Federal Government Whack-A-Weenie
Harsanyi, at reason, says forget death panels, let's talk circumcision panels:
According to Genesis, God commanded 99-year-old Abraham to circumcise himself, everyone in his household, and even his slaves--as they, apparently, didn't have enough on their plates--to close the covenant. Those who were not circumcised were removed, as it were, from this holy deal with God.Now people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (those folks who often carry themselves as if they, too, had the ear of the Lord) are mulling a national campaign to promote "universal circumcision" for all boys in the United States in an effort to reduce the spread of HIV. Additionally, as The New York Times reported this week, the CDC is thinking about expanding the campaign to target promiscuous adult heterosexual men. (Abstinence or circumcision? How quickly do you think sex becomes overrated?)
...Studies suggest that circumcision can help prevent HIV, though it has not shown to help those with the greatest risk, men having sex with men. One also suspects--or perhaps hopes--that ancient cultures simultaneously concocted the circumcision ritual because, through some instinctual trigger, they sensed it was hygienically beneficial.
Here's the problem: Why is the CDC launching campaigns to "universally" promote a medical procedure? If you're an adult (and nuts) or a parent, no one stands in your way of having a bris. Today 79 percent of men are circumcised already, and even if 100 percent were, the effect on the collective health of the nation would be negligible. If this is the standard, where does it stop?
And what would a proactive CDC mean if government operated health insurance? No, I don't believe Washington would deploy a phalanx of grinning, twisted doctors to perform coerced circumcisions. But when the CDC dispenses medical advice of the "universal" brand, it's difficult to accept that a government-run public insurance outfit wouldn't heed advice and act accordingly.
What if the CDC, through meticulous study, were to realize that circumcision is an entirely worthless procedure? Why would "we" waste $400 a pop? Would the CDC campaign to "universally remove" the operation from hospitals? Today, incidentally, government-run Medicaid doesn't pay for the procedure in 16 states. Most private insurers, on the other hand, do.
Though dismissed by public-option proponents, this is an example of how government persuasion can influence our decisions--first by nudging and then, inevitably, by rationing.
The larger, more pertinent point for today is that government has zero business running campaigns--and these things inevitably turn into scaremongering efforts--that try to influence our choices regarding our children and our bodies. Especially when the procedure has so little to do with society's collective health. Circumcision is a personal choice.
Well, a personal choice for everyone except that poor little sucker lying on the chopping block.
As I've written here before, and commented at reason, it is obscene to perform a medically unnecessary procedure -- a mutilation -- on a boy too young to consent to it. While this country prohibits adults from smoking pot or renting their bodies to other consenting adults, if anything should be illegal, it's this primitive practice.
That said, should you happen to be one of those lettuce-headed people who believes, sans evidence, in The Imaginary Friend, and you believe he commanded you to let some religious official hack a piece off your weenie, have at it -- when you're 18 or older.
A few links on why the measures taken in African countries don't make sense to apply in the west. First, The French National Council on AIDS:
The same measures are not applicable to the Northern countries. The recommendations of the WHO state that this strategy is aimed at countries with high prevalence, and not at countries with low prevalence or in countries where it relates specifically to one part of the population such as in France or the United States.
The Brits, from the BBC:
Keith Alcorn, from the HIV information service NAM, also warned against a knee jerk reaction. "We have to be careful not to take evidence from one part of the world and apply it uncritically to others. Male circumcision will have little impact on HIV risk for boys born in the UK, where the risk of acquiring HIV heterosexually is very low."
Australia put a figure on hetero-risk:
An Australian-born man is estimated to have a 0.02% (0.0002) risk of HIV acquisition if he does not inject drugs or have sex with men. This very low risk means that the population health benefit of an intervention like generalised circumcision programs would be negligible.
Why The Spanish-Accented Businessman Is Yammering Into His Phone At Starbucks
I told him I also have business conversations to make -- and I make them at home because I don't want to bother anyone.
"Maybe I can't talk at home," he told me.
"Why not?"
"Because when I'm home, my time is for my 2-year-old."
So, because you reproduced, the rest of us have to listen to your boring heehawing about the pharmacy business?
Apparently, yes. He started shouting at me, something along the lines of "Thank you, thank you, I have nothing more to say to you!" (If that's the case, why do you keep shouting "Thank you, thank you...etc.?)
So...this guy is supposedly in business, yet he doesn't seem to understand that ethical business means paying for the costs of your own business, not making others pay with their attention -- so you can (apparently) save money on an office.
Well, our attention doesn't belong to you, pharmacy dude.
I was waiting for him to give out a phone number so I could post it -- although, when I was explaining why it's rude to force others at Starbucks to listen to your cell phone conversations, I told him that I've blogged them before. (If you're going to publicly yammer information, it's obviously not information you want to keep private. And maybe if it becomes public, you'll act more considerately in the future -- simply out of the realization that public cell phone conversations are exactly that: public outputs of information.)
Then, I looked over and laughed -- the guy had his business card, with his name and company name big enough to read from where I was sitting, about six feet away, pasted on his laptop.
He's Ben Singer, of Farmacia Remedios. I got an earful about his business -- you can, too!
Ben is talking about doing the right thing in the community. Heh. They put "services and the community before profits." Double heh.
Let's review what was apparently going on here: It costs him to have an office, so he makes bigger profits by making people listen to him do his business at Starbucks.
I Hate Compact Fluorescents!
I call them the Not Much Light-bulbs. Something happened to the overhead light in the dining table half of my living room, and my landlord replaced the fixture with one that takes compact fluorescents. Now, I turn it on, and there's barely any light at all, so I have to turn on two lamps plus that light if I want to see anything. Plus, it's really ugly light -- the kind you see on institutional aqua stairwells where somebody's being chased by a murderer.
Howard M. Brandston concurs, writing in the WSJ:
Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting. We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is to make it comfortable and habitable. This is most critical in homes, where this law will impact our lives the most. And yet while energy conservation, a worthy cause, has strong advocacy in public policy, good lighting has very little.Even without taking into account people's preferences, CFLs, which can be an excellent choice for some applications, are simply not an equivalent technology to incandescents in all applications. For example, if you have dimmers used for home theater or general ambience, you must buy a compatible dimmable CFL, which costs more, and even then it may not work as desired on your dimmers. How environmental will it be for frustrated homeowners to remove and dispose of thousands of dimmers? What's more, CFLs work best in light fixtures designed for CFLs, and may not fit, provide desired service life, or distribute light in the same pleasing pattern as incandescents. How environmental will it be for homeowners to tear out and install new light fixtures?
...If energy conservation were to be the sole goal of energy policy, and efficacy were to be the sole technical consideration, then why CFLs? If we really want to save energy, we would advocate high-pressure sodium lamps--those large bulbs that produce bright orangish light in many streetlights. Their efficacy is more than double what CFLs can offer. Of course this would not be tolerated by the public. This choice shows that we are willing to advocate bad lighting--but not horrible lighting.
Not yet, at least. Energy regulations pending in Washington set aggressive caps on power allowances for energy-using systems in commercial and residential buildings. These requirements have never been tested.
Here's my modest proposal to determine whether the legislation actually serves people. Satisfy the proposed power limits in all public buildings, from museums, houses of worship and hospitals to the White House and the homes of all elected officials. Of course, this will include replacing all incandescents with CFLs. At the end of 18 months, we would check to be certain that the former lighting had not been reinstalled, and survey all users to determine satisfaction with the resulting lighting.
I like this guy.
It Isn't Health Insurance They Want
Brad, over at WendyMcElroy.com, takes apart the term "pre-existing conditions":
Those who are promoting health care reform are trying to water down the term "insurance." Insurance is something you buy to hedge your risk against an unlikely, future event.If my car gets stolen, I don't then go out and buy insurance and expect the insurance company to replace the car. Likewise if my house burns down. I buy home insurance because there may be one chance in a thousand that my house will be destroyed, but if it is destroyed, the financial burden will be devastating. In doing so I pool my risk with others. If there are a thousand of us, perhaps one house will burn down; but our combined premiums are sufficient to cover the cost. This is not altruism. This is a purely free-market transaction, motivated by the self-interest of all involved.
...The wannabe-health-czars are trying to pervert the word "fairness" by using the buzz-phrase "pre-existing conditions," and arguing that if "pre-existing conditions" aren't covered, then the insurance policy is somehow "unfair." Look: if you have a "pre-existing condition," that means your odds of contracting that disease are 100%. And in an insurance pool, you'd be required to pay premiums amounting to 100% of your expected loss.
So let's kill off the euphemism "pre-existing conditions," and call it what it is: you're already sick. And what the already-sick are asking for isn't "insurance," it's welfare. We can talk about how a society might go about providing this welfare...but not if we continue to muddy the issue with linguistic chicanery.
Mistreat 'Em Right
The commenter who sent me this link, wrote, and I concur, "If I was to pick one criterion with which to judge a society, the treatment of women would be it."
By that standard, as this article shows, Islam is vile.
Beats Nambumetone
I slept funny, then got into an evening dress funny (the slinky kind without a zipper that you pull over your head) and did something horrible to my neck.
In fact, since Sunday, I've been in the worst back and neck agony I've ever felt, and hot showers, heating pads, and even a gift certificate from a friend for a Thai massage (in which a rotund little Thai woman walked on my back, among other oddnesses) were of no avail.
I was in such pain that I even looked in my medicine cabinet for drugs, which, save for Ritalin, I don't usually like to take because all drugs have side-effects. There was a 10 year old bottle of Naproxin (mega-aspirin, essentially, and way too old) and an unopened couple-year-old bottle of some "nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory" called Nambumetone that had such creepy side-effects that I decided to try to keep suffering my back/neck problem instead.
Well, when the going gets tough, Gregg gets me laughing with a little Photoshopping Skyped over the transom. Yesterday, he added a flying saucer over the shot of me on the boardwalk for Psychology Today to see how long it would take for me to notice. Loved this one from this morning with old-forceps-in-the-forehead Zawahiri.
Well, I'm finally starting to feel better. While certain self-pleasuring is limited to dogs, I found that you can actually give yourself a massage (or that "hurts so good" feeling) in the exact spots you need it with this amazingly useful and odd-looking back thingie my friend L. recommended, called The Original Backnobber II
See the little photos in the picture for how it works. And it really, really works, and without much arm effort, because you just kind of lean into it to apply pressure to where you need it on your back, neck, etc. And it breaks down into two pieces so you can take it with you. It's really the single dumbest-looking and most useful thing I've bought all year. (I'm using it in between writing this blog item, and finally starting to feel better after having it since 3:20 yesterday afternoon, when I bought it at the overpriced hippie health food store in Santa Monica.)
Did Officer Wesley Cheeks, Jr., Also "Act Stupidly"?
Will the President say that about him, too? Because, I think this is a pretty clearcut case. It seems to me, if you're in the law enforcement business, you should actually know the law -- local, state, and what the Constitution and Bill of Rights say, too. These officers seem to just make it up as it suits them, which I find pretty chilling. We can have rights up the wazoo, but if police officers are ignorant of them or just pretend they don't exist, it is as if they don't exist at all.
Regarding the situation in the video, the officers claimed First Amendment rights are different on school grounds. That's not my understanding from my days on my high school newspaper. Indeed, here's the quote I recall, from the Student Press Law Center:
Q: Do high school students have First Amendment rights?
A: Yes. As the United States Supreme Court said in 1969, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." But the First Amendment only prohibits government officials from suppressing speech; it does not prevent school censorship at private schools. A state constitution, statute or school policy could provide private school students with free speech protections.
via baldilocks/insty
Add This One To The List Of First Date "Nevers"
Never steal a woman's car on the first date...at least not if you previously sent your picture to her cell phone -- apparently from your own cell phone.
Detroit-based dumbshit Terrance Dejuan McCoy had dinner with the woman, stiffed her on the check (saying he'd left his wallet in her car), borrowed her keys, and took off in her 2000 Chevy Impala...until the police impounded both him and the car.
via Jay J. Hector
Is Your Dinner Less Interrupted Because Like 5 Cents Of The Telemarketing Proceeds Go To Charity?
Oh, glory be, the FTC is banning robocalls. Er, some robocalls. This is called "Your legislator brakes -- no, bends over -- for lobbyists." And it's something -- but only a little something -- because I predict some or many of the robocallers will just take it off-shore. Here are the exemptions from an AP story on MSNBC:
Calls that are not trying to sell goods and services to consumers will be exempt, such as those that provide information like flight cancellations and delivery notices and those from debt collectors.Other calls not covered by the Telemarketing Sales Rule include those from politicians, charities that contact consumers directly, banks, insurers, phone companies, survey calls and certain health care messages such as prescription notifications. These don't fall under the jurisdiction of the FTC, a commission spokesman said.
Before the ban, consumers had to specifically join a do-not-call list to avoid prerecorded telemarketing calls. But after Sept. 1, consumers shouldn't get most of these calls anymore. If they do get one, they can file a complaint with the commission online through FTC.gov or by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP.
Oh, can you file a complaint? Hilarious. I write about this in my upcoming book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society.
I don't want to give what I wrote away three months before publication, but, per André Tascha-Lammé's research, filing a complaint against an offender is effective on the level of standing in your living room, shaking your fist at the sky, and cursing out the honcho of the telemarketing company.
Tyler Cowen's Terrific Book
I'm reading and loving economist Tyler Cowen's latest book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
It starts with a fantastic and very original view of autism and Asperger's that matches what I see in an amazing little autistic savant/ray of sunshine I know (Sergeant Heather's little boy), and that's similar to how I see ADD/ADHD (not a "disorder" but a different type of brain/operating system). At the same time, Cowen doesn't deny that some autistic children and people have it terribly rough vis a vis fitting into non-autistic society.
Here's Cowen's Bloggingheads.tv appearance with Will Wilkinson, who discusses his own ADHD in the context of Cowen's book.
Wilkinson mentions Robert H. Frank, whose talk on consumption, at the Penn Human Behavior and Evolution Society, I blogged here.
Islamo Fashion
"First-class clothing for second-class citizens." A very special fashion show on Bill Maher's Real Time:
Child Endangerment!
That's what these parents were accused of, anyway. From Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids blog, a woman in Central New York writes:
I'm not sure if we did something wrong here or not, and I feel myself being pulled every which way. But the morning we left our nine-year-old daughter with our sleeping six-year-old son in a car in a busy parking lot (windows open), we really thought they'd be okay. I figured if someone attacked them, they'd be noticed, because a lot of people were in and out constantly.My daughter had asked me if she could stay in the car and read, and I had exchanged a glance with my partner - the children's dad -- and then said yes, told her to scream the usual ("This stranger's hurting me!") if someone who felt skeevy got too friendly, and to use the cell phone to call 911 if anyone tried to open the doors of the car.
When we were paged, I suspected my daughter had reached the end of her book and her brother hadn't woken yet, so she'd called the store to have us paged, knowing we'd come out and relieve her boredom. But when we got back to the car after an absence of half an hour, the cops were there.
My partner was charged with endangering the welfare of a minor.
And this wasn't the first time they've been reported, either. Somebody called Child Protective Services on them when their kids were playing a block from their house, sans adult supervision, and had apparently chased a ball into the street.
I don't know about you, but I grew up in suburban Detroit, and we went to the park by our house alone (I must have been six or eight when I was allowed to do this) and swung on the swings and played in the big concrete construction tubes. And I had overprotective parents!
Idiocy I Forgot To Blog About Yesterday
This week's award for idiots who could find evidence of "racism" in the fake wood grain of a formica table top goes to those who are going after Microsoft for editing a stock photo for an ad running in Poland, replacing a black man's head with a white man's. As a commenter on the Daily Mail piece about it said:
COMMENTER: Good grief. All the black people in Poland must be up in arms, all ten of them.
Fay Weldon Wises Up About Men
If you love him, you'll pick up his socks instead of wanting to kill him for dropping them. (Of course, it helps if you feel enough of a person that you don't feel demeaned by it.) Beth Hale quotes Weldon in the Daily Mail:
The 77-year- old author - best known for The Life and Loves of a She Devil- also criticises the strident approach of early feminism for encouraging women to believe that all men were stupid and useless.
And, in another opinion likely to irritate the sisterhood, she says men are much nicer these days.
Weldon, in an interview to promote her 29th novel, Chalcot Crescent, said: 'There are women at work and there's mating behaviour, and women get them confused.
'At work, gender should not come into it. Women are right to refuse to make the coffee, but when you get home I'm afraid you have to make the coffee.
