Welfare Losing Its Stigma! (Just What We Need)
Kaus writes:
Assiduous bipartisan bureaucratic attempts to remove stigma from food stamps have at least partially succeeded, and the program has expanded rapidly, roughly doubling since 2000.But a stigma placed on cash-like welfare (which food stamps are) remains a positive sign of a healthy work ethic. If you came across two societies--Society A, in which food stamps were stigmatized, with families reluctant to go on the dole even if they were eligible, and Society B, in which they weren't, you would want to bet on (and live in) Society A. It's one thing to relax the stigma on welfare in times of epic economic decline. It's another if the stigma doesn't return with the possibility of employment. The CBPP chart would also have demonstrated that food stamp rolls have risen rapidly before--in the slump from 1988 to 1994--only to fall just as rapidly when the economy picked up in the mid-90s. Of course, at that time we had a President (Clinton) who was campaigning against "welfare as we know it."** It seems unlikely that President Obama will repeat the performance. ...
Well, single motherhood has lost its stigma, and look how well that's working for all the kiddies -- like the ones I spoke to last week: the 11th graders, many of whom read at a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade reading level.
And no, this isn't a result of poverty -- there are poor kids who read fine, or way, way, way better than fine, like my ex-assistant, a Korean, first-generation American. Of course, she grew up in a home with not only a mommy and daddy but her only-Korean speaking grandma (cute little old lady who'd hang up on anybody who spoke English if she answered the phone).
These reading levels come straight out of not having a daddy, but hey, let's be "tolerant" of people's choices. (Of course, I think we should be highly intolerant of them, on behalf of the kids born without a choice into these situations.)
Free Health Care For Illegal Immigrants!
Get yours today! It's the rare Internet forward I'll ever blog or even do more than groan as I erase it, but this letter, supposedly to President Obama, is an exception:
Dear Mr. President:I'm planning to move my family and extended family into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me.
We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico , and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements.
We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, President Calderon, that I'm on my way over?
Please let him know that I will be expecting the following:
1. Free medical care for my entire family.
2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might need, whether I use them or not.
3. Please print all Mexican government forms in English.
4. I want my grandkids to be taught Spanish by English-speaking (bi-lingual) teachers.
5. Tell their schools they need to include classes on American culture and history.
6. I want my grandkids to see the American flag on one of the flag poles at their school.
7. Please plan to feed my grandkids at school for both breakfast and lunch.
8. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easy access to government services and be able to vote.
9. I do plan to get a car and drive in Mexico , but, I don't plan to purchase car insurance, and I probably won't make any special effort to learn local traffic laws.
10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from their president to leave me alone, please be sure that every patrol car has at least one English-speaking officer.
11. I plan to fly the U.S. flag from my house top, put U S. flag decals on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any complaints or negative comments from the locals.
12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, or have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start.
13. Please have the president tell all the Mexican people to be extremely nice and never say a critical things about me or my family, or about the strain we might place on their economy.
14. I want to receive free food stamps.
15. Naturally, I'll expect free rent subsidies.
16. I'll need Income tax credits so although I don't pay Mexican Taxes, I'll receive money from the government.
17. Please arrange it so that the Mexican Gov't pays $ 4,500 to help me buy a new car.
18. Oh yes, I almost forgot, please enroll me free into the Mexican Social Security program so that I'll get a monthly income in retirement.
I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for all his people who come to the U.S. from Mexico .I am sure that President Calderon won't mind returning the favor if you ask him nicely.....
Thank you so much for your kind help.
You're the man!!!
Immigration law enforcement, anyone?
Rights On FIRE For Teachers At University Of Minnesota
I read stuff like this and, for a moment, I'm not sure whether I live in the USA or the USSR. This is from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in education -- a terrific organization that doesn't care what your political background is, liberal or conservative, as long as you are allowed freedom of speech. A few snippets from a piece written for FIRE by Adam Kissel:
All signs are that the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is planning to enforce a political litmus test for future teachers. The university's College of Education and Human Development intends to mandate certain beliefs and values--"dispositions"--for future teachers. Yet that is not enough. It even intends to redesign its admissions process so that it screens out people with the wrong beliefs and values-those who it judges will not be able to be brought around to the correct beliefs and values of "cultural competence" even after remedial training....Here are the key excerpts regarding how the group describes the "obligatory," "indispensable" features of "cultural competence" on the level of "Self":
Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.Future teachers will understand that they are privileged & marginalized depending on context ... It is about the development of cultural empathy, if you will. Teachers first have to discover their own privilege, oppression, or marginalization and also are able to describe their cultural identity.
Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege[.]
Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity[.]
On the level of "Self & Others," future teachers must take the Intercultural Development Inventory, "which measures five of the six major stages of the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity." Their "Cultural Intelligence" also will be assessed. They must reveal a "pervasive stereotype" they personally held about an identity group, and presumably argue in their paper that this view has now been "challenged" on the basis of their experiences with that group. They also will be assessed regarding "the extent to which they find intrinsic satisfaction" in being in "culturally diverse situations."
In the area of "Self & Schools,"
Future teachers will recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism. That schools and classrooms are often structured in ways that advantage and disadvantage some groups but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation.
Actually, I would say schools have state-supported systems that are guided by racism -- like affirmative action programs, where a rich black or Latino kid is given special savings a poor white or Asian kid cannot get access to.
Read the whole FIRE report. There's also a letter to the University. Or, rather "University," as it should now be called.
Clearly, the place isn't an institution of higher education but of a low form of indoctrination.
via @KateC
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Super (Dog) Nanny
Alex Williams writes for the NYT on parents applying Cesar Millan's dog-training wisdom to raising civilized children.
I can't even keep track of the people this who've informed me that I am absolutely unqualified to weigh in on parenting since I have yet to squeeze out a child. Sorry, ladies and gents, if there's an area on the body a person's wisdom is centered, I don't think it's down there. And while I don't want children, I don't see the discipline I apply to my dog as much different from what kids thrive on.
An excerpt from Williams' piece:
"When we started watching his shows, we had intended to apply his advice toward our dogs," said Amy Twomey, a blogger on parenthood for The Dallas Morning News who is raising three children under 10 with her husband, Matt. "But we realized a lot of ideas can be used on our kids."Indeed, Mr. Millan's advice has replaced a shelf full of books on how to tame an unruly child. "It's all the same simple concept: how to be the pack leader in your own house," she said.
Certainly, an army, or at least a few divisions, of credentialed experts on human parenthood long ago stumbled on Mr. Millan's philosophical holy trinity -- exercise, discipline and affection equals happiness.
... "Unlike modern parents," (Allison Pearson) added, "dog trainers don't think discipline equals being mean. They understand that dogs are happiest when they know their position in the hierarchy."
... Mr. Hranek said that some parents he knows "do not allow the word 'no' to be said around the house. How absurd is that?"
"When you're wishy-washy with dogs, they take advantage -- 'He didn't mean don't eat that biscuit,' " Mr. Hranek said. "Kids think the same way."
I shot a video of Lucy a while back -- I was practicing with my neighbors' Flip camera -- but I needed to learn iMovie to edit it, and I still haven't gotten around to that. It's a shame, because you'd see how adorably good she is on command...immediately following orders to sit, lie down, and come when I call.
I even trained her to use a litter box if I'm not home to let her out or if she has to go in the middle of the night. And, because I don't think my neighbors should have their lives disturbed because I have a pet, she's not allowed to bark outside, and hears "no noise!" and is brought inside immediately if she does.
It's all about training, and I have always believed you train dogs the way you parent kids; basically being a "loving fascist" like my parents were. If she's good, she might get a treat, but if she's naughty, she'll get punished -- consistently, even though it sometimes feels a bit embarrassing to mete out punishment on a 3-lb. dog (I joke that I beat her with a rolled-up business card).
Actually, because she's a very social little dog, if she's naughty, she goes to "doggie jail," which means being closed in my bedroom instead of being out in the thick of things. If she's really naughty, she has to sit in the dry bathtub for a few minutes -- her absolute least favorite place. Even with my dog, there's none of this culture of "go-right-ahead" mommying (although a few people have called me a bitch in recent days, I'm not my dog's mom.)
Great Contra Costa Times Interview About My Book
Jessica Yadegaran, a reporter for the Contra Costa Times who's interviewed me before, did an absolutely super piece on me and my just-published (Nov. 27!) book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society. An excerpt:
For the book, Alkon studied evolutionary psychology and discovered that our prehistoric brains are not built to be nice to strangers. But it's not an excuse. Neither is technology. Or stress. Mindless, minute acts of rudeness aside, Alkon says we must hold flagrant offenders accountable. Don't be afraid to wag your finger and stand up for the victim.Recently, we chatted with Alkon over the phone (at a volume respectful to our cubicle mates) about empathy, technology, and how to handle famous people who are rude.
Q: You say rudeness has to do with our small-tribe psychology. Can you explain?
A: We live in societies that are too big for our brains. Based on the research by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, humans can have meaningful interactions with about 150 people. Beyond that, it's difficult to have a connection.When you know people, you behave differently than if you didn't. You couldn't be rude because you'd be voted off the island. So our brains are slow for the times we live in. We're around strangers all the time, but contrast that to living in a small town. If you robbed a bank, your mom would know about it before you took off in the getaway car.
Q: Can you talk about your "Verizon Made Me Do It" theory?
A: People like to blame technology for their rudeness. But it's just a medium. In the hands of a polite person, a cell phone never bothers anyone. Mine is always on vibrate in public places.Q: What do you think is at the root of good manners?
A: Empathy. That feeling that says, 'Am I bothering you?' Unless you stumbled onto a moon crater, chances are you're on Earth, not on the moon, and there are a lot of people who will be bothered by your loud conversation on your cell phone. So think about what you're doing that's offending people or stopping them from sleeping.Q: Does the lead-by-example model still work in modern society?
