on a woman, but she’s self-conscious about it, and always covers it up in baggy clothes because her ex used to call her “wide ride” and other names. What can I do to help?
--Bringing Up The RearThere’s never been a better time to have a big dumpster. For an increasing number of women, butt implants are the new boob job. For a less invasive boost, there’s underwear with built-in butt falsies. Unfortunately, nobody’s come up with a prosthesis for flat, saggy self-worth –- which is typically what makes a woman stick with a guy who calls her mean names. A girlfriend who’s lacking on the inside is likely to make any relationship misery on some level, or at least kind of a drag. If that doesn’t dissuade you, all you can do is keep showing and telling her how hot you find her -- not despite but because of her apparent need to special-order panties from the company that made the cover for the Astrodome.
And The Bride Wore Debt
Nicholas Kulish writes in The New York Times about the ridiculous excess of so many weddings:
At a lovely wedding I attended recently with nearly 400 other guests, a friend asked aloud what exactly one would have to do in order to be left off the invitation list. A survey this year found that the average wedding costs $27,852, compared with $15,208 in 1990. That is just the average, to say nothing of the mind-bogglingly lavish affairs of the well-to-do. These are now professionally stage-managed events, carried off with the precision of state dinners.The more taxing, elaborate and expensive the event becomes for the bride and groom, the easier it is for them to lose perspective and begin asking more of their guests. The share of so-called destination weddings, where guests are dragged to Hawaii or Tuscany, has increased 400 percent over the last 10 years.
When my parents were married, my mother and grandmother catered the event themselves, with two friends helping out. There were a mere 80 guests in attendance, less than half the current average. My mother even made her own gown for this Potemkin wedding. Yet our family’s shame is effectively obscured by the photographs of seemingly happy people in dresses and tuxedos, either excellent actors or blissfully ignorant of the fact that they had participated in such a low-rent affair.
...Wedding fatigue, while at times a difficult malady, is hardly the tragedy of our age. It is very unlikely that help is on the way, though perhaps something similar to the Health Savings Account could alleviate some of the strain. It is the curse of wedding fatigue that it strikes those least able to afford it: young adults no longer receiving parental subsidies but still well below their earning potential. Victims tend not to have accrued very many vacation days and are — before the invitations begin clogging the mailbox — hoping to establish a first foothold in the real estate market.
As I wrote in my column a while back:
What really needs planning is the marriage, not the wedding. Your conflict over throwing the nuptial equivalent of the Super Bowl half-time show is probably just the tip of the ice sculpture. What are his expectations about sex, pets, early retirement, personal hygiene, having children, household chores? (Just a guess on that last one, but he expects the house to be really, really clean, and you get to be Cinderella?) Is one of you a tree-hugger and the other more of a "back to pavement" type? Will he inform you during your final stretch of labor that he wants to raise the kid in the Hare Krishna tradition, and he hopes that's cool with you?Oops, you've been so busy trying to book the Taj Mahal that you forgot to notice whether you're actually compatible. If figuring that out on your own seems daunting, you might take the RELATE (relate-institute. org) or PREPARE (prepare-enrich.com) compatibility surveys. For help turning your current dictatorship into more of a partnership, invest in one of John Gottman's weekend workshops for couples, (gottman.com). Sure, they'll cost you -- about what you'll pay for two and a half hours with a good divorce lawyer after pawning gold-plated garlic presses to pay for groceries starts getting old.
You probably can't make your fiance stop pining for a three-story wedding cake with a sunken koi pond, but maybe you can eventually come to the agreement that "something borrowed" for your wedding shouldn't be $100,000. One of the happiest couples I know borrowed only a house for their wedding -- for a potluck dinner after they got married on the beach, surrounded by 40 of their closest friends. Their un-extravaganza took three weeks of planning and cost several hundred dollars -- if you add the cost of their clothes, several cases of Prosecco they picked up at a wine warehouse, and "a really nice chocolate cake."
Maybe there's something to be said for the simple wedding you want -- one that's more a reflection of love than liens for years to come. It will free you up to focus on what really matters...which, maybe, just maybe, isn't whether the doves fly around on cue or just hop on the bride and groom statuette and do the number they usually do on your windshield.
And that's my ex-assistant Lydia's wedding I mentioned above (the one that cost a few hundred bucks, not a few hundred thousand). I think she's probably been married about five years now, and she and her husband still have that air of being newlyweds about them -- maybe because they know what's important.
Homeland Security - Just Not In Our Homeland
We have the appearance of being protected in our country -- not actual protection. Here's an excerpt from a New York Times editorial, "Hokum on Homeland Security":
In a tour of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia last week, President Bush declared that “America is safer than it has been” and assured Americans that “we’re doing everything in our power to protect you.”...But there is still no system to detect liquid explosives, a shocking deficiency more than a decade after terrorists were caught preparing to use such explosives to bring down a dozen airliners over the Pacific Ocean. The installation of “puffer” machines to detect trace explosives is lagging, and a program to integrate explosive-detection machines into the automated baggage conveyor systems at airports will not be finished, at the current pace of spending, for another 18 years.
Very little of the commercial air cargo that is carried aboard planes is screened or inspected, mostly because neither the shippers nor the airlines want to disrupt this lucrative flow of business. There is still no unified watch list to alert airlines to potentially dangerous passengers, and a prescreening program that would match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists remains stuck in development. All this in the industry that has received the most lavish attention since 9/11.
Even worse gaps remain in other areas. Port security relies primarily on certifying that cargo shipments are safe before they are loaded on freighters headed for this country. Only a small percentage of containers are screened once they hit our shores, raising the fearsome possibility that a nuclear or biological weapon might be smuggled in and detonated here.
Programs to keep dangerous nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union out of the hands of terrorists through greater security are moving so slowly that it will take another 14 years to complete the job. This is reckless beyond belief when nuclear terrorism is the most frightening prospect of all.
On the industrial front, the nation’s chemical plants, perhaps the most lethal and vulnerable of all our manufacturing complexes, remain dangerously underdefended, mostly because the government has been unwilling to compel private industry to take action. A new tamper-proof identification card for workers in the far-flung transportation industry has yet to be issued.
...Almost everyone agrees that the administration has taken some important steps toward greater security, but as the leaders of the 9/11 commission recently commented, it has not made the issue a top priority. The long, costly, chaotic occupation of Iraq, though touted as a front line of the war on terror, has actually sapped energy, resources and top-level attention that would be better applied to the real threat, a terrorist attack on the homeland.
Luckily, we're winning in Iraq, and it looks like democracy is just around the bend, Al Qaeda has been put out of business, and the Iraqi Shia and Shiites are just hanging around passing bouquets of flowers back and forth.
Credentials Don't Change Crap-Think
Sam Harris reviews Francis Collins' book, "The Language of God, noting "that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind":
Francis Collins—physical chemist, medical geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project—has written a book entitled “The Language of God.” In it, he attempts to demonstrate that there is “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity. To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable, spectacular and vile. “The Language of God” reads like a hoax text, and the knowledge that it is not a hoax should be disturbing to anyone who cares about the future of intellectual and political discourse in the United States.Most reviewers of “The Language of God” seem quite overawed by its author’s scientific credentials. This is understandable. As director of the Human Genome Project, Collins participated in one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history. His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind. Lest we think that one man can do no lasting harm to our discourse, consider the fact that the year is 2006, half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old, our president has just used his first veto to block federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds, and one of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain):
As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted….God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.
...Collins describes the moment that he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:
On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains … the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.If this account of field research seems a little thin, don’t worry—a recent profile of Collins in Time magazine offers supplementary data. Here, we learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity…
It is at this point that thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human beings. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it was not obvious to him as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of his readers.
If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins—because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins’ alpine conversion would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth trailing clouds of glory.
Church Isn't Sacred
Immigration officials are all prissy about picking up an illegal immigrant, simply because she's holed up in a church, as if there's some magic doormat there they can't cross. Here, I'll help them: March on in, boys, a lady in that church is breaking the law. An excerpt from the AP story:
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Immigration enforcement officers do not plan to enter a church where a single mother sought sanctuary rather than submit to deportation to Mexico, a government official said Friday.But Elvira Arellano, 31, and her supporters say only a stay of deportation will ensure that she and her 7-year-old son, an American citizen, are not forcibly removed from the Adalberto United Methodist Church.
"The situation doesn't change," Arellano said in Spanish.
Arellano has been living in the church since Tuesday, when she was supposed to surrender to authorities for deportation.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had said they would apprehend Arellano at a time and place "of their choosing" and that nothing prevented them from going into the church.
But on Friday, a government official close to the case said immigration agents have decided against entering the church to remove Arellano.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is against ICE policy to discuss operational matters, said the Arellano case carries "no more priority than any of the other 500,000 fugitives nationally."
Arellano will be apprehended "at an appropriate time and place," the official said.
Ridiculous.
How To Travel With Your Helper Monkey
Special helper monkey guidelines from the TSA:
* When a monkey is being transported in a carrier, the monkey must be removed from the carrier by the handler prior to screening,
* The monkey must be controlled by the handler throughout the screening process.
* The monkey handler should carry the monkey through the WTMD while the monkey remains on a leash.
* When the handler and monkey go through the WTMD and the WTMD alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening.
* Since monkeys may likely draw attention, the handler will be escorted to the physical inspection area where a table is available for the monkey to sit on. Only the handler will touch or interact with the monkey.
* TSOs have been trained to not touch the monkey during the screening process.
* TSOs will conduct a visual inspection on the monkey and will coach the handler on how to hold the monkey during the visual inspection.
* The inspection process may require that the handler take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection.
And they're worried about my hair gel?
Precedent Clinton
Gina Keating writes for Reuters that the hand that fed the Republicans may now bite them, the poor dears:
A lawyer plans to use a legal precedent that allowed President Bill Clinton to be sued while in office to force Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential adviser Karl Rove to testify in a lawsuit brought by former CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband.
California attorney Joseph Cotchett said he will ask a federal court to order Cheney, his ex-chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Rove to testify in depositions about their role in disclosing her classified status.
The civil lawsuit accuses them and others of conspiring to publicly identify Plame as a CIA agent to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for writing in an op-ed piece that the Bush administration twisted intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Cotchett, who took over as trial counsel in Plame's case on Tuesday, said legal precedent for whether Cheney and the others could claim legal immunity in the case comes, in part, from Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a unanimous ruling that neither Clinton "or any other official has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity." In order to be dismissed from the case or avoid testifying, Cotchett said, lawyers for Cheney and the other men would have to argue that they were acting on government business if they are found to have leaked Plame's name to the media.
Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert agent.
Why Should Prostitution Be Illegal?
Yes, I know it is illegal. But why should it be?
I read a rather dull discussion about this in the Western Standard, but I thought the question they posed -- "Some may consider prostitution immoral. But is it moral to keep it illegal?" -- was interesting.
My position? It's your body, sell it if you want to. How can anybody have any right to tell you what you can and can't do with it?
Also, I would venture a case could be made for laws against prostitution being yet another invasion of religion into secular life. I mean, are there really atheists galore out there who care if you want to pay or be paid to get fucked?
And finally, I would go so far as calling seeing a prostitute the moral thing to do -- especially vis a vis giving some unsuspecting date the impression she's going to get more than laid; ie, a relationship.
An old boyfriend of mine who always had some beautiful crazy girl banging on his door at 3 a.m. when it became clear there was no relationship in their future finally took my advice and called up an escort service. His only complaint to me: "Why didn't you make me do this sooner?"
Psychics Get It Exactly Right On JonBenet
(Except for all the exactly wrong information.) Here's psychic Dorothy Allison on JonBenet's killer:
Allison insisted that the little girl's parents were "absolutely not" involved, and that the real killer was a former handyman. She perceived "connections" to Germany and Georgia, the numbers 2-8-9, and the names "Martin" and "Irving" -- the latter, she said, being "the one I think that did this" (the murder).
Of course, whether it's actually the guy remains to be seen. He sounds nuts, and his ex-wife says he was elsewhere. Is he just a fanatic who studied the crimes? Here's the Alisa Tang AP story:
BANGKOK, Thailand — A former American school teacher said publicly Thursday that he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she died in what he called "an accident," a stunning admission after a decade without answers in the 6-year-old girl's murder. But the suspect's ex-wife said she was with him in Alabama at the time of JonBenet's 1996 death.John Mark Karr, 41, will be taken within the week to Colorado, where he will face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault, Ann Hurst of the Department of Homeland Security told a news conference in Bangkok.
"I was with JonBenet when she died," Karr told reporters afterward, visibly nervous and stuttering. "Her death was an accident."
Asked if he was innocent of the crime, Karr said: "No."
As he was escorted to his guesthouse to pick up his belongings, Karr told The Associated Press: "I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet. It's very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much, that her death was unintentional, that it was an accident."
Asked what happened when JonBenet died, he said: "It would take several hours to describe that. It's a very involved series of events that would involve a lot of time. It's very painful for me to talk about it."
He told the AP he made "several efforts to communicate with Patricia before she passed away," referring to JonBenet's mother, who died in June, "and it is my understanding that she did read my letters."
No evidence against Karr has been made public beyond his own admission. U.S. and Thai officials did not directly answer a question at the news conference Thursday about whether there was DNA evidence connecting him to the crime.
Karr's ex-wife, Lara Karr, told KGO-TV in California that she was with her former husband in Alabama at the time of JonBenet's killing and she does not believe her former husband was involved in the homicide.
She said her ex-husband spent a lot of time studying the cases of Ramsey and Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her Petaluma, Calif., home and slain in 1993.
Under no circumstances does any mother or child deserve what happened to JonBenet, but I have to say, I found the sexualization of this child at 6 truly creepy. Was it a contributing factor that drew a crazy to her? And what kind of person, pedophile or no, is capable of doing this to any child?
Bloggers' Garage Sale
Murder First, Premeditate Later
Good piece in The New York Times by Irshad Manji about the phony baloney reasons given for Islamic terror:
LAST week, the luminaries of the British Muslim mainstream — lobbyists, lords and members of Parliament — published an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair, telling him that the “debacle” of both Iraq and Lebanon provides “ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.” In increasingly antiwar America, a similar argument is gaining traction: The United States brutalizes Muslims, which in turn foments Islamist terror.But violent jihadists have rarely needed foreign policy grievances to justify their hot heads. There was no equivalent to the Iraq debacle in 1993, when Islamists first tried to blow up the World Trade Center, or in 2000, when they attacked the American destroyer Cole. Indeed, that assault took place after United States-led military intervention saved thousands of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
If Islamists cared about changing Iraq policy, they would not have bothered to abduct two journalists from France — probably the most antiwar, anti-Bush nation in the West. Even overt solidarity with Iraqi suffering did not prevent Margaret Hassan, who ran a world-renowned relief agency in Baghdad, from being executed by insurgents.