'It's such a waste of time trying to tell your husband to pick up the socks or clean the loo. It's much easier just to do it yourself.'
I'm reminded of a great story I read the other day in Judith Sills book, Biting the Apple: Women Getting Wise About Love
In a television interview some years ago, Esther Williams told a story about her marriage to Fernando Lamas, in answer to a question about what marriage to a traditional Latin male was like."We'd be sitting by the pool and he would ask for a tuna-fish sandwich. He would want me to get up and get it even tough he was sitting just as close to the kitchen and he was perfectly capable of making his own tuna fish. And," she continued, smiling,"if I could make it for him, I did. Not because I was afraid he'd be mad at me. And not because I thought it was my job as a wife or anything so rigid as that. I made it for him because it made him happy and I loved to make him happy. I knew he thought being a Latin male made him king of the world I wasn't willing to be his full-time subject. But I wasn't out to prove he wasn't king, either."
Meet The Real Teddy Kennedy
The Daily Mail headline says it all: Ted Kennedy: The Senator of Sleaze who was a drunk sexual bully...and left a young woman to die. The article says a whole lot more.
Stupidity 101
Via @michaelshermer, this is an actual college course at Occidental:
180. STUPIDITY.Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beavis and Butthead. This course examines stupidity.
My Boyfriend Nearly Ended Up In An Asylum
And all I got was this groovy new photo!
Next step, website masthead redesign. If you have any suggestions/examples, do let me know. Please post only one link per comment, or you will get eaten by my spam filter. Two links? Please post two comments.
The advicegoddess.com treatment above was done by an art director who didn't know me, who did a favor for the guy who designed my site. I prefer very clean design and clever humor, but not so clever it will bore the hell out of everyone who sees it daily, including me.
photo by Gregg Sutter
We'll Just Force Doctors To Work For Free!
LA Times consumer columnist David Lazarus has a brilliant idea. The way to solve the country's health care problems is to turn doctors into part-time slaves! He writes, utterly unabashedly:
...Why not make a week or two of community service a condition of licensing? If you want to practice medicine in California (or elsewhere), you'll agree to do some pro bono work every year.I bounced this suggestion off Dr. Brian Johnston, an emergency physician at White Memorial Medical Center in Boyle Heights. He wasn't thrilled.
Johnston said he already devotes about a third of his time in the E.R. to treating people without insurance who may never be able to pay their medical bills. He also said he loses money on just about every Medi-Cal patient he treats because of low reimbursement rates.
"A week of free service wouldn't be fair," Johnston said. "I'm already contributing."
Fair point. On the other hand, I suspect there are more than a few doctors, dentists and others who aren't quite as charitably inclined.
So let's try this instead: As a condition of licensing, a medical professional would be required to demonstrate that he or she treats at least a tenth of patients on a pro bono basis annually.
That is, for every 10 patients that a healthcare provider sees, one would receive the same level of care as all the others but at no cost.
Such patients would obviously have no medical coverage or face some other economic hardship.
If that condition can't be met, the healthcare provider would have to volunteer for a week at a local free clinic or at an event similar to the one at the Forum.
Many high schools require that students perform community service as part of their graduation requirements. This is good for the students and good for the community.
I don't see why this same standard can't apply to people whose profession is all about helping people (or at least should be).
Um, because we outlawed slavery a few years back.
Here's the e-mail I just sent to David Lazarus:
Dear Mr. Lazarus, I choose to do volunteer work and so do a number of people. I encourage you to encourage more to do it, Mr. Lazarus -- as I do in my upcoming book.But forced labor as a solution? Well, if you think that's righteous, feel free to work a day a week and send me that portion of your salary -- simply because I could sure use it, in the wake of some of the newspapers I write for going out of business.
Or, as we say it here in AdviceGoddessland, "Mouth, meet money."
Please address your checks to:
Amy Alkon
171 Pier Ave. #280
Santa Monica CA 90405And please let me know when I can expect the first one. Thanks! Truly appreciate this!
-Amy
What's your bet on whether he'll take me up on my offer?
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Lazarus responded like so:
In a message dated 8/26/09 9:08:05 AM, David.Lazarus@latimes.com writes:Actually, I'm content to do my volunteering in the classroom and at the food pantry.
I wrote back to him:
But, why shouldn't I get to tell you that you just direct some of your income or time to me, the way you suggest should be done to doctors? FYI, I already volunteer in the classroom and give advice to people whose questions will never make my column. I also try to help a homeless artist as much as I can. I just wouldn't dream of telling anyone they have to give their time for free.My ex-boyfriend is an anesthesiologist who mainly works on liver transplants. He went to med school, which cost him plenty, went through a long and tough residency, and wakes up in the middle of the night to go be a part of these operations. And he should work for free? But, not by his choice?
Buy Now, Pay And Pay And Pay And Pay Later
Jim Kuhnhenn writes for the AP that the White House projects a $9 trillion federal deficit -- which is more than the sum of all the deficits since America's founding. (Hint to the President: You're supposed to leave children an inheritance, not a really big bill.)
The Real Cost Of Health Care In France
Guy Sorman sets Sara Paretsky straight in a terrific piece on City Journal. Paretsky published "Le Treatment" in The New York Times about taking her husband, who was suffering chest pains, to a French hospital, and getting him diagnosed (correctly, with pneumonia) and treated, and later getting a bill for the services for $220. Cheap, huh?! Just not as cheap as it seems. Sorman writes:
Paretsky's adventure is a parable based on a false assumption: that health care can be public, reliable, and free. It may indeed seem free, or close to free, for an American tourist receiving treatment in an emergency; as a French taxpayer, however, I paid a heavy price for Paretsky's husband's treatment. And you, my American reader, did too.How much? France's costly national health insurance is mostly financed by taxes on labor. A Frenchman making a monthly salary of 3,000 euros will pay approximately 350 of them (deducted by his employer) for health insurance. Then the employer will add approximately 1,200 euros, making the total monthly cost to the employer of this individual's services not 3,000 euros but 4,200. High labor costs in France affect not only consumer prices but also unemployment rates, since employers are reluctant to pay so much for low-skill workers. Economists agree that unemployment rates and the cost of national health insurance are directly related everywhere, which partly explains why even in periods of economic growth, the average French unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent.
High as they are, taxes on wages are not enough to cover the constant deficits that national health insurance runs. France imposes an additional levy to try to close the insurance deficit--the CSG (contribution sociale généralisée)--which applies to all income, including dividends, and which Parliament increases every year. Altogether, 25 percent of French national income goes toward what's called Social Security, which includes health care and basic retirement pensions for all.
French national health insurance is also subsidized by American patients. This is because France decides which drugs to use and at what prices; American pharmaceutical companies must either accept the dictated prices or lose an enormous market. The companies therefore sell their medicines at higher prices in the U.S. in order to cover their expenses and turn a profit; the surplus is then sold cheaply to the French, who take the same pills as Americans but at half the price or less.
In the end, who paid for Paretsky's husband's nearly free ride in a French hospital? French workers and taxpayers; American patients; and the young, unqualified, and out-of-work French unable to find jobs because of the unemployment that national health insurance engenders.
Bienvenue to Obamacare! Leave your wallet and valuables at the door.
Roll With The Lunches
Who wants to see "real" women in their women's magazines? I do -- along with "real men," in stories about interesting work they're doing in science, politics, or whatever. I don't want to see "real" women as models, except for the occasional beautiful older woman or jolie laide girl.
In other words, yes, I think models in magazines should be beautiful. (If I want to see ordinary women who aren't that beautiful, I can push a cart around the grocery store). But, not surprisingly, Glamour magazine is now seizing on the P.R. idea Dove had (and make no mistake, it's all about selling something, not about being wonderful to women), to show a big naked girl with her poochie stomach flopping over on itself. Yuck!
Enraged comments may be left below.
How Is Ted Kennedy Like Mary Jo Kopechne?
Your answer below.
Not surprisingly, they failed to mention Miss Kopechne in the slavering praise-a-logue they did on Kennedy on the 11 o'clock local news.
My Dog Ate My Staples Rebate
I got paper; Lucy got to go to the groomer. It's hard to believe a dog can be vain, but she is.
Here she is looking a little windblown:
A Doctor Rakes In The Big Bucks
Primary care doc Vance Harris's SERMO.com piece on why doctors are fed up is posted on CNN -- echoing what I hear from my liver transplant anesthesiologist ex-boyfriend, who makes $30 an hour from the government when he wakes up in the middle of the night to help install a new liver in a Medicare or Medicaid patient:
How many dozens of chest pain patients have I seen in the last month for whom I didn't order an EKG, get a consult, set up nuclear imaging or send for a catheterization?Only I have the advantage of knowing how anxious some are and that they have had similar symptoms over the last 20 years. After a history and exam, I am willing to make the call that this is not heart disease. In doing so, I save the system tens of thousands of dollars.
Most of these patients are worked into a busy day, pushing me even deeper into that mire of tardiness for which I will be chastised by at least six patients before the end of the day. My reward for working these people in and making the call is at most $75.
How many times has an anxious patient come in demanding an endoscopy who I examined and then decided to treat less invasively for three to four weeks first? Few of these patients are happy no matter how many times I explain that it is reasonable to treat their reflux symptoms for several weeks before endoscopy.
This delay in referral has led to many tense moments in the last 20 years. The cost savings to the system is thousands of dollars each and every time I am willing to make the call and go with the treatment. My reward is about $55 from Medicare and private health insurers.
How many low back pain patients have come to the office in agony knowing that there has to be something serious to cause this kind of pain? A good history and exam allows me to reassure the patient that there is nothing we need to operate on and that the risk of missing anything is low.
This takes a lot of time to explain as I teach them why they don't need an MRI. If someone else ordered the MRI, guess who gets to explain the significance of bulging disks to an alarmed patient? Setting realistic expectations on recovery and avoiding needless imaging helps saves the system thousands of dollars. My reward is another $55.
How many diabetics do I struggle with, trying to get them to take better care of themselves? How many hours have I spent with teenage diabetics who will not check their blood sugar and forget half of their insulin doses?
Hundreds of hours seem wasted until one day they open their eyes and want to take care of themselves. My reward for years of struggle is a few hundred dollars at best. The savings to society for my hard work and never-give-up attitude is in the tens of thousands of dollars.
I am in my 22nd year in practice, now caring for 3,600 patients. Having me in the system has resulted in savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every year. My financial incentive to hang in there and work harder is that I now make less than half what I did 20 years ago. This year I will make even less.
These are the reasons so many physicians have left medicine entirely and most of us who are left wonder how long can we continue to work like this?
Who here thinks medical care will improve with Obamacare, and how and why?
Oh, and about all those uninsured people -- check out this piece by Michael D. Tanner on Cato for the real deal on the 47 million uninsured number being tossed around.
Add Wrong? You're Screwed.
James M. Peaslee writes in the WSJ about a revenue provision in the health-care bill, voted on by the House Ways and Means Committee earlier in the summer, mandating that the IRS slap penalties on honest taxpayers who make mistakes in their taxes -- penalties the IRS has had the power to waive:
Predictably, the result was some taxpayers getting hit with penalties they didn't deserve.Last June, the Small Business Council of America sent some compelling tales of woe to Congress, including one in which a 72-year-old owner of a coin operated car wash set up retirement plans for his seven employees and got socked for his good deed with a $900,000 penalty for not reporting the plans properly. The company and its owner are now headed for bankruptcy. In another case, a penalty of $100,000 each was imposed on the six minor children of an owner of a small business in Utah for not filing the right tax forms.
In response, some members of Congress sent a letter to the IRS asking it to suspend collecting the penalties in similar cases while Congress debated what to do.
However, Congress should not be surprised by these stories. The IRS was only enforcing the law exactly as Congress wrote it.
In another example of bad lawmaking, in 2007, Congress stuck into a supplemental appropriations bill a major change in the way penalties are computed for people in the business of preparing tax returns. Congress acted without consulting with the IRS. The IRS chief counsel at the time, Donald Korb, said publicly that the service had been "blindsided" by the change.
The change created a conflict of interest for tax professionals. It subjected them to a higher penalty standard than their clients, which encouraged them to give tax advice that protected the tax preparer more than the taxpayer. The IRS and tax professionals tore their hair out trying to sort through the mess until 2008, when Congress changed the law again.
There are lessons here for Congress. Don't take away the ability of the IRS to waive penalties. Also, don't tinker with penalties without thinking through the effect on the overall penalty regime.
A Judge And His Imaginary Friend
Can atheists be parents? From Time.com, aspiring adoptive parents were denied a child because they don't believe, sans evidence, that there's a big man in the sky:
In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite Eleanor Katherine's tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."
Teach a child to think rationally, whether she grows up in a religious family or not, and it's unlikely the child will believe in god. I'm a case in point. Unfortunately, somewhat rational religious people tend to compartmentalize. To borrow from Sam Harris, they'll require evidence if you tell them their frozen yogurt can fly, but they'll just take somebody's word for it that Zeus is up there caring about their lives. Or...is it Allah? Or Jesus?
Of course, the judge, apparently being an irrational thinker (i.e., believing that there's a god, a guy who lets 4-year-olds die of cancer, in fires, and of rape-murders), never processed the thought about the kid's freedom the other way around: "the child should be taught to reason, and have the freedom to refrain from worship, and not be influenced by gullible parents who believe whatever a man in a religious frock tells them."
By the way, depending on the religion, children aren't taught to be good for the sake of being good, but because they'll burn in hell if they aren't. This isn't ethics; it's an argument for behaving in one's self-interest. Personally, I prefer Adam Smith's "theory of moral sentiments -- sympathy (empathy) as a motivator, with a little reciprocal altruism on the side, plus the notion that I won't like myself much if I behave like a shit.
Thanks, Raddy!
Welcome To The Muslim World
Europe is over, kids. Europe as we know it. People there are multiplying like bunnies, and they aren't products of The Enlightenment.
Visit the Louvre and the Uffizi while you can -- before they paint over all the faces on the paintings and turn the museums into mosques.
Thanks, Flynne!
Hat Crime
That more people -- including me -- don't wear them more often. Here I am in one of my favorite Amy Downs hats, enroute to Virginia Postrel's DeepGlamour hats party, where you can see a closer shot of that hat. 
I love, love, love Amy Downs' hats. If you're up in the Pacific Northwest, go visit her shop. I'm hoping she's still doing the glam hats, now that she's moved from the Lower East Side (where I bought her hats in my Advice Ladies days) to flannel shirt territory.
On a related note, another thing I do is wear evening dresses for everyday wear. I buy them on sale -- 75 percent off, around now or at off times -- so they end up costing less than regular clothes a lot of the time. We shot a photo on the beach last night for Psychology Today, which is serializing my book (yay!) and I wore an evening dress I got for $19.99. I just love that!
P.S. The dress I'm wearing here isn't an evening dress, but it is by some Italian designer -- got it years ago for $9.99 on sale at Daffy's on 18th Street in New York. If your style doesn't change with the trends, you don't have to buy the trendy crap; you can just buy what looks great on you when it's deep-discounted!
P.P.S. Sorry boys who aren't homosexual. This has been a fashion moment. It won't happen again -- for a while, anyway.
photo by Gregg Sutter
It's The Big Government, Stupid
reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch spells it out in the New York Post -- the real reason Americans are angry:
The message of the various Tea Party protests, which predated this summer's ahistorical media panic over town hall "lynch mobs," has been pretty simple, says Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the nonprofit that has helped organize the protests, told Reason magazine this spring. "It was: stop spending so much money, stop borrowing so much money, and stop bailing out people who were irresponsible."...This isn't about liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. A majority oppose Obama's policies because they fly in the face of this country's bedrock values of personal liberty and limited government. Robbing Peter to pay Goldman Sachs does violence to that fundamentally American ethos.
Read his whole piece at the link. Here's his list of the Top 10 Obama Government Grabs:
1. The Stimulus ($787 billion)Making government the nation's largest employer.
2. The Omnibus ($410 billion)
Now largely forgotten, this porktastic piece of leftover Bush legislation passed in March without so much as a peep from a new administration that campaigned nobly against earmarks and fiscal irresponsibility.
3. Health Care Reform ($1 trillion?)
The white whale of Obama's domestic agenda; currently under threat from all sides of every aisle.
4. Cap and Trade.
Not yet law, and less likely to become so now that health care reform has hit the skids, this House-approved legislation would nonetheless make producing and consuming energy much more expensive, adding an estimated $1,100 per household by 2050, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
5. Antitrust lawsuits against Google, et al.
Not on everyone's radar screen yet, but the new head of the Justice Department's antitrust division has recently said, regarding everyone's favorite free search engine, that "I think you are going to see a repeat of Microsoft."
