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Palin By Comparison
I can't vote for Obama, who's a socialist and all "nukes are mean!" For me, it's McCain...most grudgingly. Then again, I figured he'd play it conservative, or at least mildly sensible, in picking a VP.

And now, what if McCain, a cancer survivor who'd be the oldest guy ever inaugurated as president, keels over in office or gets seriously ill? We'll have a woman in the presidency who basically has, for a short time, run a state with the population of Massachusetts fishing village. Okay, okay...to be fair, with a state population of 670,000, Alaska's actually just a little smaller than San Francisco.

But, now, it's not just Sarah Palin, from hockey mom to governor, it's Sarah Palin, from hockey mom maybe to leader of the free world. And whoops, she has five children: "Hold on, Mr. Putin. Dolly's got a booboo!"

Yet, here we go, with people on the right falling all over themselves to find this choice acceptable ("Love the one you're with," I believe it's called). Stephanie Simon writes for the WSJ:

Ms. Palin's decision to accept the nomination for vice president just four months after the birth of her disabled son gave pause to a few conservatives. But just for a moment.

"If I were her pastor, I'd be very concerned for her and her family," Mr. Mohler said. "But it looks as though she's found a way to integrate it all in a way that works."

"It's a mixed blessing, because she has a young child," said Mark Liederbach, a Christian ethicist and strong supporter of traditional family roles. "There's a little bit of concern... but she has older children who can help out."

Others on the right say it's sexist to suggest a woman can't raise a family and work -- or seek high political office, or serve as commander in chief, if the need arises. "She's more the example of the modern woman than the Gloria Steinems of days past," said Jill Stanek, a conservative blogger popular with the pro-life community. "She can handle it."

Meanwhile, during a press event she had to change the baby's diaper. Here, from People, by Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, on "Shattering The Glass Ceiling":

Sarah Palin, in ruby red peep-toe platform heels that showed off a pink French-style pedicure, first ducked into a holding room to change the diaper of her just-up-from-a-nap 4 1/2-month-old son, Trig.

SARAH PALIN: Morning person. Yup. We don't sleep much. Too much to do. What I've had to do, though, is in the middle of the night, put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump. Do a couple of things different and still get it all done.

As a new mom, how are you going to juggle all this?
SARAH: I am thankful to be married to a man who loves being a dad as much as I love being a mom, so he is my strength. And practically speaking, we have a great network of help with lots of grandparents and aunties and uncles all around us. We have a lot of help.

Oh, goody. Sorry to disappoint all you righties looking for a rubberstamp for Mrs. Palin (like all the sickening examples of this all over the damn place), but in a V.P. candidate, if we had a female, I was looking for something a little more...barren. Battle-ax-ish. Thatcheresque. At least somebody with high-functioning 20-somethings who are off smoking pot in college somewhere.

Meanwhile, there's this, from Sean Cockerham and Wesley Loy in the Anchorage Daily News:

(Alaska) State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.

"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

Now, maybe that's just mean-spirited sniping. Any Alaskans like to weigh in?

I'm guessing it was a huge deal that she's pro-life -- and perhaps the fact that she's a woman was a desperate shot to snare those Hillary-supporting vote-your-vagina ladies. Yeah, I'm sure they'll all be right over. Or might've if McCain had picked Kay Bailey Hutchison, or somebody pro-choice. And come on, with KBH, do you think the ladies and gents on the right would really break for Obama?

And hey, a pro-life V.P. -- that's what's really important to Putin and Ahmadinejad. Yes, if McCain drops and she becomes president, Ahmadinejad'll surely be thinking, "Ooh, yeah. Now we're scared. Now we'll stop our naughty behavior, listen to mommy, and all sing kumbayah."

Meanwhile, McCain has, in one fell V.P.-picking swoop, managed to make the issue of the inexperienced Obama a non-issue: "Come aboard, voters! I hired a woman! And besides the pro-life bone I'm throwing to all you religious nutters, she's a hottie, and shoots moose...and that's all you need to know! (MILF, anyone?!)"

McCain, most disturbingly, played the gambler. Or he's just an old fool. Or he's exhibiting yet another rash McCain decision. Or believes his own P.R. -- McCain, the maverick -- and is trying to live up to it. Or all of the above. This, remember, is a lady he met once before he brought her down to Sedona.

Of course, it helps to remember that McCain, as Matt Welch wrote in his excellent book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, is at his personal best when he feels like the underdog. Is this what this is?

On a side note, I know the V.P. isn't in charge of science education in this country, but all we need is another nutter at the top. Here, from Tom Kizzia, in the Anchorage Daily News:

The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said she thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the state's public classrooms.

A comment left below the story:

Palin is bimbo babe
God help this country if Palin is elected. Science will go out the window. Before long we'll be making knock-offs of China's technology instead of the other way around.

Reason's Mike Rigg found this list on Yahoo:

45: number of months Sarah Palin has been pregnant
20: number of months Sarah Palin has been governor

9,000: population of Wasilla, AK the town of which Palin was mayor
15,000: the number of people at the rally announcing her nomination as VP

7: number of people in the Palin family
7: number of houses John and Cindy McCain own

72: years that John McCain has been alive
49: years that Alaska has been a state

1: number of times McCain and Palin had met before today

20 million: the number of dollars that the city of Wasilla was left in debt when Palin's term as mayor ended

When John McCain started his campaign, Sarah Palin was not yet governor of Alaska.

John McCain left both his first wife and Mitt Romney for beauty queens.

One of the few "real" ones, Brookhiser at NRO, writes:

The Palin pick shows a low opinion of the vice presidency, and it shows conservatives in a bad light.

1. The Vice Presidency. Either McCain thinks the war on terror isn't serious, or he thinks the vice-presidency isn't. Since the former is obviously untrue, it must be the latter. McCain is certainly following a very old conception of the job. One nineteenth century veep was reputedly so underutilized that he kept a tavern in his home state. But that is not our conception. Vice Presidents have grown in clout and responsibility. In the last fifty years, four former vice presidents have run for president (Nixon, Mondale, elder Bush, Gore), two of them successfully, while since Carter/Mondale, veeps have been given more and more to do. McCain, bless him, intends to do everything himself. Good luck! Perhaps the Palin pick is a sly diss both of Obama/Biden and Bush/Cheney. Palin will go to funerals.

2. Conservatives. Palin will also be assigned to pacify conservatives. On the evidence of the numerous emails reprinted here, that will be easily done. Reader after reader said that the base was now energized. You would have thought the base was energized by being in a war. If not, perhaps we need a new base. We have shown the same color-by-numbers mindset that liberals did when they rallied to Obama. Liberals love Obama because he is a Numinous Negro. Conservatives love Palin because she has a Downs baby and an M-16. For both sides, that is all on earth ye know and all ye need to know. You might call it mystical and childish.

May I be so wrong that a hundred harpies will pluck my eyeballs.

Now who do I vote for...Bob Barr? (Sigh...no Barr fan, either.) Anybody got a write-in?

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Slime On The Other Side
Hey, if you don't like what the other side might have to say about you, do your best to gag them. John Fund writes in the WSJ that "Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire." Of course, at the moment, the Obama campaign is too busy going after Kurtz to do any coming clean about anyone or anything -- not that they'd want to:

Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.

An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.

Separately, Mr. Obama's lawyers have also demanded that the Justice Department prosecute an organization called the American Issues Project for running an ad about ties between their candidate and Mr. Ayers.

Obama aides believe John Kerry lost in 2004 because he failed to respond to the "Swift Boat" ads attacking him, and they are lashing out. Sometimes the Obama objections have merit, as when they exposed errors in Jerome Corsi's sensationalized Obama biography. But sometimes they are designed to shut down legitimate questions. "They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter told Gabriel Sherman at the New Republic. "The whole Obama narrative is built around the narrative that Obama and [campaign strategist] David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true." The stakes are high. If the full story of Mr. Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been revealed before the Iowa caucus, he wouldn't have won.

Read about l'affaire Rezko and the Iraqi billionaire at the link. Meanwhile, what's bad for the gander...is very good to ask one's opponent!

The Obama campaign didn't hesitate to criticize Hillary Clinton for not revealing the names of donors to the Clinton Library, or John McCain for releasing only two years of tax returns as opposed to Mr. Obama's 10 years. Those were proper questions. But so too are requests for information from Mr. Obama, a man whose sudden rise and incompletely reported past makes him among the least-vetted of presidential nominees.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Mommy And Daddy As Rent-A-Clowns

X percent of parents believe this! X percent of parents believe that!

I just love it when some company gins up parental guilt and stress based on...the opinions of other parents!

Kelly V. Lobanov, of "The Hodges Partnership," which sounds like a think tank but is actually a P.R. firm, sent me an e-mail asking me to publish an article:

Hi Amy,
Please consider publishing the article below which highlights the importance of active play and how parents struggle to find time for it.

A national online survey of 1,000 parents of children 12 years and younger found:
- that while 99 percent of parents agree that playtime is important
- 62 percent play with their children less than one hour a day, on average.

My name is Kelly Lobanov and I represent HearthSong (www.hearthsong.com) the national toy catalog that commissioned the survey.

This made me angry, because I know some people -- editors and parents -- may take this seriously, not noticing that these are simply opinions of the least valid sort: those of a bunch of people with no special background or qualifications in child development.

By the way, even if parents beyond the 1,000 do play with their children "less than one hour a day," that doesn't mean it's a problem.

Now, I don't have special qualifications in child development, but I do my homework -- to a degree I suspect Kelly does not. I wrote about kids and play and parental guilt in my column, Look Before You Sleep. Here's an excerpt:

The parental "no" has officially joined the ranks of chronically missing items like The Holy Grail, Atlantis, and Britney Spears' underpants.

You're supposed to be your kids' mom, not their full-time birthday clown. This means meeting their needs, as opposed to falling prey to their ransom demands; i.e., "Send in the chopper and the cupcakes or I'll scream my lungs out until spring!" If you're keeling over from reading "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" 40 times, it's because you didn't say no 39 times. "No" is also the correct response when besieged with requests for a chunky peanut butter sandwich with all the chunkies removed. But, children can be such finicky eaters! Correction: American children can be such finicky eaters, because their parents tend to confuse parenting with working room service at a five-star hotel. In France, on the other hand, the kids' meal is whatever the parents are eating; brains, livers, kidneys and all. And while the kids can pick out bits they don't like, their choice is clear: eat or starve.

Saying no to your kids will not turn them into meth-smoking, liquor store-robbing carjackers. Actually, throwing up a few boundaries might even serve to prevent this -- and less dire but extremely annoying outcomes (just what society needs, another 35-year-old snot who was denied nothing during childhood). Kids need to feel loved and secure -- and that doesn't take hours of mommy-and-me Lego. In fact, psychologist Judith Rich Harris writes that "anthropological data suggest...there may be something a little unnatural about adults playing with children." Anthropologist David F. Lancy notes that, beyond Western society, one "rarely" sees it. Regarding this apparent lack of a parental instinct for parent-child play, Harris writes, "This implies that children do not require play with an adult in order to develop normally." . . .

I dashed a quick e-mail off to Kelly:

Parents shouldn't be playing with their kids. They haven't throughout history. Not much, anyway. I just heard a whole talk at an evolutionary psych conference on how the important thing is for kids of various ages to play together, and I've written about this as well. My question is why are you putting pressure on parents? (I know -- to sell products.) Yes, play is important. Kids can do it just fine without mommy and daddy's help.

Here's Kelly's article:

THANKS FOR THE BALL, DAD, C'MON, LET'S PLAY
Unfortunately, Most Parents Have Little Time to Play with Kids, Survey Finds
(Big fucking deal, Amy adds)
by Kelly V. Lobanov

Angie Schuler, an advertising account representative and mother of two, has heard it all about maintaining a healthy work-life balance. But between her 60-hour work week and making sure Isabelle, age 6, has done her homework and Gavin, 3, has not hidden his vegetables in the sofa cushions, there's not much time for fun and games.

Like most parents, Angie knows all about the importance of play time. Finding the hours - or even minutes - in a hectic day, however, is not always possible. She is not alone. Despite near universal acknowledgment that playtime is a vital component of a child's development, 62 percent of parents engage in "active play" with their children for six hours or less per week. That translates to under an hour a day on average. If that's not bad enough, 16 percent of moms and dads admit that playtime with their kids averages less than one hour each week.

According to a new survey commissioned by HearthSong, a national toy catalog, and conducted by IPSOS Public Affairs, 99 percent of parents with a child aged 12 and under believe that children's play is important for a variety of reasons, but in a world in which the demands on parents' time are considerable, only 38 percent of parents say they spend at least six hours per week in active play with their kids. One in six parents doesn't even spend an hour a week, averaging fewer than 10 minutes per day in playtime with their sons and daughters.

"Everyone recognizes that for children to be children, they need time to play," said Beverly Fries, an educational play expert at HearthSong, one of the nation's leading catalog toy companies. "Play at any stage of a child's development helps instill a sense of accomplishment, delight and both intellectual and social growth. What is equally important to understand is the opportunities that play provides parents to engage with their children, to praise and encourage them in ways that instill strong and enduring bonds."

The survey also found that parents who do play with their kids, over one third (36%) say they most often play with games or toys, another quarter (27%) most often participate in unstructured play and a like number (27%) play outside, in either unstructured or structured activities such as sports.

Parents were fairly evenly split on the value of structured play. Forty-four percent of respondents said that structured play such as play groups, school and sports leagues satisfy their child's play requirements, while 56 percent disagreed.

When asked what they believed was the most important aspect of play in contributing to their child's development, more than one in four parents (27%) said "learning to interact with others," while fewer mentioned developing "motor skills" (18%), "problem solving" (17%), "creative thinking" (17%), "imagination" (12%) or a "sense of accomplishment" (9%).

And lastly, despite the growing popularity of electronic toys, such as computer and video games, only 38 percent of respondents indicated that their child spends more time with electronic toys than with other types of play.

"Laughter and engagement in active play is essential to the well being of your child," said Fries. From newborns to pre-teens, active play enhances a child's mental, physical, emotional and social development throughout their life."

Boston College psychologist Dr. Peter Gray, who studies mixed-age play, actually gave the plenary address on this subject at NEEPS, the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society conference I attended this May in New Hampshire. Here's an excerpt from a paper he wrote on it, Nature's Powerful Tutors; The Educative Functions of Free Play:

Age-mixed play is less competitive and more nurturing than same-age play. When players differ widely in age, experience, and ability, there is no point in trying to prove oneself better than others. Rather than focus on winning, players find ways to make games fun and challenging for all concerned. Age mixing is valuable both to the younger and the older children involved.

Younger children benefit by being exposed to the more sophisticated activities and abilities of older children, among whom they find role models. A useful idea here is Lev Vygotsky's concept of a zone of proximal development: defined as the realm of endeavors that a child can do in collaboration with more skilled others, but cannot do by himself or herself or with others at his or her same level (Vygotsky, 1978). For example, two 4-year-olds cannot play a simple game of catch. Neither can throw or catch well enough to make the game fun. However, a 4-year-old and an 8-year-old can play catch and enjoy it. The 8-year-old can toss the ball gently into the hands of the 4- year-old so the latter can catch it, and the 8- year-old can run and leap and catch the wild throws of the 4-year-old. So, catch is in the zone of proximal development for 4-year-olds. We have made analogous observations for many intellectual and social skills, not just physical skills.

Older children also benefit in many ways from their interactions with younger ones. In age-mixed play, older children have opportunities to practice leadership and nurturance and to consolidate their own knowledge through teaching. Also, the creative activities of younger children inspire older children and adolescents to continue to play at such activities as painting and modeling with clay, and to develop artistic skills.

As a culture we are affording children continuously less opportunity for free play, unguided by adults, and continuously less opportunity to interact with children who differ from themselves in age. The observations I have described here suggest that, in letting these trends continue, we are depriving children of the most enjoyable routes to education.

Guilting parents who don't find it fascinating to read the same book to a kid 40 times is unproductive and maybe even damaging. Psssst! Parents! 3-year-olds can be cute, but they're BORING. And it's just fine to admit that.

You do your parental duty by breaking your kids out of the nuclear family bind so they can be socialized with other kids of all ages. Set it up so your kids play with other kids -- of all ages. Your job, as a parent, is to sit there with other parents and talk about adult things, adjudicate any fights, and say "That's wonderful!" when your kid occasional points out that they've manage to climb a tree without cracking their head open. (Yeah, okay, how they'll get down is anyone's guess -- but maybe the other kids can help your kid work that out, like kids have pretty successfully for generations and generations.)

Those are my two friends in the photo: Dinosaur Boy, who's 7, and In-Charge Girl, who just turned 4, and who knows who's the boss and will be quick to show you if you forget it!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Rent To Rent
Like my friend Kerry Madden, an author of children's books, I haven't bought into the panic to buy a home. I, too, live in the outrageously expensive Los Angeles housing market, and I have never owned a home anywhere, let alone here.

I have rented the same house for about 10 years. I like my landlord and his girlfriend a lot, and I'm a good tenant: never late on the rent in 10 years, and I call them right away when anything goes wrong (important, because, say, a leak not reported immediately can do serious property damage).

Kerry has a smart piece in today's LA Times about her family's tenure in various rental apartments and homes, and how they're in no rush to buy now that prices are finally coming down:

We've lived in our current home for 10 years now. We pay $1,400 a month in rent for a five-bedroom in Silver Lake. Our only debt is mounting college loans. Our landlord is a good guy. He's raised the rent only once, and he has a home-warranty plan, which means that if something breaks, the company comes out and fixes it. The neighborhood is full of friends for the kids.

But is it a holding pattern? Shouldn't we look to buy now that prices are finally coming down? But how can we with tuitions going up?

In July, I spent a week with my teenage daughter, Lucy, at the Appalachia Service Project in Leslie County, Ky., collecting oral histories from families while she took photographs. It was a land of coal trucks, church bells and folks who grew up on roads named Hell For Certain and Turkey Foot. The extended family we interviewed had rarely left their Kentucky holler and lived in a compound of four adjacent trailers built in the 1940s, some heated by coal and wood stoves. We stood in one tiny addition built recently out of plywood, and I asked, "What's this room going to be?"

A volunteer said, "It's going to be the new baby's room."

I slipped outside in the hot July sun to watch as kids of all ages raced around playing; 21 children lived on the place, all cousins and siblings.

Turkey Foot Road was home to them. My sister's new Craftsman in Oakland is home to her. California is home to my kids.

Maybe part of me will always be looking for home. We moved a lot during my childhood, the whole family following my father from one football coaching job to the next. Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Michigan, Georgia ... .

I never once intended to miss the South after Kiffen and I left, but I do. I go back to it searching for a sense of home, and I find flashes of it in the humidity, cicadas, lightning bugs and cracking thunderstorms. I feel it when I'm back there on a porch, listening to stories that loop, twist and meander -- and when the guitars, banjos and fiddles come out -- and I have this longing to never lose it again.

But there is home here too, in Silver Lake with our friends. Lately, our youngest, Norah, will ask, "Are we moving to the South?" I tell her I don't know, and then she and Kiffen get back to work building her treehouse in the backyard. We've lived in Los Angeles longer than we've lived anywhere. We've created a life here with our kids. We may not own this house, but we've made it a home.

Kerry's most recent book is Jessie's Mountain.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Libel Tourism
Historian Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, was sued for libel in a British court in 2000 -- and, surprisingly, won -- after she pointed to statements by David Irving that she deemed holocaust denial.

Next stop in the British courts? Muslims seeking to make free western societies a little less free and western -- on the way to making them a whole lot less free and western.

Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism, writes for Scripps News of a new trick for silencing criticism of Islam and terrorists that's sure to be used more and more -- taking advantage of ridiculous British libel laws in British courts against writers in other countries. Here's how it works:

A book published in the United States names an individual abroad who supports terrorist groups. That individual -- for the sake of discussion, let's say he's a Saudi petro-billionaire with a home in London -- goes online and orders a few copies, which arrive in the mail. He takes those books to a British attorney who files a lawsuit complaining that his client has been libeled.

The billionaire knows it will be much easier to prevail in the U.K. than it would be in an American court, where the First Amendment and decades of case law provide free speech protections. (Under English law, by contrast, the burden in a libel case is on the defendant to prove his innocence -- which can be impossible if he's been using confidential sources or even just sources who don't want to cross an ocean and take part in a courtroom battle.)

