Doing Anything Differently Because Of The Swine Flu?
How are all of you reacting to the news?
Will We Have "Dislike Crimes"? "Just Kinda Irritated Me Crimes"?
The House voted to expand the "hate crimes" law, increasing penalties for attacks deemed to be based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity or mental or physical disability.
As a potential deterrent, this law is stupid, and blind to human nature. If somebody is in a hate-filled, murderous rage against you because you're, say, Chinese, what likelihood is there that they're going to stop in their tracks and say, "Oh, wait. I think there are increased penalties if this is a race thing"?
Thomas Ferraro writes for Reuters:
The current law, enacted four decades ago, limits federal jurisdiction over hate crimes to assaults based on race, color, religion or national origin.The bill would lift a requirement that a victim had to be attacked while engaged in a federally protected activity, like attending school, for it to be a federal hate crime.
House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer urged passage of the Federal Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.
"Hate crimes motivated by race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, and identity or disability not only injure individual victims, but also terrorize entire segments of our population and tear at our nation's social fabric," Hoyer said.
Bush had helped stop such a bill in the last Congress, arguing existing state and federal laws were adequate. But President Barack Obama asked Congress to send it to him to sign into law.
"I urge members on both sides of the aisle to act on this important civil rights issue by passing this legislation to protect all of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance," Obama said in a statement before the vote.
Conviction of a hate crime carries stepped up punishment, above and beyond that meted out for the attack. The bill would allow the federal government to help state and local authorities investigate hate crimes.
Murder is murder, and should bring with it substantial punishment, if not life in prison. You aren't less dead when a Muslim kills you because you're Jewish, and their religion commands them to convert or kill "the infidel" -- especially those who are Jews.
Chances are, you're no less missed than a man who was shot to death on the street while being robbed. Whether the robber hated the guy for having blonde hair or just shot him because he was worried about being recognized...does it really make any difference? Should it?
And where do we draw the line? How do we know the person who kills you doesn't hate you because you remind him of his evil aunt? If he's murdering you, and he's not a contract killer, he's probably got some beef against you.
Oh yeah, I guess you're out of luck if you're hated, but not because you're in one of these protected groups. And, in that, aren't we...discriminating in the name of stopping discrimination? (If there's anything I hate, it's that.)
In a piece by Sharon Dunn in the Greeley Tribune, Volokh blogger David Kopel, who published a paper arguing against hate-crime laws in 2003, concurs:
Kopel said all populations should be protected, and singling out certain groups sends the message that only those groups are worthy of special protection."These are laws that do nothing for 99 percent of crime victims," Kopel said. "If a gang of thugs beats up someone and puts them in the hospital, that's not a hate crime. But if one guy punches someone in the face because of an argument about a parking space and calls him a (racial epithet), that's a hate crime."
In his paper, Kopel argued that "once the government gets into the business of claiming that some identity groups deserve special favor, it is difficult to see why every identity group should not be given the same favor."
"Everyone deserves strong protection from crime regardless of sexual orientation or race or anything else," Kopel added, noting that he believes all hate-crime laws should be repealed.
Federal attention to the matter, however, would send a message to states as well as the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community that if society is going to grant additional penalties for violence against certain groups, that this traditionally persecuted group also is worthy of protection, say advocates.
"If you have the federal government deciding nationally, maybe some of the other individual states will do it as well," said Mindy Barton, legal director at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Colorado. "The level of impact is not just on the immediate victim, but on broader society, and if you don't have a law like this, it sends a message to people that it's OK to commit these crimes."
Oh, come on. I'm horrified by violent crimes against anyone -- as is any civilized person. But, we have laws against murder -- and they involve prosecuting based on whether you killed the person, not what you thought of them while you were doing it. Which is as it should be. We can't read minds, and trying to shouldn't be the basis of a prosecution.
The Truth About "Deadbeat Dads"
There are deadbeat dads out there, and deadbeat moms, too. From a Fox story by Lisa Porteus:
The percentage of "deadbeat" moms is actually higher than that of dads who won't pay, even though mothers are more consistently awarded custody of children by the courts.Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support -- 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 -- give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 "deadbeat" mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media.
That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures.
Whatever sex you are, if you if you choose to have a child, and decide to duck supporting that child, I find you a loathsome person. And there are far too many of these loathsome people out there.
But, the reality is, there are also parents out there, especially in the current economy, who've lost their job, are unable to find another, and are simply unable to pay or unable to pay the pre-recession amount they were assigned. There are also parents out there who have found new jobs, but jobs that pay much less -- but are still expected to pay huge sums in child support, based on their previous income; sometimes because they didn't know to go get their child support order changed in court. These parents typically end up going further and further into debt, and sometimes being thrown in jail -- and in too many cases, not because they're bad people, but simply because they've fallen on hard times. These parents are sometimes women, but are usually men.
As Elaine Sorensen and Chava Zibman write at Urban Institute:
Nearly 11 million fathers in the United States do not live with their children. Two-thirds of these fathers do not pay formal child support.1 Society is rightly concerned about the widespread failure of absent fathers to contribute to their children's support. And a variety of recent policy initiatives are strengthening the enforcement tools necessary to ensure that "deadbeat dads" are identified and required to fulfill their child support responsibilities.But what exactly is a deadbeat dad? Most people would agree that he is someone who shirks his duty for no good reason. Our data show that 4.5 million nonresident fathers who do not pay child support have no apparent financial reason to avoid this responsibility. None of these fathers are poor. On the other hand, these data also show that 2.5 million nonresident fathers who do not pay child support are poor themselves.
Obviously, poverty is not an excuse for shirking parental responsibility. Society expects poor mothers to work and use their earnings to support their children. Certainly it expects poor fathers to do no less. But society devotes considerably more resources to helping poor mothers succeed in the labor market than it does to helping poor fathers do so. This emphasis on mothers is appropriate if they face more labor market barriers than do fathers. Its policy merits are more dubious if the fathers are equally ill-prepared to make it in the world of work.
This brief uses the 1997 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) to examine the characteristics of poor nonresidentfathers who do not pay child support.2 We find that these fathers face similar labor market barriers to those faced by the poor mothers, but the fathers have far fewer opportunities to increase their chances of labor market success.
By the way, in any conversation about parents who don't pay, don't forget the victims of paternity fraud or state error -- who have their lives ruined when the state comes after them for child support, and never mind DNA evidence that the child isn't theirs. Unbelievable-sounding, I know, but it happens -- and happened to somebody I know, along with myriad strangers.
I got on this topic because of a show Lifetime is planning to air, called "Deadbeat Dads," continuing the myth that any guy who isn't paying his child support is a horrible person who can pay, but just doesn't. The show is a reality dealie, where a bounty hunter will go after these guys, but I guess, unless the title is a mistake, deadbeat moms just aren't part of the deal.
I'm guessing they'll pick the really big scumbags for the greatest dramatic effect, not the guys who've lost their jobs. But worst of all, the producers of this show, which is supposed to center the welfare of children, think nothing about turning kids into collateral damage. As Kevin O'Shea writes for the Detroit News:
The fact that the show is now on Lifetime, a network well known for its programming targeted at women, has raised some hackles. So has the potential effect of the show on the children involved. One critic says "The worst part about 'Deadbeat Dads' is the way it publicly humiliates children of divorce by depicting their fathers as not loving or caring for them. These children did not volunteer to be humiliated on national television."
The show was originally slated to appear on Fox, but men's groups, led by Fathers & Families, launched protests, and Fox dropped it. To voice your complaint to Lifetime in hopes they'll drop it as well, and for more information, click here.
The Death Cult That Is Islam Sinks To A New Low
Timothy Williams writes for The New York Times of the latest twist in mass murder for Allah:
BAGHDAD -- At least 80 people died and 120 others were injured Thursday in three bombings, one by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad who, Iraqi officials said, held a young child's hand as she set off her explosives among a group of women and children receiving emergency food aid.
Presumably, it's all because of the Jews.
For The Grater Good
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Push To Be The Un-Bush
Is it possible that Obama's foreign policy is guided by a rather seventh-grade desire of really, really wanting to be liked? What other explanation could there possibly be for the little photo exhibition he's planning -- vis a vis the consequences? Ben Johnson writes on FrontPage:
IF HISTORY IS ANY GUIDE, A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND JIHADISTS. In 2004, after the media published photos of Abu Ghraib and leftist politicians blamed America, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi prefaced his beheading of Nicholas Berg with these words: "we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins...slaughtered in this way." Yet those images had a more lasting impact on the War on Terror. John McCain revealed four months ago that "a former high-ranking member of al-Qaeda" told him "'the greatest recruiting tool we had - we were able to recruit thousands of young men,' he said - 'was Abu Ghraib.'"
Yet America's dark history of releasing compromising photos is not detaining President Obama from handing al-Qaeda a veritable public relations coup. The media have emphasized that he plans to release 44 photos of interrogators abusing detainees by May 28; however, sources report the administration will release a "substantial number" of other images, and up to 2,000 photos in all could be divulged.
The offense of Abu Ghraib was not that it revealed typical interrogation techniques; all the methods employed violated the Interrogation Rules of Engagement, and the military had already begun trying the guilty before the leak. The import was not even the acts themselves, lurid as they may have been. The importance was the photos, which shocked everyone who viewed them on the now-defunct 60 Minutes II - photos beamed around the Muslim world to confirm the darkest imaginations of the jihadist heart: this is how Americans treat innocent Arabs. It may have helped if leftist politicians had not taken pains to present Abu Ghraib as the official face of the American fighting man (as David Horowitz and I document in Party of Defeat, pp. 106-111).
For this reason, the Pentagon opposed releasing any additional photos. In 2005, then-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers warned, "It is probable that al-Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill, which will result in, besides violent attacks, increased terrorist recruitment, continued financial support, and exacerbation of tensions between Iraqi and Afghani populaces and U.S. and Coalition forces." Both Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who led the ground war in Iraq, opposed the release.
...Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, admitted, "I do think it will be used as a propaganda tool and have some damaging impact." Even The Huffington Post noted Kerry "did concede that the pictures 'will be used as a tool... as were the other photos [from Abu Ghraib].'"
In other words, leftists understand and expect that this will harm America's safety and increase jihadist activity - and they're plowing ahead, anyway. But Teresa's better half cited the Left's all-important rationale: "But this didn't happen under Obama; it happened under Bush, and everyone understands that."
Money, Meet Mouth
Guess how much it cost to scare the daylights out of New Yorkers by buzzing Manhattan with Air Force One -- for a photograph that could have been created by an art trainee on Photoshop for, oh, $25 an hour?
Roger Runningen and Tony Capaccio write on Bloomberg.com that, per a review President Obama ordered (was forced to order, I think they mean), that shot cost taxpayers $328,835 -- not including time and productivity lost from the evacuated workplaces and pain and suffering of people who lived through 9/11 and/or lost loved ones.
Can we please have that money back? And for a little entertainment, how about a scoop of that stupid-spending ridicule we've been promised? As Veronique de Rugy and Eileen Norcross write at the WSJ:
President Barack Obama has promised a full accounting online of where his $787 stimulus package is spent and to expose to public ridicule anyone caught wasting taxpayer money. At a White House news conference in March, the president put it this way: "If we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it."
Subtext: Except when we're the ones spending the money, which we'll do with abandon.
Helloooo, Pork Chops!
Dance on over to my plate, will you?
Thanks to all the people out there who think eating piggies gives you swine flu, we all should be able to pick up a bargain pork chop or two this week. From the CDC:
What is swine flu?
Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.How does swine flu spread?
Spread of this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is thought to be happening in the same way that seasonal flu spreads. Flu viruses are spread mainly from person to person through coughing or sneezing of people with influenza. Sometimes people may become infected by touching something with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose.Can I get swine influenza from eating or preparing pork?
No. Swine influenza viruses are not spread by food. You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe.
Tasty, too!
Reproducing With Exactly The Wrong Guy
A woman makes babies with a man she married to save from drinking and destructive behavior, and as a form of personal rebellion. An excerpt from the Advice Goddess column I just posted:
Sorry, but who "rebels" by becoming a suburban housewife? What are you, from a long line of pimps, prostitutes, and smack-addicted death metal artists?At least you're clear on the fact that you married a man whose interest in children is akin to that of a guy I saw in Starbucks last month: intently reading the paper as his toddler ran around the place trying to pull a large iron sign over on himself, then seeing if he could crack his head open on any sharp objects. Yes, there's hands-on parenting, hands-off parenting, and "Hey, wait -- is that thing mine?"
The rest of my answer and comments are live at this link.
Who Says Animals Can't Speak?
The AP is quoting one right here, Youssouf Fofana, the 28-year-old Muslim who reportedly led 27 other like-minded animals in the lengthy and brutal torture and murder of a young Jewish man in France, 23-year-old Ilan Halimi:
(Fofana) smiled as he took his seat in the Paris court and said, "Allah will be victorious."
This Week's "Man-Caused Disaster"
Luckily, it wasn't terrorism, just a man with his rectum where his cranium is supposed to be. This would be Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, the asshat who approved having Air Force One buzz Manhattan, flanked by two fighter jets, for, as you've probably heard, a photo shoot. Hey, genius, read the paper much? There were a whole bunch of news stories in September of 2001...
Here's the AP story in the New York Post. Ula Ilnytzky and Sara Kugler write:
The FAA notified the New York Police Department of the flyover, telling them photos of the Air Force One jet would be taken about 1,500 feet above the Statue of Liberty around 10 a.m. Monday. It had a classified footnote that said, "Information in this document shall not be released to the public or the media.""Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo op right around the site of the World Trade Center catastrophe defies the imagination," Bloomberg said. "Poor judgment would be a nice way to phrase it. ... Had I known about it, I would have called them right away and asked them not to."
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said typically a flight like this would be publicized to avoid causing a panic, but they were under orders not to in this case. They regularly get requests for flyovers, but without secrecy restrictions.
The FAA also alerted an official in the mayor's office, but he didn't tell Bloomberg, who said he first learned about it when his "BlackBerry went off crazy with people complaining about it."
...Workers in lower Manhattan were stunned by what they saw.
John Leitner, a floor trader at the New York Mercantile Exchange Building, said about 1,000 people "went into a total panic" and ran out of the building around 10 a.m. after seeing the planes whiz by.
"We were informed after we cleared out of there," Leitner said. "I kind of think heads should roll a little bit on that."
The classy thing to do, Louis, would be to resign. Luckily, there are no reports of anyone getting hurt or killed in the panic. At this level of government, you just don't get a pass on making mistakes like this.
Bucknell Shuts Down Free Speech
According to the students, the deans did hunt for 30 minutes to do it on a technicality! It's an affirmative action bake sale, mirroring affirmative action's affects. Groups are charged more or less for donuts depending on their race.
Affirmative action bake sales are forms of protest that are protected by the First Amendment and by private universities' guarantees of freedom of expression. As we have said many times before, accusing organizers of a one-day bake sale protest of engaging in discrimination is insulting to victims of real discrimination, and doing so willfully censors the message of the protest. FIRE has won cases in this area consistently over our ten-year history, even at private colleges. Looks like Bucknell, if it actually values the free exchange of ideas, is going to be next.
Here's FIRE's YouTube channel, with my pal Greg Lukianoff. The vid there continues with a case of victimist propaganda at the University of Delaware -- one that forced straight white guys to see just what bad people they are...all in the name of anti-discrimination. Do your best to stomach the music and all. They've got very good intentions -- and policy -- at FIRE.
Know The Obit Before They Die
Moving piece by my good friend David Wallis about the death of a neighbor, published in Drexel University's The Smart Set. An excerpt:
Robert Aronson was not a borrow-the-sugar kind of neighbor. A balding man with a bushy mustache and oval black plastic spectacles that dominated his face, Mister Aronson -- as I always called him -- kept to himself. He only offered a polite hello and perhaps the West Fourth Street weather report when we occasionally passed each other on the stairs of our Greenwich Village walk-up. Once or twice he knocked on my door to alert me that my keys dangled in the lock. I always found his reserve strange, considering that we shared a profession. Mr. Aronson worked as a copy editor at a daily newspaper in Jersey City, retiring in 2002; I sensed that he might have been downsized or had taken a buyout. We occasionally complained to each other about the dismal state of the newspaper industry, but that was the extent of our camaraderie. I chalked up his aloof demeanor to the difference in our ages. He looked to be about 20 years older than I, but it turned out to be a 31-year gap.Our singular social interaction outside the building came two years ago. I invited him to a reading I was giving at a local Barnes & Noble to celebrate one of my books on censorship. But even at that festive occasion we men of words exchanged but few.
Over the years, I gleaned hardly anything else about Mr. Aronson. I can't recall ever seeing him with company. He apparently enjoyed hiking. Sometimes in the summer he looked like a big kid in shorts, a T-shirt, tube socks, and hiking boots. And he must have loved jazz. Sax solos routinely burst through his black metal door. I imagined Mr. Aronson methodically removing a Charlie Parker record from the jacket stored in a plastic sleeve, checking both sides for scratches and gently placing the disk on a vintage turntable. But he could have owned a brand new MP3 player for all I knew, as I never set foot in his apartment. In Manhattan, proximity does not necessarily mean close.
Nevertheless, the sight of a DayGlo-green sticker affixed to his suddenly padlocked door -- "Police Department, Seal for Door of D.O.A. Premises" -- stung like a jab to the jaw. Mr. Aronson, 73, had died alone in his apartment while I was I on the other side of our shared plaster wall. Since we were never pals, I felt that I had no license to grieve. Yet I surprisingly choked up, wondering about his demise.
I hoped that he had suffered a massive heart attack in his sleep rather than a paralyzing stroke that left him unable to call for help. Would he have breached the barrier of politeness and called me in distress? Did he have next of kin? Would my neighbor end up in a potter's field?
