I'm Looking For Brianna Salcedo
I don't know her, but she called me at home last night. Well, actually, she got on the phone after the auto-dialer dialed my number for the Police Activities League. 520-373-3845 was the number on my caller ID.
Brianna said her name, first and last, and I asked her to spell it, which she did, and I wrote it down. I also asked what she makes, bothering people at home in the evening for the P.A.L., and discovered that it's a mere $8/hr. I asked how she'd like it if I called her at home to talk about issues that interest me. She said she'd love to talk about the Police Activities League from her home, but that she's a college student, and she gets home too late, at around 10pm.
I told her that was okay, I would be happy to call her at 10 to discuss issues that interest me, if only she'd give me her number. She said she couldn't, they weren't allowed (my, how convenient!) but as I did get her to tell me her whole name early on in the call, I Googled her, and asked her if she was the Brianna Salcedo from Fresno. Mclane High School. She said she was. Genius. This is a girl who needs a little more training in how the world works.
I tried to find her number while she was on the phone (and she hung on all the while!), but I'm guessing she either lives with mommy and daddy, or in a dorm, or with a roommate, because I couldn't find her in Fresno.
Oh yeah, and this isn't my first dealing with these bother-you-at-home'ers. Here's an e-mail exchange I had with their PR dude in August of 2007:
Dear Ms. Alkon:I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that our telephoning has caused you.
Your number will be placed on our “do not contact’ list today. The calling usually stops immediately but sometimes it takes 24-48 hours to clear our computers.
While we are engaged in telemarketing and are probably responsible for contacting you, we are reviewing our telephone calls to your number to ensure that no other problem exists in our system. All calls are monitored and if this was an operator issue they will be or already have been reprimanded.
Also as you are aware there are several organizations, some with almost identical names that are also contacting the public asking for donations. While we can’t remove your contact information from their records, I do apologize for their behavior.
Organizations such as CALPAL are dependent upon the good will of the public for their support and it is not our intention to violate that good will.
If you should need to contact me in the future, you may use my direct line or email.
Thanks for calling CALPAL and alerting us to this issue.
Charles McNeil
Director of Development
California Police Activities League
510-544-4302 (direct line)
cmcneil@calpal.org
My favorite part of his e-mail:
Thanks for calling CALPAL and alerting us to this issue.
Yeah, I'm sure they were thrilled.
My e-mail to him as of last night:
Just minutes ago, I received yet another call from your organization, despite your pledge to remove me from your list. Brianna Salcedo was on the line, and I extracted her full name from her in hopes of calling her at home to discuss issues of interest to me. Sadly, it seems she isn't listed in Fresno or nearby.I would like to be taken off the list of numbers of people you bother at home at night. For once and for all. I'm too tired to remember if I can sue you guys through the California Telemarketer Provisions and/or the Federal ones, but I'll be sure to find out. I'm a big fan of the police who keep my neighhborhood safe. I'm not a big fan of the people who bother me at home. --Amy Alkon
PS Please let me know how much of the money raised actually goes to Police Activities.
Weird Florida Voter Turnout - More Than 100%
Whaddya know...Wendy McElroy concedes that there may be "an easy and innocent explanation" for this, but one Florida precinct, D001, is showing a voter turnout of, right now, 110%. Yes, 930 voters cast 1028 ballots, for a 110.54% turnout.
But Where Are All The "Afrocentric" Jobs?
Geniuses north of the American border have approved an "Afrocentric" public school for Toronto. From Canada's CTV:
Trustees with the Toronto District School Board have voted to approve an "operational model" for an Afrocentric school, a controversial plan to help struggling black students in the city's education system."The strategies developed by our staff following consultation with our communities, will hopefully more effectively address the needs of youth who have historically struggled in TDSB schools," John Campbell, chair of the board, said in a press release late Tuesday night.
In total, the board has approved four strategies:
•Creating a "Program Area Review Team" to recommend the program and operational model for an Africentric Alternative School, to open in September 2009;
•Establishing a pilot program in three existing schools that would integrate the "histories, cultures, experiences and contributions of people of African descent and other racialized groups" into curriculum;
•Establishing a "Staff Development, Research and Innovation Centre" to assess the best way for improving the success of marginalized and vulnerable students; and,
•Drawing up a plan to address underachievement for all marginalized and vulnerable students.
Yoohoo...I don't think black students are struggling because the curriculum isn't "Afrocentric" enough. In fact, I think going along with that idea can be damaging to the very kids it's supposed to help, promoting a culture of victims. And note that the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, to name a few, managed to get by quite nicely in this country without special Iro-, Italo- or Jew-centric schools.
My French teacher, who is European, was commenting last night on how ridiculous and divisive it is to refer to blacks as African-Americans. I mean, if I know you, and you want to be called "African-American" or "German-Polish American," well, I guess I'll do my best to coddle you (and probably start seeing you a little less). Hélène, my French teacher's comment, was something along the lines of "Why aren't people here all just 'Americans'?"
Although I got sick in January, taking me out for a week and putting me behind in my writing, I'm going to continue my program in inner city schools, and start bringing in other speakers -- those who are “self-made” successes -- to talk to the kids, step by step, about how they did it, in turn, demystifying the path to a rewarding career and life.
Any suggestions of speakers in the Los Angeles area should be sent to adviceamy at a o l dot com. Please only send suggestions if you have contact information for the person, and include it. Speakers should be people who are not from ritzy backgrounds, and are kind of middle class but successful in some kind of cool career, and who got there, despite the odds, on their own. And who can detail, step by step, how they did it.
For example, I show kids a copy of my column (800 words) and then bring out the huge pile of papers with a bunch of crap written on them that was the path to getting to what's good and funny and makes sense...showing them that writing isn't just this smooth path from "Once upon a time..." to "The end"...but sending a message that, if you're willing to work hard, it's actually possible to do something satisfying and cool with your life.
When I did my talk at Uni High, they didn't get the permission slips signed so they could tape the session, and I didn't want to talk too much about it here because I thought the kids might read my blog afterward, and I didn't want to chance having comments on the entry pitying them, or calling them pitying names like "kids at risk." But, the session went really well, and I'm eager to do it again and bring in other speakers, at least once a month.
Oh yeah...if you teach at a school with inner city kids, and want me or others to come talk, please e-mail me and I'll arrange it.
Afrocentric schools link via fark
Dawn Of The Dud
Who's to blame for all your dud girlfriends? Hmmm...maybe...you? Just posted another one of my Advice Goddess columns. A guy writes:
I'm a 31-year-old guy who’s just about given up on dating. My last girlfriend was desperately needy. She’d make me go to the store with her, and when I went to work, she’d hang out in my office all day. (She wanted to sit on my lap and talk to me while I worked.) It drove me nuts, so we split a couple months ago. The girlfriend before her couldn't stop going on and on about the details of her sex life with her former boyfriend. I can’t seem to pick a winner. I think it’s due to one of three things: 1) I’m attracted to girls with serious issues. 2) All girls are like that. 3) My standards are way too high. I’d love to have a girlfriend who doesn’t have big issues, and who has friends, hobbies and goals beyond the relationship. Is that the impossibility it seems to be?
--Flailing Around In the Dating Pool
My reply:
So, the last girl in your life not only went to the office with you but sat on your lap while you worked? Wait…you were dating a Chihuahua? Let’s just hope she was woman enough to do her business in the ladies room instead of on Wee-Wee Pads under the conference table.This girlfriend was the replacement for Lady Overshare, sexual historian: “We interrupt this relationship to bring you the nude stylings of Lincoln And His Log.” And interrupt, and interrupt, and interrupt. Nothing like a woman who gets a guy all fired up to dash past the sexy underwear store to the pet store to buy her a muzzle.
Dating can be challenging for a man with standards. The thing about standards is that you can’t just leave them on the fake fireplace with your frat boy beer stein collection. You actually have to take them with you and hold them up to women you meet. Sure, you can say you want a girlfriend with goals, hobbies, and a self, but you seem to go for any woman who doesn’t have gills. Then, instead of taking responsibility for what you let into your life, you reach for ego shelters like “Maybe I’m just hot for the nutty ones,” “All girls are like that,” or “I’m just too good for this world.” In the words of my late pal Al (therapist Albert Ellis), “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” >>cont'd>>
The rest is here, along with a bunch of comments.
Vote Your Vagina!
The National Organization for Women is supposed to be about getting the best PERSON for the job. Of course, they're often or usually about anything but. CNN.com says the New York state chapter of NOW slammed Ted Kennedy for his "ultimate betrayal" for supporting Obama -- although Kim Gandy, head of the national chapter, damage-controlled with a more tactful approach.
Seems to me that the "ultimate betrayal" you can exact on a woman is leaving her to die in a submerged car, but hey, maybe that's why I'm not a NOW member.
Here's an excerpt from CNN:
In a sharply critical statement, the New York state chapter of NOW took aim at Kennedy Monday for what it called an "ultimate betrayal," and suggested the Massachusetts Democrat "can't or won't" handle the idea of Clinton becoming President of the United States."Sen. Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard," said the statement. "Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, the Family Leave and Medical Act to name a few."
"And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment!" the statement continues. "He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton."
Or maybe he just thinks the black guy would do a better job?
I suggest women with brains follow my lead and vote for the person who'd make the best president, not the person who looks most like them when they do that 8th great health class thing, seated naked with the hand mirror on the bathroom rug.
Love Is A Barter Field
You sometimes find some true stories in The Onion.
This time, "Heather Barrs" is "ready for romance and all of its positive net gains!"
Relationships are a two-way street, and you can't expect to make them work unless you're willing to get out there and risk being hurt. Took me a long time to learn that, but now that I'm ready to open my heart to another person, it's only a matter of time before I find my soulmate. So look out, world, because I've got a whole lot of love to give to the first person who can match that love with a similar offer or its equivalent in luxury items, birthday and anniversary presents, or cash.I will also accept a biweekly series of dinners at fashionable yet intimate restaurants.
I guess I'm just a hopeless romantic. When I see a handsome man with sparkling baby blues, it's no time before I fall head over heels and offer him an impressive six-month infatuation package for 2 percent over market price. I can't help myself! Anyone who knows me knows I'm the kind of girl who wears her heart on her sleeve and doesn't mind haggling for a better deal on growing old together.
As they say, 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have swapped one's undying affection for having someone around during the holidays.
...Just look into my eyes and you'll know we were born to engage in a mutually beneficial transaction together.
An old boyfriend kept calling me complaining that some girl or other was screaming and pounding on his door at 3am. They thought he was relationship material. He did want a relationship, but he couldn't find anybody who was quite right. So, he slept with girls and they all got the idea that they were on their way to a relationship with him -- until it became clear they weren't and the door banging and threats to burn the building down began.
I finally advised him to date hookers. I see it as a fair, free-market exchange. Much more above-board than the basis of many relationships.
He finally listened to me, and called a Brazilian escort service. And then he called me to complain: Why didn't I make him do it sooner?
So, Who Or What Made God?
Michiko Kakatuni reviews John Allen Paulos' book, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up, in The New York Times:
In his opening chapters Mr. Paulos uses simple logic to point up the gaping holes in the so-called first-cause argument. “Either everything has a cause, or there’s something that doesn’t,” he writes. “The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn’t have a cause, it may as well be the physical world.”What’s more, he notes, “the uncaused first cause needn’t have any traditional God-like qualities. It’s simply first, and as we know from other realms, being first doesn’t mean being best. No one brags about still using the first personal computers to come on the market. Even if the first cause existed, it might simply be a brute fact — or even worse, an actual brute.”
The Ethicist's Questionable Ethics
The New York Times' Randy Cohen, aka "The Ethicist," argues for affirmative discrimination (and made me feel like I needed a shower after reading his reply).
Personally, I don't believe you resolve discrimination by discriminating. Furthermore, "minority candidates" who are qualified must find it pretty insulting to be assumed to be "affirmative action" hires. Here's the question:
I teach at a state university that offers financial incentives to hire minority candidates. A department receives $1,000 for completing a tenure-track hire but $5,000 if it hires a minority candidate. I’m concerned that colleagues will make recommendations based on the financial reward rather than pursue the “best” candidate. Should the institution offer these bounties? — DR. MARK E. CHASE, SLIPPERY ROCK, PA.
And here's "The Ethicist's" reply:
There’s nothing discreditable or even unusual about using financial incentives to prompt estimable conduct. Governments use tax codes to promote desired activities. Businesses offer bonuses to encourage certain kinds of job performance. (Full disclosure: I have a “financial incentive” to write this column. It’s called a “paycheck.”) Be wary of skewing your argument with a loaded word like “bounties.”It is admirable of your school to acknowledge that some minorities are underrepresented on campus, that this is unjust in itself and that it subverts the school’s mission: it is important for students to encounter professors (and fellow students) of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. In pursuit of this goal, the school may try various things. There might be better ways to genuinely expand faculty diversity, but until such methods are on the table, and unless the danger you worry about actually emerges, financial incentives are worth a try.
Be comforted that hiring a new faculty member involves so many layers of scrutiny, so many opportunities for colleagues to weigh in, that the hazard you invoke is minimal. Remember: this tactic is not meant to lower hiring standards but to broaden the pool of people considered for the job.
For so long there has been so much social (if not legal) pressure arrayed against hiring such folks — in effect, incentives to hire white men — that it seems hypocritical to object only when incentives benefit minority candidates.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to judge people "by the content of their character," and their ability to do a particular job. Isn't the alternative racism? Even if it does benefit "minorities"?
Furthermore, aren't kids of all colors from families with financial hardship the ones who really have it rough?
She's Deaf, You Pay The Price
A few words on the law of unintended consequences, and why I'm for small government, by the Freakonomics boys in New York Times Magazine:
A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.
So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted, researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the patient asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he would probably lose.
If he ultimately operated on the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would also then need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time. By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.
He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out, she didn’t need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who would have to pay the interpreter’s bills.
Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had a dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on, getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”
So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question to answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled?
Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.
...So does this mean that every law designed to help endangered animals, poor people and the disabled is bound to fail? Of course not. But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences.
Spam Grows On Trees
I got this e-mail from mamasource@mamasource.com, subject line: "(Friend's first name and last initial") has sent you a tree." This person is a friend of mine, and I was a little surprised to get some e-click dealie from her, but I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I clicked the link and clicked to plant the damn tree. Grumbling all the way, because life is really too short for this kind of click this, click that shit. See below, I've copied in the text of that e-mail:
NAME DELETED has reserved a special tree planting for you!Would you like to plant your tree now?
Planting your tree is 100% free
Yes, plant this tree! No, do not plant this treeWhen you plant the tree DELETED has reserved for you, a real tree will be planted on your behalf through the non-profit group Trees for the Future
Trees for the Future has planted over 50 million trees since 1988!
This tree planting was reserved for you by DELETED from Malibu
In a message dated 1/26/08 11:51:12 AM, DELETED FOR PRIVACY writes:
That damn tree thing...I got an email from an old friend who wanted to connect me on “Mamasource.” And the next thing I knew, I hadn’t paid enough attention and the site had hijacked my yahoo email directory. I hope it won’t generate any spam for you. Yikes!
I wrote to the company:
I got some dumb plant a tree message via your site (from an editor friend, and I didn't want to offend her, so I clicked on it and filled in my e-mail address). Later, I got the e-mail address below back from her. Please advise. If this happens to me (my address book being hijacked) I will take legal action against your company, and write about it, too. Far and wide. I await your reply. -Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist
The Mamasource asshats respond:
Dear Amy,This is Anne at Mamasource Member Support. Thanks for your message and we are very sorry for any inconvenience.
Contacts from your email address book that are checked and highlighted in bright yellow are only contacted during the registration process if you click the button to "Select Moms and Invite". In this case, those highlighted contacts receive an invitation to join Mamasource.
Just so you know, although the invitations have already gone out, from now on your contacts will not receive any additional Mamasource invitation emails from you.
Again, we are very sorry for any inconvenience. Please let me know if you need any assistance and I will be happy to help you.
Warmly,
Anne
Mamasource Member Support
"Dear Amy," she writes? If I were so dear to you, I'd still be doing the work I need to do, and not sending out e-mails to see if my address book has been compromised. Here's the e-mail I wrote Anne back:
I didn't click "Select Moms and Invite," so what do you mean "Invitations have already gone out"? Do you have evidence that e-mails have gone out to my entire address book? What do you mean, "highlighted in bright yellow"?Let me make this clear: I need to know to whom any invitations have gone to from my e-mail address, and I need to know immediately.
I am completely disgusted. I've been working nonstop since about 5am, with a tiny break for lunch, and the last thing I need to do is reparations because of your site's sneaky method of getting members.
This is my work e-mail, and this is not only embarrassing, it may be hurtful to me.
Please advise IMMEDIATELY. I am supremely pissed off and I need to know immediately so I might attempt to protect myself. -Amy Alkon
If you get an e-mail from Mamasource, I suggest you delete it immediately. A sampling of my friends reveals no Mamasource (ick!) spam from me (ie, "Amy A wants to plant a tree [up Mamasource's founder's ass])...probably because I'm too suspicious to click more than "yes, I want a fucking tree planted" upon seeing my friend's name and the city where she lives.
As always, beware of e-mails bearing shit you don't want in friends' names from dubious places.
L.A.'s Answer To The Lawn Jockey
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Joys Of Genital Mutilation
Of course, the joys of female genital mutilation, if they can be called that, are solely for the barbarian men and brainwashed barbarian women forcing clitoridectomies on little girls. From NPR.org:
"Supporters of female genital mutilation say it dampens a girl's sexuality and protects her honor."..."...She is only left to be a baby-maker," Weil-Curiel says.
For the record, I think penisectomies, also known as circumcisions, are barbaric, too. Parents have no business getting surgery done on their children unless it's a medical necessity. And no, I don't think preventing masturbation, dumbing down a guy's sex drive, or going along with primitive religious practices that have now become routine for all counts as a medical necessity.
Yes, but what of the research that shows circumcisions may prevent HIV? Well, so does wearing a condom. And the studies were done in Africa. As an article (posted on an anti-circ site) noting the problems with the studies said:
The conditions in Africa are very different from those in the developed world. It would be wrong to apply findings from Africa to the developed nations.
