Mira Sorvino's Stinky T-Shirt
On a superficial note, I am not a "gal pal," nor do I have "gal pals," and if I did, I'd be too busy throwing up to have much contact with them. Got this icky-toned e-mail last month, and I was a bit behind due to book-related stuff, so I'm only posting it now:
Subject: Re: Mira Sorvino Wants You To Tell a Gal P.A.L.In a message dated 9/30/09 3:40:25 PM, Jamie.Dammrich@zenogroup.com writes:
Hi Amy,
As gal pals, we talk about everything. Yet there's one subject that often goes unsaid - domestic violence. Did you know that one in four women reports being abused by a husband or partner in her lifetime?
The Allstate Foundation and Mira Sorvino are encouraging people to talk for change about domestic violence through the Tell a Gal P.A.L.® campaign. Spread the word about domestic violence during October's National Domestic Violence Awareness Month by:
Listen to Mira's Story: Learn why spreading the word about domestic violence is so important to Mira. We encourage you to embed Mira's video on your site!
SHARE YOUR STORY OR 'TELL A FRIEND' AND ENTER TO RECEIVE A LIMITED EDITION T-SHIRT: Readers can share stories of overcoming domestic violence or helping a "gal pal" in need, or send a 'Tell a Friend' email. Readers who submit stories or 'Tell a Friend' can enter to receive a limited edition Tell a Gal P.A.L. t-shirt as worn by Mira Sorvino!
Ick. Do they wash it first, or is celebrity sweat supposed to be part of the charm? I mean, nothing against the girl, but the tone of this keeps making me want to make a dash for the porcelain bowl.
Jamie's e-mail continues:
DONATE A SUIT (Sep. 28-Oct. 9): Donate nearly new women's business suits to benefit survivors. Donated suits will be given to local domestic violence organizations and Dress for Success affiliates across the country. Click here to find a donation location near you. We hope you will take action and spread the word about domestic violence, inspiring other community members to do the same. If you're interested in speaking with someone from The Allstate Foundation, I'd be happy to coordinate an interview. Let me know if you have any questions and please visit ClickToEmpower.org for further information. A multimedia news release about Mira's partnership with the Allstate Foundation can be found here. Thanks, Jamie Dammrich On behalf of The Allstate Foundation 312.396.9715
I write to Jamie:
Where is this stat from, please?And are you aware that men are also victims of domestic abuse, but they are more likely to try to laugh it off or leave it unreported?
Jamie writes back:
In a message dated 9/30/09 4:00:32 PM, Jamie.Dammrich@zenogroup.com writes:Hi Amy,
That statistic is from the Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence study by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, July 2000.
Yes, we are aware that men sometimes are victims of domestic violence and may not report it. The facts and statistics that we have show that women are more often the victims of domestic violence. A 2005 study by the U.S. Department of Justice reports that women comprise 84 percent of spouse abuse victims and 86 percent of victims of abuse by a boyfriend or girlfriend. With the start of October's Domestic Violence Awareness Month we are focusing on the programs and tools that we can provide to help survivors of domestic violence lead safer, more secure lives.
Please let me know if you would like additional information.
Best,
Jamie
My turn:
From: AdviceAmy@aol.com Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:05:38 -0400 Subject: MORE - response - Re: Mira Sorvino Wants You To Tell a Gal P.A.L. To: Jamie.Dammrich@zenogroup.comThanks - but I think the stats are highly inaccurate due to a number of things -- often women are initiators and are put down as victims. Furthermore, as I pointed out, men don't report incidents and often are too embarrassed to identify even to themselves as domestic violence victims. For you to put out that 84/86 percent stat below is just wrong. The way I see it, the important thing isn't trying to impress people with wrong stats that sound impressive but to point out that domestic violence happens and what to do. And I happen to know, from my friend Sergeant Heather (of the LAPD, who works DV cases) that the one way to get victims out of these situations (men or women) is to get them to go to group sessions where other victims speak. Otherwise, they're defensive about their situation and about staying with their abuser.
DR. HELEN, who I forwarded my e-mail exchange to, does all the real heavy lifting:
Amy,Thanks for setting the record straight. So great to see others that are fighting back. I really think there is a lot of money and power flowing to these DV groups and that is why they are so intent in keeping the false stats out there or using those that are outdated or onesided.
Here is a letter I sent to the Tennessee Department of Health with links to various studies that show women to be instigators of violence:
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-efforts-at-educating-officialdom.html
Be sure to click Dr. Helen's link and read her letter.
(More!) Wanted! People Who Go After Cell Phone Rudesters
I need your help.
Heard of anybody who goes after cell phone rudesters? Tells them to shut up? Posts their conversation and phone number on their blog like I do? Or takes some other tack, violent or nonviolent, to stop these jerks from streaming their dull lives into our brains?
Can you please pass along links to any blog items or articles about this? (One per comment, please, so it won't get kicked into spamland. Just post a second comment for the second link, and so on.)
Thank you!
--"The Militant Miss Manners," as my friend Kaja calls me.
UPDATE: Here's Larry David doing it -- unfortunately, only on TV, not in real life, which is what I need -- real life examples:
"Never" Is A Real Strong Word
Stank Of America, the bank that gave a total of $12,000 of my money to identity thieves with ONLY a fake driver's license in my name...no bank card required, no PIN punched in, no signature check...on SEVEN separate occasions...is at it again.
B of A said they were sorry in the way only they would or could -- by subsequently firing me as a customer for complaining that they failed their fiduciary duty to me by...well, failing to require anything but a driver's license from the thieves...a piece of ID banks know is often and easily forged. (You can buy a fake driver's license pronto for $150 just down Wilshire Boulevard at MacArthur Park, of cake/rain fame.)
Now, my least favorite spokes-enabler, B of A's Betty Riess, is at it again, after the bank fired a customer, apparently for complaining about her credit limit being halved. Arthur Delaney writes on HuffPo:
According to Padgett, when she protested further, pointing out that she'd never made a late payment on the card in question, the Bank of America representative responded by canceling her credit card altogether -- ending a 12-year relationship in which she'd done nothing but make full payments, and on-time, too."Why don't you put the limit back where it was?" she recalled asking. The response: "No, you've been canceled."
This happened on Tuesday. On Thursday, a Bank of America spokeswoman told the Huffington Post that Bank of America would never cancel a card to punish a customer for griping.
"We do monitor accounts for risks and may adjust customer lines up or down as appropriate based on their risk profile based on their performance," said spokeswoman Betty Riess. "We would not close an account just because somebody would call in about it."
Short memory or flaming liar? You choose!
Thanks, David!
Where The Wild Things Are
The chilly dog likes to remain close to the vest.
P.S. Regarding the frighteningly practical choice of wardrobe, I'm writing, and it's cold in here, so the evening gowns are in the closet, and Lucy and I are both wearing those jackets made of recycled plastic milk bottles.
As I'm posting this, she's just started snoring like an old man -- the strangest sound in the world coming out of an sickeningly cute little dog.
Snitty Women
From the "Oh, please" files, women readers of the Times of London "expose casual sexism."
From reader Lucy Jenkins:
Megan Fox, rising Hollywood starlet: "I think all the women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. That's what our purpose is in this business. You're merchandise, you're a product. You're sold and it's based on sex. But that's OK. I think women should be empowered by it, not degraded."Aggggghhhhhhhh. What happened to intelligence, talent, hard work, entrepreneurial spirit and personality? And since when have we been "products"? Women don't help themselves sometimes.
Ladies, save for men wanting to have sex with naked or semi-naked women with hot bodies (and the same goes for males of all species), the planet would be populated mainly by rocks, plankton, and weird spiny creatures.
When I want intelligence, hard work, entrepreneurial spirt and personality, I hang out with Barb Oakley, who happens to be one of the first women in the army to be trained on the M-16.
Tragically, when we're together, she tends to avoid leaping around Angelina Jolie-style, in a black leather bustier, and blowing away terrorists. For that sort of thing, I go to a darkened movie theater with Gregg.
Speaking of women engineers (Barb is an engineering prof and the former head of the engineering society), here's a little engineering-oriented whine from a girl named Emma:
A friend of mine who works in the engineering industry, having graduated with a first for her masters degree, was giving a presentation on her company's newest advancement to some industry bigwigs. Less than five minutes in, the biggest wig there, in the centre of the front row, put his hand up and asked if she actually knew what she was talking about or if she was just the looker. No one said anything in her defence.
Emma, darling, please tell us why her lips were taped shut with electrical tape, prohibiting her from speaking up in her own behalf.
All the better to whine about "casual sexism" than focusing on serious sexism, like the kind in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. There, some women are trying to repeal "guardian laws," which treat women like pets -- saying women need a male relative's permission to do just about anything. But, never mind that -- do as Allison Smith does on the ToL site, and sniffle about how male celebrities don't have to expose flesh on the red carpet.
Amy In Psychology Today - On Newsstands Now!
It's the issue on sale now, with the chimp on the cover (no, that's not a picture of me!). But, I am pictured in the piece, standing in front of the Venice boardwalk in a bright yellow evening dress and long black gloves, and holding a bright orange fly swatter, in a fantastic shot by Gregg.
Oh, and best of all, it's accompanying a serial of my book. So, you'll get a little taste of what it's about. Happy reading!
P.S. The book is officially published November 27, but I heard that the publisher got it in their warehouse yesterday, so it may be in stores sooner than expected, and it's now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Software Savings At Amazon
Okay, ignore the deal Amazon e-mailed me where you save a whole penny on Snow Leopard. There are some other good deals here from Amazon's Software Deals of the Week
And, as long you're ordering, don't forget to pre-order my book! It's I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Econ For Drooling Idiots
According to a CNNMoney piece by Peter Valdes-Dapena, Cash For Clunkers ending up costing taxpayers $24,000 per car:
The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates.The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.
"It is unfortunate that Edmunds.com has had nothing but negative things to say about a wildly successful program that sold nearly 250,000 cars in its first four days alone," said Bill Adams, spokesman for the Department of Transportation. "There can be no doubt that CARS drummed up more business for car dealers at a time when they needed help the most."
This is a time when a number of us "need help the most." Those of us who aren't car dealers are cutting our expenses and looking for new ways to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the government is going after hookers trying to make a living on Craigslist, and passing laws that make it cost-prohibitive for crafting moms to earn a few bucks without going through $4K of testing to see that the baby booties they're knitting don't have lead in them.
Krauthammer On The Magic
In Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: And Obama is, in your eyes, ...Krauthammer: He's becoming ordinary. In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average. His approval ratings are roughly equal to what the last five presidents' were at the same time in their first term. Other people have already said he's done and finished because his health care plans ran into trouble; but I say they're wrong. He's going to come back, he will pass something on health care, there's no question. He will have a blip, be somewhat rehabilitated politically, but he won't be able to pass anything on climate change. He will not be the great transformer he imagines himself to be. A president like others -- with successes and failures.
SPIEGEL: Every incoming president to the White House has to confront reality and disappoint voters.
Krauthammer: True. But what made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician -- the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created.
There was tremendous goodwill, even I was thrilled on Election Day, even though I had voted against him and argued against him.
SPIEGEL: What moved you that day?
Krauthammer: It's redemptive for a country that began in the sin of slavery to see the day, I didn't think I would live to see the day, when a black president would be elected.
I thought that was pretty amazing -- but very much not enough. And really, I think the "hope for change" was pretty facile -- stopping there, and stopping at "He's not Bush." Very much not enough...as we're now seeing. And for those who aren't in the know about me, I was not exactly a Bush fan.
Here's the sort of thing Obama is making progress on -- the passage of the thought crimes bill:
Listen to the language he uses at the beginning. And he talks pretty talk about protecting gays, but does nothing substantive to change the situation for a majority of the gays and lesbians in America, who still cannot marry the person they love.
Thanks, Robert W
John And Kate Plus Money And A Stadium
The McCourt divorce. Scroll down for details.
Heaven And Squagels
David Cross on how stupid the newspaper is:
How The Republicans Can Get Their Groove Back
Luigi Zingales has a smart piece on City Journal, echoing something I've long thought -- that the Republicans aren't the party of small government; they just say they are. He suggests the solution to the Republican party's malaise is to turn back from being pro-business to being pro-market. I'd add that they need to stop pandering to the religious nutters, which alienates fiscal conservative/libertarians like me. Zingales writes:
In part, too, Reagan's platform lost its appeal because the Republican Party frequently betrayed it. How can Republicans effectively campaign against big government when the size of government increased by 33 percent during President George W. Bush's first term, the largest increase in federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson? How can Republicans portray themselves as free-market paladins when Bush's last secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, orchestrated the most massive state intervention in a Western economy since François Mitterrand's nationalization of the French banking system? The party has much to do before it regains credibility on this score....It has to move from a pro-business strategy that defends the interests of existing companies to a pro-market strategy that fosters open competition and freedom of entry. While the two agendas sometimes coincide--as in the case of protecting property rights--they are often at odds. Established firms are threatened by competition and frequently use their political muscle to restrict new entries into their industry, strengthening their positions but putting their customers at a disadvantage.