I feel a distant connection to the guy because I've stayed in David's apartment a number of times in the years after I left New York. I wonder which of the black steel doors was his (probably to the right), or if I ever saw him.
I'm reminded that I need to use the phone number I tracked down and call Ms. Michael Drury, a wise woman, and the aging author of the now-out-of-print but still available (used) book, Advice to a Young Wife from An Old Mistress
I'm also sentimental about people I care about who've died. I keep their names and long-out-of-service phone numbers on my mobile phone, and love when people e-mail me about them and remind me of them for a moment during some busy day. And I even wear Cathy Seipp's black suede pants that her daughter Maia gave me. Best, though, to grab all the contact you can while people are still here.
Girls With Guns
Rachel Papo's shots of the girls of the Israeli Army.
via Insty
The Softer Side Of Islam
Joanne Jacobs points out the cuddly way textbooks refer to the religion that literally means submission -- and the coverup of the Quran's mandate to convert or kill anybody who isn't an Allah-worshipper. Here's some of the weenying in print, from a piece she links to in the Christian Science Monitor by Gary Bauer:
In his 2008 study "Islam in the Classroom: what the textbooks tell us," Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council (ATC), reviewed 10 of the nation's most widely used junior and senior high school history textbooks. The results should disturb anyone interested in conveying to our children a truthful history of the religion whose extreme adherents drive so many of today's tragic headlines.At a time when America is locked in a battle of ideas with Islamic extremists and other enemies of freedom, accurate knowledge is indispensable. Yet, Sewall's findings underscore how political correctness is distorting the next generation's understanding of this battle.
...Sewall found that many textbooks gloss over or delete important facts. For example, in the 1990s, "jihad" - which has many meanings, among them "sacred" or "holy" struggle but also "holy war" - was defined in the Houghton Mifflin junior high school book only as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."
The many acts of violence committed on behalf of Islam in the past decade have made that definition incomplete, to say the least. Yet, as ATC notes, "by 2005, Houghton Mifflin apparently had removed jihad from its entire series of social studies textbooks."
In discussing sharia law, the Islamic code that can be used to subjugate women and deal death to wayward believers, many textbooks are intentionally vague. Holt Rinehart Winston's 2006 "Medieval to Early Modern Times" junior high textbook states simply, "[Sharia] sets rewards for good behavior and punishments for crimes." Another popular history textbook states, "Muslim law requires that Muslim leaders offer religious toleration."
Descriptions of Islam since 9/11 are particularly disturbing. Though Islamic extremism has become a fact of life throughout much of the world, most of the reviewed textbooks suggest instead that poverty, ignorance, and the existence of Israel are at the root of terrorism. The closest that any textbook gets to suggesting a faith-based component to terrorism is Glencoe's "Modern Times," which states broadly that "Muslims have not accommodated their religious beliefs to the modern world."
No fucking kidding...although they've done a pretty good job in using technology created thanks to the Enlightenment and Western values -- using it in service of murdering thousands upon thousands of "infidels."
My comment on Joanne's site, quoting somebody else's at the top:
"They're still upset about the Crusades, for goodness sakes."Yeah? And Jews are a little tweaked about the Holocaust, but as courageous Wafa Sultan pointed out, you don't see them running around blowing up German restaurants.
Oh, and note that one is called "courageous" whenever one speaks out against the barbarism that is Islam. When one speaks out against the evidence-free belief in god that is Judaism or Christianity (I'm critical of any evidence-free belief) one is merely called wrong or rude by Jews and Christians, who will likely argue with you, but not approach you while wearing a bomb vest.
Joanne via Insty
Red Rum, Red Rum
From the Skagit Valley tulip festival.
photo by Mike D.
Why Are So Many Black Children Fatherless?
Children need daddies. In the black community, there's a good deal of talk and marching over what white people are doing to hurt black people, but far too many black women are doing their part by bringing their children up fatherless.
Here's a piece, reportedly by the Detroit News editorial writer Bill Johnson, via dadi.org, "Urban Future Bleak Until Single Mothers Stop Having Babies," that shows why black women, especially, need to be singled out over this. (The piece is old -- Archer was last mayor in 2001, but in 2007, 72 percent of births of black children were to unwed mothers.):
Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer delivered an inspiring State of the City address this week. To illustrate the city's progress, he recited the words to a song: "Ain't no stoppin' us now ... we're on the move." However, in the shadow of the new monuments being erected -- casinos, ball parks, the Campus Martius development project -- family disintegration continues to threaten the well-being of city residents.The extent of this problem was confirmed in a recent study by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation. Comparing statistics for its Kids Count report, the organization reported that Detroit ranks No.1 in unmarried births among the nation's 50 largest cities. Of the 16,729 babies born in Detroit in 1997, 13,574 were black, 1,679 were white and 817 were Hispanic. Seventy-one percent were born to unmarried mothers. This compared with a state average of 33 percent and a 50-city average of 43 percent.
Government statistics reveal that the percentage of all babies born to unwed mothers nationally rose to 32 percent in 1997 from only 5.3 percent in 1960. Among blacks nationally, 69 percent of births were to unwed mothers. And in a departure from previous increases in births to unwed teen mothers, 70 percent of births to single mothers involved women 20 or older.
The survey data notes that in 1960, 9 percent of children lived in a single-parent household -- usually headed by the mother. By 1998, 28 percent of all children and 55 percent of black children lived with a single parent.
If you note data like these, be prepared to be accused by the P.C. armies of being racist for singling black women out for the way they're a minority but a majority of the unwed mothers. But, in light of the stats, it's simply the right thing to do. And, of course, all women who choose to bring children into the world without fathers should be singled out. Children need daddies. In myriad areas, they come out better if they have them, according to a 40-year Oxford study (among many others):
The study concludes that close paternal involvement not only improves academic performance but also relationships and health.The benefits were greatest for youngsters who established a strong bond from at least the age of seven. Oxford University's Centre for Research into Parenting and Children tracked the lives of 17,000 children born in 1958, monitoring their progress at 7, 11, 16, 23 and 33.
They were given scores at each stage according to how big a part their fathers played in such pursuits as reading, helping with homework and accompanying them on outings.
The highest scorers performed best in school, socially and in their own subsequent marital relationships.
More from Bill Johnson's piece:
There appears to be no hard data, however, indicating why births to unwed mothers are so much more prevalent among black Americans.Single parenthood should not be viewed with indifference. Indeed, the number of single moms poses serious social and public-policy dilemmas. It has been well documented and reported, for example, that children born to unmarried women are far more likely to live in poverty, suffer abuse and be neglected. Girls born into these families are more likely to become pregnant than children living with their married parents and continue the generational cycle of unwed motherhood.
Children from low-income, fatherless households are also more likely to become school dropouts. Children in these families tend to be lower achievers than those from two-parent, higher-income families. These trends generally exist even when a stepfather is present.
Studies also have concluded that children growing up without their biological father are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, commit suicide, engage in crime and be incarcerated.
Johnson happens to be black. What I want to know is why he's still one of very few who's speaking out about this. Is it out of some really sick self-interest (in maintaining black victimhood) that the Jesse Jacksons of the world focus on blaming government and white people for everything that's tough for blacks?
Clueless Right And Left
Blame the Canadians! Everybody's doing it. Lee-Anne Goodman writes for Canadian Metro News Services:
John McCain is the latest high-profile politician to repeat the diehard American falsehood that the 9-11 terrorists entered the United States through Canada.Just days after Janet Napolitano, the U.S. homeland security secretary, sparked a diplomatic kerfuffle by suggesting the terrorists took a Canadian route to the U.S. eight years ago, McCain defended her by saying that, in fact, the former Arizona governor was correct.
"Well, some of the 9-11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know," McCain, last year's Republican presidential candidate, said on Fox News on Friday.
Ambassador Michael Wilson set things straight:
"As the 9-11 Commission reported in July 2004, all of the 9-11 terrorists arrived in the U.S. from outside North America. They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued to them by the U.S. government. No 9-11 terrorists came from Canada."
And even if terrorists did "come through Canada," they'd have to pass through American customs, same as if they came off the plane from Saudi Arabia and through the swinging doors at Miami International, Boston Logan, or JFK. That is, unless they snuck over from Windsor to Detroit in a boat, or slunk over the U.S. Mexico border with all the illegals looking to break our typically unenforced immigration laws and work here...or to deliver their babies into instant American citizenship -- like the illegals who have dropped four million babies already.
Mark Steyn said it well on The Corner:
As readers well know, I'm all for taking the slightest opportunity to blame Canada, but this is pathetic: The 9/11 killers filled in joke paperwork issued by the US State Department and were waived through US immigration by US officials: No Canadians were involved, only the government of the United States. Three thousand Americans died as a result of the federal bureaucracy's Saudi Visa Express service, but the nation's most senior politicians can't be bothered apprising themselves of this basic fact.This is what happens when you take what are meant to be "citizen-legislators" and bulk them up with a retinue larger than the average Gulf emir. Half these guys are hopeless when they're off the cue cards, but, even by those standards, this is embarrassing: We're talking about a basic fact about the defining event of the last decade - and McCain can't even be bothered getting that right.
Spray On, Stay Up!
A spray may help premature ejaculators, writes Thomas H. Maugh II in the LA Times:
In a double-blind trial of more than 300 men with a lifetime history of prematurity, researchers found that the mean time to orgasm increased from about 0.6 minutes to 3.8 minutes in those using the spray.The findings, to be presented Tuesday at a Chicago meeting of the American Urological Assn., were released today.
This new topical spray "has promise to become one of the most effective treatments for premature ejaculation," said Dr. Ira Sharlip, a urologist at UC San Francisco and an association spokesman. "It has a number of characteristics which will be attractive to patients."
Premature ejaculation is one of the most common sexual problems of men, striking about 1 in every 3 -- compared with 1 in 4 who have erectile dysfunction.
Researchers have generally taken two approaches to overcoming the problem: treating the brain or numbing the penis.
Scientists noted some time ago that certain antidepressants, such as Zoloft and Prozac, had a side effect of delaying ejaculation. Johnson & Johnson developed a new drug, called dapoxetine, that maximized this effect. The drug has been approved in a couple of European countries, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ruled that it is not approvable, in part because of the problems associated with long-term use of such drugs.
The other approach is to use a topical anesthetic, such as EMLA cream, a combination of the anesthetics lignocaine and prilocaine in a cream base. It has not been approved for treating premature ejaculation, but many physicians prescribe it off-label.
The cream takes 45 minutes to work, however. The man must also wear a condom, or the cream will rub off on the female, preventing her from achieving satisfaction.
On the female? I think they mean in the female, and eeeeuw!
The Charming Way To Tell Your Girlfriend She's Being A Bit Demanding
Gregg's e-mail subject header said "Out of the Office Reply." The text:
Gregg will be out of the office until December 12, 2012.
Hard Boyled
Susan Boyle, the Scottish woman who sang on the British talent show, has been the subject of much discussion all up and down newspapers and the web.
The thing is, looks matter, and that sucks, but probably feminism's insistence that looks "shouldn't" matter has meant little girls and women aren't told what Boyle should have been: that looks are important, and that it's very important you do the best you can with whatever you have. Boyle, by the way, now looks much better, thanks to a bit of hairstyling and a mowing of the brows that looked like two black overgrown front lawns.
Looks matter because we evolved to care about them. It was a survival thing. Men evolved to seek the female face and body that indicate fertility, and yes, what we consider beautiful -- youth, clear skin, symmetrical features, a .7 waist-to-hip ratio (hourglass figure) -- are indicators a woman is fertile. Women, likewise, go for men who are taller, and also care about symmetrical features, but evolved to care very much about whether men are providers, dads, not cads. Again, this sucks, but it's a fact, and telling girls not to care about their looks isn't helpful in terms of guiding them through reality.
By the way, my mother didn't teach me to care about how I look. (I don't think she cares all that much about how she looks -- not enough to put in the level of effort many women do.) I got the idea about it from all the books I read as growing up (during the friendless years). I remember, in particular, some book about the Holocaust where one of the women in the camps had a tube of lipstick and rubbed it on her cheeks and wore it on her lips so the guard would think she was pretty and keep her alive.
Pam Belluck at The New York Times writes about the biology of why looks matter:
On a very basic level, judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into impersonal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a dog or a cat. "Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information," said David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University. "If we look at a chair, we can categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there."Eons ago, this capability was of life-and-death importance, and humans developed the ability to gauge other people within seconds.
Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, said that traditionally, most stereotypes break down into two broad dimensions: whether a person appears to have malignant or benign intent and whether a person appears dangerous. "In ancestral times, it was important to stay away from people who looked angry and dominant," she said.
Women are also subdivided into "traditionally attractive" women, who "don't look dominant, have baby-faced features," Professor Fiske said. "They're not threatening."
Indeed, attractiveness is one thing that can make stereotypes self-fulfilling and reinforcing. Attractive people are "credited with being socially skilled," Professor Fiske said, and maybe they are, because "if you're beautiful or handsome, people laugh at your jokes and interact with you in such a way that it's easy to be socially skilled."
"If you're unattractive, it's harder to get all that stuff because people don't seek you out," she said.
AGE plays a role in forging stereotypes, too, with older people traditionally seen as "harmless and useless," Professor Fiske said. In fact, she said, research has shown that racial and ethnic stereotypes are easier to change over time than gender and age stereotypes, which are "particularly sticky."
One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us broadly accurate information, even if all the details don't line up. Ms. Boyle's looks, for example, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic level and lack of worldly experience.
Her behavior on stage reinforced an outsider image. David Berreby, author of "Us and Them," about why people categorize one another, said the TV audience may have also judged her harshly because, in banter with the judges before singing, she appeared to be trying, awkwardly, to fit in.
"She tried to be chipper, and when they asked her age, she did this little shimmy," as though she assumed that on such programs "you're supposed to be kind of sexy and personable, and she got it wrong," Mr. Berreby said. "Nothing sort of triggers our contempt more than something trying to be acceptable and then failing."
When people don't fit our preconceived notions, we tend to ignore the contradictions, until they are too dramatic to overlook. In those cases, said John F. Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale, we focus on the contradiction -- Ms. Boyle's voice, for example. While that makes us see her as more of an individual, we also "find a way to make the world make sense again, even if the way we do it is to say, 'This is an exceptional situation.' It's easier for me to keep the same categories in my mind and come up with an explanation for the things that are discrepant."
... Professor Dovidio said that encountering discrepancies to stereotypes probably "creates a sort of autonomic arousal" in our peripheral nervous system, triggering spikes of cortisol and other indicators of stress. "That autonomic arousal is going to motivate us to do something in that situation," he said, especially if the situation is dangerous.
Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers, theorizes that in Ms. Boyle's case, the audience also experienced a "rush of dopamine" from the surprise pleasure of hearing her voice. "Novelty drives up dopamine in the brain and you feel good," she said.
That may help explain why so many people are drawn to the Susan Boyle story. But their embrace of her and other underestimated underdogs is unlikely to upend our penchant to stereotype.
The Dalai Lama Doesn't Have Children To Feed
The Dalai Lama is yet another jerk finding a silver lining in the financial crisis. Louis Sahagun reported for the LA Times on a speech the Dalai Lama gave in Santa Barbara:
The Dalai Lama, in a ringing denunciation, declared Friday that the ailing global economy is the result of "too much greed, and lies and hypocrisy.""These are some of the factors behind the global crisis," he said at a news conference at UC Santa Barbara. "Those people who feel that money is the most important thing in life, when economic crisis hits, learn that it is only one way to be happy. There is also family, friends and peace of mind."
"Therefore, this crisis is good," he added with a laugh, "because it reminds people who only want to see money grow and grow that there are limitations."
It's capitalism that allows people to have the best hope of feeding their children. Right now, people aren't buying, products aren't selling, stores and manufacturers are going out of business, and the advertising dollars aren't flowing to newspapers -- causing them to go out of business. A strong free press is vital to a democracy, but hey, maybe we'd be better off learning our limitations, like the Dalai Lama has, of a government like China's.
More from the piece, one of the people gushing over the guy:
Then there was Melanie Strickland, 48, a substitute teacher from the Joshua Tree area. Moments after the Dalai Lama left the stage, she was reciting large portions of the teachings -- nearly verbatim -- over her cellphone to a friend."The key is to rise above thoughts of pain and anger," she told her friend, "and focus on the here and now between those thoughts. See?"
Yes, rise above how your child is hungry for dinner, but you can't quite afford it because you and your husband are both out of work. Do your best, 'kay?
Lots Of Children Left Behind
Thanks to the teacher's union. From The Wall Street Journal, a piece that once again makes it clear that teaching children is a secondary agenda of the teachers' union:
Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.If you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.
So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.
This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that "TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience."
They say some school districts are easing their caps. But, why have any caps?
The President's Apology Tour
Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the WSJ, dissects Obama's trip to Europe: yet another outing in character as a character he seems to relish playing -- the un-Bush. Now, I was no George Bush fan, but like Rabinowitz, I'm uncomfortable with the kowtow tour I see from Obama -- complete with bowing and scraping to leaders of fundamentalist nations like Saudi Arabia (on the other hand, perhaps he wanted to kiss the guy and hold his hand like George Bush did, but it was only the first date?) and getting all cuddly with the anti-American Chavez. It's shades of an attitude I don't like seeing from the American president -- like the little snit war with Rush Limbaugh. Because other leaders and other countries like to see American seeming humbled doesn't mean it's good P.R. for us. Rabinowitz writes:
He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle.
None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.