The legal costs are chump change for the billionaire, while few nonfiction writers command similar resources. If the writer chooses not to spend months living in a hotel and fighting it out in court, the case will be forfeited and he will be hit with a "default judgment." If he doesn't pay, he'll never again be able to set foot in the U.K. and other countries that enforce British court judgments.

But more important is this: The message gets sent, loud and clear, to journalists, scholars and publishers, that researching and writing about terrorists and those who enable them is verboten -- even in America.

May writes that Congressmen Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) are behind the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, which would allow Americans sucked into one of these bullshit cases a "federal cause of action to sue back" -- and to recover legal fees and damages if a U.S court decides the foreign suit was a specious scheme to squash First Amendment rights.

The problems, as May sees them:

First, although there is bipartisan support for this approach, not enough backers -- so far at least -- are from the majority party: Of ten sponsors on the House side, only one is a Democrat. Second, we're deep into the presidential campaign season, a time when very little moves on Capitol Hill. Third, never underestimate the ability of the Saudis, their lobbyists, their allies and their courtiers, to kill that which interferes with their interests.

Write your senator here.

Write your congressperson.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Sadly, On The Taxpayer Dime
Last night I got a few comments on my website that pretty obviously were from the self-described "progressives" I call the Sadly Pathetics, who decided to attack my website with spam and a flurry of nonsense comments after I spoke out in a way unapproved by "progressives."

Last night, one of these tiny little thugs left a comment on my entry Barkleying Up The Wrong Tree...that traced back to...a government IP address! The NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States Department of Commerce.

So...get this...the commenter is apparently trying to punish me for my free speech...on the government dime. Wait...I pay for the government with my tax dollars! On my dime!

Here's a screenshot of that comment:

Here's a comment from the Sadly Pathetic site from somebody who calls himself dailey:


Well, kitten, you're about to find out. I did me a little lookie-see on the Internets, and came up with this:

And this:

And then, from the staff search at the NOAA, this:

In case that's too small for you to read, it's:

Dailey, Kevin Andrew
301-817-4197
kevin.dailey@noaa.gov
NESDIS
Control Branch
Physical Science Technician

In between digging this stuff up, I dropped an e-mail to one of the media dudes at the NOAA, Scott Smullen, the deputy director in their Office of Communications:

Dear Scott, I've recently had my website attacked by a bunch of commenters from a site called SadlyNo -- SadlyNo.com -- who go after people they believe to be conservatives who speak freely, and who have a viewpoint different from these so-called "progressives."

I continued with the IP address and other details.

...

Meanwhile, as long as I had Kevin's number, hell, why not call it?!

It was the wee hours of the morning, but something told me he was on the job. And, whaddya know, I was right.

His colleague answered the phone and ran to get him. Kevin got on the line, all gulpy, and pretended he didn't know what I was talking about. He insisted it wasn't him. I read back his personal e-mail address, and said, so, then, he was telling me somebody was posting from this government IP, using his e-mail address...etc, etc.?

Not surprisingly, the chickenshit hung up on me.

As you can imagine, that dissuaded me!

I called back. Click.

I called back again. He got on the phone and said, in a hard whisper, I couldn't be calling him -- he worked for THE GOVERNMENT!

Yeah, no kidding...on my dime.

Meanwhile, he's still pretending he doesn't know what I'm taking about. We go through this bullshit for a while. He knows I've got him and I know I've got him, and he's going to have to admit it.

We do a little dance for a while to get to that point. I read him the comment, per his request. Hilarious. I figure he's buying time, trying to figure a way out of this.

And then I say, "And you post on Sadly No, of course. And you posted this on my site, from the government IP where you are right now." The bullshit about it not being him continues for a while more. It's really late -- maybe 3 a.m.-ish. I need to go to bed. I tell him he'd better start talking. Finally, he realizes further resistance is futile.

So...Kevin Andrew Dailey, whose salary is paid for by you and me while he's posting on my site...Kevin Andrew Dailey, who posted the above "tranny" comment on my site, per the marching orders published at Sadly Pathetic -- "Hey, kids, let's go poke Albert "Amy" Alkon with a stick and have some fun, mkay?" -- explains with the following steaming load.

"The pictures I saw from the Sadly No website made me think I didn't know if you were a male or a female."

"Which picture is it that made you think that?" I ask.

The loser still doesn't man up. "I don't know," he says.

"Why would you be interested in such a thing?," I ask him.

"I don't know," he says again.

"You're not just trying to harass me, are you?" I say, "When you're posting, 'Are you a tranny?' you think this is appropriate, from a government website, from your government job, and post this on my site."

I continue. "Now these people have said on that site, they said, 'Go over there and bother her.'"

Not surprisingly, the tiny little thug doesn't have the balls to own up that he posted to try to punish me for speaking in a manner unapproved by the tiny little mob of "progressives."

No, instead, he keep pretending that he has serious reason to believe I'm transgendered! As if this is a serious concern by anyone.

I press him to tell me which picture. He says he doesn't remember, and then he says, "It was a facial picture."

I squeeze him further. He professes not to know which one. (Meanwhile, there were four. I've collected them here -- see for yourself if you think he's telling the truth.)

He admits to posting on Sadly Pathetic.

I ask him if he seriously thinks I'm transgendered.

"No I don't," he says. "That's why I asked."

Oh, please. Pussyman keeps stonewalling, so I shift my line of questioning, ask him what he does.

Get this, he says he's a satellite controller!

So, I say, "You're supposed to be controlling satellites, but instead you're posting on my site, am I a tranny?"

I say it again, so I can be sure it sinks in: "I'm paying you...out of my tax dollars, and you're posting on my site, am I a tranny?"

"I was curious," he says. Right.

"Do you walk up to women in the supermarket and ask them if they're trannies?" I ask him.

He says he doesn't.

"Then why would you do it online?" I ask.

"Because it's different."

"Ohhhh!" I say, "So I'm not really a person. Do you think maybe it would hurt a woman's feelings if you ask her if she's really a man?"

"If I did, I am sorry," he says. "It wasn't my intention."

"What was your intention?" I ask.

"I was curious," he says.

"You were curious. You're curious on your government time," I say. "Why was it important to you to know if I was a tranny."

"It wasn't important," he says.

"You do things all the time that are totally unimportant, right?" I ask. "So...you wouldn't go up to a woman in public and ask her if she's a tranny, but I'm such a non-person, because of what, because that's what the Sadly Nos made me out to be, because I spoke in a way they didn't like?"

He's just hummina-hummina at this point, so I say this: "I suggest you write me a little explanation about what you've done. And e-mail it out of your personal e-mail address."

He said he'd be there for another hour.

I told him not to e-mail me on the taxpayer dime, to do it when he got home. I gave him my e-mail address, and ordered him, "You send that to me right away. I want it when I wake up!"

It's 4:25 a.m., I have yet to receive Kevin Andrew Pussyman's e-mail, and I'm going to bed. In between trying to expose Bank of America and tracking down tiny little thugs using their taxpayer funded work time to try to punish people for speech unapproved by the "progressives," I actually have a book to write.

But first, let's review: We've got these "progressives" who have decided I'm racist, ignoring all the facts presented to them to the contrary, simply because I don't speak the approved progressive-speak.

Most amazingly, they've decided to try to denigrate me by calling me a male-to-female transsexual. For the record, I don't think ill of transsexuals -- calling me one is simply incorrect.

But, I recognize their intent in calling me this. And it's especially amazing coming from this group. I mean, of all the people in the world who have it hard, people who are born one sex and feel strongly that they are another, are right around the top of the list. But, never mind that, perfect weapon for the "progressives."

Oh, and one last thing:

Hey, Dailey, you fucked with the wrong "tranny," huh?

A hint for the future: Never go after a woman who has bigger balls than you do, even if they are only metaphorical.

UPDATE:

It's 5 a.m., Pacific Time. Kevin just e-mailed me. His effort is, well, sadly pathetic. See for yourself:

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Running Late
Hilariously, if a Libertarian Party press release is correct, there will be only one candidate on the Texas ballot, and it won't be a Democrat or a Republican. I got this e-mail on Wednesday from Andrew Davis, from the Libertarian Party:

Barr Only Presidential Candidate on Texas Ballot

Republicans, Democrats miss deadline to file presidential candidates in Texas

Atlanta, GA - Bob Barr is slated to be the only presidential candidate on the ballot in Texas after Republicans and Democrats missed the Aug. 26 deadline to file in the state.

"Unless the state of Texas violates their own election laws, Congressman Barr will be the only presidential candidate on the ballot," says Russell Verney, campaign manager for the Barr Campaign and the former campaign manager for Ross Perot. "Texas law makes no exceptions for missing deadlines."

The Texas Secretary of State Web site shows only Bob Barr as the official candidate for president in Texas.

"We know all about deadlines," says Verney. "We are up against them constantly in our fight to get on the ballot across the nation. When we miss deadlines, we get no second chances. This is a great example of how unreasonable deadlines chill democracy."

"Republicans and Democrats make certain that third party candidates are held to ballot access laws, no matter how absurd or unreasonable," says Verney. "Therefore, Republicans and Democrats should be held to the same standards."

Andrew Davis then sent me this:

The state law that would make such a filing an impossibility is Texas Election Code Section 192.031, which says the following:

§ 192.031. PARTY CANDIDATE'S ENTITLEMENT TO PLACE ON BALLOT. A political party is entitled to have the names of its nominees for president and vice-president of the United States placed on the ballot in a presidential general election if: (1) the nominees possess the qualifications for those offices prescribed by federal law; (2) before 5 p.m. of the 70th day before presidential election day, the party's state chair signs and delivers to the secretary of state a written certification of: (A) the names of the party's nominees for president and vice-president; and

Essentially, if the parties have not nominated a candidate, then it is impossible to submit a filing with the nominees name.

But, wait...then there's this, on a page for Dems and Republicans on the Texas Secretary of State's office:

If you receive a majority of the votes cast in the primary election or receive the most votes in a primary runoff election, if applicable, your name will appear on the general election ballot in November.

I sent that to Andrew with this remark:

So...unless I'm dim or something, doesn't it seem the Dem and Republican will be on the ballot automatically?

And he wrote back:

I believe that means that you do not have to qualify for party status like minor parties do, but you still must file for office. For that, the applicable election code would be section 192.031.

It's all very confusing. I've written to an expert in the area but have yet to hear back. Any legal beagles around who can clarify this?

Richard Winger, of ballot-access.org, had this to say in clarification when I wrote him and asked about this:

No state's presidential primary determines who the presidential and vice-presidential candidates will be. After all, different candidates win the primaries in different states. In 2008, in the Texas presidential primary, Hillary Clinton got the most votes, 1,459,814 to only 1,358,785 for Obama (by Obama won the Texas caucuses). Also, of course, a presidential primary doesn't settle who the v-p nominee is.

The Texas law is very clear. It is 192.031 and says, "A political party is entitled to have the names of its nominees for president and vice-president placed on the ballot if before 5 pm of the 70th day before presidential election day, the party's state chair signs and delivers to the secretary of state a written certification of the names of the party's nominees for president and vice-president."

The Republican National Committee went to a great deal of trouble to get laws like this in the various states amended, during 2003 and 2004 (because the party's 2004 convention was to end on September 1, the latest major party presidential convention in U.S. history at that time). Then the Republican National Committee had to do more work like that in 2007, because the party chose an even later National Convention for 2008! In other words, they had to re-do some of the lobbying they had done in 2003, because the new laws they had passed still didn't provide for late-enough deadlines. Caroline Hunter was the attorney for the Republican National Committee who supervised this work in 2003 and 2004. This year, she ended up on the Federal Election Commission. If you could reach her, you could ask her why the Republican National Committee didn't seem to notice what an odd thing the Texas legislature did in 2005. That 2005 bill, moving the deadline from 60 days before the November election to 70 days, was absolutely going in the wrong direction! And making this headache for the Republican Party.

In other words, if these state deadlines don't matter, why did the Republican national committee work so hard to get them eased?

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Barkleying Up The Wrong Tree
Last night at the Democratic convention, Charles Barkley, the basketball retired player, spoke to a CNN reporter and said Barack Obama will get elected if white people will vote for a black man.

Jacob Weisberg lays the black/white social guilt blackmail out on Slate -- the idea that if Obama doesn't win it means America is racist:

Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

Oh, please. I know there are white racists out there -- just like there are black racists out there who will only vote for Obama because he's a black man.

My problem with Obama isn't that he's a black man, or a half black man, if you're really counting, it's that he's a socialist!

Oh, and if you think it's just in the health care arena that he's going to make a mess of things, check this out.

An overall problem with Obama's popularity isn't that he's black, but that he's a rock star. As the WSJ put it in an editorial:

Mr. Obama's descent from his Icarusian heights earlier this spring reflects a shift in this race that has nothing to do with race. A skin-deep Obamamania had energized the country. Now that's giving way to serious consideration of credentials and policy substance. After all, voters are choosing the world's most powerful man. Mr. McCain has been drawing contrasts with his younger rival to close the gap in the polls. We'll see if the trend continues.

As a matter of sober fact, many Americans look at the junior Senator from Illinois and worry, as his Democratic Vice Presidential candidate pointed out last year, that he isn't "ready" for the job. Does this mean that anyone who agrees with Joe Biden's previous assessment is a racist? Do Democrats really think so little of their fellow Americans?

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Biden Didn't Just Steal Kinnock's Words
He stole Kinnock's life. Jack Shafer, on Slate, shows why Biden's plagiarism was particularly creepy:

Biden didn't merely borrow words and phrasings from Kinnock, which is a time-honored practice of candidates and their speechwriters and is almost never regarded as plagiarism. He became Kinnock, as David Greenberg writes today, claiming things about himself and his family that were untrue and that he knew to be untrue.

In his closing remarks at an Aug. 23, 1987, debate at the Iowa State Fair*, Biden said:

I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?

Biden then gestured to his wife and continued:

Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?

Kinnock had said:

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

Pointing to his wife, Kinnock said:

Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?

...Reporters confirmed that Biden had repeatedly cited Kinnock as the source before abducting the Kinnock persona at the state fair. That didn't make the abduction any less egregious, though. Or any less weird. For instance, Biden wasn't the first in his family to attend college, as he claimed, conceding to E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Sept. 18, 1987, Times that ''there are Finnegans, my mother's family, that went to college.''

Biden had similarly echoed Kinnock by saying that his "ancestors ... worked the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours." He could produce no such ancestors upon request. The Times' Dowd also found Biden lifting Kinnock's "gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact," proof of his intimacy with the source material.

The only practical explanation for Biden's plagiarism is he guessed that being Kinnock on the stump would be more compelling for his audience than merely citing him. And he was probably right.

David Greenberg, also on Slate, had this, too:

Unfortunately for Biden, more revelations of plagiarism followed, distracting him from the Bork hearings. Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. (In one account, Biden said that Pat Caddell had inserted them in his speech without Biden's knowledge; in another account, the failure to credit RFK was chalked up to the hasty cutting and pasting that went into the speech.) From Humphrey, the hot passage was a particularly affecting appeal for government to help the neediest. Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.

If that wasn't bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article in a term paper that he submitted. He admitted as well that he had falsely stated that British Labor official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape. (Healey had denied the claim.) And Biden conceded that he had exaggerated in another matter by stating in a speech some years earlier that he had joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters, and was thus actively involved in the civil rights movement. He protested, his press secretary clarified, "to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater." The latter two of these fibs were small potatoes by any reckoning, but in the context of other acts of dishonesty, they helped to form a bigger picture.

...The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates an unseemly air of hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race was the right thing to do.

Twenty-one years on, how much should Biden's past behavior matter? In and of itself, the plagiarism episode shouldn't automatically disqualify Biden from regaining favor and credibility, especially if in the intervening two decades he's not done more of the same, as seems to be the case. But no one has looked into it. The press should give his record since 1988 a thorough vetting. It's worth knowing whether the odds-on favorite to be our next vice president has truly reformed himself of behavior that can often be the mark of a deeply troubled soul.

Deeply troubled? I think that's a bit dramatic. I think he's just another sleaze who did whatever he thought he could get away with to get elected. You?

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The Self-Help President
I've marveled at how utterly non-threatening the guy is who's running as the Democratic candidate to be the leader of the free world. I think that's a substantial part of his appeal to younger voters: He doesn't quite seem like a grownup. He's not a businessman (not the way you'd see your dad or grandpa as a businessman). He's this boyish, sensitive man with a wife who seems to be much more man than he.

Gregg, by the way, noticed that when the two of them were on stage the other night, and they were going to greet the audience, Michelle Obama strode ahead of him like a power-walker instead of taking his arm and going along to support him. Verrrry interesting!

And there's a very interesting piece on the "post-masculine" Obama on City Journal and in The Wall Street Journal by Michael Knox Beran, headlined "Barack Obama, Shaman." An excerpt:

Mr. Obama's charisma is tuned to the mood of the moment. The charisma of American political leaders has typically rested on images of unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt in the North Dakota Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his Secret Service code name ("Lancer"); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret Service called "Rawhide." Mr. Obama's charisma, by contrast, is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today's television talk-show culture, in which admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Ms. Paglia writes in "Sexual Personae," to appear an "androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother."

Mr. Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the 1930s. Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: "Everybody who's dealt with him," columnist David Brooks says, "has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them." His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Mr. Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

With the triumph of Mr. Obama's post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the empathetic mommy-state that Balzac prophesied in "La Comédie humaine." The leader of the future, Balzac foresaw, would be a man who, like his diabolically charismatic Jacques Collin, possesses a capacity for maternal love. When his protégé Lucien dies, Collin exclaims: "This blow has been more than death to me, but you can't understand what I'm saying. . . . If you're fathers, you're only that and no more. . . . I'm a mother, too!" Collin ends his career as a functionary of the state--and a policeman. The Grand Inquisitor of the future, Balzac intimates, will undertake his inquisitions in the name of matriarchal pity.

Yet if Mr. Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Mr. Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders' adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as "ideological minorities" to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Mr. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those "absolutists" who would defy the community. The "ideological core of today's GOP," he writes, is "absolutism, not conservatism," an absolutism driven by those who prize "absolute truth" over "communal values." This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives.

Mr. Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is "a rejection of absolute truth." His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West's traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man's fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic--an instance of utopian overreaching.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

I Used To Buy My Illicit Drugs At An Office Supply Store
Printer toner is one of the bigger scams around. The stuff probably comes close to the cost of an equivalent supply of coke. Well, okay, it's ridiculously expensive. Hence the reason, if you print in any volume whatsover, you should probably Google the words toner, override, cheap, and perhaps lying bastards, per a piece on Slate by Farhad Manjoo:

I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints--until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner--or was my printer lying to me?

To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Brother isn't the only company whose printers quit while they've still got life in them. Because the industry operates on a classic razor-and-blades business model--the printer itself isn't pricy, but ink and toner refills cost an exorbitant amount--printer manufacturers have a huge incentive to get you to replace your cartridges quickly. One way they do so is through technology: Rather than printing ever-fainter pages, many brands of printers--like my Brother--are outfitted with sensors or software that try to predict when they'll run out of ink. Often, though, the printer's guess is off; all over the Web, people report that their printers die before their time.

I take a different approach. First of all, I should mention that I have a laser printer -- the most economical printer for anybody who prints more than a few pages a year. Let's just say I'm a heavy user, as I edit my writing best on the printed page.

I have an hp Laserjet 1300, and old workhorse laser that used to be Gregg's. It's a fantastic printer, both because it's been enormously reliable, and I put it through quite the workout, and because I've figured out how to make it enormously economical.

I could buy toner for my printer at Staples, the hp Q2613X high-capacity cartridge. Last I checked, it was $92. Now, I'm a girl who buys shirts at Goodwill for $5. Do you really think I'm going to just flip out a $100 bill for toner without a second thought?

Nuh-uh.

Helloooo, eBay!

It's become a sort of a game for me, to see exactly how cheap I can get my toner. I started out around $26 a cartridge, with maybe $10-$15 for shipping. Last I bought toner, I got it by volume -- five cartridges for $13 each, plus a few more shekels for shipping.

Sure, it's off-brand, and printer companies go on and on about how this will void your warranty, etc. Really? This printer is older than I am, and running about as well.

Meanwhile, printer ink is just one of the many things I buy on eBay. Unfortunately, though, I've gotten a weird message a couple times recently, thanks, of course, to my commie friends, the French.