Using these studies to argue for male circumcision is like arguing that people should get their heads cut off so they won't get their hair wet when it rains. Okay. Or a person could carry an umbrella.
More arguing against male circumcision here.
NPR link via Kate Coe
What's Cholesterol Got To Do With It?
Gary Taubes, who wrote the terrific book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, that shows that much of what we believe to be dietary science is actually "science," has another debunker in The New York Times. An excerpt:
In the 1950s, two hypotheses competed for attention among heart disease researchers. It had been known for decades that cholesterol was a component of atherosclerotic plaques, and people who have a genetic disorder that causes extremely high cholesterol levels typically have clogged arteries and heart attacks. As new technology enabled them to look more closely at lipoproteins, however, researchers began to suspect that these carrier molecules might play a greater role in cardiovascular disease than the cholesterol inside them. The cholesterol hypothesis dominated, however, because analyzing lipoproteins was still expensive and difficult, while cholesterol tests were easily ordered up by any doctor.In the late 1960s, biochemists created a simple technique for measuring, more specifically, the cholesterol inside the different kinds of lipoproteins — high-density, low-density and very low-density. The National Institutes of Health financed a handful of studies to determine whether these “cholesterol fractions” could predict the risk of cardiovascular disease. In 1977, the researchers reported their results: total cholesterol turned out to be surprisingly useless as a predictor. Researchers involved with the Framingham Heart Study found that in men and women 50 and older, “total cholesterol per se is not a risk factor for coronary heart disease at all.”
The cholesterol in low-density lipoproteins was deemed a “marginal risk factor” for heart disease. Cholesterol in high-density lipoproteins was easily the best determinant of risk, but with the correlation reversed: the higher the amount, the lower the risk of heart disease.
These findings led directly to the notion that low-density lipoproteins carry “bad” cholesterol and high-density lipoproteins carry “good” cholesterol. And then the precise terminology was jettisoned in favor of the common shorthand. The lipoproteins LDL and HDL became “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol,” and the lipoprotein transport vehicle was now conflated with its cholesterol cargo. Lost in translation was the evidence that the causal agent in heart disease might be abnormalities in the lipoproteins themselves.
The truth is, we’ve always had reason to question the idea that cholesterol is an agent of disease. Indeed, what the Framingham researchers meant in 1977 when they described LDL cholesterol as a “marginal risk factor” is that a large proportion of people who suffer heart attacks have relatively low LDL cholesterol.
So how did we come to believe strongly that LDL cholesterol is so bad for us? It was partly due to the observation that eating saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol, and we’ve assumed that saturated fat is bad for us. This logic is circular, though: saturated fat is bad because it raises LDL cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol is bad because it is the thing that saturated fat raises. In clinical trials, researchers have been unable to generate compelling evidence that saturated fat in the diet causes heart disease.
The other important piece of evidence for the cholesterol hypothesis is that statin drugs like Zocor and Lipitor lower LDL cholesterol and also prevent heart attacks. The higher the potency of statins, the greater the cholesterol lowering and the fewer the heart attacks. This is perceived as implying cause and effect: statins reduce LDL cholesterol and prevent heart disease, so reducing LDL cholesterol prevents heart disease. This belief is held with such conviction that the Food and Drug Administration now approves drugs to prevent heart disease, as it did with Zetia, solely on the evidence that they lower LDL cholesterol.
But the logic is specious because most drugs have multiple actions. It’s like insisting that aspirin prevents heart disease by getting rid of headaches.
One obvious way to test the LDL cholesterol hypothesis is to find therapies that lower it by different means and see if they, too, prevent heart attacks. This is essentially what the Vytorin trial did and why its results argue against the hypothesis.
Other such tests have likewise failed to confirm it. A recent trial of torcetrapib, a drug that both raises HDL and lowers LDL cholesterol, was halted midstream because the drug seemed to cause heart attacks and strokes rather than prevent them. Estrogen replacement therapy also lowers LDL cholesterol, but it too has failed to prevent heart disease in clinical trials. The same goes for eating less saturated fat.
So it is reasonable, after the Vytorin trial, to question the role of LDL cholesterol in heart disease. Not whether statins help prevent heart disease, but whether they work exclusively, or at all, by this mechanism.
Our National Day Of Romantic Insincerity
Valentine's Day. I hate it. I'm only reminded of it now because papers are calling me for Valentine's Day tips.
If somebody loves you, they show you all the time, not just on the officially recognized day for it. For me, Valentine's Day is this manufactured holiday, and it's especially for people who treat each other like steaming crap all year round, and then have this one 24-hour period to get naked and be nice to each other. Feh.
What's wrong with being really romantic on the average Thursday? It's much more exciting then.
Speaking of which, I won't say what the show is just yet, but there was a TV shoot at my house Thursday -- one I was in. They told me Wednesday afternoon that they needed to be at my house at 10 am the next day, or they couldn't work me into the schedule. Eek. At the time, I was still in for a bunch of errands and an appointment that kept me running around until dinnertime.
Well, guess who woke up at 6am, got to the store by 7am to get me a few things I needed, and then came over to help me get my house ready? (No small task.) My kind of Valentine. And not a stuffed animal (gag!) or a heart-shaped pancake in sight.
Now, I love buying presents for people I care about. A good friend is going through a lot with her parents now -- both have dementia in varying degrees, along with other problems, and both are in different facilities -- and she started crying a little on the phone with me the other day. Well, I only spent about $10, with shipping...got her World's Softest Socks, in deep purple, which I absolutely love and wear when I write because I can't stand having cold feet. Made her feel better, too. And this was a gift sincerely given, not one given because the calendar said it was time.
As for the Valentine's Day thing, girls have to take the lead on cutting down on the ridiculousness (if you are a girl who think it's just ridiculous and kind of sickening, like me). Sure, there are some gooey guys out there, but I think most guys or a whole lot of guys celebrate Valentine's Day simply because they know they'll get their asses kicked if they don't. I mean, do you really think men buy anything with baby's breath of their own volition?
Don't Credit The Nutters For Fewer Abortions
In The New York Times, there's an editorial that goes into where, exactly, the abortion rate went down: '
Between 2000 and 2005, the last year in the study by the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed yearly dropped from 1.3 million to 1.2 million, the fewest since 1974. The proportion of pregnancies ending in abortion also declined significantly.Abortion opponents like the National Right to Life Committee seized upon the numbers as vindication for their strategy of demonizing abortion and making it harder for women to obtain one. Many states now mandate counseling sessions beforehand. But a harder look at the data suggests another explanation.
Almost two-thirds of the decline in the total number of abortions can be traced to eight jurisdictions with few or no abortion restrictions — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington State and the District of Columbia. These are places, notes the Guttmacher Institute’s president, Sharon Camp, that have shown a commitment to real sex education, largely departing from the Bush administration’s abstinence-only approach. These jurisdictions also help women avoid unintended pregnancies by making contraception widely available.
The lesson: prevention works. Restrictions on abortion serve mainly to hurt poor women by postponing abortions until later in pregnancy. While shifting social mores may change some people’s behavior, the best practical strategy for reducing abortions is to focus on helping women avoid unwanted pregnancies.
One of the most intriguing findings of the abortion study has to do with RU-486, which allows women to safely terminate a pregnancy in its first weeks without surgery. Guttmacher Institute researchers found that a significant decline in the number of abortion providers over the past decade is being offset by an increase in providers that offer the drug.
What kind of idiot thinks telling teenagers not to have sex will have an effect other than having them not carry condoms and not be prepared when they eventually get hot and hormonal? I guess if you can believe, without evidence, that there's a big man in the sky moving everybody around like chess pieces, you'll believe anything.
Death Spam
Sula Arafat's fortune? Getting a piece of that is old hat. The latest in spam is the threat of assassination. Rather congenial, too. ("How are you?") And I love the use of caps "Someone you call a friend wants you Dead by all means." Oh, and "by all means"...does that mean the killer plans to use a gun, an ax, poison, pills, and throw me off a tall building just before he uses all those items? The e-mail follows. Let's see, if the guy has a time machine, he just might be able to get to Los Angeles from Australia by 7:30pm:
How are you.Am very sorry for you my friend, is a pity that this is how your life is going
to end as soon as you don't comply.As you can see there is no need of
introducing myself to you because I don't have any business with you,
my duty as
I am mailing you now is just to KILL/ASSASINATE you and I have to do it as I
have already been paid for that.Someone you call a friend wants you Dead by all means, and the person
have spent
a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told me that he
want you
dead and he provided us with your name ,picture and other necessary
information's we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down
and they
have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you,
and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to
contact you and see if your life is Important to you or not since
their findings
shows that you are innocent.I called my client back and ask him of you email address which I
didn't tell him
what I wanted to do with it and he gave it to me and I am using it to contact
you now. As I am writing to you now my men are monitoring you and they are
telling me everything about you.Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? As someone has paid us to kill you.
Get back to
me now if you are ready to pay some fees to spare your life, If you are not
ready for my help, then I will carry on with my job straight-up.WARNING: DO NOT THINK OF CONTACTING THE POLICE OR EVEN TELL ANYONE BECAUSE I
WILL KNOW. REMEMBER, SOMEONE WHO KNOWS YOU VERY WELL WANT YOU DEAD! I WILL
EXTEND IT TO YOUR FAMILY, INCASE I NOTICE SOMETHING FUNNY.DO NOT COME OUT ONCE IT IS 7:30PM UNTIL I MAKE OUT TIME TO SEE YOU AND
GIVE YOU
THE TAPE OF MY DISCUSSION WITH THE PERSON WHO WANT YOU DEAD AFTER YOU HAVE
COMPLIED WITH MY DEMANDS, THEN YOU CAN USE IT TO TAKE ANY LEGAL ACTION.GOOD LUCK AS I AWAIT YOUR REPLY
Regards
Don bush.
----------------------------------------------------------------
EscapeNet - Flat rate ADSL broadband from $29.90
http://www.esc.net.au
Oh yeah, and you've got to love an alleged contract killer who gets the person's e-mail address from the person who's hired them -- without explanation. Sorry, but if a person gets taken by this, they're probably one of those evolution would have taken out like a restaurant water glass just a few years back.
Hey, Feminists! I Got The Message -- And I'm Not Impressed
There's a letter going around, signed by 700 feminists, mewling that “columnists and opinion writers from The Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world.”
David Horowitz writes:
The signers of this Letter claim that, “contrary to the accusations of pundits,” they support Muslim feminists in “their struggle against female genital mutilation, ‘honor’ murder, forced marriage, child marriage, compulsory Islamic dress codes, the criminalization of sex outside marriage, brutal punishments like lashing and stoning, family laws that favor men and that place adult women under the legal power of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and laws that discount legal testimony made by women.”Well, we welcome these avowals of support for the rights of Muslim women. However, forgive us for doubting their sincerity. As one of us pointed out in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin during Islamo-Fascism Week:
“One of our concerns … is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. There are probably 600 Women’s Studies programs on American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. We have had a very hard time locating a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.”
What was true last October is still true today. As recently as December 10, a Muslim teenager was strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab without a protest from the American feminist movement. And that is only one of many crimes committed in the name of Islam against Muslim women over which the feminist movement continues to be silent.
On New Year’s Day, Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead in Irving, Texas. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, on a warrant for capital murder. The girls’ great aunt, Gail Gartrell, told reporters, “This was an honor killing.” Apparently Yaser Said murdered his daughters because they had non-Muslim boyfriends.
The signers of the Open Letter say that they are against honor killing. Here is an honor killing in the United States. Where are these feminists on this issue? Why are they not supporting the hunt for Amina’s and Sarah’s killers and organizing a campaign in the Muslim community to stop such practices?
Why not indeed? Here are a few Google searches: "Amina Said + Pandagon": zero. "Amina Said" +feministing: zero. "Amina Said" +thenation: zero. Yes, the roar of the feminists is just deafening.
As I wrote to somebody who e-mailed it to me:
Thanks for sending this. I do have to say, I see it as a reaction against those of us who have come out saying they aren't addressing these issues. I don't see them being so vocal about these things -- they focus on ads that say something's "skinny" and other stuff I find completely dippy and invented as a problem.
Here's one of the ads from the NOW link just above:
And here, for a nibble of the feminist approach to the oppression of Muslim women, vile feminist darling Amanda Marcotte posted "How headscarves, pantyhose, and push-up bras are all the same thing":
On the provocative post title, that’s a reference to the theory of compulsory femininity. The idea is that women have all these onerous tasks to prove we’re feminine and submissive enough, and these tasks are enforced through social pressure, institutions, and sometimes even government force. Fashion provides a pretty clear-cut example of how this works, because feminine fashions are routinely enforced in every way imaginable. The theory of compulsory femininity also explains exactly why a hijab is no different than a push-up bra, since both items of clothing are worn to demonstrate alliance with patriarchal dictates and are hardly worn just for the hell of it.Taking that into account, it’s hard to deny that the hysteria over headscarves is racist in nature. Faux feminist outrage over women wearing a simple headscarf, which is comfortable and doesn’t physically restrain you, unlike a lot of compulsory feminine fashions, sounds really rich coming from people who will then enforce their own version of compulsory femininity on women. (So, yes, Violet gets a pass, because I’d bet she’d condemn pantyhose, which are an invention of the devil, just as quickly.) From my point of view, the struggle between the demands on Western women to display their hair versus the demands on Muslim women to cover their hair is nothing but a couple of patriarchies bickering over who has the better displays of control over their women. I no more would feel comfortable tying my hair into a scarf to go to work or out to dinner than a lot of women would feel comfortable having their hair out in those circumstances. I do tie my hair into a scarf a lot, but it’s a casual thing, for shopping and housework. In more formal situations, compulsory femininity dictates that I display my hair, and for most women, they also feel they have to dye it, straighten it, curl it, blow dry it, wear it long, sex it up somehow. The common theme between the Western fashion and the Muslim fashion is that women’s hair is too damn sexually appealing to allow women’s personal feelings about the matter dictate how they wear it.
Truth told, there’s a lot of compulsory femininity in America that is just as much a pain in the ass as tying your hair into a scarf. I remember when it seemed like the only bras you could find were push-up bras. (Amy: Oh, please.) Now, by no means is that as oppressive as any situation where the law mandates you have to wear something, which is certainly true of head coverings in some countries, but if you’re just comparing the two items of clothing as legally voluntary symbols of willful female subservience, the headscarf at least is more comfortable.
Uh, am I just out of it? I have yet to hear of anybody in America killing women for not wearing push-up bras.
P.S. Here's how Pandagon respects the rights of others.
Atom And Yves
Roger Cohen writes in The New York Times about one area French industry exceeds ours -- in nuclear power. The French nuclear energy company Areva "provides about 80 percent of the country’s electricity from 58 nuclear power plants" and "is building a new generation of reactor that will come on line at Flamanville in 2012, and is exporting its expertise to countries from China to the United Arab Emirates":
Contrast that with the United States, where just 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear plants, no commercial reactor has come on line since 1996, no new reactor has been ordered for decades, and debate about nuclear power remains paralyzing despite its clean-air electricity generation in the age of global warming....I know, that word “nuclear” still sends a frisson. Images multiply of Hiroshima and Chernobyl and the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 and waste in dangerous perpetuity, not to mention proliferation and dirty bombs.
But the lesson of the post-9/11 world is that we have to get over our fears, especially irrational ones.
Nuclear power has proved safe in both France and America — not one radiation-related death has occurred in the history of U.S. commercial nuclear power. It constitutes a vital alternative to the greenhouse-gas spewing coal-power plants that account for over 50 percent of U.S. electricity generation. Thousands of people die annually breathing the noxious particles of coal-fire installations.
Of course, wind and solar power should be developed, but even by mid-century they will satisfy only a fraction of U.S. energy needs, however much those needs are cut. Hundreds of square miles of eyesore wind farms barely produce the electricity you get from a nuclear plant on less than a square mile.
“Nuclear power is the most efficient energy source we have,” said Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. “Uranium is energy-dense. If you got all your electricity from nuclear for your lifetime, your share of the waste would fit in a soda can.”
Cravens once feared this waste so much that she demonstrated against nuclear power plants, but she’s come around. Like Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who once lambasted nuclear power as “criminal” and now advocates its use, she’s been convinced by the evidence. That’s called growing up.
UPDATE: Another surprise from France, via Instapundit, from The Foundry, "When Did the French Become Better Adherents To Limited Government Than the GOP?"
Today’s Financial Times reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration plans to freeze public spending for five years “to eliminate its deficit and reduce spending as a share of national output.” While Congress figures out the fastest way possible to deficit spend $150 billion on a stimulus package that history suggests will do nothing, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told FT a global downturn would only “reinforce the goverment’s determination to move swiftly and far with structural reforms.”...Maybe France’s new leadership can drop by to remind wayward appropriators in the [GOP] caucus what real fiscal discipline looks like.
Is Islam Worse Than Other Religions?
Some nitwit left a comment on my "Another Muslim Girl Decomposing" blog item the other day:
I don't think Islam is any worse than any other religions. I just don't think much of any of them either. I think being a member of one should generally count as a strike against your right to vote. I get very worried about my countries, the UK if you were wondering, attitude to Islam as we've got really good at ignoring every other religion in sight. But for some reason we take them seriously, even their woefully inept mass murderers. Ho hum.
Raymond Ibrahim, editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, responds at Front Page:
In the Muslim community, the holy war [i.e. jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people. That is why the Israeilites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority [e.g. a “caliphate”]. Their only concern was to establish their religion [not spread it to the nations]… But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations (The Muqudimmah, vol. 1 pg. 473, emphasis added).
Even when juxtaposed to their Old Testament counterparts, the sword-verses are distinctive for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay non-believers today no less than yesterday. Yahweh commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did Yahweh give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their descendants the Jews, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam’s original enemies were, like Judaism’s, historical (e.g. Christian Byzantines and pagan Persians), the Koran rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book—“until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves utterly subdued” (9:29) and to “slay the pagans wherever you find them” (9:5). The two conjunctions “until” and “wherever” demonstrate the perpetual nature of these commandments: there are still “people of the book” who have yet to be “utterly subdued” (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and “pagans” to be slain “wherever” one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa).