A: I think that's a little unrealistic. Are you really going to reform some flagrant abuser by being a sweet victim? For most people, who are not mindful in the moment (but act rude), that's a fine solution. Ask them to quiet down or shake your head, and maybe they will get it.Q: And if they don't?
A: That's when I get on my broom. I'm what's called a costly punisher in anthropological terms. I go after people when I see an injustice at cost to me and no benefit to me. I seek to impose punishments on the people who are rude. I'm not going after people who are not mindful or didn't mean to be rude. I'm going after flagrant offenders who don't care about me or you.
More at the link!
The Big Humungous Gigantic Stupid
Welcome to health care "reform" that will make both our fiscal and physical health suffer. Krauthammer writes on NRO:
Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method -- a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.
A few of the goodies in the Senate bill, causing an "overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency"?
•You'll find mandates with financial penalties -- the amounts picked out of a hat.
•You'll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third -- numbers picked out of a hat.
•You'll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies -- percentages picked out of a hat -- that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.
The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.
Then do health care the right way -- one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness, and inefficiency.
How are things going in Britain with government-run health care? Well, here's an article -- Simon Heffer writing for the Telegraph, "Want to fix the NHS? Go private":
This exposes one of the great pretences of the NHS: that it is there first and foremost for the benefit of patients. It isn't. It exists these days mostly for the benefit of various trade unionists who are fully paid-up members of the Brown clientele, and who earn good money as petty bureaucrats trying to "manage" things that, if they need to be managed at all, could be far better done by fewer people in much more efficient systems....There is a solution, but it would really put out of joint the noses of the clientele. When a hospital fails in the way that the Basildon and Thurrock Trust has, it should be turned over immediately to a private-sector hit squad to sort it out.
This does not mean violating the terms of the 1946 Act that set up the NHS, and depriving people of a health service free at point of use. It means that the people who provide them with that service do not work for the state, but for contractors employed by it. I can understand that this would upset Leftists in all parties - including in the Tory party, whose policy on the NHS is to do everything identically to Labour - but that would be too bad. The maintenance of the ideological purity of the politically motivated should not be put before the lives of those to whom the state has a duty of care: but that is precisely how things are at the moment.
Wanda Sykes Fills In The Blanks On Tiger Woods
I'm A Foul-Smelling "Nazy" (Part Two)
(This post has been updated and moved up a day.)
You don't have to agree with me on my views about parental consideration -- in fact, it's quite fine if you don't.
But, if you do disagree with me, how about some civilized expression of your disagreement? Apparently, that's not in the plans for architect Fernando Andrade. I got this e-mail from him, subject lined "Kids":
In a message dated 11/27/09 11:36:41 AM, gsra.fandrade@gmail.com writes:
You probably don't have kids, and if you do..... God save them! I don't like the way you look.... I should not be force to share the same fligth, your smell really bothers me..... Get of the plane..... You are but a step away from being a nazy....
My response:
Fernando,
It seems you have a difference of opinion with me, and I welcome hearing it. Unfortunately, you've just chosen to speculate on how I smell and call me a "Nazy."On your website, you look like a much more respectful person than is reflected in this e-mail to me. Do you speak this way to people you disagree with in public, or just when you can dash off an e-mail to them? -Amy Alkon
UPDATED: Architect Fernando Andrade writes back, proud of what he wrote the first time:
In a message dated 11/27/09 1:06:49 PM, gsra.fandrade@gmail.com writes:My point is what do u do with people you don't like... For whatever reason... Not "you" per say but anyone for that matter... I refer to you in a general way that encompass those who are not tolerant... Do you know for a fact that the mother did not try to controll the kid? Were does it stop?
You have pick the wrong subject to make a point... A rude and loud adult is a completly different thing than a child...
I don't know you... Don't know how you smell or for that matter how you look, but I take it that it offends you my reference to smell and looks... I'm just trying to make the point ... Intolerance is what create the biggest problems in this world.... And yes, I do speak my mind when I believe that people are in the wrong... Or mistaken on their views.
You write, I respond.... I am not hidding my email or name,
today you ( people in general)preach kick crying kids out of public exposure tomorrow.... Who knows?!...trow them overboard?
My response:
Let's see, you're a grown man, and an architect for some years, and you equate my saying parents should be considerate of other passengers who may not only find hours of a child screaming unpleasant, but may get migraines from it, with...throwing children overboard?Do you typically run around screaming at people that they smell and they're (this is so quaint) "Nazys" whenever you have a difference of opinion about them? Come on, admit it, didn't you think you'd just get verbally violent with me, try to be hurtful, because you thought you'd get away with it?
For the record, you didn't sign your name to your e-mail (and I suspect you didn't write an e-mail like that expecting to get one back starting "Fernando") -- I'm just good at tracking people down. You weren't hard at all, for me, but your e-mail address doesn't translate directly to your architecture firm and name. I suspect you thought you'd just slam me in a most nasty way and get away with it. Isn't that the truth?
There are many people who've disagreed with my opinion -- on this op-ed, and at other times -- who've written me long, civil e-mails to tell me why. I respect them for their civil, adult response -- although I still may not agree with them. Commenters on my blog -- like a guy named Crid -- have persuaded me on a number of issues with rational argument. I really like that...yes, even smelly, "Nazy" that I am.
Are you raising children and is this the example you set for them? Do you tell them to call people names and make fun of them for being ugly or smelling bad? And even if you don't, do you think maybe this part of your "character" seeps through to them? If so, I think I should write an op-ed about the likes of you!
Why do you think it's right and even positive to "tolerate" those who are completely inconsiderate of others? This mother, for example, reportedly didn't feed her child before they got on the plane. She also made this all about her, and how terrible things were for her. I see this as typical of the culture of "go-right-ahead" mommying, and something that will not bode well for the rest of us when children, so narcissistically raised, grow up. I was raised to be concerned for others. As I wrote in the piece, the idea that I would ever be loud in a public place did not exist for me in what was possible in the known universe.
How do parents who care about others do it? My neighbor, who is a great mother, but also a considerate person, had to travel with her two young children when her husband's mother was sick. She sees that they're fed and rested before getting on the plane, brings each a change of clothes in case they spill something, brings toys and games to distract them, brings snacks, and brings little surprise toys and games to distract them if the other distractions aren't working.
When her daughter was a little younger and once started crying on a plane, she was mortified at disturbing other passengers. She took her into the bathroom to soothe her so she wouldn't disturb the other passengers with her crying.
I love my my neighbors' children, who sometimes are loud and wake me up, because their parents try to see that they don't. Their trying -- and caring -- makes all the difference, and makes me able to laugh on occasions when the little boy does. Accidents happen and are part of life. Had my parents been in that woman's position -- and they wouldn't have been, because they didn't take us out until we were able to be in public without disturbing others -- they would have probably evaporated out of embarrassment on the spot...after apologizing to the entire plane.
So glad you're so proud of what you've written, because I posted your initial response on my blog to give you a wider voice. I'll post and tweet your response as well.
PS More on how I was raised and on how good parents act here.
Why The Greg Craig Debate Matters
Reason Foundation's Manny Klausner sent me this Politico story by veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew about disillusionment by Obama supporters with the president, and not just over the economy and health care:
A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.
The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can't be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don't understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.
The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason - not the first or only reason - to conclude that he wasn't the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign.
This may seem like a lot to hang on a Washington personnel move. After all, intramural back-stabbing or making people fall guys when things go wrong (think Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary Les Aspin after the disaster in Somalia) are not new to Washingtonians.
But Craig's ouster did not occur in a vacuum. It served as a focal point to concerns that have been building for months that Obama wasn't pressing for all that might be possible within the existing political constraints (all that one could ask of a president); that his presidential voice hadn't fulfilled the hopes raised by his campaign voice (which had also taken him a while to find); that he hadn't created a movement, as he had raised expectations that he would; that would be there to back him up and help him fulfill his promises.
Read the details at Politico. Here's The WSJ's Noonan on Drew's piece:
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of--and warning for--the White House....She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision--"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."
...Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."
He added that rather than bowing to emperors--Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"--he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.
When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.
This country voted in a president who did almost nothing in the Senate. The mystery to me is why people are now surprised that he's floundering around in The Oval Office. (And no, in case you're wondering, I was no McCain fan...thank you, especially, reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch.)
Joe Santley Is A Much Better Person Than I Am
Gregg and I just got back from a lovely Thanksgiving with my neighbors (and their darling, loving, well-behaved young children), and I found this e-mail waiting for me:
In a message dated 11/26/09 4:50:41 PM, joesantley@gmail.com writes:
You are outrageous. I am sorry for you that you are proud of being the most hated woman in LA. You obviously have no memory- I am sure that you have at some time during childhood mugged or stolen from many people-in the form of attention by crying.... as a writer- you are worthless. A one sided righteous jerk off. You are part of the problem in this world- In fact just looking at your ugly face in your blog- which I was forced to look at to get your stupid email address- is cause for a legal action if I go by your philosophy! The damage that has been done to me just by looking at your ugly mug is far more damage than a screaming child that just wants to go see his daddy. You are truly an Ugly Person- Through and through- A true Bitch- But maybe "bitch" is not the right word. Because at least a Bitch gets F&^%&^$&^. Looking at you -you are probably don't have kids because you cant have kids because no real man would touch such a soulless hag. Go F yourself.
I do find it hilarious that a guy who writes such an ugly e-mail (perhaps he's incapable of rational argument?) prissies up on the words "fuck" and "fucked." Go for it, Joe -- come on, let even the naughty words out!
I didn't say that to Joe. Just this:
Dear Joe, I see I have much to learn about kindness and respectful disagreement from you. Thanks so much for your thoughts. -Amy Alkon
Here's a little something I cut from the "The Underparented Child" chapter of my book before publication (went and searched for it in an earlier version of the manuscript because so many people seem to be wondering about my childhood):
I asked my dad whether my two sisters and I ever threw screaming fits as children. He said "No, not after you were little babies," and added, "We always talked to you girls as adults, and expected you to act like adults when we took you to restaurants or other adult places. You were children, so you didn't always do the right thing. But, we'd say, 'Girls, that's not done here,' and you'd listen."