When I went to buy some essential stuff for my hair ($16 on eBay vs. $22 on Amazon), and previously when I went to buy some Clinique eye cream, I got this message:

Dear User:

Unfortunately, access to this particular listing or item has been blocked due to a Paris commercial court decision that bans trade of certain authentic perfumes and cosmetic products on eBay because of French selective distribution laws. eBay is appealing this ruling but is nevertheless required to enforce it. We are blocking your viewing in an effort to comply with this court decision. Regrettably, in some cases, we may prevent users from accessing items that are not within the scope of the decision because of limitations on existing technology.

Grrrr. As my Paris-dwelling expat friend Mark says, the French are best at "the three 'F's" -- Food, Fashion, and Fucking" (up free enterprise, I might add).

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Economist Fran Lebowitz
That word has probably never been associated with her name. But, via brainyquotes, she has a wise appraisal of the lottery:

"I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not."

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Ever Heard Of Community College?
A kid named Zoe Mendelson writes in the LA Times that she's going to Barnard on a full scholarship -- because her parents, most puzzlingly, have "virtually no income":

I live with my mom, who is a full-time student; my dad teaches part time. Although I'd like to think my scholarship is merit-based, were my parents more comfortably middle class, I would not have been so fortunate. And without a scholarship, there's no way I could afford a school such as Barnard.

The situation is more complicated for my friend E.G., who will be a freshman at his first-choice school this fall, Johns Hopkins University. He was at my house when his dad text-messaged me, asking that I pass along that his ACT score had come -- 34 out of a perfect 36. Last year, he competed in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a project in which he figured out how to extract a chemical from sassafras root that treats parasites in beehives and could prevent colony collapse disorder.

His parents met in South Korea, where his father was based during his U.S. military service. E.G.'s mom is an overnight supervisor for Kmart, and his dad is a civil engineer working with flood relief/recovery operations in the Air National Guard. This is information that he has volunteered to me proudly.

E.G. got some scholarship money, but he is having trouble coming up with his share of the costs for one year -- $30,875 -- because, as his dad put it, his family is "in the nether region." Their household income is too much to qualify for substantial financial aid but not enough to pay that amount. In other words, being middle class makes it nearly impossible to afford the college of your choice, even if you get in.

Oh, boohoo, he might have to go to UCLA and live at home to save money. The horror! The horror! Mendelson continues:

Sure, E.G. could accept one of his more lucrative scholarship offers at another school. But E.G. wants the best, and suggesting that all brilliant middle-class kids should just go to the schools they can afford undermines the meritocracy that we claim as a nation. Those worthy of the best are not the richest or the poorest but the brightest.

There are loads and loads of kids who are "the best." Some of them even go to Santa Monica college the first two years to save money. Here's the fee list at SMC:

Fall 2008 Semester: $20.00 per unit enrollment fee (Subject to Change); plus $32.00 Student Services (includes, $14.00 Health fee; $13.00 I.D. card; $19.00 Associated Student fee). Non Resident tuition is $195.00 for F1 students, and $164.00 for domestic non-residents. A parking decal for the main campus costs $85.

Perhaps Zoe's family would've had more money to send her to school if they hadn't sent her to China -- or did somebody else fund that, too?

Meanwhile, what about the hardworking middle-class parents who don't have tales of woe? Oh...I guess they send their kids to college the old-fashioned way: they pay for it.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Not Biden The Hand That Feeds You
From a Jonathan Chait piece from 2005, posted on Common Dreams, Biden stands firmly on the side of the people -- the people making the hugest campaign contributions, that is:

Biden supports a bill in Congress that would make it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. This is one of those abysmal pieces of legislation that exists only because businesses with a vested interest in it have lobbied hard for its passage and that would have no chance of success if more than a tiny fraction of the public were aware of its existence.

Bankruptcy filings have risen slightly in recent years. Credit card companies argue that it's because people are gaming the system, going on irresponsible spending binges and then using bankruptcy to stick their creditors with the bill.

The more likely explanation is that the rise in health insurance costs has driven more people into bankruptcy. A recent Harvard study found that half of Americans who declared bankruptcy did so because of illness or medical bills. Regardless of why you go bankrupt, though, the new bill would make it easier for creditors to seize your assets. Nice, huh?

This isn't to say there aren't abuses in the bankruptcy system. There are. The bill simply does nothing to stop them.

The worst abuses are loopholes allowing corporations or wealthy individuals to declare bankruptcy and keep millions of dollars safe from creditors. One such device is something called an "asset protection trust" -- a kind of savings fund that can't be touched by creditors. States actually compete with one another to offer the most generous trusts so they can lure businesses and affluent individuals to park their money in that state.

The most popular state for such trusts is corporate-friendly Delaware.

Delaware, of course, is home to Joe Biden. It's also home to many credit card companies, the driving force behind the bankruptcy bill. You don't have to connect a lot of dots to see the picture here.

No, you don't. If you're going to make it harder for people to declare bankruptcy, make it harder for all people.

I'm especially touched by Biden's vote for corporate welfare. When corporations go boom, it's the shareholders who suffer -- in a lot of cases, Joe Nobody taxpayers like you and me.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Newsflash: Few Illegal Aliens Are Mentally Retarded
The dumbshits at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spent our money to set up a program for illegal aliens to turn themselves in to be deported. From the Charlotte Observer, Franco Ordoñez reports:

Only one illegal immigrant in Charlotte volunteered for a pilot deportation program urging illegal immigrant fugitives to turn themselves in, federal officials said Friday.

The federal government ended the controversial program, known as Operation Scheduled Departure, after the three-week pilot produced just eight volunteers nationwide.

"I think we learned that the most effective means to restore integrity to the nation's immigration system is the enforcement of immigration laws," said Jim Hayes, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and removal operations.

Two words: Um, duh!

The other morning, I heard on the radio, on KFI's Handel on the Law, I think, that only eight people, total, had turned themselves in! Way to spend my tax dollars, asshats!

The kind of public officials I want? The kind who spend my money like it's coming out of their pocket. Yeah, I know, put away the meth pipe and get to work already.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Susan Carpenter's Been Saving This One!
It seems Carpenter's been waiting to use this tired old crack since junior high school. Todd Everett caught it -- in Carpenter's LA Times review of Sandra Tsing Loh's very funny new book, Mother On Fire. Carpenter writes, for no particular reason whatsoever:

Loh is a cunning linguist who's honed her craft over 20 years, and it shows.

Todd Everett writes:

I don't know which is more egregious: that the gag's so old, so tasteless on a middle school boys' room level, or that is was told by a woman and passed by copy editors in a "family" newspaper. In any event, please, Times editors: back to the motorcycle reviewing for Ms. Carpenter! And apologies, of course, if Ms. Loh is, in fact, lesbian.

And no, Sandra is not a lesbian, and mentions her husband in the book with great frequency. The use of "cunning linguist" is not only unfunny, but completely weird and rather pathetic.

In fact, it's so dumb and pathetic, I wondered if there's somebody at the paper who has a grudge against Carpenter -- or whether, with all the copy editors they've drop-kicked, there was nobody around when the story went to press to prevent her from just being herself.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Meet The Vice-Plagiarist
Maybe it isn't a big deal to a lot of people, but for me, stealing the words somebody's sweated onto the page is akin to stealing somebody's TV, but without all the heavy lifting.

From famousplagiarists.com:

Joe Biden's history of plagiarism and "stressless scholarship" gave plenty of ammo to his enemies, one of them choosing to circulate a so-called "attack video" to demonstrate Biden's outright plagiarism of a British politician's speech. But this appropriation from Neal Kinnock was not the first occurrence of unacknowledged lifting by the senator from Delaware.

In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper. Such "stressless scholarship" as it is euphemistically called has become all too common in the modern Internet era with countless cheatsites and "research services" offering to sell students papers on topics from A to Z.

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We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Butt
Meet the ass bra.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Welfare Queens
Guess who's next! The car companies, of course, speculates The Wall Street Journal:

Earlier this month, the Detroit Free Press reported that the top dogs at Ford, GM and Chrysler had a meeting of the minds and decided that the way out of their current losing streak would be to ask the feds for a lifeline. They figure they'll need $40 billion or so to ride out their current troubles until they reach the promised land of hybrids, the Chevy Volt, and, who knows, maybe even profits.

...The plan is for the government to lend some $25 billion to auto makers in the first year at an interest rate of 4.5%, or about one-third what they're currently paying to borrow. What's more, the government would have the option of deferring any payment at all for up to five years. Meanwhile, Barack Obama recently signaled that he's open to federal money to help the auto makers invest in "renewable" technology, and Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and Mr. Dingell are supporting the $25 billion in loans to the not-so-Big Three as part of a second-round economic "stimulus."

Detroit's political calculation is plain: Having seen the way Washington has bowed to rescue the mortgage industry and Wall Street, why shouldn't auto makers give it a try? Michigan is up for grabs in the election, so now is the time to strike with a goal of getting the Bush Administration and both Presidential candidates to agree.

The car makers can also claim with justification to have been hurt as badly as anyone by Washington's policy blunders. The weak dollar has contributed to the spike in oil prices that has socked their most profitable vehicles. And the nonsensical way that fuel-economy standards force Detroit to subsidize cars that consumers won't buy has helped put the Big Three in this hole.

Then again, the car makers saddled themselves with a cost structure in flush times that has proved unsustainable as their market share has eroded. They have made great strides of late in shedding legacy pension and health-care costs, but they took decades to do so. The fact that GM's lending arm, now 51% owned by the owners of Chrysler, dipped its toes in mortgage lending hasn't helped either.

There also happens to be a thriving U.S. auto industry outside of Michigan. These plants are owned by foreign companies, but they employ 92,000 Americans and build and sell cars here. Tens of thousands of their shareholders are Americans. Would these companies and plants get equal consideration under any bailout plan? And if Toyota and Honda get help, why not Delphi and other auto suppliers? We're told the low-interest loan proposal would give priority to the "oldest" plants -- which is another way of saying those plants organized by the United Auto Workers.

Somebody should've started investing in "renewable technology" in the 70s, during the first oil crisis. But, I suspect carmakers know, deep down, that the Feds will always be around to bail them out. I only wish I had the same sort of leeway.

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They'll Huff And They'll Puff

Rumor has it, this is the guest house on one of McCain's properties

First, let me make something clear: I am no fan of either candidate; in McCain's case, because I read Matt Welch's excellent book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

Then we have Obama, who, among other things, thinks nukes are mean, and we really should do away with them, and he'll work to see that all the nutbags around the globe promise to do away with them, too. More on that here. A friend commented to me about Obama's nuclear policy, "He sounds like the Miss America contestants who want 'a really good diet pill and world peace.'"

Meanwhile, Obama's after McCain for not knowing how many houses he owns. You know, these presidential candidates are very rich guys: Both of them. All of them: George Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerrey, to name the last few. And McCain is married to a woman who has buttloads of money.

If you have buttloads of money, and you are a U.S. senator, there are people who handle your finances. I mean, why shouldn't there be? Do we really want U.S. senators -- especially who have buttloads of money and can pay a small army of accountants -- to be home at the dinner table doing their own taxes and tallying up the number of guest houses on every property and checking the list twice?

I really don't care whether McCain owns four houses or an entire subdivision, and I get sick of these "issues" that are taking the place of issues (whoops -- "Sadly Pathetic," if you know what I mean). And, it's not like we have any shortage of real problems in this country.

Not surprisingly, the accusation from the Obama camp: that McCain is out of touch with the ordinary person. Excuse me, but Obama made $4.2 million last year. How hard of a time do you think he and his wife have balancing the household budget?

Meanwhile, I, an ordinary person (financially, at least), splurged on a $62 used dress at a resale store called Wasteland. Splurged. It was bright orange, and I'd just written for nine hours straight, so there you have it. I promise: I'll repent tomorrow -- by wearing my new dress.

You've got to love the Obama quote, from an Anne E. Kornblut story in the WaPo:

"If you don't know how many houses you have, then it's not surprising that you might think the economy is fundamentally strong," he said. "But if you're like me, and you got one house, or you are like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don't lose their home, then you might have a different perspective."

I'd love to be in touch with the the common man the way Obama is, owning even one house (I rent) and with $4.2 million in the bank, just from last year. Why, he's a regular gas station attendant. Oh, wait...maybe we don't have those much anymore these days, thanks to pumps that take debit and credit cards. But, please take note: I'm not out of touch because I own too many houses, but because I drive a hybrid and rarely get gas.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The Binge-Drinking Age
College presidents are coming out and campaigning against the 21-year-old drinking age, writes John Hechinger in the WSJ:

More than 100 college presidents, including leaders at Dartmouth, Duke and Middlebury, have joined the month-old Amethyst Initiative, which argues that "the 21-year-old drinking age is not working" and "has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking."

John McCardell, a history professor and former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, is leading the effort. His group, Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit unaffiliated with the college, has received financial backing from money manger Julian Robertson. Mr. McCardell says he receives no money from the alcohol industry.

He argues current laws drive drinking underground, causing more problems than they solve. "The law is out of step with reality," he says. "The law is so obviously unjust and discriminatory. It ought to at least be the subject of debate."

But he and the college presidents are taking on powerful constituencies, including some of their colleagues, the top government traffic-safety agency, the insurance industry and public-health authorities, all of which say the higher drinking age saves lives. Even representatives of the alcohol industry say they support current laws.

Laura Dean-Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, says she is alarmed by the initiative. The mother of a 17-year-old high-school senior, she says she wouldn't want her child to go to a school whose presidents had signed the statement, saying it sent the message, "It's OK to drink underage."

This is because she is a fundamentalist, not a thinker.

"There is a better way," John Cloud writes in Time:

At first it sounds a little nutty, but you might consider drinking with your kids. Incongruously, the way to produce fewer problem drinkers is to create more drinkers overall--that is, to begin to create a culture in which alcohol is not an alluring risk but part of quotidian family life. Of course, that's a mostly European approach to alcohol, but there's reason to think it could work here. And it may be the best way to solve the binge-drinking problem.

...But as psychologist Stanton Peele writes in his 2007 book Addiction-Proof Your Child (one of his 10 books on addiction), "When alcohol is presented as impossibly dangerous, it becomes alluring as a 'forbidden fruit' ... The choice between abstinence and excess is not a good one to force on children."

By the early part of the current decade, alcohol officials had noticed the numbers on binge-drinking, and they embarked on a new kind of prohibitionist strategy to discourage it: the "social host" law, the most sweeping change in American alcohol-enforcement since Prohibition. Social-host laws make residents over 21 responsible for any underage drinking that occurs at their home. The laws vary, but those who break them can be fined, forced to pay for police costs that result from underage drinking or even jailed. Twenty-four states and more than 100 local jurisdictions have passed such laws, the majority of them in the past five years. Many of the laws make no allowance even for parents to drink with their own kids; of the 55 social-host laws passed by California jurisdictions, for instance, only 25 make exceptions for parents.

That matters because there's evidence that drinking with your kids--not buying them alcohol for a party but actually drinking with them at home--is a good way to teach responsible drinking behavior.

Interestingly, check out the deal on those studies on alcohol's effect on developing brains. Also from the Time story:

It is accepted as an article of faith in the prevention community that "the teen brain" should not be exposed to any alcohol. But the research on alcohol and the young brain is actually quite murky. It has mainly shown that very high doses of alcohol given to adolescent rats (those roughly 40 days old) affect those animals differently from the way alcohol affects adult rats. In typical studies, the rats are injected with 5 g of alcohol per 1,000 g of their body weight, often after the rodents have been deprived of food for 12 hours. Rats metabolize alcohol about 10 times as fast as humans, but in a typical rat, this 5 g/kg dose on an empty stomach still results in a monumentally high blood-alcohol concentration. "It's difficult to compare to humans, but it's about a case of beer," says Aaron White, an alcohol researcher at the Duke University Medical Center--that's a case of beer ingested all at once.

What these rat studies tell us is that exposure to very large amounts of alcohol (particularly repeated exposure) probably inhibits normal brain development. And yet there are signs that in certain ways the adolescent brain is better equipped to handle alcohol than the adult brain. Adolescent rats show less vulnerability than adult rats to alcohol's sedating effects (which is one reason kids can party so much longer than adults). Other studies have found that, as White writes, "adolescents may be less sensitive than adults to the effects of alcohol on motor coordination." None of this means you should let your kids get drunk with their friends. But there's little reason to think small amounts of alcohol consumed at family meals will be as harmful.

Because alcohol is harder to obtain now than in the '70s and '80s, more kids are delaying their first drink. But most people will drink before 21, and it's a reasonable goal for parents to be there when it happens. "What if a kid has never had alcohol and drinks for the first time at 21?" asks Peele, the author of Addiction-Proof Your Child. "If they haven't developed a capacity to regulate themselves with alcohol at all, you can be headed for trouble."

Stanton's book is here: Addiction Proof Your Child: A Realistic Approach to Preventing Drug, Alcohol, and Other Dependencies.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Child Labor
(American-style.)

My 7-year-old neighbor left this on my back step when he went in for dinner.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Wanna Get Death Threats? Say It's Wrong To Kill People In The Name Of Religion
The New York Times' Deborah Solomon interviews Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-Christian immigrant who grew up during the Lebanese civil war. Gabriel is now a vehement critic of Islam and author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It. Solomon asks Gabriel:

Are you concerned that your new book, "They Must Be Stopped," will feed animosity toward Muslims?
I do not think I am feeding animosity. I am bringing an issue to light. I disapprove of any religion that calls for the killing of other people. If Christianity called for that, I would condemn it.

What about all the moderate Muslims who represent our hope for the future? Why don't you write about them?
The moderate Muslims at this point are truly irrelevant. I grew up in the Paris of the Middle East, and because we refused to read the writing on the wall, we lost our country to Hezbollah and the radicals who are now controlling it.

In your new book, you write about the Muslim presence in America and bemoan the rise of Islamic day schools and jihad summer camp. Is there really such a thing?
Yes. Instead of taking lessons on swimming and gymnastics, the kids are listening to speakers give lectures titled "Preparation for Death" and "The Life in the Grave."

You also lament the public foot baths that have been installed at the University of Michigan and elsewhere to accommodate Muslim students.
I lived in the Middle East for the first 24 years of my life. Never once did I see any foot-washing basins in airports or public buildings. So why are they pushing them down the throats of Americans?

I can't get upset if people want to wash their feet before they pray. This is the way they are taking over the West. They are doing it culturally inch by inch. They don't need to fire one bullet. Look what is happening in Europe. Do we want to become like "Eurabia"?

But relatively few Muslims live in this country -- about three million, or 1 percent of the population, whereas Amsterdam, for instance, has been estimated to be as high as 24 percent Muslim. They started as guest workers in Europe; they grow at a much faster rate than any other religion.

...Are your parents still in Lebanon?
I became an orphan at the age of 23. Both my parents are buried in Israel, on Mount Zion, with Oskar Schindler.

Why did you bury them in Israel?
I wanted to honor my parents. After all, it is the Holy Land. And I wanted to ensure that both my children will know where my loyalty lies -- with Israel, because Israel for me represents democracy, respect and human rights, something that no other country in the Arabic world offers.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Now He's An Olympic Postal Carrier?
There's some silly brouhaha about Michael Phelps endorsing Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes instead of, say, Wheaties or having his picture put on the wrapper of one of those little inedible hockey pucks made of bran and, I guess, pulverized fiberboard. From the New York Daily News, Rich Shapiro writes:

Olympic legend Michael Phelps will appear on boxes of the Kellogg's brand sugar cereal, drawing sharp criticism from health experts worried about the message he'll be sending to children across America.

"I would not consider Frosted Flakes the food of an Olympian," said nutritionist Rebecca Solomon of Mount Sinai Medical Center.

"I would rather see him promoting Fiber One. I would rather see him promoting oatmeal. I would even rather see him promoting Cheerios."

The announcement yesterday that Phelps, 23, winner of a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, would grace Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes boxes instead of the traditional athlete's choice of Wheaties left many perplexed.

Frosted Flakes has three times the amount of sugar as Wheaties and 1/3rd the fiber.

This doesn't matter much to a virtuoso swimmer who consumes 12,000 calories a day.

Still, in a country where childhood obesity is an alarming issue, Phelps' iconic image sharing space with Tony the Tiger sends the wrong message, experts say.

No, parents allowing their kids to have whatever they want sends the wrong message. It was Phelps' job to win at the Olympics, which he did, not to deliver messages to people's children.