6) Pay Czar
As part of the federalization of commerce, the Obama administration appointed a "Special Master for Compensation" to review the top salaries of executives at firms receiving bailout money. This will surely debase their global competitiveness.
7. Turning Pell Grants into an entitlement.
This, like the recently terminated Cash-for-Clunkers program, will doubtlessly prove popular (as most federal programs that give away "free" money usually are), but the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act will, if passed, make the federal government the last big provider of student loans in America.
8. Having the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco.
This Philip Morris-backed development, which will reduce the nicotine content of cigarettes, will keep safer tobacco products off the market while imposing onerous marketing restrictions.
9. Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
Unclear how it will all shake out, but the federal government is preparing steps for unprecedented regulation of all consumer finance transactions. Already, payday lenders are being chased into the black market, and New York is losing its luster as an international capital for finance.
10. Federal Trade Commission overreach.
Again off most radar screens, the former Ralph Naderite who now runs the FTC's Consumer Protection Division has announced intentions to crack down on companies deemed to violate consumer privacy, even if no consumers are complaining.
Coloring Outside The Lines
Team Obama keeps quacking about competition in health care being key. So...why don't they actually do something meaningful about it, like as the WSJ suggests, let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines -- a proposal that's been before Congress since 2005. The WSJ quotes AARP dude John Rother mistakenly arguing against it:
Mr. Rother: "There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it's called risk selection. It's a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas."How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?
His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey--where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880--is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky--where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006--would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.
That's not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.
Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. "If consumers do not want expensive 'Cadillac' health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits," Mr. Herrick has written.
A 2008 publication "Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance," (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.
Welcome To The USSR, 90405
Friday night, I threw a "Secrets of Publishing Panel" at LA Press Club with my friend Susan Shapiro, who just published her first novel, Speed Shrinking (very funny), and who, as a writing teacher, has helped more people become published authors -- people who, prior to meeting Sue had about as much chance of becoming a first-round draft pick in the NFL.
For anyone who's interested, Sue's book on writing is Only as Good as Your Word: Writing Lessons from My Favorite Literary Gurus
Anyway, Gregg drove my neighbor and me to the event, and was driving Sue back to her hotel before driving us home when we came up to a "sobriety checkpoint" -- a big roadblock set up in Santa Monica, between Third and Fourth Street on Pico. I was horrified. Our car wasn't weaving from lane to lane, and Gregg was in no way driving erratically. But, simply because we'd chosen that stretch of road, we, along with other motorists who'd also unwittingly chosen that stretch of road, were herded into a parking lot where Gregg was made to present his license and asked by an officer whether he'd had anything to drink. (Since we hadn't been bobbing and weaving, the answer going through my head when he was asked this: "None of your damn business.")
All in all, I was just horrified. They had a whole big setup there, orange traffic cones, dozens of police officers, tables with spotlights over them -- where a guy was filling out paperwork (perhaps only caught for having an expired license -- this happens in these drunk driving roadblocks, like one in Florida I read about, where they didn't catch a single drunk driver, but got people on a lot of other offenses).
Probable cause anyone? Doesn't that sort of thing matter in the slightest? Merely taking a road means you get pulled over and searched? I looked this thing up last night and saw it justified here and there as a "public safety" issue -- in the interest of keeping drunk drivers off the road. Well, don't we have a compelling public interest in keeping knife slashers from killing people? Why aren't we stopping pedestrians everywhere and searching them for blades?
This -- and searching anybody without probable cause -- seems terribly, terribly unconstitutional. I couldn't find anything directly about these drunk driving checkpoints at Volokh, but I did find these two pieces. First, this, from a DUI attorney. And then this, by David J. Hanson, Ph.D., a sociology prof emeritus at SUNY/Potsdam:
The Michigan Supreme Court found sobriety checkpoints to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, in a split decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Michigan court. Although acknowledging that such roadblocks violate a fundamental constitutional right, Chief Justice Rehnquist argued that they are necessary in order to reduce drunk driving. That is, he argued that the end justifies the means. Attorney and law professor Lawrence Taylor refers to this as "the DUI exception to the Constitution." 1Dissenting justices emphasized that the Constitution doesn't provide exceptions. "That stopping every car might make it easier to prevent drunken driving ... is an insufficient justification for abandoning the requirement of individualized suspicion," dissenting Justice Brennan insisted. 2
Chief Justice Rehnquist had argued that violating individual constitutional rights was justified because sobriety roadblocks were effective and necessary. But dissenting Justice Stevens pointed out that "the findings of the trial court, based on an extensive record and affirmed by the Michigan Court of Appeals, indicate that the net effect of sobriety checkpoints on traffic safety is infinitesimal and possibly negative." 3 And even if roadblocks were effective, the fact that they work wouldn't justify violating individuals' constitutional rights, justices argued.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has made the DUI exemption to the Constitution, eleven states have found that sobriety checkpoints violate their own state constitutions or have outlawed them. In these states, individuals have more protections against unreasonable search and police sobriety roadblocks are prohibited.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which strongly promotes them, implies that sobriety roadblocks are legal throughout the entire United States without exception. It says that "the U.S. Supreme Court on June 14, 1990 upheld the use of sobriety checkpoints to detect and deter impaired drivers. Previous appeals to the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of such checkpoints had been declined, which allowed high state court rulings to stand. The June 14, 1990 ruling clearly upheld the constitutionality of such enforcement measures." 4
MADD also dismisses those who question the use of sobriety checkpoints by asserting that "opponents of sobriety checkpoints tend to be those who drink and drive frequently and are concerned about being caught." 5 MADD provides no evidence of this assertion and none has been found in any published research study. There are, however, published reports that opposition is especially strong among civil libertarians, judges, law enforcement leaders and conservatives. 6
The High Price Of Being "Stupide"
France is going to charge idiots who go off to risky foreign locales and then need rescue, and I'd love to see us follow suit. From eTurbonews:
The draft of a new law proposed by the foreign minister would oblige travelers to reimburse France for air fare and other costs that it could incur during a rescue from a war zone or hostage situation. French officials say that their aim is to prompt responsibility among travelers during a time when many kidnappings are taking place across the globe.Many critics are saying that this new measurement would unlikely prevent a hot headed traveler from getting into trouble in some of the dangerous corners of the world. These critics go on to say that a government must protect its citizens no matter what the cost.
The Foreign Ministry did note that these new measurements would not affect people in cases like Clotilde Reiss, a 24-year-old French teacher who was on trail in Iran and freed last Sunday on bail that was paid by the French government.
The ministry went on to say that this new bill would apply only to leisure seeking tourists and their travel agencies. The new law would not apply to diplomats, air workers, reporters, and others that are engaged in professional activities outside of France.
Dinner And A Lecture
Gregg wanted to take me to dinner on our way home from a friend's party on Friday night, and I thought of a new place on Main Street I'd passed, La Grande Orange. Well, it turned out to be a little too hipster for my taste, and although the food was good, that's not all you get. Witness the message at the bottom of the menu: 
O'Reilly...Limbaugh...Coulter...And...Hentoff?
Former Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff is no fan of Obamacare. The WSJ quotes him, from his piece in the Jewish World Review:
I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)--as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill--decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to "Dr. Obama," particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).
Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing--which is fundamental to Obamacare goals--"the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.
No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health care plan.
Turns out Hentoff isn't exactly a rubber-stamping lefty.
UPDATE: Guess whose health care probably won't be rationed? From the Center For Immigration Studies ("an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985"):
Health reform legislation, particularly H.R. 3200, contains a number of provisions that open the door to taxpayer funding of immigrants' health care. That's for illegal aliens, legal aliens who are supposed to rely on their sponsor for financial assistance their first five years here, and certain immigrants who sponsor other immigrants.In brief:
•Despite nominally barring illegal immigrants from receiving a health-insurance subsidy, an amendment to require that applicants be screened for eligibility -- as are all other welfare recipients -- was rejected on a party-line vote.
•Even legal immigrants whose sponsors are supposed to provide them financial support would be eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies.
•Certain legal immigrants who qualify for premium subsidies or expanded Medicaid would also be able to sponsor new immigrants, whom they would have to pledge to support.
•Illegal immigrants would be exempt from the legal mandate to have health insurance, but they'd still receive taxpayer-funded medical services at health clinics and hospitals required to serve all those presenting with medical emergencies.
Here's How Obamacare Worked In Maine
Via the WSJ on a failed experiment in government health care:
In 2003, the state to great fanfare enacted its own version of universal health care. Democratic Governor John Baldacci signed the plan into law with a bevy of familiar promises. By 2009, it would cover all of Maine's approximately 128,000 uninsured citizens. System-wide controls on hospital and physician costs would hold down insurance premiums. There would be no tax increases. The program was going to provide insurance for everyone and save businesses and patients money at the same time.After five years, fiscal realities as brutal as the waves that crash along Maine's famous coastline have hit the insurance plan. The system that was supposed to save money has cost taxpayers $155 million and is still rising.
...The program flew off track fast. At its peak in 2006, only about 15,000 people had enrolled in the DirigoChoice program. That number has dropped to below 10,000, according to the state's own reporting. About two-thirds of those who enrolled already had insurance, which they dropped in favor of the public option and its subsidies. Instead of 128,000 uninsured in the program today, the actual number is just 3,400. Despite the giant expansions in Maine's Medicaid program and the new, subsidized public choice option, the number of uninsured in the state today is only slightly lower that in 2004 when the program began.
Why did this happen? Among the biggest reasons is a severe adverse selection problem: The sickest, most expensive patients crowded into DirigoChoice, unbalancing its insurance pool and raising costs. That made it unattractive for healthier and lower-risk enrollees. And as a result, few low-income Mainers have been able to afford the premiums, even at subsidized rates.
This problem was exacerbated because since the early 1990s Maine has required insurers to adhere to community rating and guaranteed issue, which requires that insurers cover anyone who applies, regardless of their health condition and at a uniform premium. These rules--which are in the Obama plan--have relentlessly driven up insurance costs in Maine, especially for healthy people.
The Maine Heritage Policy Center, which has tracked the plan closely, points out that largely because of these insurance rules, a healthy male in Maine who is 30 and single pays a monthly premium of $762 in the individual market; next door in New Hampshire he pays $222 a month. The Granite State doesn't have community rating and guaranteed issue.
The Hate Beat
Great piece in reason by my friend Matt Welch on Missouri School of Journalism Assistant Prof. Charles Davis' recommendation that newspapers start a "hate beat." He quotes Davis:
Hate, shuffled off stage in the post-racial haze of the election of the nation's first black president, is back with a vengeance. Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.
And takes this crap apart just beautifully:
I didn't realize that we were now teaching strategies for "beating" various societal phenomena in J-school, but I will admit to a certain unfamiliarity with academia....To get all journalistically theoretical for a moment, what is the definition of journalism? Well, I don't know, but I do know that one thick chunk of the idea is to write or say (or aim to write and say) things that are unequivocally 100 percent true, and hopefully verified in some way. This is even more true, if such a thing is mathematically possible, for those who deliver lectures on all that should be true and good about journalism.
What, class, do we notice about Davis' statement above? IT IS DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. We used to have slavery in this country, and Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of officially sanctioned, legalized discrimination against disfavored minorities. And you want to tell me that hate is "larger and nastier than ever"? We had a CIVIL WAR in this country, where people not only brought their legally licensed firearms to townhalls, but they MURDERED THE SHIT OUT OF ONE ANOTHER. How many people died in racially fueled street riots 41 years ago, compared to how many died in racially fueled street riots in 2009? This little couplet, tossed off without evident concern, as if OF COURSE we all know this is true, is blatantly, sophomorically, and insultingly untrue.
I recently had a publicist say something to me about how awful these protesters are (alluding to some notion that they're hateful), and I've heard other people say as much as well, and I'm just not getting it. Aren't these protesters just people voicing their displeasure at government? And isn't that what democracy is all about? Please, if you see "hate" out there -- other than from the random nut -- do let me know. But, if what you see is just angry citizens trying to make their voices heard...isn't that a good thing?
The Difference Between Lies And Opinion
A top model named Liskula Cohen was attacked by somebody on a Blogspot site. An anonyweenie, of course. Now, you're within your rights to give your opinion about somebody, but you aren't within your rights to lie. Richard Koman writes on ZDNet:
An anonymous blogger posted photos of Cohen on her Blogger.com blog with cheery captions like "Skankiest in NYC," a "psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" and "desperation seeps from her soul, if she even has one."Cohen sued the unknown blogger and demanded Google turn over the information, which it resisted. It took a judge's order to get Google to turn over a name and email address, which apparently was legit, as Cohen reported:
Thank God it was her... she's an irrelevant person in my life. She's just somebody that, whenever I would go out to a restaurant, to a party in New York City ... she was just that girl that was always there.So now that Google had to turn the info over, does that mean that bloggers will be held responsible for their defamatory statements? It would seem so, and that would be a good development. Although the problem on the Internet is that once published these things archive themselves and propogate themselves forever. In any case, bloggers might be well advised to give false information to providers if they don't want to be exposed.
I believe you can still be tracked through your IP. And, if you're doing it at the public library or an Internet cafe...do they have video cameras?
And let's get something clear: You're within your rights to state your opinion about somebody -- although anybody can sue for anything. What you can't do is post lies with impunity.
Could a clever lawyer say "psychotic" is an opinion and an obvious exaggeration? Perhaps. And everybody lies -- sometimes to preserve somebody's feelings. But, whoring? If she hasn't been trading sex for money, or sex for something, well, that's defamation. And defamation is defamation is defamation. The fact that some anonyweenie hides behind a Blogspot blog address and an anonymous e-mail address doesn't change that.
Lawyers who lurk, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points. I'm not a lawyer; I just know a few, and have read passages in Eugene Volokh's book
Maybe You Have To Be Post-Soviet
That is, to understand how dangerous and awful the march toward socialism in this country really is. Svetlana Kunin now lives in Stamford, Connecticut, but she came from the Soviet Union. She writes in Investor's Business Daily about the harsh, hellish life (for anyone but the Party members) in her native land, and then this:
Those who left Russia found a different set of values in America: freedom of religion, speech, individual pursuits, the right to private property and free enterprise. The majority of those immigrants achieved a better life for themselves and their children in this capitalist land.These opportunities let the average immigrant live a better life than many elites in the Soviet Communist Party. The freedom to pursue personal self-interest led to prosperity. Prosperity generated charity, benefiting the collective good.
The descendants of those immigrants are now supporting policies that move America away from the values that gave so many immigrants the chance of a better life. Policies such as nationalized medicine, high tax rates and government intrusion into free enterprise are being sold to us under the socialistic motto of collective salvation.
Socialism has bankrupted and failed every society, while capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
There is no perfect society. There are no perfect people. Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism. Change to socialism is not an improvement on the imperfections of the current system.
The slogans of "fairness and equality" sound better than the slogans of capitalism. But unlike at the beginning of the 20th century, when these slogans and ideas were yet to be tested, we have accumulated history and reality.
Today we can define the better system not by slogans, but by looking at the accumulated facts. We can compare which ideology leads to the most oppression and which brings the most opportunity.
When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.
Now in 2009, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences.
Your Tax Dollars
I suspect this is how many politicians feel about your hard-earned money that the city, state, and Federal government swipe from you -- just a big piggybank from which they can pay for their fun, frivolity, and personal expenses...just as long as they can twist them into something that sounds remotely government'y...or...not.
In this case, a Baltimore politican used city police officers from the marine and helicopter units to stage a fake raid so he could propose to his girlfriend. Peter Hermann writes for the Balt Sun:
State Del. Jon S. Cardin called Baltimore's police commissioner this morning and apologized for using city police officers from the marine and helicopter units to stage a fake raid during which the lawmaker proposed marriage to his girlfriend."He offered an apology for putting the Baltimore Police Department in this kind of predicament and spotlight," Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III told reporters after honoring a family that donated money and time to help spruce up the police academy in Pimlico.
Cardin, a Baltimore County Democrat who issued a brief statement Monday and did not return calls for comment today, has also promised to repay the city for any expenses incurred Aug. 7. That night, he and a friend had officers board a boat, pretend to search it and find a box with a ring for his soon-to-be fiance.
The story has brought national attention to the Baltimore County representative, who also is an attorney, and embarrassed the Police Department as it deals with crime at the Inner Harbor and elsewhere and is trying to persuade citizens to donate money to help cash-strapped programs survive.