Meanwhile, at least as many Muslims are dying at the hands of other Muslims as under the boots of any foreign imperial power. In Sudan, black Muslims are starved, raped, enslaved and slaughtered by Arab militias, with the consent of an Islamic government. Where is the “official” Muslim fury against that genocide? Do Muslim lives count only when snuffed out by non-Muslims? If not, then here is an idea for Muslim representatives in the West: Go ahead and lecture the politicians that their foreign policies give succor to radicals. At the same time, however, challenge the educated and angry young Muslims to hold their own accountable, too.
This means reminding them that in Pakistan, Sunnis hunt down Shiites every day; that in northern Israel, Katuysha rockets launched by Hezbollah have ripped through the homes of Arab Muslims as well as Jews; that in Egypt, the riot police of President Hosni Mubarak routinely club, rape, torture and murder Muslim activists promoting democracy; and, above all, that civil wars have become hallmarks of the Islamic world.
Muslim figureheads will not dare be so honest. They would sooner replicate the very sins for which they castigate the Bush and Blair governments — namely, switching rationales and pretending integrity.
There are the occasional terrorists who aren't Muslim -- Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Baader Meinhof Gang -- but why are so many Muslims?
And just when you thought it couldn't get any sicker, there's this, from a New York Post story by Andy Soltis:
Twisted young British parents planned to sacrifice their precious baby in the evil cause of jihad by mass murder.Fanatical terror suspect Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his wife, Cossor, 23, are among those being interrogated by police as suspects in the massive plot to attack trans-Atlantic flights in midair.
What the outwardly normal couple had secretly plotted is almost too horrifying to consider, cops said.
The Alis planned to use 6-month-old son Zain's baby bottle as a liquid bomb, blowing themselves and their child up, along with hundreds of others aboard the flight.
Cossar was allowed to bring Zain to a police station house so she could breast-feed him there. The baby was later turned over to her grandparents.
To their stunned friends and neighbors in a housing project in north London, the Alis were known as quiet, struggling parents and observant Muslims who showed no signs of terror ties.
"Cossor was not someone I had an argument with, never any problems," said a shocked Bronwene Hammond, who attended London's Walthamstow School for Girls with her.
"She would wear the full Muslim outfit because of her parents, but she was never preaching," Hammond told The Mail on Sunday. "There were a lot more religious people at school."
But British security experts suspect that Cossor Ali is an example of a chilling phenomenon that is growing in popularity among the terror set - a woman willing to use her innocent appearance to allay suspicions and carry out a suicide bombing. At least 20 Muslim women have blown themselves up in such attacks.
Particularly disturbing was Cossor Ali's apparent intent to conceal the liquid trigger for a bomb in Zain's baby bottle when the family boarded a jetliner.
"It may be beyond belief, but we are convinced that there are now women in Britain who are prepared to die with their babies for their twisted cause," a security adviser to the British government told The Times of London.
"They are ruthless, single-minded and totally committed."
Depressed? Find A Husband!
Sorry, but depression isn't exactly the pert big boobs and Ferrari of dating. That point is somehow missed in a Reuters story, headlined "Feeling blue? Try saying, 'I do.'" The researchers they quote say marriage alleviates depression because just "mattering" to another person can alleviate depression. Here's an excerpt:
Lonely? Feeling low? Try taking a walk -- down the aisle. Getting married enhances mental health, especially if you’re depressed, according to a new U.S. study.The benefits of marriage for the depressed are particularly dramatic, a finding that surprised the professor-student team behind the study.
“We actually found the opposite of what we expected,” said Adrianne Frech, a PhD sociology student at Ohio State University who conducted the study with Kristi Williams, an assistant professor of sociology.
They expected to find that one spouse’s depression weighed too much on the marriage, but “just mattering to someone else can help alleviate symptoms of depression,” Frech said.
Frech will present their findings at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Montreal on Sunday.
The researchers used a 3,066 person sample that measured symptoms of depression -- such as an inability to sleep, or persistent sadness -- in the same people both before and after their first marriage.
They found that depressed people experienced a much more extreme decrease in the incidence of those symptoms.
“Depressed people may be just especially in need of the intimacy, the emotional closeness and the social support that marriage can provide ... if you start out happy, you don’t have as far to go,” Williams said.
On the other hand, if you’re not depressed, marriage could have the opposite effect, Frech said.
Um...yeah. And, as I mentioned above, another slight problem: People curled up in a fetal position at the corner pickup joint aren't exactly the hot tickets of the dating world. And all this marriage rah-rah-ing, is it right?
Bella DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris write in a recent study published in Psychological Inquiry that I used in my column:
In a 15-year longitudinal study with 15 waves of data collection, Lucas and his colleagues tracked the reported happiness of thousands of participants, focusing particularly on those who married and stayed married throughout the study (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2003). This design allowed for a within-participants analysis of changes in happiness over time for the same individuals as they made a transition from being single to married. The usual between-participants comparisons at each point in time were made as well. The latter comparisons suggested a link even smaller than the one reported by Haring-Hidore et al (1985). Civil status accounted for about one percent of the between-participants variance in happiness in any given year.In their within-participants analyses, Lucas et al (2003) divided the data for each participant into three time periods. The year leading up to the marriage, together with the year following the marriage, was defined as the time of the marriage. The other two time periods were the years before and after the marriage.
Examination of the initial happiness reports provided a hint of a selection effect. The participants who got married during the study and stayed that way started out reporting happiness levels .278 of a scale point higher (on an 11-point scale) than the average participant in the study. However, in supplementary analyses, the authors found that the participants who married and then divorced were no different than average in their initial happiness.
For the participants who got married and stayed married, there was an increase in happiness (of .234 of a scale point) at the time of the marriage. The increase was smaller for the participants who had been especially happy as singles. (The authors ruled out statistical regression as an artifactual explanation.) Typically, though, the initial blip in happiness did not last: “People were significantly less satisfied in the years after marriage than they were in the years surrounding marriage” (p. 532). When participants’ happiness after marriage was compared to their happiness before marriage, again the results were a wash: “On average, they are no happier in the years after marriage than they were in the years before marriage” (p. 532).
Lucas and his colleagues emphasized that there was much individual variability in patterns of happiness. For example, they noted that “there were as many people who ended up less happy than they started as there were people who ended up happier than they started (a fact that is particularly striking given that we restricted the sample to people who stayed married)” (p. 536). Clearly, the weight of the evidence from this impressive study does not support any sweeping statements about the transformative power of marriage in improving well-being.
The truth is, the way I see it, there's too much absolutism about marriage being THE path to bliss. In fact, I think there are a whole lot of miserable married people and a whole lot of people who are happy as clams (are clams happy?) as "independents."
Independents? Yes. I hate the word "single," which exists as a comparison to married, as if marriage is the gold standard of being. It is for some. And not for a whole lot of other people. In fact, but for the propaganda for marriage, a lot of people would be happily unmarried and a lot better off.
It Isn't Alienation, It's Islam
Time and time again, people argue that it's the poor treatment of Muslims that causes them to blow up the rest of us. Here's Farrukh Dhondy in The Wall Street Journal about the poor, alienated British Muslims:
Frustration and aimlessness are the seeds of alienation. British identity gives them no goals. They turn, instead, to the disciplines that were instilled in them from birth. Al Qaeda's aim to dominate the world with a universal Shariah kingdom makes them part of an elite. Their stance is fundamentally ideological, and being the ideology of religion, with 72 virgins on offer in paradise, it is fundamentally illogical. Their basic Western education makes them aware that they may be challenged in their fantasies of faith by more enlightened arguments of other Islamic persuasions. Instead, their spokesmen and suicide notes refer to British policies and lend a veneer of logic, of cause and effect, to their murder.
He does, to his credit, suggest Muslim persuading Muslims is the answer. Still, I've written here before that I had a pretty crappy childhood. I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody was Christian, and seemed to have been raised to be extremely unfriendly to Jews. Gregg Heinrichs, now a prof at Eastern Michigan University, was one of only a few exceptions. Anyway, for much of my childhood, I had no friends, kids chased me around and called me "dirty Jew" and told me I killed Jesus. (Yeah? Well, I got away with it, didn't I?) My dad even had to go to see Mr. Townsend, the junior high school principal, to get a bunch of girls to stop throwing chairs at me in the hall and calling me anti-semitic names.
Anyway, my point is, I reacted by growing up kind of a doormat, doing anything to be liked, and then, in my 20s, figuring out that wasn't working for me and developing self-worth. These days, obviously, I'm completely over a need to be liked! Still, I somehow never came up with the notion of murdering thousands upon thousands of other people as a way to make something of myself, or make up for past wrongs. Is my libertarian/fiscal conservative/atheistic bent the problem -- or is it Islam?
Heather MacDonald's Brain
If only the fundamentalist idiots running our country had half of it; collectively, we'd be many times smarter. Of course, the 'nutters in power call themselves conservatives, but they're actually anything but. So much of the time, what they mean by that -- it's code, really -- is that they're on a leash to their religion...mental muppets...on call to vote against science and for prayer in schools and all the rest.
How many top people in our government do you consider deep thinkers -- or even rational thinkers? Names, please. And P.S. You aren't a rational thinker if you sequester part of your rationality to believe in god, Santa, or the tooth fairy. Heather writes:
Upon leaving office in November 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft thanked his staff for keeping the country safe since 9/11. But the real credit, he added, belonged to God. Ultimately, it was God’s solicitude for America that had prevented another attack on the homeland.Many conservatives hear such statements with a soothing sense of approbation. But others—count me among them—feel bewilderment, among much else. If God deserves thanks for fending off assaults on the United States after 9/11, why is he not also responsible for allowing the 2001 hijackings to happen in the first place?
Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.
Conservative atheists and agnostics support traditional American values. They believe in personal responsibility, self-reliance, and deferred gratification as the bedrock virtues of a prosperous society. They view marriage between a man and a woman as the surest way to raise stable, law-abiding children (Amy says: count me out on that one -- Heather should meet the Loftons.). They deplore the encroachments of the welfare state on matters best left to private effort.
They also find themselves mystified by the religiosity of the rhetoric that seems to define so much of conservatism today. Our Republican president says that he bases “a lot of [his] foreign policy decisions” on his belief in “the Almighty” and in the Almighty’s “great gifts” to mankind. What is one to make of such a statement? According to believers, the Almighty’s actions are only intermittently scrutable; using them as a guide for policy, then, would seem reckless. True, when a potential tragedy is averted, believers decipher God’s beneficent intervention with ease. The father of Elizabeth Smart, the Salt Lake City girl abducted from her home in 2002, thanked God for answering the public’s prayers for her safe return. When nine miners were pulled unharmed from a collapsed Pennsylvania mineshaft in 2002, a representative placard read: “Thank you God, 9 for 9.” God’s mercy was supposedly manifest when children were saved from the 2005 Indonesian tsunami.
But why did the prayers for five-year-old Samantha Runnion go unheeded when she was taken from her Southern California home in 2002 and later sexually assaulted and asphyxiated? If you ask a believer, you will be told that the human mind cannot fathom God’s ways. It would seem as if God benefits from double standards of a kind that would make even affirmative action look just. When 12 miners were killed in a West Virginia mine explosion in January 2006, no one posted a sign saying: “For God’s sake, please explain: Why 1 for 13?” Innocent children were swept away in the 2005 tsunami, too, but believers blamed natural forces, not God.
The presumption of religious belief—not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it—does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith—nor do we need it to be conservative.
Sticking It To The Stick
Sorry, I just can't help myself -- here's a link to a brilliant takedown of the skinny hate whore by Jerry Coyne, a Department of Ecology and Evolution prof at the University of Chicago.
What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any God -- the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks), that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology? According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat, knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing -- screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child -- Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"
Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it -- and showed that generations of his predecessors were misled -- would reach the top of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit. There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.
...If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the Bible -- or even religion -- to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem; and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below). Dawkins would never say -- as Coulter does -- that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible about doing unto others?
The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the partition of India? Religion, of course -- or rather, religiously inspired killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther, and countless popes.
As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error: She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.
Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.