Aside from the divine words of the Koran, Muhammad’s pattern of behavior—his “Sunna” or “example”—is an extremely important source of legislation in Islam. Muslims are exhorted to emulate Muhammad in all walks of life: “You have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern [of conduct]” (33:21). And Muhammad’s pattern of conduct vis-à-vis non-Muslims is quite explicit. Sarcastically arguing against the concept of “moderate” Islam, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world’s support per a recent al-Jazeera poll, portrays the prophet’s Sunna thus:
“Moderation” is demonstrated by our prophet who did not remain more than three months in Medina without raiding or sending a raiding party into the lands of the infidels to beat down their strongholds and seize their possessions, their lives, and their women” (from The Al-Qaeda Reader).In fact, based on both the Koran and Muhammad’s Sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded (e.g. 4:24, 4:92, 8:69, 24:33, 33:50, etc.).
While law-centric and legalistic, Judaism has no such equivalent to the Sunna; the words and deeds of the patriarchs, though recorded in the Old Testament, never went on to be part of Jewish law. Neither Abraham’s “white-lies,” nor Jacob’s perfidy, nor Moses’ short-fuse, nor David’s adultery, nor Solomon’s philandering ever went on to instruct Jews or Christians. They were merely understood to be historical actions perpetrated by fallible men who were often punished by God for their less than ideal behavior.
As for Christianity, much of the Old Testament law was abrogated by Jesus. “Eye for an eye” gave way to “turn the other cheek.” Totally loving God and one’s neighbor became supreme law (Matt 22:38-40). Furthermore, Jesus’ “Sunna”—as in “What would Jesus do?”—is characterized by passivity and altruism.
My remarks in response to the commenter above:
Is your head out from your cheeks now?(I still can't get over "Ho hum" from your comment above.) You'd better wish for more people like me, sounding the alarm about the reality of Islam, and fewer people like you, yawning all the way to your conversion to Islam or eventual death, as the Muslim population explodes in Britain.
As for "ignoring every other religion in sight," you've perhaps had Jews recently tell you you weren't allowed to drive from Friday after sunset until sundown on Saturday? It's not the other religions who want to convert, subjugate or kill you...or hadn't you noticed?
Very Spicy Tuna Roll
It's not just a side of wasabi you're getting with your order. Marian Burros writes for The New York Times that recent lab tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that a diet of just six pieces a week could exceed the limits of acceptability by the EPA:
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.
Dr. Gochfeld analyzed the sushi for The Times with Dr. Joanna Burger, professor of life sciences at Rutgers University. He is a former chairman of the New Jersey Mercury Task Force and also treats patients with mercury poisoning.
The owner of a restaurant whose tuna sushi had particularly high mercury concentrations said he was shocked by the findings. “I’m startled by this,” said the owner, Drew Nieporent, a managing partner of Nobu Next Door. “Anything that might endanger any customer of ours, we’d be inclined to take off the menu immediately and get to the bottom of it.”
...Tuna samples from the Manhattan restaurants Nobu Next Door, Sushi Seki, Sushi of Gari and Blue Ribbon Sushi and the food store Gourmet Garage all had mercury above one part per million, the “action level” at which the F.D.A. can take food off the market. (The F.D.A. has rarely, if ever, taken any tuna off the market.) The highest mercury concentration, 1.4 parts per million, was found in tuna from Blue Ribbon Sushi. The lowest, 0.10, was bought at Fairway.
...Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.
...In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.
I've cut down considerably on my sushi-eating in recent years, although I did eat it at the main Nobu from time to time, and at Gourmet Garage, too, where I still go when I'm in NYC.
Actually, these days, I don't eat much fish at all. Instead, I take fish oil capsules every day -- in my case, Nordic Naturals - Omega 3, 120 softgels -- which, unlike Carlson's, didn't give me fish burps (they're lemon-flavored). It's very important to consider the brand you take, because many of the fish oil caps can have mercury.
Accordingly, I chose Nordic Naturals because their products are certified by IFOS (although I don't think my precise version of Omega 3 is listed there -- they don't test every one of them, I don't think). IFOS is the International Fish Oil Standards organization, which checks for purity, contamination, etc., and, for example, the factual correctness of the label.
Oh yeah...and I guess if you're a tuna sushi lover, as I am, and it makes you feel better, you could take them with a spoonful of sticky rice and a bit of pickled ginger.
Who's Got The Bigger Big Tent?
There's this idea that people on the left are tolerant and that it's those on the right who are intolerant. Does the data support this? Arthur C. Brooks has a very interesting piece in the WSJ:
In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.
To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.
In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.
Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.
In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.
Cathy Seipp would've agreed.
I Read The Atlantic With A Pink Highlighter
Such a terrific magazine. This month's (January/February) Atlantic Monthly has (among others) a fantastic cover story, "After Iraq, What Will The Middle East Look Like," by Jeffrey Goldberg. An excerpt, which echoes my thought that democracy is not possible in Muslim countries:
The neoconservatives’ big idea was that American-style democracy would quickly take hold in Iraq, spread through the Arab Middle East, and then be followed by the collapse of al-Qaeda, who would no longer have American-backed authoritarian Arab regimes to rally against. But democracy has turned out to be a habit not easily cultivated, and the idea that Arab political culture is capable of absorbing democratic notions of governance has fallen into disfavor.In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”
After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.
“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”
Islam is a violence-based, collectivist religion which guides pretty much every moment of the Muslim's life. Democracy values the individual. There's a clash here that can't be worked out.
The Lies Have It
Douglass K. Daniel writes for the AP that a study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that the Bush administration issued 935 false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks:
The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."...Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.
The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.
"The cumulative effect of these false statements _ amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts _ was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.
"Some journalists _ indeed, even some entire news organizations _ have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq," it said.
I'm Not A Cult Member
But, too many people are -- people who align themselves with a particular party or belief system and vote for it with the loyalty and team spirit of a middle school cheerleader. It's nonthink. And you see it from bloggers all the time -- those who would probably leap to lay out the cgi welcome mat for Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mengistu if it was in keeping with their party lines.
Personally, I'm a thinker, not a joiner. I just try to vote for the least creepy sellout, which is how I see all the candidates and their dubious wheelings and dealings, supposedly on our behalf.
It's why this blog is a smattering of political this and that. Because I'm not any one thing; I'm a bunch of things: fiscally conservative, socially libertarian, and, a term I made up, a personal responsibilitarian. And for keeping the religious nuttery in the church, synagogue, or mosque where it belongs. And for finding somebody I can vote for in the next election without projectile vomiting. And at the moment, that's a person who doesn't look like they'll be on the ballot.
How about you? Have you drunk the Kool-Aid? And if so, did your glass have an elephant or a donkey on it? (Or a "Race Haters For Ron Paul!" sticker?) Arnold Kling writes for Tech Central Station:
Are all mass political movements cults? I tend to think so.Many well-meaning libertarians signed on to the "Ron Paul revolution." At first, this only required accepting his pro-life and anti-immigrant stances as libertarian, contrary to the leanings of many libertarians. More recently, a journalist for The New Republic found some newsletters that were circulated under Ron Paul's name in the 1980's and 1990's that included angry, racist rhetoric. Ron Paul himself disclaims having such sentiments, and he says that the writing was the work of someone else operating with lax supervision.
I do not know Ron Paul. He may be wise. He may be decent. But to dismiss all doubts about his judgment and his character would be to succumb to a cult.
Let me hasten to add that I do not think of the Paul cult as unique. I am equally loathe to join the Clinton cult, the Obama cult, the Guiliani cult...you name it.
For me, democratic politics is a "lesser of evils" game, and I'm never sure how best to play it. But I have to say that when I read that this year's New Hampshire primary had a record turnout, it made my heart sink rather than warm. Not that I'm against voting, but I hate to think of people as buying into anyone's political campaign.
For libertarians, I recommend focusing on institutions that compete with government: families, private schools, charities, and religious organizations (short of becoming cult-like in your devotion). I recommend developing your logical reasoning skills and applying those skills to questioning what politicians say. But I do not recommend joining mass political movements. Instead, treat them as cults.
And don't forget "The Cult Of The Woman," aka "Vote Your Labia."
And many blacks do it, too -- "Vote Your Race Cult," via a Balt Sun story by Michael Hill:
Some argue that blacks should vote for [Mrs.] Clinton "because her husband was good to us," he continued."That's not true," he thundered. "He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."
What does your preferred movement or political party do that you find asshole-ish or wrong? Anything at all?
The Latest Fashion Fat
As somebody who looks high and low for people in Los Angeles not wearing sweatpants, or worse, yet, sweatpants with "JUICY" plastered across the ass, I liked this bit speculating on how and why so many people are obese and dress as they do. Giles Coren writes in The Times/UK:
An even heftier reminder of the crisis in Britain came at Tokyo airport when I was checking in, where three Englishmen of 18 stone each or more stood in front of me, their feet wide apart in that stability-maintaining stance to which the morbidly obese resort, wearing the first tracksuits I had seen since I arrived (for I had attended no athletics meetings) and clutching vast Starbucks tubs of warm frothy milk drinks, just like mother used to express. This tubby triumvirate looked not like toddlers, but bona fide babies.Did we start dressing as infants because we got too fat to be comfortable in grown-up clothes, or did we eat ourselves into the shape of babies because once we were dressing like them we thought we might as well look like them?
Some Hotels Allow Dogs, Some Hotels Allow Women
Just like some hotels in the U.S.A. are beginning to allow dogs, welcome to Saudi Arabia where progress is allowing lone women to stay in hotels by themselves -- providing they send word to the police first. From an AP story:
Women in Saudi Arabia can now stay in a hotel or a furnished apartment without a male guardian, according to a government decision that comes as the country faces increasing criticism for its severe restrictions on women.The daily Al-Watan, which is deemed close to the Saudi government, reported Monday that the ministry issued a circular to hotels asking them to accept lone women — as long as their information is sent to a local police station.
The decision was adopted after a study conducted by the Interior Ministry, the Supreme Commission of Tourism and the religious police authority known as the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
Saudi women, under strict Islamic law, suffer severe restrictions on daily life: They are not allowed to be anywhere with an unrelated man, cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian's permission.
This can be tough for Saudi women like Fatima al-Timani, forcibly divorced from her husband by her family. From another AP story:
Fatima said her husband, a hospital administrator, followed Saudi tradition in asking her father for permission to marry her in 2003."My brother reported good things about him, so my dad accepted his proposal," said Fatima, a computer specialist who was 29 when she married.
She said her father knew that Mansour came from a less prominent tribe than hers, but that he didn't mind because he "cared about the man himself."
A few months after the wedding, several of Fatima's relatives, including a half brother, persuaded her father to give them power of attorney to file a lawsuit demanding an annulment, she said.
Then her father died, and Fatima said she'd hoped the case would be dropped.
But on Feb. 25, 2006, police knocked on the couple's door to serve Mansour with divorce papers — which said his marriage had been annulled nine months earlier.
"We were shattered. How did this happen? Why?" Fatima asked.
Saudi lawyer Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, who used to represent the couple, said local interpretations of Islamic law hold that relatives of a married couple have the right to seek an annulment if they feel the marriage lowers the extended family's status.
He said authorities are reluctant to overrule such annulment orders, believing they are private matters within extended families.
Fatima took the couple's 2-year-old daughter and 4-month-old son to live with her mother, who had persuaded her to let Mansour deal with the legal issues on his own.
But after three months without her husband, Fatima and the children sneaked out of her mother's house and flew with Mansour to the western seaside city of Jiddah, where they sought to live in anonymity.
Saudi police soon discovered them and imprisoned the family for living together illegally.
"The police told me I either return to my (mother's) family or go to jail," Fatima said. "I chose jail."
"My children and I were thrown in a cell with women sentenced for pushing drugs, practicing witchcraft and behaving immorally," Fatima said. Authorities allowed her to send her daughter back to live with her father, but the infant stayed with Fatima in jail.
"He learned to speak in jail, he learned to walk in jail and his teeth came out in jail," she said.
An End To State-Sponsored Discrimination?
The Democratic candidate for president will likely be either a black man or a woman. Isn't it finally time to end the discriminatory practice of "affirmation action," and go by "best man or woman gets the job" -- or the spot at the university? Even if that man or woman is Asian, not black or Latino?
Stephanie Simon writes for the LA Times (bugmenot.com for a login) that activists in five states have launched a drive to cut off tax dollars for programs offering preferential treatment for race or gender. Ward Connerly is behind it:
Connerly, who is of black, white and Native American heritage, began fighting against racial preferences as a member of the University of California Board of Regents in the mid-1990s. He has said he came to the issue after meeting with a white couple whose son had been rejected from several University of California medical schools; they believed less-qualified minority students had an unfair edge in admissions. A land-use consultant by training, Connerly now devotes himself to anti-affirmative- action campaigns.
More about Connerly here. And here's one of the whiners from the other side:
"They've targeted states where there's a white majority electorate and a vocal, if small, extreme anti-immigrant right wing," said Shanta Driver, who runs By Any Means Necessary, a coalition that defends affirmative action. In such states, she said, "it's extremely difficult for us to win."
I might have skin the color of Wite-Out, but beyond being for the idea that you don't resolve discrimination by discriminating, I'm not anti-immigrant, just anti-illegal immigrant. Come legally, and have something to offer us, like an ability in technology or medicine, and I'll be right there to set out the welcome mat for you and maybe even offer you a lemonade.
Here's the result of pushing race for law school admissions. From a WSJ story by Gail Herriott:
While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander’s research suggests that just the opposite may be true–that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.
Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.
Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.
The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.
Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Mr. Sander has his critics–some thoughtful, some just strident–but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn’t need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.
Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash–neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.
Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?
Accusations Of Racism As A Form Of Advancement
This week, Slate is publishing excerpts from Richard Thompson Ford's new book, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. Here's his preamble to the first installment, which actually seems to say a bit more than the first installment itself:
Almost all Americans agree that racism is wrong. Many believe that it remains a serious problem that affects many people on a regular basis. But a lot of people also worry that the charge of racism can be abused. We can all think of examples: Tawana Brawley's claimed assault seemed to have been a staged hoax. Michael Jackson—a musician who enjoyed the most lucrative career in the history of recorded music—teamed up with Brawley's former handler, Al Sharpton, to accuse his recording label, Sony Music, of a "racist conspiracy" to undermine his popularity after sales of his disappointing latest album are, well, disappointing. The multimillionaire—who, through untold plastic surgeries, has achieved the Aryan phenotype of Snow White— declared fearlessly, "When you fight for me, you're fighting for all black people, dead and alive." (That rumbling you hear is the sound of thousands of former slaves, sharecroppers, and victims of Jim Crow turning in their graves.) Prince, a musician whose contract was not quite as good as Michael Jackson's but still extraordinarily generous, complained that he was a "slave" to his record label (years later Prince made a deal with Jackson's old label, Sony, apparently unafraid of the racist conspiracy). Clarence Thomas, when charges of sex harassment surfaced during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court of the United States, compared his critics to a lynch mob. And of course there's O. J. Simpson. We all know what happened with O. J. Simpson (don't we?).The Race Card will examine the prevalence of dubious and questionable accusations of racism and other types of bias. I will argue that the social and legal meaning of "racism" is in a state of crisis: The term now has no single clear and agreed-upon meaning. As a result, it is available to describe an increasingly wide range of disparate policies, attitudes, decisions, and social phenomena. This leads to disagreement and confusion. Self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of "bias" tactically, in order to advance their own ends. And people of goodwill may make sincere claims that strike others as obviously wrongheaded.
Fish Fingers
Bad news for creationutters, via University of Chicago paleontologist/anatomy prof Neil Shubin. In "Creationist's Nightmare: An Evolutionary Anatomy Lesson," Lizzie Ratner writes in the NY Observer:
When the renowned paleontologist Neil Shubin announced in 2006 that he’d discovered an ancient fossil with an uncanny resemblance to a “missing link” between fish and land-dwellers, creationists responded with all the fury of pissed off-apes. Jumping, hooting and thumping their chests, they denounced the discovery as secular “propaganda” and trashed Dr. Shubin’s creature, named Tiktaalik, as nothing more than a desperate, pro-evolution publicity stunt.“With the continued invalidation of the corrupt theory of neo-Darwinism in the eyes of many, and school boards nationwide taking a favorable look at intelligent design, it is not surprising that evolutionists are scrambling to enact damage control,” wrote Frank Sherwin, a “creation scientist,” in a news post for the Institute for Creation Research shortly after the story of Tiktaalik landed on the front page of The New York Times. “Enter an alleged ‘missing link’ that some are saying reveals one of the greatest changes in the field of zoology.”
Now, nearly two years later, Dr. Shubin has come out with his riposte, a book titled Your Inner Fish that is bound to send his anti-evolutionist foes into fits of pre-primate rage. This isn’t because Your Inner Fish is a particularly strident or polemical work. Written in a clear, patient voice, it keeps its God-delusion comments to a minimum while somehow managing to go 200 pages without ever mentioning the E-word. (Instead of “evolution,” Dr. Shubin uses Darwin’s more delicate term, “descent with modification.”)
But for those readers still raging over the idea that humans might be descended from “lower order animals” (like, say, monkeys), Dr. Shubin’s book suggests an even more terrifying possibility: It offers a rigorously empirical exploration of how humans evolved from microbes into men and women, with some vital contributions from jellyfish, sharks, flies and, of course, Tiktaalik-like hybrids along the way.
Indeed, if there’s one message of Your Inner Fish, it’s the “exceptional similarities” between creatures as distant and disparate-seeming as Homo sapiens and, say, Paracoccus denitrificans, a humble bacteria bearing a remarkable resemblance to the mitochondria buried in all human cells.
As Dr. Shubin writes, “All animals are the same but different. … We may not look much like sea anemones and jellyfish, but the recipe that builds us is a more intricate version of the one that builds them.”
Or, in practical terms: Don’t expect to see Mike Huckabee curling up with this book.