Bealefeld said an internal investigation is under way "to figure out exactly what occurred ... what resources were used, how they were used and who was involved." Department officials don't yet know how much money the stunt cost taxpayers, but officials have said the officers involved were on-duty and diverted from fighting crime.
via ifeminists
Couchsurfing Allegedly Turns Into Rapesurfing
Big surprise, huh, if her allegations are true? Robert W. sent me this link below, posted on the couchsurfing BBS.
Chris Brooke writes in the Daily Mail about the alleged rape of a Chinese tourist who used a CouchSurfing website:
A woman of 29 was raped by a man who offered her free accommodation through a website aimed at helping travellers, a court has heard.She arranged to stay with Abdelali Nachet through CouchSurfing.com after using the site to stay with strangers across Europe without any problems.
But her brief stay in Leeds turned into a nightmare, it was alleged.
Nachet, 34, took her back to his flat, threatened to kill her and raped her twice during a 'degrading and humiliating' ordeal that lasted throughout the night.
Prosecutor Simon Phillips said the woman tried to escape but tripped up in the hall and Nachet told her: 'If you try to run away I will kill you and after that I will kill myself.'
He added: 'She felt in very real and genuine fear that she was at risk of being murdered by this defendant.
Another woman apparently accused the guy of funny stuff as well:
The jury heard the night after the alleged rape, two women and a man Nachet had met on the same website had travelled to Leeds to stay at his flat.Mr Phillips said Nachet started dancing with one of the women and tried to touch her breasts.
Robert W. writes:
I'm guessing that most of your readers would say that they'd never let a "stranger" into their home. But I've let friends of friends and family of friends stay at my place for years, even if I wasn't there. And I've never had even one bad incident occur.
Robert W. is lucky.
It's nice to believe people are basically good. And most people probably won't rape you or rob you or do other creepy stuff to you. But, especially if you're a woman, the cheap way to travel isn't always so cheap. (Pssst...avoid hitchhiking.com, if it exists, too.)
Glaxo Scum Kline
News of yet another drugmaker using ghostwriters to promote its drugs, writes Matthew Perrone in the SD Trib:
WASHINGTON -- Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline used a sophisticated ghostwriting program to promote its antidepressant Paxil, allowing doctors to take credit for medical journal articles mainly written by company consultants, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.An internal company memo instructs salespeople to approach physicians and offer to help them write and publish articles about their positive experiences prescribing the drug.
Known as the CASPPER program, the paper explains how the company can help physicians with everything from "developing a topic," to "submitting the manuscript for publication."
The document was uncovered by the Baum Hedlund PC law firm of Los Angeles, which is representing hundreds of former Paxil users in personal injury and wrongful death suits against GlaxoSmithKline. The firm alleges the company downplayed several risks connected with its drug, including increased suicidal behavior and birth defects.
A spokeswoman for London-based Glaxo said the published articles noted any assistance to the main authors.
"The program was not heavily used and was discontinued a number of years ago," said Mary Anne Rhyne.
Like, in 2002, according to Perrone's article. Wow, that makes all the difference.
Why Capitalism Is Bad For Fascism
Rose Friedman, wife of the late Milton Friedman, wrote with him in their 1980 book, Free to Choose
Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.The combination of economic and political freedom produced a golden age in both Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. The United States prospered even more than Britain. It started with a clean slate: fewer vestiges of class and status; fewer government restraints; a more fertile field for energy, drive, and innovation; and an empty continent to conquer. . . .
Ironically, the very success of economic and political freedom reduced its appeal to later thinkers. The narrowly limited government of the late nineteenth century possessed little concentrated power that endangered the ordinary man. The other side of that coin was that it possessed little power that would enable good people to do good.
And from my copy of Hayek's book, here's a passage I have highlighted, where he quotes and comments on De Toqueville:
Nobody saw this more clearly than the great political thinker de Toqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom," he said in 1848. "Socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives - the craving for freedom - socialists began to increasingly make use of the promise of a "new freedom." The coming of socialism was to be the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. It was to bring "economic freedom," without which the political freedom already gained was "not worth having."
...Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth ... The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth.
Friedman quote via the WSJ
Skimp Their Way To Our Deaths
Anesthesiologist Ronald Dworkin writes in the WSJ:
Incredibly, Congress's proposed health-care reform plan risks skimping on anesthesia. According to one of the health-care bills in Congress, H.R. 3200, the public option would reduce reimbursement for anesthesia by over 50%....In no medical specialty is the spread between the Medicare rates and private insurance rates greater. Progressives expect to pay anesthesiologists Medicare rates, which are 65% less than private insurance rates, without any change in the system. But there will be changes.
Some anesthesiologists will leave the field. They are already faced with lawsuits at every turn. Something else has happened in America that threatens to tip the balance for anesthesiologists. Americans have grown very fat. This complicates anesthesia tremendously. Putting in IVs, spinals and epidurals is harder. Inserting breathing tubes is much more dangerous.
Quality of care will inevitably decline. That decline will come first in obstetrics. At the hospital where I work, two anesthesiologists work in obstetrics almost around the clock, so that a woman in labor need not wait more than five minutes for her epidural. Other hospitals are less fortunate, and have on staff at most one anesthesiologist in obstetrics. The economic crunch will eventually force these hospitals to cover obstetrics "when anesthesiology is available," meaning in between regular operating room cases.
During an obstetrical emergency, these short-staffed anesthesia departments will scramble to send someone to perform the C-section. Don't forget, a baby has only nine minutes of oxygen when the umbilical cord prolapses, so time is of the essence.
At the very least, pregnant women will be waiting a lot longer for epidurals. But more pain on the labor floor is only the beginning. If hospitals delay the administration of anesthesia because Congress skimped, needless deaths will certainly result.
My old boyfriend is an anesthesiologist on liver transplants at what's considered one of the best hospitals in the country. He's called out of bed in the middle of the night with frequency, and works crazy hours. If you're not being paid a lot for that, why do it?
Fiji Water: The Bottled Water Of A Military Junta
By Anna Lenzer in Mother Jones:
Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?...Nowhere in Fiji Water's glossy marketing materials will you find reference to the typhoid outbreaks that plague Fijians because of the island's faulty water supplies; the corporate entities that Fiji Water has--despite the owners' talk of financial transparency--set up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg; or the fact that its signature bottle is made from Chinese plastic in a diesel-fueled plant and hauled thousands of miles to its ecoconscious consumers. And, of course, you won't find mention of the military junta for which Fiji Water is a major source of global recognition and legitimacy. (Gilmour has described the square bottles as "little ambassadors" for the poverty-stricken nation.)
"We are Fiji," declare Fiji Water posters across the island, and the slogan is almost eerily accurate: The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.
...Selling long-distance water to green consumers may be a contradiction in terms. But that hasn't stopped Fiji from positioning its product not just as an indulgence, but as an outright necessity for an elite that can appreciate its purity. As former Fiji Water CEO Doug Carlson once put it, "If you like Velveeta cheese, processed water is okay for you." ("All waters are not created equal" is another long-standing Fiji Water slogan.) The company has gone aggressively after its main competitor--tap water--by calling it "not a real or viable alternative" that can contain "4,000 contaminants," unlike Fiji's "living water." "You can no longer trust public or private water supplies," co-owner Lynda Resnick wrote in her book, Rubies in the Orchard.
...What Mooney didn't say is that though Fiji Water may fill a void in the impoverished nation, it also reaps a priceless benefit: tax-free status, granted when the company was founded in 1995. The rationale at the time, according to the company: Bottled water was a risky business with uncertain chances of success. In 2003, David Gilmour said that his ambition for Fiji Water was "to become the biggest taxpayer in the country." Yet the tax break, originally scheduled to expire in 2008, remains in effect, and neither the company nor the government will say whether or when it might end. And when Fiji has tried to wring a bit of extra revenue from the company, the response has been less than cooperative. Last year, when the government attempted to impose a new tax on water bottlers, Fiji Water called it "draconian" (a term it's never used for the regime's human rights violations) and temporarily shut down its plant in protest.
On a related note, here's Michael Pritchard's TED talk about the Lifesaver bottle he invented to purify filthy water, keeping out bacteria that other filters let through, and making the most revolting water drinkable for about a half cent a day. Good for a family of four for about three years. For about 20 billion dollars, everyone on the planet can have access to safe drinking water, he says.
via Page and Dornenburg, authors of The Flavor Bible
Bible Lessons
The lesson is, you have opposable thumbs and the ability to reason. Don't let the latter go to waste. The BEattitude blogs about some of the entirely charming stuff found in The Bible:
I'm amazed at how many people base their entire lives on the words of men who believed slaves were useful (especially sex slaves - Exodus 21:7-11), women were their subservient possessions, rape victims should be punished, disobedient children should be executed, homosexuals should be killed, genocidal slaughter was okay if it was a command from God, etc. These divinely inspired men also thought the earth was flat, the universe revolved around the earth with heaven above and hell below the ground.They had a primitive perspective on every aspect of life, but I am to believe they had infallible wisdom about their god's divine plan and laws? God supposedly inspired these men to write fictional folklore stories, but didn't bother telling them they shouldn't have slaves and treat women so terribly.
Just Posted Another Advice Goddess Column
A short question and a long question, "Wimp My Ride" and "Stare Way To Heaven," one after the next. One's about the myth of the nice guy, and the other's about ogling. Check 'em out here.
A Short Course In Brain Surgery
Filmmaker Stuart Browning chronicles the story of a Canadian man with a possible brain tumor has a four-month wait for an MRI. They were willing to pay for one. It's illegal under Canada's single-payer system, so he got a broker to get them in in the USA. The fun continued...
More videos here. And via @dreades, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association is talking about making their health-care system more like our current system. Jennifer Graham writes for The Canadian Press:
SASKATOON -- The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.
"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Do You Helicopter Your Kids To School?
Lenore Skenazy wonders, in the Chi Trib, about what age your kids should start walking to school. She writes:
Most of the world's kids walk to school by themselves starting in 1st grade. But here? Are you kidding? While the majority of us parents walked to school, today only 10 percent to 15 percent of kids do. How come?The usual reason parents give is, "Times have changed," and that's true. Surprisingly, they have changed for the better.
Nationally, according to U.S. Department of Justice figures, we are back to the crime rate of 1970. In the '70s and '80s, the crime rate rose.
It peaked around 1993 and has been going down ever since, dramatically. So if you played outside any time in the '70s or '80s, your kids are actually safer than you were.
How come it feels just the opposite? When our parents were raising us, they were watching "Dallas" and "Dynasty." The biggest crime was big hair. Today's parents are watching "Law & Order" and "CSI," shows overflowing with predators, rapists and maggots. TV has gotten so gross and so graphic, "I don't think there's a single episode of 'Law & Order' that could even have been shown before 1981," says TV historian Robert Thompson.
Those scary shows -- coupled with cable stations running off to Aruba or Portugal every time a white girl disappears -- make us feel as if kids are being abducted 24/7. But the truth is: If, for some strange reason, you actually WANTED your child to be abducted by a stranger, do you know how long you would have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?
Guess.
Now guess again.
Oh, forget it. The answer is 750,000 years, according to Warwick Cairns, author of "How To Live Dangerously."
So what age can your kids start walking to school? Same age that you did. And that goes for waiting at the bus stop and taking public transit too.
Hitchens Wipes The Floor With Yale's Excuses
Yale is publishing a book about the Mohammed cartoons -- without the Mohammed cartoons -- and Hitchens sets them straight on Slate:
The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press' surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has "never blinked" in the face of controversy, but "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question."Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."
So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them ... and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.
It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media--and in the age of "the image" at that--refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.
Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood--our own and that of others--to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.
The Problem Isn't Unplugging Grandma
It's getting grandma plugged in in the first place. Mark Steyn writes in the OC Reg:
The only way to "control costs" is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don't worry, it's all very scientific. In Britain, they use a "Quality-Adjusted Life Year" formula to decide that you don't really need that new knee because you're gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it's in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert "finite resources" away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you'd be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to "old age." Well, he had a good innings. He was 57....I had an elderly British visitor this month who's had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she's had in the past decade in Britain - even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable "resources." So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It's the difference between health "care" (i.e., going to the doctor's every month to no purpose) and health treatment - and on the latter America is the best in the world.
President Barack Obama has wondered whether this is a "sustainable model." But, from your point of view, what counts is not whether the model's sustainable but whether you are.
Steyn advocates a system like Singapore's, which is detailed here, in a piece by Bryan Caplan in Econlib.org. Read the comments, too.
"D" Is For "Don't Stay Out Of The Sun Without It"
As a sun avoider, I was taking 1,000, then 2,000 iu of Vitamin D, but, for a few months, I've been taking 5,000 iu. I'm planning to get tested to see whether I need more (and I suspect I will, per what a light olive-skinned friend of Northern Italian extraction discovered when he was tested). There's a terrific article on Vitamin D on LewRockwell.com, believe it or not, by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD. An excerpt:
There are thirteen vitamins humans need for growth and development and to maintain good health. The human body cannot make these essential bio-molecules. They must be supplied in the diet or by bacteria in the intestine, except for vitamin D. Skin makes vitamin D when exposed to ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation from the sun. A light-skinned person will synthesize 20,000 IU (international units) of vitamin D in 20 minutes sunbathing on a Caribbean beach.Vitamin D is also unique in another way. It is the only vitamin that is a hormone, a type of steroid hormone known as a secosteroid, with three carbon rings.
Steroid hormones such as cortisone, estrogen, and testosterone have four carbon rings. Ultraviolet B radiation in sunlight breaks open one of the rings in a steroid alcohol present in the skin, 7-dehydrocholesterol, to form vitamin D (cholecalciferol). The liver changes this molecule into its circulating form, 25-hydroxyvitamin D (calcidiol, 25[OH]D), the "vitamin D" blood tests measure. Cells throughout the body absorb 25-hydroxyvitamin D and change it into 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (calcitriol), the active form of vitamin D that attaches directly to receptors on the DNA of genes in the cell's nucleus.
The vitamin D hormone system controls the expression of more than 200 genes and the proteins they produce. In addition to its well-known role in calcium metabolism, vitamin D activates genes that control cell growth and programmed cell death (apoptosis), express mediators that regulate the immune system, and release neurotransmitters (e.g., serotonin) that influence one's mental state.
...Now, a century later, a wealth of evidence suggests that rickets, its most florid manifestation, is the tip of a vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency iceberg. A lack of Vitamin D can also trigger infections (influenza and tuberculosis), autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease), cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Practitioners of conventional medicine (i.e., most MDs) are just beginning to appreciate the true impact of vitamin D deficiency. In 1990, medical journals published less than 20 reviews and editorials on vitamin D. Last year they published more than 300 reviews and editorials on this vitamin/hormone. This year, on July 19, 2007, even the New England Journal of Medicine, the bellwether of pharmaceutically-oriented conventional medicine in the U.S., published a review on vitamin D that addresses its role in autoimmune diseases, infections, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (N Engl J Med 2007;357:266-281).
...There is now strong scientific evidence that vitamin D does indeed reduce the risk of cancer. Evidence from a well-conducted, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this is the case, at least with regard to breast cancer. A Creighton University study has shown that women over the age of 55 who took a 1,100 IU/day vitamin D supplement, with calcium, and were followed for 4 years had a highly statistically significant (P <0.005) 75% reduction in breast cancer (diagnosed after the first 12 months) compared with women who took a placebo (Am J Clin Nutr 2007;85:1568-1591).
If you decide you want to order some Vitamin D, the brand I take (Biotech, 5,000 iu) is available on Amazon, but for an exorbitant price. While I appreciate how sweet you've all been about buying stuff through Amy's Mall, it's way cheaper here, right from the Biotech site. Oh yeah -- they're tiny capsules and very easy to take.
And remember, I'm your Advice Goddess, not your doctor. I'm just reporting on what I'm doing. For actual medical advice on whether Vitamin D supplements are right for you, turn to somebody who practices evidence-based medicine -- if you can find such a person. (Don't be to sanguine that your doctor bases their treatment for you on evidence, as opposed to which drug company reps take them to lunch.)
Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Failing
Bill Wyman writes at SpliceToday. This is just part one -- an excerpt from a bit of it that I experience, especially in features sections of dailies:
2. Newspapers are the product of monopolist thinkingThe paradigmatic American newspaper, once its competition had been eliminated, settled down into a comfortable monopoly position in most cities; sometimes there was another paper around, but in most places one newspaper stood dominant and took home most of the ads, not to mention the money.