Stunning Intelligence Failures That Led To 9/11
This site has a horrifying timeline, of notification after notification that the 9/11 attacks were about to occur...all of them ignored. Here are just a few examples, but go to the link and read the whole list, plus links to the complete 9/11 timeline:
June 4, 2001: Illegal Afghans Overheard Discussing New York City Hijacking AttackAt some point in 2000, three men claiming to be Afghans but using Pakistani passports entered the Cayman Islands, possibly illegally. [Miami Herald, 9/20/2001] In late 2000, Cayman and British investigators began a yearlong probe of these men, which will last until 9/11. [Los Angeles Times, 9/20/2001] They are overheard discussing hijacking attacks in New York City during this period. On this day, they are taken into custody, questioned, and released some time later. This information is forwarded to US intelligence. [Fox News, 5/17/2002] In late August, a letter to a Cayman radio station will allege these same men are agents of bin Laden “organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airlines.” [Miami Herald, 9/20/2001; Los Angeles Times, 9/20/2001]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden
June 13, 2001: Bin Laden Wants to Assassinate Bush with an Explosives-Filled Airplane
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak later claims that Egyptian intelligence discovers a “communiqué from bin Laden saying he wanted to assassinate President Bush and other G8 heads of state during their summit in Genoa, Italy” on this day. The communiqué specifically mentions this would be done via “an airplane stuffed with explosives.” The US and Italy are sent urgent warnings of this. [New York Times, 9/26/2001] Mubarak will claim that Egyptian intelligence officials informed American intelligence officers between March and May 2001 that an Egyptian agent had penetrated al-Qaeda. Presumably, this explains how Egypt is able to give the US these warnings. [New York Times, 6/4/2002]
Entity Tags: al-Qaeda, George W. Bush, Hosni Mubarak, Osama bin Laden
Late Summer 2001: Jordan Warns US That Aircraft Will Be Used in Major Attack Inside the US
Jordanian intelligence (the GID) makes a communications intercept deemed so important that King Abdullah’s men relay it to Washington, probably through the CIA station in Amman. To make doubly sure the message gets through it is passed through an Arab intermediary to a German intelligence agent. The message states that a major attack, code named “The Big Wedding,” is planned inside the US and that aircraft will be used. “When it became clear that the information was embarrassing to Bush administration officials and congressmen who at first denied that there had been any such warnings before September 11, senior Jordanian officials backed away from their earlier confirmations.” The Christian Science Monitor will call the story “confidently authenticated” even though Jordan has backed away from it. [International Herald Tribune, 5/21/2002; Christian Science Monitor, 5/23/2002]
Entity Tags: Jordan General Intelligence Department, Abdullah II ibn al-Hussein, Bush administration, Central Intelligence Agency
July 2001: India Warns US of Possible Terror Attacks
India gives the US general intelligence on possible terror attacks; details are not known. US government officials later will confirm that Indian intelligence had information “that two Islamist radicals with ties to Osama bin Laden were discussing an attack on the White House,” but apparently, this particular information is not included in the July general warning and is not be given to the US until two days after 9/11. [Fox News, 5/17/2002]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden
July 16, 2001: British Spy Agencies Warn al-Qaeda Is in The Final Stages of Attack in the West
British spy agencies send a report to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top officials warning that al-Qaeda is in “the final stages” of preparing an attack in the West. The prediction is “based on intelligence gleaned not just from [British intelligence] but also from US agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency,” which cooperate with the British. “The contents of the July 16 warning would have been passed to the Americans, Whitehall sources confirmed.” The report states there is “an acute awareness” that the attack is “a very serious threat.” [London Times, 6/14/2002]
Entity Tags: al-Qaeda, Tony Blair, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency
Late July 2001: Taliban Foreign Minister Tries to Warn US and UN of Huge Attack Inside the USTaliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil learns that bin Laden is planning a “huge attack” on targets inside America. The attack is imminent, and will kill thousands. He learns this from Tahir Yildash, leader of the rebel Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is allied with al-Qaeda at the time. Muttawakil sends an emissary to pass this information on to the US consul general, and another US official, “possibly from the intelligence services,” also attends the meeting. The message is not taken very seriously; one source blames this on “warning fatigue” from too many warnings. In addition, the emissary supposedly is from the Foreign Ministry, but did not say the message came from Muttawakil himself. The emissary then takes the message to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. They also fail to take the warning seriously. [Independent, 9/7/2002; Reuters, 9/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, Tahir Yildash, al-Qaeda
Late July 2001: Argentina Relays Warning to the US
Argentina’s Jewish community receives warnings of a major attack against the United States, Argentina, or France from “a foreign intelligence source.” The warning is then relayed to the Argentine security authorities. It is agreed to keep the warning secret in order to avoid panic while reinforcing security at Jewish sites in the country. Says a Jewish leader, “It was a concrete warning that an attack of major proportion would take place, and it came from a reliable intelligence source. And I understand the Americans were told about it.” Argentina has a large Jewish community that has been bombed in the past, and has been an area of al-Qaeda activity. [Forward, 5/31/2002]
Entity Tags: al-Qaeda
Late July 2001: Egypt Warns CIA of 20 al-Qaeda Operatives in US; Four Training to Fly; CIA Is Not Interested
CBS later reports, in a long story on another topic: “Just days after [Mohamed] Atta return[s] to the US from Spain, Egyptian intelligence in Cairo says it received a report from one of its operatives in Afghanistan that 20 al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas. To the Egyptians, pilots of small planes didn’t sound terribly alarming, but they [pass] on the message to the CIA anyway, fully expecting Washington to request information. The request never [comes].” [CBS News, 10/9/2002] This appears to be just one of several accurate Egyptian warnings from their informants inside al-Qaeda.
Entity Tags: al-Qaeda, Central Intelligence Agency
You Spammed The Wrong Girl
As an advice columnist and blogger, I get e-mail for a living, and I'm deluged. I answer almost every advice request I get (or, when I'm really snowed, as many as humanly possible). Every moment I spend dealing with spam is a moment I'm not spending answering my mail. And those moments add up. In other words, spammers are time and resource thieves, and nobody gets to steal from me and get away with it if I can help it.
Well, it came as a surprise yesterday when a spammer, apparently in the MLM business, not only thought he could mass-hijack others' time and e-mail boxes to increase his sales, but also gave clear contact information for his spam-ees to reach him. And reach him I did.
Since he had no problem bothering perfect strangers, surely, he has no problem with perfect strangers calling to let him know how they feel about spam. Perhaps you'll want to give him a little jingle at the numbers below (both are mainland USA numbers), or take a moment to e-mail him. You might also want to pass on this link to your friends who have, say, an opinion or two about spam.
Here's his e-mail I got Sunday morning:
Greetings :My name is Michael Eisbrener and I am sorry for the unusual approach but I acquired your email address as a person who is actively involved or is looking for an online business opportunity. I did not get your personal permission to email you.
I would be grateful if you would allow me to send you details of an opportunity that I am involved in. I did not want to send you any details until I had mailed you to seek your permission first, as experience has taught me that not all leads that I acquire are genuine Opportunity Seekers. If this is the case for you then please ignore this email as you have already been excluded from future mailing from me.
If however, it is ok to send you details of my opportunity then please visit (URL REMOVED!) and leave your information. You will see the details of my program.
I work at home full time and what I show is what is working for me. Unfortunately it doesn't work for everyone, at least not so far. It does save everyone more than they spend. Many people become only a customer.
So why not give it a try?...the information is FREE anyway!...
Just give me a chance to show you a program that will make you money in the next week and months ahead.It's easy to get started. Click my e-mail address link for one e-mail.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you very much for your time.
My highest regards,
Michael J. Eisbrener (Google search)
651-393-2838 (voicemail) or 305-421-3165 (the guy came on the line here)
mykleone@yahoo.comYou are TIRED of all opportunity e-mails? Click the remove link below and I will put you into two LARGE Global remove lists and my own personal one.
Just click REMOVE ME
Yeah, right. So, I should have to work to remove his marketing turds from the lawn of my life? Nuh-uh...especially since that's a way spammers and junk faxers know they have a "live one" at a particular address.
First, I called the 605 number. Voicemail. The 305 number gets him on the phone.
I let him know I'm, well, unhappy about receiving his spam.
"Are you in marketing?" he asks.
I tell him it's none of his business what I do. I make the point that it's unethical for him to take my time to advertise his business, to have me pay for his marketing costs. He laughs that I'm wasting my time even further and tells me "No, you're unethical."
Why am I unethical, I ask him?
"Because you claim other people are unethical."
(Well, if it isn't Staggering Genius, Inc.) I tell him that's not an explanation. I press for an explanation that actually explains something. He keeps on keeping on on why *I* am actually the unethical one.
He gives the childhood rationale that whenever you point a finger, three fingers point back at you.
And yes, he sounded like an adult male, not an 8-year-old boy.
I repeat my contention that it's wrong for him to offload his marketing costs on others, taking my time and using my e-mail address.
He again laughs that I'm wasting my time. Well, yes, in trying to reason with him. I tell him I am, at the moment, just trying to be ethical and get his side of the story. The guy says, "You have a definition of unethical that's obtuse to the world."
I doubt that. I think most people just let themselves be bullied, spammed, and otherwise taken advatage of a little more than I'm willing to let myself be. That said, I don't pick my ethical standards by popular vote.
The guy claims he only gets e-mail addresses from people who've asked for information on his site. I give him my e-mail address and tell him to send me the IP it was left from. He says he'll get back to me very soon.
The thing is, I've been list-served spammed before, and when somebody does this maliciously, they don't do it on one obscure site, and they send stuff from the nastiest sites possible -- KKK, Lyndon Larouche, and steak and lobster sites (who would think I'm some vegan, I have no idea, but there you have it). I got no slew of e-mails, only this one. You be the judge. I mean, if you don't think your notion of what's ethical is too "obtuse," like mine.
Of course, a suggestion that he's lying about where he got my e-mail address is in the first paragraph of his e-mail:
I did not get your personal permission to email you.
Again, you be the judge. If you talk to the guy or leave a message, post a comment here. And please encourage others to link to this blog item. Only by demanding accountability will anybody be accountable.
The guy e-mails me back:
In a message dated 8/13/06 10:13:19 AM, meisbrener@gmail.com writes:
Amy, I apologize. I just looked up your email address on the list I purchased from who I thought was a reputable list broker.I e-mail him back:
I do open the contents and look at the first page or so of email files to insure the data I require is there. Your list, a substantial list, is full of emails that are not substantiated with date and ip address. ONLY THE First 300 are actually usable. The entire rest of the list is just email addresses and had I taken a better look I would have deleted the entire list. Fortunately for me I sent to only a small portion. Thank you for helping me uncover a potentially serious problem.
I have deleted the list, added your email to my remove file and to two global remove lists I work with.
My highest regards,
Michael J Eisbrener
305-421-3165
It would have been nice if you'd come clean on the phone instead of suggesting I'd left a comment on your site asking you to contact me. P.S. Lying is unethical.I've been list-serve spammed before, and it's always from hate sites, never people trying to sell their services. What list service is selling my name? I want that information so I can track people who serve spammers. Please send the name and contact information.
Why do you think it's ethical at all to spam people? Your logic that my definition of unethical is "obtuse" isn't logical at all. What person wants to use their time opening their e-mail to make your marketing costs cheaper?
I'm glad I could help you figure out that this wrong, but doesn't this fall under "do unto others"? Why didn't you figure out that "cheaper and easier" doesn't translate into ethical without my help? I await your reply.
PS Are you now going to stop spamming to lists you buy as a marketing choice entirely? I'd be very interested to know.
I await your reply. -Amy Alkon
I'm still awaiting. And awaiting. Something tells me he's realized he can't just throw around illogic combined with words like "obtuse" and get away with it, at least, not with me. Since he got back pretty fast after my telephone call, and not to this e-mail, I suspect one of two things: 1. It's Sunday and he's out for the day, or 2. He doesn't have a valid answer to my question in the PS:
Are you now going to stop spamming to lists you buy as a marketing choice entirely?
Yoohoo, Mr. Eisbrener?
I'm not surprised you're not responding, but I at least deserve to know who sold you my e-mail so I can have it removed from their list...and invoice them, to boot, for using my attention as sales bait.
And let me encourage everybody: The only way people are going to stop abusing our privacy, our peace and quiet, our safety, and the rest is if we speak up when they do it. Tell them we refuse to be abused.
Hey, spammers: there's a reason I pay for an Internet connection and maintain an e-mail address and it isn't so I can play a really fun game trying to pick my personal e-mail out from the pyramid schemes, Nigerian 419s, etc.
Okay, this is just one guy and one little e-mail. But, maybe if he's chastened, and he tells two spam-happy marketing friends, and so on, and so on...
P.S. Interestingly, the guy's IP address resolves to Medellin, Columbia.
And then there was a letter to the editor from a Michael J. Eisbrener in Medillin, Columbia, in some Christian journal.
Yet his phone number has a Miami area code. His voicemail area code is from St. Paul, Minnesota. I find this a bit odd. Perhaps his phone bounces to Colombia. If so, I hope it costs him when people from the USA call. Just a wee lesson for our pal, who's probably a bit surprised one of his marks had such an easy time reversing the charges on spam.
You know how it goes, Mr. E -- "whenever you point a piece of"...junk e-mail, three pieces of junk e-mail (or junk phone calls) point back at you."
Or something like that.
Random Acts Of Blindness
In the latest Advice Goddess column I posted, a guy's had two "horrible, abusive marriages," and wants to know how he can learn to trust; specifically, to trust his new girlfriend. Responsibility for one's past choices, anyone? Here's my reply:
There are things that are beyond a person’s control, like when you’re sitting in an easy chair in your living room and you die in a plane crash. Or maybe you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, and a horrible, abusive marriage falls on you like the house from “The Wizard of Oz.” Twice.Chances are, you put more thought into what you’re having for lunch than who you’re supposedly having for forever: “Did my steak have leg room? Did my lettuce have a happy childhood? Did my chicken have meaningful conversations and a chance to read the classics?” After you’re done with the important questions, there’s just enough time to ask, “Hi, I barely know you, but will you marry me?”
Of course, knowing somebody well is no guarantee. People change. They get more conservative, or less conservative, or convex in the places they used to be concave. But, beyond the handful who go barking mad at 29, most people don’t change a whole lot. In other words, it’s unlikely you married some sweet, gentle flower who woke up one morning a raging, plate-throwing psycho. If you never knew what hit you -- until you started picking the Wedgwood out of your left cornea -- it’s probably because you never really looked at what you were getting into. Even now, you write about your marriages like they just happened to you, and paint yourself as a victim -- very convenient, since “blaming the victim” is considered heresy on par with using the flag to clean the bathtub.
But often, the victim does bear some responsibility. Take me, for example: I used to live in a pretty isolated section of downtown New York City, just past a big UPS garage. I had a rule that I’d only take Greenwich Street home when the UPS guys were there loading and unloading. After moving to California, I came back to visit and lah-dee-dah wandered down Greenwich late one night -- followed, unbeknownst to me, by some creep who ran up behind me and helped himself to a big grope. I screamed and thrashed, I ran, I was fine. Did I tell myself I was a victim? No, I told myself I was a moron -- and resolved to never again meander around New York City with my street smarts dangling off some palm tree back home.
Your problem isn’t learning to trust, it’s learning that trust shouldn’t be thrown around like birdseed. Figure out what your standards are, then put time and effort into determining whether a particular person measures up. Don’t get sidetracked looking for the good in people, since you’re unlikely to get divorced because your partner is witty, attractive, and inventive in bed. Instead, look for the bad and the ugly, and decide whether you can live with them before you let a woman into your life. Don’t make excuses: “She’s great except that her last 12 relationships broke up after she cheated on the guys with their best friends. This time will be different.” Yeah, sure it will -- because no two so-called best friends will have sex with your girlfriend in exactly the same way.
The entire column is here.
Real Or Faked?
This photo and more at SultanKnish. Don't miss the latest -- Charlie Sheen's giant, life-threatening head over Hezbollah and Al Gore's death breath on Lebanon. Real or faked...you be the judge!
Here are a few less amusing doctored photos.
Dearbornistan: Muslims In The U.S.