But, back to Joe Santley's e-mail, let's get this straight -- I am:
"...truly an Ugly Person- Through and through- A true Bitch- But maybe "bitch" is not the right word. Because at least a Bitch gets F&^%&^$&^..."
...Because it's my opinion that it's inconsiderate to bring children on a plane for non-emergency trips when you can't be sure they won't scream the whole way and bother the other passengers?
Here's my kind of parent, my friend Hillary Johnson, from a passage in my book:
When my son Tyrone was about a year old, my ex and I found ourselves in one of those binds -- we really needed to just go to a restaurant (tired, cranky), but we had an equally tired, cranky one-year-old. Our solution? The coffee shop at the bowling alley! Surely we would be within the polite decibel range in such environs.... well, we were, until Tyro braced his pudgy little legs against the lip of the formica table and kicked it over, spraying icewater and french fries in a 20 foot radius. That was our last restaurant visit for several years. I simply arranged my life otherwise for that period of time. I found that staying home was a great way to avoid stress--for me and the other 10 million inhabitants of LA.
And here, also from my book, is how I feel about my neighbors' kids -- which has everything to do with how they're parented:
Their kids do, on occasion, wake me up seriously early on a Sunday morning, and the little boy is always inventing some new game which involves repeatedly banging some hard object on the paved walk between our houses when I'm trying to write. For me, what makes all the difference is hearing their parents say, "Shhh, come over and play in our yard, Amy might be sleeping." The fact that they care makes me respond to the BANG! BANG! BANG!-ing with a head-shake and a laugh, then open a window and remind the little boy that I'm an old bag who needs her beauty sleep.
UPDATE:
I just heard from Joe:
In a message dated 11/27/09 4:44:28 AM, joesantley@gmail.com writes:
I appogise for what i wrote. To be honest, i went so far into absurdity to show you how ridiculous we humans can be- When really all we want is equality and respect. I am sure that you are not a bad person- you took time to read and ponder my thoghts- even as cras as they were. I have a son with Autism, and I hope that if you ever decide to have children, that they are blessed and do not have to suffer as my son does. You would quckly learn that the things you wrote hold little merit and I am sure that it would be a growth time for you. As for my words...inexcuseable, yet full of passion. I am thankfull that you responded so that I could grow from this exchange as well. Again, I appologise for my reaction. Joe
My response:
Joe, I appreciate the apology, but I suspect you aren't being honest here about this being some calculatedly "absurd" response. That seemed to me to be an impulsive expression -- going after me for my looks (which I have no control over -- I only have control over my behavior).I write about my brilliant friend Sergeant Heather in my book, who leads strangers in public to team up with her when she's out with her autistic son. By the way, I so love her son that I write him letters from the elephants and the cheetahs -- I'm mailing him one today...I'll send you a copy...(have to get the photo on my computer). I photographed it to e-mail it to Heather before he gets it in the mail. I'm really busy, but it means something to me to make him happy, and it takes so little for me to do that.
Heather's son doesn't suffer because she is an amazing parent, with her husband, and she actually has the older children and her daughter feeling that it's not a chore, but just a part of being in their family to care for their autistic 5-year-old son. Her big handsome 16-year-old son, at the 5-year-old's birthday party, totally unprompted by the parents, told the 5-year-old boy it was time to go to the bathroom and took him there. It's important to Heather and her husband that there will be people in place to love him and care for him when they're gone.
Thank you for your reply. Going to download the letter and attach (okay, now attached to this e-mail). PS Her son is an autistic savant -- I got him a flashlight for his birthday so he could make shadow animals and he came over and read me the entire back of the package, which is why he can read the letters I send him. He loves elephants. The cheetahs, he loves, too. Their names (the ones who write to him c/o my mailing address, are named Bob, Kelly, and Frank, and they live in Africa, around the block from the elephants).
Best wishes, -Amy Alkon
The letter to Sergeant Heather's son is below:
Not bad for an evil, child-loathing meanie like me, huh?
P.S. A marvelous book about life on the autism spectrum is Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
Ed Morrissey Reviews I SEE RUDE PEOPLE
I'm thrilled to hear he really liked the book, and that he said it was one of the few he finishes these days -- and especially because because Ed is a smart guy and a class act. I just did a very interesting radio show with him the other day, linked here. Here's are a few snippets from his just-posted review of my book on HotAir.com:
When I received an advance copy of Amy Alkon's I See Rude People, it seemed like a fun diversion -- and it's definitely fun, but most definitely has something serious to say about modern living and the price people have to pay to ensure that the world does not treat them like doormats....Think of it in terms of the "broken window" philosophy of Rudy Giuliani and Howard Safir in New York City. Ignoring the petty insults to society encourages larger breakdowns, whereas enforcement of the ground-level norms discourages them. Alkon hails the French example in her book by noting that French parents insist on proper manners for their children -- and are not at all shy about correcting the children of others in public when they transgress etiquette norms.
Alkon layers her book with equal helpings of sociology and personal experiences, but of course it's the latter that make I See Rude People a page-turner. She spares no one and few details. She rips into Bank of America, and in the process exposes some business practices that might have its customers thinking seriously about changing banks. Alkon balances this by showing how Whole Foods understood the need to treat its customers as though they cared about them, and how they needed only a little prodding to come to that realization.
...The book just hit the stores this weekend. It's a fun, quick, entertaining read, sure to make your blood boil -- but also sure to provide more than just moments to which we can all relate. Alkon gives us a path to follow to demand that people treat us as they should.
Get your copy of "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society" here, for only $11.53 at Amazon.
Budget Deficit Magic Tricks
John Stossel, at reason, finds himself incapable of suspending disbelief. More of us should follow his lead. An excerpt:
President Obama insists that health care "reform" not "add a dime" to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow "$900 billion over 10 years" has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit.It's amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion.
How do they do that?
The key to magic is misdirection, fooling the audience into looking in the wrong direction.
I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he'll saw a woman in half. That's entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he'll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it's not entertaining. It's incredible.
The politicians have a hat full of tricks to make their schemes look cheaper than they are. The new revenues will pour in during Year One, but health care spending won't begin until Year Three or Four. To this the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner asks, "Wouldn't it be great if you could count a whole month's income, but only two weeks' expenditures in your household budget?"
To be deficit-reducers, the health care bills depend on a $200 billion cut in Medicare. Current law requires cuts in payments to doctors, but let's get real: Those cuts will never happen. The idea that Congress will "save $200 billion" by reducing payments for groups as influential as doctors and retirees is laughable. Since 2003, Congress has suspended those "required" cuts each year.
What Nerds Do On Black Friday
I'm watching/listening to an hour lecture by Robert Trivers at the University of Regina on deception and self-deception (those of you who aren't on the political left, just wait through the couple political bits at the beginning -- Trivers is very interesting):
I write about Ekman's research on "micro-expressions" in my book. Trivers brings up an interesting point about blink rate as a way to determine whether somebody's lying.
He also brings up research I've read about how people who have a more positive outlook seem to have stronger immune systems. It's not only "nice to be nice," as I say in my book, it seems to be healthier!
Glamour On A Budget
My friend Virginia Postrel of Deep Glamour asked me for glamorous gift ideas for people on a budget, who hope to avoid the Black Friday insanity. Here are my suggestions:
For safe glamour, I'll pass along a recommendation from my good friend Sergeant Heather, keychain pepper spray. If you're wearing high heels and a slinky dress, you aren't going to be able to outrun a mugger, and if blinding him with your beauty doesn't cut it, a red pepper schpritz in the eyes should do quite nicely.
For unwrinkled glamour, I recommend the best sunblock on the market, Anthelios #60 pour la visage. That's "for the face," in French, and if you don't want yours to look like an Hermes lizard handbag by the time you're 50, this is the stuff to slather on. (It also helps to live like a bat, and carry my big banana leaf umbrella whenever you leave the house during daylight hours.)
For people not on a budget, here are Amazon's Black Friday Week Deals
Finally, because good manners never go out of style (and neither does earning back one's book advance), I recommend my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One womans' battle to beat some manners into impolite society...which is published today!
Remember The Troops At Thanksgiving
Very moving cartoon by Dave Granlund. Thanks and gratitude to all who are fighting or have fought on behalf of the rest of us.
At Once Undermannered And Overparented
That describes far too many kids today, and it isn't their fault, but that of the adults who are supposed to be teaching them both independence and how to be a civilized part of a world with a lot of other people in it.
My pal Lenore Skenazy -- called "the worst mother in the world" for letting her then-9-year-old son Izzy ride the subway home by himself after he begged to do so -- has company. I think I was the most hated women in Los Angeles this week for my op-ed on screaming children on planes and the people who "parent" them.
Not everybody hated me for it -- some people were grateful. And I made the #1 most-emailed story of the day not only in Los Angeles, but in Australian papers, too! The piece ran in Dallas, Philly, Atlantic City, and elsewhere, and was linked today by Denis Dutton on Arts & Letters Daily. If you want to take advantage of free shipping at Amazon (on orders of $25 or more), I suggest picking up all three of our books.
Denis' excellent book is The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
But back to today's topic -- an article by Nancy Gibbs in TIME on helicopter parenting and the damage it seems to do to kids. Here's the bit where she quotes Lenore:
Once obsessing about kids' safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics -- the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America's Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results -- all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. ("Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?") Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, "hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers."Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons' school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being "at least part Sikorsky," hiring a football coach for a son's birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, "Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?" (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.
That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be."
Is Every Hooker A Victim?