A pro-market strategy aims to encourage the best conditions for doing business, for everyone. Large banks, for instance, benefit from trading derivatives (such as credit default swaps) over the counter, rather than in an organized exchange: they can charge wider spreads that way, and they can afford to post less collateral by using their credit ratings. For this reason, they oppose moving such trades to organized exchanges, where transactions would be conducted with greater transparency, liquidity, and collateralization--and so with greater financial stability. This is where a pro-market party needs the courage to take on the financial industry on behalf of everyone else.
A pro-market strategy rejects subsidies not only because they're a waste of taxpayers' money but also because they prop up inefficient firms, delaying the entry of new and more efficient competitors. For every "zombie" firm that survives because of government assistance, several innovative start-ups don't get the chance to be born. Subsidies, then, hurt taxpayers twice. A genuinely pro-market party would have resisted more vigorously the Wall Street bailouts, in line with popular sentiment.
And a pro-market approach holds companies financially accountable for their mistakes--an essential policy if free markets are to produce sound decisions.
13 Things You Didn't Know You Could Rent
Brian Clark Howard lists 12 things you didn't know you could rent. My personal favorites (although I think I should end up in an urn -- best not to muck up other people's groundwater or take up unnecessary space):
10. Solar panelsThe high entry cost for solar panels (typically tens of thousands of dollars) has kept many interested homeowners away from renewable energy. But now more and more companies are exploring rental and lease models.
For example, Citizenrē REnU offers rental agreements that require no purchases or hassles with permits or service. Participants normally end up paying less for electricity than they would from their utility over time.
11. Caskets
The average American funeral costs between $7,000 and $10,000, so it's not surprising that many people are looking for ways to cut costs. A fairly common alternative is to rent an attractive casket for services, then use a cheaper option for burial. Many funeral homes offer the service, which can save customers hundreds.
Not surprisingly, he left sex partners off the list. Make that #13. A number of men have found that renting is much more cost-effective than getting sex for free.
60 Billion Dollar Fraud
Medicare fraud is one of the most profitable crimes in America. Stunning how blatant the fraud is. And how easy.
via Robert W
Why More Women Aren't Bloggers
No, it isn't that "the patriarchy" rules Movable Type, Expression Engine, or Blogspot. Fellow girl blogger Melissa Clouthier gets it right:
The Internet still feels like the Wild West. There are some safe homesteads-social media, for example. Consider: On Facebook, a woman can decide who she wants to connect with and who she wants to keep out. On Twitter, a woman who feels wrongly attacked can block the attacker. (Meghan McCain, the mad blocker, comes to mind. She takes even mild criticism as a block-worthy offense.)When it comes the arena of ideas, the women who blog are not typical women. Over and over, the women who blog are tougher. Like the shotgun wielding Western expansionists of yore, women bloggers take shots and can shoot back.
Women bloggers are often sexualized and insulted. One famous incident with Kathy Sierra involved photoshop and personal information. Kathy quit, something I urged her not to do. She is now, though, on Twitter and I believe she blogs anonymously to spare herself the insulting misery. Michelle Malkin, Amanda Carpenter, and just about every conservative woman blogger, including me, has endured horrible personal, violent and sexual insults-very often from "enlightened" male liberal commenters and bloggers.
...In addition, women often don't like the intellectual jousting. Part of it is gender wiring. Men see verbal sparring as a testosterone-fueled challenge. Women see degraded communication and hostility. When they put an idea out there, it seems aggressive when someone rips the point of view to shreds. And, it is aggressive.
Crazed Food Addict Formerly In Charge Of Policy
Meet former FDA chief David Kessler, who doesn't bother to base his dietary advice on science, but merely on his own unstoppable obsession with tasty food. Sullum writes for reason on "The Peril of Palatability":
According to The Washington Post, David Kessler's research for The End of Overeating included late-night forays into the trash bins behind Chili's restaurants across California. From the chain's garbage he retrieved ingredient boxes with nutritional labels that revealed the secret of dishes such as Southwestern Eggrolls and Boneless Shanghai Wings. It turned out they "were bathed in salt, fat and sugars."Kessler could have saved considerable time and trouble by paying a Chili's employee to write down this information for him. Or by visiting the Chili's website, which provides numbers for the calories, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and sodium in the company's food. Or simply by assuming that food promoted as a mouth-watering yet affordable indulgence probably has a lot of fat, salt, and sugar in it. But as The End of Overeating more than amply demonstrates, Kessler is the sort of crusader who spares no effort to uncover the obvious.
Kessler, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco's medical school, grabbed headlines as head of the Food and Drug Administration under Bill Clinton by taking on Big Tobacco. In this book he mounts an assault on Big Food, but the results are even feebler than his unsuccessful effort to regulate cigarettes without statutory authority. He combines banal observations, dressed up as scientific insights and revelations of corporate misdeeds, with presumptuous advice that overgeneralizes from his own troubled relationship with food.
Kessler urges readers to eschew pasta, French fries, bacon cheeseburgers, candy, and other "hyperpalatable" foods that he and some people he interviewed for the book have trouble consuming in moderation. Kessler wants us to know he is powerless over chocolate-chip cookies and "those fried dumplings at the San Francisco airport." Using himself and several similarly voracious acquaintances as models, he argues that "conditioned hypereating" is largely responsible for the "obesity epidemic."
Dessert, meet willpower.
I've read the science of what make people fat -- the insulin reaction caused by eating foods containing flour, sugar, or easily digestible starches like potatoes. When insulin levels rise, we stockpile calories as fat. Eating foods with very low (or no) carbs -- meat, fish, poultry, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy veggies -- decreases appetite and increases fat loss and weight loss.
A friend I put on an all-meat-and-eggs diet lost 17 pounds in a month. A woman wrote me yesterday that she lost 40 pounds after reading Taubes' book (linked above). What's tragic is how many supposed people of science promote a way of eating that has little or nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with keeping people fat and unhealthy. This is especially awful when women, who do everything so many doctors and "researchers" tell them to (eating a non-science-based, high carb, low-fat diet) remain quite fat despite manic exercise, and often can't find a man, or a very good man, because of it.
Two Interesting Books Somebody Here Bought On Amazon
One of my big influences, Albert Ellis, the late founder (with Aaron Beck) of cognitive behavioral therapy, was influenced by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who said, "It is not events that disturb us, but the view we take of them."
So, I was very interested in these two books somebody bought by clicking through the Amazon logo on Amy's Mall:
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
All The Economic Sense Of A Sand Flea
That would be the description of the California legislators who want to ban the sale of big-screen TVs in California (because California isn't already in such economic trouble that it's about to drop off into the ocean sans quake). Yes, let's put those electronics retailers right out of business!
Six words of little genius to solve the problem created by a ban: Drive. To. Nevada. To. Buy. One.
A KTLA report:
via reason
The Real Opposition To Obamacare
It isn't just the economic price that's troubling so many people, although that certainly is a factor. AEI president Arthur C. Brooks, writing in the WSJ, gets it right, that the proposed health care "reform" runs contrary to three core values of American free enterprise culture -- individual choice, personal accountability, and rewards for ambition:
First, Americans recoil at policies that strip choices from citizens and pass them to bureaucrats. ObamaCare systematically does so. The current proposals in Congress would effectively limit choice across the entire spectrum of health care: What kind of health insurance citizens can buy, what kind of doctors they can see, what kind of procedures their doctors will perform, what kind of drugs they can take, and what treatment options they may have.Meanwhile, ObamaCare would limit the ability of people to choose affordable insurance coverage through less-comprehensive, consumer-driven insurance plans. And it wouldn't allow Americans to shop for better health-care plans from out-of-state carriers.
Second, Americans believe we should be responsible for the consequences of our actions. Many citizens bitterly view the auto and Wall Street bailouts as gifts to people who took imprudent risks, imperiled the entire economic system, and now appear to be walking away from the mess.
Similarly, Americans are cold to a health-care system that effectively rewards individuals for waiting to get insurance until they get sick--subsidizing their coverage by taxing those who responsibly carry insurance in good times and bad.
On its face, the reformers' promise to provide health insurance to nearly all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, is appealing. But as most instinctively realize, if people don't have to worry about carrying insurance until they need it, many won't buy it. Already, the Census Bureau tells us that 21% of the uninsured are in households earning at least $75,000. Although there are certainly plausible reasons for this in some cases, this phenomenon will worsen under ObamaCare.
Third, ObamaCare discourages personal ambition. The proposed reforms will institute a set of government mandates, price controls and other strictures that will make highly trained specialists, drug researchers and medical device makers less valued now and in the future. Americans understand that when you take away the incentive to make money while saving lots of lives, the cures, therapies and medical innovations of tomorrow may never be discovered.
All these countries with socialized medicine benefit greatly from American innovation. Without incentive here for invention, and with American doctors getting squeezed, and forced to make meager incomes (especially vis a vis the level of training and the seriousness of their jobs), the quality of care and innovation around the world can't help but dip enormously.
Welcome To The United States Of Zimbabwe
A rant by U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff about the clueless dipshits in charge of our economy:
Hope for change? Small change is what our dollar will be worth after Bernanke and the rest get done with it, according to Schiff. Hyperbole, or will we be carrying a suitcase of dollars to the corner store when we're out of milk?
via reason
The Wiggly Note
This is a New York Times op-ed written in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre by my very good friend Barb Oakley, an engineering prof at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and the author of the terrific book Evil Genes
It reminds me of my time at the University of Michigan, when I was living in an apartment just off campus, and the nutty guy living upstairs repeatedly told me, in all seriousness, that all redheads were witches and should be burned at the stake, and, more specifically, *I* should be burned at the stake. I called the police, and they said there was nothing they could do until he actually lit a fire. (The perfect excuse for me to move out and move to New York, where I finished my last year at NYU, thanks to a scholarship I wrote my way into.)
Barb, by the way, was one of the first women in the army trained on the M-16, so she knows her way around a trigger (she rose from private to captain). An excerpt from her piece:
THE sticky note on my door was wiggling. It was a gift from a student.Glued to the middle of it was a cockroach.
Don't get me wrong. It wasn't that I was an unpopular professor. To the contrary -- according to student evaluations, I might as well have had a sign on my forehead that said "Kindly."
I was told later that the cockroach was a symbol of love from -- well, let's call him Rick. Rick had recently moved into the lab across the hall from my office, where he spent the night in a sleeping bag under one of the benches.
Rick, who had been a student for more than a decade, sometimes whiled away his time discussing guns and explosives with some of the more munitions-inclined faculty members. He admitted that he kept his basement stocked with a variety of "armaments."
Sometimes I wished I had an armament, although, like Virginia Tech, my university does not allow firearms on campus. I wished that because, not only did Rick attach love-cockroaches to my door and live across the hall from my office and possess a small armory, but Rick watched me all the time. Sometimes he followed me out to my car -- just to make sure I was safe.
When I complained about Rick to the dean of students, I was told there was nothing to be done -- after all, "students have rights, too." Only after appealing to that dean's boss and calling a raft of fellow professors who had also come to fear Rick's strange behavior was I able to convince the administration to take grudging action; they restricted his ability to loiter in certain areas and began nudging him toward the classes he needed to graduate.
In a strange way, I could see the administration's point. Rick looked fairly ordinary, at least when away from his sleeping bag and pet cockroaches. It must have seemed far more likely that Rick could sue for being thrown out of school, than that I -- or anyone else -- could ever be hurt. The easiest path, from their perspective, was to simply get me to shut up.
Long Day, Late Night
Just waking up, 10 a.m.-ish. Read anything of interest in the Sunday papers or elsewhere? Do tell. (One link per comment so you won't go to my spam folder, if you do post links.)
The Daddy Gap
Where does low achievement come from? High school teacher Patrick Welsh writes in The Washington Post:
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn't be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father's absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don't: parents.
My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.
A 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece from City Journal that I've linked to before takes a historical look at the problem, from the Moynihan Report on:
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
Black leaders like Jesse Jackson need to take a little time off from blaming white people for everything and start stigmatizing single motherhood in the black community, and start teaching that every time a child is born to some poor single mother, it's a tragedy.
Strange Sex Stories From The Muslim World
From Daniel Pipes blog, a whole host of stories about sexual barbarism under Islam, showing, for example, that making women run around in tents with eye-slits isn't much of a solution when the religion holds it up as really great that Mohammed married a 6-year-old and had sex with her when she was 9. Which story do you find most barbaric? (I found it hard to choose.)
A Great Investment
That's paying drug-abusing welfare mothers to be sterilized -- in hopes that they don't do as 33-year-old Shamana Johnson has done.
Johnson is a single mother who'd been in prison, who has a history of substance abuse and who, the LA Times' Sandy Banks writes...yes, get this..."had nine children, then parceled them out like puppies."
Five are in foster care, one died as a toddler, and two are "unaccounted for," according to a DCFS memo. Sick. Sick. Banks writes:
As one social worker told me, "No matter how dismal her record of parenting, you can't go over to a woman and say, 'You're not going to be a fit mother, so we're going to take that right away from you.' "To that, Barbara Harris says: Why not?
Harris and her husband had three sons when they became foster parents in 1990 to an 8-month-old girl born to a crack addict who hadalready lost four children to foster care.
A few months later, a social worker asked them to take the baby's newborn brother. Over the next few years, they would adopt four siblings from that same woman.
For Harris, it became a personal issue. And she responded in 1994 with what some considered an outlandish offer: She would pay drug-abusing women $200 to be sterilized.