I mean, come on: Do children across America have cars, driver's licenses, credit cards, and wallets filled with grocery money? Do they drive to the grocery store and do the shopping?

Amazing concept here, parents should parent. This involves telling children what they can and cannot eat. When your child asks you to buy Frosted Flakes (or, rather, tells you to buy Frosted Flakes, depending on how far gone you are in the parent-as-feudal-serf to the children thing), simple answer: "No."

As opposed to: "Anything you say, master Cody!"

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Pebbles And Bamm-Bamm

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The Forgotten Wisdom Of Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Kay Hymowitz writes in City Journal of the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "both a descendant and a scholar of what he called 'the wild Irish slums,'" in her piece "The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies."

It was rejecting the findings of Moynihan's Department of Labor report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," that prompted what Hymowitz calls "a momentous--and, as time has shown, tragically wrong--decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty." Hymowitz starts out her piece with this:

1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

...More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They "shape their children's character and ability," he wrote. "By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child." What children learned in the "disorganized home[s]" of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a "stable home" for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan's analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to "shape their children's character and ability" in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan's conclusion: "a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure."

Not surprisingly, Moynihan's report was treated as racism in The Nation and in the NAACP's official publication. An activist named William Ryan, of CORE, accused Moynihan...

of "blaming the victim," a phrase that would become the title of his 1971 book and the fear-inducing censor of future plain speaking about the ghetto's decay.

That Ryan's phrase turned out to have more cultural staying power than anything in the Moynihan report is a tragic emblem of the course of the subsequent discussion about the ghetto family. For white liberals and the black establishment, poverty became a zero-sum game: either you believed, as they did, that there was a defect in the system, or you believed that there was a defect in the individual. It was as if critiquing the family meant that you supported inferior schools, even that you were a racist. Though "The Negro Family" had been a masterpiece of complex analysis that implied that individuals were intricately entwined in a variety of systems--familial, cultural, and economic--it gave birth to a hardened, either/or politics from which the country has barely recovered.

And what made it even worse? The man-blamers, of course! (And don't miss the bit at the link about the much-lauded Marian Wright Edelman.)

Feminists, similarly fixated on overturning the "oppressive ideal of the nuclear family," also welcomed this dubious scholarship. Convinced that marriage was the main arena of male privilege, feminists projected onto the struggling single mother an image of the "strong black woman" who had always had to work and who was "superior in terms of [her] ability to function healthily in the world," as Toni Morrison put it. The lucky black single mother could also enjoy more equal relationships with men than her miserably married white sisters.

If black pride made it hard to grapple with the increasingly separate and unequal family, feminism made it impossible. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality, or both. As for the poverty of single mothers, that was simply more proof of patriarchal oppression.

Sadly and strangely, as I've found out in this past week, the quickest way to be called a racist by a mob of thugs is to say anything the slightest bit critical of the problems in the black community, like the shockingly vast rate of fatherless homes.

The truth is, on a practical level, the worst thing you could do (and you could even say the racist thing to do) to that 70 percent of black children being born to single mothers is to shut up about how damaging it is.

Thanks, Dave From Hawaii!

UPDATE: The tiny little thugs posted some vast pieces of spam while I was at the bank. They have been deleted. Please refresh your browser and they should disappear. Other vast pieces of spam will be dealt with accordingly. Refresh, refresh! -Amy

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Am I Right Or Wrong?
I'm still parsing my recent experience where, in the wake of disagreeing with something I wrote, instead of merely disagreeing in a civilized way, as individuals, the "progressives" at a site I now refer to as Sadly Pathetic sent over the 7,000 dwarves to try to disrupt my blog.

These tiny little thugs posted numerous pieces of 30-page spam in nonsense characters, and spam with long, copied and recopied pieces about communism, referring to various blog commenters here. They posted numerous comments that said nothing, in some tired in-joke pseudonym lots of them use (I guess as a way of saying, "Hah! We peed on your tree!"), and then sent over people who either are the dimmest humans I've ever encountered who aren't in group homes, or who were trying to suck my time in hopes of making me re-explain what was explained plainly in the blog item above where they posted their utterly dim and contradictory assumptions.

And then, brilliantly, as their way of criticizing me for supposedly being racist (and read the post at the link -- I'm clearly not), they posted comments about how I have an ass so huge Christo couldn't cover it (which might be a hurtful remark if I didn't weigh what I weighed in high school as a skinny little redhead). And then there was lots of stuff about how I'm a male-to-female transsexual (intended to be derogatory, but which I simply see as a statement of untruth). Meanwhile, of all the people in the world who have it rough, people who are born one sex but feel they are truly another...the "progressives" are trying to use being transgendered as a weapon against me. Nice!

But, back to the whole right/left thing, as I posted at the link above:

The worst thing about this for me is learning how naive I've been in pooh-poohing right-wingers when they tell me how the real fascists are on the left. Again, I take people as individuals, but I've learned that there are a whole lot of people who call themselves "progressives" and "liberals" who see speech they disagree with not as a reason to speak out themselves, but as a reason to work very hard to intimidate the person who's spoken from speaking their mind again.

I just had an interesting exchange with Steve Miller in the comments (below the entry in the link above). Steve writes:

Yikes! This is why I don't blog.

It's intimidation, and it occurs in business, too. Raise a question about Obama at any business where the default position is lazy leftist, and immediately you are asked why you believe torture is OK. Because Obama is against torture, and McCain is for it.

I see fairly civil discussions on right-leaning sites between leftists and rightists.

What leftist site permits rightists to speak freely with civility in the answers? TPM? FireDogLake? Huffington Post? Daily Kos?

Posted by: steve miller at August 20, 2008 8:58 AM

I responded:

This is what I talked about last night in my French class (filled with leftists, and the only woman who is not a leftist was not there). They insisted, utterly without experience in the blog world, that there are "cons" (assholes) left and right. But, actually, my experience has been what yours is, steve miller, and I'm saddened by it.

Why do you think it is that right-wing people can think I'm an idiot and merely blog about it, or discuss it, and left-wing people take it to another level (and no, not all people). But I made it plain to right-wing friends that I voted for that sleazebag John Kerrey (I couldn't vote for the fundamentalist, anti-science George Bush), and before him Al Gore, and before him Bill Clinton. I'm sure they all think I'm terribly misguided for my votes, but they still speak to me.

Meanwhile, two left-wing friends stopped speaking to me when I voted for...that Lyndon LaRouche of California politics...Arnold Schwarzenegger!

Unbelievable.

Or...not, really.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at August 20, 2008 9:04 AM

UPDATE: The tiny little thugs posted some vast pieces of spam while I was at the bank. They have been deleted. Please refresh your browser and they should disappear. Other vast pieces of spam will be dealt with accordingly. Refresh, refresh! -Amy

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Why God Doesn't Answer Your Prayers
Easy. God is imaginary.

Absolutely fantastic site -- 50 simple proofs that god is imaginary: godisimaginary.com

Here's some stuff from the first one, Why God Doesn't Answer Your Prayers:

Proof #1 - Try praying

What would happen if we get down on our knees and pray to God in this way:

Dear God, almighty, all-powerful, all-loving creator of the universe, we pray to you to cure every case of cancer on this planet tonight. We pray in faith, knowing you will bless us as you describe in Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19 and James 5:15-16. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. We pray sincerely, knowing that when God answers this completely heartfelt, unselfish, non-materialistic prayer, it will glorify God and help millions of people in remarkable ways.

Will anything happen? No. Of course not.

This is very odd. Jesus makes specific promises in the Bible about how prayer is supposed to work. Jesus says in many different places that he and God will answer your prayers. And Christians believe Jesus -- according to this recent article, "54% of American adults believe the Bible is literally true." In some areas of the country the number goes as high as 75%.

If the Bible is literally true, then something is seriously amiss. Simply look at the facts. In Matthew 7:7 Jesus says:

Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

If "every one who asks receives", then if we ask for cancer to be cured, it should be cured. Right? If "our Father who is in heaven gives good things to those who ask him", then if we ask him to cure cancer, he should cure it. Right? And yet nothing happens.

Here, the rationalizations are explained:

A favorite Christian rationalization for why God does not answer our prayer to eliminate cancer is because "it would take away free will." The logic: If you pray and God answers your prayer, then God would have revealed himself to you, and you would know that God exists. That would take away your free will to believe in him. Of course, if this is true, then by default all of Jesus' statements about prayer in the Bible are false. It means that God cannot answer any prayer. Also, why is a God who must remain hidden like this incarnating himself and writing the Bible?

If Jesus is God, and if God is perfect, why aren't all of Jesus's verses about prayer true? Was Jesus exagerating? Was he fibbing? If Jesus is perfect, why wouldn't he speak the truth? Why doesn't a prayer to cure cancer worldwide tomorrow work?

Believers have many different ways to explain why all these verses in the Bible do not work, even if you are praying sincerely, unselfishly and non-materialistically, and even if the answer to your prayer would help millions of people and glorify God in the process. They will say things like this:

"You need to understand what Jesus was saying in the context the first century civilization in which he was speaking..."

or:

"When Jesus talked about 'moving a mountain', he was speaking metaphorically. When someone says, 'it is raining cats and dogs,' no one takes him literally. Jesus was using a figure of speech rather than speaking literally..."

or:

God is not a thing. He is a being. He has a will. He has desires. He relates to people. He has personality traits. Prayer is a fancy word for talking to God. God, who knows everything, even before we say it, knows the difference between our thoughts and wishes, and when we are actually addressing him. He hears our prayers and responds. His responses are based on his personal decisions. We cannot predict how he will respond to our prayers... [ref]

The problem is, all of these rationalizations miss two important points:

1. God is supposed to be an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect being.

2. The statement, "Nothing will be impossible for you", along with the other Bible verses quoted above, are false. The fact is, lots of things are impossible for you.

If a perfect being is going to make statements about how prayer works in the Bible, then three things are certain: 1) He would speak clearly, 2) he would say what he means, and 3) he would speak the truth. That is what "being perfect" is all about. A perfect, all-knowing God would know that people would be reading the Bible 2,000 years later, and therefore he would not use first-century idioms (he would say what he means). He would know that normal people will be reading the Bible and interpreting it in normal ways, so he would speak in such a way as to avoid mis-interpretation (he would speak clearly). He would know that when you say, "Nothing will be impossible for you", that what it means is, "Nothing will be impossible for you" and he would make sure that the statement "Nothing will be impossible for you" is accurate (he would speak the truth). If God says it, it should be true -- otherwise he is not perfect.

Unfortunately, the fact is that thousands of things are impossible for you no matter how much you pray, and no one (including Jesus) has ever moved a mountain.

In order to see the truth, you need to accept the fact that all of the above verses are wrong. The fact is, God does not answer prayers. The reason why God does not answer your prayers is simple: God is imaginary.

thanks, Raddy!

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Dress For Success!

Now hookers can shop at the mall!

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An Alternative To Medicines That Work
I'm always amazed when people tell me they're taking "Chinese herbs," and usually think to myself, "Why not just lick lead paint of a wall?" I mean, it's possible whatever the person's taking is useful for something; perhaps not for what they actually have. But do they have any idea what's actually in the little vial, and what it actually does or doesn't do? I'm guessing that they don't. But, for a lot of people, believing is enough.

In a book Scott Gottlieb reviews in the WSJ, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D., Singh and Ernst detail the results of hundreds of studies examining the purported benefit of altie medicine treatments:

Ginseng has been proposed as a cure-all for everything from cancer to common colds, but there's no evidence that it does any good. Shiatsu massage appears to be a "waste of effort and expense," the authors say. Many aspects of traditional Chinese medicine, like the use of the herbs aristolochia and liquorice, are potentially harmful. Aromatherapy can relieve stress, but there is not a lick of evidence that it can treat a specific illness. Chelation therapy -- a legitimate method of removing heavy metals such as lead or mercury from the body, but now pitched in alternative-medicine circles as a cure for heart disease and other ailments -- is "disproven, expensive, and dangerous," according to Mr. Singh and Dr. Ernst. They urge patients "not to use this treatment."

Some alternative remedies, it should be said, do appear to have value. There is evidence that St. John's Wort can help mild depression, although probably not as well as conventional antidepressants. Echinacea may be able to help relieve symptoms of the common cold, and perhaps reduce the length of illness, but so can many better understood conventional remedies that are sold over the counter. "It seems bizarre," the authors note, in light of the disappointing results, "that alternative treatments are touted as though they offer marvelous benefits."

...Together they conclude, after cataloging the evidence, that most of the popular forms of alternative medicine are "a throwback to the dark ages." Too many alternative practitioners, they say, are "uninterested in determining the safety and efficacy of their interventions."

And safety is a real concern. "Chiropractors who manipulate the neck can cause a stroke . . . some herbs can cause adverse reactions or can interfere with conventional drugs." The authors are particularly hard on homeopathy, the practice of using ultradilute solutions of common substances. The solutions are so dilute, though, that they are often little more than water. "Homeopathic remedies, which of course contain no active ingredient, can be dangerous if they delay or replace a more orthodox treatment," Mr. Singh and Dr. Ernst write, calling homeopathy "the worst therapy encountered so far -- it is an implausible therapy that has failed to prove itself after two centuries and some 200 clinical studies."

Orac, of Respecful Insolence, says it so well on his old blog:

Never forget that alternative medicine testimonials exist largely for one purpose: To sell a product. Most of them are advertisements They are no more "unbiased" than pharmaceutical advertisements. In fact, they are worse, because at least the pharmaceutical companies have to be able to back up their claims with science and disclose potential adverse reactions in their ads. No such requirements exist for most alternative medical treatments, mainly because most of them claim to be supplements rather than medicines. The other problem with testimonials is that they don't rise even to the lowest level of medical evidence, the anecdotal report. Anecdotal reports in medicine require a careful documentation of symptoms, lab tests, diagnoses, exact courses of treatment, and a patient's response to treatment. Testimonials almost never present these elements in sufficient detail to judge whether the treatment actually did anything. There's just no way of telling truth from exaggeration or fiction.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Dalrymple Again
Here we go again. It's a repeat of a familiar tragic tale around these parts these past few days -- a tale of flagrant child endangerment -- but in a different color. I suspect when I tell it about a white lady, the tiny little fascists who've been accusing me of being racist for criticizing a black lady may find some other thinker unapproved by "progressives" to drop their tiny little comment attack turds on.

The story this time? A British welfare freeloader, Fiona MacKeown, had a taxpayer funded litter of children -- nine children by five different fathers, none of whom ever contributed for long to the children's upkeep, writes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.

One of these children, a fatherless 15-year-old, Scarlett Keeling, was left behind while Mummy and most of the rest of the gang trotted off to Goa, India where the $50,000/year welfare payments apparently go much further than in the U.K. Dalrymple mentions yet another McKeown child, not taken to Goa, a 19-year-old drug addict.

In the absence of a daddy to look out for her, Keeling was dumped into the lap of a tour guide 10 years older, a man her mother had known only a short time. Poor, daddyless and de facto motherless Scarlett reportedly said she had sex with the tour guide only because she needed a roof over her head. In addition, Dalrymple writes:

According to a witness, she was constantly on drugs; and one night, she went to a bar where she drank a lot and took several different illicit drugs, including LSD, cocaine, and pot. She was seen leaving the bar late, almost certainly intoxicated.

The next morning, her body turned up on a beach. At first, the local police maintained that she had drowned while high, but further examination proved that someone had raped and then forcibly drowned her. So far, three people have been arrested in the investigation, which is continuing.

About a month later, Scarlett's mother, interviewed by the liberal Sunday newspaper the Observer, expressed surprise at the level of public vituperation aimed at her and her lifestyle in the aftermath of the murder. She agreed that she and her children lived on welfare, but "not by conscious choice," and she couldn't see anything wrong with her actions in India apart from a certain naivety in trusting the man in whose care she had left her daughter. Scarlett was always an independent girl, and if she, the mother, could turn the clock back, she would behave exactly the same way again.

It is not surprising that someone in Fiona MacKeown's position would deny negligence; to acknowledge it would be too painful. But--and this is what is truly disturbing--when the newspaper asked four supposed child-rearing experts for their opinions, only one saw anything wrong with the mother's behavior, and even she offered only muted criticism. It was always difficult to know how much independence to grant an adolescent, the expert said; but in her view, the mother had granted too much too quickly to Scarlett.

Independence? Independence?! Sorry, but calling abject child neglect "independence" doesn't make it so. Independence at 15 is maybe going on a little date with a 16-year-old, not fucking your way to shelter after your "mother" has abandoned you.

Most shockingly, the Observer's resident idiot sees things a little differently:

Even that seemed excessively harsh to the Observer's Barbara Ellen. We should not criticize the mother's way of life, she wrote, since it had nothing to do with her daughter's death: "Scarlett died for the simple fact that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people, as well as being blitzed with drugs, late at night, in a foreign country." On this view, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people is a raw fact of nature, not the result of human agency, decision, education, or taste. It could happen to anybody, and it just happened to happen to Scarlett. As for drugs, they emerge from the ether and blitz people completely at random. It all seems very unfair.

Let's be real plain about this: This girl died because she had a "mother" and no daddy.

There was a car crash in my neighborhood the other day. Horrifying. Some woman apparently whipped around a stopped car at a crosswalk -- stopped because two guys with bikes were crossing -- and hit one of them. I live in terror that I will hit somebody with my car and possibly leave them dead or in pain for the rest of their lives. It's a sense of "agency" that makes me feel that way -- a sense of personal responsibility for my actions, and a sense that my actions can have powerful, maybe very negative consequences. In short, my message to myself when I'm behind the wheel: Drive carefully, there are other people out there. You might hurt them.

This, to me, is the correct way to feel about nebulous, hypothetical strangers. Meanwhile, this idiot Barbara Eden...she fails even to trace a sense of responsibility from mother back to daughter? How creepy.

Shockingly, just like with the "progressives" in America and black leaders apparently more interested in the welfare of their wallets than the black community, people in the U.K. were loath to criticize the "parent" of poor, dead Scarlett. Dalrymple has an idea of why:

I suspect, however, that the main consideration inhibiting elite criticism of MacKeown is that passing judgment would call into question the shibboleths of liberal social policy for the last 50 or 60 years--beliefs that give their proponents a strong sense of moral superiority. It would be to entertain the heretical thought that family structure might matter after all, along with such qualities as self-restraint and self-respect; and that welfare dependency is unjust to those who pay for it and disastrous for those who wind up trapped in it.

The problem is the "parents" who make the kids pay, and the kids who get no say in it.

thanks, Craig

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

This Is Why Our Founding Fathers Fought For Free Speech?
This, just below, is a partial screenshot of one of numerous pieces of spam posted on my site yesterday by those who seek to punish and intimidate me for posting speech unapproved by "progressives." The one like this I pasted into a Word document added up to 27 pages, and 64,478 characters.

(And please note, this tiny snippet of the spam pictured above isn't a comment made by me despite my name at the bottom; it was just left on my site in my name by one of the tiny thugs; apparently from some proxy server in the Netherlands.)

My question: Was the reason our founding fathers fought for free speech really so tiny little thugs who call themselves "progressives" can foil any possibility of it on the websites of anyone whose opinions they disagree with?

The "progressives" at SadlyNo! didn't like my thoughts on a woman named Tarika Wilson, an unwed mother who had six daddyless children with five different drug dealers, and had then taken up with another, and was then shot and killed in a SWAT raid on her house.

Now, I don't like our drug laws, and I think it's reprehensible to do a SWAT raid on a house with six children on it, but that wasn't the main focus of my blog post. As I wrote:

...the fact remains that the police generally don't seek to break down the doors of homes of women who've had five boyfriends who are all, say, accountants, architects, or managers at Subway.

The SadlyPathetic's were irate that I didn't write it their way. I told one of their commenters, if they wanted a different angle on the story, they were free to go open their own blog and have at it. (Whoops...did I forget to kowtow?)

Meanwhile, I wrote, in response to Wilson's uncle's comment that she was "respected" for taking "great care" of those kids:

Maybe if the community disrespected women who live this sort of lifestyle she would've been less likely to get knocked up six times by a bunch of drug dealers, then taken up with yet another.

And excuse me, but on what planet does bringing six daddyless children in the world, and allowing a drug dealer around them add up to "great care" for one's kids?

To clear up a major sticking point of the tiny little thugs, even after I explained numerous times (they're not interested in the facts): My use of the word "litter" isn't a racist attempt to "dehumanize" black women. I have used the term for various women who have many children, including Catholics, rich white women, and Muslims.