Our Big Democrat-In-Chief Has Some Goodies For You
George Bush calls for welfare for regular people, in the form of a tax rebate (and other measures), in hopes of propping up the nosediving economy -- the economy sent into a nosedive by all the sleazebag loans given to poor people who could never dream of paying them off, bank credit default swaps, and the one-or-two-trillion-dollar debt for Iraq, to name a few. From a Maura Reynolds story in the LA Times:
Stepping out as the standard-bearer for an economic rescue, President Bush called Friday for about $150 billion in tax rebates and other measures designed to be a "shot in the arm" for the flagging economy.The president, who was out of the country for much of the last two weeks as bad news on the economy piled up, returned to the policy forefront by calling for an even larger plan than the $100-billion initiative being discussed in Congress.
"This growth package must be big enough to make a difference in an economy as large and dynamic as ours," the president said at the White House, flanked by his top economic advisors and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bush provided few details of what he thought the package should contain. Instead, he laid out "principles" that included an emphasis on tax incentives for businesses, which congressional Democrats have already said they would accept, and opposition to tax increases, which Democrats have indicated are off the table.
The centerpiece of the emerging plan appears to be a one-time tax cut -- paid as a cash rebate this year -- of $800 per taxpayer, or $1,600 for a couple filing jointly. Rebates of that size would total about $100 billion. Officials hope they would spur consumer spending and economic growth.
The remaining measures are likely to be a mix of tax incentives designed to encourage business expansion along with cash relief for the unemployed and needy, who would be likely to spend the money immediately, stimulating growth.
My problem with the nutter party (the Republicans) is that few of them seem to be actual conservatives -- fiscal conservatives like me -- they just label themselves that because of their retrograde way of looking at the world through Jesus-colored glasses.
I was listening to Tammy Bruce taking over for Al Rantel on the radio last night on my way to a party and I heard her say, to my surprise (but earning my respect), that she's "a Reagan Democrat." She explained that she could never call herself a Republican as long as the Republicans are the party that wants to tell a woman she can't have autonomy over her own body. I'm with you, sistah.
As I keep asking, whatever happened to the real conservatives? Classical liberals, I mean. Yoohooo, you guys all sleeping? Because we could use some solid fiscal policy and the Republicans only pretend to be against the handouts-as-government the Democrats are openly for, which is part of what got us into this economic mess in the first place.
Stupid Reasons People Die
I want to recommend a book by John Corso, M.D., full title, Stupid Reasons People Die, An Ingenious Plot For Defusing Deadly Diseases.
Throughout the book, Corso cuts through common assumptions about health care and at the end, has a chapter on exactly what tests he thinks people need, and when and why, to avoid dying stupidly (i.e. when death could have been prevented but for a simple test).
Now, I'm not for hypochondria-based medicine (my recent experience with anesthesia has convinced me the way to stay healthy is to do whatever you can to avoid ever needing medical intervention) but Corso seems to take the prudent but necessary side of preventive care.
I haven't read the entire book, just read a bunch of it and skimmed a bunch more, but I did find one area where he fell down, which is in advising women to "know thy own breasts" -- in other words, through self-examination. Now, mine happen to be on the larger side, and I sometimes joke with the mammographer that there could be a bomb implanted in there and I wouldn't find it through self-examination. But, I think even women with smaller breasts feel a lot of lumps all the time or don't know what they really feel and don't have a good grasp on what's dangerous and what's not. A book I recently got in the mail that echoes that notion is Dr. Nieca Goldberg's Complete Guide to Women's Health. Goldberg writes:
If this book had been written ten years ago, it would say that the standard of care for examining your breasts would be a monthly self-examination. This has fallen out of favor because of a long-term recent study of women working in a Shanghai factory. Half the women were given instruction on self-examination of the breast; the other half received no instruction. After ten years, the researchers found that there was no reduction in the death rate from breast cancer in the women who performed self-examination. Therefore many concluded that self-examination is a waste of time.
I'm not a doctor, haven't read this study or any others, and maybe it's "better safe than sorry" -- but I think the real message here (and a message Corso does make as well at the end of his book) is to get regular mammograms and maybe ultrasound and/or MRI if you're a younger woman with large, dense breasts and a history of breast cancer in your family. Ashkenazi Jews with a history of breast cancer in the family might want to see if they can get the BRCA test.
Another Muslim Girl Decomposing
James Orr, with news services, writes for The Guardian:
The teenager Shafilea Ahmed was described as a bright and intelligent young woman who wanted to go to university and become a lawyer. But the 17-year-old was "torn" between her ambitions, and her family and religion, her inquest at Kendal county hall in Cumbria heard.The young girl, who received a traditional Pakistani upbringing, confided in her teachers that she feared being forced into an arranged marriage.
She later went missing from her family home in Warrington, Cheshire, in September 2003.
In February 2004, five months on, her badly decomposed body was found on the banks of the Kent river at Sedgwick, in Cumbria.
Ahmed was most likely strangled or suffocated, according to pathologists. No one has been charged over her death and her parents, Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed, deny any involvement in her disappearance.
Giving evidence, Ahmed's friends and teachers revealed how the teenager had once arrived at school with a cut lip and bruising on her neck.
She allegedly said one of her parents had held her down while the other one beat her. Her father denied the claim.
Contrast this with the commenters who pop in here (in between all the sane and rational commenters) to opine that Islam is "no worse" than any other religion. I'm no fan of the belief, without evidence, in god, no matter what flavor it comes in -- but my friends who grew up Catholic, and kids I went to temple with when I was growing up, all actually were allowed to grow up.
What's with these people who are so determined to believe in this "I'm Okay/Mohammed Atta's Okay" vision of the world? At what point do they wake up? Is there any hope of waking them up? And if so, how?
"Imagine The Stupidest Clothing You Can"
Writes Norm. "Then click this link."
What You Don't Know Could Hurt You
Another disgusting revelation about drug companies and what they do with research that shows their drug might not do much for you. You guessed it: Circular file!
In other words, the data your shrink is going by in prescribing an antidepressant might not be the whole story. Just the part that sells the drug. Even worse, drug companies bury reports of untoward side effects or get the the analysis rejiggered to make them go away (as with Vioxx).
Utterly disgusting details of the antidepressant coverup in this New York Times story by Benedict Carey:
The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications; and many researchers have questioned the reported effectiveness of antidepressants. But the new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.
The finding is likely to inflame a continuing debate about how drug trial data is reported. In 2004, after revelations that negative findings from antidepressant trials had not been published, a group of leading journals agreed to stop publishing clinical trials that were not registered in a public database. Trade groups representing the world’s largest drug makers announced that members’ companies would begin to release more data from trials more quickly, on their own database, clinicalstudyresults.org.
And last year, Congress passed legislation that expanded the type of trials and the depth of information that must be submitted to clinicaltrials.gov, a public database operated by the National Library of Medicine. The Food and Drug Administration’s Web site provides limited access to recent reviews of drug trials, but critics say it is very hard to navigate.
“This is a very important study for two reasons,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal. “One is that when you prescribe drugs, you want to make sure you’re working with best data possible; you wouldn’t buy a stock if you only knew a third of the truth about it.”
Second, Dr. Drazen continued, “we need to show respect for the people who enter a trial.”
“They take some risk to be in the trial, and then the drug company hides the data?” he asked. “That kind of thing gets us pretty passionate about this issue.”
This reminds me of a story of a kid practicing marksmanship in WWII. Some officer came by and asked how he'd managed to shoot a whole row of bullseyes in the wall. The kid said something like, "It's easy. I shoot first, draw the bullseye afterward." Cute, unless you're the one taking the drugs.
Blow Me Up, Tom
I hear Tom Leykis read something from one of my columns yesterday, but I wasn't listening at the time. Anybody hear it? Anybody know what he read/said?
Reboobed
Buy yourself new titties, and guess what: You're not done. There may be heavy health and maintenance costs. From a New York Times story by Natasha Singer:
At a time when manufacturers have provided the F.D.A. with clinical studies that follow patients for just a few years, there is no established medical consensus on how long implants last, leaving doctors to rely on their anecdotal experiences when discussing durability with patients.Given the lack of such data, critics said, women may not be prepared in the long term for the ordeal or financial burden of subsequent surgery.
“Your implants may last less than 10 years or more than 10 years, but when you start having problems with them, your health insurance is unlikely to cover the M.R.I. tests or the reoperations,” said Carol Ciancutti-Leyva, the director of a 2007 anti-implant documentary called “Absolutely Safe.” “It can be a very expensive proposition, especially if you are young.”
Many women are aware that implants can break down over time, requiring replacement just like car tires. Both saline implants, made out of a saltwater solution, and silicone implants, made out of gelatinous silicone, can form minute tears in their rubbery shells, causing ruptures. In the case of such defects that require product replacement, both manufacturers, Allergan Inc. and the Mentor Corporation, offer guarantees. Mentor has a 10-year guarantee to replace implants and defray some surgical fees; Allergan’s warranty includes lifetime implant replacement and up to $1,200 for fees for the first 10 years.
Dr. Mark L. Jewell, a plastic surgeon in Eugene, Ore., who is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, said he warns his patients that breast augmentation surgery automatically guarantees a second operation at some future date. He added that many patients in clinical studies had elected to have follow-up operations to change implant type, size or position.
“Women are used to having their hair or nails done on a regular basis to maintain their appearance,” said Dr. Jewell, who has conducted clinical trials for both implant manufacturers and is a consultant for Allergan, the manufacturer behind the ads running in Elle. “Ultimately, breast implants may also be a matter of maintenance.”
But a rupture is only one of the local complications that may engender additional surgery. Like cocoons that grow around larvae, scar tissue can form around implants; and sometimes that scar capsule hardens and squeezes the implant, causing pain and deforming breasts. And saline implants can cause visible, tactile rippling beneath the skin.
Not all doctors, however, are as forthcoming about the risk of additional surgery as Dr. Jewell.
“My plastic surgeon told me that my saline implants should last forever,” said Krista Schell.
Which brings me to a point I've been making a lot lately: Listen to your doctor -- and then go get a second and maybe even a third opinion, if it's about something major, and/or research their advice yourself if you're capable.
And finally, the big question: So, boys, what do you think of fake'uns? Like 'em? Or, even if you're a booby-man, would you rather see a flat-chested girl wearing a push-up bra to make the best of what she has?
Quick! Figure Out How This Target Billboard "Objectifies" Women!
Via Consumerist, the feminists are up in arms about a Times Square Target billboard:
A Target billboard depicting a woman spreadeagled over a Target logo with her vagina centered squarely on the bullseye has some parents and feminists all riled up. One of them, Amy from ShapingYouth.org, contacted Target to see if they realized, you know, that their ad had a woman's crotch centered on a bullseye.
She's making a snow angel, retards. For people who are supposedly about seeing women "as people first," these feminists sure are all about pussy!
Target wisely told the nitwit bloggers who whined to them that they don't deal with "non-traditional media outlets." Which is much politer than saying "We don't negotiate with morons."
Personally, I find the billboard kinda kicky.
Sarko Kisses Islamic Ass
Via Reuters, unbelievably dim and out-of-touch statements by Sarkozy about the Saudis and Islam:
In Riyadh on Monday, he hailed Islam as "one of the greatest and most beautiful civilisations the world has known" and described his Saudi hosts as rulers who "appeal to the basic values of Islam to combat the fundamentalism that negates them."His praise for a kingdom that enforces and propagates a strict version of Islam, during a visit aimed at securing lucrative export contracts, was the last straw for his critics.
Monsieur, with the Muslims multiplying like mice in France, it's only a matter of time before the nutbags institute Sharia law, paint over the face of the Mona Lisa, and forcibly convert or kill all these children you've had or are about to have, along with the rest of French citizenry. Then again, perhaps you understand that, and were just doing your best to survive the death of French culture and western freedoms. Bonne chance!
Five Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit
By Robert Bryce, in the WaPo. Here are a couple of them:
1 Energy independence will reduce or eliminate terrorism.In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: "The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States." Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America's foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.
But the hype doesn't match reality. Remember, the two largest suppliers of crude to the U.S. market are Canada and Mexico -- neither exactly known as a belligerent terrorist haven.
Moreover, terrorism is an ancient tactic that predates the oil era. It does not depend on petrodollars. And even small amounts of money can underwrite spectacular plots; as the 9/11 Commission Report noted, "The 9/11 plotters eventually spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack." G.I. Wilson, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has fought in Iraq and written extensively on terrorism and asymmetric warfare, calls the conflation of oil and terrorism a "contrivance." Support for terrorism "doesn't come from oil," he says. "It comes from drugs, crime, human trafficking and the weapons trade."
5 Energy independence will mean a more secure U.S. energy supply.
To see why this is a myth, think back to 2005. After hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, chewing up refineries as they went, several cities in the southeastern United States were hit with gasoline shortages. Thankfully, they were short-lived. The reason? Imported gasoline, from refineries in Venezuela, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Throughout the first nine months of 2005, the United States imported about 1 million barrels of gasoline per day. By mid-October 2005, just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, those imports soared to 1.5 million barrels per day.
So we're woven in with the rest of the world -- and going to stay that way. Today, in addition to gasoline imports, the United States is buying crude oil from Angola, jet fuel from South Korea, natural gas from Trinidad, coal from Colombia and uranium from Australia. Those imports show that the global energy market is just that: global. Anyone who argues that the United States will be more secure by going it alone on energy hasn't done the homework.
Robert Bryce is a fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. He is the author of the forthcoming Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence.
via Todd Fletcher
The Unwanted "I Love You"
How do you deal with it? Check out my Advice Goddess column I just posted, "Once More With Fleeing." A reader writes:
This girl I’ve known for six years is visiting me. We live on opposite sides of the country, and once a year, have weeklong “dates” (the polite word for it). I thought we had a no-strings-attached arrangement. Then, two days ago, she said, “I love you.” Yikes. I just like her a lot, but felt bad saying that, so I lied and said “I love you” back. She’s since said it three more times. So, I lied three more times. How do I get myself out of this?--Pinocchio
My response:
Nothing makes the apartment walls close in like an unwanted declaration of love. You’re just dying to turn around and see if maybe, possibly, the person who made it could’ve been talking to somebody else: “Please, God, let an intruder be standing behind me.”Even worse, an unwanted “I love you” is like a mouse infestation. Where there was one, pretty soon there are three, then six, then the extended family’s scampering over and counting on you to set out cheese plates. The problem is, there’s an expected response to “I love you,” and it isn’t silent terror. Those Three Little Words come flying at you, and all you can do is bat them right back, maybe figuring you’ll pick them up later and attach the part you left off: “Uh, what I meant was…please don’t cry…it’s just that I forgot the bit after ‘I love,’ which was something along the lines of ‘having transcontinental sex with you.’”
You two did have an arrangement along these lines. So, what happened? Was she just overcome by a wellspring of affection, like that moment in elementary school when you pour the vinegar into the volcano? Maybe this was the inevitable outcome of six years of Nude Fun Week, plus where she’s at in life, plus maybe a blast of oxytocin, “the cuddle chemical” that can make even a woman who swears she can compartmentalize go all nesty on you: “You know, I could really see us shopping for dishtowels together.” Oh, don’t stop.
It’s also possible that what she was overcome by was a desire to shove this to the next level. No better tool for that than the phrase that seals the deal. You say it back, a trap door opens, and you wake up hogtied in the hold of a steamer ship bound for a wedding in her parents’ backyard. “I love you” can also be an investigative tool: “Testing…testing. Can I put framed photos of us on my desk? Move my couch into your living room? If I do a cannonball off the Golden Gate Bridge, will you dive in after me?”
Whoops! Your answers to these questions -- “No! No!” and “Enjoy your swim!” -- somehow came out “I love you.” Okay, mistakes happen. But, when you let the first “I love you” scurry off into the relationship, that was the time to send out the guy with the truck and the net. Now, with multiple “I love you’s” bouncing around, how do you unsay “I love you”? The answer is, you don’t. That’s cruel and unnecessary. Instead, rejigger what those “I love you’s” meant by giving her a sense of where you won’t be going with her -- anywhere you haven’t been going these past six years. In the future, pay attention to whether somebody’s more invested than you’d like, and you might avoid L-bombs and uncomfortable exchanges like “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” You: “Not if you can help it.”
The entire entry, with a bunch of comments, is here.
The Hillary Clinton/MLK Dustup
John McWhorter asks the essential question about it in the WSJ:
...Why would a white person running for president in 2008 dismiss the legacy of King near his birthday, which is celebrated as a national holiday, and right before a primary in a state with a large black vote?
But, first, Clinton's entire quote, from Media Matters. It's apparently been truncated by a number of media outlets to exclude the bit about Kennedy:
I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said, "We are going to do it," and actually got it accomplished.
Back in the WSJ, McWhorter makes sense of the furor that followed:
Yet there she was on "Meet the Press" Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson's masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama -- which is true.Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and countless black bloggers hear a grievous insult in her simple observation? The outcry is so disproportionate to the stimulus that one can barely help suspecting something outright irregular.
I think of a study published last year in the Journal of Black Psychology. It documented that the extent to which black Americans perceive their lives to be affected by racism correlates with symptoms of general paranoia disconnected from racial issues.
To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.
But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?
There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.
Huckabee Wants The State To Become Church
This seems like a prank posting, but it's not. From The Raw Story, while speaking about human life and the definition of marriage, the retrograde religious freak Huckabee said he wants to amend the Constitution to conform with "God's standards":
"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." (..."of how we treat each other and how we treat the family," Huckabee continues in the video at the link.)When Willie Geist reported Huckabee's opinion on MSNBC's Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski was almost speechless, and even Joe Scarborough couldn't immediately find much to say beyond calling it "interesting,"
Scarborough finally suggested that while he believes "evangelicals should be able to talk politics ... some might find that statement very troubling, that we're going to change the Constitution to be in line with the Bible. And that's all I'm going to say."
Geist further noted of Huckabee that if "someone without his charm," said that, "he'd be dismissed as a crackpot, but he's Mike Huckabee and he's bascially the front-runner."
What's scary is that, in 2007, in the most powerful nation in the world, Huckabee isn't dismissed as a crackpot, and is, instead, a leading candidate to lead our country. Are we having a government or an after-school prayer session?
Thanks, Norm
Who's Nick Counting Now?