...Harris -- who lived in Orange County then and now resides with her family in North Carolina -- was castigated by civil rights groups, accused of coercing vulnerable women to sign away their reproductive rights.
But donations rolled in, anguished families sought her out and addicts around the country signed up.
Harris' focus has shifted since then from sterilization to long-term contraception -- IUDs, implants, hormone patches and shots.
She pays a woman $300 for a tubal ligation. For an intrauterine device, a client receives $75 at insertion, $100 at her six-month checkup and $125 at the end of each year, for as long as she keeps the device in.
More than 3,000 women have signed on; 1,200 opted for sterilization and the rest for long-term birth control, according to her website, www.projectprevention.org.
My pal Ben Edward Akerley's letter about the piece to the LA Times (check out the last line on the loophole in welfare reform):
Dear Editor:
In Sandy Banks' article "Tough problem, tough tactic" (10/27/09) regarding birth control among welfare mothers, she states that birth control becomes a difficult problem because it represents an intrusion into a delicate area of family life. Certainly no intrusion occurs when a couple who can afford additional childbearing chooses to proceed on the basis of that very private decision. However, when a welfare mother bears another child, the decision becomes a very public choice because she expects us taxpayers to foot the bill to raise her unwanted progeny to age 18. Even though the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 prohibits any welfare mom from getting additional cash for another baby, she will get additional food stamps and that extra bounty can serve for some as an incentive to have yet another child.Ben Edward Akerley, Los Angeles
UPDATE: Tax-deductible donations to Project Prevention are accepted at Harris' PayPal-enabled link here.
Tough Times Naked
I met smart, beautiful, insightful Amazon woman Susannah Breslin when we were both on Candace Bergen's former talk show together, and whenever I read her work, I'm always impressed, and remind myself to seek out her writing more often. She pulls together an always very readable piece of prose, but, even better, she says and thinks things other writers couldn't get near if they tried.
Just found this link through Instapundit -- to her piece on recession in the porn industry. Apparently, some magazine didn't find it quite the upbeat nudie industry piece they were hoping for and didn't publish it (idiots!), so she published it herself on the web.
An excerpt:
Three years ago, Powers shot four to five movies a week. Nowadays, he's lucky if he shoots two a week. Like many other businessmen, he's been forced to cut corners. Ergo, the "life support system for a penis" of yesteryear has been replaced by the lower maintenance RoboCock."We got rid of the male talent!" Powers crows, triumphant. He enumerates the benefits of working with an animatronic phallus on one hand. "They don't complain as much. They're always hard. You don't have to feed them." Of course, the 21st century woodsman does have one drawback. "They've always got bolts falling off," Powers admits with a shrug.
Pat Condell Waves Goodbye To Free Speech
Making it a crime to criticize Islam.
Be sure to listen to the CAIR guy's goal for Islam in American at the end.
Guy Charged With Exposing Himself
The thought crimes we were talking about the other day? This is one of them. Police decided the guy wanted people to see him naked -- so they charged him with indecent exposure after woman cutting through his front yard with her kid (according to this news report -- other reports dispute this) saw him making coffee in his own kitchen in the buff, and then, allegedly, standing in the buff in a window. From WTOP:
Williamson says his roommates were not home when he came into the kitchen and made his coffee.Fairfax County Police say they believed Williamson wanted to be seen naked by the public.
Williamson, a father of a 5-year old girl, said he plans to fight the charge.
"There is not a chance on this planet I would ever, ever, ever do anything like that to a kid," he says.
Police say they are checking to see if there have been any other complaints.
A trial lawyer, who is not connected to the Williamson's case, says the state will have to prove that Williamson knew people were there for them to get a conviction on the charge that carries a one-year jail term and a $2,000 fine.
Maybe he does want to be seen naked, maybe he doesn't. Answer: Don't take the path by the guy's house or tell the kid not to look. Sorry, but seeing a man with his dong hanging out is a terrible thing why?
Here's how a similar thing worked in Canada, in a case that was overturned on appeal:
Canada's Supreme Court has exonerated a man convicted of committing an indecent act in 2000, after he was spotted masturbating in his living room near a window. Actually, "spotted" doesn't quite describe it. A neighboring couple reported Daryl Clark to the police after secretly observing him through binoculars for almost 15 minutes.The complainants, a couple who live next door, said they were worried for their daughters' welfare when they saw Clark in a position that suggested masturbation. The couple then went to their own bedroom to get a better look, brought out binoculars and a telescope, and tried (unsuccessfully) to videotape their neighbor.
UPDATE: Wendy McElroy brings up a few more good points on this:
--this is how easy it is to be arrested on a sex-related charge these days. This is how ridiculous the charges may be. When someone is on a sex registry, you should always ask "what was the charge?" The person could be 'guilty' of nothing more than public urination in a park or having had sex with a girlfriend who was one year younger.--I note that the man's name is disclosed; in some stories his photo is included. I note the woman is given anonymity even though she cannot be considered off-limits -- e.g. as a rape victim. This gender bias is typical in the reporting of most sex incidents.
--I note Williamson has a 5-year-old daughter and I assume, since he reportedly lives with roommates, that he is estranged from the mother. I hope she is a fair, decent human being because this charge alone -- should the mother pursue the matter -- could result in his losing all visitation with his little girl.
--the presence of the 7-year-old child raises this case into the realm of official hysteria -- a place where it is possible that Williamson will be convicted even though he is patently innocent of wrongdoing. Innocence is no defense against a sex crime when a child is even peripherally involved.
via FreeRangeKids
The World's Youngest Terrorist
Probably the cutest Al Qaeda operative, too.
via Volokh
The Sound Of Frugality
From Amazon: 50 different MP3 albums for $5 each
What I'd buy, if I were buying: The wild and wacky Assoluto Morricone Vol. 1
Coddle Prod
A parent writes to FreeRangeKids' Lenore Skenazy about how different life is in Germany, where they don't overprotect kids to death:
You might see, for example, a pack of 6-year-old kids walking to school with no parents in sight. 8-year-olds riding the train by themselves to get to school. Giant rope parks and cool huge slides that had no safety devices you would expect to see in the States (and the parents OK with it).Our view of the world changed again when we enrolled the kids into German public school. The lady who finds schools for kids was Type1 diabetic herself. Her first question was, "Is the 8-year-old giving himself his own insulin shots?"
Excuse me?! The thought hand't even crossed our minds. Apparently all Type1 kids in Germany learn to give themselves injections when they are diagnosed. No such recommendation was ever given to us in the States (and we take the kids to a progressive university research hospital).
In a note the headmistress at school sent home to the parents, there were quotes like, "Please don't come upstairs with your kids to drop them off," and, "Wait outside for the children when you pick them up, they know where to go." And, "Don't wait around - drop your kids off and leave."
If you look around German life, this type of upbringing makes sense. The country is filled with strong, independent people who can fend for themselves in the world. It also helps that they have a VERY orderly and rules-based society, but raising kids to be confident has a massive impact on society.
Last night, a European friend of mine told me about going down to Mexico for a beach vacation a few months ago, and being amazed at how well-behaved the children were. They weren't screaming or arguing or shouting with their parents. And these, she said, were not rich families, but families of all economic backgrounds.
My friend speaks five or six languages, and could understand the Spanish and told me that she heard one mother say to her little boy something like, "Don't leave your toys all scattered about; people need to get by," and instead of screaming or fighting, he dutifully picked up his toys and moved them closer.
I've only been to Tijuana once with a friend who drove there -- hated it -- and never to any other part of Mexico, so I have no experience with this. But, her experience is sure pretty different from what I experience of so many kids in the USA.
Why Cut Costs When You Can Just Hide Them?
Barenaked subterfuge that the press mostly just ignores -- stripping the "Sustainable Growth Rate formula" from health care "reform." From the WSJ:
Later this week, or maybe next, Senate Democrats plan to vote on a stand-alone bill that strips a formula that automatically cuts Medicare physician payments out of "comprehensive" health reform. Rather than include the pricey $247 billion plan known on Capitol Hill as the "doc fix" as part of ObamaCare, they'll instead make this a separate contribution to the deficit, without compensating tax increases or spending cuts....It's true that Congress likes to pretend that the "sustainable growth rate," or SGR, is real. Created in 1997, the SGR slashes Medicare reimbursements if costs rise too steeply, as they always do. In January, doctors fees are scheduled to fall by 21.5%, and 40% over the next five years. That would force many doctors to stop seeing Medicare patients, so Congress intervenes every year and temporarily overrides the cuts.
The American Medical Association's asking price for supporting ObamaCare is scrapping the SGR. House Democrats did just that, but it pushed the total cost of their bill above $1 trillion, a political red line. The Senate Finance Committee chose the subterfuge of fixing the problem for only one year, which is how Chairman Max Baucus could claim he had done the miracle-work of designing an entitlement that reduces the deficit over 10 years. The AMA wasn't pacified.
So now Democrats are simply going to "untether" this spending on doctors from ObamaCare, hiding even more of its true costs. At a meeting on the Hill last week, Mr. Reid and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made the quid pro quo explicit, telling the AMA and about a dozen specialty societies that in return for this dispensation they expect them to back ObamaCare, no questions asked.
Cheep, Cheep!
HDMI (2 meter) 6 foot cable HQ 1080P 1.3b
The header above reminds me of something that happened at Gregg's reunion. I was seated at a table and Gregg was getting us drinks, and some guy tried to take the chair next to mine. Gregg's math teacher, just on the other side, informed the man, "Her mate is sitting there." My "mate"? What are we, parakeets?
I know the guy just wasn't sure whether we were married (or "just slutting around," as I described our seven-year relationship to shock some smartass), but this also reminded me of how silly it sounds to call a grown man the very teenage "my boyfriend." (Of course, other terms -- like "my lover" are not just silly but hurlworthy.)
I once came up with a term for longterm partners who aren't married -- "constant," as in "my constant" instead of "my boyfriend" or "my girlfriend." I meant to write a piece to try to spread the word, but never got around to it. Now, I'm not even sure I like it. What do you think?
How Divorced Dads Get Cut Out Of Their Kids' Lives
It's well-illustrated by a now-split-up lesbian couple's custody battle over their daughter Isabella, from a Glenn Sacks'/Ned Holstein column on MSN, "With Gay Marriage Comes Gay Divorce":
It's not every day that America's conservative Christians rally around the cause of a lesbian. Yet numerous groups are providing support and expensive legal services for Lisa Miller. Miller's cause? To deny her former civil union partner Janet Jenkins any role in the life of the daughter they raised together....Miller, who became a Christian and renounced lesbianism after leaving Jenkins, even pushed aside Jenkins' parents, who Isabella adores and who live near Miller. Janet's dad Bucky, a retired firefighter who's been married to his wife Ruth for over 50 years, says, "The loser in the whole thing, of course, was the baby."
...Most of Miller's tactics are well known to noncustodial fathers. According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington, D.C.-based children's advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents.
Miller moved far way from Jenkins as a way to separate Isabella from her -- a common tactic in custody cases. Miller pushed Isabella's grandparents out of their lives -- at Fathers & Families we receive thousands of anguished letters from distraught grandparents who were excluded from their grandchildren's lives after their sons got divorced.
Miller made unsupported claims of abuse by Jenkins. Canadian jurist Bruce Pugsley recently wrote in an opinion that it's "commonplace" for the system to be manipulated by estranged spouses claiming abuse, "no matter how remote the assault may be in time or, indeed, how trivial the contact." Many legal experts have voiced similar concerns.
Children, heterosexual noncustodial parents and lesbian social mothers like Jenkins all need the same thing -- strong legal protections for parent-child bonds. This begins with a rebuttable presumption of shared custody after a divorce or separation.
Under this presumption, as long as both parents are fit, they will both have the right to share equally in raising their children. These presumptions do exist in some states, but they are generally weak and too easily evaded.
Moreover, courts need to enforce their own visitation orders, instead of allowing custodial parents to flout orders year after year with little or no consequence. When abuse charges are made, they need to be investigated seriously and quickly, and there need to be consequences for false accusations. Judges fighting overcrowded court calendars instead tend to "err on the side of caution" by upholding abuse claims. False accusers rarely suffer any penalty, while children must bear the loss of a parent.
Thought Crimes Legislation
ARC's Don Watkins has it right about the House vote to expand federal "hate crimes":
Despite the denials of "hate crime" law supporters, this criminalizes certain ideas. If the government can punish a criminal more harshly based on the "message of intolerance and discrimination" he sends through his crime, then the inevitable conclusion is that sending a "message of intolerance and discrimination" is a crime....It is irrelevant whether the ideas currently deemed "hateful" are repugnant, which in the case of racism or anti-gay vitriol they certainly are. Every attack on free speech starts by targeting ideas people find repugnant; that's how censorship gains purchase. But once the principle is established that the government can punish people for holding unpopular ideas, then any dissenter is at risk.
How's It Hanging?
Better be low and droopy, if you're a Somali lady, or you might be accused of wearing a bra. Un-Islamic! say the local Islamists. From the Daily Mail:
A hardline Islamist group in Somalia has begun publicly whipping women for wearing bras that they claim violate Islam as they are 'deceptive'.The insurgent group Al Shabaab has sent gunmen into the streets of Mogadishu to round up any women who appear to have a firm bust, residents claimed yesterday.