I've asked my dad to send me a copy or two of the Detroit area Muslim hate rags. In the mean time, if you want to have your illusions dashed about how Muslim Americans are just one more flavor in this big melting pot of ours, get a load of this undercover work by Debbie Schlussel at a rally at the Hezbollah hangout, the Bint Jebail Cultural Center, "in the heart of Islamic America" --Dearborn, Michigan:
Sunday's event was no different than the usual Bint Jebail hate fare, minus the bloated, pandering federal officials. It was a Hezbollah rally filled with anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric, as well as prayers for the Mujahideen and the Martyrs. What I saw and heard should be must viewing for all Americans.But you didn't read any of it in the whitewash AP story by a reporter who apparently doesn't speak or understand Arabic--the language of most of the speeches (and probably not English, either, since he couldn't even get the name of the club right). Not that Arabic fluency was necessary. It was quite clear that this was a modern day Nazi hate-fest.
While AP reported that there were 1,000 people in attendance, this was the one time when the mainstream media under-reported numbers at an extremist Muslim rally. There were easily 2,500-3,000 Jew-hating, anti-American bodies in the room that has a maximum capacity of 1,000. No fire marshals, though. The Dearborn police were guarding these Hezbollah supporters in a car outside the venue. The fire was reserved for the speeches.
Among the many speakers, several things were in common: multiple statements about the Jews, cheers for the total destruction of and end to Israel, and support for Hezbollah, the Mujahideen, and the Martyrs.
A very religious Islamic event, I sat with the many bitter-looking, hijab-encrusted women in black (the women were relegated to separate seating in the back). Every imam of every Shi'ite mosque in town was there, white turban et al. That includes Imams Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America and Mohammed Ali Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom--heads of the two largest mosques in North America. (I've written extensively about Elahi's connections to Iran and Hezbollah.) Also there, Imam Husham Al-Hussainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Institute. At a Dearborn rally in memory of Yasser Arafat, he held a poster of his hero, Ayatollah Khomeini. Both Qazwini and Al-Hussainy were hugged by President Bush in media photo ops when he came to town upon Iraq's liberation.
Haj Mohammed Turfe (AP incorrectly called him Mohammed "Torfah"), Founding Chairman of the Bint Jebail Cultural Center, gleefully and repeatedly spoke of how "only a few thousand Jews will survive Armageddon." This mantra, repeated often throughout the event, got raucous, deafening applause and cheers. Well, for once--I thought--extremist Muslims have respect for Christianity...when they can twist it to suit their fascist hopes and dreams.
Dr. Ali Ajami, Lebanese Consul General in Detroit, delivered a fire-and-brimstone anti-Semitic tirade that would make Father Coughlin blush. An open supporter of Hezbollah, sources say he was installed in the position by Hezbollah officials in the Lebanese and Syrian governments. Incredibly, he is constantly feted by Department of Homeland Security officials.
Then, there was Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi. First, he said that Americans and Jews are "diseased," among other attacks. He sang a prayer for the Martyrs and Mujahideen--to the fervent applause of the attendees. He urged those in attendance not to buy new clothes for the next year, and to instead donate the money to "them, our brothers and sisters." It was quite clear he was speaking of Hezbollah (giving money to it is a violation of U.S. law). Incredibly, this Islamic David Duke is still a regular columnist for The Detroit News, thanks to editorial page editor Nolan Finley.
Throughout the speeches there were cheers and statements of support from the crowd for Hezbollah and against Jews. Some of the loudest cheers came for the repeated mantra, "Pray for the Speedy Dismantling of the Jewish State." It was a take on the business card of extremist Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, a surprise speaker at the event. But his card says, "Pray For the Speedy Peaceful Dismantling of the Zionist State." His audience was not interested in the "peaceful" part, apparently.
Sure, there are moderate Muslims. Again, unfortunately, most are as vocal as bunnies.
The Baja Vote
Ken Layne's got mine. He was the one who suggested relocating all the Israeli Jews to Baja. They grew oranges in the desert once. Why can't they do it again? Here's what Layne says:
Here's the deal: that whole Israel/Arab thing is getting very ugly and a lot more people will die before Israel wins. Sure, Israel always wins, but what about the hassle? What about the lives lost, and the economic mess, and the general bummer of living in a Death Zone?
Does Israel really want to be the only functioning democracy in the Maniac Middle East, forever? And endlessly have to haggle and fight with the poor, backward dictatorships surrounding it? Hell, Israel doesn't even have oil. Other than the historical thing, there's not much to the Holy Land beyond desert, suicide bombers and some nice beaches.That's why I'm asking you both to consider my big idea of moving Israel to the lovely and sparsely populated Mexican state of Baja California Sur. Presidente Fox, you're the first democratically elected leader of Mexico, and most Mexican Jews voted for you. Prime Minister Sharon, you're an old warrior who needs a vacation and a bucket of Corona beer on the beach. Israel has money and smarts. Mexico has a bright future but could use a few hundred billion in foreign investment.
Here's what Mark Twain had to say about Ottoman Empire-era Palestine in his 1869 book, The Innocents Abroad:
Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective — distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.Baja California Sur is the southernmost chunk of the California peninsula, a thin and sparsely populated strip of desert surrounded by the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean. An online travel guide describes it like this:
The northern part of the state is typically hot and extremely arid, with vegetation typified by desert shrubs and cactus .... Baja California Sur is largely unpopulated and has the least number of residents of any Mexican state. The population is primarily mestizo — people with a mix of Native American and European ancestry — and many people are recent immigrants. The state has virtually no indigenous population, and only a tiny minority speak an indigenous language.Perfect. The Israelis could all take a sleeping pill on the plane and wake up in a place that looks much like home — minus the angry Palestinians and maniac bombers. The Palestinians could awake to a land without Jews...and without any sort of modern infrastructure or economy. (Happy Israeli Arabs would be welcomed in the nuevo Promised Land, just as they are welcomed in Los Angeles.)
Lower Baja California has only 420,000 residents, most in the capital city of La Paz and the booze resorts of San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas. But north of La Paz, it's pretty much uninhabited desert, just like British-controlled Palestine before the Zionists arrived and made the harsh land blossom with fruits, vegetables, software companies and night clubs.
Unlike the Holy Land and all its complications, Lower Baja has never been a center of anything but piracy and tequila binging. Francis Drake was one of the many pirates to land on Baja, long thought to be an island. The Spanish Jesuits finally made a few permanent settlements. There wasn't even a paved road from the Mexican mainland until a few decades ago. And check it out, Ariel: it's said that Sephardic Jews came to Baja to escape the freakin' Inquisition back in the 15th Century. (There's a 1973 book about this, but I can't find a copy.)
Baja California Sur has 46,920 square miles. Israel has 10,840 square miles — including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Surely President Fox could spare a chunk of his least populated state for the sake of peace.
Would Israel rather be forever surrounded by hostile Islamic fundamentalists and progress-hating dictators or be a day's drive or one-hour flight from Southern California and all the friendly Jews and non-militant Muslims in Los Angeles?
Vicente, your lovely nation has a healthy Jewish community. Why not sell a piece of Lower Baja to a people who will pump billions into the region? The Jewish homeland will do more than make a thriving nation from this land — they'll bring a democratic model for all of Mexico.
We all know the fighting in Israel is never going to stop. And, with the high value for human life that's supposed to be part of the Jewish religion, is an old wall with a bunch of gum wrappers with wishes stuck in it in Jerusalem, and all the rest, really worth all the children who will be killed defending it?
Sleek On The Outside
Scary On The Inside
Pimp My Rights
Whore your way to a new car! Sorry, before you get too excited, only police officers need apply.
These days, the LAPD is not just jailing men for soliciting prostitution (which, in my book, shouldn't be a crime). The mere suspicion of soliciting a prostitute allows the cops to seize your car -- under a December 2002 ordinance allowing the municipally-sponsored theft.
That's right...you don't even have to be convicted -- simply suspected:
That accusation can be based on the vaguest of exchanges with the "trick task force" member."You just know," a 38-year-old officer identified only as Heather told the Los Angeles Daily News. "You look. You see. You smell it."
Great. That's how I like my rights -- dependent on "Heather's" hair-trigger, nasal-twitch intuition. The story continues:
Once seized, vehicles are held by the city until a civil hearing is held. In this hearing, the traditional rules of evidence and burden of proof do not apply. Instead, the city only needs to prove its case with a "preponderance of the evidence," not establish its case "beyond a reasonable doubt," in order to keep the car. The city attorney then will offer to sell back the car to its owner through a settlement offer. If the settlement is not accepted, the city will auction the car and keep the proceeds. The Los Angeles Police Department plans operate its car seizure sting at least once a month through October.
An LA Daily News article by Susan Abrams says more than 500 cars have been impounded since the city attorney initiated the program in 2003:
The city has made $325,000 in buybacks, though the city attorney's office emphasizes that the program is meant to deter solicitation, not earn money.Even with the auto seizure program, even as solicitations occur on the Internet or over cell phones, Heather says there are still men who would rather pick up women on the street.
Only twice has she worked a task force when she was unsuccessful. Some officers joke about those moments, of the times when a john offers only $15, Heather said.
"Sometimes you feel a little self-conscious walking back and forth," she said. "It's a tad bit hard on the ego."
And her husband won't watch her work on a task force, even though she's invited him.
"He says, 'No, I don't want to know'," she says.
Heather became a police officer 11 years ago. She grew up in the Valley and had worked as a waitress for eight years. When she attended a seminar and listened to a female LAPD officer talk about the job, she just about signed up on the spot.
I would say prostitution is a much more honest job than Heather's, wouldn't you? It's your body. Why shouldn't it be legal to sell it if you want to? Sell sex. Sell your organs. Why should the state get to regulate you as commerce?
P.S. Rocky Delgadillo is the city attorney, LA residents, and was when the ordinance was enacted. He ran unopposed in 2005. If you're for personal freedom and respect for civil rights, you should probably see to it that he doesn't have your vote next time around -- and that there's somebody around to oppose him in 2009.
In the mean time, as long as this Kelo-for-cars ordinance is in place, have your hookers delivered if you'd like to avoid an unexpected need for new transporation.
A Really Moving Story About A Girl Finding Her Birth Mother
There's a line I like, "My tears stuck in their little ducts, refusing to be jerked," by film critic Peter Stack. There's a lot of cheesy sentiment in the world. It isn't often I read something that moves me. This did. It's an article by Denise Kersten in the Washingtonian about being adopted and discovering a letter from her birth mother in her mother's file cabinet:
The envelope was made of almost translucent yellow paper. It was unsealed but as crisp as if it had never been opened. In a small hand, someone had written the name "Erica" on the front. I knew right away it was for me. I closed the filing-cabinet drawer where I'd found it and carried it up to my room.Turning the letter over and over, examining the delicate handwriting and the floral design on the back, I remembered a conversation I'd had with my mom years before. I was complaining about my name, which I'd never liked. She told me she and my dad had almost called me Erica. She asked if I would have preferred it.
"Definitely," I said, not questioning why they had considered that name.
Now I knew why.
I often went into my parents' study when they left my two brothers and me alone. I had an insatiable curiosity, especially when it came to things written or said about me. Teachers' comments, standardized-test scores, doctors' records--all the things I wasn't supposed to see--thrilled me. While my brothers, Jerry and Petie, sat absorbed by the TV, I'd dig through my mom's hiding places, finding old photographs, greeting cards, documents, letters. A mahogany filing cabinet in the study of our Milwaukee home contained the most interesting items, but it was usually locked.
One file in the cabinet drew my attention. It was labeled "adoption" in my mom's schoolteacher handwriting.
I've always known I was adopted and always wanted to know more about my birth mother. Perhaps that's why I went through my parents' papers--I had a sense I would uncover something. The adoption file held neatly arranged documents about my brothers and me, each of us adopted from different families. Among my papers was a data sheet that listed my birth parents' ethnicities, ages, and physical attributes along with the social worker's assessment of their intelligence.
At age nine or ten, I'd stare at that white sheet as if it held the secrets of the universe. My birth mother was 22 when she had me, it said. She had brown hair and brown eyes. I have blond hair and blue eyes--in high school my nickname was Inga because of my Nordic looks. On paper I sound a lot more like my birth father, who was reported to be tall, blond, and fair-skinned. Yet I always identified more with her than with him. Years later, I have only a dim memory of his description, while I can still see the words typed about hers.
As a child I'd wander around the grocery store, my school, the shopping mall looking for women who fit her description. I felt like the lost baby bird asking, "Are you my mother?" In my imagination she was keeping tabs on me by playing a peripheral role in my life. The school nurse, family friends, even an aunt became suspects. I played out elaborate dramas in my mind, imagining a shocking reunion.
The mystery of my birth mother dominated my early adolescence, when I felt I had a personal relationship with her. I attributed all sorts of positive qualities to her, believing she'd fill some gap in my angst-ridden teen world. The more I argued with my mom about wanting to stay out late or not doing the dishes, the more convinced I became that my birth mother would understand me.
When I opened the letter, at age 11, a whole world unfolded. Suddenly this mysterious person who had given birth to me had a voice and a personality. I read about her pregnancy and her reasons for giving me up. I discovered that she had happy memories of me.
"I really enjoyed watching your hands and feet move across my stomach," she wrote. "Sometimes if I tickled your feet, you'd kick back at me. Lots of times you'd wake me up in the middle of the night with all your squirming and kicking. I was always glad when you did that. Most of the time I'd turn on the light and watch until you quieted down again."
Because I knew from the documents that she was 22 when she had me, I assumed she'd been devastated when she learned she was pregnant. But she wrote: "Most people think that I must have been upset and unhappy when I found out for sure that I was pregnant. I guess in some ways I was. I was worried about what to do and what would happen to me. But at the same time I was awed and pleased and a little proud to think of you inside me."
She wrote of the difficulty she'd had in giving me away and mentioned that there were others who had thought about keeping me. These others--my birth father, her parents--became characters in my drama, people who had seen me and perhaps loved me.
One day on a school bus, two kids in my school--one of whom was adopted--were arguing. As the fight heated up, the other child lashed out, "You're adopted! That means your mother didn't want you."
"No," I butted in. "That means his parents picked him instead of just getting stuck with him."
That's how I resolved the issue in my mind. I don't think I suffered much from feelings of rejection because I had such loving adoptive parents. Knowing they'd gone through the long adoption process to get me made me feel especially wanted. I was able to focus on being chosen by them instead of on being abandoned by my birth mother.
At the same time, I wondered why my birth mother hadn't kept me. In the letter she wiped away whatever feelings of rejection I had. That letter in the yellow envelope became my most treasured possession, and over the years I'd take it out every now and then to remember what she told me.