The same can't be said for the large numbers of Americans who caught up with the details of the president's apology tour. Presidents have been transformed by office, and Mr. Obama may yet be one of them. But on the evidence so far, he has, as few presidents before him, much to transform. Or, at least, to understand.
Since that bridge too far to Europe, ordinary Americans, including some who voted for Mr. Obama, have shown evidence of a quiet but durable resentment over the list of grievances against the United States that the president brought to the world's attention while overseas. There are certain things that can't be taken back. There are images that are hard to forget. Anger of this kind has an enduring power that could, in the end, haunt this presidency.
The Temple Of Modernity
And its bystanders. 
Perhaps they're waiting for Sharia law?
Obamacare: They Get What You Pay For
Or maybe you die because nobody's paying for it, or not enough people are paying for it, or too many people are getting something and paying little or nothing for it. Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard that it's up to the Republicans to defeat Obamacare (unfortunately, there aren't enough Libertarians to defeat anything, although perhaps they could convince a few people to switch from turkey to ham for lunch). In Barnes' words:
Obama's liberal reforms would probably be irreversible. Most ominous is creation of a government health insurance program open to everyone. The respected Lewin Group estimates such a program would soon cover 130 million Americans, most of them refugees from private insurance. It would only be a short step to a Canadian-style, single payer system run by bureaucrats in Washington.It's worth noting how Canadian health care failed to save the life of actress Natasha Richardson after a recent ski accident. The nearby hospital had no scanning equipment or neurosurgeon, and there was no helicopter to fly her to a trauma center. By the time she arrived at one, she was brain dead. Why wasn't proper treatment and equipment at hand? Government had decided not to pay for them.
...The Clinton proposal was developed at the White House with little contribution from congressional Democrats, the folks who would have to approve it. In addition, the Clinton team was unwilling to accommodate either allies or critics who wanted to reach a compromise on health care. Hillary Clinton stood her ground, until it crumbled beneath her.
Obama, in contrast, has assigned Democrats in Congress the task of drafting the health care bill. This is both smart and politically safe. They're in sync with Obama on a mandate that every American have health insurance with generous minimum benefits, that businesses offer it to employees or pay a stiff fine, and that people have the option of switching to government health insurance.
That's not all. Obama and other Democrats now talk about health care in a more appealing fashion. "They've co-opted Republican rhetoric on health care," a leading Washington lobbyist says. They've learned this from extensive polling. Would voters like the option of choosing between employer-based health insurance and a government insurance program? Of course they would, particularly when the word "public" is substituted for "government."
And rather than replace employer-purchased insurance, the "public" plan would merely "compete" with it. The competition might not last long, as we discovered in 1965 when Medicare drove private insurers out of business and quickly became the only plan for seniors. That's exactly the effect a government health insurance option would have now. By offering cut-rate fees and drug prices--it wouldn't need to make a profit--it would soon clear the field of competitors.
More on the lack of helicopter here. Apparently, Canada has only 10.3 CT scanners per million people, versus our for-profit system's 29.5. Whether Richardson's life would have been saved if this were different, nobody can say. But, if government is the only health option, we're all going to be in trouble.
Back to what medical care is like in Canada, the CBC posted a piece in 2007 about waits for CT scans up there:
Nova Scotia best for CT scansAs in past years, patients also experienced significant waiting times for various diagnostic technologies across Canada: computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans.
The median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.8 weeks. British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the shortest wait for CT scans (4.0 weeks), while the longest wait occurred in Manitoba (8.0 weeks).
The median wait for an MRI across Canada was 10.1 weeks. Patients in Ontario experienced the shortest wait for an MRI (7.8 weeks), while Newfoundland and Labrador residents waited longest (20.0 weeks).
Hey, you U.S. citizens, ever had a CT scan? How long did you wait?
Finally, while I recognize that there are problems in the system, people who can't get care at all (pre-existing conditions, employer-tied health care and they lose their job, for example), and that stuff should be fixed...well, aside from those issues...I pay for my own health care, and unless you're destitute, completely unable to work and/or seriously crazy, please tell me why I should be paying for yours.
How Feminism Paves The Way For Islamism
The piece, by Fjordman, on BrusselsJournal, says it starts with the war against boys and men, and is helped along by feminist demands for "multiculturalism" and the massive immigration it fosters of people unfriendly to Western values (or, I'll add, at war with the West and Western values, who seek the violent overturn of Western society and to install Sharia law). An excerpt:
Didn't feminists always claim that the world would be a better place with women in the driver's seat, because they wouldn't sacrifice their own children? Well, isn't that exactly what they are doing now? Smiling and voting for parties that keep the doors open to Muslim immigration, the same Muslims who will be attacking their children tomorrow?Another possibility is that Western feminists fail to confront Muslim immigration for ideological reasons. Many of them are silent on Islamic oppression of women because they have also embraced "Third-Worldism" and anti-Western sentiments. I see some evidence in support of this thesis.
American writer Phyllis Chesler has sharply criticized her sisters in books such as The Death of Feminism. She feels that too many feminists have abandoned their commitment to freedom and "become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers," thus failing to confront Islamic terrorism. She paints a portrait of current U.S. University campuses as steeped in "a new and diabolical McCarthyism" spearheaded by leftist rhetoric.
Chesler has a point. Judging from the rhetoric of many feminists, all the oppression in the world comes from Western men, who are oppressing both women and non-Western men. Muslim immigrants are "fellow victims" of this bias. At best, they may be patriarchal pigs, but no worse than Western men. Many Western universities have courses filled with hate against men that would be unthinkable the other way around. That's why Scandinavian feminists don't call for Scandinavian men to show a more traditional masculinity and protect them against aggression from Muslim men. Most Norwegian feminists are also passionate anti-racists who will oppose any steps to limit Muslim immigration as "racism and xenophobia."
Totalitarian feminists in Norway are threatening to shut down private companies that refuse to recruit at least 40 percent women to their boards by 2007, a Soviet-style regulation of the economy in the name of gender equality. I have read comments from Socialist politicians and leftist commentators in certain newspapers, such as the pro-Multicultural and feminist -- critics would say Female Supremacist -- newspaper Dagbladet, arguing that we should have quotas for Muslim immigrants, too.
What started out as radical feminism has thus gradually become egalitarianism, the fight against "discrimination" of any kind, the idea that all groups of people should have an equal share of everything and that it is the state's responsibility to ensure that this takes place. A prime example of this is Norway's Ombud for Gender Equality, which in 2006 became The Equality and Anti-discrimination Ombud. The Ombud's duties are "to promote equality and combat discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability and age."
Western feminists have cultivated a culture of victimhood in the West, where you gain political power through your status in the victim hierarchy. In many ways, this is what Political Correctness is all about. They have also demanded, and largely got, a re-writing of the history books to address an alleged historic bias; their world view has entered the school curriculum, gained a virtual hegemony in the media and managed to portray their critics as "bigots." They have even succeeded in changing the very language we use, to make it less offensive. Radical feminists are the vanguard of PC.
When Muslims, who above all else like to present themselves as victims, enter Western nations, they find that much of their work has already been done for them. They can use a pre-established tradition of claiming to be victims, demanding state intervention and maybe quotas to address this, as well as a complete re-writing of history and public campaigns against bigotry and hate speech. Western feminists have thus paved the way for the forces that will dismantle Western feminism, and end up in bed, sometimes quite literally, with the people who want to enslave them.
The conclusion of the piece is here:
Daniel Pipes keeps saying that the answer to radical Islam is moderate Islam. There may not be any such thing as a moderate Islam, but there just might be a moderate feminism, and a mature masculinity to match it. In the book Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of manliness. As he says, "Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad." Manliness can be noble and heroic, like the men on the Titanic who sacrificed their lives for "women and children first," but it can also be foolish, stubborn, and violent. Many men will find it offensive to hear that Islamic violence and honor killings have anything to do with masculinity, but it does. Islam is a compressed version of all the darkest aspects of masculinity. We should reject it. Men, too, lose their freedom to think and say what they want in Islam, not just women.
However, even a moderate version of feminism could prove lethal to Islam. Islam survives on the extreme subjugation of women. Deprived of this, it will suffocate and die. It is true that the West still hasn't found the formula for the perfect balance between men and women in the 21st century, but at least we are working on the issue. Islam is stuck in the 7th century. Some men lament the loss of a sense of masculinity in a modern world. Perhaps a meaningful one could be to make sure that our sisters and daughters grow up in a world where they have the right to education and a free life, and protect them against Islamic barbarism. It's going to be needed.
To me, any sort of quotas for women, are contrary to what feminism is supposed to stand for, but really doesn't. My problem with feminism, as I've said before, is that it's too often about people demanding special treatment under the guise of equal treatment. And I'm totally against that sort of thing, as any fair person would be.
Wendy McElroy, on iFeminists, writes "good women must speak out" -- and, I should add, not just women:
Stand up for the values that have been ravaged by PC feminism: freedom of speech, parental control of children, the rights of men, and the ability to rise through merit alone.Every day offers opportunities to transform the culture. When a friend launches into a male-bashing diatribe, remind her that she's talking about your husband or son...and object. When a co-worker loses a deserved promotion because of affirmative action, give him moral support. When public schools teach your child values you abhor, complain to the School Board.
But be prepared to argue because political correctness will die as it lived -- kicking and screaming ad hominem abuse as a substitute for arguments. If you defend your husband, you may be called anti-woman. If you protest affirmative action, you'll be slurred as a racist. If you don't want gay teachers "coming out" in school at taxpayers' expense, you'll be labeled homophobic.
...Good women must not let PC feminism continue to affect our culture. Speak out.
My dad told me I could do anything boys could do. However, in making that statement, the assumption was be that I could do anything boys could do if I were willing to do the work and take the risks boys would. Unlike many of those crowing for "equality," I want actual equal treatment. If a man's better than I am at something, or puts more into it than I do, well, then he deserves the job. And vice versa.
Losing Paul Krugman
Obama's got a frenemy at The New York Times. Krugman blogs:
$100 million here, $100 million there "pretty soon, even here in Washington, it adds up to real money," says the president....OK, politics is theater. But you could argue that the president shouldn't feed the bogus claim that we can close fiscal gaps by eliminating a bit of waste.
No, we have to eliminate a whole slew of pork -- which includes a whole slew of social pork, including the latest paid bit of volunteerism, a boondoggle named after Ted Kennedy ("The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act") -- to the tune of $5.7 billion tax dollars.
If somebody actually wants to serve America, they'll shrink government, not expand it with bullshit armies of paid volunteers. As for Ted Kennedy's legacy for America's youth, it includes, as Nick Gillespie writes at the reason link just above, "a incoherent and archly ideological commitment to failed feel-good policies such as No Child Left Behind, which traps at-risk students in public schools that no Kennedy offspring has ever been caught dead in."
Krugman link via Insty
Oh, and by the way, that term "frenemy" was coined by Jessica Mitford, not some "Sex and the City" writer.
Idiot Buys "Art," Then Sues
I think people who buy Louis Vuitton purses
Then, it got better: MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, held what I thought of as "the emperor's new purse exhibit" -- a show of Japanese artist Murakami's work, selling some of his ugly designs for Louis Vuitton.
Even dumber, the museum apparently got zero cut from the sales of the ugly crap, in a special LV/Murakami branded store in the museum. Here, from supertouchblog, is the spin the museum put on that genius idea:
It turns out the decision to grant the luxury retailer a license to kill was a curatorial one, made by the show's organizer, MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel in an effort to highlight the inherently commercial aspect of Murakami's work, as expressed by his personal "Superflat" manifesto. In the eyes of Schimmel, it seems, the act of viewers buying Murakami's bags in the midst of a formal museum exhibition helps "break down the boundaries between low and high art" (a key concept of Murakami's philosophy) and allows the viewer to interact with the artist's work firsthand.
Now an L.A. man, Clint Arthur, who bought one of the prints is suing for fraud! Mike Boehm writes for the LA TImes:
They may not have realized it, but the folks who snapped up as much as $4-million worth of limited-edition prints by artist Takashi Murakami two years ago at the special Louis Vuitton boutique inside his exhibition at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art apparently were getting nicely mounted handbags -- minus the snaps and straps.
This is all what the "art" world is about -- getting people to pay piles of money for piles of crap. It's part of the rethinking of art that makes up modern art. I sure wouldn't buy stuff like this -- besides, I find this particular stuff ugly as all get-out -- and I think the first time Ad Reinhardt painted a black canvas it was funny, and same with Andy Warhol's soup cans. But, enough already, all you monkey-see, monkey do "artists." Figure out your own thing or learn to actually...draw and paint!
More from the LAT piece:
"Louis Vuitton . . . knew that neither [Arthur] nor anyone else would pay $6,000" if it was clear they were getting factory leftovers from handbag production, says a legal memo that Arthur's attorneys filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, countering Louis Vuitton's attempt to have Judge A. Howard Matz dismiss the case as groundless.The point of installing a boutique inside the "Copyright Murakami" exhibition at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary building was to highlight the Japanese pop artist's trademark blurring of the lines between art and commerce, MOCA officials said at the time of the 2007-08 show. But Arthur contends that selling repurposed handbag material as 500 collectible art prints priced at $6,000 and $10,000 crossed the line from commerce to fraud because Louis Vuitton allegedly hid the fact that the prints were made from the same fabric sheets as the Murakami-designed bags and accessories selling nearby for almost $1,000.
When Arthur initially sued Louis Vuitton North America and MOCA last June, those class-action lawsuits alleged only that both had failed to provide information about the artworks required under California's Fine Prints Act.
He and his attorneys added the fraud allegation in August, after finding a 2007 interview in the journal ArtInfo in which MOCA's chief curator, Paul Schimmel, admitted that he was "surprised" that Murakami "took the materials that he had printed for various [Vuitton] products . . . and he had them stretched like paintings and made into a very large but numbered edition" of prints to be sold in the boutique. Schimmel had invited the artist and Louis Vuitton to set up the store inside the Geffen exhibition -- a rare, if not unprecedented, move for a major art museum.
Attorneys for the multibillion-dollar luxury goods company argue in legal papers that Arthur has no case because, as an experienced collector of fine art prints, he should have known from the context that he might be getting something that would blur the lines between art and manufacture. "Such ambiguity is . . . part and parcel of the Murakami aesthetic and thus, was part of the bargain," says one Louis Vuitton legal memorandum in the case.
Louis Vuitton also argues that because the boutique's sales brochure advertised the prints as "canvasses revisited by Takashi Murakami," and because their design was identical to handbags in the same boutique, Arthur should have known that he wasn't getting what he says he expected: works created specifically as limited-edition prints.
The way I see it, the joke is on anyone who actually pays for this ugly crap -- except, maybe, if you're paying to have it removed from your sight.
Looking For That Special Anybody
A woman gives herself 52 weeks to find a husband, and even has a website, 52weeks2findhim.com. From a piece by Jessica Ravitz on CNN.com, 43-year-old Neenah Pickett is 14 weeks into her search, and says:
"I can't believe how hard it is," she said of the journey so far, which has brought her more dates in two months than she'd had in two years. "But that's why the deadline is so important."
In the piece, she never says why she wants to be married. About the deadline thing, another woman complains:
..."It's OK to say, 'I want to be a partner in a law firm in three years' ... but we're taught to not be open about our desires about marriage, because we don't want to scare off the guy," she said. By being honest, "you end up attracting men who want the same thing as you."
Yeah, men who have the idea that their lives will be okay, their problems will be solved, they'll have eternal bliss, if only they can fill that soulmate spot, and fast!
People who can't find any partner sometimes (or often) have stuff about them that needs fixing -- but it's easier to look outside than inside for the answer (or rather, "answer").
Until you fix what's broken in you, you're not partner material. As I sometimes say to people who write me, "You can't have a healthy relationship with an unhealthy person."
As for Pickett, from her site, it looks like what she might be seeking, more than a husband, is publicity.
Note To Dumbass Legislators: "Devouring" Books Is Just A Metaphor
Here's the latest bit of dumbshittery resulting from the CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act), which is supposed to protect children, but mainly seems bent on protecting businesspeople from earning a living. Karen Raugust writes at Publishers Weekly about the new testing requirements for lead content in books:
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has said it will not enforce the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act when it comes to "ordinary" books printed after 1985, and legislation was introduced last week that potentially would exclude ink-on-paper and ink-on-board books from the Act entirely. But for publishers of novelty and book-plus formats--which account for a significant chunk of sales, especially in mass-market and special-market channels--the CPSIA will remain in full force, with all of its costly testing, certification and labeling requirements.After a stay of enforcement, publishers have until February 10, 2010, to get their CPSIA-mandated third-party testing procedures in place. However, publishers and retailers have had to comply with the law's safety requirements since February 10 of this year, which has led the large retail chains to demand testing for all children's products, some as early as last November. A survey of over a dozen publishers exhibiting at Toy Fair in mid-February found that almost all already had some sort of testing in place, largely due to the demands of their key customers.
Several publishers said they test all of their titles, not just novelty books but also ink-on-paper formats. Most books came through the testing with flying colors, but there were a few incidences reported in which titles did not make the grade. With the increasing interest in all things "green," it's interesting to note that books made of recycled materials are more likely to contain some lead or phthalates and therefore less likely to make it through the testing process.
As I commented on Overlawyered, which has been really terrific about covering the results of this ridiculous act:
I'm not a mother, so perhaps I'm naive, but do children commonly lick books and eat the pages...or do they just read them?
What Every Gorilla Needs
It's the Gorillapod
From Amy's Mall, where so many of you have been great about buying stuff to help me make up for the downturn in newspapers. (Meanwhile, I'm writing as fast as I can to begin putting together what I think will be my new book). As I wrote at about the Gorillapod at my Mall:
A present I bought for Gregg. He loves it. You can even hang your camera upside down from a tree. Just make sure you attach it carefully!