The women are then inspected to see if the firmness is natural, or if it is the result of wearing a bra.
It's a tough job, but somehow, they find men to do it.
If they are found wearing a bra, they are ordered to remove it and shake their breasts, residents said.
The Reform That Isn't, And The Health Insurer That Told The Truth About It
Humana got in trouble with the Obama administration for sending out this mailer to some of their members -- 900,000 seniors in its Medicare Advantage plan, the program that gives them a choice of private insurance options.
Humana, echoing the Congressional Budget Office, merely warned that spending cuts would lead to reduced benefits and some people losing their coverage. A WSJ op-ed reported that "the Obama apparat went nuclear":
At the behest of Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, Medicare's administrators menaced Humana with fines and regulatory punishments, and even told all insurers participating in Advantage to shut up too--or else.In its Friday ruling, Medicare slapped Humana on the wrist for disseminating information that it claimed was "misleading to beneficiaries"--even though it was perfectly true--but also lifted the gag order. Insurers will be allowed to communicate with enrollees, provided they get permission. This is basically a concession that the critics are right...
Is it just me, or does free speech seem less and less free every day?
No Bush fan was I, to say the least, but I'm finding the Obama administration pretty damn scary.
Oh, and (fuck you, FTC!) I didn't get a free book from anybody in exchange for saying so.
Don't Edit My Damn Food Order
I'd ordered a burger at Rochester, Michigan's Andiamo, where we went with Barb Oakley for a quick drink before we booked for our plane back to L.A.
When I ordered, I forgot to micromanage, "And I really mean rare," as I often do at American restaurants that aren't in the gourmet or gourmet-ish genre, so numbskulls won't edit my food.
Annoyingly, the burger came rather well done -- flavorless and quite chewy. I asked the waitress if she'd asked for what I ordered. She then informed me that they "don't make it rare," and that she ordered it "medium rare." Well, gee, thanks, for involving me in that decision.
I actually like my beef not just rare, but pretty much "still mooing." And if you want me to sign a paper saying I won't sue you if I grow a second head or if my first one falls off into the toilet, that's fine by me. Just bring me my goddamn burger the way I ordered it.
Oh, and P.S. We just went to this place because it was close to the coffee place where Barbo and I were working. Next time, I'll walk to the diner, where they made my omelet "not-too-well done" two days in a row, and didn't re-edit that to "cook the living shit out of it" because it somehow makes the chef feel more squishy and secure.
Obama Buys Off The Seniors
From the LA Times op-ed page:
As part of the $787-billion economic stimulus package enacted in February, Washington sent a $250 check to every adult on Social Security. The same amount went to those enrolled in Veterans Administration, Railroad Retirement and Supplemental Security Income benefit programs. The purpose of the one-time payments was to boost consumer spending and help revive the economy. But in President Obama's view, once was not enough. On Wednesday, he urged Congress to spend $13 billion on a second round of $250 checks, saying, "Even as we seek to bring about recovery, we must act on behalf of those hardest hit by this recession."
Um...small businesses and working people?
The LAT wisely writes about the President:
He should explain why paying $250 to this group of beneficiaries would do more for the economy than other uses of the money. And if lawmakers agree, they should find a way to pay for the next round of checks out of the $787 billion already approved but not yet spent.
What, besides a little much-needed popularity for the president (in the groups getting paid off) is this actually buying?
It's Pretty Here
A stream near our hotel in Rochester, Michigan, where Madonna grew up, and where my good friend, Evil Genes
Where I grew up in suburban Detroit, they razed the trees, flattened the already flat land, and built subdivisions, and I found it terribly ugly, and couldn't run out of the state fast enough.
A Very Costly Brand Of Feminism
That's bucking Islamism, as the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali does. Naturally, she now lives under a death threat. Patt Morrison interviews her for the LA Times. An excerpt:
When it comes to women in Africa, is the U.S. using too many of its values or too few? There is too much apologizing for what freedom means. In Africa, you're told, "Oh, this is our custom -- polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values." Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, "Oh, I'm really sorry, it's your custom."...I've asked other feminists this question: Why are women's rights always the ones up for negotiation?
Yes, isn't that interesting? Women are mainly oppressed by their own fathers, their own brothers, their own mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, so it's the most intimate kind of oppression. Another thing: Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it's the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, "Stop oppressing your women," they'll tell you, "Don't impose your culture on me." It would have been fantastic if, when [President] Obama went to Cairo, he [had said], "We have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man, whatever color."
...Do you make a distinction between mainstream and radical Islam?
I refuse to do that because one gives birth to the other. You are born into mainstream Islam. You are taught: Do not question the prophet; everything in the Koran is true. And then the radicals come and they expand on that, they build on that. So it is up to so-called mainstream Islam to tackle the radical element. [Mainstream Muslims] have to question the infallibility of the prophet Muhammad. They have to quit teaching children and young people that everything in the Koran is true and has to be taken seriously.
You can see it in the Christian world. You have pockets of very radical Christians who refuse to change. But most Christians have decided to reform, to introduce new ways of looking at [the Bible] and to allow freedom of thought and speech. So if people move away from the radical ideas, they're not killed, they're not beheaded.
Addiction And Reality
A seven-point debunking from addiction treatment specialist Stanton Peele, whose views on addiction I favor -- that addiction is not a disease but a choice, for short-term version long-term orientation (as in, "I'll smoke meth today and screw work on Monday, and screw even having a job").
From his Psychology Today blog, a couple of the points:
4. Heroin.
Powerful analgesics, taken regularly, are difficult for many (but not most) people to quit. After all, most of us have had intravenous supplies of narcotics in the hospital, followed by prescriptions for powerful analgesics when we went home. What is remarkable is not so much that heroin can produce serious withdrawal for some, but how variable this syndrome is and how comparable it is to other depressant and painkiller drugs and analgesics (like Vicodin and OxyContin), which are the fastest growing drugs of abuse and today are taken by the majority of illicit narcotics users and overdose victims. So much has been written about heroin withdrawal, it is mainly worth noting that when people quit the drug with little difficulty (as the major league ballplayer Ron LeFlore did when he entered prison and took up baseball) it is simply considered impermissible to describe or portray this aspect of their stories.3. Cigarettes.
In ratings by cocaine and alcohol addicts, smoking is regularly cited as the more difficult drug to quit, generally on par with or more difficult than heroin. Nonetheless, more than 40 million living Americans have quit smoking. While impressive, this still only represents about half of all of those ever addicted to cigarettes - although a higher percentage of those in higher socioeconomic groups have quit. When I speak to recovering people at addiction conferences I ask, "What is the toughest drug to quit?" By acclimation, the audience shouts out, "cigarettes" or "smoking." I then ask, "How many people in this room have been addicted to cigarettes but are now off them?" Half to two-thirds - often hundreds of people - in the room raise their hands. "Wow," I enthuse. "And how many have used any kind of therapy - medical or a support group - to quit?" Never have more than a small handful done so.
What we need is not a war on drugs but a war on "Drug War" lies, and drug and substance policy that is moderated by solid scientific evidence and common sense.
And, for anybody battling an addiction, I recommend Peele's book, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction
What Don't They Want To Control?
It seems it's something new every day. And sadly, no, that's not hyperbole. Today, it's our salt intake. Daniel Olson writes at Openmarket:
Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration, working with the Institute of Medicine, has been considering a change in the regulatory status of salt. The FDA cannot currently restrict the amount of salt that can be added to processed foods, and the proposed change would allow them to do so.Advocates of the proposed regulation, like former FDA commissioner David Kessler and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, argue that reducing the sodium in foods would improve people's health and cut public health spending. Opponents argue that the evidence supporting health benefits of sodium reduction is by no means conclusive, and that attempts to reduce sodium intake could actually be harmful.
But a recent study by University of California, Davis nutritionists concludes that it may not even be possible to reduce salt intake through regulation. The study shows that people are naturally inclined to regulate salt intake to physiologically determined levels by unconsciously selecting foods to meet their needs.
You can tear my salt shaker out of my cold, dead hands. And P.S. If I do die, it's not going to be from salting just about everything but coffee and desert, which I do.
Tierney on research on salt here.
via Walter Olson
How Does Gay Marriage Harm Straight Marrriage?
Um...er...
That's pretty much the response of the Charles Cooper, a lawyer for the anti-gay marriage side.
Judge Vaughn Walker, who's presiding over the California gay marriage ban lawsuit, wants Cooper and his team to present evidence that male-female marriage would be undermined by legalizing gay marriage. Lisa Leff writes for the AP:
"What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?" Walker asked."My answer is, I don't know. I don't know," Cooper answered.
The Day-Waster I'm Glad I Missed
It's the story of the boy who wasn't actually in the balloon, of course -- the Rocky Mountain version of the LA low-speed car chase. (And come on, was the ending a surprise to anybody?)
I was away from the computer for much longer than usual because Gregg and flew in to Gunfire Gulch (aka Detroit) for his high school reunion, and to celebrate Elmore's birthday, and so I could have a nerdgathering with my brilliant and very exciting friend, engineering prof Barb Oakley, author of Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
We took the red-eye, so I slept until noon at Gregg's mom's house, then we sped out to Rochester where I toured Meadowbrook Hall with Barb, who kept whispering the dirt about the Dodges and Wilsons in between the official tour guide's comments. A bit on Meadowbrook here, and detailed information here:
Meadow Brook Hall is the fourth largest historic house museum in the United States and is renowned for its superb craftsmanship, architectural detailing and grand scale. Built between 1926 and 1929 as the residence of Matilda Dodge Wilson (widow of auto pioneer John Dodge) and her second husband, lumber broker Alfred G. Wilson, the 110-room, 88,000-square-foot, Tudor-revival style mansion is complete with vast collections of original art and furnishings.
The Dodge brothers were especially interesting. Horace was the engineering genius and John was the sales genius. What they don't say on the tour is that they were prone to bar fights. They also don't even mention how the Dodge brothers aided the war effort or how America is -- or perhaps has been -- especially fertile ground for invention and business:
As World War I began to heat up in Europe, the Dodge brothers were called upon in 1917 to make the delicate recoil firing mechanisms for French 75 and 155 cannons, which were the backbone of the Allied artillery effort.Working by hand, the French were only able to produce about five recoil mechanisms a day and had turned to the United States for help.
Barb told me that John met with the French, looked at the mechanism and said, "Horace could do that!" And he did.
Aside from producing touring cars, ambulances and screen side units for use on the battlefield, the Dodge brothers built and equipped a new factory in Hamtramck for the sole purpose of producing the precision recoil mechanisms. Within a year, the Dodge factories were able to produce up to 30 mechanisms a day.
"Screw You, Troops!"
That's pretty much what our legislaturds are saying, with all the earmarks they funded -- at the expense of the troops. Shaun Waterman writes for the Wash Times:
Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
(Would that be the Museum of Mary-Jo Kopechne Would Probably Be Alive Today, But For This Callous Asshole?)
While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, "in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year," said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.
Ultimately, the voters are at fault. Have we in this country all had the vote so long and our freedoms so long that we just don't really care?
P.S. If you want to meet somebody who values voting and who votes with real care, talk to an emigrant to this country from Cuba or the USSR.
via reason
Raw Food Nitwittery
I don't like raw vegetables much, except for lettuce, avocado and cucumbers. Otherwise, I prefer my veggies cooked in butter.
Raw food faddists are horrified, I'm sure. And people tend to assume that raw vegetables are healthier. But, are they? Do vegetables lose their nutritional value when heated? Sushma Subramanian writes for SciAm:
Cooking is crucial to our diets. It helps us digest food without expending huge amounts of energy. It softens food, such as cellulose fiber and raw meat, that our small teeth, weak jaws and digestive systems aren't equipped to handle. And while we might hear from raw foodists that cooking kills vitamins and minerals in food (while also denaturing enzymes that aid digestion), it turns out raw vegetables are not always healthier....The downside of cooking veggies, Liu (Rui Hai Liu, a Cornell food science prof) says: it can destroy the vitamin C in them. He found that vitamin C levels declined by 10 percent in tomatoes cooked for two minutes--and 29 percent in tomatoes that were cooked for half an hour at 190.4 degrees F (88 degrees C). The reason is that Vitamin C, which is highly unstable, is easily degraded through oxidation, exposure to heat (it can increase the rate at which vitamin C reacts with oxygen in the air) and through cooking in water (it dissolves in water).
Liu notes, however, that the trade-off may be worth it since vitamin C is prevalent in far more fruits and vegetables than is lycopene. Among them: broccoli, oranges, cauliflower, kale and carrots. Besides, cooked vegetables retain some of their vitamin C content.
..."We cook them so they taste better," Liu says. "If they taste better, we're more likely to eat them." And that's the whole idea.
Give This Speech, Mr. President
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote the speech the president should give at the Nobel ceremony. An excerpt:
"Let me begin by thanking the Nobel committee for awarding me this prize, the highest award to which any statesman can aspire. As I said on the day it was announced, 'I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize.' Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all."But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century -- the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.
"I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, to liberate Europe from the grip of Nazi fascism. I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers and sailors who fought on the high seas and forlorn islands in the Pacific to free East Asia from Japanese tyranny in the Second World War.