What's always been most important is one of the first lines: "The thing that I most want you to know is that I love you."
I was certain she'd want me to find her. I've seen television shows in which someone tries to find his or her birth parent but is shunned or ignored. Because of her letter, I never worried about that.
Even more, I felt compelled to find her so I could respond to one of the last things she wrote, in handwriting looser and messier than the rest: "Oh, Erica, I hope that you have a full, happy life and that you approve of my decision and don't think too badly of me."
I could feel the pain she'd felt at having to hand over her newborn to strangers, and the guilt she'd begun to experience. I wanted to tell her that I'd had a wonderful childhood and that I was grateful for her sacrifice.
"I think of what it would have been like to keep you," she wrote. "I think of how happy I'd have been the first time you smiled at me. But deep down I wouldn't have been satisfied, knowing I wasn't giving you the best start in life I could have."
The rest of her piece is at the link above. Worth reading. Mind your mascara, though.
When Life Gives You Lemons
Make propaganda. A New York Times editorial about how Bush's early warning about the London plot made for a real PR opportunity:
It comes like a punch to the gut, at times like these, when America's leaders blatantly use the nation's trauma for political gain. We never get used to this. It never feels like business as usual.On Wednesday, when the administration already knew that British agents were rounding up suspects in what they believed was a plot to blow up planes en route to the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney had a telephone interview with reporters to discuss the defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in a Democratic primary. Cheney went off on a rather rambling disquisition, but its main point was clear: In rejecting Lieberman, who supported the war in Iraq, the Democrats were encouraging "the Al Qaeda types." Within the Democratic ranks, the vice president added, "there's a significant body of opinion that wants to go back - I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in."
The man who beat Lieberman, Ned Lamont, lives in Greenwich, a suburb full of commuters who work in New York high-rise buildings. They are completely aware of the way international terrorism can come crashing down on an ordinary family, leaving the survivors stunned and bereft. A dozen of their neighbors died at the World Trade Center. They will never be able to go back to a "pre-9/11 mind-set."
But that did not seem to deter Lieberman from scoring a cheap sound bite on Thursday. Leaving Iraq, as Lamont advocates, "will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England," he said. "It will strengthen them and they will strike again."
Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan.
Is it just me, or didn't public service used to have a little more public and a little less self in the service?
The Ape's Ass View
but a fundamentalist Republican senator.
The U.S. is going backward about as fast as we moved forward. Our nation of primitive religious fanatics lags behind in the world in grasping genetics and accepting evolution writes Ker Than at LiveScience.com, about a piece in the August 11 issue of Science:
A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say.
“American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.
The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005. Adults in each country were asked whether they thought the statement “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” was true, false, or if they were unsure.
The study found that over the past 20 years:
* The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent.
* The percentage overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48 to 39 percent, however.
* And the percentage of adults who were unsure increased, from 7 to 21 percent.Of the other countries surveyed, only Turkey ranked lower, with about 25 percent of the population accepting evolution and 75 percent rejecting it. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and France, 80 percent or more of adults accepted evolution; in Japan, 78 percent of adults did.
...Politics is also contributing to America's widespread confusion about evolution, the researchers say. Major political parties in the United States are more willing to make opposition to evolution a prominent part of their campaigns to garner conservative votes—something that does not happen in Europe or Japan.
Miller says that it makes about as much sense for politicians to oppose evolution in their campaigns as it is for them to advocate that the Earth is flat and promise to pass legislation saying so if elected to office.
"You can pass any law you want but it won't change the shape of the Earth," Miller told LiveScience.
Morons. And they don't even know enough to be embarrassed.
Sleazy Republican Operative Guns For Murtha
It wasn't long ago Murtha was one of those Democrats the Republicans loved to love. Now sleazy Ken Mehlman is using a retracted story to attack Murtha, whom he says "who claims America is more dangerous than Iran and North Korea." From a post on Think Progress:
Mehlman is referencing a 6/25/06 story in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which reported that Murtha said he believed the “American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran.”Three days later, the paper retracted the report. Murtha was actually citing an international public opinion poll, not expressing his own views. But why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good smear?
Oddly, the story can no longer be found on the paper's site. Neither can the retraction. I searched Murtha on the Sun-Sentinel site and only this story, "Squad members threatened to kill me, soldier testifies" from The Washington Post comes up.
Perhaps The Brits Were Too Tolerant
Mary Ann Sieghart writes in the London Times on July 20, 2006 of an "honor killing" of a girl in England named Samaira Nazir. Nazir's own brother and cousin cut her throat and stabbed the 25-year-old girl repeatedly because she wanted to marry a man of her choice. Her father was reportedly involved in the attack:
The details were particularly horrific. Her mother stood and watched as she was murdered — how could any mother do that? Her two nieces, aged just 2 and 4, were forced to witness their father stabbing her, close enough to be spattered by her blood — how could any parent do that? She screamed for help and neighbours saw her blood-soaked arm emerge briefly from the front door, but their attempts to intervene were rebuffed.
Samaira Nazir Of course, grotesque acts of violence happen in all countries. The West is not free from sin. But what sets this type of murder apart is that the perpetrators believe that what they are doing is morally justified. In another (dis)honour killing in 2001, Faqir Mohammed stabbed his daughter 20 times in the head and stomach. He told police: “According to the law it was not right, but according to religion it was right.”
Of course, many Muslims will be horrified by that remark; they see honour killings as positively un-Islamic. But it is peculiarly galling for Westerners constantly to be dubbed “immoral” by Muslims, to be treated as if Muslims occupy the moral high ground while the rest of us swim in a sewer of moral decadence. In fact, many Muslims’ attitudes to the women in their families, even if they fall short of violence, are to most of us deeply immoral.
Ever since slavery was abolished, it has been considered morally abhorrent for one human being to own another. It is just as morally abhorrent for a father, husband or brother to behave as if he owns an adult woman. He has no right to determine whom she marries, what she wears on the street or how she chooses to live her life. He certainly has no right to kill her.
Yes, there are flaws in the Western liberal world, too. But it is not as if we are strikingly more tolerant of activities that Muslims consider decadent. Non-Muslim Britons have roughly the same attitudes to licentiousness as do Muslims. Some 54 per cent of Britons find public displays of drunkenness unacceptable, according to our recent poll, along with 57 per cent of Muslims. And only slightly more Muslims (29 per cent) than the general public (21 per cent) say the same about women wearing low-cut tops and short skirts.
Broadly, with only a few exceptions, ours is a law-abiding society in which we tolerate difference and get on with our lives while trying to behave well towards each other. So why, in that case, are Muslims so negative towards us? We hear a lot about Islamophobia, but to judge from a survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, British Muslims are far harsher on the rest of us than we are on them — and they are far more critical of us than are Muslims living in Germany, France or Spain.
Pew gave both Muslims and non-Muslims a list of positive and negative characteristics and asked which applied to each other. Between half and two thirds of British Muslims claimed that Westerners were selfish, arrogant, violent, greedy and immoral. Even Pakistanis living in Pakistan were less likely to say this than British Muslims, and German, French and Spanish Muslims had a markedly less jaundiced view of Westerners.
Meanwhile, British non-Muslims were among the least likely of all Westerners in the countries surveyed to attribute those negative characteristics to Muslims. We were also among the most likely to say that Muslims were devout, honest, generous and tolerant.
It is both remarkable and heartwarming that non-Muslim Britons are prepared to be so open and appreciative to a community that has such a censorious view of us. For if anyone deserves to have a grievance, it is surely non-Muslims whose generosity is not being reciprocated. Forget Islamophobia for a moment: why does no one ever complain about Britannophobia?
Bombing Us Back To The Middle Ages
"Threat level red at London Heathrow."
I came home from dinner late last night and heard on CNN there was a "major terrorist plot" foiled at London Heathrow -- a huge worldwide hub for flights, that moves 186,000 people a day. The plot, the CNN anchor says, was apparently to bring down flights while in the air with bombs in hand luggage, causing a major loss of life.
The more modern the world gets, the harder these barbarians work to destroy it. Where are the "moderate Muslims" we sometimes hear about? Are their mouths sewn shut? Their jaws wired together? I don't hear anybody speaking up against primitivity and murder plots by these savages.
CNN's Richard Quest, via phone from Los Angeles, told the anchor that it's likely passengers, in the near future and possibly more, will only be able to take on a wallet, prescription drugs, and maybe baby formula. Women may have to taste the baby formula for it to be allowed on the plane.
Suddenly, it looks like an even bigger mistake that we were fucking around in Iraq instead of focusing on Al Qaeda.
MORE, from Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer:
In June 1995, U.S. and Filipino authorities uncovered a plot very similar to the one revealed Thursday in the U.K.In that plot, called the “Bojinka Plot,” bombs were to be placed aboard 11 jumbo jets and detonated by timing devices as the planes flew over the Pacific Ocean, killing an estimated 4,000 people.
Most of the jets were to be American carriers and most of the dead would have been Americans.
The bombs were small, using a Casio watch as a timer and contact lens bottles filled with nitroglycerine. They were to be secreted behind the wall panels in the plane's lavatory.
The bombs would have been timed to go off over a number of hours to heighten the terror.
The plan, also called the “Day of Hate,” was conceived by Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, and his uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.
Only a fire in Yousef's Manila apartment thwarted it. Mohammed later modified the plan, took it to Osama bin Laden, and it became the blueprint for the 9/11 attacks.
"Day of Hate," huh? How about "Day of Murder"? In the words, spoken on Al Jazeera, of Dr. Wafa Sulfan, a Syrian American psychologist:
"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."
From the Wikipedia entry on Wafa Sultan for those who think anti-Americanism is the root of the violence:
Sultan revealed to the Times that she is working on a book to be called The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster, and says she was shocked into secularism by the 1979 atrocities committed by the Muslim Brotherhood against innocent Syrian people, including the machine-gun assassination of her professor in her classroom in front of her eyes at the University of Aleppo where she was a medical student. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."
Here's an excerpt of Sultan's Al Jazeera debate with Dr. Ahmad Bin Muhasmmad, an Alegerian professor of religious politics. And a more recent reminder that they aren't just blowing us up.
Anti-Vaccination Idiots Endanger Us All
From a Felicia D. Stoler story at ABC.com:
It started as a self-sacrificing trip to Romania to perform missionary work at an orphanage.But when a rural Indiana family returned home in 2005, the voyage ended in a horrible twist: Thirty-four people in the West Lafayette area came down with measles, a highly infectious disease brought home from Romania by the family's teenage daughter, who hadn't been vaccinated against it.
Although she wasn't feeling well, the girl attended a church function, where several unvaccinated members of the community became exposed to her germs. (Her family has asked that its name be withheld for privacy reasons.)
The family's story highlights a growing concern, according to a report published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Although vaccines are designed to protect those most vulnerable to infections — children — an increasing fear of vaccines could make more towns ripe for the spread of measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as mumps and whooping cough, also known as pertussis.
Why do some people choose not to vaccinate their kids? In 1998, the Lancet, a British medical journal, published an article that claimed that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine caused autism in children. The article has since been retracted, but the worry has remained.
As a result, even though vaccines are required for school attendance, many parents have opted out, claiming that vaccination violates their personal or religious beliefs. It appears this view is especially prevalent among parents who home-school their children. And this, in turn, puts children and their communities at a growing risk of spreading preventable epidemics.
"Most parents today have never seen the physical and emotional devastation caused by vaccine-preventable diseases and have a skewed view of the perceived risks associated with vaccines versus the actual risks of the diseases the vaccines are designed to prevent," said Dr. Gary L. Freed, chairman of the U.S. National Vaccine Advisory Committee and director of the Pediatrics and Child Health Evaluation and Research unit at the University of Michigan Healthcare System.
Some Are Less Demure About It Than Others
A friend snapped a photo of one of my cars' relatives. (Full disclosure: I only get about 66 or 67 mpg on the highway.)
Do You Buy Stolen Property?
Don't be too quick to say no. You do if you're a woman who carries a counterfeit handbag. Now, the day I pay hundreds of dollars for some piece of nylon crap that says Prada on my back is probably the day I start believing in god and get strapped to an elevated cot.
That said, I'm always shocked when women I know -- especially writer women who value their copyrights -- give the big middle finger to Miuccia Prada's or Dolce and Gabbana's by buying cheap counterfeits of their bags.
Sure, handbags by these people cost several arms and five legs in the store. And it's these designers' right to sell their work for as high a price as they can get. You don't like it, don't buy it. But, in the future, do think twice about stealing it. Here's an excerpt from an article in the Maine Times by Giselle Goodman:
Many people who knowingly buy fake bags don't know much about the dark side of their purchase."Most people think its a victimless crime," said Michelle Moore, media spokeswoman for the IACC. "They think it's the big brand that suffers. The bigger problem is they don't see what they do as giving money to support something they would never give money to support."
Meaning, studies done by the IACC have tracked the money brought in by counterfeiters to drug rings, terrorism groups and sweat shops.
"It does seem like a Catch 22," she said. "There is such a demand, everybody wants (the latest handbag). But there's no reason why, as a society, that we need to value materialism over what is right."
Of course, the hilarious thing to me about wearing Louis Vuitton and the rest is that it doesn't scream "I have style" or "I'm rich" as much as it screams "I'M A LABEL WHORE!" and "I don't have self-esteem, I have 'I bought really expensive goods'-esteem." Oh yeah, and then there's "As a consumer, I'm really a pushover."
Bullshit Not Only Walks, But Tangos
One of the many e-mails I answer that don't make it into my column. First the original, fresh from trailer-town -- although the writer would surely be the last to know:
Hello,Next, a letter from some guy she apparently showed her e-mail to me before or after sending it:
I am a single 20 year old mother and 2 years ago I dated a man 20+ years older than myself. He wasn't married, he didn't have an estranged wife, or even a girlfriend. He was just significantly older than me. The public reaction to our relationship was incredible, no one approved. Least of all my mother who I believe had a crush on him at the time.
After a few months I broke up with him. Not because I saw anything wrong with him (to this day he was the best boyfriend I ever had) but I couldn't take the disapproval. It seemed as if everyone judged by the age difference that he was taking advantage of this young sweet innocent little lamb of a girl. 18 I was, but inexperienced little innocent looking for a father figure I was not!
I would be railed upon for hours about how I shouldn't be with this man, "He'll cheat on you", "He's taking advantage of you", "He will get you pregnant and leave you", etc, etc, etc. Worst case scenario scare tactics to get me away from him. They worked in the sense that I got tired of all the shit getting flung at me and broke up with him.