Clearly, my problem is with people who put out, well, litters of children, as I think it's quite difficult to care adequately for one to three children, let alone six, and especially if you are an unwed mother who's had those children with five different drug dealers, and left them daddyless, as I know how essential fathers are to a child's well-being.

This, apparently, is thinking unapproved by the "progressives" at SadlyNo! But instead of merely posting a critical blog item on it, a mob of their commenters rushed over to punish me (apparently, they do this to anyone they do not agree with who is not a flaming lefty) by mucking up my comments section with posts that said nothing, but all used the same in-joke pseudonym.

Next, the tiny little thugs started putting up comments in my name and regular commenters's names, even using the word "nigger" in one of those posts -- as if that commenter had said it. That's straight defamation, and completely disgusting.

Finally, after I started deleting comments that were clearly from people sent over here to be part of a mob to punish me for speech unapproved by the liberalocracy, the tiny thugs started posting huge spam posts like the one above -- also in my name -- from proxy servers in Germany, etc.

Meanwhile, these creepy little fascists, who'd surely insist they're for free speech, didn't just post numerous pieces of spam on my site. Glenn Sacks, a fathers' rights blogger who blogged about what was happening to me, was attacked as well.

You know the drill: "Mustn't have unpermitted speech! Must go after anyone who doesn't say what we say they should say, or who agrees with anyone who doesn't speak only in approve 'progressive'-ese!" Nice.

...

The day before, a friend e-mailed me that she was disgusted that the commenters from SadlyNo! were posting that I was ugly and looked like a man as a way to punish me for my unapproved speech.

Of course, she wrote that before they started trying to shut my comments section down with these vast spam posts from proxy servers. I wrote back:

I only wish they were just calling me ugly and saying I looked like a man. My site is under this major attack. After I blocked the in-joke pseudonym they were using, and they could no longer leave shill comments to muck up my comments section, they started leaving spam and nonsense character posts thousands of words long. And this after a bunch of the tiny little thugs spent a good deal of time Friday posting lies on my Wikipedia page, which Wikipedia had to lock.

And you know, I'm thinking I'm proud to be accused of being like a man. I love men, especially my boyfriend, and respect a lot of men, and I guess they're saying that because I'm acting like I have balls. "And thanks for noticing," I suppose I should say.

This comment makes it quite clear (as if I didn't know) that the intention by the mob from SadlyNo! is to punish me for my speech:

Well, Amy, You've spent an otherwise enjoyable Sunday bearing the consequences of running your mouth first and thinking second. It couldn't happpen to a more deserving person.
Immy Kant 128.151.4.147

Yes, we have a typical commenter applauding the speech squashers -- from a University of Rochester I.P. address, no less. Yes, let's have that free exchange of ideas that universities are supposed to be about -- oh, except if you don't have the APPROVED set of ideas, except if you don't think what we "progressives" think is okay.

Is this really what it means to be a "progressive"?

As for "bearing the consequences" -- none of these yahoos burned down my house or ran over my dog. I sat at the computer eating a gourmet lunch and drinking some lovely wine this afternoon, and then went out to try to help at a traffic accident in my neighborhood. I have technology for dealing with tiny little thugs, and it's being employed.

The worst thing about this for me is learning how naive I've been in pooh-poohing right-wingers when they tell me how the real fascists are on the left. Again, I take people as individuals, but I've learned that there are a whole lot of people who call themselves "progressives" and "liberals" who see speech they disagree with not as a reason to speak out themselves, but as a reason to work very hard to intimidate the person who's spoken from speaking their mind again.

Furthermore, let me say most emphatically, I didn't "run my mouth first and think second." I meant every word I said. And I've come to that thinking over years of reading about the value of fathers and problems in the black community.

The sad thing is, my anger at the way teen motherhood in any community, but especially the black community is just "yeah whatever-ed" comes from a sense of what's possible for all people, and frustration that a lack of expressed values is leading to children being born into poverty and raised to continue the cycle...and, in part, because the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world, and ordinary people, too, are too smart to do what I've done: say, "Hey, this is wrong," and surely lose their entire income pronto, from all those people who prefer to focus on how victimized blacks are (and there is victimization of blacks) rather than how blacks victimize themselves.

You don't have much control over other people who victimize you. What you do have control over is how you live your life, and how you raise your children to live theirs.

Okay, you're an 18-year-old girl in the inner city. If you're going to have sex, who do you have sex with? A drug dealer? Okay, let's say nobody's ever mentioned that's a bad idea, or not strongly enough so it actually sinks in, and let's say you're naive, dumb even, and you get pregnant. Happens to teens of all races and socio-economic backgrounds. So...you've messed up, given birth as an unwed mother to one child. What to do, what to do? Have six more, with five different drug dealers, then take up with a sixth drug dealer, or...?

Or...here's an excerpt from the advice I gave a young girl whose skin color I didn't know, who was seven months pregnant by her porn nut boyfriend:

You might look into having somebody adopt your child -- unless there's been some miracle and the guy is now a great man and father of the year to be. What should be primary is what the best interest of the child is, and I have to tell you, I wouldn't have children myself, but my close friends and neighbors have them, and it's a two-parent job, to say the least. Are you going to leave the kid with daddy and hope he doesn't leave her face down in the bathtub when he gets engrossed in some particularly juicy porn? -Amy Alkon

This is all about the children, and I take a woman like Tarika Wilson to task for putting her needs first same as I take to task selfish, upper-class women who are "single mothers by choice."

Choice? Whose choice? Did your child get to choose to not have a daddy?

Here, check out how well that works out for the child. I mean, if you aren't too busy trying to squash my speech.

And if you don't find that absolutely heartbreaking, what are you?

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

So Pathetic, So Pathetically Unbusy
I just got this in my e-mail from one of the SoPathetic! (aka Sadly,No!) commenters I'd blocked, a weenie in the U.K. who calls himself "Cain":

I woke up, feeling like something had crawled into my mouth and died sometime during the night. It was no relief to find out it was tongue. Did I say night? Early morning looked more plausible, the light seemed to be coming from all directions, giving me a splitting headache.

Worse, this wasn't even my flat. My heart sunk as I realized I had spent another booze-induced sleep session at the office. Clearing the sleep from my eyes, I managed to sit up straight, feeling the stiffness in my back. I put the lid on the cheap scotch from last night - Glenmorangie - and finished the half empty glass.

It burned as it went down, but I was feeling more alert, more alive. I rocked back on my chair, and looked out the window. Another soulless day, the too bright sun shining off the reflective, all too familiar buildings.

Oh how I hated it here.

I put my feet up on the desk, pulled my fedora over my eyes, and made myself at home with the silence. It was relaxing, and peaceful. In my office with no work to do, no pressing engagements and half a bottle of low quality single malt to get me through the afternoon.

And then she walked in. Rolling off the streets like some primeval force, a whirlwind of passion and destruction.

"I'm sorry", I said, "I think you have the wrong room. The drag queen's make up class is three doors down." It was, too. This was a cheap neighbourhood, and you took office space where you could afford it.

"I'm NOT a drag queen! And anyone who says otherwise, or edits my Wikipedia to say so is nothing more than a filthy and childish liar!"

An American. And either in hysterics or denial, possibly both. This wasn't going to end well, I could tell.

"I'm sorry....ma'am" I answered, cautiously. This met with no outburst, so I continued on, "what can I do for you this, uh, fine day?"

"Are you Cain?" she asked.

I looked around discreetly for any recording devices or other listeners. I saw none.

"Yes", I replied, in a bored, drawn out yawn. "What's it to you?"

"I hear you're a dick. I need someone to be a dick for me."

I thought about this momentarily. Her jaw looked like it could crack open a man's skull, and there was something disconcerting about that Adam's Apple...

"I assume you mean a Private Detective, of course. Then you have come to the right place. What exactly can I do for you? In a professional capacity, of course."

She withdrew a sheet from her handbag, and placed it on my desk. Swinging my legs down, I grabbed the paper and had a look. It was a printout, of a Wikipedia edit history page. Some numbers were circled, and highlighted with a marker pen.

"My name is Amy Alkon, Cain", she said, "and I need you to find a man for me. I need you track down and bring me Gary Ruppert."

What was that? Would I settle for the head of Alfredo Garcia?

My response to the guy:

"I'm amazed that anyone finds me interesting enough to waste so much time on."

I do have to say, I find it amazing that the very people who are after me for being racist see no problem with intimating that I'm transgendered, meaning it to be some derogatory thing.

I don't see it as derogatory, merely incorrect, and rather typical of the low-blow tactics the "progressives" seem to have in the absence of the ability to rationally criticize people they disagree with.

Meanwhile, here's a column I, Amy Alkon, accused bigot (at least by the "progressives"), wrote in an attempt to humanize crossdressers in the eyes of the general public.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

About People With Heads Filled With Lettuce
Great little passage from the slim Dalrymple book I just read, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, that relates to a recent topic here:

To overturn a prejudice is not to destroy prejudice as such. It is rather to inculcate another prejudice. The prejudice that it is wrong to bear a child out of wedlock has been replaced by the prejudice that there is nothing wrong with it at all. Interestingly, the class that first objected on intellectual grounds to the original prejudice, namely the well-educated upper-middle class, is the least likely to behave as if that original prejudice were unjustified. In other words, for that class the matter is principally one of intellectual preening and point-scoring, of appearing bold, generous, imaginative, and independent-minded in the eyes of their peers, rather than a matter of practical policy.

Shocking concept, huh, that children need fathers? Some stats on that from fallenfathers:

•63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (US Dept. Of Health/Census) - 5 times the average.
•90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes - 32 times the average.
•85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes - 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)
•80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes --14 times the average. (Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
•71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes - 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
•75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes - 10 times the average. (Rainbows for All God's Children)
•70% of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes - 9 times the average. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Sept. 1988)
•85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes - 20 times the average. (Fulton Co. Georgia, Texas Dept. of Correction)

Clearly, fathers represent a lot more than just a paycheck to a child; they represent safety, protection, guidance, friendship, and someone to look up to.

At the very least, children need two-parent, intact families to have the best shot in the world. From a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story by Mackenzie Carpenter (in which she looked at the research on gay and lesbian parents of my friend Judy Stacey):

...most studies have found that outcomes for children of gay and lesbian parents are no better -- and no worse -- than for other children, whether the measures involve peer group relationships, self-esteem, behavioral difficulties, academic achievement, or warmth and quality of family relationships.

...Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at New York University and co-author with Tim Biblarz of "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" in the American Sociological Review, says conservative groups distorted the findings of her 2001 study, which found some slight differences in children of lesbian mothers in terms of career choices and sexual experimentation. And while some of her ongoing work is finding "minor differences in sexuality and possibly in the range of comfort, but just barely, with non heterosexual behavior," a European study of daughters of lesbians has found a skew toward more heterosexual partners.

Conservative groups have cited Ms. Stacey's writings to bolster their contention that children in gay families don't turn out "the same" as children of heterosexuals, but Ms. Stacey said what few differences she detected had no impact on child well-being.

...Still, the battle between political conservatives and university researchers rages on.

When Dr. Dobson, in his Time magazine essay criticizing Ms. Cheney, cited research from Kyle Pruett at Yale University to state that children need fathers, Dr. Pruett, author of "Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child," was furious, claiming Dr. Dobson had misrepresented his findings to suggest that children of gay parents would somehow suffer developmentally. After attempts to contact Dr. Dobson proved fruitless, he taped an interview and posted it on YouTube.com excoriating the conservative leader.

"Look, I said, if you're going to use my research to judge and implicate personal decisions people are making, you are going to hear from me about it because I consider this a destructive use of good science," Dr. Pruett said in an interview.

While "fathers make unique contributions to children, never do I say in my book that children of gay parents are at risk. Love binds parents and children together, not gender. There are plenty of boys and girls from these families with masculine and feminine role models who turn out just fine."

Here's Judy on Dobson's distortions:

Rather obviously, children need to grow up in intact families to have the best shot in the world.

UPDATE: Because we have a problem with tiny little fascist thugs coming in here to disrupt the discussion -- like with multiple posts on this entry of the same probably 3,000-word piece of spam, and similar-length pieces of spam with nonsense characters -- please refresh your browsers when you see disruptive comments. I'm deleting them, and this is being dealt with.

MORE: My site is under attack by "progressives" who have suspended the use of language for spam posts filled with reams of garbage characters. This is supposed to shut me up. Fuck free speech. We don't like what you're saying, so we're going to shut you up. What kind of "progressives" are these? I have had a real unpleasant lesson about liberals. I know all liberals aren't like this, but a buttload sure are as fascistic as any Communist dictator.

Please keep refreshing your browser. Gregg is now deleting these spam comments, but they may pop up from time to time.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Not Lost In Translation
This news bit seems to have been poorly translated from the Italian, but the horror of being a woman in Saudi Arabia still comes through. Alessandra Antonelli writes for ANSAmed:

The sentence could not be appealed: guilty for converting to Christianity, a young Saudi woman was set alight by her father, who first had cut her tongue.

Not an ordinary father, but a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Against Vice, a sort of police watching over the moral behaviour of the citizens of Saudi Arabia and the full compliance with the rules of the rigid Wahabi doctrine, by using whiplashes on the legs for too high heels and arresting men and women not linked by marriage or family bonds for meetings in restaurants.

To the injury of the conversion, the woman had added also the insult of the written word, by writing articles with Christian-religious content on blogs and regional websites.

The brutal news reported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)'s daily Gulf News reflects the reality of Saudi Arabia, a conservative and intransigent country, and throws ice-cold water on the image of an oil kingdom which says to be ready to open up partially to other religions, an image painted by the recent gestures of the king Abdallah Bin Abdelaziz.

How much clearer does it have to become, how damaging it is for us to be beholden in any way to these barbarians, the Saudis? The World Trade Center, but for our need for Mid-East oil, would surely still be standing, and 3,000-plus innocent people who happened to work in just the wrong building, and those who died trying to save them -- on that day or of respiratory and other illnesses afterward -- would surely be going about their lives and business today.

Anybody who's lived in Manhattan has a story -- of the guy who had to pick up the kids at school that day, as in the case of a friend's husband, and was spared because of it. Had she moved her meeting, her kids would be fatherless and she'd be a widow today.

Thanks, Jeff

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Sadly, No
I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I'm a fiscal conservative and largely libertarian, although, per Milton Friedman on open borders being a disaster in a welfare state, I'm not for open borders.

I do have to say, I know people on the right (who think I'm kind a nitwit for being against the Iraq war and some other stuff they're for), and people on the left (who, for example, find my ideas on health care just plain wrong), but I have to say, in my personal experience, people on the right haven't pulled the nasty attempts at intimidation and silencing that people on the left have when they've disagreed with me. It seems there's no fascist like a "progressive."

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Violence Is Golden
Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, writes in the WSJ about Al-Jazeera celebrating the return of the gloating child murderer Samir Kuntar. Kuntar is the barbarian who smashed the head of a 4-year-old girl with his rifle in 1979 -- after killing her father as she looked on. Pearl writes about Kuntar:

He was convicted, sentenced to 542 years in prison, and never expressed any remorse. He was released by Israel on July 26 in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006.

As anticipated, Hezbollah's mass celebration in Beirut, in the presence of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, evoked a chivalrous scene from a fairy tale gone awry. One by one, the whole Lebanese leadership stepped up to "brother Kuntar" to shake the hand and kiss the cheeks of that arch-symbol of barbarity.

The focus of my attention naturally turned to Al Jazeera because, with its outreach of 50 million to 100 million viewers from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, this pan-Arab satellite channel is considered the conscience and future of the Arab world.

A chill went down my spine when British-accented announcers, who introduced Al Jazeera's English channel correspondent Rula Amin, translated the wisdom of Kuntar's words from the original Arabic. Imagine a voice cast in a perfect Oxford accent articulating in unmistaken empathy: "He has returned to a hero's welcome . . . After 29 years in [an] Israeli prison, Samir Kuntar spent his first day of freedom vowing to continue to fight against Israel. He says he hopes to see the enemy again very soon."

Then came Kuntar's birthday party, initiated by Al Jazeera's bureau in Beirut and aired on Al Jazeera TV July 19 (translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute). There was orchestral music, a huge birthday cake and infinite admiration by the Al Jazeera bureau chief announcing: "Brother Samir, we would like to celebrate your birthday with you. You deserve even more than this . . . Happy birthday, brother Samir."

How amateurish was the Coliseum in Rome compared with modern-day satellite rituals of death and brutality. Imagine millions of living rooms watching their new role model, child-killer Kuntar, lowering a huge butcher knife onto his birthday cake to the sound of fireworks and male chorus: "This is the sword of the Arabs, Samir."

Al Jazeera admitted to Israel's Press Office on August 6 that "elements of the program violated Al Jazeera's Code of Ethics." Pearl continues:

I believe Al Jazeera owes a more definitive public apology, not only to Israel, but primarily to its viewers, for attempting to turn their children into the likes of Kuntar; to the journalism community, for robbing the profession of its nobleness; and, most urgently, to us, citizens of this planet, for attempting to relegitimize barbarity in the public square.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Yoohooo, Loser!
Most hilariously, somebody edited my Wikipedia page to say I'm a male-to-female trannie.


Since the edits happened in the past few days, I imagine they were made by some inarticulate loser who couldn't quite debate me on the points -- probably on the two blog items (here and here) I posted about the Tarika Williams case, and my feeling that there's something way wrong in the black community when few people in it, including black leaders, say so much as boo to a woman who has six daddyless children, by five different drug dealers by age 26, and then takes up with yet another drug dealer. Child neglect and endangerment, anyone?

In the comments below these entries, I showed, and a lot of people showed, that I am not racist -- simply somebody who speaks critically about issues I see, and this happens to be one of them.

But, geez, think of all the gynecologist visits I could've saved if I were a trannie. And the cost of decades of tampons. Not to mention all the expensive bras! Then again, I'm reeeeal glad there's no reason for a prostate exam.

Unfortunately, I used to have a pretty nice writeup on Wikipedia, until all the losers with grudges who apparently just don't have the chops to debate me on the issues got in there and deleted it. (There were a few other unsourced lies posted there, too, which I deleted. I wrote to the Wikipedia administrator about it. The guy who seems to have posted the tranny thing, "David r from meth productions," seems to have gone after Johann Hari, too.)

UPDATE, per Treacher request:

Doctors are doing really nice work these days, huh?

Photo by Gregg Sutter, who is getting really sick of hearing me joke about this: "Can we talk about my penis?" etc.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The Business Of Islam
Among other things, it's quashing free speech, but even better, getting those of us who have it (or some semblance of it) to preemptively quash it for them.

Johann Hari has a terrific piece in The Independent, in part, about the book Random House recently dumped, about the child molestation victim Aisha, better known as Mohammed's wife.

For those not in the know, he married her at six and had sex with her when she was nine. In civilized societies, we jail people for this sort of behavior. (Oh, and did you know that, for Muslims, anything Mohammed does is to be emulated?)

Hari writes:

Some people will instantly ask: why bother criticising religion if it causes so much hassle? The answer is: look back at our history. How did Christianity lose its ability to terrorise people with phantasms of sin and Hell? How did it stop spreading shame about natural urges - pre-marital sex, masturbation or homosexuality? Because critics pored over the religion's stories and found gaping holes of logic or morality in them. They asked questions. How could an angel inseminate a virgin? Why does the Old Testament God command his followers to commit genocide? How can a man survive inside a whale?

Reinterpretation and ridicule crow-barred Christianity open. Ask enough tough questions and faith is inevitably pushed farther and farther back into the misty realm of metaphor - where it is less likely to inspire people to kill and die for it. But doubtful Muslims, and the atheists who support them, are being prevented from following this path. They cannot ask: what does it reveal about Mohamed that he married a young girl, or that he massacred a village of Jews who refused to follow him? You don't have to murder many Theo Van Goghs or pulp many Sherry Joneses to intimidate the rest. The greatest censorship is internal: it is in all the books that will never be written and all the films that will never be shot, because we are afraid.

Since Jones has brought it up, let us look at Mohamed's marriage to Aisha as a model for how we can conduct this conversation. It is true those were different times, and it may have been normal for grown men to have sex with prepubescent girls. The sources are not clear on this point. But whatever culture you live in, having sex when your body is not physically developed can be an excruciatingly painful experience. Among Vikings, it was more normal than today to have your arm chopped off, but that didn't mean it wasn't agony. If anything, Jones's book whitewashes this, suggesting that Mohamed's "gentleness" meant Aisha enjoyed it.