"I will accept this award on behalf of the American airmen who in June 1948 broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin with an airlift of food and fuel so that West Berliners could continue to live free. I will accept this award on behalf of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who protected Europe from Communist dictatorship throughout the 50 years of the cold war.
"I will accept this award on behalf of the American soldiers who stand guard today at outposts in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan to give that country, and particularly its women and girls, a chance to live a decent life free from the Taliban's religious totalitarianism.
[snip]
"Finally, I will accept this award on behalf of my grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who arrived at Normandy six weeks after D-Day, and on behalf of my great-uncle, Charlie Payne, who was among those soldiers who liberated part of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald.
"Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know -- and I want you to know -- that there is no peace without peacekeepers.
Mackey's "Conscious Capitalism"
Reason's Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie interview the Whole Foods CEO. Here's the five-minute version:
The hour-long version is below:
It's Like "Amy Alkon On Carburetors"
The analogy would be Michael Moore on capitalism. An excerpt:
I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.
At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1%!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist AND a Christian -- because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.
When you are in church this morning, please think about this. I am asking you to allow your "better angels" to come forward. And if you are among the millions of Americans who are struggling to make it from week to week, please know that I promise to do what I can to stop this evil -- and I hope you'll join me in not giving up until everyone has a seat at the table.
Thanks for listening. I'm off to Mass in a few hours. I'll be sure to ask the priest if he thinks J.C. deals in derivatives or credit default swaps. I mean, after all, he must've been good at math. How else did he divide up two loaves of bread and five pieces of fish equally amongst 5,000 people? Either he was the first socialist or his disciples were really bad at packing lunch. Or both.
I'm all for willing giving to your neighbors and others. It's part of the final chapter of my upcoming book. But, isn't there a little in the bible about it being wrong to steal? Because, in addition to being irrational, and Hayek wrote, the road to totalitarianism, that's what socialism is -- stealing: forcing money out of people to give to other people. It's mugging, just without the ski mask.
As for Moore, he can be the Jesus among us, leading the way on the new path to giving. Move out of the pricey Upper West Side apartment! Send his children to public school instead of a pricey private one! Drink tap water instead of bottled water and nice wine! And give his wealth and future film profits to the poor! Michael...yoohoo, Michael? Where is that man of the people?
Shermer does a good review of Moore's film here (a good review in that he pans it, and writes about it well).
Thanks, Patrick, for the top link
Follow The Burqa
"Why Osama Bin Laden Really Turned To Terrorism," a very interesting piece by Phyllis Chesler. An excerpt:
...The young Osama had to bear the shame of having no mother--and of having a mother who was a fourth "revolving position" wife, who was duly divorced, banished, and known as "the slave." Osama himself was known as the "son of the slave." Nevertheless, rather than identify the source of all his misery (his father, Islamic gender apartheid), Osama spent his life yearning for paternal affection and attention which he never really got....Back to al-Qaeda's founder. Osama, the husband, never banished his first wife, Najwa, who, we are told, used to play tennis and paint--but Osama forced her to fully veil, Saudi style. Their wedding? No jokes, no music, no dancing was allowed. Thereafter, Osama never allowed Najwa out of the house except to visit relatives or to move to another house. She lived her life in purdah, in prison. She endured Osama's marriage to three other women, one of whom she herself chose. She never complained.
Osama did not allow modern medicine for his children; refrigerators were forbidden, as were air conditioners, phones, toys, and televisions. Osama expected his sons to also become suicide killers and he subjected his young children to dangerous and frightening military maneouvers. According to Omar and Najwa, Osama also murdered his children's pets in chilling ways--ways that characterize many other serial killers.
Once, Osama killed a pet monkey. He had one of his lackeys run it over with a car. Osama said "The monkey was not a monkey but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God." He gassed a new litter of puppies, Nazi-style, trying to see how long it would take them to die.
But what was it that sent Osama totally over the edge? What compelled him to plan the mass murders of civilians on every continent? Omar tells us. When Osama saw American female troops on Middle Eastern Arab soil, he cried out. " Women! Defending Saudi men!"
That was the ultimate shame, the only shame that mattered, greater than the shame of having no mother, no father, the shame of being known as the "son of the slave." Instead of bonding with persecuted women and/or trying to protect them, Osama went the usual psychological route. He subjugated and imprisoned his wives and bonded with his absent father by becoming like him, only more so.
Psychologically, unconsciously, Osama has denied needing to be protected by a strong woman, namely a mother, when he was an infant, and his denial goes so far that he chose to becomes a serial killer, a mass murderer; he specializes in killing life. He is an anti-Mother. Osama takes his rage out on America, Jews, Christians, Israelis because, in his eyes, they have freed their women; indeed, to him, such countries are therefore like women and must be subordinated.
Nonie Darwish On The Israelis And The Palestinians
From an interview of the Egyptian-born former Muslim in the Catholic Herald, by Ed West:
After university she worked as an editor and translator for the respected Middle East News Agency, before emigrating to the United States in 1978. She married an American and converted to Christianity, and now attends an Evangelical church, and yet she still remained hostile to Israel until an extraordinary incident 40 years after the death of her father."My brother in 1995, living in Gaza, had a stroke and was unconscious. Someone said to his family: 'If you want him to live, send him to Israel.' They [Arabs] prefer Israeli hospitals. You know, even Arabs don't believe their own hatred. In times of troubles Arabs will trust Jews. "They saved my brother's life, they were very kind to his family. And I started changing my views after that."
She now states firmly that "the Palestinian Arabs are the victims of the Arab world" and "if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, it is finished". "I just wrote an article called 'Arab-made misery'. It is the Arab League's policy to never absorb the Palestinians, because then there will be no pressure." She also cites the disastrous rule of Hamas in the land where she grew up after the Israeli withdrawal.
"Instead of paying attenton to internal issues, instead of building a trade centre, instead of making it the Hong Kong of the Middle East, and it is in a very central position, what did they do? They started hurling missiles from schools. They started having a civil war."
Be Prepared -- For Adults To Be Real Morons
A cute first-grade kid is all excited about being in the Cub Scouts, so he takes his little knife/fork/spoon eating utensil to school with him -- and gets suspended under the zero sense (uh, tolerance) policy. Ian Urbina writes for The New York Times that the kid, Zachary Christie, now faces 45 days in reform school:
"It just seems unfair," Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.
But, based on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, "regardless of possessor's intent," knives are banned.
But the question on the minds of residents here is: Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?
"Zachary wears a suit and tie some days to school by his own choice because he takes school so seriously," said Debbie Christie, Zachary's mother, who started a Web site, helpzachary.com, in hopes of recruiting supporters to pressure the local school board at its next open meeting on Tuesday. "He is not some sort of threat to his classmates."
Still, some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.
"There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife," said George Evans, the president of the Christina district's school board. He defended the decision, but added that the board might adjust the rules when it comes to younger children like Zachary.
How about somebody adjusts George Evans right of a job? Should a person so idiotic, so bureaucratic, so unable or unwilling to think, be in charge of educating America's kids? (Answer: there are so many more where he came from.)
Let's review: 45 days in juvey jail...for bringing a piece of silverware. (I think this might be the one, or like the one he's got in the photo in the NYT.)
Is it a secret to anyone that a child can stab another child in the eye with a pencil or any other number of objects? In fact, I have a faint scar in one palm where some kid did get me with a pencil. Shall we also outlaw pencils? After all, surely children can learn handwriting by drawing the letters with their fingers in the air.
The 80-page Christina Schools code of conduct can be found at a link on the HelpZachary.com site his family has put up.
I'm reminded of the Ask The Pilot where the TSAsshats made pilot Patrick Smith hand over the spare set of silverware he carries with him -- silverware he nicked from the plane! Yes, you never know when a pilot will bring down the plane using the knife they give you to cut your mashed potatoes -- perhaps because it seems a less obvious choice than just steering the fucking thing straight into the ground.
Obamathink
Sorry, but merely not being George W. Bush is not enough. Taranto writes in the WSJ:
Obama's record of accomplishment consists of nothing more than a successful political campaign against, as he put it in his convention speech, "the failed policies of George W. Bush." At the time, we doubted whether running against a man who would not appear on the ballot made political sense. The outcome speaks for itself.But whether out of political calculation or sheer carelessness, Obama has continued, in effect, campaigning against George W. Bush. He frequently laments the "mess" he "inherited"--as if he had been born into the presidency or won it in a lottery rather than seeking out the responsibility he now holds. In May he declared, "The problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place." Actually, Guantanamo was a solution to the problem of what to do with the detainees; the current problem was caused by Obama's rejecting it without first coming up with an alternative plan. In August, as we noted, the president sounded downright thuggish in blaming his predecessors for the lousy economy: "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."
We don't remember any president in our lifetime attacking his predecessor in this manner, or at all. We haven't exhaustively researched the question, but our impression is that you'd have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find one who did--and his denunciations of Herbert Hoover were for domestic, not foreign, consumption.
Why did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because he pandered to the prejudices of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Surely he didn't do it with the Peace Prize (or at least this year's Peace Prize) in mind. He did it because disparaging George W. Bush is a cheap way of winning approval among certain constituencies, both foreign and domestic.
Actually accomplishing something is much harder. Then again, he has accomplished something, writes Ross Douhat in The New York Times -- by accepting the Nobel:
It confirms, as a defining narrative of his presidency, the gap between his supporters' cloud-cuckoo-land expectations and the inevitable disappointments of reality. It dovetails perfectly with the recent "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which he was depicted boasting about a year's worth of nonaccomplishments. And it revives and ratifies John McCain's only successful campaign gambit -- his portrayal of Obama as "the world's biggest celebrity," famous more for being famous than for any concrete political accomplishment.Great achievements may still await our Nobel president. If Obama goes from strength to strength, then this travesty will be remembered as a footnote to his administration, rather than a defining moment.
But by accepting the prize, he's made failure, if and when it comes, that much more embarrassing and difficult to bear. What's more, he's etched in stone the phrase with which critics will dismiss his presidency.
Slick Willie. Tricky Dick. Jimmy "Malaise" Carter. Dubya the Incompetent.
And now Barack Obama, Nobel laureate.
Sugar Is Poison
USC's Robert H. Lustig on "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." Sugar is poison. I eat almost no sugar, and very few carbohyrates, because I've read the science -- the evidence-based kind -- on both. Most people's doctors have them eating based on the "science" -- like Ancel ("Mr. Selection Bias") Keys' shoddy research detailed in Lustig's video.
And no, a calorie is not a calorie. Eating less and exercising more isn't the answer.
Binge-eater? Eat meat only, with adequate fat and protein, and I bet you won't find yourself binging.
Oh, and as Lustig will tell you, don't assume fruit juice is healthy, or much healthier than soda. It's loaded with sugar.
Two books for people who want to eat a science-based diet:
Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
And Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades' The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle
Also check out Michael Eades blog, and follow him on Twitter at @DrEades, where he often links to studies on low-carb and vitamin D. He's really good (and I don't think many people in medicine, especially the dietary end of things, are).
Thanks, Cridster, for the Lustig link
The End Of Free Speech In Canada
Mark Steyn And Ezra Levant were tried in kangaroo court. Kathy Shaidle writes at FrontPage of the "Canadian Human Rights Act," which, of course, is about removing rights and freedoms, not granting them:
Enter Mohammed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy, two self-styled "Muslim community leaders." In separate complaints, they've accused Ezra Levant and Maclean's magazine of violating the Canadian Human Rights Act, because what they published is allegedly, in the words of Section 13(1), "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
Sound familiar? I'm very pro gay rights -- and rights for all people -- but I'm against "hate crime laws" which work out to be thought crimes laws. And isn't any murder a "hate crime"? If you're going to murder somebody, whether you're doing it because he slept with your girlfriend or you don't like people of his color, you aren't doing it because you weren't sure whether to kill him or hug him.
Shaidle continues:
Note that magic word: "likely." There's no need to prove that these publications inspired actual hate crimes, like arson or assault. Rather, unelected, unaccountable CHRC bureaucrats need merely deem it "likely" that words or images in the Western Standard or Maclean's might inspire persons unknown to commit offenses of some sort or other between now and the end of the world. That's "thought crime" meets "future crime," but without the cool flying cars you'd at least get in a dystopian sci-fi flick. And it is enshrined in Canadian law....Steyn and Levant employed their considerable rhetorical skills to defend themselves and, not incidentally, to mock their radical Muslim accusers and their "sharia-lite" attempts at punishing two uppity infidels.
Steyn repeatedly reminded readers that his opponent, Dr. Mohammed Elmasry, was a rather unlikely defender of "human rights":
"... he's the guy who said on Canadian TV [in 2004] that he thought all Israeli civilians over the age of 18 were legitimate targets for murder. In other words, he is an objective supporter of terrorism - I've got no complaint against that: he's entitled to his views, I just wish he thought I was entitled to mine.
"But it does show you how absurd this is, that a guy who is an active supporter of terrorism is suddenly the poster-boy for Canadian human rights."
Steyn also cautions those of us south of the Canadian border that "the superficial fluffily benign language of multiculturalism that comes so naturally to our rulers provides a lot of cover for the shriveling of free speech."