Almost immediately I took up with a fellow my age that met with public approval and guess what? I got pregnant and he left me. (Not a big concern, I have a stable career, resources, and I am more than capable of raising my daughter. Unlike many mothers my age I am not working 9-5 at a McBurger to provide for my child. As disappointing as the situation is, a deadbeat dad isn't the blow to my life that it would be to others. I count my blessings often.)
Funny how no one batted an eye lash when this went down but were outraged and my simply being with an older man!
Well, time goes by and since we run in the same social circles we began to spend time together again. After testing the waters, we found that we are still interested in one another. Because of the public response to our relationship last time we have been seeing each other secretly. It's not frequent, but I enjoy the time I spend with him.
As much as I HATE the term, the best way to describe the relationship is "friends with benefits". Uggg, I wish there was another way I could put that. I am not interested in seriously dating anyone, although everyone around me is eager to see me dive headfirst into the dating pool. I enjoy what we have. I am not chomping at the bit to get married and I don't see any reason to go from jackass boyfriend to jackass boyfriend at this point in my life. I have someone I am comfortable with and care about. He treats me with respect and seems to care for me as well. And, yes, I enjoy sleeping with him from time to time. No longer term pressure just......this. And as long as no one knows, no one can give a shit.
I guess I just want someone to confirm that this is OK. I'm happy with this. I begin to wonder after a while that there is something wrong with me that I see this kind of situation so differently for everyone else around me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings. I pray that some of this makes some kind of sense. Writing is not my strong suit.
- The Sadder but Wiser Girl?
PS - While it is a secret now (god forbid) someone may find out one day, and I can't help but wonder how it would be best handled. I wouldn't want to make the same mistake twice and give up something I consider good for me simply because it doesn't fly well with the popularity polls. Not that I plan to tell anyone at all, but luck favors the prepared.
Dear Ms. Alkon,
I wrestled with whether to write this letter to you, but out of concern for accuracy and fear that you might not be able to smell the bullsh*t surrounding the letter to which I refer, you might inadvertently give advice that could be the launch-point for further disaster for one of your advice seekers.
I am a close and long-term friend of a young girl/woman (and her family) who just wrote a letter to you, basically asking for your permission to date an “older man”. She let me read the letter before she sent it to you and I was amazed at how she related what she considered to be the facts surrounding her question. Maybe I am mistaken and you or your people would have been able to discern the truth between her lines all by yourselves, but I feel compelled to walk you through. I cannot bear to see this girl and her family go through more insanity “supported” by an advice columnist’s unenlightened recommendations. I will take on “Sadder But Wiser Girl’s” misrepresentations point by point.
The “20+ years older” man is in fact 27 years older than she is. He was not only living with the mother of his two little children at the time he seduced “Sadder But Wiser Girl”, but introduced what turned out to be his common-law wife to everyone as his wife. So as far as everyone knew, he was married. After many years together, Mr. Older Man only just moved into a separate apartment last month. It should be noted that Mr. Older Man offered his services to SBWG’s mother as a “carpool dad” 3 years ago when “SBWG” was only (newly) 17 and living at home with her mother. That is how he wormed his way into position to groom this young girl.
SBWG ‘s mother was extremely upset when she found out that he had been sneaking her out of the house late at night to have sex at a local public building to which he had after hours access. It was not because her mother “had a crush on him” (not sure who came up with that one). SBWG’s mother was upset because this man revealed himself to be an untrustworthy sleaze-bag. The truth is, he is a 47 year old alcoholic. He works in a casino on the outskirts of town. He has a long history of preying on young, just barely legal girls. Probably because actual adult women smell his crap a mile away and will have nothing to do with him.
After a few weeks, HE broke it off with HER. He was sniffing around another young thing at the time and lost interest in SBWG. SBWG was devastated and rebounded into a relationship with a random young man whom she paraded in front of Mr. Older Man trying to make him jealous. He wasn’t. SBWG got pregnant by this random young man almost immediately (within 6 weeks). Yet another illustration that this girl is not making good decisions.
SBWG states that “no one batted an eye lash when all this went down”. That could not have been further from the truth. This situation caused quite a high-Richter shake up in many lives within her circle of family and friends. The fact that she is so incredibly disconnected from the monumental amount of effort that it has taken for every one to adjust to and support her through the situation is appalling. She received no small amount of financial, emotional and material assistance from everyone who knew her, especially her long-suffering mother whom she often derides behind her back while asking her for favors even now.
The baby’s father did not leave her. She left him, because Mr. Older Man suddenly decided he wanted to sleep with her again.
SBWG is Not in a stable career. She has had 8 jobs in the last 18 months or so. Taco Bell and Wal-Mart were two of them. She is presently on probation at her current job because she is behaving so irresponsibly. The only reason she hasn’t been fired yet is because the managers are worried for her baby’s welfare. She doesn’t have a car anymore because she neglected basic maintenance and blew the engine. She lives rent free with her baby’s father’s parents who took her in because she lost her subsidized apartment though her own actions and they were worried, again, for the baby’s welfare. SBWG is amazingly immature and despite her proclamations that she is “more than capable of raising her daughter”, she clearly is not. I’ll spare you the messy list of reasons why.
SBWG did not “run in the same circles” as Mr. Older Man. She had to actively insert herself into his circle and, more importantly, between him and the newest 19-20 year old he was recently dating/sleeping with. I doubt that this new girl is aware of SBWG and Mr. Older Man’s rekindled relationship-on-the-sneak.
“Friends with benefits” means she listens to a lot of Alanis Morrisette. It also means that Mr. Older Man has convinced her that for him to be able to have sex with her while he stays otherwise available to “scope and scout for fresh new trout” is the height of a sophisticated adult relationship. He does not treat her with respect.
Bottom line is SBWG is living in a warped dream world. This whole situation between SBWG and Mr. Older man has created several lifetimes of rotten karma to work out. Lots of pain. Lots of loss for her distraught but caring family (and for SBWG too but she is too young to be aware of it yet). She is still adolescent and wants what she wants no matter what chaos it causes for her, her family and friends, and now for her little baby daughter. Everyone is worried about the baby.
I can’t imagine how it is to have a job dispensing advice to people you don’t know. I would be so reticent to write what might seem an appropriate response to a situation as it is presented, for fear that some unstable personality would use it as fodder for an argument to do (or keep doing) something destructively stupid.
Anyway, I will let you do your job now. Thank you for letting me say my peace.
A Tired Friend
My response, which I copied to both of them:
I smelled the bullshit the moment I read that she was having her kid as an unwed mother at 20.I don't want kids, and I've always been pretty mature and responsible, and even if I wanted them I wouldn't have been ready to have them until I was in my late 30s. At least I acknowlege that.
This girl has terrible self-esteem issues and the commensurate lack of personal values and has no business having a kid. She needs to focus on her kid and not take up with any men.
This child didn't ask to be born -- she owes it a life. A pity you need a license to cut hair and only working ovaries to have a child.
A book for her to read -- The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem -- although in suggesting it I feel a bit like I'm throwing an eyedropper of water on a forest fire. She should also look up bbhonline.org -- to find a program near her to help her figure out how to parent.
Running around with older men while working at the likes of Taco Bell isn't parenting. Women who behave like this would do the best thing, I believe, in giving their children up for adoption to people who are capable of parenting. This is the ultimate act of selfishness on her part.
"Almost immediately I took up with a fellow my age that met with public approval and guess what? I got pregnant and he left me."Horrifying. Birth control anyone? Planned parenting? We'll be thanking this chick when we're being carjacked by her child because she was too busy attending to her needs to parent.
Note to SBWG: There are plenty of loving, infertile couples out there. Give the kid up instead of fucking them up. The ability to spread your legs and shit out a baby isn't parenting. Far from it.
The Flatulent Raccoon
That would be Ann Coulter on evolution. Via Media Matters, Robert Savillo writes:
According to right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, "flatulent raccoon theory" is as valid as Darwinian evolution. On Page 214 of her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, she states:Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have -- and you've got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don't accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat. That's basically how the argument for evolution goes [emphasis in original].
I think it's unlikely Ann Coulter, who graduated from University of Michigan's law school, is dumb enough to believe the world is flat or much of the other crap she spouts. I think what she's most concerned with is flat income theory -- the notion that her income will be much flatter if she doesn't appeal to the mob mentality of the lowest fearful yahoos out there.
Savillo continues:
Coulter uses this "theory" that she has concocted throughout the book to suggest that Darwinian evolution is similarly questionable once one has all the facts. Coulter appears to be trying to develop a parody of evolution analogous to Bobby Henderson's parody religion, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- created in response to the Kansas School Board's decision to require the teaching of "intelligent design" as an "alternative" to the theory of evolution. Henderson's Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster serves as an alternate version of "intelligent design" because of the obvious parallels. But while the satirists who created the Flying Spaghetti Monster use its similarities with intelligent design to comic effect, Coulter identified no comparable parallels between "flatulent raccoon theory" and the theory of evolution. Furthermore, Coulter's analogy makes a mistake common to many creationists who confuse Darwinian evolution, the explanation of how different species develop, with theories about the origin of life.Coulter devotes two whole chapters to the discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Throughout, she offers falsehoods, misleading statements, and distortions of evolutionary theory, all packaged with smears of prominent progressive and Democratic figures as well as news reporters and media personalities. Coulter doesn't actually present new evidence to make her case against evolutionary theory; she only uses the space to criticize evolution, which is a tired tactic of creationists. Page after page, the reader is bombarded with classic creationist arguments. But evolution is a scientific theory that has the support of the National Academy of Sciences; it has no relation to beliefs that cannot be tested, thus the suggestion that "liberals think evolution disproves God" is completely illogical.
A summary of some of the idiocy Coulter spews about evolution in her book:
With a mix of misleading claims, pseudo-scientific arguments, distortions of evolutionary theory, and outright falsehoods, Coulter places herself not only outside the mainstream but truly toward the lunatic fringe....Though she stops short of saying that the earth is 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve rode through the Garden of Eden on the backs of dinosaurs, in her quest to disprove evolutionary theory, Coulter echoes the arguments of the creationists from whom even many religious conservatives distanced themselves long ago.
Among her falsehoods, misinformation, and distortions, Coulter:
* Misstates how fossils demonstrate the evolutionary transition from reptiles and mammals, as well as the fossil record of dinosaurs and mammals.
* Distorts the likelihood that a living creature will be fossilized.
* Distorts the duration of the period known as the Cambrian explosion, omits important information about its significance, and suggests that 10 million years is "sudden."
* On transitional fossils, misrepresents relation of the Archaeopteryx to modern birds.
* Omits information regarding the Piltdown man and Archaeoraptor hoaxes.
* Misrepresents the evolution of the eye and ignores recent research.
* Falsely suggests that "irreducible complexity" disproves evolutionary theory.
* On the drawings and theories of Ernst Haeckel, omits a century of scientific criticism while falsely suggesting that textbooks still use Haeckel.
* Falsely suggests that the Miller-Urey experiment did not accurately reflect early Earth atmosphere.
* Throughout the book, displays her own misunderstandings regarding evolutionary theory (i.e. descent with modification, the evolution of bacteria).
* Offers only classic creationist arguments from discredited, unscientific ideas, despite a claim on the inner jacket sleeve of the book stating that Coulter writes "with a keen appreciation of genuine science."According to the weblog of William Dembski, a supporter of intelligent design, all of the above-mentioned falsehoods, misinformation, and distortions can be attributed to his "generous tutoring."
...Rather than support her claims with scientific evidence, she instead substitutes the ad hominem attacks that have become her trademark.
Who here wants to bet Coulter believes in evolution -- as much as she disbelieves a lot of the other crap she throws around?
I don't have a problem in the world with whores -- the kind who trade sex for money. Trading lies and hate for money -- that kind of whore I just can't abide.
Cold Comfort
Saletan On AC and global warming:
The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, only one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it. On every street in my neighborhood, people have torn down ordinary homes and put up giant air-conditioned boxes that extend as far as possible toward the property line. They've lost yards and windows, but that's the whole idea. Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we're replacing it with indoor space. From 1991 to 2005, the median lot size of single-family homes sold in the United States shrank by 9 percent, but the median indoor square footage increased by 18 percent. If you can't stand the heat, go hide in your kitchen.
Seven years ago, when my wife and I moved into our house, we built a garden and patio in the back yard. Now, overcome by heat and mosquitoes, we're thinking of replacing them with something a bit more climate-controlled. We still want to look at nature. We just don't want to feel it. And for better or worse, we'll probably succeed. Two months ago, we saw Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Walking out of the air-conditioned theater, we agonized over what we could do to fight global warming. The conversation ended when we realized that our most useful contribution would be to cancel the renovation. Wrapping ourselves in a climate-controlled bubble can't make global warming less true. But in the short run, it can make it a lot less inconvenient.
That's the problem in Washington today. Policymakers aren't facing global warming, because they aren't feeling it. They gave themselves air conditioning in the 1920s and '30s, long before the public got it. White House meetings and congressional hearings on climate change are doomed hours beforehand, when the thermostats are set. One minute, you're watching video of people sweltering in New Orleans. The next minute, you're watching senators dispute the significance of greenhouse gases. Don't ask whether these people are living on the same planet. In effect, they aren't.
When outdoor heat leaks into the Washington bubble, like crime into a white neighborhood, officials treat it as a faux pas. Three weeks ago, House Majority Leader John Boehner told reporters in a Capitol press gallery, "It'd be nice if they could get you a little more air conditioning up here." This week, President Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, assured White House correspondents that their briefing room would soon be renovated. "Gathering from the temperature in this room at this moment, I think everybody agrees that it's probably about time to have a new and updated air conditioning and heating system," he joked. But maybe the air conditioning system we need to fix is the one outdoors. And maybe we won't face that truth till it becomes more inconvenient.
How big a house do you really need? I live and work in a one-bedroom Craftsman bungalow with a sectioned off area where I have my small office (cut out of the living/dining room by a previous tenant) with a desk and two big bookshelves; one side, one behind, and a tall filing cabinet. My assistant sits just across at what is supposed to be my dining room table but is partially piled high with books and papers.
I could use a little more space -- so I could have a big dining room table devoted to actual dining, and room for books. At the moment, I'm storing the literary runoff on a bookshelf in my kitchen. Still, if I weren't a writer with a research bent and a druggie-like book habit, the small space I have woud be pretty much fine.