Smart piece by India Knight in the Times of London on the Belle du Jour story -- the beautiful cancer researcher who turned tricks for a while as a high-priced call girl. Here's an excerpt:
I am sometimes quite hard-pressed to see how an expensive hooker differs wildly from an under-dressed "party girl" out on the town with someone loaded. That distinction has, surely, become blurred to the point of erosion. Except that there are two differences: only the prostitute gets her chip-and-pin machine out at the end of the evening and only the party girl has a lifestyle that is lauded in celebrity magazines: only she becomes a role model.To be honest, I have more respect for the woman who recognises the transaction for what it is. Look at the two girls: one, self- reliant, gets the cash and walks away, job done. One is at the mercy of someone else's wallet, not for a couple of hours but for weeks, months, maybe even years on end. Who's the victim? Who's being had?
...This isn't a defence of prostitution, which I don't much care for -- not so much on moral grounds as on the grounds that many prostitutes have a horrible life and do themselves huge emotional and psychological harm. But not all of them. There are worse and more dishonest ways of getting cash out of men. Colleagues at the Bristol hospital where she carries out medical research into childhood cancers said: "This aspect of Dr Magnanti's past is not relevant to her current role at the university."
Anyone expressing amazement at the ease with which Brooke Magnanti has been rehabilitated should take a look at the real world. Of course she's been rehabilitated: her colleagues are clever enough to know that compared to what else goes on out there, she was a class act.
"Please Design A Logo For Me. With Pie Charts. For Free."
Hilarious e-mail exchange.
Free! $3 worth of MP3s at Amazon.
Amazon Black Friday deals here.
Really Fun Radio Show In Vegas
Here's the link. Did it last night with the very fun and funny Chris Miller and Derek Washington. I'll be on the radio in Australia in 20 minutes or so, then off with Gregg to Thanksgiving at my neighbors' a little later. No, I don't cook -- I just attend!
I found Dr. Helen is a kindred spirit when I did one of her PJTV shows -- and not just because we're both concerned with men's rights and both un-PC. She talked about making an undercooked salmon dinner for Glenn when they were first dating. Glenn's a smart guy. He and his brother are doing the Thanksgiving cooking and she's answering email while waiting for dinner to be served. Things are the same with Gregg and me, although he sometimes (oh...the stress!) does ask me to put the food on plates.
The ME! ME! ME! Generation Sans Birth Control
Just got an e-mail, subject line: "Really...your Cougar-ass on TV this morning." (I was on Los Angeles' KTLA TV this morning, talking about my op-ed on underparented children on planes, and about my book.) Here's what the guy wrote:
In a message dated 11/25/09 9:17:58 AM, secretboyfriend1@hotmail.com writes:Are you that old and lonely that you have no patience for human kind. I understand, but I simply think you just need a stiff rogering from a good man (or woman) and let off some of that middle age tension.
I thought a simple fuck you would suffice, but you might have thought me rude.
But... fuck you anyway.Enjoy life alone.
See you on a flight with my 2 yr old soon.
Xo
SB
My response:
Thanks so much for your kind thoughts. I have a boyfriend, and saw him last night, although the only hot thing he gave me was a huge container of chicken soup, which he drove all the way across town to bring me from Cantor's Deli, because I was coming down with a cold.As for you, do you walk up to people in public and spread your particular brand of cheer, or do you stick to doing it the weenie way, sending anonymous insulting e-mails to people over the Internet?
I'm 45, not lonely at all, and no matter how old I get, I'll never be "patient" enough to be able to stomach people like you.
And let's get this straight: You're angry at me because I suggest that it's important for people to be respectful of others? Kindly avoid reproducing again.
-Amy Alkon
Frankly, even if I were the ugliest woman in the world, you don't get to choose your looks; you do get to choose your behavior, and whether you parent your children or whether you let them have their feral little run of other people's lives.
I talked to my mom this morning about all the online commenters on the LA Times piece who've been saying they should call my parents and find out what I was like as a child. My mom would be fine with that (remember, she called my car thief and chewed him out for stealing my car).
She remarked on how I used to go to temple with her, to services, and sit there quietly in my little dress and Mary Janes. She contrasted this with a family that often sits behind her now: the little girl STANDS on the velvet seats and makes noise during services (and is not quieted by her parents) and even listens to her iPod during the service. Her parents don't stop her or even seem to care. My mother just can't believe it.
Welcome to "parenting." I'm sensing a need to move to out-of-the-way rural areas when all the results of it come of age.
The Mothers (And Fathers) Of Prevention
A guy named Jim read my LA Times op-ed and sent me this posting from straightdope.com, from a certain Mrs. Zappa, whose daughter threw a tantrum in the grocery store. Mrs. Z could teach all those "go right ahead" mommying practitioners dashing off nasty e-mails to me a thing or two. Mrs. Z writes about her daughter:
I got her home, by which time she had started to calm down. We canceled her birthday party (scheduled for 2 days later) but could not reach all the attendees because some had not RSVP'ed so they showed up anyway, that was pretty mortifying. I still get sick to my stomach thinking about that whole scenario.The one funny thing about it: A few months later, she came to me with a very serious, sad expression on her face and said, with GREAT pathos, "It really hurt my feelings when you cancelled my birthday party". A Good Mommy would surely respond to that with sympathy and sorry and hugs, right? She surely had every right to expect that, right? HAH!! I said "Good!". In utter shock, she said "You're glad you hurt my feelings?". I said "I'm *glad* you were upset. That was a punishment for your really horrible behavior. If you weren't upset, it didn't teach you anything. Misbehaving causes you to lose good things".
Moon Unit's daddy writes:
We tried calling all the guests who RSVP'ed, but a few did not get the word about the cancellation. When kids came to the door, I got down to their level and explained that Moon Unit was being punished, and there would be no party. I gave them their goody bag, thanked them for coming, and was treated to the most amazing look of "ZOMG! Parents can do *THAT*!!! " as the kids and parents left.I punish my kids so hard it improves other kids' behavior!! <- Evil Daddy Grin (tm)
Email From People Better Than I Am
In the wake of my LA Times op-ed on screaming children on planes and the people who "parent" them, here's one of the many constructive e-mail I got from people who are much more mature than I am:
In a message dated 11/24/09 4:53:58 PM, bobbybenterprise@gmail.com writes:I read your column in the LA Times today. What a nasty horrible mean person you are. It is a good thing you are not a mother. Based on your comments, you would not be a very good one. And after looking at your picture, if I was seated next you on a plane I would start screaming right away.
Happy Thanksgiving
Hmm, was I supposed to be learning a better example from him?
You've gotta love the people who write really nasty letters and then follow up with the likes of "Happy Thanksgiving."
After writing "And after looking at your picture, if I was seated next you on a plane I would start screaming right away," why not be consistent and write "Fuck you!"?
For the record, I didn't travel on a plane until I was 12. I have a youngest sister who's five years below me in age, and my parents waited until she was 7 before we flew anywhere (to Disney World in Florida). Before then, we only went places my dad drove us in the family station wagon like northern Michigan and parts of Canada near Detroit.
Leaping To Assumptions
So many people are imagining so many interesting things about who I am and what I think after reading one 800-word op-ed by me.
Len here is a proud victim!
In a message dated 11/24/09 2:40:52 PM, lcantrow@sbcglobal.net writes:You're certainly gonna sell some books with that column. I don't have kids either and can't stand them screaming on a plane, so I completely agree it's disturbing. But then I remember I live in a society, which needs the next generation of people, and not ones who were threatened into silence by angry parents. You write: "As a child, I was convinced that I could flap my arms and fly, but the idea that I could ever be loud in a public place that wasn't a playground simply did not exist for me." Is that fear you lived with the reason you need to scream in a public place now?
You may sell some books, but you are a very unenlightened person. Me, I put up with the screaming.
Len
My reply:
My parents, like my neighbors who are parents, didn't "threaten" their children "into silence." They just made clear what behavior was and was not acceptable. Dinner wasn't a silent time -- we sat together as a family and we talked about what we did all day, and other subjects It's loving to give kids boundaries. Because my parents did, I make my deadlines and pay my bills on time. I've had kids work for me who are the products of permissive parenting. They're for the worse for it. And why put up with the screaming? I go talk to a kid and say, "Hi there...I just wanted to tell you that when you're loud like that it hurts my ears, and I think it hurts a lot of other people's ears, too."-Amy Alkon
Loved this guy, who reforwarded me the same e-mail a bunch of times -- I guess because I didn't reply quite lickety-split enough for him:
From: andrewbaker77@hotmail.com
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:02:24 -0800Hi Amy
Regarding the rude world swirling around you: You get the world you see. -AB
My reply:
You get the world you put up with. FYI, we were not taken out in public until we behaved well enough to not disturb other people. My parents care a great deal about that, as do I. I have a dog, and she is not allowed to be outside and bark. If she barks even once (and she's trained not to), I run right out and scoop her up. Why? Because my neighbors shouldn't have their thinking or their sleep or their peaceful enjoyment of their apartments disturbed because I choose to have a pet. -Amy Alkon
In a message dated 11/24/09 3:21:59 PM, andrewbaker77@hotmail.com writes:
Yeah, right, you stayed in your house until you were 21. Never a screaming baby were you in public, or a bitching adolescent. No wonder you're so narcissistic. -ABPS: A suggestion. Before you pen a book about how to change the world, maybe you should go out and see the world.
If you had, you'd realize just how myopic this vision you have of a barklessbabyscreamingless world is that you embrace.
Me again:
Is it bad that I care that I don't interrupt my neighbors' reading? Would the world be a better place if I left my dog outside to bark for hours?
Screamers On A Plane
I have an op-ed in Tuesday's LA Times. An excerpt:
BY AMY ALKON -- A little late in making those Thanksgiving flight plans? Wondering how you could possibly afford your ticket...that is, without putting a kidney up for sale on Craigslist? Good news! You can get a free flight home on Southwest, plus a $300 travel voucher. Just do what I plan to -- get on a Southwest flight in the next few days, and when it's taking off, shout over and over, "Go, Plane, Go!" and "I want Daddy! I want Daddy!"Pamela Root got both the free flight and the voucher, plus an apology from Southwest, after her 2-year-old kept screaming those things at the top of his little lungs as their San Jose-bound flight was about to take off. In fact, little Adam reportedly screamed so loudly that the safety announcements couldn't be heard, and the pilot turned the plane back to the gate in Amarillo, Texas, where the two were booted off.