How The United States Is Turning Into France
A small part of the population is paying for a large part of the population's existence. John Stossel writes at reason on the U.S. government's penchant for playing Robin Hood:
The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center recently disclosed that close to half of all households will pay no income tax this year. Some will pay less than zero--that is, they'll get money from those of us who do pay taxes.
The Tax Policy Center adds that this year the average income-tax rate for the bottom 40 percent of earners will be negative and that their cash subsidy will equal 10 percent of the total amount the income tax brings in, thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit and President Obama's "Making Work Pay" program.
The view from the top also shows the lopsidedness of the tax system. The top 20 percent of earners makes about 53 percent of the income in America but pays 91 percent of the income tax. The top 1 percent pays 36 percent. The IRS says the bottom half of earners pays less than 3 percent.
This presents a serious problem because government has such vast powers to dispense favors. As Shaw suggested, people who pay no tax will not hesitate to vote for politicians who promise big spending. Why not? They will get stuff without having to pay for it..
Don't just blame the Democrats. The Republicans talk small government but most truly seem to be for anything but -- except when they're opposing programs by the Demcrats.
Maybe the problem is that so many Americans seem to think it's fine to live on credit, so they have no problem with their government being run on it. But, it's a serious problem. Lawrence Kadish writes in the WSJ:
When the government spends more than its revenue, there is a budget deficit. These deficits are paid for by Washington selling interest bearing Treasury securities. If the government were ever to default on its promise to pay periodic interest payments or to repay the debt at maturity, the United States economy would plunge into a level of chaos that would make the Lehman bankruptcy look like a nonevent.It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill.
...Except for a few years in the late 1990s, for decades Washington has spent more than it has taken in each year and borrowed the rest. Taxpayer dollars that could have paid off debt each year have instead been spent on interest to finance debt. Unfortunately, that's a vicious cycle that will likely only get worse.
That's not going to change unless we all stop allowing lawmakers to use our tax dollars to bribe their particular subset of the citizenry -- and unfortunately, I don't see that happening in this lifetime. You?
Nobel For Econ Announced
Surprisingly, considering the committee's recent history, it is not being given to a 27-year-old Beverly Hills woman who has yet to balance her checkbook or pay off her credit cards, but hopes to in the near future; nor is it being given to the U.S. government, to encourage it to stop running at a scary-massive deficit.
No, it sounds like it actually went to two people for their accomplishments -- Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, for work on how community institutions can prevent conflict, according to a CNN piece:
Ostrom's work shows that local communities often manage common resources -- such as woods, lakes and fish stocks -- better on their own than when outside authorities impose rules, the committee said."Bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information, while citizens and users of resources do," she said to explain the significance of her work.
... Williamson's work examines why large corporations tend to arise -- and why they do not -- based on the cost and complexity of transactions, according to the Nobel committee.
"He has taught us to regard markets, firms, associations, agencies and even households from the perspective of their contribution to the resolution of conflict," the panel said.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, No Telling When Obama pledged to end the miltary's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," but didn't say when, exactly that would happen. Elizabeth Williamson writes in the WSJ of his speech to a Human Rights Campaign benefit dinner:
Mr. Obama, who spokes for about 25 minutes, told the crowd that he came to the gay community with a simple message: "I'm here with you in that fight....My commitment to you is unwavering."Mr. Obama's comments could spark criticism from conservatives and some supporters who say the administration must set different priorities.
Introducing Mr. Obama, Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese told the crowd, "We have never had a stronger ally in the White House. Never."
Richard Socarides, who had advised the Clinton administration on gay and lesbian policy, told the Associated Press that Mr. Obama delivered "a strong speech in tone, although only vaguely reassuring in content.''
"The president and Nobel winner came and paid his respects, but tomorrow many will ask: What's his plan, what's his timetable,'' Mr. Socarides said.
When there are plans spoken of, without action plans behind them, the speech may as well be:
Quack quack quack quack quack. Quack quack quack. Quack quack. Quack quack quack quack quack. Quack quack. Quack quack quack. Quack quack.
And so on.
And here's how "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" didn't work for a guy in the Navy. (Thanks, Choika, for the link.)
Terms That Bother Me
As a way of saying someone close to you is dead, I hate the term "lost" -- which suggests to me that the person in question disappeared in the mall or is wandering around a crowded Delhi street, trying to make their way back to the hotel.
Being Gassy And Bloated Isn't A Health Maneuver
I typed this out for somebody; thought I might as well post it -- why I just eat plenty of fat and protein and don't make any effort to eat fiber:
Here's Gary Taubes on fiber, in Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
From page 132, from the Fiber chapter:
The results of the forty-nine-thousand-women Dietary Modification Trial of the Women's Health Initiative, published in 2006, confirmed that increasing the fiber in the diet (by eating more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables) had no beneficial effect on colon cancer, nor did it prevent heart disease or breast cancer or induce weight loss.
Page 133:
As we have seen with other hypothesees, the belief that dietary fiber is an intrinsic part of any healthy diet has been kept alive by factors that have little to do with science: in particular, by Geoffrey Rose's philosophy of preventive medicine -- that if a medical hypothesis has a chance of being true and thus saving lives, it should be treated as if it is -- and by the need to give the public some positive advice about how they might prevent or reduce the risk of cancer.
Page 134:
"Scientists have known for years that a diet rich in vegetables, fruits and fiber, and low in fat, can greatly reduce -- or eliminate -- the chances of developing colon cancer," as a 1998 Washington Post article put it -- four years after the Harvard analysis of forty-seven thousand male health professionals suggested it was not true.
As for the main reason most people think they should have fiber, personally, I've found that as long as I'm eating enough fat on my meat, dairy and only low-carb vegetable diet, everything comes out quite nicely.
Taubes interview here.
Offend Christians And Jews, And They'll Complain
Offend Muslims, and there's a good chance they'll kill you. Maxim Lott writes at FoxNews that a German publisher has cancelled a novel, fearing that it would fearing that it would offend Muslims and put him in danger:
The publisher of the book, which was to have been titled "To Whom Honor is Due," has indicated that he withdrew the book after an expert on Islam warned that some of the passages could spark violent retaliation from Muslims."After the Muhammad cartoons, one knows that one can't publish sentences or drawings that defame Islam without expecting a security risk," Felix Droste, of Droste Verlag publishing, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel last week.
...This new controversy comes on the heels of Yale University Press' refusal to print the cartoons that were published in Denmark in a new book that details the controversy surrounding them.
It also recalls other recent incidents: In 2008, Random House pulled The Jewel of Medina, a book about one of Muhammad's wives, and in 2006 a German theater cancelled a play in which Muhammad gets beheaded.
...Nonie Darwish, the author of Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law
, said the publisher had every right to be afraid.
"The publisher is being realistic in their fear of retaliation from Muslims," Darwish told FOXNews.com. "I cannot blame the publishing company. I blame Western governments, [the] legal system and police who are not protecting the infidel West from the danger of Islamic assault on Western civilization.
"I am often amazed by Muslims who are offended by criticism of Islam but at the same time curse and encourage jihad and violence against Jews, Christians and non-Muslims. If Muslims want respect from others they must remove the tons of commandments to violence against others."
While Scalia, annoyingly, tries to pass Christianity off as constitutionality by contending that crosses are just grave markers, Islam commands its followers to convert or kill the rest of us. Mark writes at Daniel Pipes:
The point should be made clear and crisp: there is no moderate Islam. There is one Islam only, which defines all thoses not under its rule as the enemy (Harbies, belonging to Dar-el-Harb, the house of war). And the only reason why Muslim do not wage war on Western civilization is because they are not powerful enough to do so at the moment.Under Islam, the most sacred duty of all Muslims is Jihad - the obligation to sacrifice body and property in the quest of turning Dar-el-Harb into Dar-el-Islam, which means one thing only - occupying the world and submitting all its people to the rule of Islam (the Dhima process). There is no other interpretation to Jihad. And it is very easy to prove: Try to get a Fatwa (religious legal ruling) from any Imam, that changes or cancells the concept of "the house of war". This will never happen.
The only thing that differentiates between militant or moderate Muslims is the level of activity in discharging the duty of Jihad. Most Muslims are inactive in this regard, but they serve as the population base for it. Some support it passively (Islamists), and some take part in it actively (Islamic terrorists).
Think of that the next time you see a couple of those ladies in headscarves moving through a store. Maybe ask them how Dar-el-Harb is working for them. Just to let on that you know.
Fox link via @katec
Garbage In, Payment Out
Many thanks to all of you who've been buying stuff on Amazon through my links or through the search on Amy's Mall. I appreciate even the smallest purchases (especially because if my site 100 or so purchases, I get a slightly higher percentage).
As for the subject of this post, the person responsible for the mondo purchase of the month bought the InSinkErator Excel Evolution Household Food Waste Disposer
List Price: $605.00 Price: $319.00 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details You Save: $286.00 (47%)
With your savings, and your purchase, you garnered me a kickback of $21.06, which really helps while I'm trying to survive the downturn in newspapers.
P.S. Going to put up a link to info on "personal session w/Amy" soon (been going through three weeks of book hell, but my book went to press Wednesday...special thanks to Crid and Kate Coe!)
I'm hoping I can transition to making the lion's share of my income through book sales and TV (have a small but good TV thing in the works), but maybe even increase my reach in newspapers if my profile gets a little higher after the book comes out.
Global Narcissism Culture
I was shocked, this morning, to read that our President -- who never did much in the Senate, and hasn't done much more as President than give speeches and go after the Olympics like the President of downtown Chicago instead of the President of the United States -- won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The AP writes that it honors "promise, not action." Well, yuck.
This is like taking the overpraising of children that's so common now in American culture and expanding it to an adult, and on a global scale.
This dishonors everyone who's righteously won a Nobel and disgusts me to the core.
I write about the sorry results of this sort of behavior in my upcoming book, and I'm reading a great book entirely about this sort of thing now, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement
P.S. Oh, and fuck you FTC, nobody sent it to me for free, and I'm still recommending it.
Pretend-Personal Spam
Yes, I'd love for "Amy Alkon Column" to be more "energy independent," but I think cutting off Spell Check to save energy, as this guy seems to have, seems ill-advised -- as does sending out pretend personal form e-mails:
We certainly would like the opprotunity to meet with you to discuss your Solar Energy project / proposal and how we can help Amy Alkon Column become more energy independent and take advantage of the finacial inentives available to you.
Our sloppy speller, Harvey Abouelata, is...unduly optimistic:
Please email me Harvey@sustainablefuture.biz or call (865) 386-7860 so we can set up a time to meet.Sustainable Future,
LLC 11614 Grigsby Chapel Rd
Farragut TN 37934
USA
Um, yeah, right. I wrote back:
I was going to call you (at home) at 3 a.m. to scold you for spamming me, but lucky you, it was a busy day and a tough three weeks, and I'm too tired.
The reason we all get these time-sucking pieces of spam that there's so little cost in it for the people who send them. The moment it starts to cost them, really cost them, it stops being so cost-effective.
I like to track down spammers home numbers on Zabasearch.com, and let them know how I feel about their business practices...don't you?
Same goes for telemarketers.
By the way, Planned Parenthood, I thought we had this all figured out, because, for about a year, you stopped using a phone line I pay for and hijacking my time to ask me for money. Let's try one more time: If you interrupt me at home again, I will give all my money to the charitable love child of Pat Buchanan and James Dobson, or whatever cause you'd be most opposed to.
And yes, I know we have a bunch of lobbyists' tools representing us in the House and Senate, but jeez...does anyone think a junk call for charity, which our legislaturds left a big loophole to allow in the Telecommunications Act, is any less interruptive than one for Achmed's Carpet Cleaning?
Oh, and the best prank on the carpet cleaners, who are pretty hard to pin down in court for money, is Crid's -- and you've got to post that one again, Cridster, because I can't find the exact details.
It goes something like this: when Crid gets one of those carpet cleaning telemarketing calls, he's all in for some serious rug cleaning action. He gives them the floor and address of...which branch of consumer law enforcement is that in Westwood?
Just love it.
The Saudis Want A Bailout
You gotta love this -- (boohoo, sniffle-sniffle) -- if the world goes so green that many countries seriously cut their dependence on fossil fuel, it seems the Saudis will be up shit's creek without a gold toilet seat cover. From an AP story on Chron.com:
Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations -- demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels....The head of the Saudi delegation Mohammad S. Al Sabban dismissed the IEA figures as "biased" and said OPEC's own calculations showed that Saudi Arabia would lose $19 billion a year starting in 2012 under a new climate pact. The region would lose much more, he said.
...Al Sabban accused Western nations of pursuing an agenda against oil producers, under the guise of protecting the planet.
thanks, Martin
There Should Be A Stigma For Single Mothers
A large of the reason there are so few single Asian mothers compared to the vast numbers of black and Latino women raising daddyless children has to be the stigma, in the Asian community, for single motherhood. But now, Choe Sang-Hun writes in The New York Times, accompanied by a way-too-hopeful-looking photo, Koreans (in Korea) are joining the ranks of the ladies who are knocked up and unabashedly on their way to single motherhood:
Now, Ms. Choi and other women in her situation are trying to set up the country's first unwed mothers association to defend their right to raise their own children. It is a small but unusual first step in a society that ostracizes unmarried mothers to such an extent that Koreans often describe things as outrageous by comparing them to "an unmarried woman seeking an excuse to give birth."