These monopoly positions created a dynamic by which the only thing a paper could do wrong was to offend or, God forbid, lose a reader. The prospect of offending readers, or having subscriptions canceled, penetrated deep into papers and became a comic cliché, famously satirized by Berkeley Breathed.
I freelanced at one point for a fairly famous U.S. paper, one whose parent company is currently in bankruptcy proceedings; among other things I did pop-concert reviews for a "Overnight" page.
(Instead of having enough printing presses to print an entire paper overnight, most papers print some sections early the previous day, as this one did; the reviews that hit subscribers' doorsteps on a given morning were therefore actually from two evenings previous, but never mind: "Overnight" it was.)
The editor of the page told me, quite explicitly that pans were not allowed. She didn't want readers to see something unflattering about their favorite artist over breakfast. That's anecdotal, but I've got a lot of anecdotes like that, and the pervasiveness of this attitude has been obvious in papers for decades. The New York Times does better work than most papers, but even it is not immune. One of its managing editors, Jill Abramson, just began a weekly series on her adoption of a new puppy.
The way I see it, if you aren't waking people up -- even offending them, but not just for the sake of being offensive -- you aren't doing your job.
Here in Los Angeles, we have only the Los Angeles Times. The upstart Herald Examiner, where a bunch of my friends, including Cathy Seipp, worked, is sadly long gone.
This Overprotected World
Kids have it differently these days, writes Jenni Russell in the Times of London, in a piece headlined "We approach others' children at our peril":
There's just one element of the stories of my childhood that fascinates my own children. It's not the absence of mobile phones, or the idea of a world before the internet. It's the fact that so many of my small crises ended in the same way: with my being rescued by the kind intervention of an unknown man. Whether I was a nine-year-old being kicked to the ground by a gang of girls in the park, a 14-year-old lost in the Welsh hills on a walking holiday or a 12-year-old who had taken a bad fall from a horse and couldn't ride home, it was adult men who stepped in without hesitation to stop the fighting or give me a lift or bandage my grazed arms.I might as well be telling my children about life with the Cherokee Indians. This isn't a world they know, where children expect to explore by themselves and where passing men and women are the people you turn to when things go wrong. Their generation have been taught from the time they start school that all strangers may be dangerous and all men are threats. So children have become frightened of adults, and adults - terrified that any interaction of theirs might be misinterpreted - have become equally frightened of them.
When my offspring and their friends have been mugged on buses, or attacked on the street by teenagers, no one has helped. Every passing adult has looked the other way. The idea that it's the responsibility of grown-ups to look out for one another's young is disappearing fast. That isn't making our children safer. It's making their lives more fearful, more dangerous and more constrained.
Last week the charity Living Streets reported that half of all five to 10-year-olds have never played in their own streets. Almost nine in 10 of their grandparents had played out and so had many of their parents, but now children were kept inside, imprisoned by the twin fears of traffic and paedophiles.
Of course, statistics show that actual stranger danger is rare, and children are far more likely to be endangered, kidnapped, or killed by somebody they know. Yet, these days, no man who even speaks to a child is safe from accusations of pedophilia. And it isn't just in the U.K. In the States, we're guilty in spades -- and raising a generation of helpless, overprotected little bunnies.
Burqini Wearer Threatens To Leave France
Rules at public swimming pools in France forbid swimming while clothed, and a French nitwit who converted to the religion which grants women the rights of dogs, otherwise known as Islam, got all huffy when the pool officials told her she couldn't wear her burqini. Hilariously, according to a BBC report, if she doesn't get her way...in her words:
Quite simply, this is segregation. I will fight to try to change things. And if I see that the battle is lost, I cannot rule out leaving France.
Bonne idée! Madame, Charles de Gaulle airport is just minutes away by car, bus or train!
The French have a huge problem with the many Muslims in their country, on the dole, refusing to assimilate into French culture, and wreaking violence -- against Muslim women and the French. If only getting rid of them were as simple as banning the burqa and the burqini!
Sarko is trying:
In June the French National Assembly appointed 32 MPs to a six-month fact-finding mission to look at ways of restricting burka use.In a major policy speech that month, President Nicolas Sarkozy said the burka - a garment covering women from head to toe - reduced them to servitude and undermined their dignity.
"We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity," Mr Sarkozy told a special session of parliament in Versailles.
In 2004, France banned the Islamic headscarves in its state schools.
Sadly, Europe has committed suicide. It's a slow death, but I predict it will all be under Sharia law in my life time.
While we're on Islam, here's one mother's sad story from 9/11 -- the attack by "the religion of peace" that was not just advocated but mandated by the Quran.
Health Insurance: Paying By The Pound?
I'm all for it. And by the cigarette, too. Or, look at it another way, discount health insurance to non-smoking, non-obese people like me. From a New York Times Magazine article, "The Fat Tax," by David Leonhardt:
Michael McGinnis, a senior scholar at the Institute of Medicine, has estimated that only 10 percent of early deaths are the result of substandard medical care. About 20 percent stem from social and physical environments, and 30 percent from genetics. The biggest contributor, at 40 percent, is behavior.Today, the great American public-health problem is indeed obesity. The statistics have become rote, but consider that people in their 50s are about 20 pounds heavier on average than 50-somethings were in the late 1970s. As a convenient point of reference, a typical car tire weighs 20 pounds.
This extra weight has caused a sharp increase in chronic diseases, like diabetes, that are unusually costly. Other public-health scourges, like lung cancer, have tended to kill their victims quickly, which (in the most tragic possible way) holds down their long-term cost. Obesity is different. A recent article in Health Affairs estimated its annual cost to be $147 billion and growing. That translates into $1,250 per household, mostly in taxes and insurance premiums.
A natural response to this cost would be to say that the people imposing it on society should be required to pay it. Cosgrove mentioned to me an idea that some economists favor: charging higher health-insurance premiums to anyone with a certain body-mass index. Harsh? Yes. Fair?
The Cleveland Clinic guy at the beginning does make the typical error about what causes people to gain and lose weight -- assuming it wasn't paraphrased wrong by Leonhardt:
People's weight is a reflection of how much they eat and how active they are.
According to Gary Taubes' exhaustive reporting, detailed in Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
Exercise doesn't seem to be the weight loss tool it's cracked up to be, either. Taubes writes about this in New York Magazine -- that one of the main problems with exercise is that it makes you hungry:
Just as sweating makes us thirsty, burning off calories makes us hungry.This research has never been controversial. It's simply been considered irrelevant by authorities, all too often lean, who have been dead set on blaming fatness on some combination of gluttony, sloth, and perhaps a little genetic predisposition thrown in on the side. But contemplating the means by which we might lose weight without considering the hormonal regulation of fat tissue is like wondering why children grow taller without considering the role of growth hormones. Or, for that matter, like trying to explain the record-breaking triumphs of modern athletes -- Barry Bonds, say -- and never considering the possibility that steroid hormones (or human growth hormone or insulin) might be involved.
If it's biology, and not a lack of willpower, that explains why exercise fails so many of us as a weight-loss tool, then we can still find reason for optimism. Since insulin is the primary hormone affecting the activity of LPL on our cells, it's not surprising that insulin is the primary regulator of how fat we get. "Fat is mobilized [from fat tissue] when insulin secretion diminishes," the American Medical Association Council on Foods and Nutrition explained back in 1974, before this fact, too, was deemed irrelevant to the question of why we gain weight or the means to lose it. Because insulin determines fat accumulation, it's quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much or exercise too little but because we secrete too much insulin or because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer than might be ideal.
To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it's carbohydrates -- particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars -- that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. "Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat," as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates -- in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars -- we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it's quite possible that the foods -- potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer -- that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.
John Cloud echoed this recently in TIME:
Some research has found that the obese already "exercise" more than most of the rest of us. In May, Dr. Arn Eliasson of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center reported the results of a small study that found that overweight people actually expend significantly more calories every day than people of normal weight -- 3,064 vs. 2,080. He isn't the first researcher to reach this conclusion. As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less."In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.
Finally, one other really terrific book on the subject -- a companion book to Taubes', with more direct information on diet, and an easier read -- The Protein Power Lifeplan
Greed And Evil
In the U.K., a girl lures a pal into sex, then falsely accuses him of rape to get 7,500 pounds in victim compensation. From the Daily Mail, at least Sarah-Jane Hilliard now "faces jail." But what if her crime hadn't been discovered? Let's hope she gets exactly the jail term he would have if he'd actually raped her -- and let's see her on some sort of work program to pay him (and big) for suffering she put him through. All in favor?
An excerpt from the story:
Hilliard told police she met up with Mr Bowers, whom she regarded as a friend, at Liquid nightclub in Basildon, Essex, on July 26 last year.She said he joined her and a friend in their taxi home, but when she stopped in a public toilet by the railway station he came in and attacked her.
In reality they had met at another club and walked to the station, and it was she who lured him into the toilet - even telling him he 'better be there for the baby' if she became pregnant.
Mr Bowers was arrested and bailed. But eight days later, after police failed to find CCTV images of the pair outside Liquid, Hilliard's friend confessed that they had actually been in the nearby Colors nightclub all night.
CCTV footage from there clearly showed Hilliard and Mr Bowers, both from Basildon, kissing and holding hands before leaving.
Officers contacted Mr Bowers and told him he would not be charged and instead arrested Hilliard for perverting the course of justice.
But this did not save him from being made a hate figure. 'The last 11 months have been horrendous,' he said.
'I've lost all my self- confidence. I don't know why she did it but her lies have ruined my life.'
Mr Bowers's father, Tony, 48, said his son had to move out of Basildon because of threats against him. He said: 'After the court case people started kicking the door of his flat in and shouting "rapist" though the letterbox.
'He moved into temporary accommodation but he heard that people were offering £100 to find out where he was. He's been threatened and chased through town with a knife too.
Thanks, Deirdre
Ladies Of The Death Cult
Compelling piece by Alissa J. Rubin in New York Times Magazine about the ladies who launch -- suicide bombing attacks, that is:
BAIDA, HAVING JOINED the group, initially did not plan to become a suicide bomber. She was drawn to it gradually as she became more deeply involved with the cell. Her cell members announced their readiness for a suicide mission in front of others in the group, making a public commitment, signaling they had crossed an invisible border and embraced the idea of a certain kind of death that would also bring membership in a holy community.The group dynamic seemed designed to make participants feel as if they were freely choosing their destiny. That sense of freedom was an important component of their metamorphosis into suicide bombers. It was certainly important to Baida, who felt she controlled little in her life, to feel in control of her death. Her goal was to take revenge on her brothers' killers -- American soldiers. When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of suicide bombings in Iraq kill ordinary Iraqis, she would only say that she thought killing Iraqis was haram, or forbidden.
"We had meetings of 11 people; some people came to the meeting with their faces covered," Baida told me. "There were three women in the group. Sometimes we were having discussions of Koran, sometimes we were meeting to see who is ready to do jihad. You could choose whether you wanted to do it. They wanted me to wear the explosive belt against the police, but I refused. I said, 'I will not do it against Iraqis.' I said: 'If I do it against the police I will go to hell because the police are Muslims. But if I do it against the Americans then I will go to heaven.' "
A few weeks later, when I met Baida again, she tried to explain to me the line dividing when it is halal (permitted) to kill a person and when it is forbidden. She said she followed the rules of her group, but her cousins had different rules: they would kill anybody. Was there a difference, I wondered, between killing American soldiers and killing American civilians, like reconstruction workers? No, she said: "I am willing to explode them, even civilians, because they are invaders and blasphemers and Jewish. I will explode them first because they are Jewish and because they feel free to take our lands."
...She spoke with enthusiasm, her face animated, vividly alive. Unlike her prison companion Ranya -- who claimed, implausibly, that she did not know that she was wearing a suicide belt -- Baida was proud of her mission and determined to complete it.
Her choice of suicide was not entirely hers to make. The suicide vests the cell gave to participants were outfitted with remote detonators so that someone else could explode the would-be bomber if she somehow failed to do it herself. This was a relatively new aspect of suicide bombing in Iraq. A second person, with a second detonator, would go on the mission to ensure against changes of heart. "One day this woman, Shaima, said, 'I am ready.' I saw Shaima when they put the vest on her. It was very heavy. With Shaima, they exploded her, she did not explode herself. There were five or six killed."
...A mother of two boys and a girl, all under 8, she had not seen them since her arrest last year. When I asked if they missed her, she said, almost airily, "Allah will take care of them."
Three Isn't Just A Crowd
For some people, it's a marriage. Dr. Helen does a show on threesome marriages, aka polyamory, with a woman married to two men. She wrote me about the show:
The couple I interviewed were really sweet though their "husband" was afraid to come on. I could really feel for their plight as they described friends and family being against their lifestyle.
A book on polyamory: The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures
And here's a piece by Abby Ellin from The Daily Beast on "Threesome Marriages" featuring the couple who appeared (without their #3) on Dr. Helen:
Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that--Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55--were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband." Says Sasha: "I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that."...Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each other, a la actress Tilda Swinton. That's closer to bigamy. Instead, triads--"triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon--demand that all three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other. In the Lessins case, that can be varying pairs but, as Sasha, a psychologist, puts it, "Janet loves it when she gets a double decker." In a triad, there would be no doubt in Elizabeth Edwards' mind whether her husband fathered a baby out of wedlock; she likely would have participated in it.
...Like most people in the poly community, the Lessins, who also helm the school of tantra (they take pleasure of the flesh quite seriously), take great pains to discuss pretty much everything. Some people even write up their agreements like a traditional prenup, detailing everything from communal economics to cohabitation rules. And buoyed by an increasing acceptance of same-sex unions, others want more legal protections. "We should have every right to inherit from each other and visit each other--I don't care what you call it, we're not second-class citizens!" says Janet Lessin. "Any people who wish to form a marriage with all the rights and duties of a marriage should have the legal right to. The spurious arguments of marriage being for procreation of children is ridiculous."
Special Interests For Clunkers
Wonder why true clunkers -- like a 1980 Cutlass with a broken air conditioner and rusty fenders -- weren't on the list for the rebate? Special interest lobbies, of course! Ralph Vartabedian and Ken Bensinger write for the LA Times of how the classic car lobby kept the most polluting cars on the road:
Nearly 5 million of the nation's most polluting vehicles were quietly excluded from the popular "cash for clunkers" program after lobbyists for antique auto parts suppliers and car collectors persuaded the government to shut out cars built before 1984.The restriction has prevented consumers nationwide who own older cars and trucks from cashing in on the $3-billion federal program even though many don't consider their jalopies to be collectors' items.
When the federal government announced the rebates of up to $4,500, Chris Hurst said, it looked like the perfect time to unload his gas-guzzling 1981 Ford F-150 pickup. Hurst, who lives in the Sierra foothills north of Fresno, was surprised to discover his truck was too old to qualify.
"If we could have gotten that rebate, it would have worked perfectly for us," said Hurst, who is now trying to sell the vehicle, equipped with Ford's biggest V-8 engine, for $1,600.
The restrictions were pushed by lobbyists for the Specialty Equipment Market Assn., a Diamond Bar group that represents companies that sell parts and services to classic and antique car collectors. The group, as well as classic car enthusiasts, have opposed cash for clunkers because they don't want older vehicles to be destroyed.
When the proposals for a clunker buyback program surfaced early this year, the specialty equipment association opposed the entire concept because such a program could shrink the size of the market for aftermarket parts. The association eventually got lawmakers to adopt the age limit.
"We are very pleased that Congress was able to include that in the program," said Stuart Gosswein, director of regulatory affairs at the association.
Gives New Meaning To "Sex-Starved"
Afghan barbarian/President Karzai talked pretty talk about not violating women's rights vis a vis a law allowing Shia men to rape their wives. But then, Human Rights Watch has discovered, a revised version of the law was passed last month, with the creepy passages rewritten like so -- from a Tracy Clark-Flory post on Salon:
The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her.
Hey, Baby, Can I Come Along While You Treat Yourself To A Drink?
A question for all you ladies out there. What would your response be (and why) if you were asked out by a guy with the attitude of this guy who wrote me recently?
"...If I invite a woman out, I ask her to pay in advance."
Let's assume the guy is attractive and not drooling or carrying a bloody butcher knife.
Oh, and a clarification, just in case: He doesn't mean he asks her to put money in escrow or something for the date, but that when he asks her out, he lets her know she'll be paying for herself.