The story of Aisha also prompts another fundamentalist-busting discussion. You cannot say that Mohamed's decision to marry a young girl has to be judged by the standards of his time, and then demand that we follow his moral standards to the letter. Either we should follow his example literally, or we should critically evaluate it and choose for ourselves. Discussing this contradiction inevitably injects doubt - the mortal enemy of fanaticism (on The Independent's Open House blog later today, I'll be discussing how Aisha has become the central issue in a debate in Yemen about children and forced marriage).

So why do many people who cheer The Life Of Brian and Jerry Springer: The Opera turn into clucking Mary Whitehouses when it comes to Islam? If a book about Christ was being dumped because fanatics in Mississippi might object, we would be enraged. I feel this too. I am ashamed to say I would be more scathing if I was discussing Christianity. One reason is fear: the image of Theo Van Gogh lying on a pavement crying "Can't we just talk about this?" Of course we rationalise it, by asking: does one joke, one column, one novel make much difference? No. But cumulatively? Absolutely.

Speech must remain free -- to maintain a democracy and a civilized society. Even minor cases of silencing must be stopped. For example: A friend of mine is one of probably five Republicans in Beverly Hills. She put out George Bush signs on her lawn before the last election. One after another, they were all stolen. Now, I am not a George Bush fan (nor was I a Kerry fan for that matter), but I find it criminal to silence political speech. I've given her a suggestion for how to catch and actually prosecute the scumbags when they very surely steal the McCain signs she'll put up.

In my own life, just yesterday, I discovered some grudge edits in my Wikipedia entry. Now, I did think it was pretty hilarious that somebody had posted that I'm a male-to-female tranny (if you want to upset somebody with something like that, you picked the wrong girl, because I kept laughing and saying throught the evening to Gregg, "Can we talk about my penis?" and such, which he found somewhat annoying. Still, as I just wrote in an e-mail to Johann Hari (who I apparently share my Wiki vandal with), "the spirit of censorship, even in the smallest form, is something I find terribly disturbing."

Look, if you've got a problem with something I've written or said, bring it on: verbally, or on the page or on my site site, and fight fair: truthfully and on point. If you're not smart enough or articulate enough, well, sorry, you should have watched less television or something, but leave the debating to people who use their heads as more than staging areas for their hair.

Thanks, Deirdre!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Why "Nice" Kids Are Getting Hooked On Smack
Michele Catalano, on PJM, has an idea or two. First she writes about what seems to be a growing availability of heroin amongst the "good" kids: honor student/cheerleader types. To figure out why, Catalano writes that we should step back to the early 90s, which is when she pinpoints the beginning of parenting becoming "almost a competitive sport":

Never before had a generation of children had so much of their days laid out for them. From infant swim classes to Gymboree, these kids hadn't even yet learned to crawl and they were being enrolled in activities that could fill their mothers' personal planners for months ahead of time.

...We used to learn letters in kindergarten; all of a sudden they were labeling your kid as a slow learner if she was five years old and couldn't write an essay on impressionist artists of the 18th century.

The pressure started early and built up, and at the same time these kids were being pushed and scheduled and overwhelmed with homework, [7] the self-esteem movement was in full force. Every child is a [8] precious snowflake. Every child is special and wonderful and everyone is student of the month! . . . Anything that could single one child out for positive attention was eliminated, as that only served to make the other kids feel bad. It was an era of overprotectiveness, as parents and teachers wrapped the kids in safe, warm cocoons, trying to protect them from both physical and mental harm. Playgrounds were renovated to provide the least likely scenario for a child getting even the slightest boo-boo. Some schools had a "no touching" policy for fear children who were brushed up against in the hallway by another child would feel harassed. Every small playground argument resulted in peaceful mediation by peers and administrators.

At the same time these kids were being coddled, cocooned, and raised on false pedestals, they were also being pressured into perfection. The overscheduling that started when they were infants continued into grade school, middle school, and high school. Kids who played sports played multiple sports. Being in the Honor Society or Key Club wasn't enough. You had to be in several clubs. You had to do more than the neighbor's kid. You had to do more than everyone. Colleges were becoming increasingly competitive, and kids were being forced to make career choices as early as 7th grade. One or two AP classes weren't enough. Everything academic and extracurricular were focused on one thing: the college application. Parents hovered over their kids, making sure ever project was perfect, every essay was golden. The [12] helicopter parent was born, and these parents had no idea what they were doing to their children.

A friend of mine has a 7-year-old daughter who recently got special call-out from the teacher regarding some clay models of animals she'd made. They were rough and kind of messy -- like they were made by a 7-year-old. All the other kids had much better animals. But, the teacher told her (or her mother, I can't remember) that she could see that the daughter made the animals herself, while all the other parents had a hand in their children's.

Catalano continues:

So here was this generation of kids who were led to believe they were each the most special person on the planet. They were kept from harm, kept from failure, kept from any kind of mental anguish. When these kids hit 16 or 17 years old and life started taking on some emotional dramas, and maybe they started to realize they might not get into the college of their choice, an interesting result of how these kids were raised emerged: they have no coping skills. These kids were never taught how to handle duress. They were not taught what to do when things don't go your way because things always were made to go their way. The pressure their parents put on them to succeed, the normal pressures of applying for college and facing life after high school, together with the realization that they are not special snowflakes and there are thousands of kids just like them out there, all vying for a place in that perfect school, caused a crash and burn for a lot of these kids.

Drugs and alcohol are readily available to teenagers. They know where to get them if they want them. There isn't a school out there that doesn't have that sector of kids that provide the action to the others. [13] The statistics show that a good portion of high school seniors will drink and smoke pot. But there are some kids for whom recreational use of beer and pot isn't enough. They don't want to get drunk or high to party. They want something more. They want escape. They want to turn off the helicopter parent voices in their heads and not feel that pressure for a while. And maybe, just maybe, some of them choose heroin -- the most stigmatized of all drugs -- as a subconscious rebellion.

So...do kids want to escape now more than ever? Or is this just a convenient and conveniently compelling explanation?

I'm not sure if she's right about the reason suburbia is turning into smack-burbia (and is it really turning into smackburbia?), but I'm with her on the way kids are both pushed and coddled, and the fact that it's a problem. Once again, here's an excerpt from my column on that, Look Before You Sleep:

You're supposed to be your kids' mom, not their full-time birthday clown. This means meeting their needs, as opposed to falling prey to their ransom demands; i.e., "Send in the chopper and the cupcakes or I'll scream my lungs out until spring!" If you're keeling over from reading "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" 40 times, it's because you didn't say no 39 times. "No" is also the correct response when besieged with requests for a chunky peanut butter sandwich with all the chunkies removed. But, children can be such finicky eaters! Correction: American children can be such finicky eaters, because their parents tend to confuse parenting with working room service at a five-star hotel. In France, on the other hand, the kids' meal is whatever the parents are eating; brains, livers, kidneys and all. And while the kids can pick out bits they don't like, their choice is clear: eat or starve.

Saying no to your kids will not turn them into meth-smoking, liquor store-robbing carjackers. Actually, throwing up a few boundaries might even serve to prevent this -- and less dire but extremely annoying outcomes (just what society needs, another 35-year-old snot who was denied nothing during childhood).

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Is It Racist If I Say This?
Are there certain conversations and observations that are off limits for certain people? Take this thing here, below. Is it racist, if I, a white girl, say it?

There is a crisis, to understate the matter, in the black community. About 75 percent (more in some cities) of black babies in the U.S. are born out-of-wedlock. That women should keep their legs closed until marriage is considered a naïve notion at best and a sexist/oppressive one at worst. Subversive is what it is.

Some people are offended by the expression "keep your legs closed." Is it vulgar? Perhaps, but so is having babies with several different men without being married to any of them.

Confession: I actually didn't say the above. LaShawn Barber, who is not an "African-American" woman, but a BLACK woman, did. I've read her stuff over the years, and I thought I would link to/post some of it -- after the 600ish comments I had around midnight Tuesday night, accusing me of being a racist for suggesting that black leaders should condemn the behavior of women like Tarika Wilson, and for my suggestion that being around drug dealers puts oneself and one's children at risk.

Wilson, for the uninitiated, is the Ohio woman who was accidentally shot in a police raid on her house. At 26, she'd already had six children in eight years with five different drug dealer "daddies," and had taken up with yet another drug dealer boyfriend.

Do you have a problem with that behavior? If not, why not?

Here's a bit of a comment I made in the wee hours on Wednesday morning, in response to a commenter I'm now calling Bubbles, because he seems intentionally slow-witted (in his continuing attempt to get me to say I'm racist and my blog posting is racist). I wrote:

But, wait: if I use "litter" to describe a white woman's children, is that racist?

I'm well-aware of the meaning of words, Bubbles. I simply refuse to write like a white woman who is terrified of being accused of being racist.

The problem with all of you accusing me of being racist is really that.

I use "litter" to describe the children of Catholic women and rich women and Muslim women in other blog posts here. It's about the number of the children not the race, religion, or socioeconomic background of the women.

The issue: The more children you have, the less care and attention you can give them. This is especially the case if you are a woman who is not married or in a longterm relationship with the children's daddy. It goes downhill from there when the children have multiple "daddies," all of whom are drug dealers.

Do none of you understand the value of a father in a child's life?

Here's more, from a LaShawn Barber blog item about an article by John Derbyshire. I particularly liked the way she started -- noting how calling somebody racist is a conversation ender; a way of knocking them down in lieu of intelligently discussing an issue. A whole lot of that going on here the other day!

Commenters who call anyone a racist in this comment thread -- Derbyshire, other commenters, etc. -- will be deleted. If you don't see your comment, that's why. Second offense, banned. Long time readers know I don't allow it. (Amy underline) It's a conversation killer used to intimidate and an easy way to avoid challenging an argument. If you don't know how to fomulate and articulate one, learn or leave.

I've banned only maybe four commenters since I've been blogging. Two, I believe, posted in other real people's names, pretending to be them. Two were just as annoying as fuck and nobody could take them anymore. Still, Barber's right about the racism label.

Barber continues:

Without stable families supporting, teaching, disciplining, and loving, the road to life success for any child is very difficult to navigate, though not impossible. With obvious disregard for marrying before having babies and the apparent acceptance of out-of-control crime rates -and charges of racism and "self-hater" against anyone who expresses such facts -- black as a group will never reach levels of achievement they could have reached had the promise of the Civil Rights movement carried over to subsequent generations. High moral character, strong families, hard work, educational attainment, and self-sacrifice for future generations -- these are vital to any race of people.

Thanks, LaShawn. Somebody's got to say it, and apparently, I'm just not tan enough.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Shit Storm
Loose bowels over Europe. A giant inflatable dog turd is wreaking some havoc across the pond, and no, the story's not from The Onion. From Agence France Presse:

GENEVA (AFP) - A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday. The art work, titled "Complex S(expletive..)", is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres (yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children's home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The Boys And Girls In The Plastic Bubble
Kids are now raised like they're porcelain figurines, allowed to do nothing and go nowhere without supervision. Debra Orr, writing about her own childhood scrapes and smashups, argues in The Independent that maybe parents are mainly protecting themselves:

I do want my own children to experience a certain degree of freedom. I'm not as strict as many parents appear from this survey to be. They both climb trees whenever they want to - within reason - even though one of them is six. He has a huge graze on his arm right now - he fell out of a tree at the weekend. He is justifiably proud of his impressive wound. But I'm by no means as generous as my own parents were. It is cars more than anything that worry me - and that's why I'd guess so many people are wary of letting their children out alone on bikes.

Looking back, I can see that it was a wrench for our parents, giving us free rein, and that they had to force themselves to step back and let us go. That makes me wonder if perhaps parents now aren't being more selfish than my own parents were, in protecting our children so much.

Are we worried only about our children's safety, or are we infected by anxiety about how we might feel if our child was injured?

The survey she talks about is a British one, showing that half of seven to 12-year-old are banned from climbing trees...and more. Sarah Cassidy writes for The Independent:

Four in 10 were banned from playing in their local park or recreational area without an adult present and one in three cannot ride a bike without parental supervision.

One in five had been banned from playing conkers and one in six were not allowed to play chase because over-protective parents had ruled that it was too dangerous.

Yet parents were much less vigilant when it came to internet safety, the study found. Three-quarters of children aged seven to 12 were allowed to surf the internet without adult guidance.

Professionals in child welfare warned that children's development was being damaged by parents' obsession with safety, which was depriving youngsters of adventurous play.

Adrian Voce, director of Play England, said playing was "an essential part of growing up ... Adventurous play both challenges and excites children and helps instil critical life skills. Constantly wrapping children in cotton wool can leave them ill-equipped to deal with stressful or challenging situations they might encounter later in life. Children both need and want to push their boundaries in order to explore their limits and develop their abilities."

The research also found that children were less likely to play outdoors than their parents had been when they were growing up. Of the adults surveyed, 70 per cent said they had experienced most of their play outdoors. In comparison, just 29 per cent of children broke beyond the four walls of home, or a designated playground, to experience creative "adventure" play. Only one in four children experienced most of their adventurous play in natural wild spaces or their local streets.

I think kids learn judgement out of testing their own limits -- to a limit, of course. You don't want your kids wandering out to the bars at night, or hitchhiking to the amusement park. But, I see a real difference between kids in the U.S. and kids in France, where they seem, more than here, to see it as part of childhood that kids fall down and get hurt.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Wafa Sultan: She Risked Homelessness To Escape Sharia Law
The courageous Wafa Sultan speaks out against Muslims beginning, little by little, to establish Sharia law in western countries, and talks about her own escape from Syria and Sharia and what it meant to her:

Here's Sharia law in Minneapolis, from back in 2007:

And here's how one Muslim portrays what supposedly goes on in Denmark. Pretty hilarious:

Here's another example of a parent who cared more about family "honor" than their child's life.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Fishing For Answers
Stephen J. Gould from The Atheist's Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts:

"We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer---but none exists."

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Who Places A Lower Value On Black Lives?
Would that be a police officer who accidentally shoots and kills a black woman, or that woman herself, a mother of six children by five different drug-dealing fathers, who takes up with yet another drug dealer?

That woman's most recent boyfriend, Anthony Terry, was arrested and pleaded guilty in March to charges of drug trafficking. And yes, before him, all the fathers of her children were drug dealers...and this according to her mother!

Her sister managed to find a bright side in Tarika Wilson's, uh, strong values system. From a Christopher Maag story in The New York Times:

Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson's mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.

"She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that," said Ms. Wilson's uncle, John Austin.

Maybe if the community disrespected women who live this sort of lifestyle she would've been less likely to get knocked up six times by a bunch of drug dealers, then taken up with yet another.

And while I'm not a fan of our drug laws, and I agree with reason's Radley Balko that these door-break searches too often have tragic consequences, and for those who are not perps...the fact remains that the police generally don't seek to break down the doors of homes of women who've had five boyfriends who are all, say, accountants, architects, or managers at Subway.

Not surprisingly, black leaders are outraged. Also not surprisingly, their outrage is not directed at women in the black community who squeeze out litters of fatherless children, or the men who fuck and run, or fuck, deal drugs, and go directly to jail. From an AP story on MSNBC:

Following the shooting, many residents accused the police department of being hostile and abusive toward minorities. One group led a series of marches through the city to protest what they said was mistreatment by police.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the city and demanded that the officer who fired the fatal shots and those who planned the raid be held accountable. Chavalia was the only person charged.

'Low value on black lives'
Local black leaders had criticized the two misdemeanor charges as too lenient.

"It's another example that there's very low value on black lives in this community," said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He said he was sickened but not surprised by the verdict and he hopes it won't reflect poorly on the city.

Arnold Manley, pastor of Pilgrim Rescue Missionary Baptist Church, said he and other black clergy leaders have been trying to work with police and city officials since the shooting, but that he was unsure whether that would continue.

"I'm hurting deeply," he said. "The message I got out of all this is that it's OK for police to go and kill in a drug raid," he said.

Pastor Manley should be "hurting deeply" that there's a need for drug raids in his community, and should maybe start speaking out about that. Again, the police aren't targeting black dentists, black cable TV techs, or black newspaper columnists.

It's awful that this woman was killed, but the fact remains: Lie down with drug dealers, wake up with drug raids.

Thanks, lujlp and purplepen!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Bank Of America Won't Give Credit To Just Anyone
It seems you have to send in an application before you can get it. Even if you're 6.

Yes, B of A sent a credit card to a 6-year-old child. From WCCO.com:

CBS station WBBM-TV in Chicago reports an Aurora mom was somewhat amused last April when she received a credit card application addressed to her then-5-year-old son. As a test she had young Bennett Christiansen fill out the application and she sent it in. She was stunned when Bank of America sent her kid a shiny new card with a $600 limit.

Amy Christiansen said her entire family had been receiving credit card applications addressed to each member of her family, including Bennett, who has since turned 6, and Christiansen's 3-year-old child.

Christiansen said she decided to allow Bennett to fill out a credit card application from Bank of America. He accurately wrote in his birthday in 2002, his annual income of $0, and the fact that he is an "other," that is, neither a homeowner nor a renter. He signed his name in writing that was obviously that of a child, she said.

A short time later, Christiansen said she received a credit card with Bennett's name on it.

One of B of A's usual spokes-enablers comes forward to offer no explanation (and actually, her name is spelled Riess):

Bank of America spokeswoman Betty Reiss was not immediately able to comment on Christiansen's specific case, but said issuing cards to children was not the bank's policy.

"We do not knowingly solicit or grant credit to a minor," Reiss said.

Yeah, like Bank of America didn't "knowingly" give a total of $12,000 of my money out to thieves. Seven times in a single statement period. From tellers to thieves with a fake driver's license in my name with the wrong expiration date. No PIN was required. The signature wasn't verified to be mine. Seven. Times. In places in Texas and the middle of California where I have never been and will probably never go.

Who would expect this level of flagrant laxness from the biggest bank in the country? Certainly not me. I later found out a bombshell about B of A, according to a B of A employee I spoke to on their phone line: "California accounts aren't in the database nationally." She further explained that B of A's banks don't all have access to the same database.

Which brings me to the question...in all these little banks Bank of America bought and schmushed together into one big, customer-maltreating bank...are all the rest of B of A's computers connected to one another?

Your guess is as good as mine!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Will He Or Won't She?
Edwards wants a paternity test! Hunter wants to "maintain her privacy and her daughter's privacy," said her lawyer (via a WaPo Lois Romano and Howard Kurtz story). Way convenient, huh?

Gotta wonder how many people in the Edwards/Hunter camp are trying to put together used Edwards styrofoam coffee cups and Rielle Hunter baby burp towels. Now, there's a woman who should hoard her garbage!

A few incredibles from the Romano/Kurtz story. First, the bit about the baby:

Last week, the Enquirer published a blurry photo of a man who looks like Edwards holding a baby. The tabloid said the photo was taken at the hotel.

"I don't know if that picture is me," Edwards said. "It could well be. It looks like me. I don't know who that baby is. I have no idea what the picture is."

When pressed by Woodruff, Edwards continued: "I mean, do you know how many pictures have been taken of me holding children in the last three years? I mean, it happens all the time."

At the Beverly Hilton? Another incredible:

Fred Baron, a friend of Edwards and a campaign fundraiser, acknowledged yesterday that he had helped Hunter financially so that she could move to what ABC described as a $3 million home in Santa Barbara.

Awww, how sweet. Does he offer that option to anyone who's a girl? I mean, Lucy and I are girls. Let us know when we can move into a $3 million home, courtesy of you. We'll take Santa Monica, near the Palisades, thanks.

When in doubt, go with Kaus! (Scroll down from the linked piece to just buckets of the Edwards stuff.)

And Ted Frank, in Overlawyered's comments (the Baron link above), has this:

The Fred Baron donations are potentially the biggest story, because undisclosed money spent to benefit a presidential candidate is, I believe, a felony.

Whoopsy!

Now, see why it's a much better idea to help Lucy and me move up in the housing world? An ocean view for us! No jail time for you! It's just win-win all around!