Root was appalled when a flight attendant told her something to the effect of "We just can't tolerate that (screaming) for two hours," reported the Mercury News. Root insisted Adam would be "fine once we take off" -- which, in my book, either means "He'll be fine" or "It would be a serious pain in the butt to be stuck in Amarillo another day."
Unbelievably, Root demanded the apology that she eventually got from the airline (shame, shame, Southwest), and hit them up for the cost of diapers and the "portable crib" she says she had to buy for the overnight stay. Even more unbelievably, there's still no word of any apology from Root to the other passengers -- people whose idea of an in-flight bonus is probably more along the lines of a free drink or a passenger in front of them who reclines his seat without turning their laptop into an expensive doorstop.
There is a notion, reflected in numerous blog comments about the incident, that other passengers should "just deal" and "give a kid a break." This notion is wrong. Parents like Root and others who selfishly force the rest of us to pay the cost of their choices in life aren't just bothering us; they're stealing from us. Most people don't see it this way, because what they're stealing isn't a thing we can grab onto, like a wallet. They're stealing our attention, our time, and our peace of mind.
More and more, we're all victims of these many small muggings every day. Our perp doesn't wear a ski mask or carry a gun; he wears Dockers and shouts into his iPhone in the line behind us at Starbucks, streaming his dull life into our brains, never considering for a moment whether our attention belongs to him. These little acts of social thuggery are inconsequential in and of themselves, but they add up -- wearing away at our patience and good nature and making our daily lives feel like one big wrestling smackdown. (piece continues at LAT link)
And I hope you'll buy my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society.
Rudeness Down Under
Talked about my book and the ideas in it on a smart show yesterday night -- in New Zealand! Jim Mora's show on Radio New Zealand. Here's a link to listen. There's an MP3 link for downloads coming, but it's broken right now.
Some Thoughts About Health Care
A blog reader sent me this letter:
Amy:I am not asking for advice, but after reading your blog, I thought I would share my experience concerning doctors and insurance for you to ponder. If the thought of reading a lengthy email is turning your stomach, just skip down to the last four paragraphs where I sum up my thoughts. ; - D
It seems to me that although we like to think that doctors are healers that only have our best interest in mind, the way that we pay doctors has an unusually strong effect on how doctors choose to treat us. It was only after I got on a top-of-the-line insurance program that health problems that I had lived with for most of my 45 years were finally diagnosed. Below are some events that seem to highlight how my insurance affected my treatment thorough the years.
First of all, when I had my first child, I asked my doctor how long I needed to stay in the hospital. He asked how many days my insurance would pay for the stay. I repeated, "How long do I need to stay in the hospital. He also repeated his words. Angrily I said that if I didn't need to be in the hospital, I should go home and not needlessly cost my insurance company money. On the other hand, If there was a problem and I needed to stay, I would stay even if it meant paying out of my own pocket. His advice did not waiver.
After my son was born, I encountered health issue after health issue and I suspected a deeper problem. I had infection after infection and grew increasingly ill. Doctors treated me with antibiotics and told me not to worry. I was involved in an HMO where my primary physician acted as a gatekeeper and the fewest tests resulted in the biggest paychecks. After 7 doctor visits, my health had continued deteriorating and I sought second and third opinions. I even went to a lab and asked them to run tests for me. Unfortunately, that is against the law. (WTF?) Finally, my weight had dropped below 100 lbs. (I am 5'6") and my fatigue was overwhelming. It was becoming a struggle to stand or even breath. I went back to my original doctor and stomped my foot and said that they were going to have to do something or I was going to die. I was finally sent to a specialist where I was diagnosed with a parasitic infection.
Due to continuing health problems, I left employment to be a stay-at-home mom. Because my illness ended up costing more than $5,000, I was a high risk patient (1 year at $5,000 does not make a high risk patient, but 2 years does. Since my son was born the year before, I fell into this category) . Ironically if doctors or the lab had run the tests I requested, the parasitic infection could have been treated with a $6.00 antibiotic rather than a hospital stay because my condition had become so poor. Of course, I am not counting the physical toll it took on my body and the cost to my career and my family because I was not treated promptly. It was 5 1/2 months after initial symptoms of my parasitic infection that treatment began.
As a high risk person, our insurance premiums went up to $1,750 per month. This was 17 years ago. I expect that rates would be close to 3 or 4 times that now.) Our family decided this was not a wise use of our money. At those rates, we could pay for an operation every year and still have money left over. We found insurance with a $5,000 deductible per illness that only cost $750 per month. At 37 years old and weighing 127 lbs, I felt something strange in my brain, like a rubber band popping. Suddenly my world began to spin like a pinwheel. I yelled at my husband to stop the car. I opened the door and fell onto the pavement, so dizzy that I was unable to even lift my head. My husband took me to a small town hospital that was nearby where they simply treated me with a drug to quell the nausea that accompanied the vertigo. The diagnosis - car sickness. I went back to school and had another strange episode in class. Again I went to the hospital. I few tests were run, but I was quickly discharged into the care of my regular physician. This time I was diagnosed with a migraine.
I have since been told that hospitals consider insurance with a high deductible on par with no insurance because they are often not paid by the patient. Hospitals, with their eyes on the bottom line try to get the patient out of the hospital as cheaply as possible.
Finally, I graduated and went to work with full benefits. I had another "spell". Perhaps it was because I arrived by ambulance. Perhaps my symptoms were more dramatic. Perhaps it was simply because I had aged. Perhaps it was because I now had full coverage where the bigger the hospital bill, the bigger the payout - guaranteed, but this time they ran a plethora of tests, $50,000 worth, in fact. Rather than complaining about the tests, I have been thankful. I feel that no stone has been left unturned. Doctor found 2 blood clots in my brain. Unfortunately, doctors had missed the opportunity to treat the clots. The window for treatment had already closed. They also found 2 arteries that had been damaged and atrophied - this was likely evidence of previous strokes. Since my carotid artery was 100% clear and my heart was healthy, they kept searching for a cause. Finally, a likely contributing factor was found. I have a genetic marker that is linked with immune system disorders. - about 95% of the people with the gene are diagnosed with some sort of immune system problem. I wonder how many are like me, who show some signs of an autoimmune disorder but are never diagnosed.
To sum it up, would Universal coverage be a life-saver for people like me, or would it make it harder than ever to get a diagnosis? Left unchecked, I think doctors would abuse hospitalization and diagnostics increase their bills to be the highest they could get out of the payer - whoever that might be. Thus, laws would be put into place restricting diagnostic tests. Now that screening mammograms are recommended starting at age 50, would a young woman who felt a lump be turned away? Would my strokes have been diagnosed sooner or even later?
Personally, although I see a lot of possible problems with Universal health-care, I think it is something we will have to try. I just hope that there is some kind of provision allowing supplemental care. If I feel that I need lab tests or a mammogram, I should be able to get it by paying for it without going through a gatekeeper.
The best thing to get us over our fear of Universal health-care is to look at Universal education. When I do, I see a system that is not perfect, but honorable and great in its own way. It is the great equalizer. It allows children even if they come from impoverished backgrounds to get an education and follow the American dream. Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor are prime examples of this.
Can people really have access to the American dream if they are handicapped by illness? While people contend that there are avenues for health-care even for the poor, a current study showed a 90% increase in the death rate for uninsured accident victims from ages 18 to 35. My experience indicated that doctors are not colorblind when they treat patients. They see green.
Thanks for reading,
Jen, Lubbock, TX
My reply:
Dear Jen,
I'm so sorry for what you went through, but I'm also sorry to say I think you're naive to think you'd get a better standard of care through government-provided health insurance.I, too, had a doctor I didn't get satisfactory care though. I changed doctors and would have kept changing doctors until I found one that was satisfactory. I did my homework and managed to find an excellent doctor in my HMO. She actually had her nurse call me because I hadn't been in recently enough, and she wants to give me a physical.
I also was very careful in choosing my HMO, Kaiser Permanente. They don't raise prices on you beyond the standard for your age if you develop some illness. I looked at that as a primary reason to choose them, in addition to their standard of care, when I picked a company when I was in my 20s.
There have been times when I've been denied certain things, and I've always prevailed on them, but it took a little work in some cases.
It's important to remember that there isn't a bottomless pit of money for your health care or anyone's -- somebody has to pay for it. The idea that the government will not ration care...well, I think that's pie in the sky thinking. Look to Britain and Canada. Best, -Amy
Jen writes back:
Amy, I do agree that health care will be rationed, but I contend that it already is. I don't think that my care would have been any better, but I imagine it would not have been any worse than what I was getting before I went on a full coverage plan. And if I become to ill to work, I will be on my own for insurance. For those that lose insurance coverage and have a pre-existing condition, it is unaffordable. That is why I think we also need to be able to pay for things ourselves. I don't think any Universal coverage would have paid to screen me for a stroke at age 37, especially since I had no risk factors.My first HMO was chosen by my employer. When I left employment, I was no longer eligible for the same insurance and had a pre-existing condition. Portability would be nice.
Perhaps the only cure is to get in with a good government plan like I finally do have. Just pray that I can keep working.-Jen
A few bits from my reply:
George Bush, who I wasn't a big fan of for a number of reasons, tried to untie health care from employment. I would have kept my Kaiser insurance even if I'd gotten a corporate job. I never got one, but I thought that out.Rationing is sure to be worse under government care.
Also, there's this from below: "If I feel that I need lab tests or a mammogram, I should be able to get it by paying for it without going through a gatekeeper."
You can get lab tests or a mammogram by paying for them. Why do you think you cannot?