The Death Cult Of The Insulted
There's one religion out there that can be counted on to murder people who insult them, and it isn't Judaism, Christianity, or Buddhism. Yale University might as well put out a press release saying so -- instead of pussyfooting around it by publishing a book about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed without the actual cartoons. Patricia Cohen writes for The New York Times:
Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What's more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children's book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante's "Inferno" that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book's author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press's decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that "Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it." The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was "overwhelming and unanimous." The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books -- like "The King Never Smiles" by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand's current monarch -- and "I've never blinked." But, he said, "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question."
So, Mr. Donatich, you're saying that Muslims are murderous and it's dangerous to exercise free speech in this country if Muslims are involved? Speak up, man! If you're going to say something, say something.
I insult Christians and Jews all the time with all my remarks about how silly it is to believe without evidence in god. They, too, react -- by telling me I'm "offensive." Ooooh, that smarts!
Camille Hates The Sin, Loves The Sinner
Paglia swears she doesn't have buyer's remorse about Obama, but isn't exactly a fan of Obamacare, writing on Salon:
Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
A Peek Into How Obamacare Would Play Out
Alan B. Miller's company ran a hospital in London, and from that experience, he says we don't want to go the public health care route. He writes in the WSJ:
Medicare works because hospitals subsidize the care they provide with revenue received from patients who have commercial insurance. Without that revenue, hospitals could not afford to care for those covered by Medicare. In effect, everyone with insurance is subsidizing the Medicare shortfall, which is growing larger every year.If hospitals had to rely solely on Medicare reimbursements for operating revenue, as would occur under a single-payer system, many hospitals would be forced to eliminate services, cut investments in advanced medical technology, reduce the number of nurses and other employees, and provide less care for the patients they serve. And with the government in control, Americans eventually will see rationing, the denial of high-priced drugs and sophisticated procedures, and long waits for care.
My company's experience with health care in the United Kingdom illustrates the point. In the 1980s, we opened The London Independent Hospital to serve the private medical market in the U.K. The hospital had not been open long when representatives of a 1,000-bed government-run hospital located a short distance away approached us to borrow high-tech equipment and instruments. Because people were ill and needed procedures the government hospital could not provide, we provided that hospital with the help it needed. But that experience convinced me that under a single-payer system hospitals do not receive the money required to purchase advanced technology or provide quality care.
Advocates of a single-payer system say that hospitals would survive if they learned to operate more efficiently. While we are always looking for ways to improve efficiency, the economic conditions of the past few years have already forced most institutions to reduce expenses and increase efficiency as much as possible.
The reality is that Americans have come to expect the best health care in the world, and to provide that, hospitals must continue to invest in advanced medical technology, salaries for well-trained nurses and technicians, and state-of-the-art facilities. If hospitals were required to operate solely on revenue from a single-payer system, they could no longer afford to provide the care that Americans deserve.
Single-payer systems have proven to be wholly inadequate in Canada and the U.K. Most people in America are satisfied with the care they receive, so it is important that we take the time to fix only the parts of our system that need repair. Let's not destroy a system that works well for most Americans. Let's judiciously change only the areas in need.
Whole Health
From the WSJ, Whole Foods' John Mackey's alternative to Obamacare. Eight points:
• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?
• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.
• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care--to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America
Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.
A Little Appreciation Goes A Long, Long Way
It's "The Lesson of the 38 Candy Bars," an interview by The New York Times' Adam Bryant of Gary E. McCullough, president and chief executive of the Career Education Corporation:
Q. What's the most important leadership lesson you've learned?A. The biggest one I learned, and I learned it early on in my tenure in the Army, is the importance of small gestures. As you become more senior, those small gestures and little things become sometimes more important than the grand ones. Little things like saying "please" and "thank you" -- just the basic respect that people are due, or sending personal notes. I spend a lot of time sending personal notes.
I'll never forget one of the interactions we had with my commanding general of the division in which I was a platoon leader. We were at Fort Bragg, N.C. We had miserable weather. It was February and not as warm as you would think it would be in North Carolina. It had been raining for about a week, and the commanding general came around to review some of the platoons in the field. He went to one of my vehicle drivers and he asked him what he thought of the exercise we were on. To which the young private said, "Sir, it stinks." I saw my short career flash before my eyes at that point.
He asked why, and the private said: "There are people who think this is great weather for doing infantry operations. I personally think 75 and partly cloudy is better."
And so the commanding general said, "What can I do to make it better for you?" And the private said, "Sir, I sure could use a Snickers bar." So a couple days later we were still moving through some really lousy weather, and a box showed up for the private. And that box was filled with 38 Snickers bars, which is the number of people in my platoon. And there was a handwritten note from the commanding general of our division that said, "I can't do anything about the weather, but I hope this makes your day a bit brighter, and please share these with your buddies."
And on that day, at that time, we would've followed that general anywhere. It was a very small thing, and he didn't need to do it, but it impressed upon me that small gestures are hugely important.
I'll complain when things are wrong, so it's only fair that I recognize when things are right. It really makes a difference to people. I know I feel that great when people I've given advice to write back to tell me I've helped them, and how they've changed. In fact, I got a nice e-mail like that today. So...I send thank you notes after parties and dinner parties, and letters to companies that are doing something right, and the occasional letter to a good friend or even to people I don't know. Recently, after hearing Steve Jobs had been sick, I wrote a note to tell him what a huge difference Apple computers (which I've had since around 1985, thanks to a University of Michigan student discount) had made in my life. I even found Gregg at the Apple store, at the iPod display, almost seven years ago.
Wanna Write (Nonfiction) Well?
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Thanks, by the way, to everybody who's been helping prop me up in the downturn in newspapers by buying through my Amy's Mall links. Even if you want something not listed there, if you go through one of my links to Amazon or use the search window on that page, I'll get the kickback. Much-appreciated!
One Nutbag Loser Does Not A Societal Syndrome Make
Great piece by Anne Applebaum over at Slate's XX blog about a really ridiculous piece by Bob Herbert in The New York Times. Applebaum gets it just right:
Herbert uses the case of a single, certifiably insane mass-murderer to argue that all of American culture is anti-woman. The implication: All American men are, deep down, in sympathy with this crazed killer, thanks to our mass media that denigrates women, etc.What on earth is he talking about? Having lived in several allegedly more progressive European countries, and having visited many far less female-friendly parts of the world, I can testify that American society is, at this point in history, one of the least misogynist on earth, one of the few in which real female achievement is possible, and perhaps the only one where women can and do succeed on a large scale. We are now on our third female Secretary of State; in Afghanistan, three women running for parliament have been chased out of their houses in the past few weeks. We consider it normal for women with children to work; at the school my children attended in Germany, this was considered borderline socially unacceptable. The majority of American university students are now women; in Saudi Arabia, women can't even leave the house without a male relative.
Maybe it's unfair to compare the U.S. to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or even Germany, but if we are talking about "barbaric treatment of women" then I think it's important that we all understand what the word "barbaric" really means.
If you're having trouble understanding, this should help -- a story about a little girl whose own father forced acid into her body because he wanted a boy. Hint, Mr. H -- it didn't happen in Cleveland, Pensacola or Bozeman.
Cheaper By The Dozen
After proposing to a woman, you find out that she'd previously slept with 83 people. Would that change your feelings for her? The details:
The guy is 30 and the girl is 26. Now this guy is thinking twice about marrying this girl. What should he do?
(A little advice for those who are contemplating telling all about their have-done list: There's honesty and there's judicious honesty.)
We're Going Broke
And Congress is buying itself private jets. Even better, Katherine Mangu-Ward writes at reason:
Congress is also overpaying for their ill-gotten planes. They're handing over $66 million for each $49 million plane. Perhaps they're exercising the Contact theory of government spending--overfund and secretly procure two of everything? This hypothesis is only slightly undermined by the public decision to double the number of planes purchased.If flying among the unwashed masses is really too much to bear, surely an option like private plane sharing service NetJets would have been more cost-effective. Of course, at no point in these deliberations--or most of the coverage for that matter--did anyone consider that congressmen might fly coach. We all remember this one to the auto execs few months back: "I'm going to ask the three executives here to raise their hand if they flew here commercial." The Big Three CEOs must be enjoying some pretty serious schadenfreude right now.
I'll vote for the Congressman who spends money like it's his, not mine. (Please whistle should one of those run for office.)
Oh, and asshats, why not try to fix the TSA instead of trying to bypass it?
2009 Is The New 1984
A government website takes over your computer -- and more.
Where's MY Carrot?
There's a New York Times op-ed about the "$75 Billion Carrot, but Few Nibbles":
In March, the Obama administration began an antiforeclosure effort that offers lenders up to $75 billion in incentives to modify troubled mortgages. If that sounds like a lot of money, it is. But so far, it has not been enough to persuade the mortgage industry to do what is needed to help Americans stay in their homes and keep the economy from falling into deeper trouble.
I'd like a nibble of that carrot, as long as we're going socialist. I never bought a house -- because I can't afford one. No, that didn't stop a lot of people -- and we're going to reward them for their financial gamble, and penalize you and me (both through housing prices surely having been artificially elevated through demand, and because we pay the taxes that fund these irresponsible bums). I'm guessing many of you reading here are in the same boat: fiscally responsible, funding cleanup for the gamblers.
More from the piece:
According to Moody's Economy.com, it would take at least one million successful modifications over the next six to 12 months to avoid the worst effects of mass foreclosures, including severe damage to families and communities and -- as foreclosures drive prices down -- a continuing loss of home equity nationwide.Unfortunately, there is also no telling at this point how many of the loans that are modified under the Obama plan will stay current, and how many will redefault. What is known is that with unemployment rising, even lowered monthly payments may prove too onerous.
With home prices falling, a better way to avoid redefault would be to forgive principal. In apparent deference to banks that do not want the losses associated with principal reductions, Obama officials have not pressed lenders to adopt that approach.
There is a real danger now that lenders, pushed by the administration, may ramp up the number of loan modifications, but that those may be especially prone to redefault. And there is a danger that the administration will squander valuable time pursuing a solution that proves inadequate, allowing the foreclosure crisis to persist. To guard against those dangers, the administration must provide copious data on the performance of modified loans over time. And it should reveal the assumptions it is using to project the program's goals.
If the Obama plan does not produce enough successful modifications, Congress must give homeowners an alternative route to relief. The best way to do that is by changing the law to allow bankruptcy judges to modify bad mortgages. The prospect of having to live by a judge's ruling would be the biggest incentive of all for lenders to modify bad loans, and it would not cost the taxpayers anything.
How To Pay Up Front For Your Own Kidnapping
Cory Doctorow posts news of an airline horror story at BoingBoing, with passengers held prisoner on a tiny plane for NINE HOURS:
Continental Airlines diverted a Twin-Cities-bound plane to Rochester (MN), due to a storm, and then locked the entire planeload of passengers in the plane overnight for nine hours. The TSA had gone home, so the passengers couldn't clear security if they got off and left the airport, and the ground crew wouldn't let them get off and stay in the airport. So 47 people -- including babies -- were locked into the plane with no food and overflowing toilets, held prisoner until the airline could get its act together. Jesus.
I would've been on Zabasearch.com on my mobile broadband, finding, and then calling and awakening Continental's chairman at home. You?
Security Theater's Business Is Booming
David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post that it's about time we dialed the paranoia back a notch:
The hyper-security has added as much to public fear (and annoyance) as to public safety. The Transportation Security Administration is so pervasive at airports that we forget how bizarre it is to see old ladies and pregnant mothers and 8-year-old kids frisked and searched as if they had just arrived from Waziristan. Does this really make sense?...Protecting our public servants is important, to be sure. But we have gotten so cranked up about security in the United States that senior officials travel in cocoons, as if they are under constant threat. Every Cabinet secretary seems to have a security detail; so do governors and mayors and prominent legislators.
What are all these security folks protecting our officials from? Al-Qaeda? Hezbollah? Crazy people? Aggrieved constituents? Or is it something more ephemeral -- a nameless, pervasive sense of danger that may suddenly assault the secretary of energy or the governor of New Jersey?
Better Than Game Shows
Want to really make out while doing nothing? Work a cushy, high-level city job, then watch your pension dollars climb into the stratosphere. Los Angeles pays exorbitant amounts of money to former city officials now sitting on their asses getting old, writes Rich Connell in the LA Times:
Collecting nearly $318,000 a year, the former head of Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power tops a list of 841 city pension recipients paid six-figure benefits, according to newly obtained records.And, like many of the retirees, former DWP General Manager Ronald Deaton will be paid more beginning this summer -- boosting his annual retirement pay to more than $327,000 -- because of annual cost-of-living increases, records and interviews show.
New DWP pension data provide a fuller picture of the city's largest retirement packages at a time when City Hall is cutting services, the public is being hit with recession-driven tax increases to cover government budget shortfalls and rising public pension costs are under close scrutiny.
The Times previously reported that nearly 600 pensioners received $100,000 a year from the city's police, fire and general government retirement plans. The new data from the city's utility adds close to 250 names to the list, which includes retirees or, in some cases, beneficiaries.
...One recent projection warned that the share of the city general fund receipts required by two large pension funds would jump from 15% this year to 33% in 2013-14.
That would amount to an increase of nearly $1 billion, making pension contributions the fastest-growing area of city spending, said Asst. City Administrative Officer Tom A. Coultas, an employee relations specialist.
"It's perfectly clear from our standpoint, design changes need to be made," he said. "The question is how much of a correction is necessary" to ensure that pension programs can be sustained.
Recent market gains and accounting changes have eased the financial blow somewhat. And a plan to cut 2,400 city jobs also could help control costs. Still, recommendations for pension changes, expected to be sent to the mayor and City Council in September, will probably include some combination of reduced benefits and adjusted contribution rates for many new city employees, Coultas said.
There are legal and practical limitations to the changes that could be made. Court rulings generally protect benefits provided to retirees and promised to current employees, officials say. Altering pension plans involves negotiations with unions and, in some cases, voter approval.
I approve! I approve! But, with people living longer, and pension payments becoming a huge problem in industry after industry, how are we not seriously screwed?
via @katec
I Don't Have Children; I Just Visit Them
I love my neighbors' children -- they're great kids; smart, interesting, well-raised, with parents who expect them to be polite. I actually go over and hang with them a bit -- on purpose. But, I also get to leave after time to look at the shells, or play soccer or have "tea" is over.
I'm just not somebody who has any interest in having children. Maternal? Um, just hand me a baby and you'll see how little interest I have. But, where I'm a realist in the child department, it seems to me many people who become parents have a rich fantasy life about how it's all going to play out. Some, of course, do seem to know what they're getting into. And people talk about the great joy of having children, but a whole lot of it looks like a pretty miserable job if you're being honest.
There's a blog item about whether children make us happier in the Times of London, posted by Hattie Garlick, and zero surprise for what it says -- for me, anyway:
Marriage, yes - great for happiness. Children, not so much.In fact, in one study spending time with the children was shown to bring us about as much happiness as commuting.
Says Nattavudh Powdthavee: "on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness... life satisfaction... marital satisfaction... and mental well-being... compared with non-parents."
Then they tried it a new way:
British academics Mathew White and Paul Dolan have conducted an extremely complex experiment involving 625 participants that essentially boils down to this:If you think happiness is about pleasure, then kids won't do it for you.
If, on the other hand, you measure happiness according to what you find rewarding, then children get far higher marks - right up at the top with work.
I'll take work, thanks. And I'm far more popular with the kids as a friend than a parent. I'm fun, and pay attention to them, and I don't tell them what to do, except when it really looks like they could fall and break their little heads, which would break my tiny lump of coal heart -- and I really do mean that.
So...do you have children? Why or why not? And if you could do it all over again, would you do it differently?
Francis The Talking Mule
Sam Harris expands on his New York Times op-ed about why he's against Francis Collins to head the NIH. (I also find Collins a shockingly terrible choice -- for the reasons Harris states). This is not a guy who should have any say over science funding. Read the whole piece to understand why. An excerpt:
Early in his career as a physician, Collins encountered a woman suffering from severe angina who appeared to take great comfort in her faith. She put the young doctor on the spot by asking him what he believed. This question shook Collins to his core. He says, "suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking." Collins assures us that up until this moment he had been a staunch atheist.How something breaks often says a lot about what it was. Collins's claim to have been an atheist seems especially suspect, given that he does not understand what the position of atheism actually entails. For instance:
If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason. (Collins, 2006, p.165)Elsewhere he says that of "all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational" (Ibid, p. 231). I suspect that this will not be the last time a member of our species will be obliged to make the following point (but one can always hope): disbelief in the God of Abraham does not require that one search the entire cosmos and find Him absent; it only requires that one consider the evidence put forward by believers to be insufficient. Presumably Francis Collins does not believe in Zeus. I trust he considers this skeptical attitude to be fully justified. Might this be because there are no good reasons to believe in Zeus? And what would he say to a person who claimed that disbelief is Zeus is a form of "blind faith" or that of all possible worldviews it is the "least rational"?