Even if I start making big bucks, I can't see living much differently. Is there something terribly wrong with me? Why do so many other people seem to neeeeed these vast, multi-thousand-foot homes?
Heterosexual Bonding With A Homosexual Feint
Two tough guys overheard at a party store in Chesterfield Township, Michigan.
The players: one extremely large, hard-drinking biker bear behind the counter and a little guy customer with his fake-titted girlfriend.
When it turns out they don't stock something the little guy is looking for, the big guy says to the little guy:
I hope we're still friends.
The little guy says:
Well, I’m not gonna kiss you on the mouth anymore.
The big guy says:
Oh, that was the best part.
The little guy buys his Jagermeister and leaves with Lady Fun Bags.
Who Are The Palestinians?
Lebanese American Sharon Nader Sloan is a real estate attorney practicing in Los Angeles. Her family is from Beirut, Tripoli and Hasroun, Lebanon. She wrote in 2002, "The ideas that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied Palestinian land, and that the Palestinian people are fighting for their land, have been accepted by most of the governments of the world and by most of the media in the world." But, should they be? Here's what she says:
The fact simply is that there are no Palestinians. These people are Arabs like all other Arabs, and they happen to live in a region called Palestine. They are not a separate people.What makes a separate people? Religion, language, culture, garb, cuisine, etc. The Arabs in Palestine speak the same language, practice the same religion, have the same culture, etc., as all the other Arabs. The few minor differences that exist between them are like the minor differences that exist between the American Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners... but they are still all Americans. People in the south of France are quite different from the people in the north, but they are still all French. These inconsequential differences do not make a people.
The Arabs living in Syria or Jordan, etc., are also the same Arabs, but they are each a separate nation because they each have a separate country. The so-called Palestinians want a separate country because they claim to be a separate nation. They are not. They were never a separate people before the new state of Israel. How did they become one now?
Because of these lies, the so-called "Palestinians" feel justified in sending suicide bombers to kill women, children, babies, old men, old women and noncombatant citizens. Because of these lies, the United Nations and the media of the world are condemning Israel who is acting less harshly than any other country would act in retaliation for such heinous attacks. What is the United States doing in Afghanistan, a totally foreign country? Killing Afghanis. Why? Because they attacked us on Sept. 11. I understand this. But why do they not understand that that is exactly what Israel is doing, only on a much smaller scale?
Ask yourself this: Should the use of terror ever be rewarded? When is the use of terrorism justified as a military tactic? As a political tactic? As an economic tactic? What implications does this hold for future conflicts?
Let us examine the truths here:
Arab "Palestinian?" with Flag of "Palestine?"1) There never was a Palestinian state or a Palestinian nation. There are no Palestinian people, per se. Rather, these are Arabs living in a region that historically has been called many things, including "Palestine."
2) Israel did not go to war against a Palestinian state and occupy its land. Rather, Israel was attacked by six Arab countries at once. She defended herself, defeated her attackers, and won the so-called territories, not from the Palestinians, but from Jordan and Egypt.
3) Jerusalem was never the capital of any state but Israel. It was certainly never the capital of a country that never existed. Why should the Palestinians get any part of it? Because they want it? Because they have terrorists?
4) Jerusalem, under the current Israeli control, is a free and open city. Israel, as a democracy, guarantees freedom of religion within its borders. Contrast this fact with areas that have come under Palestinian occupation. What percentage of Christians have left in recent years because they cannot stand the harassment and persecution?
5) Most Arabs living in Palestine today are not indigenous to the region. It was not until after the Jews had changed deserts and swamps into a productive and thriving land that the Arabs started migrating there. Arafat himself was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. Did you know that?
The belief that giving the Palestinians a state will bring peace is a delusion. The truth is that they want it all. The short-term goal is a state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza. The long-term goal is a state which includes all of "historical Palestine," including Jordan.
How do I know this?
The late Faisal Husseini, Arafat's Jerusalem representative, a man who was cultured, sophisticated and considered the most moderate of all the Palestinians, shortly before his death on May 31, 2001, expressed his true feelings in an interview with the popular Egyptian newspaper el Arav. Husseini said: "We must distinguish the strategies and long-term goals from the political-phased goals which we are compelled to accept due to international pressures." But the "ultimate goal is the liberation of all of historical Palestine." Explicitly he said: "Oslo has to be viewed as a Trojan Horse."
He even added and clarified that it is the obligation of all the Palestinian forces and factions to see the Oslo Accords as "temporary" steps, as "gradual" goals, because in this way, "We are setting an ambush for the Israelis and cheating them." He also differentiated between "strategic," long-term, "higher" goals, and "political" short-term goals dependent on "the current international establishment, balance of power" etc.
All of historical Palestine! Does not this include all of Israel and all of Jordan?
The entire piece is at the link above.
Obviously, He Loves Her
Here's my friend Jackie's wonderful boyfriend Antoine pulling her Hello Kitty luggage in Paris, and apparently not at gunpoint or anything.
The Kate Moss Of Hezbollah
Who is this man? He keeps popping up everywhere, hoisting dead children!
Ooops, if you're going to stage photos, don't be sloppy about it. Sloppy, sloppy!
Verrrry suspicious timeline. And they got this Condoleeza Rice Qana hate poster made reeeeal fast!
And here's a Canadian National Post piece on how this crowd of dead people; apparently, many or mostly children; ended up in this one building that happened to be so cozy with a Hezbollah rocket launcher:
There is also evidence to suggest that Hezbollah callously imported corpses from elsewhere to pump up the Qana body count -- a macabre and cynical ploy allegedly engineered for the benefit of international reporters.Initially, 57 people were said to have died in the Qana tragedy. But many analysts who have seen the footage point out that some of the dead pulled from the collapsed apartment were in an advanced state of decomposition, far more so than if they had died scant hours earlier. Tellingly, the Lebanese Health Ministry and Human Rights Watch have both said that they could confirm only 28 of the 57 deaths originally reported.
Twenty-eight civilian deaths is certainly horrible enough -- especially when 16 of them are children. But this total is less than half the figure originally reported.
Israel's terrorist enemies have used such tactics before. During the 2002 Battle of Bethlehem, which began after Israel lifted a Palestinian siege at the Church of the Nativity, a fearsome firefight occurring on that town's streets. Palestinians claimed Israeli forces had shelled a hospital and killed dozens of defenceless patients. Later it was discovered, however, that most of the dead were in fact corpses disinterred from a nearby cemetery and smuggled into the hospital -- likely in the back of ambulances -- to be strewn among the damage and so lend credibility to Palestinian propaganda claims that a civilian slaughter had occurred.
Hmmm, and oddly, it seems 15 of the dead were physically or mentally handicapped children. If that's 15 out of 28, that means over half of the dead were disabled. Kinda weird odds, huh?
Are these Hezbollah family values? Strap bombs to teenagers and turn them into suicide bombers, and if a four-year-old's a little slow in the head, use him for rocket bait?
How Big A Slut Are You, Girls?
Or rather, girls, how big a slut were you? And who here thinks it's a good idea for a woman to tell her boyfriend or husband how many men she's been with? I say it's never a good idea to tell. A guy will tell you he can handle it, but guess what: he's most likely lying. The truth: The way male sexuality works, there's a good chance he'll forever be tormented by the dirty pictures, or at least feel some contempt toward you.
Now, if you were The Whore Of Babylon until the moment you met him, I'm not suggesting you pretend you were the 21st century Donna Reed. But, you can suggest you've been around the block maybe once or twice without giving the exact mileage.
And yes, of course if you have some form of transmittable creepy-crawlies, there should be full disclosure up front. But, the question here is about whether a woman should give a male partner a full numerical accounting. I say terrible idea. What do you think?
And has anyone had any experience telling somebody the number of people (and/or animals) you've been with and had them hold it against you forever...until you finally broke up?
Busby Berkeley Goes To The Gym
And all in one take, too. Remarkable. From YouTube, the treadmill dancers.
Zoology Used To Be Science
Morons at the Atlanta Zoo bring in psychics to predict whether the panda's been knocked up:
It was all done "in the spirit of good fun," according to a news release from Zoo officials.Atlanta-born psychic Helene Frisch said she telepathically connected with Lun Lun using "tone vibration," the release said.
Frisch said she discerned that not only is Lun Lun pregnant, but she will likely bear a male cub by September 4.
Another psychic -- Andy Liu, a native of China -- used the ancient I Ching to calculate a 65 percent chance that Lun Lun is pregnant.
Zoo spokeswoman Jennifer Waller said officials have another reason to suspect that Lun Lun is expecting: The panda was artificially inseminated last March.
But panda pregnancies are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
Waller said officials should have definitive word on her condition this month.
Last July, Zoo Atlanta officials thought Lun Lun was pregnant but learned in August she was not.
Here's more on psychics. Here. Here. Here. Here. And, finally, here, with James Randi. (In the last one, click on the "Images," too, to see some pretty hilarious pictures.)
Phone Call Of The Wild
I'm going to start blogging some of my short questions from my Advice Goddess column that I don't put on my New Columns page. Here's one:
My boyfriend of three months went on vacation for 10 days, and he’s phoned me only twice since he left. He’s off in the woods with his family, and doesn’t have cell phone reception unless they go into town. Still, this makes me feel he doesn’t really think about me. Do I have reason to be upset? --UndercalledThe guy’s off somewhere where successful wireless communication involves lighting a fire and flapping his sleeping bag over it. Chances are, he didn’t guarantee you a certain amount of mindshare, communicated in a specific number of phone calls -- so why throw a huffy? What you have here is not reason to be upset, but reason to get a life so you aren’t sitting around whining that your boyfriend’s doesn’t revolve around yours. Plus, giving somebody their freedom generally makes them less likely to feel the need to escape. In other words, a little time away might be all it takes to make your boyfriend want to spend a lot less time away -- that is, if his girlfriend manages to avoid reacting to his visit with Mommy, Daddy and the bears like it was 10 days with bar floozies, strippers, and hookers.
From my syndicated column "The Advice Goddess," by Amy Alkon. If it's not in a paper near you, please ask to have it be carried by a paper near you. It runs in alt weeklies and dailies (except the Los Angeles Times) where they want readers who won't be dead in five years -- and are willing to brave a few letters from angry old ladies to get them.
Close-Call Caller ID
I was almost in a car crash yesterday afternoon -- while standing perfectly still. I'm a very careful driver, and my M.O. is assuming everybody else on the road is incapable of driving and, at the same time, paying much more attention to their phone call than the road.
I live in a pretty sweet little neighborhood, on a small, residential two-way street with parallel parking, not a thoroughfare. There are kids and pets on my street, and most people seem pretty careful.
I flipped on my turn signal and slowed to a stop -- but the car in my rear-view mirror kept coming. Fast.
This happened once before when I was stopped -- an SUV crashed into me on the freeway when I was standing stock-still in parking-lot-style traffic (and I saw it coming, and not slowing, in my rear-view mirror).
Afterward, my Los Angeles-raised NYC friend Russ Baker gave me the wise advice to hit the horn when I see a driver behind me who looks like they're going to crash into me. I've done that a number of times when I've had more time to react.
Well, this girl (holding her phone in one hand and driving with the other) was coming so fast, and it all happened so fast, I was just paralyzed. She narrowly missed me, swerving wildly around me at the last second. My first impulse was to be glad to be unhit. My second impulse was to follow her selfish, irresponsible ass and yell at her when she got out of her car.
And I did. And yes, I stopped at every stop sign, and no, I didn't speed. And, thanks, I appreciate in advance your concern for my safety, but does this girl look like a gang member or somebody who has a gun in her glove compartment?
The dimwit drove straight home and started unpacking her car. She probably didn't even notice me behind her, turn after turn after turn, because she was too involved in her damn call.
I confronted her, asking, "What if you'd hit me?"
"The insurance would've paid for it," she sniffed.
"What if I got lifelong back pain out of it?" I demanded.
She told me I was "crazy."
Yeah, how nuts, not to want to be injured by some selfish twat in a speeding, half-ton phone booth.
Do you know this girl?
Here's the view from the rear.
The Golda Standard
Three quotes from Golda Meir:
"I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace." -Golda Meir"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." -Golda Meir
"When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons." -Golda Meir
I don't agree with everything the Israelis do, but there's a whole different psychology at work in a culture that celebrates sending its children out to be blown up, and puts terrorist organizations in residential buildings. I still can't get the picture out of my mind of "the Arab street" cheering about 9-11. Who cheers when other human beings die?
Still Running On Foreign Oil
Among others, the Extra-Virgin olive variety. Seeing more and more biodiesel-mobiles these days, like this one that belongs to my neighbor -- the alternative to hybrids for those whose mechanical sense goes beyond knowing that they have none.
From The "People Say Crazy Shit When They're Drunk" Files
Get me really drunk and I'll probably just keel over. This isn't to say I can't hold my liquor. I can -- providing I'm not expected to hold any more than a thimble-full. Forgive me for cutting into the major Mel fatigue you must be feeling right now (correct answer: "That's okay, Sugar Tits!"), but I liked a piece Bill Maher had on HuffPo about L'Affaire Skunk-Drunk Mel:
As I watch so much of the world ask Israel for restraint in a way no other country would (Can you imagine what Bush would do if a terrorist organization took over Canada and was lobbing missiles into Montana, Maine and Illinois?) - and, by the way, does anyone ever ask Hezbollah for restraint. you know, like, please stop firing your rockets aimed PURPOSEFULLY at civilians? - it strikes me that the world IS Mel Gibson. Most of the time, the anti-semitism is under control, but that demon lives inside and when the moon is full, or there's been enough alcohol consumed, or Israel is forced to kill people in its own defense, then it comes out.I've heard Mr. Gibson say he's sorry, and that he's wrong, and others say, well, he was drunk, he's got a disease, etc. But my question is, what is the root of this, Mel? I mean, we all say crazy things when we're drunk, and we've all undoubtedly had ugly moments when we're superstressed out and then drunk on top of it, I know I have - but what comes out at that moment isn't a tirade against the Jews. Yes, liquor releases demons, but I want to know why the demon in Mel Gibson is hatred of the Jews to begin with (I know, the father). Why, when Mels's id is released, its about the Jews fucking everything up, just like it was with Hitler. Except Mel Gibson, when his id is in check, I believe, really knows how wrong that is, and how stupid. He, I believe, at least fights with himself about this.
But he'll never win as long as he's so religious, because, I hate to tell you, the disease isn't alcholism, the disease is religion.
But that's another essay.