Also, make sure you get the more heavy-duty one if you plan on shooting with one of those big pro cameras (a digital SLR).
You Show Me Yours...
Just posted another Advice Goddess column -- "A Breath Of Fresh Affair" -- a response to a woman who worries about her boyfriend's ethical issues (thanks to a discovery she made by snooping in his e-mail). An excerpt from my response:
You make noises about "authentic living," which sounds like one of those really cheesy regional magazines, but I think you mean living so what you do matches what you say you believe. Yet, here you are, somebody who demands fidelity, then gets together with Mr. Zipper Issues. You worry he's been unethical -- and what's a girl to do but violate his privacy in hopes of finding out? And then, upon discovering the guy had his hand in the booty jar, you did what any rational, fidelity-favoring girlfriend would: said absolutely nothing -- unless you count "Sign here, Honey!" as you went in with him to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house.Some people are happiest knowing the whole truth -- except for any parts that would keep them from being able to live a nice comfortable lie. In France, they have the "cinq à sept" -- the five to seven -- slang for a time between work and dinner when people sneak off to see their lover. Sure, it goes against the way things are supposed to be, but it works for some -- the person gets what they're not getting at home, but without breaking up their home. Something similar goes on over here when the mob guy's wife asks, "Hi, Honey, what did you do at the office today?" The last thing she wants is the truth: "Oh, paperwork, some sales calls, then garrotted a guy and stuffed him in an oil drum."
The rest and comments are at this link.
How Do You Get To Be The Kind Of Person Who Does This?
There's been a horrible case here, too little in the news (and why, a friend of mine keeps asking?) of two college students, Adrianna Bachan, 18, and Marcus Garfinkle, 19, who were victims of a most barbaric hit-and-run. Bachan was killed and Garfinkle was seriously injured.
Claudia Cabrera, the driver, has pleaded not guilty to felony hit-and-run and misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, and is on jail (with $1 million bail set). And then, there's her husband. From ABC Los Angeles:
Police say that Josue Luna, 32, pulled Garfinkle off of the hood of the car after his wife, 30-year-old Claudia Cabrera, struck the pair as they crossed Jefferson Boulevard and Hoover Street near USC.
Yes, this animal pulled the seriously injured Garfinkle (who suffered two broken legs, and more) off the hood of the car.
And this is incredible -- he's out on bail, after crossing back into California from Mexico where he went (ran?) after the hit-and-run. More from the story -- from Bachan's mother, speaking about Luna:
"He is the accessory to the murder of my daughter. The animal who took Marcus Garfinkle off of his windshield of the car threw him on the road and left him there to die," said Bachan.
I find it inexplicable, on a personal level, as how somebody can behave so barbarically to another human being -- but, on a related note, I just started reading the stunningly brilliant and brilliantly well-written book of a friend of mine, engineering professor Barb Oakley.
Her book is Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
Kudos to my friend Kate Coe, who has been outraged about how little press this story has been getting, and whose outrage reminded me to blog about it.
Stop Comparing McVeigh To Bin Laden
Robert Spencer has an excellent piece on Front Page about something that's bugged the hell out of me for the longest time -- people who, upon hearing about Islamist acts of terrorism, throw out, "Well, Christians are terrorists, too!" and bring up Timothy McVeigh.
Unlike McVeigh, bin Laden isn't some deviant, going against what his religion commands. Quite the contrary -- he's following right along with the commands of Islam, and the Quran, a book that Muslims are supposed to take literally. Spencer writes:
All the orthodox sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach that the Islamic community has the responsibility to wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law. All four principal schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence agree on the importance of jihad warfare against non-Muslims. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 996), a Maliki jurist, declared: "Jihad is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may dispense others from it. We Malikis maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them."Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a Hanbali jurist who is a favorite of Osama bin Laden and other modern-day jihadists, agreed: "Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought."
The Hanafi school sounds the same notes in The Hedaya: "If the infidels, upon receiving the call [to convert to Islam], neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax, it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them..."
And so does the Shafi'i scholar Abu'l Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1058): "It is forbidden to...begin an attack before explaining the invitation to Islam to [unbelievers], informing them of the miracles of the Prophet and making plain the proofs so as to encourage acceptance on their part; if they still refuse to accept after this, war is waged against them and they are treated as those whom the call has reached..."
All these jurisprudential schools also teach that when a Muslim land is attacked by non-Muslims, every individual Muslim has the responsibility to wage defensive jihad. All this is in accord with Muhammad's command to Muslims invite non-Muslims to Islam and then go to war with them if they refused both conversion and second-class dhimmi status: "When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to accept Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them.... If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [a special tax on non-Muslims; cf. Qur'an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them." (Sahih Muslim 4294)
...Many observers assume ... that Al-Qaeda's departure from mainstream Islam must be located in its preference for the writings of ancient jurists rather than modern ones. But no Islamic sect or school has ever reformed or rejected these teachings.
Spencer's latest book: Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs
It Ain't Maybelline
We're disconnected from war because we just read workaday news reports of it; we don't see it down to the stuff under the fingernails.
Here are a couple more photos from my talented painter friend Roman Genn (aka "the Mad Russian), who went to Afghanistan for the LA Times and National Review.
The above shot is from the January 17 bombing in Kabul. Roman writes, "I was not supposed to film there. ...Marines didn't give a damn where I was filming or not."
What is that red stuff, you ask? "Natural human juice," Roman says. "Commonly known as blood."
This below, says Roman, is "Marines in the CH-53E helicopter flying into Kabul, firing a fifty cal."
Want To Live Like The Saudi Arabians Do?
Islamist Saudi Arabia, not secular France, is the perfect place for you! And that's pretty much what France is telling one of those Muslim ladies who goes around in the black tablecloth with the eyeslits.
Interestingly, while burka wearers are free to unsettle shoppers like me while they traipse around Galeries Lafayette, either as tourists or illegal immigrants, I think French girls who dress like French girls run into quite a few problems back there in Saudia Arabia.
Charles Bremner writes for the Times of London about the Muslim woman who (sniff, sniff, boohoo) couldn't get French citizenship:
A Muslim member of the French Government has attacked the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a prison, applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore it."The burka is a prison, a strait-jacket," Fadela Amara, the Minister for Urban Affairs and a longstanding women's rights campaigner, said yesterday. "It is not religious. It is the insignia of a totalitarian political project for sexual inequality."
The court decision denying Faiza Mabchour, 32, French citizenship has drawn approval from both Left and Right, highlighting a rejection of Muslim customs that conflict with the values of the secular French republic.
"The affair of the burka", as it has become known, began in late June when the Council of State, the highest civil court, endorsed a decision to refuse nationality to Ms Mabchour because her practices conflicted with French society and especially sexual equality.
Ms Mabchour, a French-speaker who lives in a southern Paris suburb, came to France in 2000 after marrying a Frenchman of North African background. They have three children, all French. At her husband's request she converted to Salafism, a hardline school of Islam that is strong in Saudi Arabia. She began wearing the dress that the French media call the burka, but which is strictly a niqab.
In the first ruling of its type Ms Mabchour's application was rejected because she had failed to integrate. Emmanuelle Prada-Bordenave, the state commissioner who decided the appeal, noted that Ms Mabchour had appeared for interviews "clothed from head to toe in the clothing of women from the Arabian peninsula, with a veil covering her hair, forehead and chin and a piece of cloth over her face. Her eyes could only be seen through a small slit.
"She lives virtually as a recluse, disconnected from French society. She has no concept of laïcité [the principle of the secular State] nor the right to vote. She lives in total subservience to the men in her family," she added.
The decision was the latest episode in France's struggle to balance the laïcité principle with the religious practices of Europe's largest Muslim community.
By the way, it's important to note that citizenship was denied to the women, not merely based on how she dressed, but more based on the fact that she failed to assimilate into French culture -- a requirement to gain citizenship in France. (Hey, better late than never to figure this out, France...considering the violent Muslim mess you have on their hands -- and on your welfare rolls.)
The violence commanded by the Quran (and yes, that's right, commanded by the Quran, which is supposed to be taken literally) should, I believe, set it apart from other religions. After all, there's a difference between free speech and yelling fire in a crowded theater.
Now, I'm for freedom of religion, freedom to believe in astrology, numerology, feng shui, and all matter of ridiculous bullshit. However, the moment it becomes clear that your religion is actually a death cult that calls for the murder or conversion of "the infidel," and the violent totalitarian takeover of democracies and the installation of "the New Caliphate," well, I kind of have a problem with that.
There are "moderate Muslims," sure -- Muslims in name only, or Muslims who don't really know what the Quran says, or who ignore the commands to violently take over the world and turn it Muslim. But, if you actually take the time to read about the reality of Islam, as I did starting after that unexpected bit of demolition in my old New York neighborhood (you know, when a bunch of Muslims murdered 3,000 people in the name of Allah)...well, once you get informed, I suspect you'll see things a little differently.
The question is...can we protect ourselves from the dangers of Islam and still remain the free, open, democratic society we've been? Can any Western society? And is any Western society doing an okay job, or doing anything right in respect to the dangers from Islam?
Finally, let's hear from a Muslim woman -- a commenter on the ToL site -- on how nicely her religion treats the ladies:
I am a Muslimah living in the Middle East and agree 100% with the French government's decision. Here in Kuwait, the Salafist MPs would love to force women into niqabs and subservience to men and drag us back to the 10th century - they don't represent me or my faith and I am sick of them!Rachida, Salwa, Kuwait
Honey, you're not the only one they want to drag back, you're just a more workable possibility right now than the rest of us.
via Dierdre
Child Support Hell -- And That's Putting It Mildly
This is a piece from November, but I just read about it in brief in the May print edition of reason. It's an absolutely sickening story about yet another case of mistaken identity child support injustice, and the extent of the hell this guy went through is, tragically, not very unusual. States, including my own state of California, seem to care much more about sticking some guy, any guy, with child support payments than about seeing that justice is done. This is a travesty absolutely beyond belief. Pete Shellem writes for the Patriot-News about one of the victims:
When Walter Andre Sharpe Jr. signed for a certified letter from Dauphin County Domestic Relations in 2001, he didn't know he was signing on for a seven-year nightmare.Since then, the Philadelphia man has been thrown in jail four times, lost his job, become estranged from his four children and spent more than $12,000 to support the child of another man.
It finally stopped in May 2007 when a judge reversed a finding that he was the father.
But the same judge has since ruled that Sharpe is not entitled to any compensation, not even the money he was forced to pay to support the child.
Sharpe's attorney, Tabetha Tanner, said the county Domestic Relations office "stole" Sharpe's identity by exchanging his date of birth, address and Social Security number for that of the father.
The agency fought Sharpe's attempts to have DNA testing and said it determined he was the father "after reasonable investigation."
Yet it took The Patriot-News less than an hour to track down the real father, Andre Sharpe, who said the girl that Walter Sharpe has been paying support for has been living with him for the last four years.
But in court papers, Domestic Relations blamed Walter Sharpe, a former trash collector, for not filing the proper motions in court to "disestablish paternity."
"What type of investigation were they doing if you can track this guy down in less than eight hours?" Walter Sharpe asked. "It just pisses me off. I tried my best to clear myself of this case, and it fell on deaf ears. It's like I'm guilty until proven innocent. I'm just another man crying, 'I don't know this person. I don't have their kid.' It's a routine they're just used to."
Again, if feminists were truly against injustice and for fair treatment for all they'd be on the front lines protesting this and other cases like it -- and this happens far too often, especially to guys who are overseas in the military.
And finally, after all this man has been through, a judge has ordered a criminal investigation of his case.
Got Gas?
Sometimes it can be a beautiful thing.
via Rick
French Lesson
So nice to see a little PDA back here in the good ole USA.
If You Can't Stand The Hate Mail, Get Out Of The Paper
Yet another writer-ninny, female of course, whinges about the horror of getting hate mail. I get it all the time. So do male columnists. I think my hate mail is funny, and when it's really good, it's hilarious. I see it as one of the perks of doing my job, and one of the signs I'm doing a good job (if you aren't pissing people off, maybe you're putting them to sleep?) If I couldn't take it, I'd work at the Humane Society.
Columnist Shari Graydon, however, writes in the Ottawa Citizen about the comments she gets from men:
Inside, the letter itself was unequivocal. In the same painstaking hand, the writer repeated my name in full and charged: You are a dog Faced Slut who likes to run off at the mouthThe random capitalization and complete absence of punctuation enhanced the disarming directness of the message, which continued: I hope some Bull Dyk gives you some B+D so Stick a Sock in it.
...Although none of these experiences have prevented me from continuing to share my opinions through print or broadcast media, I confess that they did briefly unnerve me.
Oh, boohoo.
And I know many women -- especially those with young children, a high- profile job, or a natural attachment to being treated with respect -- who would welcome such attention even less. Especially in an age of instant messaging, Google and YouTube.
So, advise them to avoid speaking out in the public eye.
Citizen columnist Kate Heartfield recently wrote that "No one is going to give women permission to join the public conversation," in a great column lamenting how few women opinion writers there are compared to men and exploring ways to change that ("Wanted: opinionated women," March 26).
Nobody gave me "permission." I annoyed the crap out of editors until they finally read my stuff and thought it would be something their readers would be interested in.
It seems to me that the more ubiquitous our faces and perspectives become, the less our femininity or feminism will stand out. And as Martha Stewart -- both a master of media profile, and a survivor of public condemnation -- would say, that's a good thing.
Oh, please. Gregg and I just shot a bunch of book covers. I keep reminding the publisher that we need to have my boobs on the cover. Men like boobs. And I like men, and I'd like them to buy my book.
The truth is, men attack a female columnist this way not because they're discriminating against her, but because they aren't. The gloves are off -- you're not being treated like some frail female who can't take it. Kingsley R. Browne makes this point in his terrific book, Biology at Work
Browne criticizes court cases "typically included unquestioningly under the rubric of sexual harassment" when they involved "expressions of hostility toward a woman that take a sexual form."
He writes that "men's tendency toward competition and striving for positions in hierarchies often leads to behaviors that, especially to women, may seem quite harsh. As Joan Kennedy Taylor has observed, 'Men will harass, tease, and verbally abuse each other, find vulnerable spots and use them to fluster each other -- almost automatically. When called on it, they will say it was all in fun. Women, when faced with such behavior, tend to take the content seriously, rather than identifying the underlying game.'"
He later points out, about workplace hazing, that hazing is usually aimed at "perceived vulnerabilities," and notes that "men's quest for dominance has not been primarily about attaining dominance over women, but achieving dominance over other men, which is consistent with Barbara Gutek's finding that in the workplace 'women are less often treated disrespectfully than men are.'"
So...in other words, when a guy sends me "Dear Bitch" e-mail and the like, he isn't discriminating against me -- he's treating me equally to how he'd treat a man. I like that.
No need whatsoever to whine.
A Big Purple Piece Of Poo
Also known as art by Franz West, LA County Museum of Art.
Does Being White Make Plane Tickets More Affordable?
Got this announcement in an e-mail to journalists -- and it's bad enough that there are segregated events for female journalists (what, are there special workshops on what to do if you run out of tampons while you're in the middle of a big story?).
Imagine the howling if somebody put on on a "Leadership Institute" for male journalists -- like those country clubs that exclude Jews, blacks, or women, and probably the Chinese.
But, it gets worse. Here's the note I got, with the essential part in bold:
From now through Friday, May 1, the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) will be accepting applications for the 6th annual U.S. Leadership Institute for Women Journalists.Here are some key facts about the U.S. Leadership Institute for Women Journalists:
* Funding from the McCormick Foundation is enabling the IWMF to offer this program at no cost this year. Additionally, 10 minority participants will be eligible to receive a $500 stipend to cover their travel expenses.
This year's institute will convene 20 mid-to-upper level female journalists for on-the-ground leadership training on July 20-22 in Chicago. During these three days, participants will:
* Take part in highly interactive skills-building sessions on issues crucial to effective leadership, including What Is Leadership, Who Am I As A Leader, Leading Change, Leading in the Newsroom, and Critical Conversation: Advocacy/Managing Up;
* Participate in small "mastermind groups" on topics participants have expressed an interest in within written questionnaires and essays submitted prior to the on-site;
* Develop a personalized action plan for future career goals; and
* Network with colleagues from across the country.The on-site sessions will be facilitated by industry leaders such as Marci Burdick, Senior Vice President of Broadcasting for Schurz Communications; Liza Gross, Former Managing Editor/Presentations and Operations for The Miami Herald; and Marcy McGinnis, former Senior Vice President for News Coverage at CBS News and current Associate Dean of Stony Brook University's School of Journalism.
Institute participants will receive one-on-one (telephone and online) coaching on implementing their personalized action plans for the three months following the institute. This coaching will be conducted by veteran journalists and professional coaches.
Additionally, participants will be become members of the IWMF network free of charge for one year.
How infantilizing, a conference apparently dealing with the special problems of women who hope to be "leaders" in journalism. If women want to be treated as equals in the business world they can't be holding women-only tripe sessions like this.
Harvard Muslim Chaplain Gets Caught Telling The Truth About Islam
Apostates -- people who leave the religion -- are supposed to be put to death...and are, with some frequency in Islam. Sadly, this conflicts with the "religion of peace" message Islam likes to convey to all the American sheep. But, occasionally, the truth rears its head, as Melody Y. Hu reports in The Harvard Crimson:
Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser '96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates.In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was "great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand."
The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in many cases, criticism of Abdul-Basser from those who have interpreted his statement as supporting the execution of those who leave the Islamic religion.