After being destabilized by his patient's faith, Collins attempted to fill the God-shaped hole in his life by studying the world's major religions. He admits, however, that he did not get very far with this research before seeking the tender mercies of "a Methodist minister who lived down the street." In fact, Collins' ignorance of world religion is prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian talking point about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the 1st century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very moment, and it has always been thus. Forty years ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a rather large band of misfits in the San Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus. (Should we consult Manson on questions of cosmology? He still walks among us--or at least sits--in Corcoran State Prison.) The fact that Collins, as both a scientist and as an influential apologist for religion, repeatedly emphasizes the silly fiction of Jesus' singular self-appraisal is one of many embarrassing signs that he has lived too long in the echo chamber of Evangelical Christianity.
But the pilgrim continues his progress. Next, we learn that Collins' uncertainty about the identity of God could not survive a collision with C.S. Lewis. The following passage from Lewis proved decisive:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--- on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg--- or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.Collins provides this text for our contemplation and then describes how it boosted him over the church transom:
Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (Ibid, p. 225)It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he "decided" (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons.
Heath Ledger Was Actually Black
Or, as the Joker, was supposedly made up to be black (which is pretty amazing, considering he was in six pounds of whiteface), and therefore..the Obama as Heath Ledger as the Joker poster is racist! Er, or, something like that. In an absolutely goofily reasoned piece in The Washington Post, staff writer Phillip Kennicott writes about "Obama as The Joker: Racial Fear's Ugly Face" (image at the link):
Between Jack Nicholson's 1989 portrayal of the Joker in "Batman" and Heath Ledger's 2008 characterization in "The Dark Knight," something sinister happened to the villain's iconic makeup. What had been a mask, with the clearly delineated lines of a carnival character, became simply war paint, and not very well applied.The visual change signaled a change in the Joker's inner mechanism. Nicholson's dandified virtuoso of violence was replaced by a darker, more unpredictable and psychotic figure. What had been a caricature became more real and threatening. An urbane mocker of civilized values became simply a deformed product of urban violence.
...the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the "urban" makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can't openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and '70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.
The Joker's makeup in "Dark Knight" -- the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world -- emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks -- the thinking goes -- don't just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.
It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its "we need to talk this through" episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.
Superimpose that idea, through the Joker's makeup, onto Obama's face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama's association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can't be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he's black.
Is that about the dumbest thing you've heard in a long time? How gleeful do you think the artist is at this absolutely ridiculous interpretation?
And I was no George Bush fan either, but where was Kennicott when they were doing Bush up as a chimp?
My guess? It seems to me the artist is just trying to say Obama is a dangerous figure, and rather nuts, for trying to turn us socialist. If that's what he or she meant, I agree.
And because, like The Joker, I have skin just this side of the color of fresh Wite-Out, this means that I am: 1. Actually black, 2. "Carrying danger with (me) like a virus," 3. Your choice here.
Why Your Priest Or Rabbi Is No Einstein
Not that Einstein was necessarily always an Einstein, either, but it seems he was usually on the right track.
Religion is about believing in the absence of evidence, and dispensing answers, and never mind asking for evidence that they're correct.
Science, on the other hand, while sometimes turned into a religion of sorts by careerists (those who put out "research" that's based more on their need to continue getting grants than anything else), is supposed to be a search for truth.
A reporter asked Albert Einstein, "How do you feel, knowing that so many people are trying to prove you are not right?" Einstein's response:
I have no interest in being right. I am only concerned with discovering whether I am or not.
For religion, anything but blind acceptance is really bad for business.
Islam Is NOT Being "Distorted" By Extremists
As this CNN story below contends, and as so many contend.
The extremists are actually getting Islam exactly right. The Quran commands Muslims to convert or kill the infidel, which is what they're doing, in hopes of reaching the ultimate goal: overthrowing governments (violently is fine, if need be, although breeding like rabbits and taking over is fine, too) and installing The New Caliphate. From the CNN piece by Manav Tanneeru, who, like so many "journalists," promotes the fraud that the violence of Islam isn't the real face of Islam:
Esra'a al Shafei, a recent university graduate in Bahrain, is young, Muslim and frustrated.The 23-year-old says the complexity of who she is as a Muslim is being distorted by extremists and the media coverage of them.
The problem is, so many Muslims are illiterate (a reported 80 percent) and even many of the literate ones haven't read the Quran, which is supposed to be taken literally -- as is everything the violent, child-fucking Mohammed did.
Yes, Muslims are supposed to emulate this lovely guy, and do -- marrying and fucking children, murdering "infidels" for Allah, and doing all manner of creepy stuff. (For the uninitiated, Mohammed married his wife Aisha when she was 6, and molested/had sex with her when she was 9.)
In a bit of recent news from "The Religion Of Peace," here's a piece from JihadWatch on three Christian pastors who were murdered when they refused to convert to Islam:
"They...cut their heads one after the other and thereafter, shouted allah akbar in wild celebration accompanied with several gun shots"
Welcome to The Religion Of Pieces -- the reveling over the chopped off body parts of anybody who isn't an Allah-bot.
How Feminism Breeds Stoopid
From Sweden's The Local, nimrod feminist parents are raising a child whose sex they refuse to reveal, and named the kid "Pop":
Pop's parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop's sex a secret. Aside from a select few - those who have changed the child's diaper - nobody knows Pop's gender; if anyone enquires, Pop's parents simply say they don't disclose this information.In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.
"We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset," Pop's mother said. "It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead."
The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop's gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.
Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.
Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child - they just say Pop.
"I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime," said Pop's mother.
But while Pop's parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.
"Ignoring children's natures simply doesn't work," says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox
, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.
"Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child's needs as an individual," Pinker tells The Local.
"Gender" is not "a social construct." There's a vast body of research that shows that men and women have substantial differences in their brains and behavior; differences consistent across cultures, even primitive cultures.
It happens time and time again that P.C. idiots who try to raise their children "gender neutral" find that boys play with transportation items and make swords out of carrots and girls will turn a cabbage into a baby. It's sure to happen here. Meanwhile, it was bad enough growing up Jewish in a neighborhood of Jew-haters. This kid has become an unfortunate experiment in what I see as a form of child abuse.
The Right To Assisted Suicide
The rather obscene assertion, by a couple posters here, that there was some service owed to society by terminally ill, suffering people -- that they would be doing something positive by suffering instead of killing themselves -- and then the assertion that they somehow owed this suffering to society, inspired me to look for a quote from Ayn Rand.
I actually came upon this piece, on the exact topic, on aynrand.org, the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, by Thomas A. Bowden:
The political influence of religious conservatism has thwarted passage of similar legislation, leaving terminal patients to select from a macabre menu of frightening, painful, and often violent end-of-life techniques universally regarded as too inhumane for use on sick dogs or mass murderers.Consider Percy Bridgman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, at 79, was entering the final stages of terminal cancer. Wracked with pain and bereft of hope, he got a gun and somehow found courage to pull the trigger, knowing he was condemning others to the agony of discovering his bloody remains. His final note said simply: "It is not decent for society to make a man do this to himself. Probably this is the last day I will be able to do it myself."
What lawmakers must grasp is that there is no rational, secular basis upon which the government can properly prevent any individual from choosing to end his own life. When religious conservatives use secular laws to enforce their idea of God's will, they threaten the central principle on which America was founded.
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, for the first time in the history of nations, that each person exists as an end in himself. This basic truth--which finds political expression in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--means, in practical terms, that you need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct your efforts to achieve your own personal happiness.
But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself--is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.
For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing (not forced) to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way.
Religious conservatives' opposition to the Oregon approach stems from the belief that human life is a gift from the Lord, who puts us here on earth to carry out His will. Thus, the very idea of suicide is anathema, because one who "plays God" by causing his own death, or assisting in the death of another, insults his Maker and invites eternal damnation, not to mention divine retribution against the decadent society that permits such sinful behavior.
If a religious conservative contracts a terminal disease, he has a legal right to regard his own God's will as paramount, and to instruct his doctor to stand by and let him suffer, just as long as his body and mind can endure the agony, until the last bitter paroxysm carries him to the grave. But conservatives have no right to force such mindless, medieval misery upon doctors and patients who refuse to regard their precious lives as playthings of a cruel God.
That would be me, thanks. To borrow from Tom Leykis, "Take me out overdose of morphine-style."
UPDATE: Part of having autonomy over your own life is to have autonomy over whether you have somebody take it for you when you cannot. And yes, you need to choose carefully in advance. The argument that there might be abuses or that you might change your mind while suffering terribly and incapacitated is no reason to remove the right from others to have someone assist them in killing themself.
The Shape Of Things To Come
Don't miss those tofu stix. Is privacy a thing of the past? Will it be?
Welfare On Wheels
Great piece by Matt Welch in reason on Cash For Clunkers:
As for the factual claims, did cash-for-clunkers indeed "help everyone"? Well, no. Let's take my favorite example: me. The Welch household owns one car, a 1994 Acura Integra. While clunky, this 15-year-old car does not qualify for the program, because it gets too many miles per gallon-around 28, allegedly. So our tax dollars are being redistributed to people who have made less eco-friendly purchases than we have.One could counter-argue that monocle-wearing magazine editors such as moi are not the intended audience for this bit of alleged FDRism, and while that actually doesn't make any sense (since no one's checking your pay stubs on the showroom floor), let's roll with it anyway. Here's the problem even then: We bought that pup (for the C-4-Cish price of $4,000, about six years ago), back when we were poor. Hell, I'd bet that the majority of households whose lone car is a 1994 anything ain't exactly swimming in the do-rey-mi. What this program does is take money from the stickshift-driving non-rich, and gives it to anyone with an SUV and/or old beater. Who (again, unlike us) is ready to shell out five figures for a shiny new car.
And wait! It gets worse, from that whole social-justice angle. What about the estimated 12 percent of Americans aged 15 years and above who don't drive, period? What about all the adults who live in the 8 percent of households that don't have a vehicle? What about half the residents of Manhattan, who took transit planners' decades-old dream to heart and "got out of their cars"? What about those who are too poor to drive? The answer: All of these people are subsidizing whoever turns in an SUV or crappy old $800 K-Car like the one I used to drive. Not only that, but what do you think happens to the $800 car market when the guvmint is handing out $4,500 checks to have the things destroyed? I'll go ahead and state the obvious: It shrinks, making it more expensive for the truly poor people, the ones who want to make that daring leap from the bus system to an awful old bucket of rust.
The Right To Not Be Kept Alive
You should have that right, if you wish, as well as the right to have yourself killed by some willing person if you are not physically capable of doing it yourself. People we love should not have their lives and freedom jeopardized for carrying out our wishes, nor should any other or others we ask to do our bidding. Whether or not you would like these rights (and no matter what your religion says), I want these rights and I think we should all have them available to us. (It's my body, I'll throw it off a cliff if I want to. Or have it thrown off.)
These issues came to the fore for Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield after his wife was diagnosed with incurable cancer. He writes of her time at the end in the Times of London:
And she made me promise. "I feel horrible, wretched," she said. "There will come a point where I won't want to go on. Once that point is reached," she said, "make sure that I have the necessary dose of diamorphine to go quickly." I promised.Not many days afterwards she began to lose consciousness and lapsed into meaningless, rambling speech. I called the doctor. He examined her perfunctorily and said: "Do you want me to take her into hospital?" Before I could reply, she said the only coherent words she had said in several hours: "Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad" (Hear, Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One) -- the final affirmation of a dying Jew. I knew immediately what she was saying to me. She had had enough. She wanted to die. The doctor left. She fell into a coma. I panicked. I had made her a promise and now I must keep it. Where do I go for help? Where would I get the drugs from?
Fortunately she died within 12 hours of losing consciousness.
Linda and I were/are (English tenses fail at this point) both religious people. We took God and the sanctity of life really seriously. We are part of a religious tradition that is strict about the sanctity of life but also compassionate. It never occurred to either of us that what Linda wanted was wrong, unethical or irreligious. What kind of God would want life to be prolonged beyond the point of endurance and meaning?
Six years later, it seems clearer and clearer that this is a widely held view, both among those of faith and those who are not religious. The ability to prolong life has brought with it many benefits but it has also brought with it largely unforeseen consequences -- the many ways in which we can keep people alive beyond the point where that life has any meaning either to the person dying or to those around them.
Medical progress has heaped upon us huge responsibilities and profound dilemmas. I would have kept faith with Linda had it been necessary and administered the fatal injection. Had it meant prison, then so be it -- though it's hard to believe that sending me to prison would have been of benefit to anyone. It isn't reasonable to ask doctors, dedicated to saving life, to take the responsibility on themselves if they have personal ethical qualms.
I can also understand that there are elderly people who fear becoming an intolerable burden. But the person who mattered most was Linda.
Linda was convinced that there are circumstances in which people can and must be trusted; that to hasten death when life is not life is an act of compassion, not a sin. As always -- well, almost always -- I agree with her.
Ice, Mice, And Advice
Catch my appearance on The Big Cigarette podcast, with Fat and Dany, right here!
That Journal Article Recommending Some Drug?
Who really wrote it? Was it the pharmaceutical company or some firm they hired, and did some doctor then stick his name on it for pay? Natasha Singer writes at The New York Times about Wyeth ghostwriting medical articles that doctors put their names on, articles that "emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones":
The court documents provide a detailed paper trail showing how Wyeth contracted with a medical communications company to outline articles, draft them and then solicit top physicians to sign their names, even though many of the doctors contributed little or no writing. The documents suggest the practice went well beyond the case of Wyeth and hormone therapy, involving numerous drugs from other pharmaceutical companies."It's almost like steroids and baseball," said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting. "You don't know who was using and who wasn't; you don't know which articles are tainted and which aren't."
Because physicians rely on medical literature, the concern about ghostwriting is that doctors might change their prescribing habits after reading certain articles, unaware they were commissioned by a drug company.
"The filter is missing when the reader does not know that the germ of an article came from the manufacturer," said James Szaller, a lawyer in Cleveland who has spent four years going through the ghostwriting documents on behalf of hormone therapy plaintiffs.
Left, Left, And Left-Of-Center
My friend Barb Oakley, an engineering prof and author of the fantastic book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: "Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world." In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its "spread the wealth" mentality intended to help society's underdogs, sounds ideal.Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs--ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences. Modern neuroscience is showing how flawed many of these policies have been--structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, for example, help explain why remedial programs simply helped them become better at conning people.
Academics in the social sciences tend to give short shrift to the dramatic failures and corruption within US educational system or unions. (Think here of the Detroit Public School system, or the National Education Association, whose former officers have written: "The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.") Instead, because of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government--at least the type of government that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs for their students--are good. This type of teaching makes the Democratic Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable, and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less likely. (How many social scientists predicted that the billions spent on busing and the Projects would worsen the situations they were meant to solve, as ultimately happened?) It's no wonder that journalists enter the profession as Democrats, then keep their beliefs intact through all-too-common tendencies to conform.
Journalists sometimes say conservatives and political independents don't go into journalism because they're more interested in money. The unspoken message, of course, is that conservatives are greedy bastards who don't have a social conscience. But many conservatives go through college to become stay-at-home housewives--they're hardly Gordon Geckos. More likely, conservatives are turned off by the propaganda dished out in their social science classes. Although I'm a classical liberal myself, last semester my daughter and I got a chuckle at whatever Marxist howler her well-meaning professor spouted that day in her introductory sociology class. She'd have hardly gotten the A she received if she'd constantly challenged that establishment.
This also ignores journalism's own issues with greed and corruption--most despicably with Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union for the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of stories that uncritically backed Stalinist propaganda, denied the Ukrainian famine, and defended Stalin's infamous trials. Duranty lived lavishly in Stalin's good graces. (Meanwhile, the Times has never returned the Pulitzer.) More recently, the New York Times' fraudulent reporter Jayson Blair received a mid-six figure advance for his memoirs--even the most egregious reporters can make big bucks and become media darlings.
Professors in the humanities and social sciences are taken aback by the kinds of claims I'm making here. How could there possibly be such problems within a discipline--or multiple disciplines--without most academicians being aware of them? But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it's actually not the right thing at all. It's rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn't proper to posit anything going on inside people's heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all--everybody was using Skinner's approach, and everybody couldn't be wrong.