Meanwhile, Lucy and I thank whomever donated $50 to our Amazon link on this page. We'll get to that $3 million dwelling, even without a Baron of our own!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

There's Moderate Islam Like There's Moderate Racism
Anti-semitism is built right into Islam, and don't believe all that hoohah about how Muslims once tolerantly coexisted with Jews and Christians, writes Bruce S. Thornton in City Journal, in a review of Andrew Bostom's book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History:

Islamic anti-Semitism begins, as do all things in Islam, with the Koran--the immutable, infallible, timeless words of Allah dictated to the Prophet--in which Jews are cursed with "abasement and humiliation" and are "deserving of Allah's wrath" because they rejected Mohammed. Jews are further characterized as corrupt, treacherous rebels and infidels whose destiny is to be the enemy of the true believers.

...Further, Jew-hatred has been voiced over the centuries by the most respected theologians, jurists, and Koranic commentators, such as al-Tabari, Baydawi, and ibn Kathir. In the sixteenth century, the Moroccan sheikh al-Maghili's voluminous diatribes against the Jews of the Touat oasis--"Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews," he wrote--culminated in a massacre of Touat's Jews and the destruction of their synagogue. Closer to our own times, this tradition can be found in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and prolific Koranic commentator, who was the most important theorist for modern jihadists. Qutb linked his call for a fundamentalist return to Islam to the Jews, whose "wicked nature . . . is full of hatred for Islam," and whose defeat would come about only at the hands of Muslims who "implement Islam completely in their lives." And modern terrorists have accompanied their murders of Israelis with similar justifications that refer to the Koran and Koranic exegetes, as in a 1968 Cairo conference that called repeatedly for forcing the Jews to return to their proper status of permanent abasement, humiliation, and wretchedness.

Like the Koran, the deeds and sayings of Mohammed collected in the hadith justify Muslim hatred of Jews. Mohammed repeatedly defines the proper behavior of Muslims by contrasting it with the customs and practices of the Jews. In the hadith, Jews are treacherous, envious, and spiteful. They alter the sacred scriptures to remove references to Mohammed; cast evil spells on Muslims; poison Mohammed; and reject spitefully Mohammed's revelation and status as "seal of the prophets." This alleged Jewish hostility toward Muslims justifies Muslims' obligation to subdue and humiliate Jews. A seventeenth-century Yemenite ruler, Imam al-Mahdi, desired to fulfill Mohammed's deathbed charge, as recorded in a canonical hadith, that "two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs," so he exiled the Jews of Yemen to the desolate plain of Tihama, destroying synagogues and desecrating Torah scrolls. Only 1,000 of the original 10,000 Jews survived the ordeal.

...Based solely on the historical evidence, Bostom's survey and 500 pages of supporting documentation sweep away what he calls the "false pillars" of current apologies for Muslim anti-Semitism: that Muslim hostility to Jews is not grounded in Islamic theology, and that Jews living in historic Muslim societies were not subject to subservience and persecution. For Westerners doubtful of their own culture's rectitude and unsure about what to believe, it might be pretty to think that Islam is just another Abrahamic path to God that shares the values of Christianity and Judaism. But the facts that Bostom collects tell another tale, one we should heed if we are to prevail against jihadist terror.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The L.A. Times And Rielle Hunter: Way Too Little, Way Too Late
Finally, finally, after suffering nationwide media blog ridicule, the L.A. Times squeeezes out a story about how they didn't tell the story, plus a "timeline," bylined Kate Linthicum, of l'affaire Edwards and Hunter. And even then, they couldn't quite manage to score the facts. For example, Linthicum's timeline has this:

2006: Edwards meets filmmaker Rielle Hunter in New York. His One America Committee pays her more than $100,000 to produce four videos about Edwards.

Um, to call her a "filmmaker" is a bit ridiculous. The woman made a 20-minute short called "Billy Bob and Them," and then miraculously sold herself to the Edwards campaign. She apparently has a few unproduced TV, stage, and screenplays in a box somewhere -- much like half of Los Angeles.

Fox has the details here, on former Manhattan party girl Hunter:

In 2000, Lisa Druck re-emerged in Los Angeles as newly single Rielle Hunter, writer and producer of a 20-minute-long comedy called "Billy Bob and Them," which she also acted in and self-distributed.

Mooradian worked on "Billy Bob and Them." When he met Rielle, he said, she was just getting or had gotten a divorce.

He conceded he was paid about $50, if that, to shoot the low-budget film in Hunter's "very nice" Los Angeles-area home that he supposed she'd gotten in the divorce.

The film, he said, didn't have much of a plot. "It was very New Age-y. It had something to do with altars and temples and crystals." The shoot lasted two days.

Mooradian told me: "She definitely had some connection to the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, and there was an offer to meet the Dalai Lama."

By 2006 Rielle had hooked up with Mimi Hockman, a New York party planner whose clients, according to her Web site, are mostly obscure corporations. Even though neither of them had any real credits for making documentaries or political promo films for presidential candidates, they somehow pitched the idea of doing Web-only short pieces to Edwards.

...Since neither of them had any experience, the pair brought in Colin Weil, an experienced ad man whose company created AIDS Walk in Los Angeles in 1984 and has a long list of impressive credits. He was introduced to Hockman through a mutual Hollywood friend, Weil says, declining to give a name.

And Kate Coe, of course, had it here and here, in 2007.

Four of the Edwards films are available here. In the first one, "Plane Truths" (heh heh), he wants the country to see "who I am, who I really am."

Well, it seems he's accomplished that!

"I want to see our party lead on the great moral issues that face our country," he continues.

And eeeuw, icky, when he's all flirty during the film, I'm guessing it's with Hunter.

"Do you think most normal Americans have any idea what we do?"

We do now!

Finally, I hadn't seen the byline Kate Linthicum before, so I looked her up. Yes, while they're throwing all the experienced reporters out of the place, we've now got the apparently undersupervised intern (Barnard Class of 2008) writing the paper:

Randy Hagihara, senior editor for recruitment at The Los Angeles Times

I hired Kate Linthicum to be an intern at the Los Angeles Times this summer.

Katie, honey, in this town, we know to look at imdb.com to see if somebody actually is a filmmaker. This is a good dating tip for you, too, dear, because half the guys you'll meet at the bar in this town are "producers."

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Second Class Citizens And Their Second Class Children
The L.A. Times editorial board comes out, as I, of course, am, against Proposition 8 -- against rewriting the California Constitution to discriminate against gays and lesbians by embedding wording "that would eliminate the fundamental right to same-sex marriage":

Supporters of Proposition 8 insist that the measure is in no way intended to diminish the rights of gays and lesbians, but instead means to encourage ideal households for the raising of children and to put a stop to activist judges. Besides, they say, domestic partnerships provide all the same rights as marriage.

In a meeting with The Times' editorial board, supporters argued at length that children are best off when raised by their own biological, married mothers and fathers. Even if that were true -- and there is much room for dispute -- this measure in no way moves society closer to such a traditional picture. Gay and lesbian couples already are raising their own children and will continue to do so, as will single parents and adoptive and blended families. Using the supporters'own reasoning, it would be better for same-sex parents to marry.

Proposition 8 supporters are right that domestic partnerships come exceedingly close to guaranteeing the same rights as marriage, as the state's high court recognized. Still, there are differences. Some are statutory -- domestic partners must share a residence, while married couples can live separately -- and others are pragmatic -- studies have found that domestic partners do not receive the same treatment or recognition from hospital staff, employers and the public as spouses do.

But it was Ronald M. George, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who cut through to the essence of the issue in the May 15 opinion he wrote: "[A]ffording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples."

In other words, the very act of denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry -- traditionally the highest legal and societal recognition of a loving commitment -- by definition relegates them and their relationships to second-class status, separate and not all that equal.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Dick Soup
Olympic-level dining with Bill Plaschke and Kevin Pang. I'm not embedding it because the web geniuses at the Chicago Trib have a player that doesn't just play when you click it but whenever you open my site. For the rest of the month. So, in the name of sanity, here's the link.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Your Colon Isn't Dirty
Well, not in a bad way (more on that below). I'm always amazed by people who think a "colon cleanse" is a good idea, simply because some chick in head-to-toe hemp tells them so. Meet its cousin, the "detoxifying" diet. Dumb, dumb, dumb. A detox diet left Dawn Page, a 52-year-old British mother, brain-damaged and epileptic. James Smith writes for the London Indepenent:

Dawn Page, 52, who has two children, was told to drink an extra four pints of water daily and cut salt intake to prevent fluid retention and lose weight. But within days of going on the Amazing Hydration Diet she was vomiting uncontrollably and suffered an epileptic fit

Mrs Page secured a £810,000 payout last week from her nutritionist's insurer after a six-year legal battle. Barbara Nash, who refers to herself as a "nutritional therapist and life coach", denies any fault. The High Court in London ratified the settlement without mention of liability.

Mr Page said yesterday: "She was not obese but Dawn liked to look after her weight. But just days after she started the diet, she began to feel unwell and started vomiting, which the nutritionist said was all part of the detox process. Her life has been seriously affected, perhaps ruined, by this fad-type way of losing weight."

Mrs Page, who had tried a number of diets since the birth of her two sons, was 12 stone when she contacted Ms Nash in late September 2001. On 2 October, Ms Page collapsed in the family home with a grand mal seizure. She was rushed to Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon, where doctors diagnosed a shortage of sodium levels in her plasma, which acts as a cushion for the brain. Because the plasma contained such low levels of sodium, water entered the brain, causing permanent damage. Mrs Page now relies on notes to remember basic instructions.

From the BBC on detox diets:

Detox diets are based on the theory that toxins from "unhealthy" food and drink build up in the body and can lead to health problems. Purging those toxins - through restricted diets, lots of water or using particular supplements - is meant to leave people feeling better and, often, thinner. But critics disagree with the principle. Dr Andrew Wadge, of the Food Standards Agency, has branded detox regimes "nonsense" and said the body has its own system of getting rid of toxins - the liver.

From Science Based Medicine on the colon cleanse:

Indeed, if you hang around on enough the "right" discussion forums, you will get the distinct sense that they find the very thought that they have feces accumulating in them all the time, loaded with bacteria, to be hateful and impossible to bear. This attitude is, of course, odd, to say the least, given that the very function the colon evolved over millions of years to do is to remove our digestive wastes safely and efficiently, extracting water, electrolytes, and what little other nutrients are left over, before depositing the waste into whatever receptical its owner sees fit to use. For the vast majority of people, whether it does it three times a day or once every three days does not matter much. Worse, in the cases of people who do have a real parasitic infection, all the purging in the world won't get rid of the critters causing the disease, no matter how many times a day one drives oneself to go. Only appropriate drugs to kill the parasites can correct the problem.

...One thing's for sure. Colon cleansing is a dubious and almost always useless procedure that shows no signs of going away. There is a thriving market offering an amazing number of products that claim to be able to rid you of all that nasty fecal buildup that doesn't exist. It may be the most obvious retort in the world for such woo, but the very nature of these sorts of products makes it difficult to avoid-nay, it demands that I not avoid-saying that colon cleansing is a load of...well, you know.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The McCain Mutiny
Paris Hilton answers back:

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Enquiring Minds
Byron York speculates on NRO why the mainstream media haven't reported on l'affaire Edwards, echoing some of what I've been saying to friends these past few days:

First, the journalists don't believe that news organizations should just uncritically pass on the reporting of the Enquirer. They have a point; the Enquirer has been quite accurate on some stories and inaccurate on others. One could argue that the tabloid's reporting on this particular story contains a wealth of detail that remains un-denied by Edwards or anyone else. Still, there's nothing wrong with news organizations being skeptical of the source.

But the question is not whether the news organizations should simply repeat the Enquirer's reporting. It's whether they are actively pursuing the story, doing their own reporting in an effort to confirm the basic allegations that Edwards had an affair with campaign staffer Rielle Hunter, and then had a baby with her, and is now covering it up. And here it appears -- from this completely unscientific survey -- that there is not a lot of independent reporting going on.

Instead, some big-time journalists seem to believe the Enquirer has nailed the story, and they are waiting for the tabloid to release the full results of its reporting. In the meantime, they are staying away from the story because it appeared in the Enquirer. In other words, they're waiting for the Enquirer to fully report a story that they wouldn't otherwise report... because it's in the Enquirer.

That could have changed by this point. If news organizations had thrown a lot of resources at the story in an attempt to confirm (or disprove) the Enquirer's allegations, it's likely some of them would have come up with something in the two and a half weeks since the Enquirer reported the story on July 22. Instead, there has been nothing.

Yoohoo, LATimes, we're still waiting! Just as they're firing reporters by the gross, they still don't have news on Edwards or a gossip column a la the New York Post's Page Six -- the stuff readers really want. Meanwhile, yesterday, on the front page, "Sikorsky" was misspelled "Sikorksy." Guess they let go one too many copy editors!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Man On A Mission!
Find the time machine and get back to 1987!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

She'll Have Hers Scrambled, With A Side Of Ph.D.
I'm all for women selling their eggs, people selling a kidney, and for infertile couples to go to India and pay a woman there to have their baby. And if it's legal for two consenting adults to exchange tomatoes for money, or car repair for money, why can't they exchange sex for pay? Free market, consenting adults, huh?

Here's a story about how more women are selling their eggs...or, as they seem to like to call it, donating them...for a fee. Via CNN:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- With a full load of classes, two young children, and her bills piling up, Michelle decided to face her economic straits in a pretty unorthodox way. As the nation's economy is slumping, some fertility clinics say interest in donating has surged.

As the nation's economy is slumping, some fertility clinics say interest in donating has surged.

She is donating her eggs to an infertile couple.

"The cost of living is crazy right now, with two kids, gas prices, and rent...I'm living paycheck to paycheck" said the 24-year-old, who did not give her last name to protect her identity. "I just really need the money to finish school."

Michelle is not alone. As the nation's economy is slumping, some fertility clinics say interest in donating has surged.

Of course, while I have no problem with human egg-vending, the answer for Michelle (and I'm speculating she's a single mother since no hubby is mentioned) might've been to wait until she had her degree, a career under her belt, some money saved up, and and a daddy for those kiddies before she got herself knocked up.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Pert Minus
It's always the last ones you'd ever want to see naked who show up bare-ass nude:

From the there's no bare there department (sorry, Gert, couldn't resist), check out the message at gotopless.org:

Welcome to Gotopless.org!
We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men. Rael, spiritual leader and founder of gotopless.org states: "as long as men can be topless, constitutionally women should have the same right, or men should also be forced to wear something hiding their chest."

Why a National GoTopless Protest day?
Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On Aug 23rd, 2008, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under "14th amendment" in the column on the right.)

Why this protest in August?
In 1970, Congress designated August 26 as Women's Equality Day "as a reminder of women's continuing efforts for equality". It is indeed on August 26, 1920, after a 72-year struggle, that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. was finally ratified, granting women the right to vote nationwide.

What will happen that day?
Across America, topless women and men will peacefully rally in the streets, parks, on the beaches of their towns and cities. Activities will start at NOON local time in each city. Topfree performances will be given by various artists to honor Women's Equalitly Day and to convey how natural it is to be topfree for women in public just like it is for men.

Toplessness court cases here.

Bare breasts in Paris? Yawn. They're everywhere. From the Paris Métro, yet another pair:


And here, from the Herald Sun/Australia, how American breasts, bared in Paris, went over with the U.S. Postal Service:

A MAN who as a child was cared for by 1920s Paris pin-up queen Josephine Baker has claimed a moral victory after forcing the US postal service to accept postcards featuring the bare-breasted "Black Venus".

The trouble started last year when Jean-Claude Baker, a New York restaurateur who Josephine apparently described as the 13th of her 12 adopted children, decided to mail out 15,000 postcards promoting his business.

The picture he chose dated from 1926 and showed the legendary African-American dancer, singer and cultural icon posing topless in her feather costume from the Folies-Bergeres music hall in Paris.

"I found this very pretty picture, it was very sweet,'' Mr Baker said, explaining how before printing the postcards, a friend suggested he clear the watercolour with the US postal service.

"When I went there, the teller said 'This is not at all acceptable. This is pornographic advertising!'

The other tellers and people started to gather around. It was humiliating,'' Mr Baker said.

Not to be beaten, Mr Baker asked his printers to superimpose a banner stamped with the word "censored'' over the offending breasts, but again the post office refused to accept the cards.

"The banner still allowed a bit of the breast to be seen,'' he said.

He went ahead and posted the cards with a larger "censored'' banner, but not before contacting a leading civil liberties organisation.

Talks between New York Civil Liberties Union and the US postal service established that the tellers were wrong and the mail carrier eventually agreed to accept the cards.

More Puritanical silliness here. And here.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Lesbo Genius And The Straight Boy
Just posted another Advice Goddess column, a lesbian who finds sex with men repellant, but contemplates getting into a relationship with a guy. Here's her question:

I've been an out lesbian for several years and am only attracted to women. A close male friend recently confessed his feelings for me. I've known him for years, and we connect in a way I've never connected with anybody. If he were a woman, I'd consider him my soul mate. If only I could somehow make myself bisexual. I love him, but have no desire for mutual pants-less-ness. In fact, the idea of sleeping with him grosses me out. Does no sex have to mean no relationship? Lots of hetero women have low sex drives, and lots are married! Should I give a relationship a try, but mandate that pants must be worn at all times?

--Dream Or Disaster Waiting To Happen?

An excerpt from my answer:

Picture your situation as an episode of "Fear Factor." Host Joe Rogan turns to you and says, "Okay, missy, it's time...strip down to your bra and panties and lie in bed with your soul mate!" You freeze and whisper to Rogan, "Is it too late to take the night in the body bag with giant hissing cockroaches, flesh-eating worms, crickets and stink beetles?"

It seems you're a lesbian, not a "lesbian" who takes vacations -- hopping the ferry from the Isle of Lesbos to the mainland for the occasional hetero holiday. But, hey, why let that stop you from getting into a relationship with a straight guy? After all, as you point out, lots of hetero women have low sex drives, and lots of them are married (ideally, to men who also have low sex drives). The question is, do YOU have a low sex drive? Or, better yet, a nonexistent one? Does he? If not, you can announce that there will be none of that "mutual pants-less-ness," and he could be nodding like a bobblehead, but consciously or subconsciously, he'll be thinking, "Nah, I'll get there. Just a matter of time." It isn't a malevolent thing, just how guys are wired. Little by little, he'll work on wearing you down: "We'll just watch a movie on the couch." "Just take off your shirt." "Just take off your sports bra"...

Full question and comments here.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Pucker Up And Die
Andy Borowitz reports on the fate of the assholes among us:

A new medical report showing that excessive cell phone use may increase the risk of cancer has sparked widespread fear among the nation's assholes, prominent assholes confirmed today.

For years, America's assholes have talked relentlessly on their cell phones -- while waiting on supermarket lines, sitting on the bus, or even crossing the street -- regardless of the effect their annoying chatter has had on those around them.

But with a new doctor's warning that cell phone use could pose a serious health risk, many jerks and douchebags are considering changing their ways.

Tracy Klugian, 32, an asshole who works as a realtor in Tallahassee, Florida, said that he and his Bluetooth have been "inseparable" for the past three years, but the new health scare may change that.

"I didn't think twice about using my cell when it was only annoying other people, but now that it may be harming me, I'm going to have to kiss it goodbye," he said. "This totally sucks."

When asked what he will miss most about his cell phone, Mr. Klugian said, "I loved when it would go off in the middle of a movie and wreck the experience for everyone seated around me -- that was awesome."

My favorite recent asshole on a cell phone experience: I go to a cafe with a no cell phones policy, posted prominently on a sign on the front door and on a sign within. A woman seated directly behind me, like with her head 10 inches behind mine, started yammering on her phone -- bad manners with or without a sign.

Others glared in her direction. I said something. "They have a no cell phones policy here."

She ignored me, walked over to a booth, and kept yammering.

"They ask that you take your calls outside," I continued.

She glared at me. "I'm talking to my son!" she snarled. (And we care?) Actually, I don't care if it's Jesus on the line, and you and he are working out the schedule for the second coming.

"Take some Prozac!" she added.

"Because my taking Prozac will cure you of your bad manners?"

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

The Two Stooges
Two Muslims managed to blow their own dumbshit asses up before they could murder other people. And then two more Muslim stooges accidentally offed themselves in the middle of a road while preparing to murder others. From the Khaleej Times, via thereligionofpeace.com:

"Two mullahs (prayer leaders) were killed when a suicide vest they were building went off prematurely," said Zemarai Bashary, spokesman for the interior ministry, which handles police matters.

The pair was in a mosque near the border with Pakistan, he said.

Two other militants were killed when a mine they were trying to plant in a road went off in the southern province of Kandahar, said police commander Abdul Raziq.