Commenter Chris over in Crimsonland put it well:
The chaplain wouldn't be staying true to Islamic teachings if he didn't support the execution of Muslims of leave Islam. This is what Muhammad ordered, as recorded in the Hadith:The Messenger of Allah said, "Whoever changes his (Islamic) religion, kill him." Al-Bukhary (number 6922)
So I don't think it's fair to blame him for correctly interpreting the commands of his religion. Instead, we ought to ask whether we ought to allow such a religion to have any legality in a democratic and human right-respecting society like ours.
via JihadWatch
McCain Aide Coming Out For Gay Marriage
CNN senior Congressional correspondent Dana Bash writes that Steve Schmidt, a key architect of John McCain's presidential campaign, is giving a speech today to the Log Cabin Republicans to urge religious conservative Republicans to drop their opposition to gay marriage:
"There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage," Schmidt will say, according to speech excerpts obtained by CNN. "I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one's liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage."Schmidt makes both policy and political arguments for a Republican embrace of same-sex marriage.
On the policy front, Schmidt likens the fight for gay rights to civil rights and women's rights, and he admonishes conservatives who argue for the protection of the unborn as a God-given right, but against protections for same-sex couples.
"It cannot be argued that marriage between people of the same sex is un American or threatens the rights of others," he says in the speech. "On the contrary, it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence -- liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
"That, I believe, gives the argument of same sex marriage proponents its moral force," Schmidt will say.
Politically, he will say that becoming more open and accepting is critical to reversing an alarming trend for Republicans -- a shrinking coalition. He will note that Republicans should be especially concerned that McCain got crushed by Barack Obama among voters under 30, who are generally more accepting of gay couples and at odds with the GOP.
"Some Republicans believe the period of self-examination within the party necessitated by the loss of our majority status is mostly a question of whether the party should become more moderate or conservative. I think that's a false choice. We need to grow our coalition, but as I said, that's hard to do if we lose some votes while gaining others," says Schmidt.
The Republicans lose fiscal conservative/social libertarians like me on a number of grounds: the fact that they aren't really for small government or fiscal conservatism, and their religious nuttery -- like their stance against gay marriage. Don't believe in gay marriage? Don't be a man who marries your boyfriend. But, don't deny it to others who seek the tax breaks and benefits allowed to others who marry because they do it in the Church-supported manner.
The Libertarians have a major chance in the next election, thanks to the bungling of the Democrats and Republicans for far too long. Don't blow it yet again, asshats, okay?
Tea Time, Santa Monica
Not an extended pinky in sight...
Jennifer Rubin writes for Pajamas on the protests -- in D.C. and nationwide:
These were hardly professional protesters -- or dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. Many said they had never attended a rally before. One woman sporting a pink umbrella and pig-shaped balloon explained that the bailouts, spending, and lack of personal responsibility motivated her to come out from a Virginia suburb. Indeed, there were many out-of-towners -- students from Pennsylvania, a couple from Kentucky, and many parent and children combinations. The dad from Maryland with his 11-year-old daughter said he'd never been to a political protest in his life but found it unconscionable to pass on thousands of dollars of debt to his daughter. It was in some ways a throwback to a bygone era of homemade signs, colorful costumes, and non-professional politicians. Not a single elected leader spoke from the small makeshift stage.So what do these people want? While labeled a "tax protest" by many media outlets, the most common items mentioned by those attending and speaking were bailouts, runaway spending, the growing deficit, "generation theft" (i.e., passing on an unsustainable debt to their children and grandchildren), and a loss of personal accountability. It was the sort of protest the Wall Street Journal editorial board would have designed if they were asked to come up with their ideal rally.
While some carried signs about immigration and even one vowing to do away with the Federal Reserve, the message was rather consistent and the tone hostile: they are very upset with the current administration and Congress' handling of fiscal and economic issues.
But Republicans should not be rejoicing quite yet. Many protesters went out of their way to say they are upset with both parties and hold George W. Bush equally responsible for launching the now never-ending stream of bailouts. And the crowd, if anything, was libertarian in bent rather than conservative. These people are advocating less government, restraints on federal power, and a return to "constitutional government." Social conservatives who seek expansion of state power on issues from abortion to support for faith-based programs may find themselves at odds with a newly invigorated movement to shrink government and enhance individual liberty.
...The proof will be in the pudding. If we see an influx of new candidates, activists, and volunteers stemming from the tea party movement, Wednesday will be seen as a significant day in modern political history and new media-based organizing. If the activists go home, never to be seen again, then the day will recede in memory as another failed attempt to shake the political status quo.
Eye Of The Tiger
Lionel Tiger
"It is...astonishing that...marriage is still legally allowed. If nearly half of anything ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately. If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6% of people who went on roller coasters damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action."
Parsing of the divorce rate stats here.
The Column That's Been Garnering All The Hate Mail From Women
In case you hadn't noticed, I've posted my advice column, Donut Seem Unfair?, that takes into account the more visual nature of male sexuality, and debunks American dietary myths that cause so many people to be fat.
Women writing me all the angry e-mails insist that the woman in question, who gained weight simply because she's too lazy to stop eating sugary foods, is owed our sympathy, and that the man "should" love after her no matter what she looks like. I've probably explained, in 100-plus e-mail over the past month, that the guy does love her -- he just wants to lust after her. Here's an excerpt from that column:
In the dating phase, women do what it takes to attract and hang onto a man: looking after their looks and maintaining a figure that's more hourglass than beer keg. While there are some wives whose medical issues prevent them from losing weight, too many interpret "Till death do us part" as "You're stuck with me forever -- more of me than you'd ever imagined." In worst cases, a woman will eat herself so big that Greenpeace tries to save her -- until they realize that's a scrunchie on her head, not a decorative blowhole.Beyond all the love hooha, marriage, especially as a child-farming enterprise, is a business partnership. Each partner has their end of the bargain to hold up, including not becoming substantially different from the person the other person married. Yes, I know it can be exhausting taking care of kids, and tedious lifting big old weights instead of Little Debbies. Well, it's exhausting and tedious earning a living, too, but imagine countering your wife's "I'm happy with my weight, and don't intend to change it!" with "I'm happy with the money I've earned, and plan to take the rest of my life off to drink beer and wax my car." Just guessing, but her response probably wouldn't be turning the other chin...
(Comments are live at the link, and that's where you'll find the rest of this column.)
The Neighbors
Vancouver, B.C. Those are the North Shore Mountains behind, and the cherry blossoms alongside.
photo by Robert W.
Joe Two- Or Three-Pack
Joe Six-Pack is going to have to cut back a few beers if he lives in Oregon. The jerks the people there elected to represent them have voted in a 1,900 percent tax increase on beer. No, that is not an error or a joke. 1,900 percent. Going from $2.60 a barrel to a whopping $52.21. From the op-ed page of the WSJ:
The money is intended to reduce Oregon's $3 billion budget deficit and, ostensibly, to pay for drug treatment.For Oregon to enact punitive taxes on its homegrown beer industry makes as much sense as Idaho slapping an excise tax on potatoes or for New York to tax stock trading. Even without the tax increase, taxes are the single most expensive ingredient in a glass of beer, according to the Oregon Brewers Guild.
But Democrats who run the legislature are desperate for the revenues to help pay for Oregon's 27.9% increase in the general fund budget last year. If they have their way, every time a worker steps up to the bar and orders a cold one, his tab will rise by an extra $1.25 to $1.50 a pint. Half of these taxes will be paid by Oregonians with an income below $45,000 a year. Voters might want to remember this the next time Democrats in Salem profess to be the party of Joe Six Pack.
If anybody needs drug treatment, it's the lawmakers. In what way is it acceptable to tax one particular product far beyond any other? And yes, I know this is done throughout the country -- and it's unacceptable.
If there are particular costs associated with a particular product -- costs which will otherwise be passed on to the taxpayer -- yes, I think it's okay to expect them to be paid by the business. For example, if you're running a factory that is in some way taxing to the local environment, you should fund cleanup or protection of said environment.
But, 1,900 percent for beer? Just obscene.
Oh, and no, I don't drink a drop of the stuff, and haven't had an entire beer in my lifetime. Not even half a beer.
"Teabagging The Establishment"?
That's a word some are unwittingly using to describe the tax protests going on today. Um...if the tea parties actually include teabagging demonstrations (see reference #2), that'll really be something to see.
More People Should Dress Like This More Often
It would make the world a less snarly and ugly place. 
People are less likely to give another driver the finger for slowing down when lost if that driver is wearing a big floppy pair of ears.
Personally, I sometimes feel the desire to go out wearing little red cat ears to match my hair, but I have yet to procure them.
Sex For Money
Why are women "grossed out" by a man paying for sex? I have a question about a woman whose boyfriend saw escorts a few times -- not while they were together -- and she is "repulsed" by him now.
I wrote back to the girl who wrote me about this, asking her about what beliefs of hers he's transgressed, etc., and asking her to explain her thinking to me about sex, prostitution and related issues, but she hasn't written back.
Maybe some of you can help me by explaining how you or women in general feel about a man seeing a prostitute or escort. Oh yeah -- there is a difference between a street hooker and an escort, although I'm not sure this girl realizes it.
So...lay it on me, ladies (and men).
Um, so to speak.
New York's Governor Is The State's Liquor Nanny
In closed-door negotiations, New York's governor Paterson, along with the New York state senate and house leaders, nixed a plan to sell wine in supermarkets -- like they do here in California...and without causing So Cal society to crumble on its foundations. An excerpt from a Consumerist post:
The corks have yet to stop popping for those who opposed the plan -- mainly drunk-driving awareness groups, the police, and small-business owners. Police feared an increase in underage drinking, since kids would have easier access to wine (uh, know any teens who crack open a bottle of Merlot on a Friday night?); and Mom and Pop wine stores claimed they would not be able to compete with the volume discounts offered at the supermarket.However, supporters of the idea, such as Vote Wine 2009 (a coalition of supermarkets, wine growers, and the New York Farm Bureau) note that "Without this proposal, consumers will continue to pay higher prices and have less choice."
A Consumerist commenter wrote:
The small business owners are right, they wouldn't be able to compete with the volume discounts and the ease of access would cause their business to decrease.
Boohoo. This is called capitalism.
via Wine Spectator
Map To The Stars' Homes
Astronomy Picture Of The Day.
via Rick
The Free World Is Cracking Down On Free Speech
Law prof Jonathan Turley writes in the WaPo of a troubling trend in the West to quash free speech. Ever since Muslims worldwide rioted over a bunch of cartoons they found disturbing, Western countries have been prosecuting more and more people for criticizing religion. When they aren't prosecuting free speech, they're keeping out the purveyers of it, as the courageous Geert Wilders was kept out of Britain:
Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of "inciting religious hatred" for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics.Emblematic of the assault is the effort to pass an international ban on religious defamation supported by United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann is a suspended Roman Catholic priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister in the 1980s under the Sandinista regime, the socialist government that had a penchant for crushing civil liberties before it was tossed out of power in 1990.
...While it hasn't gone so far as to support the U.N. resolution, the West is prosecuting "religious hatred" cases under anti-discrimination and hate-crime laws. British citizens can be arrested and prosecuted under the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which makes it a crime to "abuse" religion. In 2008, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for holding up a sign reading "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult" outside the organization's London headquarters. Earlier this year, the British police issued a public warning that insulting Scientology would now be treated as a crime.
...History has shown that once governments begin to police speech, they find ever more of it to combat. Countries such as Canada, England and France have prosecuted speakers and journalists for criticizing homosexuals and other groups. It's the ultimate irony: free speech curtailed for the sake of a pluralistic society.
...After years of international scorn, the United States can claim the high ground by supporting the right of all to speak openly about religion. Otherwise, free speech in the West could die with hope of little more than a requiem Mass.
It would help if our president spoke freely -- and truthfully -- about Islam, instead of giving it phony baloney credit as some great boon that's made all sorts of wonderful differences in the west. Sure, there was that bit of free demolition Muslims did on the lower west side of Manhattan, but other than that, in my daily life, I'm mostly reminded of what the totalitarian death cult of Islam's done for our country when I get bent over by the TSA after a three-hour wait at the airport, and when I have to take small packages to the post office and wait in a 20-minute line instead of putting them in the mailbox.
Make Me Your Puppet
I'm working on what I think will be my next book, but it's a little scary to settle on a topic, because I'll be living with it pretty much nonstop for at least a year. Aside from a book reprinting my columns, which is not what I'm working on, if you could have me write anything, what would it be?
FYI, my book on the collapse of manners and how to change things (plus all my funny pranks of the rude) will be out in November via McGraw-Hill. Jackie Danicki pretty much bothered me until I said I'd write it. So...you can have an influence. So, suggest away.
Yes, Vagina, There Really Are Differences Between Men And Women
And we're not just talking about the "down there" stuff, which is about where many feminists would have you stop -- except, that is, when they're trying to demonize all or most men as rapists and child molesters, and rape as something that men, in vast numbers, will start doing, well, just for sport.
Here's a particularly creepy comment from the quaintly named blog "I Blame The Patriarchy."
I have to say, the moment somebody uses that word I know exactly the unfounded hysteria they'll be into -- and this lady (lydy? wmn?) didn't prove me wrong.
speedbudget
April 12, 2009 at 5:55 am
Just once, I'd like to see side by side statistics of "gotcha pregnancies" versus rapes. I think that might bring a little perspective to this MRA nonsense.Oh, Lard, no. Then the MRAs will just start calling rape "gotcha" sex and you know that shit will catch on.
(MRAs are "Men's Rights Activists.")
Who even thinks stuff like this? I'd love to know who these ladies are, and what their real issue is with men. (Look, if it's your mustache keeping you from getting dates, they make products for that, girls.)
Some guys aren't such great people; neither are some women. It's the human condition. But, if you can find me a single men's rights activist who thinks rape is a joke and there should be more of it, well, I'd be seriously shocked. This is about these ladies (we use the term loosely) exercising their hatred against men in their own special little man-hating sphere.
Back to the actual topic of this post, it seems so dumb to have to say so, but there are so many who refuse to believe this -- who see men and women as simply different-shaped versions of the very same thing -- in the name of "equality." Men and women's differing physiologies led to differing psychologies as we evolved over 1.8 million years.
And let me be clear: I'm for fair treatment for all, but it helps to be clear that men and women are decidedly not the same; for example, men have a much higher propensity to take wild risks (and dangerous jobs -- which usually come with higher pay than working in public relations or a nursery school, jobs which tend to have more interest for women). I was reminded of men's propensity for risk-taking this morning by a story in the Times of London by Simon Kurs about the guy who scaled the Lloyds building in London during the G20 summit:
It is the morning of the G20 summit, and as a Who's Who of world leaders gather in London to discuss the precarious future of the global economy, a figure is clinging by sweaty fingertips to a ledge more than 100ft above the streets below.As the City buzzes with thousands of protesters and police, this man has evaded the security around the Lloyd's Building -- in the heart of the Square Mile -- and is now shimmying up its distinctive metallic exoskeleton without so much as a safety harness or rope.
He reaches the top of 300ft-high landmark just after midday, having unfurled a banner in support of onehundredmonths.org, a green website, on the way up, then clambers down again to the base where a reception committee of about 20 police officers has gathered. Amid cheers from the crowd of City workers, he is arrested, escorted to a van and taken away to be questioned.
It's just another day in the life of Alain Robert, aka the Human Spider, who is the world's most notorious -- and prolific -- urban climber. He may be 46 years old but there is no sign of him slowing down.
Since climbing his first building in 1994, Robert has scaled more than 100 skyscrapers around the globe, including the Empire State Building and the Taipei 101 tower, which stands at 1,671ft. He's also tried to climb the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which are the world's tallest twin buildings, getting 60 storeys up before being stopped.
He's been arrested more than 100 times, been beaten and bruised by the security guards he's outwitted, and suffered five serious falls, which have left him with debilitating injuries to his arms and wrists (though these all happened, somewhat ironically, when he wasn't climbing buildings). Oh, and he also suffers from vertigo.
..."I love climbing, and there doesn't ever have to be another reason to do it," he says. "But now I mainly climb to raise awareness for green causes. I have three children and this issue is more important than anything. We have a bunch of charismatic leaders -- including Sarkozy, Obama and Merkel -- who are working in the right way, but we still need to keep thinking about what can be done to protect future generations, with ideas like making energy more efficient and cleaner."
While I've always made it my practice to throw myself into what I was afraid of -- I'm talking about emotional risks, like getting over being terrified of being on TV. I see no need to sky-dive or wander up the side of tall buildings.
Some women do ballsy, physically stuff, but the truth is, the Evilla Knievels of the world are very few and far between -- the point being that men and women truly are different in some ways, and denying that is silly, divisive, and seriously counterproductive.
By admitting the differences -- say, for example, the way women and men tend to see dirt and mess differently (women tend to notice, um, detail, around the house; men, who evolved better distance vision from their days chasing wildebeests, tend to step over it) -- maybe we can all get along a little better.
Living Apart Together
It works for Gregg and me -- six very happy years of being together but living separately, 13.2 miles apart -- and these two newlyweds in The New York Times plan to do it, too. I think it's not such a big deal to people when couples who aren't married do it, but people seem to find it especially shocking when married people live separately. About these newlyweds, Abby Ellin writes:
Mr. Laite lives his life largely in books and movies and has a "spartan routine that would put a Samurai to shame," said Ms. Feldman, whose apartment is the color of Pepto-Bismol, with a pink chandelier shaped like a giant octopus, expensive art commingled with paint-by-numbers paintings and a vast array of vintage memorabilia.They dated for about three weeks before the word "love" popped up. Three months later they took a trip to Las Vegas. On the plane Mr. Laite looked at her and realized that they would be married. "Not planned, or hoped or wished for, but realized as a fact," he said. "She's smart, she's funny, she puts up with my nonsense. She puts me at ease more than anyone else I've known. She makes me feel that I'm good for her."