Read the whole thing here, and check out her bio, too:
Barbara is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and a recent vice president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Currently an Associate Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, she has been at the forefront of efforts to expand the bioengineering profession and has won awards from such organizations as the National Science Foundation. Oakley's work has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience.Oakley's academic career came after a series of globetrotting adventures that got her dubbed "a female Indiana Jones." While knocking back tumblers of vodka with the captain of a Soviet fishing boat during the height of the Cold War, she was told, "You know too much, it's time to kill you"-- a rhyme in Russian. She chronicled her stint as a maritime translator in Hair of the Dog: Tales from Aboard a Russian Trawler
.
Other exploits include working at the South Pole Station in Antarctica; rising from U.S. Army private to captain, during which Oakley was recognized as a Distinguished Military Scholar; and teaching in Qíqíhā'ěr, Manchuria--"the Red Chinese equivalent of Fargo, North Dakota, but with six million people," she says.
The Real Deal On Obama's Health Care Plan
Eliminating private insurance. The uncovered video:
"Everything Happens For A Reason"?
And, in this case, it's that people believe, sans evidence, in a big man in the sky. A little girl died from a treatable illness because her religious nutter parents prayed for her recovery instead of taking her to the doctor. From the Wausau Daily Herald, the jury found them guilty after 15 hours' deliberation:
Dale R. Neumann, 47, of the town of Weston was charged with second-degree reckless homicide in connection with the March 23, 2008 death of his 11-year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neumann.Prosecutors say that Neumann failed in his duty to protect his daughter when he chose not to take her to a doctor after seeing she was seriously ill. Kara, as the girl was known, died from complications of undiagnosed diabetes. Doctors testified this week that she could have been saved up until her death if she had received fluids and insulin.
Dale's wife, Leilani Neumann, 41, was convicted of the same charge on May 22. The charge carries a maximum 25-year prison sentence.
If you believe in god, check out this simple experiment from one of my favorite sites, Why God Hates Amputees. You're supposed to first find a deserving person who has had both legs amputated, and create a prayer circle for them.
The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother.If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.
What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.
And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.
No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously. And we know that God ignores the prayers of amputees through our own observations of the world around us. If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day.
Isn't that odd? The situation becomes even more peculiar when you look at who God is. According to the Standard Model of God:
•God is all-powerful. Therefore, God can do anything, and regenerating a leg is trivial.
•God is perfect, and he created the Bible, which is his perfect book. In the Bible, Jesus makes very specific statements about the power of prayer. Since Jesus is God, and God and the Bible are perfect, those statements should be true and accurate.
•God is all-knowing and all-loving. He certainly knows about the plight of the amputee, and he loves this amputee very much.
•God is ready and willing to answer your prayers no matter how big or small. All that you have to do is believe. He says it in multiple places in the Bible. Surely, with millions of people in the prayer circle, at least one of them will believe and the prayer will be answered.
•God has no reason to discriminate against amputees. If he is answering millions of other prayers like Jeanna's every day, God should be answering the prayers of amputees too.Nonetheless, the amputated legs are not going to regenerate.
What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very clear line. God never answers the prayers of amputees. It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.
Still believe in god? Or would you just like to.
A little something Daniel Dennett told me: He believes that otherwise intelligent, rational people really don't believe in god, they believe in the belief in god.
That describe you? Just wondering how you can believe in something without evidence. And if you believe, sans evidence, in god, do you also believe, sans evidence, that your house levitates, and do you go around telling people you believe in it?
Questions For Muslims
Love this one, posted by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula, on the Islamic ruling on eating mermaids:
Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?Apparently, the Koran or some of its promoters discussed mermaids at some point, therefore they are presumed to exist. The question is then a reasonable one: if you throw a net over the side of your dhow, and haul in a mermaid along with a nice catch of ordinary fish, is she halaal? Can you chop her up, sell her at the market, or take her home to the family for dinner?
There is a fatwa on the subject of eating mermaids that cites many scholarly Islamic sources. Here are a few.
Al-Durayr - a Maaliki scholar - said in al-Sharh al-Sagheer (2/182): Sea animals in general are permissible, whether it is dead meat or a 'dog' (shark) or a 'pig' (dolphin), and they do not need to be slaughtered properly. End quote.Al-Saawi said in his commentary on that: The words "or a 'dog' or a 'pig' also include a 'human', referring thereby to mermaids. End quote.
Shaykh Ibn 'Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him) said, after stating that it is more likely that it is permissible to eat crocodiles and sea snakes: The correct view is that nothing is excluded from that, and that all the sea creatures which can only live in water are halaal, alive or dead, because of the general meaning of the verse - i.e., "Lawful to you is (the pursuit of) water game and its use for food" [al-Maa'idah 5:64].
Well.
That was a revelation. I'll never be able to watch Splash with the same eyes again.
Now I just need recipes. I've gutted enough salmon that I probably don't need cleaning instructions.
Oh, and a mermaid. I wonder if the Asian market in the Twin Cities would have any?
Magic Jack
Anybody tried or heard of this discount phone calling device? The Magic Jack device itself, which plugs into your USB port, is maybe $30. And you get almost free local and long distance phone calls (anywhere in the U.S. and Canada) -- for $19.95 a year, and the first year is free. Magic Jack website is here.
This interests me because I haven't had the guts to ditch my phone line yet in one of my frugality measures, thanks to the hell a friend of mine went through with Vonage.
My big question: What's the catch? Well, one I heard from listening to the video on the site -- it sounds like you get a new phone number. I've had mine for a long time, and I'm not interested in changing it. Also, if your Internet service goes kaput, so does your phone.
Pink Ribbons For 70-Year-Old Men!
Doctors and professors of medicine Steven Woloshin and Lisa M. Schwartz, authors of Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics
It's hard to oppose cancer education. That is probably why the proposed Education and Awareness Requires Learning Young (EARLY) Act has 363 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. The $45-million bill, which seeks "to increase public awareness regarding the threats posed by breast cancer to young women," is well-intentioned and emotionally appealing.It is also a big mistake.
For starters, it targets women between the ages of 15 and 39. Fewer than 5% of breast cancers occur before age 40. According to national statistics, about one in 10,000 20-year-old women will die of breast cancer in the next 10 years (meaning that 9,999 will not). For context, a 70-year-old man has about the same risk of dying from breast cancer.
...A call for increased self-examination among young woman might also trigger more screening mammograms, and there is no evidence that mammography before age 40 reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer. Young women have dense breast tissue, which leads to more false alarms. Mammography screening also results in over-diagnosis, the detection of cancers that were never destined to cause symptoms or death even if untreated. It has been estimated that 10% to 50% of breast cancers detected by mammography screening are in fact over-diagnosis. Over-diagnosis leads to treatment that can only cause harm. And of course, early exposure to radiation can itself increase cancer risk.
...Neither the American Cancer Society nor the National Breast Cancer Coalition support the EARLY Act, and the latter is actively opposing it. Why? Because no matter how intuitively appealing it may be to engage young women in the fight against breast cancer, the EARLY Act runs counter to the evidence. It would end up doing more harm than good.
How does cancer funding in general stack up along gender lines? Tara Parker Pope blogs at The New York Times:
Among the big cancers, breast cancer receives the most funding per new case, $2,596 -- and by far the most money relative to each death, $13,452. Notably, prostate cancer, the most common cancer, receives the least funding per new case at just $1,318. But on a per-death basis it ranks second, with $11,298 in N.C.I. funds.
Here's NYT commenter "Dave" on lung cancer:
As a doctor, I would just like to remind everyone that the #1 cure for lung cancer is simply not smoking. 90-95% of lung cancers are caused by smoking and all-cancer mortality would be reduced 50% by not smoking. Billions can be spent on lung cancer drug development and it will only lead to a 3-4 month added survival. I would like to see the non-smokers get back the health insurance dollars being used on smokers through a $4/pack health insurance tax. The extra cost would reduce smoking through economic reasons and the revenue would pay for care of currently uninsured without having to raise taxes elsewhere. I don't see any politician spouting this simple advice.
It's The Color Of Your Money...
Stuart Taylor has a wise take on race-based preferences, writing at National Journal:
The young Sotomayor, raised in modest circumstances in the Bronx, N.Y., had shown special promise and drive by becoming valedictorian at a competitive Catholic school. And, by her own account, her test scores were not terribly "far off the mark" set by more privileged applicants from better schools.In short, while Princeton's admissions office no doubt considered her ethnicity, she was an ideal candidate for the kind of class-based affirmative action that crusading liberal Justice William O. Douglas -- who saw race-based preferences as unconstitutional -- advocated for extraordinarily promising students of all races in his 1974 dissent in DeFunis v. Odegaard.
The case involved law school admissions. Douglas called for "evaluating an applicant's prior achievements in light of the barriers that he had to overcome" -- not his or her race. He explained:
"A black applicant who pulled himself out of the ghetto into a junior college may thereby demonstrate a level of motivation, perseverance, and ability that would lead a fair-minded admissions committee to conclude that he shows more promise for law study than the son of a rich alumnus who achieved better grades at Harvard. That applicant would be offered admission not because he is black, but because as an individual he has shown he has the potential [to excel].... Such a policy would not be limited to [racial minorities], although undoubtedly [they] may in practice be the principal beneficiaries of it. But a poor Appalachian white, or a second-generation Chinese in San Francisco, ... may demonstrate similar potential and thus be accorded favorable consideration."
This is exactly as I think it should be. Taylor continues:
Contrast Douglas's vision with the quota mentality displayed by Sotomayor's complaint in 2001, in one of her "wise Latina" speeches, that "we [Latinos] have only 10 out of 147 active [federal] Circuit Court judges and 30 out of 587 active District Court judges. Those numbers are grossly below our proportion of the population [emphasis in original text]."Sotomayor ignored the fact that the talent pool for judicial appointments is not the general population but rather the population of lawyers with the experience and accomplishment to qualify. By that measure, Latinos were overrepresented in the federal judiciary, as Ed Whelan, head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has documented. "According to the ABA," he wrote, "in 2000 the percentage of lawyers who were 'Hispanic' was only 3.4 percent [and] the very numbers that Sotomayor complained about equate to 6.8 percent of federal Appellate judges ... and 5.1 percent of District judges."
Abducting People Into Islam
Yet another case, in Egypt this time, of two Christian girls being kidnapped by Muslim barbarians who plan on forcing the girls' conversion to Islam. Mary Abdelmassih writes for AINA:
"At 10 o'clock of the same morning someone called me and asked if I was Amira's mother. He introduced himself as Sheikh Mohammed, and said that my daughter is fine and will convert to Islam," the mother said. "When I cried and begged him to let me have my daughter back, he said he would let me see her again after her conversion to Islam, and ended the call. I tried calling that cell phone back several time, but there never was a reply."..."When I started to cry at the Mosque entrance, one of them came to me and said 'Listen, mother of Amira, I am warning you not to report the abduction to the police or do anything, the price will be your son Meena (9 years old) being slaughtered in front of your own eyes. I am not threatening, I'm talking seriously.'" He further said "Listen, your daughter Amira will convert to Islam next Friday, and we are now preparing her for that. Now go home and stay indoors until everything is quietly over."
After getting this message, Samira said that she was filled with terror, went home quickly and took her son Meena and escaped from the whole region, to somewhere unknown.
Samira Markos lives in Alexandria alone with her two children, Meena and Amira; her husband has been working in Libya for the last ten years.
"All the Muslims in our neighbourhood know about the abduction. I could not get hold of my husband, and even my Christian friends have abandoned me as they are afraid of the Salafis who are in complete control of the region."
Salafi is the name of a movement or sect in which Muslims try to imitate their Prophet Mohamad in every aspect of life.
Have we mentioned recently that Prophet Mo married his wife Aisha when she was 6 and molested her (uh, consummated their relationship) when she was 9?
via JihadWatch
Scummy Mummy
Laurie Peterson over at Minyanville is proudly unethical, bragging about how she instructs her child to lie. Peterson writes:
For starters, the swim club membership I won at an auction for the season requires that kids be at least 14 to go alone. I didn't know this when I cast the winning bid. Since most of the hours the pool is open coincide with the time I'm in the office, I instructed my daughter to say she's 14 if asked.There's no question she could pass. But the official paperwork I filled out says she's 12. She knows this and doesn't want to do it because she's worried someone will find out. As a result, the cost-per-swim of this membership in the rainiest summer on record is one thing I'm trying to forget.
Then there's the restaurant fibbing.
We enjoy eating outdoors in the summer. One of our favorite places to do this is catering to the recession-driven needs of the market. It runs a Tuesday night special where Kids Eat Free. Lots of chains are offering deals, ranging from P.F. Chang's (PFCB) to Red Robin (RRGB) to Denny's (DENN).
Kids at our neighborhood haunt get an entrée, a beverage and a fantastic dessert. We're not talking strawberry Jell-O (KFT). The options include profiteroles and key lime pie. The portions are large enough that I can share a spoonful or two. Even when paying the full $7.95 price of the Children's Menu, you couldn't beat this deal if you tried.
Recently we were charged for the meal, and I corrected the waiter. He took her meal off the bill. I had failed to see the notation that kids must be under 12. Later I did. This time I encouraged my daughter to be younger, and continue to be 11. It's not like we carry around a birth certificate if anyone asked for one.
Getting a meal for kids 12 and younger when your kids are older is not only lying, it's stealing. I don't care if you think it's dumb there's an age range on it -- if you don't like it, make peanutbutter sandwiches for the kids and stay home.
Wait, is she really a thief? I mean, aren't these small things? Well, it's like the old quip about prostitution. Horrified if I ask you whether you'd fuck somebody for $10, but you'd consider it for $1 million? You're still a whore. We're just hagging about the price.
By the way, there are reasons for rules at pools, and they often have to do with safety and liability. I wonder, how quick would this woman be to sue if something went wrong. (You know, rules are just dandy when they work out to your beneft...ka-ching!)
Oh, and not surprisingly, there's a gotcha! ad that plays sound on the Minyanville site. Turn your sound down before you go there. Unpleasant experience all around for me, in her land of ethical sewage.
Wait! Best of all, there's this: "Laurie Petersen is the General Manager of Family Media at Minyanville Publishing and Multimedia." Great. I'll be going there for all my advice on raising healthy, ethical children.
via Consumerist
Dench Mouth
(I love it.) It's in the vein of when somebody calls me a bitch and, instead of getting defensive, I raise an eyebrow and say, "And...?" Perez Hilton posts:
Dame Judi Dench was crossing Shaftesbury Ave in London on her way to rehearsal for a new project on Tuesday and was almost run down by a speeding taxi. The taxi driver shouted to her out of the window, 'You stupid cunt!". Dame Judi's fast reply- "That's Dame Cunt to you!"
via GS
The Oxymorons Who Want Us Dead
Islamic tolerance -- the term is a hoot, considering the way they murder women who dare to rebel against behaving like men's possessions, and considering this sweet little ad for an Islamic conference with a beheaded Statue of Liberty. Not surprisingly, they find democracy "perverted," with all its fostering of individual rights and personal freedom.
Meanwhile, the oxymorons keep blowing themselves (and us) up for Allah -- told that they'll get the famous 72 virgins (or is it 72 raisins? -- there's some uncertainty about the translation, but never mind, since a reported 80 percent of Muslims are illiterate).
Wake up, sleeping world. The barbarians are using western technology and lax immigration laws to take over and hurl us all back to the Middle Ages -- those of us they let live, vis a vis the Quran commanding them to convert or kill all "infidels" and install "The New Caliphate."
If you'd like to be among the informed, read sites like JihadWatch and thereligionofpeace, where I found the link to this piece above.
Dumbshits For Public Office
Way to conserve natural resources with that "Cash For Clunkers" program. @KateC makes a great point:
Did "Cash for Clunkers" not ever strip the cars for parts? What a waste.
And surely, with the rush dealers were in to get the cars crushed so they wouldn't be left holding the bag financially, there was no time to strip them -- if even it's lawful, and I don't know, because I haven't read the law (and don't have time right now).
When I drove my 1970 Mercedes (post-Rambler), I once needed a new corner window (the little triangular one), complete with the works. It would've been $900 to order one from Germany, the Mercedes dealer told my garage. I ordered one for $35, including UPS charges, from Sun Valley Auto Wrecking (818-768-0704). Great guys, by the way, should you ever need parts for a Mercedes. Polite, helpful, sweet, even. And they'll mail you out what you need pronto.