When health care is "free," that's when you'll have a problem.
Also, I work very hard for what I earn -- why should my earnings go to subsidize others' health care? Why should my earnings belong to you? Why should parents not pay for their children's education (except for the very, very poor), and have only as many children as they can afford to educate?-Amy
On Basketball And Boobs And The Biggest Dick In The World
Nancy Rommelmann should check with me before she posts blog items, because I find her writing and thinking irresistible. This is a problem if I'm on deadline, as I am today, because I drop what I'm doing and go read her. Loved this piece she blogged on Sunday. An excerpt from the dick portion, but go read the whole thing:
In 1988, I still believed my ticket to stardom would arrive in a big car soon after I arrived in Los Angeles. It did not. Nor was it in the Porsche 911 I found myself stepping into one evening, a car that belonged to a man I was told had the biggest dick in the world. Though he told me this himself, I'd first heard it from my sister-in-law. Sandra was a northern Italian girl with Gina Lollobrigida curls and a gap between her front teeth. She and my brother married for love, but she also needed a green card and, well, she often strayed. She was more attentive to my wanting to be an actress, and told me she'd met a man--let's call him Hal--who was casting a film. He'd liked her look and asked her to audition, which she had, though not because she an actress and or had any ambitions to act. Then why did she audition? Because she was a pretty twenty-five-year-old to whom someone said, "I want you in my movie." While this might cause someone to scratch her head in Schenectady, in Hollywood, it's axiomatic that you go.
Understanding Islam
"Religion of peace"? Not exactly. Although there are Muslims who don't practice their religion as a form of violence, as it's directed by the Quran, which is meant to be taken literally, that's exactly what it is.
There's a lot of creepy stuff in the Bible (and I'm no fan of the evidence-free belief in god of any stripe), but you don't see the Christians seriously considering stoning their neighbors for adultery or for wearing more than one fabric (although some do, most vilely, use the Bible as an excuse to discriminate against and even hate gays).
Here are a few words on the true nature of Islam, from American Thinker:
The Islamic worldview divides the world into two spheres: the non-Islamic world is the dar al-harb, or the "house of war," and the Islamic world is the dar al-Islam, the "house of peace." From the Muslim perspective, "peace" is achieved only once the enemy has been conquered and subordinated to Islam.Throughout Islam's imperial reign, no difference has existed between civil law and religious law, or sharia. The distinction between civil and religious law is a Christian, not an Islamic, idea. "Secular society" simply does not exist with Islam properly understood. Apostasy is punishable by death within the Islamic code. Secular rulers in Muslim countries during the twentieth century were a historic aberration, a result of British colonialism. Many, like the Shah of Iran and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, met unhappy ends at the hands of the devout.
A special condition called dhimmitude exists within the Islamic legal code for groups of non-Muslims conquered by Islamic forces who refuse to convert. Some contemporary observers view dhimmitude as an example of Muslim "tolerance," but the truth is quite the opposite; dhimmitude is a subordinate condition. The dhimmi was not allowed to attempt to convert Muslims to his religion, his house of worship was not allowed to be more conspicuous than a mosque, he was not allowed to hold political office, and he was required to pay a special tax.
(It is for these reasons that the existence of Israel is particularly grating to Muslims. Israel exists within what has historically been the dar al-Islam, but modern Israel is not in a condition of dhimmitude subservient to Muslim political authority).
Today's Western elites who think that Islamic militants do not represent "true Islam" are dangerously wrong. From the very beginning of the Islamic faith, the good Muslim, following the example of Mohammed, has been called to do battle against unbelievers, reject secularism, and reject any notion of the equality of faiths. In his 1998 manifesto "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders," Osama bin Laden quoted the Qur'anic injunction to "fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them" and also cited Mohammed's belief that "I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshiped." Osama then concluded that "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." (Even if only 10% of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims heed this call, enemy strength still amounts to 140 million).
Donald Collins on Islam from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
As a social liberal but one who believes in reportorial factualness, I was of course shocked at the council's refusal. I hope it will reconsider. However, I suggest, on the basis of common humanity and common sense -- which have always been qualities that bring out the best in Americans of all races, creeds and colors -- that Americans better take a hard look at this fanatical situation.First, the plain truth: People who believe in Islam have adopted a faith born in medieval times, a religion certainly in part born in violence, which has not evolved in any substantial way since its inception. Islam's benign adherents, who represent that religion's majority, are, I am sure, as shocked as we all are at the dastardly acts of those such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter.
However, the record of native-born Muslims in and Muslim immigrants to Europe and the U.S. is far from reassuring. As with all entrants into the U.S., we should be extremely cautious about importing unneeded millions of new migrants of any faith or race -- just as we certainly should not ever be guilty of kowtowing to the fanatical wishes of the Islamic fundamentalists to not publish images of Allah in cartoon form so as to avoid being attacked by those same jihad types.
You may recall my dismay at the behavior of my university, Yale, when the Yale University Press, after consultations with Muslim clerics, diplomats and counterterrorism officials, canceled the scheduled publication in an academic work of 12 cartoons spoofing Muhammad. The cartoons had appeared in a Danish newspaper four years earlier, sparking Muslim protests that resulted in riots and more than 100 deaths.
We had better begin to recognize the uncomfortable truth that Islam just isn't another religion that benignly promotes peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, and certainly not toward women in most Middle East countries.
Here's an explanation of the passages in Major "Allahu Akbar!" Hasan's talk. A little long, the guy at the beginning is a little off-putting, but slide the cursor down to around the 19:32 mark for "The Verse of the Sword" and more:
A Q&A from "Answering Muslims," the site the video is from.
More on "the religion of peace" at thereligionofpeace.com. Solutions, anyone? I'm at a loss.
Burka Barbie!
From the Daily Mail, among the 500 Barbies on sale in a charity auction are a few Barbies in Burkhas:
Makers Mattel are backing the exhibition which is the work of Italian designer Eliana Lorena.
The good stuff is below the article, in the comments:
will burka barbie not be allowed out of the toybox without a chaperone if action man is in the room? what happens if a brother and sister both want to play with their dolls at the same time?
- Barbara, Endangered England
Another commenter suggested a FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) Barbie. Here's yet another:
Mmm that looks fun to play with! And does she have to sit 3 rows back from Ken when put back in the cupboard?
- nikki, sussex
And then, my contribution:
Suicide bomb vest sold separately!(All the better to blow up Iraqi women and children waiting in a U.N. food line, like some burka-clad "religion of peace"-following lady did not too long ago.)
Unbelievable Abuse Of Power
John Murtha, dictator:
Fox & Friends
I'll be on Fox & Friends Sunday morning (around 6:50 am, PST, I think) to comment on holiday rudeness, in connection with my new book, I See Rude People
Pssst! can somebody do me a wee favor and record it? I think I'm recording it, but the time seems wrong, and I want to make sure I have it. Probably won't need your recording, but just in case!
Vote Your Melanin!
Apparently, all black people are supposed to vote alike. Who does this icky thinking come from? None other than Jesse Jackson, who went after Alabama Congressman Artur Davis as a race traitor for going against the health care bill. From the WSJ:
"We even have blacks voting against the health-care bill," said Mr. Jackson. "You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man."Mr. Davis is running for governor in a state that John McCain won last year, and his vote was surely influenced by the reality that Alabamans aren't the biggest fans of ObamaCare. The Congressmen, to his credit, took the high ground in response to Mr. Jackson's low blow. "One of the reasons that I like and admire Rev. Jesse Jackson is that 21 years ago he inspired the idea that a black politician would not be judged simply as a black leader," he said in a statement referencing Mr. Jackson's 1988 Presidential bid. "The best way to honor Rev. Jackson's legacy is to decline to engage in an argument with him that begins and ends with race."
Psssst! Jesse...there are a number of conservatives out there who happen to be...rather dark-skinned...Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter.
I would say the real race traitor is a guy like Jackson who expects less from black people simply because they're black (remember Jesse Jackson muttering about Obama that he wanted to "cut his nuts off," apparently in response to Obama's telling black fathers to man up). Of course, Jesse Jackson's living has always depended on divisiveness, or maintaining the idea of it, between blacks and whites. And then, as Patterico notes, it's hard for a guy to stigmatize the tragic number of out-of-wedlock births in the black community when he himself is the baby-daddy of some single mother's child.
Does anybody call white congressmen race traitors for voting the way the Black Caucus recommends on some issue? Or, are they simply congressmen voting their conscience (I know, it's, well, optimistic to say that of many politicians) or the way the voters in their district would prefer?
Of course, in the spirit of fairness, it isn't just the black people who play the race card. Here's Barbara Boxer getting reamed by Black Chamber Of Commerce CEO Harry Alford a few months back. She twitters on for a while, but he sure brings it home at the end:
ACORN And The Underage Sex Trafficking Project
International sex trafficking project in the works? We're ACORN, how can we help you? From BigGovernment. Part One:
Part Two:
Here's how this was reported by the LA Times' James Rainey. reason's cavanaugh writes:
Back when the still-unfolding ACORN hidden camera story started breaking, Rainey condemned the conservative media's unseemly race to the bottom. If he had been content merely to bury all signs of life under the reliably heavy snowdrifts of his prose (sample: "No legitimate news organization can claim editorial integrity if it merely regurgitates information from political activists without subjecting the material to serious scrutiny"), Rainey would have been OK. Sadly, in his zeal to exonerate ACORN, Rainey uncritically regurgitated some self-exculpatory quotes from local ACORN employee Lavelle Stewart, who asserted that she had sent Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe away after they claimed to be, respectively, a prostitute trafficking in underage sex slaves and a pimp with congressional aspirations.
Whoopsy! Film at 11!