It took him a year to propose, which he did on his birthday the following June.
Still, their marriage will be decidedly nontraditional since the economy thwarted their plans to buy a two-bedroom co-op.
"I am a big believer in the man-cave, and my one-bedroom apartment is like Liberace and Carol Channing had a baby," she said. "Jeff's been a bachelor for 25 years or so -- to be married is already kind of jarring." They will maintain separate residences and spend weekends together.
I love that we live separately. It means we miss each other instead of annoying each other, and we're forever dating. We never gets to that point where couples treat each other with boredom, or worse, contempt -- which marriage and relationship expert John Gottman
The Best In Low Technology
Gregg got me a pre-seasoned cast-iron skillet -- the Lodge Logic 12-Inch 
Thanks again to everybody who's been buying stuff on Amazon through my Amy's Mall links to help keep me afloat in the downturn in newspapers. Working hard to figure out my next book and retool!
This morning, I got a $299 Roomba
And P.S., if you want something that's not linked in my mall, all you have to do is click through one of my links to get to Amazon, and then search for it, and I'll get the kickback for your purchase because of the way you get to it.
The Marilyn Defense
I'm really tired of the claim by irate women that Marilyn Monroe was actually fat by today's standards. She wasn't, and today's American size standards are utterly ridiculous, with size inflation beyond belief to delude the size 16 into thinking she's a 10, further enabling the manic American consumption of starchy and sugary crap and vast portions.
I'm 5'9" and weigh about a pound under what I did in high school, but I don't exercise wildly or starve myself; I just know how to eat, thanks to trips to Paris (where they consume small portions of tasty food with fat in it), and to reading Gary Taubes
Here I am from an accidental view in my neighbors' old mirror from when Gregg shot my book cover a few weeks ago (sorry, can't show you the cover images!):
Being the height I am, I should probably wear an eight, but thanks to American manufacturers' frequent size inflation, I often wear a two, four, or six or an extra-small. In the case of one particular skirt, I got a 0, but only because they didn't have -- get this -- a -1 or -2, and then had to get it taken in. Utterly ridiculous. If I'm a zero, then what does my tiny little Korean ex-assistant wear, a minus five?
Meanwhile, in the Times of London, Sarah Buys debunks the notion that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 16:
There has been much debate about Marilyn Monroe's vital statistics. She possessed one of the most celebrated bodies in the world and the ludicrous rumours, hyperbole and aura of enigma that surrounded her image were all part of the Marilyn machine. They certainly contributed to the extraordinary level of fame she had acquired by the time she was found naked and dead in bed on August 5, 1962, at just 36 years old.After all these years, mystery and conspiracy theories still surround her death, but when it comes to her physical attributes, I can put a few facts straight. Contrary to received wisdom, she was not a voluptuous size 16 - quite the opposite. While she was undeniably voluptuous - in possession of an ample bosom and a bottom that would look at home gyrating in a J-Lo video - for most of the early part of her career, she was a size 8 and even in her plumper stages, was no more than a 10. I can tell you this from experience because a few weeks ago, I tried to try on her clothes.
...As I tentatively tried to coerce my way into the Some Like It Hot dress, Valerie Nelson, the woman charged with caring for the pieces in the Jersey exhibition, talked me through Monroe's body shape. Monroe was 5ft 5in (I'm an inch shorter); just over eight stone (I'm ¾ of a stone heavier); she had a respectable BMI of 21 (don't ask). She had an incredibly narrow back and rib cage but big boobs, so if she were to pop into Rigby & Peller for a bra fitting today she would probably be a 30E.
She didn't have a long body, and although her legs were a lovely shape (beautiful bony ankles and knees) they weren't particularly long. She had a very short rise (the distance from waist to crotch), but what made her body so extraordinary was the 13-inch difference between her breast and hip measurements and her waist. In her younger years her vital statistics would have come in at 36 23 35, and although her weight fluctuated throughout her career, she always maintained that out-of-this-world body ratio. A real life Jessica Rabbit.
Keep in mind that she may be talking about British sizes, which are larger than American ones. An American two equals a British six; an American four, a British eight; an American six, a British 10; and an American 10, a British 14.
Oh, and eight stone is 112 lbs. 8.3 stone would be 116, which sounds quite normal and reasonable for a 5'5" woman.
Actually, I should launch the Gary Taubes Diet Challenge here. (He has no such thing.) But, I haven't dieted for maybe 15 years, and the need for Gregg to shoot my cover came upon us suddenly. I hadn't been eating too well or exercising (I typically do 60 cardio minutes a week on an exercise bike with moving arms), and a photo really does put on 10 pounds.
I thought, crap, it's Wednesday, we're shooting on Sunday -- so I ate almost no carbs from Wednesday to Sunday...eating meat, fish, chicken, cheese, and non-starchy vegetables, and ended up weighing what I did in high school...not that I was fat before, but I wasn't quite as thin as I am in the photo.
And I didn't starve myself: I ate bacon, eggs, cheese, and green vegetables swimming in oil. And something interesting happened: my energy level was even higher than it was normally. I feel almost like I did when I was 17. So, post-photo shoot, although I don't need to be book-cover slim anymore, I have pretty much stopped eating carbs to any great extent. I drink wine sometimes at night or when I'm out with Gregg, and when we do go out, I'll order dessert. But, I just can't give up the feeling I have from making a habit of not eating flour, sugar or easily digestible carbohydrates (potatoes and other sweet or starchy vegetables, fruit juices, etc.) And now, without ever feeling hungry, I weigh just under what I did in high school.
So, if it's medically okay for you to do so (remember, I'm an advice columnist, not a doctor, so I can't tell you whether it is), why not take a week and go very low carb and see what it does for you. The first few days, you'll feel like crap if you're used to eating a lot of carbs, because I think you go into a little withdrawal. What you won't be is hungry.
(I'll think of you all tomorrow as I'm having my usual two-egg cheese omelet for breakfast with a strip of bacon on the side.)
Let's Stop Racial Discrimination In Hiring And Promotion
A bunch of white firefighters were promoted ahead of black firefighters even though the black firefighters got better test scores. Outrageous, right? Disgusting, huh? Plain old wrong, isn't it?
Remember what Martin Luther King said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character..."
I'm with him. Which is why I'm as outraged by the real story as I'd be by the switcheroo'y one I posted above. The real deal is that white firefighters (and a few Hispanics) in New Haven, CT, scored much better than black firefighters, so New Haven found itself stuck. They threw out the test and promoted no one.
Adam Liptak writes in The New York Times:
NEW HAVEN -- Frank Ricci has been a firefighter here for 11 years, and he would do just about anything to advance to lieutenant.The last time the city offered a promotional exam, he said in a sworn statement, he gave up a second job and studied up to 13 hours a day. Mr. Ricci, who is dyslexic, paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read textbooks onto audiotapes. He made flashcards, took practice tests, worked with a study group and participated in mock interviews.
Mr. Ricci did well, he said, coming in sixth among the 77 candidates who took the exam. But the city threw out the test, because none of the 19 African-American firefighters who took it qualified for promotion. That decision prompted Mr. Ricci and 17 other white firefighters, including one Hispanic, to sue the city, alleging racial discrimination.
Their case, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on April 22, is the Roberts court's first major confrontation with claims of racial discrimination in employment and will require the justices to choose between conflicting conceptions of the government's role in ensuring fair treatment regardless of race.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has repeatedly noted his hostility to what he has called the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race." In 2007, diverging from an important Rehnquist court decision that allowed public universities to consider race in admissions decisions, the Roberts court forbade public school systems to take race explicitly into account to achieve or maintain integration.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
I'm with him. There's more on the case here, at adversity.net, an organization dedicated, as I am, to stopping discrimination on the basis of race.
The Sahara Of Godlessness
The pope warned of a "desert of godlessness" in his Good Friday address. (Hmmm... actually, I'd like a dessert of godlessness; to bite the head off something small, gourmet, and chocolate, as we evil atheists are known to do.)
From The Daily Mail:
Pope Benedict XVI last night attacked the rise of aggressive secularism in Western societies, warning them that they risked drifting into a 'desert of godlessness'.He used his Good Friday meditations to compare deliberate attempts to remove religion from public life to the mockery of Jesus Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified.
'Religious sentiments' were increasingly ranked among the 'unwelcome leftovers of antiquity' and 'held up to scorn and ridicule', he added.
Well, if you believe in astrology, numerology, psychics, or god -- believing in stuff you have no evidence works or exists -- I'm going to find you silly and gullible.
Astrology buffs and related sillies don't affect others' lives much with their beliefs (perhaps, save for when Nancy Reagan reportedly used astrology to help guide a few decisions in The White House).
And about that "desert of godlessness," atheists don't have a conspiracy to cover up pedophilia, nor do they lie to Africans about condoms, putting them at risk for HIV and AIDS. More desert, please; less religion.
When In Afghanistan, Do As The Romans Do
My artist friend Roman Genn, aka "the mad Russian," took a wee trip for the LA Times and National Review -- to Afghanistan. The images he drew for the LA Times are here. Click them up to see them larger.
Read Roman's bio here. And see his incredible paintings here.
Here, below, is a photo of Roman. Cute, isn't he? 
Roman makes friends easily!
Here we have the afternoon siesta, Afghanistan-style.
And, here's Roman and another one of his pals.
Photo credits (from top to bottom): Dan Schiller, Hamid, Lt.Col. Vadim Fersovich, Mike Nelson
How To Get Rid Of Shitty Writers In Your Local Paper
Just campaign to have them hired by the Obama administration.
I was reading Romenesko's media news site on Thursday morning, when, to my great delight, I saw that Rosa Brooks, Barbara Ehrenreich's dull and often (or usually) irrational daughter whose unreadable column runs on the LA Times' op-ed page, has been given a job in the Pentagon.
This, of course, horrifies me as well -- that this lettuce-for-brains will have any say over anything -- and even worse, that she'll be doing it as "an advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy." But, since I have no say over which idiots this administration hires, I am thrilled to no longer have her sucking up space in the local paper.
Not surprisingly, in her typical irrational "government should be our mommy and daddy!" fashion, she recommends government bail out the papers. Now, I'd like things to be back the way they were two years ago, before papers started calling me to tell me they were going out of business or killing the section my column runs in, but I'm not a big enough whore or idiot to want government to be in charge of the currently free press. Barbara bunny just wants the grownups to come save her (never bothering to rub two brain cells together to figure out how this will all be paid for -- like maybe that we, and generations and generations to come, will be saddled with monstrous debt):
Like everyone else whose livelihood is linked to the newspaper industry, I've been watching, appalled, as newspapers continue their death spiral, with dwindling circulations and thousands of layoffs. Here at The Times, the editorial staff is down to almost half the size it was in 2000. Often, as I've watched talented colleagues get the ax, I've suspected that I've only lasted this long because as a freelancer -- with no benefits and minimal pay -- I'm just too cheap to be worth firing.Still, I knew it was time to pray for a government bailout in December, when my editor explained that because the paper's parent company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, I might not get paid for my recent columns. From a legal perspective, he told me, I wasn't a columnist -- I was an "unsecured creditor" of Tribune Co. (Along with other freelancers, I got paid in the end, but if I ever do this again, I'll be sure to ask CEO Sam Zell for some collateral first -- the title to his house, maybe.)
...If we're willing to use taxpayer money to build roads, pay teachers and maintain a military; if we're willing to bail out banks and insurance companies and failing automakers, we should be willing to part with some public funds to keep journalism alive too.
I, for one, am not willing to bail out banks, insurance companies, and failing automakers -- nor am I for the free press to become the on-the-dole press. It's bad enough that we're going into huge debt -- on top of the huge debt we already have.
Brooks might not get it, but the LAT's commenters do:
29. Gee I'm an engineer. I provide a valuable service to society. I'd like a bailout too. Would you guys mind subsidizing my salary too? Eventually, we'll find the last two productive people who make a product that people will actually pay for and just tax all of their earnings so we can support people who went into journalism. Yay! Submitted by: mg31. I will so miss the weekly amusement that this column provided, as no one could ever mistake it for reasoned discourse from a rational, educated, and worldly person. Subsidized journalism - don't we call that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? We all know how robust and idependent that is. What I fear even more though, is the thought of Ms. Brooks having an impact on our defense policy. Let's hope there are still newspapers to expose any ideas she might try to fester upon us.
Submitted by: Tim Bowman
12:04 PM PDT, April 9, 200933. So let me get this straight: In order for the press to fully serve in its honored "fourth-estate" capacity as the watchdog of government, it needs to be funded and backed by the government? Seriously? I fear for my safety now that you will apparently be brining that world class caliber of analysis to the DOD.
Submitted by: Jason
11:58 AM PDT, April 9, 200941. "Other democracies pay for accurate reporting, so why shouldn't the U.S.?" Yeah, I think Russia did. They called their paper Pravda or something.
Submitted by: PJ
11:10 AM PDT, April 9, 200947. This is a ridiculous article. Newspapers are struggling because they made bad business choices and failed to understand their markets or recognize the threats of emerging technologies. Newspapers and news outlets as we know them may change, but "news" as a product will continue to exist, subject to the laws of supply and demand like any other product. Newspapers are just a delivery format, like VHS or floppy disks. We wouldn't bail out those industries as they become outdated and inefficient. We wouldn't create subsidies or tax breaks for people who insist on using archaic technologies.
Submitted by: Sarah
10:35 AM PDT, April 9, 200976. To paraphrase Tom Jefferson: "Given a choice between government-run newspapers and no newspapers, I would choose the latter." If Ms. Brooks thinks licensing of journalists will "encourage robust and independent reporting," she is heading to the right place--a job in an administration trying to install socialism.
Submitted by: Old Editor
5:50 AM PDT, April 9, 2009
And one of the reasons the LA Times is failing -- one small reason -- is their taking for granted reader eyeballs by publishing unreadable people like the out-of-state Brooks regularly instead of the brilliant (and local) Eugene Volokh.
A.O. Scott Should Be Horse-Whipped
Along with any other critic who gave the dreadful film "Duplicity" anything other than a straight-out "See this if you can't fulfill your masochistic urges by getting somebody to pull out all your toenails with a rusty pliers."
Here's Scott's review, headlined "Effervescent Espionage With Two Irresistible Forces." Oh, hurl. (Which is what Clive Owen looked like he wanted to do when he was forced to spit out some of the movie's dreadful dialogue.)
I particularly love this quote: "However you describe it, "Duplicity" is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time." Maybe he saw the unreleased movie, where they cut out all the boring parts, which is most of the film.
Weirdly, the film, about two former secret agents who go into the business world to steal their way to funding their life together, has no sex (just the aftermath and a lingering Clive kiss on JR's back) and no violence. It was entirely bland, mildly funny in a few places, and one of the longest movies I've ever seen. And neither poor Gregg nor I can figure out why they kept going back to a particular piece of dialogue in flashback in various places around the world.
How bad was it? So bad it was completely puzzling how they got it in the theaters. MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS!
(Was that unclear?) Here -- once more so I'm sure you'll dodge this turkey bullet:
MISS! MISS! MISS! MISS!
Are You A Boor?
You are if you're out with a friend and you wordlessly make them wait while you start texting. If you've got an emergency, and say so, that's different. But, how often does anyone have an actual emergency?
Monica Hesse writes in The Washington Post about the extreme rudeness that is turning to your electronic messaging device while you're out with somebody:
Too late. The conversation is dead. It expired the moment the BlackBerry first vibrated. Now all that you, the former half of two communicating people, can do is awkwardly stand there and deal with the fact that you are less engaging than a five-ounce piece of plastic. It's maddening -- or maybe it's just a simple question of etiquette: What is the appropriate course of action when you have been abandoned for a Personal Digital Assistant?"It's a very anxious moment for me," says Michael-Levon Warren, a designer in Southwest Washington, who has been dropped for many an e-mail or text message. After a while, "I start to think, maybe I shouldn't be standing here. But then I have to keep standing there because I didn't walk away to begin with."
Should you stay, or should you go?
Should you cool it, or should you, perhaps, blow?
Even trained professionals struggle with this question. Jodi Smith, the founder of Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting in Salem, Mass., describes a recent lunch with one pal who began texting four times in a 20-minute span.
Smith pointedly turned off her own cellphone. She explained that she'd been looking forward to uninterrupted conversation. "But it was like a Pavlovian response. It was almost as if she was drooling" whenever the phone buzzed. Finally, Smith got up and moved to another table. When the friend came looking for her, full of promises and apologies, Smith was skeptical. "Are you really done?" she asked. "You don't have to be a pity friend."
Having manners means restraining the urge to do whatever you damn well please in favor of showing a little empathy and consideration for others.
This means putting your phone on vibrate in public. Nobody is charmed by your ringtone. Frankly, it's interrupting our thoughts. And this means focusing on a friend when you're with a friend. If they're not interesting and important enough for you to do that, well, maybe you should cut them loose and go out alone with your electronic toy.
How Barbarians Think
Muslims rejoice at the Italian earthquake, reports adnkronos, from postings on Jihadist websites:
Dubai, 8 April (AKI) - Jihadist users of Al-Qaeda linked websites have been rejoicing at the devastating earthquake that hit Italy's central Abruzzo region on Monday, describing it as a "divine punishment" for "the enemies of Islam". The earthquake killed over 260 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed thousands of buildings, leaving 20,000 homeless."At last they have had their dark days too. O Allah, kill them and leave them destitute vagabonds," said one of a series of comments that have appeared on various jihadist websites this week.