For now, let me just say again: the world has their simmering hatred of the Jews under check most of the time, but do watch them when they start weaving on PCH.
And Mel, let me remind you: The Jews have not started all the wars in the world. But they have greenlit all the movies.
I'm with Bill. Don't give me that "drunk people come up with the craziest things" crap. Drunk people go off on what's already in their head. If I, for example, were a ranting drunk, I'd probably go off on, say, Puritans and flip-flops, and maybe Puritans in flip-flops; i.e., stuff that's already in my head. I think I can pretty much guarantee, under no circumstances am I going to start ranting and raving about how much I hate the Jews -- or the Coptics or anybody else for that matter.
Mel's clearly a religious idiot who hates the Jews. If you're Jewish or you hate people who hate people and/or people who promote irrational, religiously based hatered of people...don't see his movies. I haven't seen one in years, and I didn't need him to get drunk and ugly to figure out he isn't somebody whose views or "Malibu-owning" lifestyle I want to $upport.
One wonders if, perhaps, a little of Mel's father's "wisdom" rubbed off on him. Check this out.
And then there are all the right-wingers who've previously bent over so far to defend Mel that it seemed like a group goatse...who are strangely silent or near-silent. Check out a rather hilarious past bendover, from National Review's "K-Lo." Well, call me Sugar Tits, but it seems she has a soft spot for feminists. Well, a certain feminist:
Mel Gibson might be my favorite feminist. If he's not number one on my list, he's pretty close, in competition with Pope John Paul II.As you probably suspect, I don't have in mind the usual definition of "feminism." I can guarantee you there'll be no fawning Ms. magazine cover story on Gibson (or JPII).
But give me a few minutes to fawn a little.
I, like others, have now seen an in-progress version of Gibson's remarkable film. There is so much to be said and that will be said about the movie. Folks who get turned off by nonsensical talk that it is anti-Semitic will miss an unparalleled movie experience. But what they'll also miss is Mel Gibson, the feminist.
Move over, Betty Friedan!
Whether To Be Condemned To Death Or Just Condemned
Which would you choose? Here's a letter to the editor in the German lefty daily, Der Tagesspiegel, posted by Andrew Sullivan:
I lived until 2002 in a small southern village near Mardshajund that is inhabited by a majority of Shias like me. After Israel left Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to take have its say in other towns. Received as successful resistance fighters and armed to the teeth, they stored rockets in bunkers in our town as well. The social work of the Party of God consisted in building a school and a residence over these bunkers! A local sheikh explained to me laughing that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or if they attacked the rockets depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population, they use them as shields, and, once dead, as propaganda. As long as they continue existing there, there will be no tranquility and peace.
Amy Is Annoyed Again
I get my mail at a mailbox rental place in Santa Monica -- as do about a hundred other people.
I started getting calls on Wednesday morning from Chase asking for "Deborah" and I can't remember the guy's name. Well, it turns out, if somebody isn't paying their bill, Chase (and probably other companies) just search for anybody else at that address and bug the crap out of them.
Telling them there's no Deborah here hasn't done the job. They just hang up and call again the next week. Finally, I called them. I explained that not only do I not know Deborah, I don't live in the 4 x 4 x 15" metal box where I get my mail. Grrrr. And naturally, they call when they're sure to get you.
I sleep late on Wednesday because I wake up at 4am on Tuesday to make my deadline, then I'm up into the evening. No...correction: I sleep late on Wednesday except when Chase gives me a jingle at 8:10 a.m. to let me know that total strangers are LATE ON THEIR BILL!
Not "I Can't Pay The Rent"
"I don't feel like paying the rent," or rather, doing what it takes to pay the rent. Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt write in The New York Times of men I'll call "The New Lazies" -- men who are out of work, but turning down jobs they feel are "beneath them," and sometimes going on "disability."
Hmmm, disability must sound like a magic, bottomless pot of money to these people, but perhaps they could urge their fallow minds into use and recognize that this means their lives are being financed by their fellow taxpayers. Here's an excerpt from the story:
Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.
“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family’s savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife’s income helps them scrape by. “If things really get tight,” Mr. Beggerow said, “I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that.”
Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.
These are men? I've had a number of jobs I didn't want or like. I worked as a mover at an all-girls moving company (and I am NOT strong of arm) and I worked as a chicken (in a chicken suit, handing out flyers). You do what you need to do to support yourself. Well, you do if you're me, and apparently, I'm something of an idiot with my outmoded ideas against going on the dole. Here's more from the story:
Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising value of his Los Angeles home. Other men fall back on wives or family members.But the fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.
No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. About 25 percent of the missing men are collecting this insurance.
The ailments that qualify them are usually real, like back pain, heart trouble or mental illness. But in some cases, the illnesses are not so serious that they would prevent people from working if a well-paying job with benefits were an option.
The disability program, in turn, is an obstacle to working again. Taking a job holds the risk of demonstrating that one can earn a living and is thus no longer entitled to the monthly payments. But staying out of work has consequences. Skills deteriorate, along with the desire for a paying job and the habits that it requires.
“The longer you stay on disability benefits,” said Martin H. Gerry, deputy commissioner for disability and income security at the Social Security Administration, “the longer you’re out of the work force, the less likely you are to go back to work.”
Yeah, Saddam Was A Bad Guy
He did bad, bad things to his people. This is terrible, yes, but a lot of terrible things happen in the world, and we had a president who advertised "no nation building" as a way to get elected. Matthew Yglesias writes about what Iraq was supposed to buy us:
Bush never said invading Iraq would educate our children or fight domestic poverty, so let’s not even get into that, for now. What the President did promise was the following: that regime change would curb nuclear proliferation, weaken al-Qaeda, and create a shining beacon of democracy. What happened? We eliminated a nuclear program that didn’t exist, encouraged Iran and North Korea to speed theirs along, offered terrorists a gigantic recruiting opportunity and training ground, and turned Iraq into a venue for chaos and civil war plagued by death squads and offering local despots a handy cautionary tale about the dangers of liberalization.
The price tag?
...Before it ends, the war will likely cost somewhat more than the $549 billion spent (adjusted for inflation) in the much more lethal Vietnam War. But even this figure will likely prove to be off by hundreds of billions of dollars because it accounts only for funds directly appropriated for war fighting. As Linda Bilmes, a leading Harvard budgetary expert, and Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out in their January 2006 paper, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,” the spending captured by the CRS, even in strict budgetary terms, is “only the tip of a very deep iceberg.”Wartime appropriations do not, for example, include the cost of disability payments to veterans wounded in the war, payments that will continue throughout their life spans. Nor do they cover the costs of medical treatment for those seriously injured in the war, or even such basic war-related costs as the replacement of equipment and munitions expended in the conflict or the need to transport soldiers back to their home bases when they rotate out of country. The war has also substantially increased the military’s overall recruiting costs, reflected in bigger bonuses and additional recruiters. What’s more, by combining the war with aggressive tax cutting, the administration has ensured that the operation is paid for entirely by borrowing money on which interest will need to be paid. The shocking truth, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, is that if one applies the Congressional Budget Office’s basic assumptions about the duration of the conflict (“a small but continuous presence”), it will cost nearly a staggering $1.27 trillion dollars before all is said and done.
The number is so high as to defy human comprehension. All the numbers ending in “-illion” sound the same. But a trillion is what you get if you spend a million dollars a day … for a million days. That’s 2,737 years -- a cool mil a day, every day, in other words, until the Year of Our Lord 4743. Or, working backward, from the time when Homer wrote the Iliad up to now. The $270 billion in rounding error is worth another 750 years at the million-a-day rate. That takes us up to the year 5493 -- or back to when Moses fled Egypt.
Anyway you slice it, it’s a lot of money. More than enough to fund any sort of “too expensive” pie-in-the-sky liberal domestic scheme. Universal preschool, for example, clocks in at about $35 billion annually -- cheap enough to get 37 years’ worth.
At the end, take a look at some of the spending alternatives -- where we might have put the money we threw into the sinkhole, Iraq.
Confirming Bolton
Perhaps he just needs to be seen in a slightly different light?
Makeover by Gregg Sutter.
Big Spoon = Fat Ass
Malcolm Ritter writes about Penn's Andrew Geyer's study on "unit bias" -- the tendency to think whatever unit of food you're served is the correct amount to consume. Hmmm, it seems there is a hell for the non-thinking...with a sign outside that reads "Jenny Craig." Here's an excerpt from Ritter's piece:
Geier, a Ph.D. candidate who works with people who are overweight or who have eating disorders, figures people learn how big an appropriate food unit is from their cultures. For example, yogurt containers in French supermarkets are a bit more than half the size of their American counterparts. Yet French shoppers don't make up the difference by eating more containers of the stuff, he noted.He and the other researchers tried a series of experiments using environmental cues to manipulate people's ideas of how big a food unit is.
In one, they put a large bowl with a pound of M&Ms in the lobby of an upscale apartment building with a sign: "Eat Your Fill ... please use the spoon to serve yourself." The candy was left out through the day for 10 days, sometimes with a spoon that held a quarter-cup, and other times with a tablespoon.
Sure enough, people consistently took more M&Ms on days when the bigger scoop was provided, about two-thirds more on average than when the spoon was present.
In another experiment, a snacking area in an apartment building contained a bowl with either 80 small Tootsie Rolls or 20 big ones, four times as large. Over 10 working days, the bowl was filled with the same overall weight of candy each day. But people consistently removed more, by weight, when it was offered in the larger packages.
In those experiments, as well as a similar one with pretzels, "unit bias" wasn't the only thing that produced the differences in consumption levels, but it had an influence, Geier and colleagues concluded.
Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab and author of the forthcoming book "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," called the new paper an impressive demonstration of the effect in a real-world setting. He has done similar work but didn't participate in Geier's research.
Take a few trips to France, and American portion sizes will start looking elephantine. After eating their yogurt (thimble-sized), anything but baby yogurts in America look like I'm supposed to be feeding myself and a family of starving Brontosauruses.
Now, I'm also the cheapest date on the continent because I only eat half my dinner at dinner, and take the rest home for lunch and maybe a snack later, too. Okay, so you can't do the doggie-bag thing in France -- but then again, in France, you get portions of food that look like they're intended for one person, not one person and a bus full of their relatives.
More on Geier's work here. Diets Don't Work, by Bob Schwartz, is a good book on eating only when you're hungry. The Fat Fallacy, by neurophysiologist Will Clower, explains why eating like the French do is healthier, and less likely to make you fat. And, no, I haven't read the one by the champagne lady, and no, I don't intend to.
Even more on the French diet here -- a London Observer article by Mimi Spencer.
Member's Lonely
I just posted a new Advice Goddess column -- a question from a guy who's large on penis and short on personality. Of course, I got several e-mails from editors subject-headered "Yikes!" or "Oops!" and asking if I had a substitution they could run. Sigh. Here's the guy's letter:
This is gonna sound like a joke, but I swear it's not. I'm an unattractive guy (not hideous, but pretty ugly) who’s overweight and really socially awkward. When it comes to talking with women, I just clam up. About the only thing I have going for me is a huge penis. While attractive guys with tiny penises and ugly dudes with suave personalities can land women, I never even get a girl to go home with me, let alone get into a relationship, which is what I want. I know a lot of women don’t care about size, but I also know some do. Am I crazy to think some women would look past my faults if only they knew what I was packing?--Big Loser
Here's my reply:
So, you’re fat, ugly, and socially awkward. Is there an armed guard keeping you out of the gym? Is the path to the salad bar mined with plastic explosive? And, before you enter a nightclub, does the bouncer slap duct tape over your mouth and tie one hand behind your back, so all you can do is use your one free hand to point to your massive rod?Probably half the successful male comedians look like they fell face first out of the womb onto the ugly stick. But for a few exceptions, the other half look like they came out clutching it in their tiny little hands. These guys turned their shortcomings into a living and, in turn, a way to get girls -- instead of a reason to, say, reduce themselves to a live-action version of the Joey The Giant Genitalia cartoon from junior-high sex ed films.
Another unlikely chick magnet is the perpetually scrawny, sickly, 91-year-old psychotherapist Dr. Albert Ellis. A few years ago, he told me over lunch that he spent a good part of his childhood hospitalized -- keeping him from both dying and developing rudimentary social skills. At 19, he was determined to get over his terror of talking to girls. For a month, he went to the Bronx Botanical Garden every day, made himself sit down with any woman he saw alone on a bench, and gave himself a minute to strike up a conversation. He talked to 100 women and asked one out. She stood him up. But, the experience gave him the courage to approach the next 100, and then some, and actually score some dates. In 2004, he married a tall, blonde, Australian bombshell half his age. So, while many refer to him as “the father of cognitive-behavioral therapy,” I like to think of him as The Hugh Hefner Of Headshrinking.
Luckily for Ellis, he must not have had some huge tool in his pants to use as a crutch. Sure, there are a few size queens, but if they want a big penis without a personality, they’ll get the kind that runs on batteries. Stop reducing yourself to the sum of your one giant part. If you’re fat, get some exercise -- beyond all the calories you’re burning wallowing in self-pity. If you’re ugly, make up for it by dressing beautifully. Wear great shoes. Women like that. If you’re filled with self-loathing, read up on “unconditional self-acceptance” in Ellis’ book A Guide To Rational Living. Finally, do as Ellis did, and make yourself talk to girls. Maybe even tell them you’ve been shy all your life and you’re working to change it. That shows guts, which go over even better than great shoes. In other words, whether you want sex or a relationship, your big penis is probably your biggest stumbling block. Convince yourself you’re hung like a horsefly, and you might get some girls.
This Is The Dumbest Shit I've Heard Since Yesterday
Via Romenesko, an "award-winning" TV sports director in Charlotte, NC, resigns after the station accidentally airs a flubbed take in which he said "shit." Mark Washburn writes about Chuck Howard shitting away his job in the Charlotte Observer (complete with little dashes through that horrifying word, "shit"):
Howard, 41, WCNC sports director for 11 years, was taping a roundup Wednesday night for the next morning's "6 News Today" when he decided to redo the segment. "Let's retake that," he said, prefacing the statement with the word s---.But when the roundup aired at 5:51 a.m. Thursday, the station showed the aborted segment rather than the one intended for broadcast. Morning anchor Colleen Odegaard immediately acknowledged the error and apologized to viewers. Howard was not on his usual newscasts Friday.
"Chuck has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Stuart Powell, president and general manager of the NBC affiliate, said Saturday.
He said he could not comment on the reasons for the resignation.
Well, shit, we could guess, huh?