I'm reminded of the ads that used to be on loads of taxis in New York City: "If you smoke, please try Carlton."

If you're primitive and stupid enough to try to blow other people up because you believe some asshole in an ugly nightgown with a flea-bitten beard who told you you'll get to fuck a lot of virgins after you're in a thousand tiny little bloody pieces for Allah...please be dumb enough to smoke yourself first.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Does A Mother Get Any More Unfit?
Mary Winkler, husband murderer, gets custody of her children. Glenn Sacks writes:

Mary Winkler--who shot her husband in the back and then refused to aid him or call 911 as he slowly bled to death for 20 minutes--walked away a free woman last year after serving a farcically brief "sentence" for her crimes.

Mary Winkler's claims of abuse were largely uncorroborated during the trial. According to the testimony from Matthew Winkler's oldest daughter, Patricia, the dead father--who as he lay dying looked at his wife and asked "why?"--was a good man and did not abuse her mother.

Mary Winkler has been in a custody battle with Matthew Winkler's parents, who have been raising the three girls since the murder. The Winklers sought to terminate Mary Winkler's parental rights and adopt the girls, a position I've supported. Mary Winkler was granted supervised visits with her daughters last year. Now, sadly, she has gained back custody of the three girls, which is clearly not in the girls' best interests.

More from a column by Glenn Sacks here, from before Winkler won custody:

Since the March 22, 2006 killing, Mary and Matthew's three children--girls ages 2, 8 and 10--have lived with Matthew's parents, Dan and Diane Winkler. The Winkler grandparents seek to terminate Mary's parental rights and adopt the girls. Mary, who served only 67 days for the killing, wants custody of her girls, and went on Oprah this week to win public sympathy for her cause.

...Mary Winkler says she's sorry for killing Matthew, but she does everything she can to portray him as a monster and herself as his meek, timid victim. Despite her protestations, she has no concept of the gravity of her crime, and claims her dead husband's parents are mistreating her by not letting her be with her children. Her court pleading reads, "The three minor children continue to be withheld from their mother without just cause," which her legal team deems "unconscionable." Winkler killed the children's father--if that's not "just cause" for withholding a child from a parent, what is?

In describing her crime to Oprah, Mary Winkler says she was angry at her husband and "just wanted to talk to him," and then she "heard a boom." A more complete description of the incident would have been that she wanted to talk to him, waited until he fell asleep, retrieved the shotgun, pumped it, aimed it at his back, pulled the trigger, and then "heard a boom." Her description of the killing was so devoid of personal responsibility that even a sympathetic Oprah didn't accept it.

Perhaps the most absurd aspect of both the trial and Oprah was the way Mary highlighted the white platform shoes which she claimed Matthew "made her" wear, and which she said were deeply humiliating to her. During the trial, Mary held up the shoe and bowed her head down in mock pain and shame. Oprah bought it, telling her audience that on her show "everybody gasped when they saw the shoe." It was up to feminist Court TV commentator Lisa Bloom, Gloria Allred's daughter, to explain to Oprah that in any "big city" people would have "laughed at" Mary's claims that the shoes were part of the "abuse" she suffered. Bloom added:

"We [at Court TV] all thought it was a first degree murder case."

She "heard a boom" and then walked away and didn't call 911? After shooting him while he was sleeping? And then serves only 67 days? And then picks up her children like she was on an extended business trip in the Caribbean?

If she were a man, is there even the remotest possibility the "justice" would be the same?

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Manicurist's Nightmare

Musée Guimet, of Asian art, Paris

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Violence Against Men
A British taxi driver was robbed of everything -- his family life, his social life, his credibility, his livelihood, his money, and the well-being of his children. The perp, a 17-year-old girl who falsely accused him off rape, got off with a two-month wrist-slap: two months in jail. And they won't even print her name in the paper. Joe Sinclair writes in the Yorkshire Evening Post:

Taxi driver Aftab Ahmed, 44, of Allerton, Bradford, was accused of rape in January last year after driving the girl home.

The 17-year-old had been out drinking in Bradford city centre with her sister and friends before they put her in his taxi.

The girl, from Shipley, West Yorkshire, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice when her case came to trial last month.

Speaking after she was sentenced to a four-month detention and training order at Bradford Magistrates' Court, Mr Ahmed said the girl had "destroyed" his life.

The teenager was told she would serve two months in custody, but the married father of 11-year-old twin daughters said: "Today is the worst day of my life, I can't imagine that the person who destroyed a whole family got only two months. ... She should be named and shamed."

She absolutely should. And I believe those who can be proven to have falsely accused someone else of rape should be made to serve the time the falsely accused would've, and pay restitution as well.

That said, how, really, do you ever give this guy back what he lost and repay him for the pain he and wife and his kids must have gone through? And, all because he picked up the wrong drunk brat and tried to get her home safely.

Here's a ruined life a little closer to home: a doctor who lost everything after being accused of rape, and under the most unbelievable circumstances, in an excerpt from a Pulitzer-winning piece by the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz:

They were, indeed, remarkable charges. If the accusation were to be believed, the defense attorney pointed out, Dr. Griffin had decided in the midst of his examination, to place his tongue in a vagina swimming in fecal matter thanks to the condition in which the patient arrived for her colonoscopy. And he had chosen to do this in a thinly curtained room surrounded by staff workers four feet away, a room in which his assistants could enter any moment. Dr. Griffin had, in his career, performed close to 9,000 colonoscopies and endoscopies without ever having shown such proclivities -- and now, the defense argument went, of all the women he might have violated he had decided to sodomize one in this condition?

... There would be an additional charge of sex abuse, on Ms. Jeffreys's complaint, that while performing her colonoscopy the doctor touched her vagina.

On the stand Ms. Jeffreys told of the apprehension she had felt about testifying, the strength she had needed to endure. As became clear early in the proceedings, the complaining witness had nothing to fear in this courtroom, where she was given singular protection from questions that might raise questions about her credibility. Judge Kahn prohibited the defense from raising instances of the complainant's alleged perjury in the civil case against her landlord, and in testimony before the Office of Professional and Medical Conduct. The defense could not raise her prior meritless litigation, her history of financial trouble, her string of bounced checks, nor could the jury know the millions she was asking in her suit against the doctor -- all issues that could establish motive and a willingness to lie for financial gain.

Shockingly, Griffin was convicted. The conviction was reversed. Shockingly, the Manhattan D.A.'s office mounted another trial:

The atmosphere of the second trial and the rulings from the bench bore small resemblance to that of the first. Unpreoccupied with imperatives like the need to encourage rape victims to come forward, Judge Jeffrey Atlas afforded the defense the standard rights of cross-examination. The judge also precluded any attempt to inject the race of the complaining witness, a black woman, as prosecutor Fleming had done at the first trial.

At this trial, attorney Callan described the effects of Demerol and Versed, a drug known to produce memory loss and sexual fantasy -- noting, for instance, that women going into labor are not given Versed because its power is such it will wipe out the memory of the birth.

When it was all over, five weeks ago, and the verdict of the jury due, Dr. Griffin went to church to say a prayer and then to court where he waited, head bowed. He did not have long to wait before the jurors filed in, looking straight at him, some smiling, and then the foreman announced his acquittal. The doctor broke down in tears and there were tears, too, in the eyes of some of the jurors -- whose views of the prosecutors' case was evidently shared by the judge. After the trial, Judge Atlas asked attorney Callan why the doctor hadn't waived a jury trial.

"I would have had your client acquitted two days ago," the judge told him.

Uncertainly gathering the shards of a career, the doctor -- still stripped of his medical license -- has, as they say, no immediate plans. It will take a lot more than a license to restore the world lost to him when the tort lawyers and the District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit descended.

via Glenn Sacks

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

More Solutions For Scumbags
Yesterday, it was slydial. Today, it's service that gives you a fake doctor's note to get out of work. From MSNBC via Reuters:

CANBERRA, Australia - Australian medical authorities are warning employees against using an online company that is planning to sell fake doctors' sick notes that would allow people to take more time off.

The notes, available from www.doctorsnotestore.com, cost about $38 each and aim to exploit Australians' fondness for "chucking a sickie," or taking days off while supposedly ill.

Most companies require workers who take a sick day off to back it up with a medical certificate.

"It is clearly inciting and abetting fraud," said Wayne Herdy, a doctor and lawyer from the Australian Medical Association in Queensland state.

...The website says the company also provides notes for Europeans, and for gym-goers to cancel contracts due to illness or pregnancy. The site offers Internet links for medical notes in Canada and the United States as well.

While the products look "extremely authentic," the company said the notes are meant to be used as novelty items and not for any illegal purpose.

Right.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Big (Electric) Bird

Electric scooter, Santa Monica.

Goes about 12 miles before it needs to be plugged in for eight hours and recharged. Snazzy, though.

The guy driving it also had a darling Asian girlfriend with a little black outfit and a bright yellow belt and bright yellow hat to match his scooter. (Now there's a dealership incentive!)

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Because It Doesn't Cost Them Much Doesn't Mean You Get To Steal It
I'm working on a question from a guy who had a tiff with his wife because he'd order a drink -- say, coffee in a diner where there are free refills -- and she'd order water and then take sips from his coffee cup. The waitress and manager both asked if she wanted coffee a couple of times, and she said no, but they knew better than to call her on the carpet on her rudeness (the restaurant can't win in that situation).

Apparently, she did this in fast food places when the guy got a cola or some cold drink. He'd drink his drink and get a refill, and she'd drink out of the refill. He didn't complain there -- maybe because he just wasn't irked enough, perhaps because of the price point of the restaurant or the fact that it isn't a service place (which doesn't change your ethical obligations an iota).

At the diner, when she did it, he finally said something -- that it wasn't "proper" to not order a drink and use his free refills to get something for nothing. (And note that she didn't just finish his one cup of coffee...there were refills involved.)

The woman's argument: there was no sign posted. Well, must there be signs for EVERYTHING? "Look, all you ethically bankrupt assholes out there, refills are per person, per cup...you have to actually buy a cup of something to get the refill."

And it matters not a whit that the coke or coffee might costs the restaurant three cents or some ridiculously low price. They have overhead and insurance and plenty of costs to pay, especially with the rising costs of food lately, often due to the increase in the price of gas.

There's a guy out there -- and I won't mention his book and thus promote it -- who talks about how he bought one $7 bag of popcorn at the movies and took it back for three months for free refills. First of all, he was doing this on dates. I've had some poor boyfriends, and some rich boyfriends, and I'm a girl who, if you're poor, will encourage you to take me on a date to a park bench overlooking the ocean, and I'll buy the wine or the lemonade. What I will not abide is an unethical boyfriend. Any woman who does is an idiot. If he's unethical to them, sooner or later, he'll be unethical to you, and don't believe otherwise for a minute.

The same, of course, goes for you guys out there. Except, in your case, an unethical girlfriend is especially dangerous. Unethical guys don't call their girlfriends and say, "Whoops, the little blue strip says pregnant!"

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Breakups For Assholes
I've always thought, if you're grown up enough to have a relationship, you're grown up enough to break up the civilized way -- by telling the person you were seeing that it's over. Not by FedEx or voicemail. If your relationship's a short thing, person-to-person on the phone. If your relationship's a serious thing, in person, but not in a public place where the person you're seeing is likely to be shocked, upset, and/or embarrassed (and plus, it's no fun for other diners if it gets heated and/or one or both of you starts weeping).

Well, now, Matt Richtel writes in The New York Times about the latest breakup technology for rude weenie assholes, Slydial:

The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation -- or unwanted intimacy -- on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received.

Ms. Gorman used a test version of Slydial that has been available for months. But since the finished product was unveiled to the public last week, more than 200,000 people have used the service, which is supported by advertisers like McDonald's.

The concept may sound antithetical to a digital era defined by ubiquitous communication and interactivity, but Slydial turns out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.

Here's one: Pay to date hookers or gigolos until you're enough of a person to end it with somebody without doing it by phone message.

I particularly loved this bit:

But Ms. Gorman, who works in marketing in Manhattan, said that using Slydial to break off her relationship allowed her to communicate effectively without the potential anxiety.

"If it's some jerk I went out on a couple of dates with, I can do without that drama," she said.

"Text messaging someone 'I would prefer not to see you again' is really not my style," she added. "But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation."

Uh, who told you life would be without awkward conversations and potential anxiety?

Oh, wait -- maybe somebody at this camp or one like it, from a story by Tina Kelley in last week's NYT:

Jill Tipograph, a camp consultant, said most high-end sleep-away camps in the Northeast now employ full-time parent liaisons like Ms. Miller, who earns $6,000 plus a waiver of the camp's $10,000 tuition for each of her two daughters. Ms. Tipograph describes the job as "almost like a hotel concierge listening to a client's needs."

The liaisons are emblematic of what sleep-away camp experts say is an increasing emphasis on catering to increasingly high-maintenance parents, including those who make unsolicited bunk placement requests, flagrantly flout a camp's ban on cellphones and junk food, and consider summer an ideal time to give their offspring a secret vacation from Ritalin.

You know, more and more, I have this fantasy that we'll have birth control pills ground up into all the drinking water, and you'll have to get a waiver from a battery of shrinks before you get to foist your offspring on the rest of us.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Lonesome Roads
Nothing like driving home from dinner at Yamashiro at midnight when nobody's on the road. In a Honda Insight, that is.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Uncle Miltie On Smoking Pot
Milton Friedman, that is.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

A Cool Woman Died
I don't usually read the obits, but Margaret Ray Ringenberg's caught my eye. The picture above it (in the LA Times print edition only), of the grandma-looking lady in the flight suit with a scarf trailing behind her, says "Lifelong Aviator." The headline reads "Pilot ferried military planes during WWII."

Now, I get carsick from my own driving, and I'm even worse on planes, but I've always loved airplanes and admired the women who did what it took to become aviatrices when the rest of the ladies were home baking bundt cakes. Via the AP:

Margaret Ray Ringenberg, an Indiana pilot who ferried military planes across the country during World War II, died in her sleep Monday in Oshkosh, Wis., where she was attending an Experimental Aircraft Assn. event. She was 87.

...After World War II, Ringenberg served as a flight instructor and competed in numerous air races, including an around-the-world race at age 72.

She continued to fly into her 80s and had logged more than 40,000 miles in the cockpit.

...Ringenberg got the bug to fly when she was a child and a barnstorming pilot landed in a field near her family's farm in northeastern Indiana. After she graduated from high school, she was resigned to becoming a flight attendant -- thinking that was the only job on airplanes available for women.

During World War II, however, flight schools suffered a shortage of students as men were drafted.

She was 19 when she flew solo for the first time in 1941. Then she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

When the war wound down, she returned to the Fort Wayne area. In 1945, during a newspaper strike in Fort Wayne, she flew over the area dropping thousands of leaflets announcing Japan's surrender.

She married banker Morris Ringenberg in 1946 and took a job answering phones at the airport. In the 1950s, she began racing and giving flying lessons. Her husband died in 2003.

Here's her website. Unfortunately, the groovy pic in the L.A. Times isn't on there.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Other Countries Probably Wish They Could Suck Like America Does
Would somebody please get the message to Barbara Ehrenreich already?

Look, we've got problems, and plenty of stuff in need of changing in America, but all in all, it's better to be American than a citizen of any other country. Beyond the fact that this is a country where poor people have cars and dishwashers, just look at freedom of speech. We have miles and miles of free speech:

photo by Gregg Sutter

Think other countries have free speech, too, to the extent we do? Think again -- as Maclean's in Canada is dragged to a kangaroo court on a supposed "human rights violation" because Mark Steyn wrote, in a book excerpt Maclean's published, about Islam's threat to the west.

Sorry, but you violate somebody's human rights when you punch them in the nose -- or blow them up or behead them -- not when you, boohoo, float the idea that their backward and primitive beliefs are a threat to western culture and Enlightenment values...which, by the way, Muslim beliefs absolutely are...starting with the Quran directive to convert or kill the infidel (that would be us).

But, back to Barbara E., here she is again, whimpering about what terrible place America is in her latest book. Laura Vanderkam lays bare the ridiculousness in City Journal:

Writing about the prospects of young college grads, she says, "My son followed up his Ivy League education with years of phone answering and fact-checking before joining me as one of the tiny number of self-supporting freelance writers who do not have the advantage of a trust fund." Answering phones? The horror!

Indeed, Ehrenreich herself is probably Exhibit Number One for the fact that there's a lot more to America than the "bleak landscape cluttered with boarded-up homes and littered with broken dreams" that she's intent on seeing. This is a country where a bright girl named Barbara from Butte, Montana, can grow up to become a best-selling author. And a black boy raised by a single mother can become the Democratic nominee for president. Such stories have no place in Ehrenreich's America. She falls into the trap of mourning "America's lost glory"--such as the golden age when Henry Ford made sure his workers could afford to buy his cars. These days, "the sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army." But Michigan's infant mortality rate for nonwhite babies in 1936 (Ford's heyday) was 71 deaths for every 1,000 live births. If that's a golden age, I prefer our current nightmare. Ehrenreich writes that she sang "America the Beautiful" as a child and "meant it," but during her childhood, Woody Guthrie was singing a verse of his classic tune (which she never mentions) about folks standing outside the relief office, wondering if this land was still made for them. Memo to Ehrenreich: It has always been fashionable to complain about how bad America is.

The truth is that since Ehrenreich's 1940s and 1950s childhood, American living standards have risen grandly. We are living longer and earning more. Yet in Ehrenreich's view, everything is falling apart, and America is about to "become one of those areas of the world prefixed by the mournful word former." It's a grim take--but thankfully, it's not universally shared. Senator Barack Obama, for instance, has described his own food-stamps-to-millionaire journey as evidence of what's right with America. Maybe in time the social critic who views herself as the champion of the working class will get the message, too.

This is this incredible place where, unlike in many countries in Europe, you aren't chained to a social station in life by virtue of who you were born to. I mean, look at Oprah and any number of other people who've come from nothing and who've gone on to a whole lot of something.

Oh, and P.S. I "tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army." That's not a "sad truth." You can get some pretty groovy stuff there. In fact, somebody did a story on me for a libertarian magazine (not reason...and I think it'll be out before the end of the year), and for the photo, I wore a body-hugging denim Guess shirt I got at Salvation Army for $5, and a vintage necklace I bought on eBay for $3.

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

Stop Crime. Wear Panties.
About 90 percent of the paparazzi problem in L.A....it's about stuff like Britney going panties-free, says Chief Bratton. Here's the video. And from the AP on MSNBC:

LOS ANGELES - Police Chief William Bratton said Thursday the city has had fewer problems with paparazzi since Britney Spears "started wearing clothes" and other celebrities changed their partying ways.

"If you notice, since Britney started wearing clothes and behaving; Paris is out of town not bothering anybody anymore, thank God, and evidently, Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don't seem to have much of an issue," Bratton told KNBC-TV.

..."If the ones that attract the paparazzi behave in the first place, like we expect of anybody, that solves about 90 percent of the problem. The rest we can deal with," he said.

Cover your coochies, ladies! We've got real crime in this town!

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« July 2008 | Home | September 2008 »

A Man Can't Get Pussy In Saudi Arabia
"This is not news," you're thinking. Actually, it's the other kind of pussy. Donna Abu-Nasr writes for the AP:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Every single man knows: Walking a dog in the park is a sure babe magnet. Saudi Arabia's Islamic religious police, in their zeal to keep the sexes apart, want to make sure the technique doesn't catch on here. The solution: Ban selling dogs and cats as pets, as well as walking them in public.

The prohibition went into effect Wednesday in the capital, Riyadh, and authorities in the city say they will strictly enforce it -- unlike previous bans in the cities of Mecca and Jiddah, which have been ignored and failed to stop pet sales.

Violators found outside with their pets will have their beloved poodles and other furry companions confiscated by agents of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the official name of the religious police, tasked with enforcing Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic code.

The commission's general manager, Othman al-Othman, said the ban was ordered because of what he called "the rising of phenomenon of men using cats and dogs to make passes at women and pester families" as well as "violating proper behavior in public squares and malls."

"If a man is caught with a pet, the pet will be immediately confiscated and the man will be forced to sign a document pledging not to repeat the act," al-Othman told the Al-Hayat newspaper. "If he does, he will be referred to authorities." The ban does not address women.

Perhaps because, in Saudi Arabia, they have all the rights of a dog.

Thanks, Eric!

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