The Price Of A Ham Sandwich Has Also Gone Up
Like everything else, education costs more, especially in California. The LA Times blogs that students are protesting over increases in the costs of a UC education:
A University of California Board of Regents committee today approved a series of controversial increases in student fees that, if passed by the full board, will raise UC undergraduate education costs by more than $2,500, or 32%, in two steps by fall 2010.The finance committee vote is expected to be endorsed by the full Board of Regents on Thursday. The two-day meeting is being held at UCLA, where today's session has been marked by raucous protests with at least 14 arrests.
The first step of the fee hike, costing undergraduates an additional $585, will take effect in January. Next fall, students will see another $1,344 increase, bringing the UC education fees to $10,302, along with about $1,000 in campus-based charges. That does not include room, board and books, which can add another $16,000.
Times are tough. Education is already ENORMOUSLY subsidized. If you tax Californians any more the state's going to break off and fall into the ocean.
I just spoke at an inner-city high school the other day, and told them about Santa Monica College, an excellent school a really smart ex-assistant of mine attended. Annual tuition right now? $1732. That assistant went there, got great grades, and went on to a full scholarship to Northwestern.
My good friend Barb Oakley wanted to become a linguist and her parents wouldn't pay for her to go to college to do that. She went into the army, studied linguistics, and became a translator on a Russian Trawler in the Bering Sea. She later got her Ph.D. and became an engineering professor.
The thing is, not everybody should go to college. I think far too many people do. Some people would be better off going to technical school. And some people can learn without a professor cracking a whip over them. Me, for example. I study all the time -- read books and journals and go to conferences. Not for a grade or a degree, but because I'm interested, and because I need to know things to write things worth reading.
If you want a higher education, you just might have to pay for it. Maybe if you do, you'll value it, and really learn something, instead of spending four years doing jello shots off some girl's cleavage.
Hot Off Hot Air
Did a great half hour radio show about my book and rudeness in general yesterday, with Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, who asked great questions, which made for what I think is a very interesting piece. Here's a link to the piece on Hot Air, and here's the show below. (To listen to just my segment, slide the little line to the 30 minute mark -- I came on 30 minutes in.)
They're Calling It "The Botax"
Going in for new boobs and the like? The government is aiming to lift and separate you from your money -- taxing cosmetic surgery in the health care "reform" bill. From law prof William A. Jacobson, blogging at Legal Insurrection:
Harry Reid and his Democratic band of friends want to impose a 5% excise tax on all elective cosmetic surgeries (those which are not needed to repair deformaties or injuries caused by an accident or disfiguring disease). It's all in Section 9017 of Harry Reid's 2,074 page monstrosity released tonight:There is hereby imposed on any cosmetic surgery and medical procedure a tax equal to 5 percent of the amount paid for such procedure (determined without regard to this section), whether paid by insurance or otherwise.To where does the health care bill direct you for the definition of "cosmetic surgery"? To Section 213(d)(9)(B) of the IRS Code:
(B) Cosmetic surgery defined.-- For purposes of this paragraph, the term "cosmetic surgery" means any procedure which is directed at improving the patient's appearance and does not meaningfully promote the proper function of the body or prevent or treat illness or disease.That's 5% which falls mostly on women, who make up the bulk of cosmetic surgeries. Add 5% to every breast enlargement, nose job, face lift, tummy tuck, and liposuction.
But, no, Obama's not going to tax anybody making less than $250K -- not unless they have an ugly nose, a flat chest, or a lot of crow's feet.
via Insty
The Mammogram Controversy
WaPo overview here.
Great science-based take on it from cancer surgeon David Gorski over at Science Based Medicine. An excerpt:
First and foremost, what matters is the woman being screened, what she values, and what her tolerance is for paying the price of screening at an earlier age, such as a high risk for overdiagnosis, excessive biopsies, and overtreatment in order to detect cancer earlier versus a relatively low probability of avoiding death from breast cancer as a result of undergoing regular screening. The next level is the public health policy level, where we as a society have to decide what tradeoffs we're willing to make to save a life that otherwise would have been lost to breast cancer. Although screening programs and recommendations should be based on the best science we currently have, deciding upon the actual cutoffs regarding who is and is not going to be recommended to undergo screening and how often women should be screened unavoidably involves value judgments by those being screened, physicians recommending screening, and society at large.
Gorski calls for better tests, better imaging technology, to more accurately assess a woman's true risk. I second that. Until then, we have what we have.
My take on it? Welcome to Obamacare! This is only a preview.
There are costs to overscreening -- unnecessary biopsies and treatment -- and then there are costs to underscreening...like death.
Hmm...needle in the boob...or being eaten for eternity by worms?
Bring on that needle!
Today's Blog Items Coming Soon!
Burning candle at both ends and the middle...last night, I went to blog, but was so tired, I felt like somebody'd hit me over the head with a frying pan, and I instead went to bed for a whole eight hours -- for a change.
Feel free to discuss whatever you want below until I can get something up.
Here's the sort of thing I've been doing instead of sleeping -- from the Toronto Star interview by Nancy White. Laurie Pike also posted a wonderful review on Los Angeles magazine's blog.
My Dr. Phil episode airs tomorrow. Check your local listings, as they say. Much more in the works!
Tonight, I'll be talking about my book live on NBC California digital stations on TV, plus streamed over the Internet, on NBC's Fred Roggin's "The Filter." Around 7:43 or 7:45 PST. From Jared, the producer:
From anywhere in the world, The Filter streams live at 7:30-8:00 pm Pacific.
I'm also on the Filter every week, usually debating (and remorselessly teasing) KABC host Leo Terrell, the "fair-minded civil rights attorney." Leo is very left. I joke that he thinks there's a big pot of money to pay for everything for everybody sitting on every street corner.
Really cool guys, Adam and Clay, at KUOO radio -- interview clip here...Adam really liked my book!
I also spoke yesterday morning to the kids at the inner-city school. Thanks so much for all your suggestions. The teacher told me that of the 2,000 who come into the school in a class, 40 percent will end up graduating. It's horribly tragic.
Also, regarding teen pregnancy, he told me about two 15-year-olds at the school who just became parents -- continuing the cycle.
Dump Her, Get Dumped In Prison
Lori Pilger, on journalstar.com, tells the story of a man, unwittingly entrapped by a vengeful ex into sex with a girl who turned out to be a minor.
Sickeningly, he just got eight to 15 years in prison -- the price of being fooled plus having a past criminal record for a previous sexual assault. And yes, that sounds bad, but he wasn't on trial for his prior behavior here. Meanwhile, the vengeful ex got just a year in jail for plotting and bringing off the crime. Pilger writes:
Jennifer Tomka, his attorney, said Ticnor believed at the time the girl was 18 and that what he was doing was legal. She argued for probation, saying Ticnor was "somewhat of a pawn in Crystal Hoover's game."In July, County Judge Gale Pokorny sentenced Hoover to a year in jail -- the most he could for contributing to the delinquency of a minor -- for her part in the crime.
Pokorny said Hoover apparently devised a plan to get back at Ticnor, an old boyfriend who had lost interest in her.Hoover planned to entice him by setting up sex with a troubled 15-year-old girl to whom she'd given prescription drugs, Pokorny said.
Investigators said she introduced the girl to Ticnor and encouraged her to send revealing pictures of herself to him.
Eventually, the three went to Bluestem Lake where, the girl told them, she felt manipulated and pressured to have sex.
Thanks, Walter Olson
The ME! ME! ME! Generation, Top Down
At root of manners is empathy, and at root of empathy is recognizing that there are other people in the world. Because of my book on rudeness, I'm talking about this a lot, and I was struck by a piece by the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby on the president. An excerpt:
PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. But he did appear by video, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was "a painful barrier between family and friends" that symbolized "a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being." He referred to "tyranny," but never identified the tyrants -- he never uttered the words "Soviet Union" or "communism," for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan -- or even Mikhail Gorbachev.He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.
"Few would have foreseen," declared the president, "that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.
Identity politics even at the Berlin wall? Couldn't we have some identity politics version of "alternate side of street parking rules are suspended" (a phrase I used to hear on the radio when I lived in NYC) when the president is speaking on international issues? Please? Please?
As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for "Ich bin ein Berliner," still less another "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat. Obama couldn't be troubled to visit Berlin to commemorate a momentous milestone in the history of human liberty. But he was glad to explain to those who were there why reflections on that milestone should inspire appreciation for the self-made "destiny" of his own rise to power.Was there ever a president as deeply enamored of himself as Barack Obama?
Beyond the president, I see a lot of kids being raised as if they're the only ones who matter. Its bad enough to experience these willful brats at 8; it's for sure not going to be fun to be around them at 25 or 35.
Black (And Blue) Friday
I consider it the most hideous day of the year -- the day when people race to the stores to scream, yell, and shove their way to a few dollars in savings (that is, until the credit card bill comes, at 26 or so percent interest).
I talked to Ron, the cool former Circuit City and Best Buy manager who now manages my local Staples, for his advice on how Black Friday can be less of a nightmare. I particularly liked his simple but right-on suggestion:
"If you aren't patient, stay home."
This both describes me and how I've spent Black Friday every year of my life. I highly recommend it.
Here, allow me to help with a few great gifts you can shop for from your easy chair:
1. I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society2. I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
3. I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
4. Well, you get the idea...
...and then there's the book I bought for my favorite 9-year-old boy: DK Space Encyclopedia
I've been in turbo frugality mode this year, thanks to all the newspapers falling off the face of the earth, but my neighbors' 9-year-old son and Sergeant Heather's 5-year-old son loved a simple birthday gift I got for each: A groovy-colored flashlight so they can make shadow animals.
Speaking of Sergeant Heather, she would advise you to give the gift of safety -- also available from the comfort of your home: keychain-hanging pepper spray.
And, in case anyone new around here is wondering, as I commented on Tuesday, I don't have children, and I will never have any children -- unless somebody drops one off on my porch.
Today's "I See Rude People" Quote
A sorta daily feature. This is from Chapter Two of my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society:
Yes, I'm aware that you have mascara, liquid eyeliner, and five shades of gray eyeshadow to apply. But, see that guy in the Ford Focus behind you? He needs to turn left, too.