Being the annoying broad that I am, I called the AMPTP number in one of Kate Coe's FishbowlLA posts:
...and talked to Nick Counter's secretary, who said, "He's in negotiations right now," and "call the Writers Guild" when I told her I used to watch TV but I no longer do, because there are only reruns on, and please make a deal. I told her I saw what the writers are asking for, and didn't find it unreasonable. "Thank you!" she said and hung up.
Fellow TV watchers! Have you been Countered today? Operators are standing by!
Whoring 101, By Mitt Romney
Why Romney won Michigan, by Byron York, on NRO. (He promised them our money, of course!):
When rival John McCain said — probably correctly — that some of the state’s lost automotive jobs wouldn’t come back, Romney answered, “Baloney.” He also promised the auto industry $20 billion in federal investment, along with relief from mileage standards and burdensome employee health-care costs. Looked at from the voter’s perspective, one candidate, McCain, offered Michiganders little understanding — the Michigan equivalent of McCain’s opposition to ethanol subsidies in Iowa — while the other, Romney, promised to throw them a life preserver. The guy with the life preserver won.
Welcome To Your Nightmare
Many men must have some fear that they could someday be accused of a crime they didn't commit; namely, rape.
It happened this past week to a Baltimore construction worker hired on a renovation project at a local middle school. When an 11-year-old girl accused him, and when charges against him turned out to be false, this led...no, not to charges against her, but..."raise(d) awareness" about allowing other construction workers to work around the schoolchildren!
Gina Davis writes for the Baltimore Sun:
(Schools spokeswoman Kara) Calder said she did not know whether the system would begin requiring background checks of contract workers.She stressed that while police had concluded that nothing had happened to the girl, the school had made changes in response to safety concerns.
Children were instructed to travel in pairs, more teachers were in the hallways between classes and more police were stationed at the school.
Also, construction was curtailed the day after the girl's accusations were made to give the general contractor, James Ancel Inc., time to install a separate entrance to the work zone by replacing a window with a door, Calder said. Any worker who doesn't use that entrance during school hours will be barred from the project, Principal Allen H. Zink said earlier this week.
Calder said she believed the entrance was installed Thursday and workers had returned to the 1,500-student school yesterday.
A little background from Davis on the false accusation:
About 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, the girl reported to the principal's office that a man had followed her into the restroom between classes and sexually assaulted her, police said. The girl said she fought off the man, ran out of the restroom and reported the attack to a county police officer stationed at the school, police said.Police initially incorrectly said yesterday that the girl had admitted to lying, but soon after said she hadn't made such a confession. (Amy: There's a poorly written sentence.) Though relieved to hear the girl hadn't been harmed, parents said the incident helped raise awareness about the potential dangers posed by contractors working in the buildings during the school day.
Some said school officials should consider requiring background checks and fingerprinting of contractors and their employees, as they do of teachers and other school workers. They also said construction workers should be further restricted from areas where children might be.
...lest another kid falsely accuse another construction worker of rape? Come on. Most construction workers are men, but most men are not rapists. Anybody working at a school should be subject to some sort of vetting, but clearly, the background that needs checking in this case is that of the kid's parents -- how they managed to raise a child who is either so sick or so sold on propaganda against men that she trotted off to ruin a guy's life for what, attention?
I haven't considered what should be done with juvenile false accusers, but I'm of the mind that any adult or near adult who can be proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be making a false rape accusation, should be sentenced to the punishment the falsely accused would have gotten, had the charge stuck.
via Glenn Sacks
"S" Is For "Simpleton"!
And all along, there you were thinking it was the Transportation Security Agency, huh?
Another bright moment in Homeland Identity Theft, uh...Security Theater...pops up via Consumerist, with this Ryan Paul Ars Technica post about security flaws in the TSA's "traveler redress website." (That's where all the little blond 5-year-olds thought to be dangerous Saudi Arabian terrorists have to write to get their names off the get your cheeks spread before flying list.)
The site—which enables travelers to seek removal from airline watch lists by providing personal identification information—operated for four months before the vulnerabilities were detected.The web site was hosted on a commercial domain by a contractor and did not use SSL encryption for submission forms that transmit sensitive identification information. The few pages of the site that did use SSL used an expired certificate that had been self-signed by the contractor. The lack of proper encryption was brought to the attention of TSA last year by security researcher Chris Soghoian, who noted that such "major incompetence" could have been avoided by basic oversight.
"At the request of Chairman Henry Waxman, Committee staff have been investigating how TSA could have launched a web site that violated basic operating standards of web security and failed to protect travelers' sensitive personal information," says the report summary. "These deficiencies exposed thousands of American travelers to potential identity theft."
According to the report, the TSA was completely unaware of the security issues while the site was in operation. During that time, thousands of travelers submitted personal information through the website and a TSA administrator claimed in congressional testimony that the agency had assured "the privacy of users and the security of the system."
Yes, it's impenetrable to anyone with a Kaypro with no connection to the Internet.
And let's give credit where credit is doodoo:
The web site was created by Desyne Web Services, a web marketing firm from northern Virginia whose clientèle includes the FBI, USA Today, and George Foreman. TSA awarded Desyne a no-bid contract valued at $48,816 for development of the redress system. According to the report, the Request for Quote (RFQ) issued by TSA prior to making the deal stated that Desyne was "the only vendor that could meet the program requirements." The report notes that Nicholas Panuzio, the TSA employee and technical lead who authored the RFQ, had previously worked for Desyne and had known the owner of the web design company since high school—a serious conflict of interest.Following the revelation of security vulnerabilities in the system, TSA transferred the site to a Department of Homeland (DHS) Security domain and notified users who submitted information through the unencrypted form that they had been exposed to risk of identity theft. The committee's report notes, however, that TSA never reprimanded Panuzio or imposed sanctions on Desyne. In fact, the report says that Desyne continues to operate several major TSA web sites and has received over $500,000 of no-bid contracts web services from TSA and DHS.
Charming. Are you feeling more secure? I'm feeling more secure that we might as well just burn our tax dollars; we'd get more out of them that way. Homeland "Security" is making a few people richer, the rest of us really fucking annoyed and inconvenienced, but is it making anybody safer? Ryan Paul continues:
As we have noted in the past, the TSA terror watch list has very little efficacy and may actually contribute to security problems. The creation of the TSA redress system was precipitated in the first place by a study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which found that approximately half of the individuals on the watch lists were false positives. The GAO has also reported ongoing problems with people on the no-fly list accidentally being permitted to fly. Additionally, TSA reported last year that screeners missed approximately 75 percent of simulated explosives and bomb components that testers hid in their clothing and carry-on bags at Los Angeles International Airport during a review of airport security procedures.In light of TSA's steady litany of serious failures, perhaps it's time for Congress to reconsider the agency's role in airport security.
Personally, I think they'd be better suited to put on puppet shows.
Why Hitch Hates Hill
Christopher Hitchens on Slate on "The Case Against Hillary Clinton." It's not just the untrammeled striving, down to the lie about how she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary -- who didn't become famous until six years after she was born. It's her actual history, too:
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred "experience" on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main "experience" involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. But there was another "experience," this time a collaborative one, that is even more significant.During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and "experience" to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband's help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.
Alice's Weekend In The Rabbit Hole
After an upper endoscopy early Friday morning, with the kind of anesthesia ("conscious sedation") that most people apparently recover from in minutes or hours, I spent three days in a thick brain fog -- sleeping, falling asleep watching crime show reruns, and waking up terrified that maybe I'd lost my magic powers. Fun. As I boohooed to my little sister, "Without my brain, I'm just a goofy redhead with big boobs."
Two days later, on Sunday afternoon, I was still feeling high, and not in a good way, and having trouble remembering the name of the procedure I'd had, or even what I had for lunch (a fried chicken leg). I called my sister all upset again in between trying to look up studies on endoscopy anesthesia and cognitive impairment (while cognitively impaired -- super-fun). She's very wise, and said a bunch of stuff to me I can't remember much of (I do recall something about negative thoughts and a broom), but calmed me down.
Gregg, in between putting Florence Nightingale to shame, kept telling me he'd take me to the emergency room, but I declined, because I felt that the damage, if there was lasting damage, was probably done. Late Sunday afternoon, I still felt like my brain was behind a thick curtain and I didn't quite have the energy or ability to push it aside to get into the pantry and get the items I needed. Pretty terrifying. I mean, what do I do, get a job in retail?
But, around 7pm on Sunday, I talked to both Gregg and my sister, and both said I sounded more coherent and more like myself again. Finally, a friend in the medical profession e-mailed me back that he thinks it's "extremely unlikely there's any permanent harm or near that." And he sent me this quote, which pretty much sums up how I feel about my experience these past three days:
"The doctors killed him. I just shot him."
--Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of James A. Garfield
Respect Is Supposed To Go Both Ways
Sarkozy was slated to visit Saudi Arabia on Sunday, and a Saudi official called on Sarko to leave his foxy girlfriend home out of "respect" for their culture.
Amazing how respect for culture goes one way; as in, when's the last time you heard a Muslim leader calling on Muslims to respect westerners or western culture -- for starters, in the most fundamental way, by not blowing westerners up?
And then, there are all the Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis, licensed by the city, who won't carry people with dogs -- not even blind people with Seeing Eye dogs -- or passengers with bottles of alcohol.
And then there's the pandering to Muslims with a bill in the U.S. Senate to serve Halal food in schools in New York City.
And how about how taxpayer dollars going to building Muslim footbaths at the University of Michigan?
And don't forget trying out a little slave-rape -- which doesn't go over quite as well in America as in does back in Islamic lands.
While we're on the issue of respect, how about you Saudis respect our culture, and our separation of church (and mosque) and state, and especially, our right to keep on living -- and if you can't deal, stay in that backward, sharia-ruled land of yours that so much better suits your needs.
Personally, I'd rather see Carla Bruni any day than one of the Saudi women in their head-to-toe tents, wishing they could drive and have rights beyond that of a dog.
Hey, Saudis...maybe you should respect your own culture a little less, huh?
Separation Of Mosque And State
Canada has "taken it on itself to be the defender of radical Islam," in the words of Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, interrogated by Canada's joke of a "Human Rights Commission" for publishing the Danish "anti-Muslim" cartoons. (As Treach wrote on the Daily Gut, where I got the link to the video of Levant's opening statement:
A Canadian imam claimed to be anguished by Levant's decision, and when he couldn't convince Levant to apologize for hurting his feelings, he reported Levant to some sort of quasi-legal government board called the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Last week Levant was legally compelled to sit before them and be subject to their questioning about his motives, and he demanded to record the proceedings. He obviously came prepared. If these people were expecting meek compliance...
Here's the first of the tapes of his kangaroo court appearance:
As he so eloquently puts it in the end of the first of the tapes, "It is not I who am on trial, it is the freedom of all Canadians."
The rest, in reverse chronological order, are here. Further background is on his blog, here, including the entry "The limits of free speech, and the power to order me to apologize," which marks a sad day for Canada.
Still think there's no reason to worry about Muslims in the west? Think again. They'll abuse our laws and freedoms to take over our society and enslave us to their backward religion -- if they don't just murder us all.
"No Woman Is Illegal"?
We have a standing U.S. senator who's also putting herself up for a candidate for president who either fails basic logic or fails government 101. Or panders so sickeningly that she ought to bring a barf bag with her on the campaign trail. What's your guess?
Through an opening in a wall, a man shouted that his wife was illegal.
"No woman is illegal," Clinton called back, with a crowd cheering in response.
What does this mean? Our laws apply to you only if you have a penis? She had some bad liverwurst for lunch? Or...maybe it's more of the kinder, gentler Hillary she's trying to portray.
I saw a bit of her appearing to attempt that on CNN. A woman was talking about how she got some ridiculous mortgage she couldn't afford and the camera went back to Hillary and she was wiping her eye. I think it was a try at a tear or two, but it looked more like she had something itchy in her under-eye makeup as she just wasn't able to wring out the desired emotion. The more I see of her, the less I like her. Of course, that's exactly what I think of all the nimrod Republicans, too -- especially those who believe man saddled up the dinosaurs (yeehaw!)
What a lackluster bunch of losers we've got running to run our country, and at a rather time with some very serious issues looming; economically, and with all those crazy Islamists running around.
May The Best Person Win
Fascinating piece by Stephen Pinker on morality in New York Times Magazine. Here's an excerpt:
Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.
It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.
I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.
Mitt Romney: The Candidate Of Welfare Queens
Of course, his kind of welfare queens are the ones who live in multimillion-dollar houses in Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Just heard him on CNN talking about the answer to the economic problems in Michigan being "investing" in research and development in the auto companies -- government "helping develop new technologies and share the cost in that."
In other words, under Romney, the taxpayers will get to bail out the auto companies. Again.
Every Witch Way But Right
Oops! The Church was wrong!
"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry."--Mark Twain
via MachinesLikeUs
A terrific Mark Twain site is here. It was created by Rob Curley, a guy I heard speak at the last features editors convention. I like him -- he pretty much said the answer at papers was to kill all the executives. If they did -- or at least fired them -- papers would be more readable and my column would be in more of them.
Dial O For Osama
Guess who forgot to pay the phone bill! Lara Jakes Jordan writes for the AP:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.
"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.
More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.
Islamist Anchor Babies
About children being born on our shores, and being granted instant citizenship via the 14th Amendment, a blog commenter writes:
Middle Eastern women from wealthy families have been having babies in the better Northeast Hospitals for years. The difference is that they take their newly minted US Citizens back to the middle east to raise them. I expect a wave of "US Citizen" jihadists to hit our shores in about 10-15 years.
I didn't find links to any stories about Muslims doing this (here's one about Venezuelans), but it's a distinct possibility: Creating terrorists with U.S. passports, and the right to return here with ease and take up residence.
I'm thinking the 14th Amendment needs some updating.
The Two-Day Demerol Daze
Sorry blogging's a little light today. I had an endoscopy yesterday morning, and I think they must've given me the anesthesia dose for the 200 lb. lady two beds down. Either that, or I'm just the anesthesia lightweight I am when drinking wine (half a glass and I'm under the table if I haven't eaten).
Going back to bed! Please slap around the deserving in my absence.
P.S. On the bright side, Gregg told me I've "got this booking-photo beauty." Awwww.
The Social Security Screwing Is Coming To Health Care
When you're at your most struggling, in your early 20s, you're subsidizing a bunch of rich old grannies with money sucked out of your paycheck and put toward Social Security. Hillary Clinton's supporters attacked Obama for not bringing that same principle to health care, as he isn't proposing a federal mandate that every American buy health insurance, as Clinton and Edwards would. In the WSJ, Betsy McCaughey shows why that mandate isn't such a good idea:
Requiring catastrophic coverage (our parents called it major medical) probably is smart. This would ensure that a person who is hurt in a car accident or diagnosed with a costly illness can pay his own medical bills, instead of being a burden on society.But catastrophic coverage is not what the mandate advocates want. They would require that everyone have comprehensive health insurance, covering preventive and routine care.
The rationale for this mandate is not personal responsibility but "shared responsibility," a polite way of saying shared costs. Requiring comprehensive coverage, the argument goes, will make it affordable for the sick, by pulling the young and the healthy -- neither of whom use these health services very much -- into the insurance pool. Advocates also argue that requiring this type of coverage will cure overcrowded emergency rooms and help tame skyrocketing health costs.
These arguments are based on myths, not facts.
The first myth is that it's fair to make everyone pay the same price for health insurance. It is not: For young people who rarely use health services, this is a rip-off. If people in their 20s paid attention to politics and voted, politicians wouldn't dare try this.
According to the latest Census data, 56% of the uninsured are adults aged 18-34. True enough, forcing them to be a part of a same-price-for-everyone insurance pool will likely bring down premiums. These young people generally need minimal health care ($1,500 a year, on average, according to a Commonwealth Fund study).
In most states, (but not New York and Vermont), young adults who buy health insurance are charged premiums that reflect their low medical needs. A 25-year-old man can buy a $1,000 deductible policy for a quarter to a third of what a 55-year-old man has to pay. (In Manchester, N.H., a 25-year-old man pays $156 per month, while a 55-year-old pays $542 for the same policy, according to ehealthinsurance.com).
Both the Clinton proposal and the bipartisan congressional proposal prohibit insurers from giving such price breaks to the young. Their mandates would force the young to subsidize the heath tab for the middle-aged generation. This subsidy would come on top of the payroll tax younger people already pay to support today's Medicare recipients. This is contrary to a fundamental American principle. This nation has always believed in making life better for its children, not exploiting them.
Pricing insurance fairly for the young doesn't mean that those middle-aged who cannot afford higher premiums should be left to sink or swim. But providing targeted subsidies out of general tax revenues is fairer than artificially lowering premiums for all middle aged people by compelling the young to pay more.
...Mandating that everyone, including young adults, buy insurance, and then hiding a hefty, cost sharing tax inside their premium, is an unfair solution.
If You Don't Have A Health Care Directive
Fill one out. There are a bunch of them on the Internet, free. Here's the one I used.
I filled mine out, had my neighbors witness it, and had them initial this little doohickey I added at the bottom:
I do not want to live as a human turnip, and I’ve had a great life and prefer that I be let die instead of forced to live on as a body in a bed being kept alive by machines if that becomes the case. Don’t be sentimental! Let me go.
And then I listed three possible friends with medical/epidemiological/research backgrounds to contact for medical advice.
I made five copies of this, filed the original, and shrunk down a little version and put it in my wallet.
You can also register your living will here for $125. An explanation of how that works is here.
When "Science Journalism" Is National Enquirer Journalism
A friend of Gregg's sent him a link to "Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'" from the Telegraph/UK. That's actually not what the study they're referencing says. The first commenter, a Gordon Rae, straightens things out:
This research was done in the biology department at London's Queen Mary University. It's not "social science". It was about gender differences in spatial awareness, not driving. And it says people are "different", not "worse".Please don't insult scientists because a Telegraph journalist decided to put some spin on the story.
The original (un-spun) report is at link.
The study is by Dr. Qazi Rahman, a cognitive biologist, with Johanna Koerting. Their findings (on straight women, at least) are similar to stuff Silverman and Eals discovered, published in Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby's book of ev. psych studies, The Adapted Mind.