Margaret Thatcher On People Who Meet
From the WSJ:
For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus." . . .To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects--the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend recently: There are people who do things in this world and people who meet. There are far too many of the latter, and far too few of the former, and when you're dealing with a company or organization, it's absolutely essential to figure out who's who.
Don't Punish The Rest Of Us
Congressman Mike Rogers on health care:
Wanna die of cancer? Move to Canada.
The Asinine New FTC Rule
The governanny extends her Big Nurse-like reach. From PCWorld, the FTC's new rules for bloggers:
A rare trend among some bloggers is to receive a small fee in exchange for reviewing a particular product or writing a blog post about it. Under the FTC's new rules, all bloggers engaging in this practice would have to disclose that they are receiving a fee for their blog post. Bloggers will also have to disclose any gifts they receive, such as a free gadget, book, or toothpaste, since the free merchandise counts as compensation.The strange thing about this new rule is that, in my experience, many bloggers already disclose when they are being paid for reviews. I've also seen disclosure on those rare occasions I've come a cross a PayPerPost model, when a blogger is basically working a product endorsement into their writing. Of course, even if a pay-per-post blogger didn't disclose what they were doing, it is often painfully obvious they've been paid to insert something about 'Super Wowee Shampoo' into their blog.
But let's say you are working an endorsement into your blog for shampoo and you end up talking about your experience with that shampoo. You must clearly disclose the typical results someone can expect to get from using that product. If your experience was not normal, a "results not typical" clause just won't cut it.
Bottom Line: If you receive gifts, money or any other type of compensation from a product manufacturer or service provider you have to disclose it.
I'm not for sale. I don't even do "link exchanges." If you like my blog, link to it. If not, don't. I link to people whose work I think is worthy, and whether they even like me, let alone link to me, is immaterial to me.
I buy many of the books I recommend here, and most that I have recommended -- like John Gottman's terrific book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
I also just got a kid at my coffee shop, with a young pregnant wife, a scholarship for free admission to the $145 Gottman Institute program, Bringing Baby Home. And no, I didn't get a kickback for this. The workshop, which I saw demonstrated at the Erickson Evolution of Psychotherapy conference about five years ago (for which I was comped, and about which I blogged) is good and I recommend good workshops simply because they're good. I wrote to the local leader of the workshop and asked them to give the kid a discount, as he probably makes minimum wage, and the guy came through.
Oh, and likewise, when I refer people to the late Albert Ellis' website, to the therapist referrals link, I don't get anything for it; nor do they even know I've referred people. I do it because I think Ellis' brand of cognitive behavioral therapy is the fastest, smartest, most efficient form out there. If you want to pay through the nose to sit for years and whine to some psychotherapist about your problems, and probably ingrain them further instead of solving them, have at it.
Actually, during the years when things were good in newspapers, until about a year ago, I'd often just buy a book on Amazon rather than asking for a review copy (free copy from publisher to reviewers, columnist who write about books, etc.), which sometimes requires finding the buried link to the media department and then faxing them a request on letterhead. I'm a busy girl.
These days, however, with papers going out of business right and left, I have to be more prudent. So, while I bought two editions of David Buss' terrific book, The Evolution Of Desire
The truth is, I get lots of review copies I'd never mention, and I actually write to publishers to urge them to never send me novels, which, with few exceptions (most of them having Elmore Leonard on the cover), I will never recommend. Books on lettuce-headed thinking like astrology will likewise never make it onto my blog or into my column, except if I'm in the mood to ridicule them.
Whoops, sorry, full disclosure, Mr. FTC man: I'm sleeping with Elmore's researcher, he buys me dinner with regularity, and, when I go with my boyfriend to Detroit, Elmore buys me dinner sometimes, too. (Oh, I'm such a dirty whore.) It gets better: Elmore also blurbed my book and tells me funny dirty stories.
Oh, and more full disclosure, engineering prof Barb Oakley gave me her amazing book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
Are we done here? I'm not for sale, and if I were, it sure wouldn't be for the price of a trade paperback.
P.S. I'm with Paul Levinson:
First, I think that a blogger or anyone who fails to disclose a paid endorsement - who gives the impression that he or she likes or approves of something, when in fact the main motivation for the blog or whatever statement is payment from the purveyor of the product or service - is behaving unethically. Such non-disclosures are lies of omission, pure and sample, and deceitful practices warrant being publicly called out.But they do not warrant a Federal or any governmental fine, which is quite another matter.
To begin with, such lies of omission are not the kinds of false assertions which are already prohibited by the FTC. Claiming that a car gives you 25-miles-per-gallon when in fact the best it can do is 15 is a bald-faced lie of commission. Such black-and-white falsities bear little resemblance to paid-for appreciations of products that masquerade as genuine endorsements. The first kinds of lies can pump false statistics into the public realm. The second kind is likely to do no more damage than making consumers feel good about a product, which would only happen if the consumers already had confidence in the blogger. As word of the blogger's deceit spread, such confidence in the blogger would shrink - without the need for government fines.
More important, government regulation of any communication, especially backed by hefty fines, is in danger of contradicting the First Amendment insistence that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Clearly, blogging - even for undisclosed payment for endorsements - is a form of press. And where would such regulation end? Are reviewers of movies, rock concerts, even books, obliged to disclose that they were given free tickets or copies of the book under review? Is a rave review undermined when it flows from media content provided gratis? Should our major publications and broadcast media be fined for such non-disclosures?
If you would say no - as I certainly would - then you must consider why bloggers should bear this burden. Is not the FTC beating up on a new new medium, most of whose practitioners lack the legal clout - as in in-house attorneys - to stand up to the government on this issue?
Dumbshits For Legislators
Cash for Clunkers was a real genius idea, says a WSJ op-ed, achieving neither of its two objectives -- helping the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boosting car sales to help Detroit and the economy:
According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
The best was this rule:
Your trade-in can not be more than 25 years old. Period.
So all the real clunkers, the real polluters, are still chug-chug-chugging down the road. A merely older car that doesn't pollute so much is now no longer available for purchase to some college grad who needs cheap transportation to their new job (if they can even find one, with our president focusing on "reforming" health care and making genius movies like volunteering to be the Oval Office-based Olympics PR dude for Chicago, instead of focusing full force on the economy).
"Hope for change"? At this point, I'm hoping for as little as possible.
Fight The Transparency!
Our elected assholes would prefer we can't read the health care bill and other legislation they're voting on. From Rasmussen Reports:
Right now, Republicans in the House are trying to force a vote on a measure that would require that pending bills be posted online for three days before that chamber votes on them. A few Democrats have joined the effort, but, according to news reports, their party leaders are fighting the bill which they view as a GOP delaying tactic. There is certainly room for cynicism about the GOP's allegiance to this particular reform at this time. Members of both parties often raise procedural issues when it works to their advantage and oppose them when it doesn't. However, the poll question did not mention the health care legislation but applied to all legislation. The results suggest that an overwhelming majority of voters consider such procedures as little more than common sense.A majority of all Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters all support posting the legislation in final form at least two weeks in advance of any vote.
...Republicans have been complaining all year that the Democratic majority leadership are rushing lengthy, complicated legislation like the $787-billion economic stimulus bill through the House and Senate without giving legislators adequate time to even read them.
Not that we believe they read them (they are too busy shaking hands and snorkeling at The Great Barrier reef...but really, that was like, totally necessary to understand climate change!)
If they were posted, you'd better believe bloggers would read them -- and post what's in them for the sheeple to read -- who maybe, just maybe would be motivated to be a little more informed about exactly what kind of legislators they're voting in.
How To Implant False Memories
Elizabeth Loftus lays out how innocent people's lives are ruined by unscrupulous therapists:
The New Addiction Is Taxing Addictions
Saletan says it over at Slate vis a vis pot legalization advocates trying to persuade legislators:
It's a truth older than democracy: To secure the government's support, just cut the tax man in on the action.But pot is now being overtaken by a savvier mainstream competitor: the campaign to tax soda. Like the tobacco-tax movement, the soda-tax movement began with a rationale of preventing and curing addiction. And like the tobacco-tax movement, it's evolving into a revenue addiction.
The latest sign of this trend is a report issued last week by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which lobbies for regulation of harmful products. The press release announcing the report is headlined, "Taxing Soda Could Trim State Deficits (and Waistlines), Says Report." It begins:
Even as 48 states and the District of Columbia are facing grim budget shortfalls, only 25 states currently impose special taxes on soda and other beverages with added sugar, and all of those taxes are very small. And according to a new paper from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, states could generate a total of more than $10 billion per year by levying a tax of 7 cents per 12-ounce can of Coke or Mountain Dew. If implemented by Congress in the form of a national excise tax, that $10 billion could make an important contribution toward paying for health coverage for all Americans....Of course, any good pusher knows that the best way to hook a new customer is to get him to sample the product. So the release adds: "On its web site, CSPI has a Liquid Candy Calculator that enables legislative staffers or citizens to calculate the revenue their state could raise from sales or excise taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages." I went to the calculator this morning to taste the benefits of a 5-cent-per-can tax in my state. Answer: $135 million. Yummy! A 10-cent tax got me $253 million. Even yummier! But I was disappointed that the yield didn't quite double. I started to wonder how much I could tax each can without dampening the rate of consumption. Talk about liquid candy.
Before long, they'll be taxing breathing. I'm not kidding. It only sounds silly now, because they're still working on the likes of soda. It shouldn't sound so farfetched down the road, the idea that if you live in an area where the air is more breathable, it's gonna cost ya.
Bestiality, Pedophilia, And Forehead Kisses
Since this is a story about a kindergarten issue, let's play "Which one of these doesn't belong?" Answer: These days? None of the above.
Lenore Skenazy of freerangekids.com (author of the terrific book by the same name) blogs "Eek! A Male!" about a man who taught kindergarten at a Sunday school, but who is no longer allowed to be around preschoolers. His crime?
A child fell down and hurt herself, and while comforting her he gave her a kiss. On the forehead. And apparently another parent saw this and assumed he was some sort of sicko. A month earlier he had a child in his class pass out napkins before snack and she went home and told her parents that she was the special helper in Mr. X's class. They switched their child's class.
Lenore continues:
The kids come up to him and ask why he isn't their teacher anymore. What is he supposed to say?
Now, more than ever, with all the divorce in this culture, kids need positive male role models, and instead, we're teaching them that all males are predators? That any affection from a man is sick, horrible, and criminal? If anything is sick, horrible, and criminal, it's that kind of thinking.
Enforcing Our Immigration Laws?
It's a real problem for LA Times columnist Tim Rutten. In fact, he apparently thinks it's a terrible, unjust thing to do. He makes big boohoohoos in the LA Times about illegal immigrants (although he never refers to them that way) who got drop-kicked from jobs Americans could be taking. (Note the unemployment rate for citizens, Timster? You mention it in your column.) Rutten writes:
This week, unemployment among American workers climbed to its highest level in a quarter of a century. In parts of Los Angeles, joblessness has reached levels unmatched since the Depression. In many predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods, nearly one in four people is out of work.Yet the Obama administration has chosen this moment to deprive more than 1,800 Angelenos, nearly all Latino immigrants, of jobs that not only pay a living wage but provide health insurance and other benefits. The workers are employed by American Apparel, the largest employer in downtown L.A.'s garment district. The company and its workers are victims of a shift in federal law enforcement that began under George W. Bush and now has taken a particularly callous turn under President Obama.
The firings are taking place because the American Apparel workers were found to be using identity documents that federal immigration authorities have deemed illegitimate. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called the firings "devastating."
"Deemed illegitimate"? Now, I guarantee that you won't say that about my "identity documents," like my birth certificate, social security card, and U.S. passport. I'm asked to present my passport and driver's license and sign a document when I do a paid TV appearance, because, just as in many or most countries around the globe, we require a person to have a permit or be a citizen to work in our country. Wow, what horrible fascist people we are.
What Gun Control Really Means
Some legislator wants to control it so you can't have a gun, or so there are all sorts of constraints on you getting one, but when there are intruders in his house, he lickety-split pulls a gun and puts a bullet in one of them. More here. And frankly, it sounds like something fishy was going on here. Once again, the people running this country so often seem like the worst people in it. Charles Rangel, anyone?
Women Disturbed That Men Look At Women
There was a piece by Slate TV critic Troy Patterson on girlwatching that I found rather dull, but there was plenty of entertainment in the comments below the piece. Read the piece here. I've posted a few of the comments below (click commenter's name to go to page where comment was found).
First, we have girlish hysteria:
@PStarling
By: buggie | Fri, 08/28/2009 - 15:55that was great. this article has given me an ulcer AND made me cry. I am literally very disturbed by all of this. I have read about it many times, but every time it is a source of much distress for me. I am a sexual person, I don't deny that people have sexual thoughts, etc. When I am having sex someone, hell yes, I want them to think of me in a sexual context. but I don't like the idea of being scrutinized by strangers. I just don't. It's not about sex. I am feeling extremely anxious and uncomfortable and sad and scared, and I'm feeling ANGRY because the men don't seem to care that it makes me, and countless other women, feel that way. It might not do physical harm, but it does do harm.