...The jihadists appear to be engaged in contest to see who can post updates on the death toll from the earthquake fastest.
..."O Allah, keep the earthquakes and tragedies coming - cursed be Europe, Israel and the United States," wrote 'Ashiq al-Irhab', which in Arabic means 'desirous of terrorism'.
Another jihadist site, 'al-Shura', has been publishing tolls of the Abruzzo earthquake victims beneath each article, accompanied by a macabre prayer.
The prayer reads: "O Allah, may the death toll continue to rise. Destroy our enemies and help Muslims!"
Nobody on those sites is crying out for gay Muslims slaughtered by the Iraqis.
Amy On Dr. Helen TV On Gotcha Pregnancies
The link is here.
UPDATE: Related column I've written on this topic, Fetal Attraction. An excerpt:
In no other arena is a swindler rewarded with a court-ordered monthly cash settlement paid to them by the person they bilked. While you don't mention being forced at gunpoint to have sex without a condom, potentially getting socked with two decades of hefty fines for being a careless idiot seems a bit like being sentenced to 100 years hard labor for stealing a muffin. The law is not on men's side. Matt Welch reported in Reason magazine (2/04) that welfare reform legislation forces some men to pay child support for kids who aren't theirs -- sometimes, kids of women they've never even met -- unless they protest, in writing, within 30 days, that they're victims of a daddy-scam.While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First
, poses an essential question: "Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?" A child shouldn't have to survive on peanut butter sandwiches sans peanut butter because he was conceived by two selfish, irresponsible jerks. Still, there's a lot more to being a father than forking over sperm and child support, yet the law, as written, encourages unscrupulous women to lure sex-dumbed men into checkbook daddyhood.
This isn't 1522. If a woman really doesn't want a kid, she can take advantage of modern advances in birth control like Depo-Provera or the IUD, combine them with backup methods (as recommended by her doctor), add an ovulation detection kit, plus insist that doofuses like you latex up. Since it's the woman who gets a belly full of baby, maybe a woman who has casual sex and is unprepared, emotionally, financially, and logistically, to raise a child on her own, should be prepared to avail herself of the unpleasant alternatives. It's one thing if two partners in a relationship agree to make moppets, but should a guy really get hit up for daddy fees when he's, say, one of two drunk strangers who has sex after meeting in a bar? Yes, he is biologically responsible. But, is it really "in the child's best interest" to be the product of a broken home before there's even a home to break up?
Big Entitled Babies At The Local College Newspaper
College is so not the real world, and some college students realize that; though, not those on the college newspaper at UCLA, The Daily Bruin.
They got a big front page ad for Haagen-Dazs -- just as newspapers are gasping for advertising and going out of business right and left -- and what do they do, but...cry and whine about it in print, and insult the advertiser:
In what we all hope will not be a recurring situation, the Daily Bruin senior staff has begrudgingly agreed to run an advertisement as the front page of today's paper. We see it as a regrettable but relatively unavoidable consequence of the recent financial trends devastating our sources of revenue and our industry.Many of us volunteered to forfeit our pay in order to ensure that the ad would not run, but because some of our staff members could not afford to use their paychecks to make a statement, we have been forced to go along quietly.
The reality of our financial situation is grim, and the fact of the matter is that we would have been forced to cut thousands of dollars from an ever-tightening budget if we had not run this advertisement.
We were forced to make a decision we find distasteful at best - and dishonest and unethical at worst - because of the ever-present and unrelenting reality of the economy and the downturn of the journalism industry.
Much of our staff, the members of this board especially, are invested in the Daily Bruin and the practice of journalism on a personal level, and nothing pains us more than to see the cover and name of our beloved publication sullied for the sake of survival.
We weighed every possible alternative and appealed to every relevent authority for a solution, but our efforts were ultimately fruitless.
Our hope is that our readers will not dismiss us as the sell-outs we feel like.
Idiots! Idiots! Perhaps partly because I'm somebody who started in advertising (at Ogilvy & Mather, right out of college, where I went to learn how to do film and TV on somebody else's dime rather than going to grad school on my parents'), I have respect for advertising. Also, perhaps because I'm not a drooling idiot.
The ads, you teenaged twats, are what keeps the paper in business. If you go on to real newspapers, you'd do well to be really nice to the sales staff, and even thank them from time to time. Without them, you'll be writing P.R. copy or working as a barista -- if you're lucky. Not a lot of jobs out there these days, kittens.
Oh yeah -- this guy, on Romenesko, the media news site, was right on. Mark Phillips writes:
From the editorial:"Many of us volunteered to forfeit our pay in order to ensure that the ad would not run, but because some of our staff members could not afford to use their paychecks to make a statement, we have been forced to go along quietly."
Try forfeiting your paycheck when you have a mortgage.
Next time someone buys a really expensive ad, thank them instead.
Decriminalizing Drugs In Portugal
It shows positive results, according to a SciAm story by Brian Vastag:
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem--it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.
Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts--defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use--are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.
Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.
Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.
"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."
What is decriminalization (versus legalization)?
Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers.
Racist Islam
I got this from FLAME, Facts And Logic About The Middle East. Their director, Jim Sinkinson, writes:
Bashir's genocide against African Muslims is permitted by Arabs because...he's not Jewish?Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir, wanted for genocide in Darfur by the International Criminal Court, was greeted with kisses by his Arab brethren last week in Qatar. Gosh, what a surprise that the Arabs embraced this fellow Arab, despite his history of murdering hundreds of thousands of African Muslim civilians.
Ah, but those were non-Arab Muslims. When Israel kills 950 Palestinians, more than 600 of whom were Hamas fighters, most of whom were hiding among civilians---after notifying Gaza residents in advance of bombing targets through leaflets and phone calls---Israel is condemned by outraged outcries from nearly every Muslim nation. When genocidal murderer Bashir kills hundreds of times more Muslims, he's feted by those same nations.
Double standard? Uh, yeah. But what else is new? The most frustrating element is not even the double standard, which we've come to expect, but that so few media have called the Arabs out on their hypocrisy. Martin Peretz of The New Republic is an exception, and his article below expresses this unfairness forcefully.
One of the key elements of anti-Israel criticism that assumes the proportion of anti-Semitism is just this double standard applied to Israel. Please review this short, indignant piece by Peretz. It will serve you well as you help people understand the difference between criticism of Israel, which certainly can be justified, and double-standard criticism, which cannot.
About the biggest idiots out there are all the black who join Islam in prison. You want respect? Become a Jew. (And I say that as somebody who has no religion, and who finds all evidence-free belief in god silly and primitive. Still, Judaism in general, culturally, morally, and in the way it treats others is heads and tails above other silly, primitive religions.)
Here's more on "Why the Murder of African Muslims Doesn't Matter to the Arabs," from Peretz at The New Republic:
Of one fact I am absolutely certain: the leaders of the Arab world are welcoming a mass murderer into their midst. And, instead of turning him over to authorities in the Hague, they are welcoming him because he is an Arab who is killing black Africans.
Assume Everybody's Lying
My column on Internet dating is up here, where comments are live. An excerpt:
On the bright side, you don't mention discovering that 125 really is her weight -- from the knees down.A seasoned shopper on an online dating site doesn't just wonder if everybody's lying, he expects it. People will tell you right in their profile that honesty is extremely important to them -- then sandwich that claim between more fudge than you can buy in one of those candy stores you see in the mall. And, because men and women have different hard-wired preferences for what they seek in a partner, they lie about different things. Men tend to lie about their height and income (and get photographed in front of a Jag -- the one parked next to their beater Nissan). Women are likely to lie about their age and weight ("more of me to love" equals "plan to pick me up for dates with a crane").
Deception has always played a big part in romantic marketing. Mascara is a lie. Wearing a slimming color is a lie. Frankly, deodorant is a lie, but let's hope the masses continue to embrace olfactory dishonesty. Of course, in person, control-top pantyhose only control so much. Online, people can get away with much more...
Why Make Use Of Reason Part Of An American High School Education?
If you think students these days are idiots -- and a good many are, according to what I read in their e-mails to me -- just check out the educators; or rather, "educators." Those in Fairfax, Virginia are educating the students -- in nonthink and irrational adherence to stupid, unreasonable rules.
Michael Alison Chandler writes in The Washington Post about the birth control pills that landed a Virginia honor student a two-week suspension and a recommendation for expulsion:
When a Fairfax County mother got an urgent call from school last month reporting that her teenage daughter was caught popping a pill at lunchtime, she did not panic. "It was probably her birth-control pill," she thought. She was right."I realize my daughter broke a rule," the mother said. But in an appeal to the school system, she reasoned, "the punishment does not fit the crime."
For two decades, many schools have set zero-tolerance policies on drugs. That means no over-the-counter drugs, no prescription drugs, no pretend drugs in student lockers or pockets. When many teens have ready access to medicine cabinets filled with prescription medications such as Xanax and Vicodin, any capsule or tablet is suspect.
Still, some parents and civil rights advocates say enforcement has been overzealous. Stringent rules have ensnared not only drug dealers and abusers, but a host of sniffling and headachy students seeking quick medical relief. The Supreme Court will consider this month the case of a 13-year-old Arizona student who was strip-searched in 2003 by an administrator who suspected that she was carrying ibuprofen pills.
Fairfax School Board members have debated over time whether to allow students to carry Tylenol or other over-the-counter medicines without registering them with the school nurse.
Morons. If, by the time you're a teenager, you can't safely take ibuprofen without adult intervention, the schools, your parents, and probably your genes have seriously failed you.
Health advocates say that harsh penalties for students who take birth-control pills at school conflicts with a campaign schools are waging against teen pregnancy.
Um, duh!
A small portion of school health clinics across the country distribute birth-control pills to teens. But in Fairfax, even carrying the pills in a backpack is counted among the most serious offenses in the Student Responsibilities and Rights handbook.During two weeks of watching television game shows and trying to keep up with homework online, the Fairfax teen, an honor student and lettered athlete, had time to study the handbook closely. If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have.
Sorry...how do you spell stoopid beyund beleaf?
The Economy Of Producing Nothing
Mark Steyn writes on NRO of G20 goals to regulate it so there's nowhere for the rich (like the wealthiest one percent who contribute 50 percent of New York City's municipal revenue) to run and hide -- as if a Swiss bank account or a post office box in the Turks and Caicos is responsible for the global meltdown:
In the current crisis, Japan, Germany, and Italy (plus Russia) are in net population decline that's only going to accelerate in the years ahead. So, unlike the U.S., they can't run up the national debt and stick it to their kids and grandkids, because they don't have any kids and grandkids to stick it to. If New York is running out of rich people, Germany is running out of people, period. The Chinese and other buyers of Western debt know that. If you're an investor and you're not tracking GDP versus median age in the world's major economies, you're going to lose a lot of money....Let it be said that in recent years in America, the United Kingdom, and certain other countries the "financial sector" grew too big. In The Atlantic, Simon Johnson points out that, between 1973 and 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By this decade, it was up to 41 percent. That's higher than healthy, but it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near that high if government didn't annex so much of your wealth -- through everything from income tax to small-business regulation -- that it's become increasingly difficult to improve your lot by working hard, making stuff, and selling it. Instead, in order to fund a more comfortable retirement and much else, large numbers of people became "investors" -- albeit not as the term is traditionally understood: Instead, you work for some company and they put some money on your behalf in some sort of account that somebody on the 12th floor pools together with all the others and gives to somebody else in New York to disperse among various corporations hither and yon. You've no idea what you're "investing" in, but it keeps going up, so why do you care? That's not like a 19th-century chappie saying he's starting a rubber plantation in Malaya and, with the faster shipping routes out of Singapore, it may be worth your while owning 25 percent of it. Or a guy in 1929 barking "Buy this!" and "Sell that!" at his broker every morning. Instead, an exaggerated return on mediocre assets became accepted as a permanent feature of life.
It's not, and it can never be. Especially given the long-term structural defects in many Western nations. A serious G20 summit would have seen France commit to the liberalization of its economy; Germany to serious natalist incentives; Britain to a reduction of the near-Soviet size of state spending in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and the United States to allowing its citizens to keep more of their hard-earned money and thus reduce both the dependency on ludicrous asset inflation as the only route to socio-economic improvement, and the risk of a Euro-style decline in birthrate caused by the unaffordability of kids.
Instead, the great powers are erecting a global regulatory regime to export their worst mistakes to the entire planet.
Right now, this is anything but a world that's conducive to production, innovation, and creation of new things -- which is a very dangerous shape for our immediate world and the world in general to be in. For the first time in my lifetime, it's no longer enough to be talented and hard-working. Now you also have to be one of the lucky ones whose talent and luck will still bring in a dollar -- or even 50 or 75 cents on a dollar -- which you wouldn't have taken a year ago, but which now looks better than no dollar at all.
Please, somebody tell me you see hope on the horizon, and please, somebody, tell me who and what form it's coming in, and when.
Phishing For Drooling Morons
Here's a screenshot of an e-mail I got Monday afternoon:
The message I forwarded to AOL's spam department along with the e-mail:
I don't know if anyone's stupid enough to reply to "LLCool Kit" supposedly from B of A, but in case they are, perhaps you should suspend Mr. Kit's account.
The Newspaper's For Sale, Not For Loan, Girliepoo!
The California section is actually the second, not the first, section of the Sunday Los Angeles Times. So...why is the California section on top?
It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm at Starbucks, where this very cute black girl in a very cute yellow dress and very cute ringlet'y hair just walked in, and...Grrr!...slid the front page section off the top Los Angeles Times that's for sale in a little stand (a little stand that says that the newspapers are "for sale" right on the top) and took it off to a table to read.
As somebody whose income has pretty much been cut in half very recently, thanks to papers cutting columnists and sections and plain old going out of business, I'm a little protective of newspapers. Also, contrary to the protestations of people who equate bloggers who link to news with investigative journalists who actually report it, we need a strong free press to safely maintain a democracy and pursue wrongdoers. (If you think the government or the police will root out corruptions and guarantee that justice is done, you're seriously naive.)
Back to the girl who made off with the front page, as those of you who are regulars here know, I'm kind of a meddling broad, so I, of course, said something to her. Something politer than, "Hey, thief! Put that back or pay for it!" (I think it was something like "You know, they actually sell those papers.") Her response: "I'm not taking it out of the place."
Me (fuming): "It's for sale, not for loan. If everyone does that, there will soon be no newspapers left."
She shrugged, walked off, and sat down to read it. Later, a somewhat plump older black woman in a pretty dress sat down with her -- I'm guessing, the mother who ill-raised her. Later a 20-something guy sat down -- probably the woman's son and the girl's brother.
I wonder what kind of business their family's in, and how they'd take it if people just "borrowed" their products, if any. Like, say, an apple, if they own a food store. "I'm just borrowing the apple! After I'm done, I'll be sure to return the seeds, stem, and core!"
In other rudenesses at this Starbucks on Sunday, a journalist I know in passing walked in -- with food not from Starbucks, foil-wrapped, on a paper plate -- and then fixed his coffee and left his paper plate on the fixins counter for Mommy to clean up. (Unfortunately, I think Mommy lives on the East Coast -- Boston or Connecticut.)
Now, it's bad enough when people leave a mess from the coffee accoutrements for the next customers who come up, or for the staff. But, leaving stuff they didn't even buy at Starbucks? Again, how were people raised that they do that sort of thing?
You heard it here first: The next time I see that, and I know the person, I'm going to photograph what they leave and track down their mother and ask her.
Western Civ Got You Down? Well, Move.
A mosque has issues with a nearby restaurant serving alcohol, writes Jessie Pounds in the Knoxville News:
Building owner Trevor Hill wants to offer alcoholic drinks along with home-cooking-style dinner and lunch menus, and he hopes to launch the eatery in about a week. He'll keep the restaurant open as late at night as is still profitable in hope of appealing to the young residents of Fort Sanders, where the building is located.The possibility that the restaurant could serve as a local drinking hangout bothers mosque attendees like board member Nadeem Sidiqqi.
Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol, but Sidiqqi said the protest isn't an attack on drinking in general, just a call for buffer zones for religious establishments.
"People may say 'we may not want to go to this mosque' if it's not a good environment," Sidiqqi said. "You want an area where you can bring your kids or your family."
Hill counters that mosque-goers are unlikely to be disturbed by noise or patrons from his restaurant. The entrances are on opposites sides of the two buildings, and Hill said that he has offered to work with mosque board members during the holy period of Ramadan, when Knoxville-area Muslims often pray at the mosque late into the night.
Hill feels he is being unjustly targeted.
"I've taken a building that's been a total eyesore ... really gone out on a limb and taken a risk for the benefit of the Fort Sanders community," he said, explaining that he has a mortgage and roughly a $1 million investment in the building. "It's not fair for me to be discriminated against any more than it is for them to be discriminated against."
The two buildings are 191 feet apart, though the distance between their front doors is longer.
Here's a solution for you: Relocate the mosque to Saudi Arabia, or someplace else where they already have Sharia law in place (instead of waiting until Muslims can take over America and convert or kill the rest of us, per the Quran's command). Sadly, your wife will have to walk around in a pup tent and your gay son will probably be shot, hung, or stoned. Them's the breaks, I guess!
Here's Robert Spencer, blogging the Quran, on the convert or kill stuff (and do note that Quran is supposed to be taken literally):
Then comes the notorious Verse of the Sword, containing the injunction to "slay the unbelievers wherever you find them (v. 5). This is, understandably, a verse much beloved by present-day jihadists. In a 2003 sermon, Osama bin Laden rejoiced over this verse: "Praise be to Allah who revealed the verse of the Sword to his servant and messenger [the Prophet Muhammad], in order to establish truth and abolish falsehood."Ibn Juzayy notes that v. 5 abrogates "every peace treaty in the Qur'an," and specifically abrogates 47:4's directive to "set free or ransom" captive unbelievers. According to As-Suyuti, "This is an Ayat of the Sword which abrogates pardon, truce and overlooking" - that is, perhaps the overlooking of the pagans' offenses. The Tafsir al-Jalalayn says that the Muslims must "slay the idolaters wherever you find them, be it during a lawful [period] or a sacred [one], and take them, captive, and confine them, to castles and forts, until they have no choice except [being put to] death or [acceptance of] Islam."