I wrote a column referencing Silverman and Eals to explain why men fail to notice messes around the house that drive women crazy in short order (men tend to have greater distance vision and women tend to have better detail vision within a small radius). Here's an excerpt from that column:
It isn’t that guys don’t notice the filth, it just takes them a little longer -- like until the crud impedes access to the bathroom or the fuzz on the dishes evolves to the point where it hisses at the dog.Now, not every straight guy is a slob, and not every gay guy is fastidious, but there’s a reason the TV hit was “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” and not “Straight Eye For The Queer Guy” -- the home makeover show to help all the gay men whose living spaces have been featured in “Architectural Digest.” And, sure, there are squalor-dwelling chicks out there, but when a woman apologizes for her “disaster area” it’s likely she’s telling you she’s run out of color-coordinated Kleenex and forgotten to pick up fresh flowers.
Because many women can’t imagine that a man would think differently than they do (thanks, in part, to the toxic mold that is radical feminism) they often take it personally when a man invites them into what looks to be a one-bedroom/one-bath Petri dish decorated in a landfill motif. The perceived insult may be magnified if he’s a guy who typically looks shaved and bathed, and like he picked his clothes out at a department store, not out of a dumpster. I mean, jeez, in honor of your presence, couldn’t he have at least hosed the place down?
The truth is, as you suspected, straight guys just don’t have the filth and disarray vision that women and gay men do. Studies show gay men’s attention to environmental detail is similar to that of straight women, but in general, “the female brain takes in more sensory data than does the male,” writes brain researcher Michael Gurian in “What Could He Be Thinking?” How much more visual detail does the female brain take in? Well, in an object recall test by York University psychologists Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals, women remembered the name and placement of 70 percent more items than the men did. At that rate, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if a guy doesn’t notice the dog hair, beer cans, and Taco Bell wrappers -- at least, not until they start blocking his view of the game.
Men can be obsessive about detail, explains Gurian, but their mental and visual attention is usually single-minded and achievement-oriented. Gurian gives the example of a man’s meticulousness in building a model ship in a tiny glass bottle. “He is focused on doing whatever it takes to succeed in reaching his goal,” but in his day-to-day life, “he doesn’t experience the mess in the house as a challenge over which to triumph.” (There’s still hope somebody will come up with a Pro-Am tournament of housekeeping.)
According to Silverman, Eals, and other researchers, a guy’s tendency to let his home become a pizza crust wilderness refuge probably traces back to our hunter-gatherer past. Men’s current visual and attentional strengths correspond to what would’ve made them successful hunters: the distance vision and mental focus needed to track and bring home dinner -- instead of being eaten by what was supposed to be dinner. Women’s superior peripheral vision and ability to process detail would’ve helped them spot the family’s favorite edible plants in a big tangle of vegetation -- while making sure the children weren’t playing in wildebeest traffic.
Culture or training may mitigate the modern man’s natural crud-blindness. My German friend Thomas, for example, can be awakened from a deep sleep by a lone crumb in the middle of the counter. If you’re a clean freak, find a guy like him. Otherwise, if a guy’s a slob, but a quality slob, maybe resign yourself to living alone and having him come over to your place. If you must live with him, keep in mind that he probably isn’t leaving a trail of trash because he’s a bad guy, but simply because he’s a guy. To keep the peace, hire a good cleaning person -- hard to find but nowhere near as scarce as really great men you click with. When you find one, why let a little thick, green bacteria keep you apart?
Men and women are biologically different, and have different capabilities. No, it probably isn't, as one commenter over at the Telegraph suggested, "the toys you play with as a child." And by the way, other researchers have shown that girls, even those of the most P.C. parents, tend to gravitate to dolls, and boys will go for trucks, or turn a carrot into a gun (when denied toy weaponry), despite attempts of idiot biology-deniers to change that -- like this silly person who claims "Educators help young children grow beyond gender." Right.
Twisted Sister-In-Law
Most of the advice requests I answer never make my column, either because they aren't requests for love, sex, dating, or relationship advice (the focus of my column), or because they're too boring or because I've answered a thousand like them before.
Here'sa type I get a lot of -- people complaining that some jerk in their life is acting...surprise, surprise...like a jerk. A woman e-mailed me this question Wednesday afternoon:
Husband’s sister calls and says she wants to come visit our family for a vacation, but will only bring 1 of her 2 children (ages 7 and 8) as “it is too expensive” to fly both of her kids to our state. She is a multi-millionaire and the $250 plane ticket is totally a non-issue. She tells us her son, who she did not chose to come, was sobbing for hours when he found out he couldn’t come to visit. My husband and I were pretty upset that a mother would make choices like this, essentially choosing one child over another. She does this fairly frequently and, according to her, the non-chosen child is distraught for days over not being included. For whatever reason, she and her husband think it is perfectly normal for their children to be separated on vacations in order to spend quality time with one or the other parent. This isn't a case of spending quality time going out for ice cream or to a movie--we are talking a full-fledged vacation here.My reply:
My husband and I talk it over and decide that we will offer to pay for the other child to visit us as as well, hoping that she will see how ludicrous her "too expensive" claim is and reject our offer. Sister quickly accepts our offer. A day later sister calls and begs my husband to accompany them on a 2 day ski trip while she is visiting. Her plans include putting both of her children in ski school programs which cost $250 a day per child. We are totally blown away by her actions. My husband now does not want her to come as he is really upset at her. What would you do if you were him (I’m trying to let brother and sister settle this one)?
This woman is a complete jerk. You know this. To expect her to act like a reasonable person is entirely unreasonable. Either accept that she's going to behave like a total asshole and don't get angry about it or cut down or cut off your contact with her. Again, for your husband to be upset at a known jerk for acting like a jerk is kind of like me getting angry with my dog because she didn't e-mail me to tell me the light over the porch went out. Hope this helps. Best,-Amy
The Ultimate Form Of Self-Control
Booth Gardner, an ex-governor with Parkinson's stumps for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Washington state. (I'm guessing it isn't the atheists who are against it. Just guessing.) From a Claudia Rowe story in the Seattle P-I:
While many politicians are reluctant even to associate their names with the issue, it is even more striking for Gardner, who during his governorship constantly frustrated fellow Democrats with his reluctance to lobby for any particular measure.Last weekend, however, he stood before a convention of social workers, beating the drum.
"I feel that God gave me a mission in life, and he also gave me the ability to think -- that includes thinking about when I want to leave early," he told the 150 caregivers. "Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of a pinhead politician who can't pass ninth-grade biology."
His quips won the expected chuckles, and afterward several attendees gave him a standing ovation. One asked where she could sign up to help. It was not surprising, as the National Association of Social Workers was among the first groups in Washington to endorse aid-in-dying 16 years ago, during its last go-round as a voters initiative.
But three social workers, all of them African American, left the room visibly upset.
"I'm not comfortable with the policy they're trying to get on the ballot," said one, Noreen Freeman. "I don't think it's our job to take our own life, and as long as you don't have consistency of medical care, you put certain groups at risk."
Data from Oregon show that among those residents who have used the Death With Dignity Act, none was black.
This is only a taste of the opposition likely to align against Gardner if his campaign moves forward.
A law making it legal for physicians to help patients die would "push caring aside in favor of killing," wrote state Sen. Margarita Prentice, a registered nurse who opposed the measure here in 1991. "We should never ask our doctors to kill."
She feels the same today, and points out that anyone is free to stop eating or discontinue life-extending medication any time they like.
"That's not dignity," Gardner snaps at such arguments.
It's great he's doing this, but why is it people have to get afflicted with something to grow principles? Or have a daughter or son announce they're gay to drop their anti-gay stance? Well, better forced than never.
Wheels Of Desire
From an interview in the January Esquire with my old Noho, NYC, neighbor, Chuck Close, who became paralyzed all of a sudden after a spinal artery collapse:
Quadriplegics envy paraplegics. You think, Man, they've got it made. There's always somebody worse off than you are.
In the same Esquire issue, Rodney Dangerfield plays on the theme:
It's great to have gray hair. Ask anyone who's bald.
Personally, I've always gone for confidence in men. I don't like guys with two big, Grandpa Munster peaks (or, horrors! some Donald Trump combover), but I find it sexy when men have the guts to totally shave their heads. At least cut the hair really close, guys. You're bald. You don't make up for it by having a lot of hair coming out of two little desert islands.
On men, I'm with Joan Rivers, same issue of Esquire, who says:
Men look great when they're a little used. They've done it, and they know about it.
Jerry Lewis, same issue:
Everybody is nine years old. Starting with me.
Birthday Soot
I just posted another one of my Advice Goddess columns -- my take on birthday presents, in response to this question from a woman:
My boyfriend’s generally pretty sweet, and we’re enjoying it all. On his birthdays, I buy him a present and dinner. Both years we’ve been together he’s bought me nothing for mine, saying he didn’t know what to get. The second year, I waited in vain all weekend, hoping we’d do something special (he did make me breakfast in bed on Sunday, and woke me with kisses and “Happy birthday”). My birthday was that Monday, and he only took me out as an afterthought. As I was leaving for work, he said, “I’ll wait up.” (I work late.) Hurt, I said, “I can’t believe you aren’t even taking me to dinner!” He then lost his temper. Maybe this seems silly, but I’m actually still hurt. Part of me wants to rise above this, and part wants to give him a lump of coal for his upcoming birthday.
An excerpt from my response:
For a lot of women, it’s the thought that counts -- as long as the guy thinks of something a little more, well, pawnable, than a plate of eggs.Personally, because I’m no longer 6, I mainly think of my birthday as a day to apologize to my mother. (I won some pickle company’s contest for being the biggest baby born in Detroit the week of March 8.) Also, I prefer to celebrate actual accomplishments. Of course, being a year older is an accomplishment for some, but I try to set goals a bit beyond “Well, well, well, another year, and I’m still not dead from meth!”
Perhaps I’m an anomaly, because there seems to be something girly about commemorating birthdays. Sure, there are guys who acknowledge each other’s, but at some point after seventh grade, birthdays seem to split off in importance along gender lines. For example, guys don’t have a version of the Sweet Sixteen, with their mom wiping away tears as she gushes, “Look, my little Adam’s grown an apple!” And consider how common it is for women to send their friends little cards and Hallmark desk bunnies, but when’s the last time you saw Rocco down at the garage buy a card with frolicking baby raccoons on it and get all sweet about Fred’s special day?
That said, your birthday’s important to you, and if you’re important to a guy, he’ll find a way to remember it. But, wait, there’s this: “He did make me breakfast in bed on Sunday, and woke me with kisses and ‘Happy birthday.’” So, your boyfriend did remember your birthday -- just not in the style to which you’d like to become accustomed. Assuming he isn’t a jerk the other 364 days a year, how could he not know what’s expected of him? After all, you bought him presents and dinner. All he had to do was the exact same thing, kind of like a chimp imitating somebody shaving.
Unfortunately, the male brain isn’t an exact replica of the female brain, just less, I dunno, lavender. Because men generally don’t operate on 13 levels of intuition, if you need something from a man, you probably have to say so. >>cont'd>>
The rest of my response, plus comments, is here.
And thanks to all who pitched in with your take on birthdays, why so many guys forget them, and what it all means.
The Last Of The Big Construction Projects
My site will go down for about an hour while they're correcting whatever is turning my apostrophes into signs that look like directions to Black Diamond slopes. Or ancient something or other. Please bear with us...it's all for the best for the future. Almost through the rough stuff! -Amy
Maybe It Isn't "The Patriarchy" After All
An insightful admission from Vivian Gornick in a book I've been reading and rereading, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I've screenshotted it below, with Tavris and Aronson's commentary preceding Gornick's:
Tanya Gold could learn a thing or two from Gornick.
Personally, I live alone because I like living alone, and because I think it's probably impossible or near-impossible to behave consistently lovingly to another human being if you're living under the same roof.
As I've written here before, in five years, I've never screamed or yelled at my boyfriend or said a mean word to him. Number one, he doesn't deserve it, and number two, you get the relationship you create.
Some woman at a cocktail party lectured me that if you don't live together, you don't experience - really hating the other person, "and that getting through that is the triumph of true love." I guess I looked shocked, because she laughed and said someday I'd "grow up" and see it her way. Sorry, is being "grown up" knowing what human nature is and living in total denial of it? If so, pass the PB&J.
Couples don't last because they act horribly to each other but in spite of it. Ideally, you're two against the world, not two people trying really hard to do each other in. You may have to make a pact with yourself and each other to always act lovingly, and it make take you some practice in restraint when you want to lash out, but over time, you'll get used to that way as a way of being instead of immediately extending tooth and fang and drawing blood. And it really does pay off.
Candidates Who Believe Man Saddled Up The Dinosaurs
Americans actually consider electing these yahoos instead of simply laughing them out of the public square. Another good'un by the UK's Pat Condell:
Don't miss the bit about Mitt Romney's underpants.
via machineslikeus
Strange Characters And Other Weirdnesses
Gregg moved the site this weekend, and he's currently trying to fix a few little problems. That's why you may see a few weird characters where apostrophes used to be, etc. This is temporary. Please bear with us!
Also, some of you may not be able to access the site from my blog until later today or tomorrow. You can get in from the front page, advicegoddess.com.
I'll Take Ron Paul On Immigration
No, I'm not a fan of his on other levels, and no, I don't think he'll be a serious candidate. And maybe the latter point is why you can't say he's not exactly pandering to the Latino vote. Here's a piece Paul has on LewRockwell.com about immigration. I particularly like the bit about ending birthright citizenship -- an outdated practice:
We're often reminded that America is a nation of immigrants, implying that we're coldhearted to restrict immigration in any way. But the new Americans reaching our shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s were legal immigrants. In many cases they had no chance of returning home again. They maintained their various ethnic and cultural identities, but they also learned English and embraced their new nationality.Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans -- including immigrants -- want immigration reduced, not expanded. The economic, cultural, and political situation was very different 100 years ago.
We're often told that immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do, and sometimes this is true. But in many instances illegal immigrants simply increase the supply of labor in a community, which lowers wages. And while cheap labor certainly benefits the economy as a whole, when calculating the true cost of illegal immigration we must include the cost of social services that many new immigrants consume -- especially medical care.
We must reject amnesty for illegal immigrants in any form. We cannot continue to reward lawbreakers and expect things to get better. If we reward millions who came here illegally, surely millions more will follow suit. Ten years from now we will be in the same position, with a whole new generation of lawbreakers seeking amnesty.
Amnesty also insults legal immigrants, who face years of paperwork and long waits to earn precious American citizenship.
Birthright citizenship similarly rewards lawbreaking, and must be stopped. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the perverse incentive to sneak into this country remains strong. Citizenship involves more than the mere location of one's birth. True citizenship requires cultural connections and an allegiance to the United States. Americans are happy to welcome those who wish to come here and build a better life for themselves, but we rightfully expect immigrants to show loyalty and attempt to assimilate themselves culturally. Birthright citizenship sometimes confers the benefits of being American on people who do not truly embrace America.
What if, not just Mexican illegal immigrants come over and have babies, but, say, Islamist mommies? It's a changed world we're living in, and this isn't just an economic issue but a security issue.
In Islam, Domestic Violence Is Domestic Bliss
Yes, yet another sicko-ism from "The Religion Of Peace." From The Yemen Times, Maged Thabet Al-Kholidy writes "There Must Be Violence Against Women":
Occasionally -- if not daily -- we hear about events occurring in Islamic and Arab societies. Some human rights organizations recently have attacked violent acts against women, standing against any type of violence -- even that between a father and daughter -- and citing the cases of some women as examples.Consequently, they offer solutions such as complaining to the police, taking revenge or leaving them men, who are either their husbands, fathers or brothers -- with no exceptions.
One such case involved a woman whose husband allegedly had beaten her. Without revealing the husband's reasons for doing so, such human rights organizations immediately urged the wife to complain to the police and the courts, while at the same time generalizing the instance and other similar solutions to any type of violence.
If a man and woman are husband and wife, the Qur'an provides solutions, firstly reaffirming any logical and acceptable reasons for such punishment. These solutions are in gradual phases and not just for women, but for men also.
For men, it begins with abandoning the marital bed, by opting to sleep elsewhere in the house. After this, they may discuss the matter with any respected person for the husband's or the wife's family, who could be in a position to advise the wife. If this also does not work, then the husband yields to beating the wife slightly. They do this because of a misunderstanding (Amy: uh, yeah, right) in the Quran, as the word says Darban, which is commonly understood today as beating. However, in Classic Arabic it means to set examples or to announce and proclaim. The more accurate meaning of this last one is that the husband finally has to set forth, to make a clear statement or proclamation, and if these measures fail, then divorce is preferable.
Similarly, wives may take actions such as abandoning the marital bed, following by leaving the husband's home for that of their parents, brothers or any other relatives. They may do this more than once, but if such action fails, they may not continue to live with their husband and via their relatives, they may request a divorce.
Despite such instructions, beating is considered a type of violence, according to human rights organizations, which urge women to complain to the police. I just wonder what kind of families our societies would have if Muslim women started doing this regarding their husbands.
Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don't think fathers or brothers would undertake such behavior unless there was a reason for it.
Fathers are responsible for their daughters' behavior, but human rights organizations deny this too. Brothers also should take action regarding their sisters' behavior, especially if their parents are too old or dead. If a daughter or sister makes a mistake -- especially a moral one -- that negatively affects the entire family and its reputation, what's the solution by such organizations?
According to them, women should complain to the courts about any type of violence against them. Likewise, should fathers and brothers complain to police if their daughters or sisters violate moral, Islamic or social norms?
Fathers should handle their daughters via any means that suits their mistake; thus, is it better to use violence to a certain limit or complain to the police? Shall such women then complain to the police against their fathers or brothers? It's really amazing to hear this.
Oh, I'm sure it is. The ways of civilized society will surely take centuries for you to get used to. Unfortunately, the spread of technology hasn't confined itself to the modern world -- meaning those whose religion demands that they convert, kill, or dhimmi down all us infidels will be able to blow all of us off the planet with ease...lest their women be further tempted to seek civilized measures to combat utterly uncivilized behavior.
Can You See Me Now?