This girl huffs and she puffs, and she huffs and puffs some more:
The author is by no means a dandy
By: LFlo | Thu, 08/27/2009 - 12:15There is a reason that the last literature on this was written in the Mad Men era of unapologetic mysogyny - the subject matter of the article is disgustingly sexist. I wear shorts in the summer because its hot, not because I want men to stare at my ass. The thought of the author doing so makes me want to vomit. At the beginning he writes about all of the possible reasons this article could be, and actually IS, extremely mysogynistic, but then brushes them aside with the assurance that it is "light-hearted." Sexual harrassment is always light-hearted for the man engaging in it, the only problem is that there is a victim involved as well. Also, a note on the Baudelaire references -congratulations to him on reading two very typical short pieces that are not representative of his body of work - I'm sure the author was convinced that adding some sort of literary basis to his article would negate all its underlying sexism. In case he didn't realize, Baudelaire was one of the most disgustingly mysogynistic writers in history and would probably consider all the "beautiful women" who this self-proclaimed dandy admires to be dirty prositutes because that is what he basically thought of all women. If Mr. Patterson is going to be this insulting to women, he should attempt to do it to a crowd of them that is not as well-read.
What an ass:
Objectification
By: psychprof | Thu, 08/27/2009 - 09:06"The girl may be an objectified being, but it is practically a subclause of the social contract that we all objectify ourselves in the mirror every morning."
Just because we objectify ourselves in the mirror, doesn't mean that being objectified by other people is justified. Being regarded as a piece of ass that others drool over is for most women uncomfortable and sometimes frightening. Yes, it may seem extreme, but when a guy checks a girl out (regardless of if she's wearing a mini-skirt in August or completely bundled up in December), there's a place in the back of her mind that worries about what consequences may arise, and I speak specifically of the potential for sexual assault. Sure, 99 times out of a 100 (maybe even 9999 out of 10,000) a checking out incident goes no further, but even that 1 in 1000 (or 1 in 10,000) chance is scary and most women do fear stranger rape more than acquaintance rape (even if the later is more prevalent).
In full disclosure, I am a social scientist and have specifically been conducting my research on this phenomenon, and I did take offense to your pooh-poohing of the legitimacy of such research. If your article was intended as tongue-in-cheek, I think it fails to come across that way. Instead, it feels like a "hey guys, here's how to belittle women and get away with it because we all know they're asking for it in those skimpy outfits and the way they act."
I'm all for people watching and I don't think either sex should have to abstain from appreciating the attractiveness of another, but your suggestions dance along a fine line of looking and leering, which quickly can lead to more offensive behaviors of whistling, catcalling, and sexual remarks.
Agree with this guy:
I find the comments more entertaining
By: stevedl36 | Fri, 08/28/2009 - 13:55I find the comments more entertaining than the article, but I suppose that's no surprise given the subject. Let me start off by saying that I'm a man who enjoys seeing attractive women.
Those who find the idea of girlwatching offensive seem to have two basic and distinct objections that I'll address seperately:
1. They are judging me, and they have no right to.
2. They are imagining themselves having sex with me, and that gives me the creeps.1. People are judging you all the time. They are judging you based on your work skills, your manner of speech, your fashion sense, who you spend your time with, your taste in music, and yes, your appearance, along with any other feature that differentiates you from anyone else. Many older people make quite a hobby of judging younger people after retirement. I do not know of an adolescent alive who doesn't spend an inordinant amount of time judging and being judged by their parents. In other words, I'm saying that this is just one more form of what we all do all the time - we judge. If you don't like it, join another species, just be aware that those of us who don't switch with you will probably judge you for it.
2. I guess some might be, but I think the car afficianado comparison is more accurate for most of us. We might be thinking, "wow, that's a nice car" or even, "I'd love to have that car," but we're not actually making it happen in our minds. If you don't like being objectified, you've made a very poor choice in being human, because each and every one of is an object. Granted, a walking, talking, thinking, feeling object, but still an object. As a male, I am thrilled to interact with a woman who has a personality that really appeals to me, or the same with a sense of humor, or outlook on the world, or other such quality. However, when we are walking by each other on the sidewalk, I know nothing of your talking, thinking and feeling, I only have the walking to go on. I might just think to myself, "wow, she's hot!"
In my opinion, girlwatching should not be overt in order specifically to avoid giving offense. No leering, wolf-whistles, or other such unseemly behavior. That being the case, it's not an activity that engages the object of attention, but rather exists entirely in the mind of the one doing the appreciation. That said, dictating what others can think and what they can't is a much stronger violation of their rights than the behavior you object to in the first place.
just my 2 cents.
Slate's response article (to the comments on Patterson's piece) is here.
The High Price Of Being Gay
In The New York Times, Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber tallied up all the extra health, legal and other costs gay couples have to bear. Worst case? $211,993. Best case: $28,595.
Much of the debate over legalizing gay marriage has focused on God and Scripture, the Constitution and equal protection.But we see the world through the prism of money. And for years, we've heard from gay couples about all the extra health, legal and other costs they bear. So we set out to determine what they were and to come up with a round number -- a couple's lifetime cost of being gay.
One example from the piece:
Estate TaxesHeterosexual married couples can transfer an unlimited amount of assets to each other during their lives and at death without paying estate taxes. Everyone else, including married same-sex couples, must pay federal estate taxes on amounts that exceed the 2009 exemption of $3.5 million. Many states also levy their own estate or inheritance taxes, though same-sex couples may be shielded from those in states that recognize their unions. Our couple lived in New York, where the estate tax exemption is $1 million. And though New York recognizes marriages performed elsewhere, that recognition does not extend to state income or estate taxes.
In our worst case, the gay partner who died first in 2055 left an estate that exceeded the state's threshold by $171,528. That meant a tax bill of $43,378, according to Ron L. Meyers, an estate-planning lawyer with a significant same-sex clientele at Cane, Boniface & Meyers in Nyack, N.Y.
Meanwhile, their identical heterosexual counterparts owed nothing.
Gay Marriage Will Be Coming
There are signs. For example, a Texas judge who's to hear a divorce lawsuit between two men married in Massachusetts just declared the Texas' "Defense of Marriage Act" unconsitutional.
Marriage should not be "between a man and a woman," but between whichever two consenting adults love each other and want to avail themselves of the rights granted by marrying.
In fact, because so many people don't marry these days, or remain single, I think every person should have a person in their life -- their "constant," I'd call it -- who's the point person for visiting them in the hospital if they fall very ill, making decisions about them if they fall very ill, and perhaps be granted other sorts of rights. (It's a little early and I've been in book hell, and now must write my column, so forgive me for leaving that a little sketchy.)
Capitalism Works
John Mackey, the Whole Foods CEO who wrote the smart op-ed about health care that spawned the boycott and the buy-cott, tells the WSJ's Stephen Moore that government needs a makeover:
He describes what the Federal Reserve has done with massive money creation as "debauchery of the currency." He thinks the bailouts were a travesty."I don't think anybody's too big to fail," he says. "If a business fails, what happens is, there are still assets, and those assets get reorganized. Either new management comes in or it's sold off to another business or it's bid on and the good assets are retained and the bad assets are eliminated. I believe in the dynamic creativity of capitalism, and it's self-correcting, if you just allow it to self-correct."
Crid Wants To Talk About Sex
Here you go.
Job Description Issues
He was elected President of The United States, not President of downtown Chicago, yet Obama seems to have some confusion over his role. Yes, it would probably be just dandy for Chicago to get to host the Olympics, but what is Obama doing taking time out to stump for them? Dave Zirin writes for HuffPo:
Mayor Daley, rocking a 35 percent approval rating, says that the Games would be "a huge boost to our economy, raising it to a new level. The Games will help us recover sooner from the recession that still grips our nation and enable us to better compete in the global economy."There is only one problem with this argument: the history of the Olympic Games almost without exception brands it as a lie. As Sports Illustrated's Michael Fish - an Olympic supporter - has written, "You stage a two-week athletic carnival and, if things go well, pray the local municipality isn't sent into financial ruin."
...Even without the Olympic Games, Chicago has been ground zero in the past decade for the destruction of public housing, political corruption raised to an art form, and police violence. Bringing the Olympics to this town would be like sending a gift basket filled with bottles of Jim Beam to the Betty Ford Clinic: over-consumption followed by disaster.
It's also difficult for Chicago residents to see how this will help their pocketbooks, given that Daley pledged to the International Olympic Committee that any cost overruns would be covered by taxpayers.This is why a staggering 84 percent of the city opposes bringing the Games to Chicago if it costs residents a solitary dime. Even if the games were to go off without a hitch - which would happen only if the setting was lovely Shangri-La - not even half the residents would support hosting the Games.
The Obamas, former Chicago residents, should be standing with their city. Instead, we have the sight of Barack, Michelle, and Oprah trying to outmuscle Pele and Brazil for a place at the Olympic trough. The question is why. Maybe Obama wants the Olympic fairy dust enjoyed by Ronald Reagan at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles or Bill Clinton at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Or perhaps he is returning favor to the developers and other sundry connected people in the Windy City who will make out like bandits once the smoke has cleared. But his intentions are clear: he wants the glitz, glamour, and prestige of the games and he wants it for the Daley machine. What the people of Chicago want doesn't seem to compute.
Hey, Mr. President: Leave the "Up With Chicago!" work to people, private and public, who live in and work for Chicago -- any who actually want the Olympics there, that is. And, hey, while you're at it, quit the health care experiment and work on fixing the broken economy, willya?
UPDATE: And Chicago is Ouwwwwwt!
The Service I Provide
A daily in Indiana that had wanted to pick up my column just decided I "might not be right for their community page." No, I'm no Dear Abby and I'm a far cry from the lazy thinker and boring writer I call "Dear Matronly Amy" who runs in a lot of daily papers, including the Los Angeles Times.
Just after I responded to the Indiana editor, a professor friend wrote me back:
Remember, no matter how incompetent our college grads are, at least they feel good about themselves!
She loved my response, so I thought I'd post it:
I see it as my job to make people feel like crap about themselves for the greater good and their own, too!
Which reminds me, I just started reading an insightful and well-written book on the topic: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement
Fondly Recalling The First Amendment
We're inching closer to the point where that happens, with political correctness taking precedent over the Constitution. Believe it or not, there's a federal ban on depictions of cruelty to animals, and because Conan the Barbarian has shots of horses being tripped by wires, Amazon could be committing a felony by selling it, writes Jacob Sullum at reason...
...unless it could convince a jury that the 1982 epic-in which a bare-chested, codpiece-wearing future governor of California declares that the best thing in life is "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women"-has "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value."By inviting jurors to be film critics, with the consequences of a bad review including up to five years in federal prison, Congress has turned the First Amendment on its head. That lamentation you hear is the dismayed cry of the Framers at the blitheness with which the people's representatives seek to crush expression that offends them and drive politically incorrect thoughts from the realm of tolerable discourse.
...The appeals court noted that "the statute potentially covers a great deal of constitutionally protected speech," including images of bullfighting in Spain (since the recorded conduct need only be illegal where it is possessed or sold) and of hunting or fishing out of season. Similarly, in a brief asking the Supreme Court to uphold the 3rd Circuit's ruling, several journalism organizations that worry about the law's impact on coverage of animal-related issues say it "appears to be a felony for anyone in Oregon to possess depictions of legal, licensed crossbow hunting in Washington." Wrinkles like that could imperil the entire genre of hunting and fishing videos.
Solicitor General Elena Kagan suggests the Justice Department will avoid such bizarre results by applying the statute judiciously. But Stevens' prosecution, which goes beyond the avowed intent of Congress, shows the department cannot be trusted to do so. If the First Amendment means anything, it means freedom of speech should not depend on prosecutorial discretion.
Predicting Obamacare
Meet health care rationing. Its name is Medicare, and it's brought to you by the government, and it's shades of what's to come under Obamacare. AEI's Dr. Scott Gottlieb writes in the WSJ about how Medicare denied implantable cardiac defibrillators to patients and certain drugs as well:
Take the travails of the pharmaceutical company Sepracor and its drug Xopenex, an innovative respiratory medicine that competes with the chemically distinct and much cheaper generic albuterol. Both are inhaled aerosols used to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Xopenex has the same benefits as albuterol, but some believe fewer of its cardiac side effects. Medicare didn't agree.The agency tried to make a "national coverage decision" on Xopenex but couldn't come up with a clinical justification to limit the drug's usage. So Medicare manipulated its payment process, saying it would pay Xopenex a price equivalent to the "least costly alternative" form of generic albuterol, 10 cents a treatment compared to about $2.50 for Xopenex. Then Medicare was sued by a patient, and a Federal court recently ruled the agency exceeded its authority.
...It's not a stretch to say that Medicare spent hundreds of cumulative man-hours focusing on Xopenex while other priorities languished. The question is why? There weren't safety concerns. Xopenex may have been used in lieu of a cheaper alternative, but at peak Medicare sales of about $300 million it represented far less than one one-thousandth of the agency's budget. Simply put, a few staffers inside Medicare were consumed with the drug and its higher price--revealing a process that is capricious and often disconnected from science.
...When private plans ration care, patients can appeal directly to an insurer's medical staff. Only a small fraction of Medicare's denied claims--about 5%--are ever formally appealed because its process is so impenetrable. People can also switch insurers, and in many cases patients chose a policy because it matched their preferences in the first place. These options don't exist in a government health program.