...Thus even Muslims who do not fulfill Islamic obligations fall into the category of those who must be fought. This is a principle that latter-day Salafist movements apply broadly and use frequently in branding governments that do not rule according to strict Islamic law as unbelievers who must be fought by those who regard themselves as true Muslims. This is playing out now in the Salafist revolt against Musharraf's Pakistan, and to a lesser degree in Egypt against Mubarak and even in Saudi Arabia against the House of Saud.
via Insty
Obama On Islam
The AP reports on a speech he gave in Turkey. A few essential quotes:
"Let me say this as clearly as I can," Obama said. "The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."
Again, the Quran, which is meant to be taken literally, commands Muslims to convert or kill unbelievers. It's not a "fringe" ideology simply because it has so many adherents. Of course, many of these adherents can't actually read the Quran, since Muslims have a reported 80 percent illiteracy rate. They just listen and do what they're told. ("Hey, Achmed, howdja like to be serviced by 72 virgins?!")
Obama continued:
"We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country," Obama said.
Shaping the world and our country? Well, Islam certainly is responsible for "shaping" Manhattan's lower west side. I guess in Obama-ean whitewashing, bringing down the WTC and, in turn, murdering 3,000 people, would be an act of "volunteer demolition."
The Wizard Of Obama
Reason editor Matt Welch takes a peek behind the curtain -- at how the president says one thing and does quite another:
Barack Obama's revelatory moment may have come in his first week as president. On his first day of work, he signed an executive order prohibiting lobbyists from holding highranking administration jobs, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise to "close the revolving door" between K Street and government via "the most sweeping ethics reform in history." Two days later, the president granted a "waiver" from the new rules to install Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as the No. 2 man in the Pentagon.As offenses go, the move was trivial. But as a signal of a governing pathology, it established a pattern that Obama has repeated serially since being sworn into office: reiterate a high-sounding promise from the campaign, undermine said promise with a concrete act of governance to the contrary, then claim with a straight face that the campaign promise has been and will continue to be fulfilled.
...Spending? Candidate Obama promised "a net spending cut" in which "every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches." President Obama has proposed the largest net spending increase since World War II, even while holding summits on "fiscal responsibility" and vowing to live by the same "pay as you go" principles he's already blown to smithereens.
Deficits? A president whose first budget will expand the deficit into uncharted territory (see Veronique de Rugy's "When Do Deficits Matter?," page 21) nonetheless promises to cut his shortfall in half within four years. This, he claimed in his speech to Congress, will be achieved partly through $2 trillion in "savings" that will come by "eliminat[ing] wasteful and ineffective programs." Analysts noted within hours that around half of Obama's "savings" actually come from letting Bush's tax cuts expire after 2010. It takes a certain kind of mind-set to characterize Americans' taking home their own money as a "wasteful and ineffective program," let alone tax increases as "savings."
Once you identify the president's tic of celebrating the very campaign promises that he breaks, you'll see it everywhere. So there he is, "proud that we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks," just days after passing a recovery plan stuffed with what the investigative website Pro Publica described as "items that could arguably be called earmarks" (and in the same week that Congress handed him a new budget swollen with brand new chunks of pork). The stimulus package will "save or create 3.5 million jobs," an elastic, impossible-to-prove projection that neatly gives him credit for either boom or bust.
...The illusion will eventually give way, and voters will see more of who Obama is than who they wish him to be. In the meantime the president has proposed a budget blueprint that would significantly alter the way Americans spend money on energy, mortgages, charities, and investments, to name just a few areas. Will they recognize the tic in time?
When's The Last Time You Heard A "Conservative" Advocate Cop-Killing?
Or the first time? And are there a lot of conservatives out there -- or any conservatives out there -- rampaging through the streets and shooting at police cars? From one of Treacher's Twitters about yet another one of Kreepy Kos' thoughts, utterly untethered to truth or anything resembling reality.
And I'm not a conservative-conservative -- I'm a fiscal conservative and socially libertarian -- but come on, is it too much to ask that the big lefty blogger be slightly factual in what he posts? When you have the level of influence that he does in the leftosphere, it's a basic responsibility.
I'm A Twit
See here. The Love Junkie
I Recommend A Hidden Camera
A little hidden video camera should do the job, since the person, from the likes of it, is an unrepentant repeat offender.
Videotape them letting their dog poo and not cleaning up after it, grab a screenshot of their poo-leaving, rude-ass mug, print it up by the dozen, and tack it up all over the neighborhood.
Problem solved! First, you should no longer wake up to a big pile of poo on your lawn. As a bonus, someone in the neighborhood should soon be moving, and you just might snag yourself a nice new apartment. Be sure you ask the landlord to double-shampoo the rugs.
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Road Dogs Video Trailer Contest
I just loved Elmore Leonard's new book, Road Dogs
The book, which is coming out in May (I got an advance copy because I'm sleeping with the author's researcher), features Jack Foley, the great character you might know best from the highly under-rated movie, Out of Sight
Road Dogs won't be out until May, but you still have a chance at entering the Road Dogs Video Trailer contest, sponsored by Harper Collins, with Entertainment Weekly. Amazingly, they've put up the first eight chapters of the book at this link.
The details of the contest:
The best video book trailers are like movie trailers: designed to build interest in a creative work. The main difference is that a movie trailer already has visual images to work with but in a book trailer, the trailer's producer needs to convert the written word into visual images. The trick is to convey a sense of what the book is about without giving anything away and compelling the audience to want more.We're looking for a 30-120 second video that captures the spirit of Elmore Leonard's book and offers a compelling interpretation of Road Dogs. It should have intrigue, edge, and energy.
You should submit your video book trailer by May 1st. The winning video will be selected by Elmore Leonard and announced on or about May 12th. The winn ing video will be featured on HarperCollins.com, ElmoreLeonard.com, and EW.com. The top five videos, selected by HarperCollins and ElmoreLeonard.com, will be featured on EW.com sometime between May 1-12.
One Grand Prize Winner will receive:
- One (1) Amazon Kindle pre-loaded with the entire Elmore Leonard Library ($676.97) - One (1) Signed copy of Road Dogs
Four runner-up winners will receive:
- One (1) Signed copy of Road Dogs
Elmore's judging this thing, by the way, so here's an insider tip: Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Elmore's Get Shorty
Another insider tip -- I suggest you don't show the characters on camera. I mean, not unless you can wrangle George Clooney for your shoot. And even then. Imagination, a video camera, and the Venice Canals...my suggestion.
Haunting Bombay
I mostly read science and psychology books and journals and crime novels these days, but my neighbor, who's writing a wonderful Young Adult novel, let me take a look at this new book, Haunting Bombay
I haven't read Shilpa's book, just skimmed it -- simply because I have to read about eight books before the end of the month, and prep from them for the author interviews I'm doing -- both taking place on C-Span.
Anyway, I thought I'd mention it here because the writing is so beautiful, and the story seems exciting, and because it's a book that takes place in India, Shilpa's native country. Reading it seems like taking a trip there (partly through a child's eyes), and in that, it reminds me of a movie I loved, Hari Om, about a French woman who ends up taking a rickshaw across India. I don't normally recommend anything I haven't tried or read, but I think this book is worth taking a chance on.
Here's the description from Amazon, including a review from one of my former LAT Fest panelists, Aimee Liu, author of Cloud Mountain
"In her stunning debut novel Shilpa Agarwal takes on the ghosts that bedevil young Pinky Mittal's extended family and dispatches them with rambunctious wit and affection. The result is like finely wrought mirror work, a glittering tapestry of vibrant contradictions, characters, and mysteries. Haunting Bombay flirts deliciously with the true spirit of India."--Aimee Liu, author of Flash HouseAfter her mother's death crossing the border from Pakistan to India during Partition, baby Pinky was taken in by her grandmother, Maji, the matriarch of the powerful Mittal family. Now thirteen years old, Pinky lives with her grandmother and her uncle's family in a bungalow on the Malabar Heights in Bombay. While she has never really been accepted by her uncle's family, she has always had Maji's love.
One day, as monsoons engulf the city, Pinky opens a mysteriously bolted door, unleashing the ghosts of an infant who drowned shortly before Pinky's arrival and of the nursemaid who cared for the child. Three generations of the Mittal family must struggle to come to terms with their secrets amidst hidden shame, forbidden love, and a call for absolute sacrifice.
About Shilpa:
Shilpa Agarwal was born in Bombay and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Duke University and UCLA and has taught at both UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. As an unpublished novel, Haunting Bombay won the 2003 First Words Literary Prize for South Asian Writers. It is her first novel.
And, again, thank you to all of you who are helping keep me afloat (and able to continue writing my column) in the wake of the downturn in newspapers by buying stuff on Amazon through links on Amy's Mall (stuff costs the same for you; I just get a six percent kickback). I truly appreciate it...from every used book to that video camera somebody bought the other day!
Peace Is Not The Answer
We can't let the nutwads of the world have nukes, or the unimpeded ability to launch them. These are not people who care about consequences. They're little boys who want to blow things up for the "glory" of it, for the hell of it, because Allah told them to...because they can.
Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen write at NewsMax that, contrary to what many believe, a single nuke could destroy America:
On Feb. 3, Iran launched a "communications satellite" into orbit. At this very moment, North Korea is threatening to do the same. The ability to launch an alleged communications satellite belies a far more frightening truth. A rocket that can carry a satellite into orbit also can drop a nuclear warhead over any location on the planet in less than 45 minutes.Far too many timid or uninformed sources maintain that a single launch of a missile poses no true threat to the United States, given our retaliatory power.
A reality check is in order and must be discussed in response to such an absurd claim: In fact, one small nuclear weapon, delivered by an ICBM can destroy the United States by maximizing the effect of the resultant electromagnetic pulse upon detonation.
An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a byproduct of detonating an atomic bomb above the Earth's atmosphere. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth's surface. In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network. It might take years to recover from, if ever.
This is not science fiction. If you doubt this, spend a short amount of time skimming the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack from April 2008. You will come away sobered.
Even as the new administration plans to spend trillions on economic bailouts, it has announced plans to reduce funding and downgrade efforts for missile defense. Furthermore, the United States' reluctance to invest in a modern and credible traditional nuclear deterrent is a serious concern. What good will a bailout be if there is no longer a nation to bail out?
Newt Gingrich is an unlikeable guy who was fucking one of his staff members -- extramaritally -- while going after Bill Clinton's penis with a vengeance. I couldn't care less. The guy should've been president. He's extremely intelligent, highly knowledgeable, a strategic thinker, and one of the few adults in politics today.
Michelle Obama Feels Up The Queen
The Brits, with their outdated monarchy, still gasp and twitter when somebody breaks their silly protocol.
The little old lady queen, who looks more like a pet than a ruler in the photos taken with the president and first lady, is apparently not supposed to be touched by mere mortals. Oops. Or so popular belief has it.
According to this piece in the Times of London, it's not such a big whoop.
Personally, I like the fact that Michelle Obama hugged the queen. I very often hug people I feel warmly about -- unless I notice them backing away with a look of horror on their face...in which case I'll usually just lick them.
This Is Where The Fund Starts
Barack Obama is spending like a Beverly Hills brat with an unlimited platinum card. Eventually, the bill for his deficit budget (into the trillions and trillions) will come -- to your address and mine. Michael J. Boskin writes about the enormous extent of it in the WSJ:
How much additional deficit and debt does Mr. Obama add relative to a do-nothing budget with none of his programs? Mr. Obama's "debt difference" is $4.829 trillion -- i.e., his tax and spending proposals add $4.829 trillion to the CBO do-nothing baseline deficit. The Obama budget also adds $177 billion to the fiscal year 2009 budget. To this must be added the $195 billion of 2009 legislated add-ons (e.g., the stimulus bill) since Mr. Obama's election that were already incorporated in the CBO baseline and the corresponding $1.267 trillion in add-ons for 2010-2019. This brings Mr. Obama's total additional debt to $6.5 trillion, not his claimed $2 trillion reduction. That was mostly a phantom cut from an imagined 10-year continuation of peak Iraq war spending....Finally, what of the claim not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year? Even ignoring his large energy taxes, Mr. Obama must reconcile his arithmetic. Every dollar of debt he runs up means that future taxes must be $1 higher in present-value terms. Mr. Obama is going to leave a discounted present-value legacy of $6.5 trillion of additional future taxes, unless he dramatically cuts spending. (With interest the future tax hikes would be much larger later on.) Call it a stealth tax increase or ticking tax time-bomb.
What does $6.5 trillion of additional debt imply for the typical family? If spread evenly over all those paying income taxes (which under Mr. Obama's plan would shrink to a little over 50% of the population), every income-tax paying family would get a tax bill for $163,000. (In 10 years, interest would bring the total to well over a quarter million dollars, if paid all at once. If paid annually over the succeeding 10 years, the tax hike every year would average almost $34,000.) That's in addition to his explicit tax hikes. While the future tax time-bomb is pushed beyond Mr. Obama's budget horizon, and future presidents and Congresses will decide how it will be paid, it is likely to be paid by future income tax hikes as these are general fund deficits.
...But what is not just worrisome but dangerous are the growing trillion dollar deficits in the latter years of the Obama budget. These deficits are so large for a prosperous nation in peacetime -- three times safe levels -- that they would cause the debt burden to soar toward banana republic levels. That's a recipe for a permanent drag on growth and serious pressure on the Federal Reserve to inflate, not the new era of rising prosperity that Mr. Obama and his advisers foresee.
It's All That Political Porn I Keep Posting
You're grown up enough to maybe weigh in on a murder trial, yet not enough to look at my website. A friend went in for jury duty yesterday and used the computers there -- well, as much as was possible. Here's the message that comes up when one types in advicegoddess.com on the free computers in the court:
Site blocked. advicegoddess.com is not allowed on this network. This site was categorized as: Adult Themes Questions? Not properly categorized?
Sign above computer carrel:
Advisement: The Internet access in the jury assembly room is a public service offered by the Superior Court for jurors to use while on jury service. The following sites are prohibited per Court policy: Adult/Mature Content, Gamblin, Hacking, Intimat Apparel/Swimsuit, Nudity, Personals/Dating, Phishing, and Pornography, Any sexually suggestive, offensive, violent, hate related, obscene, exploitative or pornographic sites are prohibited. Jurors seen using or accessing such sites will be asked to discontinue the use of the Internet and may be subject to civil or criminal penalties.
Well, how First Amendment'y of them.
And if you're on some trial and want to see some bobblers in a bikini for a little break from the mayhem...this is a problem why?
White Guys Finish Last
It's my latest appearance on with Dr. Helen on PJTV on the Council For Women And Girls. Here's the link. (I got off to a slightly rocky start, I thought, but woke up in the middle.) Below, that's what my dress looks like in real life. TV ate it.
Photo by my man Gregg Sutter.
What's Good For The Goose
...Is good for the gosling. A teenager uses domestic violence laws against her mother, much in the way false claims of domestic violence are often made against men to gain an upper hand in divorce and custody battles. Michelle, a commenter on glennsacks.com, wrote:
My then-17 year old daughter was out of control. Sneaking out her bedroom window not once, but twice in the same night, with two different guys, more than once. Our neighbor finally told us what was going on; her bedroom is upstairs so I had no idea she could do this undetected.She had no sense of responsibility whatsoever, did no chores, and her language was as vulgar as it gets.
When I tried to discipline her, she would threaten to call the police and "make an injury" on herself to blame on me. And one day, she made good on that promise.
I came home from shopping one Sunday to find three police cruisers in my driveway and my daughter standing amongst them with a big red welt-like mark on her neck. She'd told them I'd tried to strangle her. I later found out she'd taken her purse strap to make the "injury." Incidentally, the reason she did this was because I removed a large bottle of rum from her bedroom and poured it out. I remember her saying, "Your ass is going to jail, just watch."
I was in such shock that I could say little except, "This can't be happening" and trying in vain to explain the situation to the cops. Then one said, "turn around" and I did and was promptly handcuffed and taken to jail.
I have NEVER laid a finger on any of our children, nor has my husband. He wasn't at home at the time, and I cannot tell you how it felt to be in the back of a squad car going downtown for doing absolutely nothing wrong (save for raising a spoiled child.)
It was her word against mine, and for some reason, I lost. I received a simple assault charge and was given a year's probation. When I returned home that night, she had this awful "told you so" smirk that made me wish I was back in the jail, for that's what my home had become since she began her rule.
I haven't the words to describe how this made me feel. All the way to the station, the cops driving me wondered aloud how I "could've done that to that sweet girl." It was the stuff of nightmares.
I sometimes joke that I was raised by "loving fascists," and add that I was sure I could fly when I was eight (I actually recall doing it once in Shiawassee park in Farmington, Michigan...flapping my arms and just taking off and buzzing around), but the idea that I would ever be loud in a restaurant or kick the back of somebody's seat in a movie theater did not exist for me in what was possible in the known universe.
This stuff? I couldn't have even imagined doing it, and I'm an imaginative girl.
It's possible that this girl was just "the bad seed," but, just guessing...child raised without boundaries? It sounds like there was a father present (in bodily terms, at least)...so...what were these two genetic material providers doing when they were supposed to be parenting their daughter?