We've moved to a new host company, and it apparently takes a buttload of time for the DNS (Domain Name Server) propagation to take place. Rich Smith explains:
When any outside source wants to know how to find your website, they first go to the registration database to find out who the DNS authority is for your website. Then they visit your hosting provider's DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there your audience can now view your website.The problem with this whole scheme is that in order to speed up the rate at which their customers can view the internet, each Internet Server Provider caches their DNS records. This means that they make their own copy of the master records, and read from them locally instead of looking them up on the Internet each time someone wants view a website. This actually speeds up web surfing quite a bit, by (1) speeding up the return time it takes for a web browser to request a domain lookup and get an answer, and (2) actually reducing the amount of traffic on the web therefore giving it the ability to work faster.
The downside to this caching scenario and what makes it take so long for your website to be visible to everyone, is that each company or ISP that caches DNS records only updates them every few days. This is not any kind of standard, and they can set this time anywhere from a few hours to several days. The slow updating of the servers cache is called propagation, since your websites DNS information is now being propagated across all DNS servers on the web. When this is finally complete, everyone can now visit your new website. Being that the cache time is different for all servers, as mentioned above, it can take anywhere from 36 to 72 hours for DNS changes to be totally in effect.
The current result? I can't see my own site on my Time-Warner cable connection, but I can see it on my Verizon mobile broadband. If you're getting through, please leave a comment here.
Also, some comments have disappeared (from the L. Ron entry from and a couple others). Very sorry about this. I think I can retrieve them from the old host company, but Gregg has been working day and night, night and day, for two days, to make this move, so we've been focused just on having the site up. Will try to get those and paste them back into the entries as soon as possible.
Also, if you're getting a weird link or a link that doesn't work, please let me know here. Or e-mail me at adviceamy (at) A O L dot com if, for some reason, you can't leave a comment here. (But, let's hope it doesn't come to that!)
P.S. We moved because of all the problems with people's comments getting kicked to spam. The old server company wouldn't allot the processor time to ameliorate that.
P.P.S. Gregg = my hero. (You have no idea what he's been through these past two days!)
UPDATE: Due to a "permissions error," some comments are not showing up on columns. They are saved in my database...they are not lost...it's just another thing Gregg has to figure out. Sigh!
What's Wrong With Hillarycare?
In The Wall Street Journal, Tarren Bragdon, a health-policy analyst with the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center for New York State Policy, asks why Senator and candidate Clinton's state spends more on health care for the poor (through Medicaid) than every other state, but still have a larger proportion of its population walking around uninsured than states that spend far less:
...New York has made private health insurance too expensive for many people by imposing a long list of mandates. For a policy not purchased through an employer, most individual New Yorkers have to pay about $500 a month, and most families about $1,400. That's about twice the national average.Three mandates are largely responsible. Two -- "guaranteed issue" and "community rating" -- are closely linked.
Guaranteed issue hits those who are buying insurance on their own. It requires insurers to sell a policy to anyone who can pay for it, regardless of health status. It sounds fair, but drives up premiums for the healthy and induces them to drop out of the insurance pool. It also encourages people to wait until they are sick before they buy insurance. After all, if you can't be turned down, why pay in when you are healthy?
Community rating requires insurers to charge the same premium to anyone in a given plan, regardless of age, gender or health. This forces the healthy to subsidize the unhealthy, also driving up the cost of insurance.
Every state mandates that insurers cover basic care. But a third New York mandate goes well beyond the basics and requires insurers to cover 52 types of services, ranging from chiropractic to fertility treatment to mental-health services. This adds about 12% to the cost of insurance in the state.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer is promoting further health-care idiocy -- extending Medicaid benefits to children in families earning up to 400% of the poverty level (about $80,000/yr. for a family of four in New York) -- many of whom already have private insurance:
If this leads parents to drop their kids from their insurance and enroll them for government benefits, Mr. Spitzer will have succeeded at expanding the Medicaid rolls while doing little to solve the uninsured problem.
Bragdon has a better idea -- reinvigorating the private, direct-pay insurance market while providing for the hard-to-insure:
Thirty-three states have created a new "risk pool" for high-cost patients without jeopardizing access to private insurance for everyone. This pool, which is often subsidized by a tiny surcharge on other policies, allows insurance companies to charge rates that more closely track the actual cost of providing health care to individuals. If New York had a similar risk pool, those in fair health could buy unsubsidized private coverage at competitive rates.The evidence suggests, moreover, that almost everybody could buy private insurance if carriers were allowed to tailor plans to meet consumers' needs.
Consider WellPoint's "Tonik Health Plans," which are cheaper because they are tailored to the needs of the consumer. In Connecticut they allow people between the ages of 19 and 34 to buy insurance at a cost of $105 to $203 a month, depending on age, gender and plan selected. About 78% of those who buy Tonik plans were previously uninsured.
...So-called temporary plans also help people find health-insurance coverage. In Washington, D.C., a 40-year-old person can buy a six-month health-insurance policy with a $500 deductible for just $119 a month. But in New York (and four other states) temporary plans aren't permitted.
If Mr. Spitzer freed the private health-insurance market and backed regulations that promote competition, affordable private health insurance would be available to nearly everyone. Precious taxpayer dollars could then be directed to the truly indigent and uninsured.
Here's TONIK for Californians, from an insurance website:
You're between nineteen and twenty-nine years old, so you've pretty much got everything you'll ever need . . . you're young, you're as healthy and in shape and travel as much and are as physically active as you're ever going to be. But unfortunately, life was designed to be pretty freaking unpredictable. It could only take one slip surfing, one fall snowboarding or one spill off a bike to set you up to discover that from time to time the financial pains resulting from coping with an unexpected injury can easily outweigh any physical distress. If and when you find yourself laid out by the grass, the snow, the waves, the roadway or something as unforeseeable as a burst appendix, you are definitely going to wish you had the assistance that only reliable health care coverage has to give.Well, Blue Cross of California is now offering a trio of straight-up, practical and reasonably priced health care plans specifically designed to cover A to Z's just like yours. They're collectively known as TONIK, and if you happen to be between 19 to 29 years of age, plan rates can clock in as low as sixty to eighty dollars per month, depending on which of the three TONIK's best describe your lifestyle and overall health insurance requirements as well as where in CA you live, your age and your general medical history. Rates are subject to change, but TONIK can help protect your way of life from just about any mishap...
...TONIK: How the Plans Breakdown:
The Thrill Seeker - waives the overall plan deductible for participant members first four doctor's office visits per year - features a $20 per office visit Co-Payment, a $64 average monthly premium and a $5,000 annual deductible schedule.
The Part Time Daredevil - waives the plan's overall deductible for member's first four general practitioner visits per year - features a $30 per office visit Co-Payment amount, an on average $73 monthly premium and a $3,000 annual deductible.
The Calculated Risk Taker - Offers its participant members basically unlimited physicians office visits each year, features a $40 Co-Payment amount, an on average monthly premium of $80 and a $1,500 annual deductible
The New Discrimination
Being disadvantaged has become an advantage. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes for (the free section of) The Wall Street Journal about the kind of kid who has a tough time getting into college these days:
Given that, with the arrival of the new year, college applications are now flooding into admissions offices all over the country, it might be a good time to reflect on the absurdity of the whole college-admissions process. Take this passage from Michele Hernández's "Acing the College Application," where she assesses the chances of a high-school student getting into a college of his choice. "Best case: Neither of your parents attended college at all, your father is a factory worker, and your mom is on disability. . . . Worst case: Your father went to Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Business School and is now an investment banker and your mom went to Brown, holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and works as a research chemist."We all understand that being a rich white kid puts one at a disadvantage in the college-admissions process. But it is worth pausing to savor the irony of an institution that charges as much as $45,000 a year asking its applicants to demonstrate their proletarian credentials.
What's a privileged kid to do? Ms. Hernández, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, offers a couple of options. "Be vague" about your parents' occupations: "If your mom is the chief neurosurgeon for a New York hospital, try 'medical.' " Or you could get yourself a job, "the less exalted the better," Ms. Hernández advises, citing one boarding-school student who improved his admissions chances by baling hay every summer (on his family's farm).
But making your collar seem blue may not be enough. What colleges are looking for these days, according to Ms. Hernández, is passion. "Since the late 1990s," she writes, "the focus has shifted away from well-rounded students to the idea of a well-rounded freshman class." A high-school student who gets good grades, serves as student body president and plays varsity football may be a remarkable person, but to an admissions officer his excellence may look rather conventional and diffuse. Better to cultivate a particular skill or enthusiasm. The ideal admissions-candidate is thus a prize-winning gymnast, a fluent reader of both Greek and Latin, a math champion, a successful entrepreneur or a violin virtuoso (all, ideally, with working-class parents, of course). And remember, Ms. Hernández warns, "passion cannot be faked."
But so much else can. Elizabeth Wissner-Gross's "What High Schools Don't Tell You" provides, as its subtitle has it, "300+ Secrets to Make Your Kid Irresistible to Colleges by Senior Year." Ms. Wissner-Gross is an "educational strategist" and proud of it. "When people ask me what I do exactly," she explains, "I'm sometimes tempted to tell them that I make kids' dreams come true."
George McGovern Wakes Up From His Nap
It's nearly time to elect a new president, but RumpleMcStiltskin is now calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. I can't say I disagree with him on many of his points, but hello? Was he in a coma these past eight years? In The Washington Post, McGovern writes:
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.
In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.
All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
...the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.
Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.
...Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.
...In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
Changing Servers Today
This should mean that I can "trusted commenter" people, which will mean comments won't get kicked to spam. There may be some downtime or weirdness during the move, but we hope not. Please bear with us...this is a good thing.
If the site does go down, just refresh your browser from time to time to find out when it's back.
The DNS transfer will take place between 5 and 7 p.m. Pacific Time. And may even be problem-free, here's hoping!
P.S. When we've successfully moved (unless it happens at 4 a.m., Gregg or I will put a little note at the bottom of this message.)
Her Bad. They're Sued.
Jose Martinez writes for the New York Daily News of a model suing a jeweler for a web video ad they put her in:
A Westchester model who donned sexy lingerie and moaned in delight for a diamond dealer's online ad is suing because the video is more G-string than G-rated.The unidentified beauty has slapped Szul Jewelry Inc. with a $5 million suit on grounds it conned her into appearing in the ad. Court papers say the spot is set to "bump-and-grind" music and has "a decidedly pornographic look, feel and sound."
"This was a bait and switch," her lawyer, Kevin Mulhearn, said of the ad, which has been viewed more 10,000 times on YouTube.
"She can live with a comedic spot that has a touch of sexiness at the end, but it's certainly not okay for her to be in something that's quasi-soft-core porn."
The 35-second "Rock Her World" spot features the model rubbing her teal teddy and purring with pleasure to the hard-grinding sounds of a guitar as the slogan, "Jewelry works every time" pops up onscreen.
The 37-year-old woman, identified in Manhattan court papers as the host of a national cable network program, contends she expected a comedic bit about a "shy average Joe guy" who lures a beautiful woman by giving her a diamond necklace.
..."She was aghast, appalled and extremely angry when she saw the ad," Mulhearn said. "She got used and exploited."
...The ad, which netted the recently married model $200, could have ugly consequences because she's always been careful to project a wholesome image, Mulhearn said.
"She doesn't want to be associated with this at all," Mulhearn said.
And now, without further ado, the ad:
Bait and switch, huh? Used and exploited, huh? That's what all that moaning says to me, too.
It is possible that they had a storyline that changed after they shot the commercial. Maybe the comedy didn't quite play. As for the idea that they had to fool her to be in this thing -- and for $200 whole dollars -- come on. Like their aren't thousands upon thousands of actress/model/spokeswaitresses who'd push her in front of a bus to take her place for free.
The part I love most is how shocked the lawyer is making her out to be for appearing in something that's "quasi-soft-core porn."
Did the director say, "Now just sit in this brightly lit kitchen in your housedress and hand little Billy a plate of cookies? And then, did he video-trick her head onto the shoulders and body of a woman who looks, acts, and sounds like some guy is going down on her?
Alrighty then.
Somehow, I think when you exhibit bad judgment, it isn't your moment to make somebody else pay.
What L. Ron Knew
You want to make money, start a religion. Here's Heinlein on it:
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens have ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
-Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
I disparage Scientology as a way to separate fools and their money -- just like all the other older religions. All they really have going for them is age, not special evidence that makes them more worthy. I'm always amused by religious people who think Scientology is somehow worse than any other religion. If you look at it objectively, one outlet of The Business That Is Religion has thetans...
When a person dies – or, in Scientology terms, when a thetan abandons their physical body – they go to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where the thetan is re-implanted and told lies about its past life and its next life. The Venusians take the thetan, "capsule" it, and send it back to Earth to be dumped into the ocean off the coast of California. Says Hubbard, "If you can get out of that, and through that, and wander around through the cities and find some girl who looks like she is going to get married or have a baby or something like that, you're all set. And if you can find the maternity ward to a hospital or something, you're OK. And you just eventually just pick up a baby." To avoid these inconveniences, Hubbard advised Scientologists to refuse to go to Venus after their death.[3][4]
...and another religion has a guy who comes back from the dead (He's baaaaak!) and an endlessly burning bush, to name just a few. The difference is in the details, but not in the believability of the details, so don't go all snobby on the Scientologists just because your irrational beliefs are older.
Germany is especially ridiculous on this. They're banning Scientology but opening their doors to radical Islam? Yeah, that's the ticket.
It's really very possible to be a good person without funding a business based on evidence-free belief in god, and/or without buying into one. Humans are hard-wired for morality. That hard-wiring, for humans to live together in groups, is one of many evolutionary survival strategies.
Where those atheists who wish to persuade others of the value of evidence-based beliefs go wrong, I think, is in not providing outlets for secular ethics -- and groups. (I'm reminded of the woman, head of some college atheists organization, who said something like "Well, the Christian groups attract people with pizza socials," as if this was a terrible thing. "Buy pizzas, lady, people might come."
People find it comforting and even fun to be in groups. Nothing wrong with that.
Heinlein quote via Mike Dunn
Prism Break
The Deadly Sunroof
Sunroofs cause shooting deaths! This just in from Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's terrorist-asskisser-in-chief, via the AP's Matthew Pennington. About Bhutto's murder:
[Musharraf] implied her decision to greet cheering supporters by poking her head out of the sunroof of her vehicle contributed to her death, adding that those who stayed inside were unharmed."Who is to be blamed for her coming out of her vehicle?'' he asked.
And who is to be named as a co-conspirator? Hmm, that's a toughie. Ford Motor Company? Chrysler? Maybe Subaru.
The Religion That Can't Take Criticism
Dennis Chapman, an Iraq war veteran who always leaves thought-provoking comments here, copied me on on an e-mail exchange he had, and agreed to let me post the piece he wrote. It started when he e-mailed a woman who blogs about Islam in Europe to ask whether she was Muslim. She wrote back:
Hi, I generally prefer my articles stand for themselves, without regard to my identity. However, to answer your question: I am not a Muslim. It may not be glaringly obvious, but I think the post you refer to does not hide that.
Since she'd rather not have her identity known, I'm not linking to her site on this entry. But, here's Dennis' response:
Thanks. Actually I suspected that you probably were a non-Muslim. The reason I suspected as much goes to the heart of the impending crisis facing Islam – a vortex that we are going to pulled down into as well: Muslims seem almost never to criticize other Muslims, no matter how poorly behaved. We Americans fight like cats and dogs, calling each other out over every kind of offense, real or imagined. Muslims, on the other hand, seem unable to criticize each other, no matter how severe the offense, with the seemingly single exception of perceived immodesty on the part of Muslim women, which is dealt with severely. The Kurds I know are an exception to the general pattern because many of them, though Muslims themselves, equate Islam with Arab domination – and they love to criticize all things associated with Arabs. I know a lot of Muslims – Somali, Kurd Arab. Many of the Kurds I know are treasured friends, and even the Arabs I met in Baghdad and elsewhere were unfailingly friendly and polite, even when voicing their criticisms of the US to me. Most of the Somalis I met in that country were also very hospitable, very nice people.
One might ask why I think Islam is heading for a crisis if all the Muslims I know are so nice (and they are!). Let me begin to answer by offering a historical analogy from a great crisis of American history – the Civil War. During the years leading up to the Civil War, only a tiny fraction of Southerners owned slaves; many (including Robert E. Lee, future commander of the storied Army of Northern Virginia) claimed to oppose slavery on moral grounds; and as late as 1860, majorities in most Southern States opposed seceding from the United States. And yet, despite all this, when forced to choose, most Southerners decided AGAINST their private inclinations, voted in favor of secession, and thus followed the hot-headed minority slave-owning aristocracy into a futile war that devastated the homes and communities of all.
I refer to the behavior of white Southerners in the US prior to the Civil War because Muslims today are behaving the same way. Most Muslims are like anybody else, perfectly willing to live and let live, wanting the same thing out of life that any Christian, Jew, Atheist or anybody else wants: prosperity and security. The problem is that, like my misguided countrymen of the antebellum South, Muslims are allowing the extremists in their communities to pull them in the direction of repression and war, even though the interests and private inclinations of the majority lie in the opposite direction.
I think that two factors, at least, are at the bottom of this situation. One of them is universal to all humankind: In the short run, scoundrels always have decent folk at an advantage. Decent folk are bound by rules of fair play and are reluctant to resort to force and intimidation. Scoundrels despise rules of fair play and are perfectly willing to use violence. The advantage that accrues to scoundrels is obvious. One can see the same dynamic play out in families all the time, where parents kowtow to one ne’er-do-well kid who is making everyone else miserable while attacking any family member who tries to stand up to the lout. This is one problem that Muslims, white Southerners, 21st Century Americans, Europeans and even the citizens of the United Federation Planets (if it existed) will always have in common. The other factor is more unique to Muslims. Most Muslim societies are tribal cultures that exist in places where, until recently, absolute cooperation and consensus within the tribe was critical to ensure survival in the face of a harsh physical environment and abounding enemies. The profound reluctance to challenge the group, or members of the group, that seems to grip Muslims today is a vestige of that tribal past. It is an anachronism today, but social changes come hard. On this latter score at least, Muslims have an excuse that my Southern forebears did not.
So to an extent, one can understand the reluctance felt by Muslims to criticize members of their community. Referring back to the Civil War analogy, Abraham Lincoln in his compassion acknowledged that were the situations of the Northern versus Southern peoples reversed, the Southerners would have opposed slavery and the Northerners supported it. But Lincoln did not allow his compassion to blind himself to the basic fact – however one might sympathize with their plight, the Southern people were wrong and had to be stopped. Likewise, however understandable the subjective reluctance of Muslims to stand up to other Muslims might be, the objective reality is that Muslims are allowing a radical minority to drag them toward a precipice. They’re dragging us along with them. For everyone’s sake, the radical minority has to be stopped before they take us all over the edge.
DENNIS CHAPMAN
UPDATE: I just got this e-mail from Esther, Dennis' correspondent:
Hi, You could post my response, as well as my blog URL and more importantly, the post that started this discussion. I appreciate that you asked, as this was a private email conversation.In any case, on my blog I do not hide the fact that I'm not a Muslim, and I do not pretend to be one.
thanks,
Esther
Her site is Islam In Europe, and here's her response to what Dennis wrote:
Hi,Though I generally agree that there's a reluctance among Muslims to criticize fellow Muslims in front of non-Muslims, I don't think that's all there is to it.
Recent surveys show more and more that Muslims in Europe are radicalizing, especially the youth. I think many Muslims see Jihad and terror attacks (especially 9/11), as a way of getting back pride that had been lost. Add to that a feeling of not belonging (a feeling which is shared also by many non-Muslim youth), and you get to an explosive combination. This comes from an even worse problem than not wanting to criticize your fellows - that of not being able to conceive of yourself as anything other than a victim. It is much easier to blame the troubles of the Muslim world today on colonialism, then on the current leaders. Muslims can both feel pride at the work of their fellow Muslims in 9/11 and blame the US, Israel and the Jews for it, all at the same time.
In the article I wrote about the 'Right of Rebuttal' - my point was more that Islamists are constantly threatening Europe with a Muslim takeover. There might be many Muslims who disagree with that being a good idea, but I am sure there are also many who see that as a point of pride. Islam is better than the liberal, decadent West, and therefore it will win in the end. I understand this is a common theme of discussion on Al-Jazeera, and it is much easier at the same time to ignore the places where Islam had already won the 'war of ideas' (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Gaza). It is easy to blame 'Islamophobes' of being afraid of a Muslim takeover, but I have yet to see one Islamist being criticized for saying the same things.
On the other hand, there is a lot in common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West. Many Westerners do not see the value of their society. They do not appreciate their own liberal values, they do not trust their politicians, or see the benefit of their political system. Muslims who denigrate the West, are in many cases only repeating what the West itself is saying. It is hard to expect from immigrants to be loyal to a country and society which isn't loyal to itself.
Esther
And actually, while many of her posts are merely news links and don't include commentary, this particular one, Right Of Rebuttal, does. Esther wrote:
If Muslims keep silent while Islamists boast about how degenerate Europe is and how it will fall to Islam - whether by demographics or ideas - they should not complain later when people draw conclusions from those Islamists and apply generalizations to the whole Muslim community.
In total agreement here!
Hannah Arendt Ducked Out To The Movies
Or something. I really have no idea why she didn't stick around, but apparently, Hannah Arendt only witnessed the opening bit of Eichmann's trial, inspiring her to come up with the notion of "the banality of evil" -- inspired by how utterly, boringly "normal," and like the rest of us Eichmann seemed.
Had she stuck around, she would have encountered a very different man, contend Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher. According to "David Cesarani’s (2004) meticulous examination of Eichmann’s life and crimes," they say Eichmann was:
...a man who identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology; a man who did not simply follow orders but who pioneered creative new policies; a man who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous ‘achievements’.
Yet, for years, there's been a consensus, Haslam and Reicher write, that regular people do wrong when, under the influence of a group, they are blinded to the consequences of their actions. They correct the myth:
People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.
They go into the history, from Arendt, to Stanley Milgram (the shock doc), to Phillip Zimbardo (who did the prison guard experiment), and come to a different, more informed conclusion, which they call "The Ingenuity of Evil":
So from Stanford, as from the obedience studies, it is not valid to conclude that people mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality. Rather both studies (and also the historical evidence) suggest that brutality occurs when people identify strongly with groups that have a brutal ideology. This leads them to advance that ideology knowingly, creatively and even proudly. The question we need to address then is ‘What leads people to create and maintain such social identifications?’ We suggest there are three parts to the answer.
1) Individual differences In a simple but powerful study, Carnaghan and McFarland (2007) placed two adverts in a newspaper. The first advert was an invitation for individuals to participate in a standard psychological experiment. The second followed the wording of the original advert for Zimbardo’s Stanford study — calling for people to participate ‘in a psychological study of prison life’. Those who responded to the second advert were very different from those who responded to the first. They were much more likely to believe in the harsh and hierarchical world that exists in prison. This finding suggests that, where there is a free choice, not just anyone would elect to put themselves in a ‘prison’ situation and take on a ‘prison’ role. The simplest way of explaining such choices would be to put them down to personality, level of authoritarianism, social dominance, or some other such individual factor. However, our own prison study (conducted in collaboration with the BBC; Reicher & Haslam, 2006, and www.bps.org.uk/pris) suggests a more nuanced explanation. Here (as in Zimbardo’s study) several of those assigned to be guards refused to embrace this role. The primary issue for these individuals was how an enthusiastic embrace of the guard group membership would impact upon their other valued group memberships. Would tyrannical behaviour undermine their social identities at home, at work, at leisure? This suggests that people will be less likely to identify with groups with tyrannical norms the more that their membership of groups with different norms is salient and the more that they are made accountable to those alternative groups.
2) Contexts of crisis and group failure It may be that there are certain people who, in any given context, are more likely to identify with tyrannical and brutal groups, but equally there are some contexts which make everyone more likely to accept such groups. Perhaps the most surprising finding from the BBC Prison Study was its demonstration of the way in which our participants, who started off holding democratic views and opposing inequality, gradually became more authoritarian as their groups failed to function effectively and the overall system fell into chaos. In such situations, the notion of a strong leader who would forcibly – even brutally – impose and maintain order became, if not actually attractive, at least less unattractive (Haslam & Reicher, 2007b). What we saw here, then, was that authoritarianism – often seen as the key personality variable that explains the dynamics of tyranny – was itself changed as a function of social dynamics.
There are strong parallels here with historical studies of the context in which the Nazis ascended to power (e.g. Hobsbawm, 1995). The Weimar Republic, which preceded Nazi rule, was riven between democrats and those who dreamed of a strong domineering leader. As the republic fell into economic and political crisis, so the middle classes deserted democracy and embraced Hitler as the man who would save them. This process is encapsulated in the words of a school teacher who, writing in 1934, explained why he had joined the Nazis: I reached the conclusion that no party but a single man alone could save Germany. This opinion was shared by others, for when the cornerstone of a monument was laid in my hometown, the following words were inscribed on it: ‘Descendants who read these words, know ye that we eagerly await the coming of the man whose strong hand may restore order’. (quoted in Abel, 1986, p.151)
In other words, in times of crisis, people look for Daddy.
Theoretical and practically, the dynamics through which such views emerge point to ways in which standard personality-based accounts of tyranny need to be radically rethought.
3) Leadership
Whatever is going on in the world, however great the crisis, it is still necessary for people to make sense of events, to explain how current difficulties came about and to have a vision of how they can be resolved. But we do not interpret the world on our own, as many social psychological models tend to imply. Rather, people are surrounded by would-be leaders who tell them what to make of the world around them. For this reason, the study of leadership must be a central component of any analysis of tyranny and outgroup hostility. Indeed, tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it. In the BBC study, participants as a whole may have become relatively more authoritarian, but it still needed active leadership to exploit this and to make the case for a new tough regime.The role of leaders becomes particularly pernicious when they suggest that ‘our’ problems come about because of the threats posed by a pernicious outgroup. In this way they can begin to take the groups with which we already identify and develop norms of hostility against outsiders. Their role becomes even more dangerous when they tell us that ‘we’ are the sum of all virtues so that the defence of virtue requires the destruction of the outgroup that threatens us. These are the conditions which allow groups to make genocide normative and to represent mass murder as something honourable (Reicher et al., 2006). It was the logic to which Eichmann subscribed when, after the end of the war, he said: ‘If, of the 10.3 million Jews…we had killed 10.3 million, then I would be satisfied. I would say “All right. We have exterminated an enemy”’ (quoted in Cesarani, 2004, p.219).
Your Inner Terrorist
I don't know about you, but it seems I'm a little behind this week, not only in my writing, but in blowing up busloads of innocent people.
Stacy Lawson puts the "ass" in "asinine" with a piece on Huffington Post, entitled "We Are The Terrorists." Here's an excerpt:
To see Bhutto's death as an isolated act of cruelty by an evil group of terrorists, distant and separate from each of us, would be to miss a profound teaching moment.
Lucky for us poor naifs, Stacy has a Ph.D. in bombastic flatulence.
It gets better:
We are all terrorists. Before you dismiss this out of hand, please take a closer look. The terrorist inside you wages acts of aggression on those you believe to oppress you. The dictator inside you declares martial law when it suits you. The suicide bomber martyrs you and wounds others in your attempts to be heard and to be right.Global events are a mirror of aggressions taking place on a daily basis within each of us. This poses necessary and immediate questions: Who am I terrorizing? What part of myself or others am I assassinating?
It is our instinctual nature to polarize the world (and ourselves) into good and evil and then attempt to eradicate all evil from view - through repression and denial or through aggression and violence. Until we reconcile the violent parts of ourselves that we have dispelled into the shadow, we will continue to play out violent scenes on the world stage.
We have denied and discarded the unsavory bits of ourselves for so long, that we can no longer clearly see how we're creating our troubled world. By definition, it is not easy to see that which is in the shadow. It is outside of our peripheral vision. It is our blind spot, the Achilles heal of the individual and of humanity. What we despise or deny we push deep into the dark recesses of the psyche, hoping it will be forever hidden there. But instead, contorted into all manner of gruesome expression that we no longer recognize as our own shadow, we confront these twisted and alienated bits of self over and over until they are reintegrated. Ms. Bhutto's death is a painful illustration of our collective shadow.
Uh, my "shadow side" wants to ask customer service people at Verizon if they were trained by the Three fucking Stooges, but somehow, I restrain myself. You want to see a real "shadow side"? Here's the result of one or more of them.
But, let's not lose track of the wisdom of The Dalai Lawson:
Our small daily acts of aggression may seem like nothing compared to the brutal assassination of a revered public figure. But the collective consciousness is an assimilation of each of us. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As long as we perpetuate the fracturing and fragmentation of disallowed parts of ourselves, stuffing our emotions and perpetuating a sense of shame and worthlessness even on a small scale, we will continue to create terrorists.
Emil Durkeim meets "I'm Okay/You're Okay" meets "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." (In Ashtanga class at Yogaworks.)
I'm guessing the conversation would go something like this:
"Mommy, where do terrorists come from?""We create them when we don't share our cookies."
Stacy earnests on about why we "create terrorists":
Why? Because operating from this fractured consciousness, we don't have the wisdom or the capacity to create a world that fosters wholeness. If we are not whole, we cannot know or create a world that is whole. As such, there will always be disenfranchised, forgotten and expendable parts. Those expendable parts and expendable people will rise up to terrorize us.In order to heal this schism, we must reconcile with the shadow. It will require us to collect up all the forgotten, orphaned, disowned, disgusting and estranged parts of ourselves...and bring them back home. All that we have denied and disdained must be held with equal love. Only then can we transmute the lower nature into higher forms. Integration of the poles of our experience is the path toward wholeness.
We are all necessary in this collective healing process since "the only true battle is the one that rages inside" of us...
Tell that to a guy whose wife and kids got turned into raw hamburger by a nutbag with a nail bomb strapped around his waist.
My big inner battle at the moment? Figuring out who this girl is trying to be. And/or whose prose she's trying to copy. I mean, real people don't talk or write like this, do they? I mean, not unless they're getting paid to play cult leaders on Law & Order or something.
Oh, wait -- here's something. From another Stacy Lawson HuffPo piece, "Igniting The Modern Mystic":
I've always adored the great mystics - Hafiz, Rumi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross. Their writings transcend our mundane human perception and give glimpses into the rapturous experience of a higher reality. Truth be told, I fancy myself a modern day mystic, someone weaving together these worlds of the mundane and the magical.
And all along, I was picturing a rectum with a Dell.
More turds of wisdom:
When asked at dinner parties or social events what kind of work I do, I find it an awkward question. The simple answer is that I'm an entrepreneur, investor, teacher, speaker and writer. But, there's far more to it than that. As Khalil Gibran once wrote, "work is love made visible." I find building social ventures and connecting with people in a teaching environment as ecstatic as love-making. The ultimate reason to create, teach, speak or write is to dissolve the veil of separation and reveal the intimate union of all existence...to awaken a recognition of ourselves as One with all that is.So when Arianna Huffington asked me to write a column on conscious living and spirituality I was simultaneously thrilled and tentative. Thrilled because these topics provoke great joy for me. Tentative because authenticity demands a level of revealed public dialogue that I've previously saved for engaged audiences or private circles. It demands an even deeper level of "love made visible."
Lest this sound trite, let me add that the mystic's love is not blind to the complication and suffering in the world. It is all-embracing, using the full human experience as fuel for the raging fire of awakening. Our modern lives are difficult. We face social injustices, environmental crises, war, economic imbalances, poverty, hunger, a vast array of suffering across our planet.
A little vaster now that you're blogging -- although we do appreciate the unintended laughs, which should give us a nice little break between reports of actual terrorism. You know, the kind where there are bloody arms, legs, and heads all over the pavement?
Viagra For Girls
Medicalizing low sexual desire in women...and news I broke that shows it's not necessarily a necessary route. Via AP/ABCnews:
A drug that could do for women what Viagra has done for men is being tested at the University of Virginia. The drug is a testosterone-laden ointment called LibiGel and it's intended to boost the libido of women who have lost interest in sex....Ovariectomies, or surgical menopause, can lead to a drop in sexual interest because ovaries produce roughly half of the testosterone in a woman's body.
Testosterone plays a key role in sexual functioning for men and women.
LibiGel comes in a pump bottle. The woman rubs the small dot of gel into the skin of her upper arm. Over the next 24 hours, the gel's testosterone seeps into her bloodstream, boosting her energy and libido.
Clayton, who is running the clinical trial at UVa, said the drug is better than previous testosterone treatments because it keeps levels of the chemical constant, much like naturally occurring testosterone.
"I expect this will work," she said.
The thing is, for a lot of women, it's not the only option -- or even a necessary option. I believe I broke the news in the mainstream media of Rosemary Basson's work, which you'll find detailed in these two of my columns below. Here's the first, an excerpt from "Groping For More":
You aren’t the only couple crawling around under furniture to look for the woman’s lost libido. In a series of studies published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, sexual medicine specialist Rosemary Basson noted data showing that a third of women lack sexual interest. A third? Hmmm…could the problem be not in women, but in the expectation that desire in women works exactly like desire in men? Well, that’s what Basson found. When a relationship is new, or when women are away from their partner for days or weeks, they’re more likely to have “conscious sexual hunger,” just like men. But, once women are in long-term relationships, they tend not to have the same “spontaneous sexual neediness” men do, but they can be sexually arousable, or “triggerable.” In other words, there’s a good chance the problem isn’t with your girlfriend’s desire for sex, but in how you’re both waiting around for it like it’s a crosstown bus.A better approach is what marriage therapist Michele Weiner Davis calls “The Nike Solution” (i.e., “just do it”) in her smart but depressingly titled book, The Sex-Starved Marriage. Jumping off from Basson’s work, Weiner Davis explains that women may not feel desire initially, but if they just start fooling around, they’re likely to get there. You should also reconsider the notion that sharing a life means sharing living quarters. Since you might have a little more sex if it’s a little less available, why not rent the apartment across the street and just do a lot of visiting? If your girlfriend’s pilot light still can’t be lit, she should have herself checked out by a specialist in female sexual medicine -- who probably won’t be the corner gynecologist. Finally, consider the unpleasant possibility that love isn’t the answer but the problem. Maybe your girlfriend never was very attracted to you, but believed the hoohah that if you love somebody, attraction will follow. Wrong. Not gonna happen. But, minus attraction, there’s still plenty of opportunity for sleeping together -- as in, lying perfectly still in flannel pajamas after you’re both spent from 20 minutes of the hottest nonstop hugging ever.
And here's a repeat mention, because this is a problem for so many people who write me for advice. From my column, "A Tale Of Naked Whoa":
The real problem for many couples is the notion that “the mood” is something they’re supposed to wait around for like Halley’s Comet -- probably due to the assumption that desire works the same in men and women. The truth is, just because a woman isn’t in the mood doesn’t mean she can’t get in the mood. According to breakthrough work by sexual medicine specialist Rosemary Basson, women in long-term relationships tend not to have the same “spontaneous sexual neediness” men do, but they can be arousable, or “triggerable.” In other words, forget trying to have sex. Tell your girlfriend about Basson’s findings, and ask her to try an experiment: making out three times a week (without sex being the presumed outcome) and seeing if “the mood” happens to strike her. You just might find the member getting admitted to the club a little more often.
Directions For The New Year
Happy 2008!
photo: Gregg Sutter
The Busboy With The Table Scraper Is Strangely Absent
The lack of white tablecloths should be these people's first clue that they are not in a fine French restaurant with staff hovering to clear the plate immediately after the amuse bouche, and to trot around with those little table scrapers to swipe away the crumbs.
Yes, it seems this is actually a Starbucks, where the staff is sometimes slow to act as your mommy, collect your garbage, and clean up your food leavings (perhaps you thought they were a little present for the next customer?) Is it too much to ask that you maybe pick up after yourself, Princess?
On your way out, do glance up at the green lettering over the awning. See how it says "Starbucks," not "Taco Bell" or "indeterminate natural foods store"? They sell food and drink in this place, they don't just provide you with a nice little table to eat and drink stuff you've bought at other places.
Have You Signed On?
ScienceDebate2008.com:
A Call for a Presidential Debate on Science and TechnologyGiven the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.
via Instapundit