My book will be published November 27 (Amazon's Nov. 1/2 is incorrect), but copies are available on Amazon now. Order yours today!
Hey, GM, We Aren't Drooling Morons!
Lovely. GM is going to use government loans to...pay back government loans! From AP/MSNBC:
GM lost $1.2 billion for the third quarter -- far less than the $6 billion it lost in the first three months of the year, before GM was transformed by a stay in bankruptcy protection. The company credited a sharp reduction in debt and sales of new models.In what it called a sign of progress, GM also pledged to start paying back $6.7 billion in U.S. loans. But the money will come from a contingency account full of government cash, leading critics to question just how healthy the automaker really is.
My Health Care Doesn't Need "Reform," Thanks!
I got a call yesterday, in the middle of a really crazy day. As you'll read in my book, my friends all know not to call me on my deadline days, so I'm always surprised when my phone rings on a Monday or a Tuesday. Well, this was a pleasant surprise. It was a nurse from Kaiser, my HMO, summoning me in to see my doctor. I've been so crazed on the book, I haven't had a physical or routine tests for a bit too long.
Yes, my doctor called me to get me to come in. Kaiser Permanente. Had it since my early 20s, they don't kick you out once you're in, reasonable rates that stay standard if you get in and pay in when you're healthy, like I did.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like my rates will be reasonable for long. Here's a New York Post piece by Sally Pipes on the cost of health care "reform":
Congress seems hell-bent on making life harder for ordinary New Yorkers. Several recent reports confirm this. A recent analysis done by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the large insurer Wellpoint and consulting firm Oliver Wyman (using WellPoint's membership data) showed that an average New York family with two children covered by a basic individual-market policy would see its premiums rise 82 percent under Sen. Harry Reid's version of the bill, which includes new excise taxes on insurers, drug companies and medical-device firms, which would all be passed on to consumers.(It'd be even worse in other states: A 25-year-old man in Kentucky, for instance, would see his monthly premium rise from $61 to $181 -- nearly a threefold jump.)
New York's small businesses would fare somewhat better. Premiums for a New York City-based firm with eight employees would rise 6 percent if the reform plan takes root.
A big part of that 6 percent hike would come from the Senate's plan to tax so-called "Cadillac" high-cost insurance plans. Because insurance in New York is already so expensive, the tax would hit many workers' policies. By 2014, New Yorkers would be forking over $33 million to the federal government in "Cadillac" taxes alone.
Democrats claim that government subsidies would help families adjust to the higher cost of insurance. But those subsidies won't offset many people's hikes. For example, premiums for a two-child family with annual income of $66,150 would still go up 24 percent under the Senate's plan -- after the subsidy is taken into account. That's an extra $80 a month.
It's easy to understand how "reform" will raise health costs -- by imposing onerous new regulations on insurance. For instance, reforms passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate would mandate that all policies cover such benefits as pediatric dental services and maternity coverage -- even if you don't want such coverage. The reform package's new minimum-benefit requirements alone would add $245 a month to the average New York family's premium.
I will never have a baby, not unless somebody drops one off on my porch. I do have to pay for maternity coverage through Kaiser, which is utterly ridiculous. (I should be able to opt out -- to not have that covered.) To have more people have more ridiculous coverage is, well, ridiculous -- and idiotic.
Seven Salient Facts About Major Hasan
Most have already been brought out here (by me or by people commenting here), but the piece at Slate by Hitchens is worth reading. An excerpt from Hitchens' analysis following his list:
What about the emphasis on Hasan's supposedly knife-edge mental state? Well, even supposing it to have been precarious, it can hardly have been improved by immersion in the rantings of Anwar al-Awlaki. I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim. A paranoid or depressive person--of whom we have many millions in our midst--does not have to end up screaming religious slogans while butchering his fellow creatures. But a paranoid or depressive person who is in regular touch with a jihadist "spiritual leader" is presented with a ready-made script that offers him paradise in exchange for homicide.All right, then, wasn't the gallant major also subject to ill treatment and even abuse? Only up to a point, when you consider that his parents had been given refuge from Palestine and enabled to build a life here, that he himself had knowingly joined an all-volunteer army, that he had been promoted (it seems rather faster and higher than his true abilities warranted) and allowed on the job to vent extremely noxious opinions about members of other faiths, to say nothing about his adopted country. No doubt he came in for a taunt or two, but if you want to avoid that, then don't express contempt for your fellow soldiers while in uniform. Black Americans used to be segregated. Jewish recruits were mercilessly hazed, as were men or women who looked as if they might be gay. Did any of them ever come up with an act of mass murder as a response? Did any of them ever offer a black or Jewish or gay ideology in justification of it? Would they have earned sympathy and understanding if they had?
Today's "I See Rude People" Quote
Here's a little snack from my (soon-to-be-published but now shipping from Amazon!) book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society:
Of course, in recent years, air travel has become like flying below Greyhound -- in the baggage compartment under the bus. There are those who still find coach seats adequately roomy; mainly small-boned children under eight, and armless, legless midgets. Better hope you have one of the latter seated next to you, and not some 300-lb man who wordlessly annexes half of your seat like he's Germany and you're Poland.
Unfortunately, the Amazon page has a mistake or two -- the worst being the bit saying that my book was published Nov. 1 or 2, depending on the edition...which makes it look like it came out a few weeks ago and nobody bought it or cared.
Although it started shipping in the middle of last week, and some stores may have it already, the official pub date and in-stores date is November 27. (Somebody at my publisher entered Nov. 1/2 date in error and sent it off to Amazon -- of course, on the weekend when my book and I were mentioned in The New York Times!)
Saturday/Sunday blog item with what rudenesses make people's blood boil is here.
How To Raise A Nation Of Fast-Food Workers
Forget "No Child Left Behind." We're apparently trying for "All Children Left Behind."
Wendy McElroy writes on ifeminists about how the P.C. approach to education is leading to both innumeracy and illiteracy. For example, children studying the latest version of "new math" are being primed for jobs where all they have to do is push the buttons on an electronic cash register:
"A. If math were a color, it would be __, because __. B. If it were a food, it would be __, because __. C. If it were weather, it would be __, because __."So read three questions in a fifth grade worksheet that represents the New-New or Whole Math being taught in schools across the U.S. Children write essays about math and use artwork to portray it, yet they do not necessarily learn the basic skills, such as algebra, that open doors to careers in engineering and other hard sciences. From kindergarten, children are encouraged to use calculators and computers to solve the simplest problems -- e.g. divide 200 by 2 -- rather than learning basic skills like addition and multiplication.
In October 1999, the U.S. Department of Education released a report to 16,000 school districts endorsing the use of New-New Math. A Jan. 4 editorial in the Wall Street Journal reported, "Within weeks of the Education Department findings, 200 mathematicians and scientists, including four Nobel Prize recipients and two winners of a prestigious math prize, the Fields Medal, published a letter in the Washington Post deploring the reforms."
The Open Letter to U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley occasioned a congressional hearing. The main concern expressed by experts and parents is that the public school system is producing children who are innumerate as well as illiterate. As Frank B. Allen, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Elmhurst College explains, "[S]tudents must know the mathematics before they can apply it.... To expect them to learn mathematics in the process of applying it is preposterous. It is like trying to teach people to play water polo before they know how to swim."
This is a valid concern, but my focus is a bit different. New-New Math is based on an ideological approach that is profoundly anti-individual. One of the ideas upon which this philosophy of education is based is 'constructivism' -- the notion that learning is discovered, not taught. Translated into the reality of classrooms, this means that grade school children discover the rules of multiplication and subtraction by themselves without the tyranny of "teacher-imposed rules." The emphasis is on the process rather than upon skills or accurate knowledge.
How is this anti-individual? It restricts, rather than encourages, a child's ability to rise as high as his or her merit. Studies, such as the one conducted by Wayne State University Math Professor, Gregory F. Bachelis, reveal the obstacles that New-New Math has placed in front of students who aspire to higher education. Namely, students are trying to take college placement tests without the benefit of basic math skills like algebra and geometry.
Oopsy!
Put On Your Red Wig
I'm doing one of my volunteer talks at the high school on Wednesday -- "WIT: What It Takes" -- my program to demystify "making it" for "at-risk" kids.
This time, though, I'm talking to a tenth grade class in which a number or many of the children read...get this...at a first, second or third grade level.
Tragic, huh?
My usual talk is basically about how pulling a job or career together is a matter of small steps and hard work, and then telling girls why they need to avoid having babies as single mothers, and for boys, why they need to avoid knocking girls up.
But, this time, I guess I'll need to talk about why it's essential to improve reading skills, and how they might go about it (including resources/people to turn to). I'm guessing nobody tells them why they need to read, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I found this story I will probably tell them, about a man who learned to read at 98, and who co-authored a book at 102. (Thanks - corrected the age!)
Here's another like that.
I'm going to talk to the teacher early in the week to find out what their job/career prospects could possibly be, and what they think about reading and more, but I wanted to ask you all for some thoughts and suggestions.
"Two Rudes Don't Make A Polite"?
(*Sunday blog item posted directly below this one with a Saturday date...leaving this up today for people who come from the NYT link.)
I think that quaint saying above was from Emily Post's granddaughter. She said it to Douglas Quenqua, the New York Times reporter who included me in their Sunday Styles section feature on punishing the rude after an editor there heard about my upcoming book on rudeness (link to Psychology Today serialization of it here).
Actually, I'm all for that sort of thinking -- at first. "Two rudes don't make a polite!" usually applies quite nicely to ordinary people who don't want to be rude, but who just aren't being "mindful."
If one of those people is barking into their phone, you just say, "Mind keeping it down?" and they'll probably get all sheepish, apologize, and pipe down or go outside and take their call. I say that all the time, and plenty of people are very nice and apologetic in response...and I thank them for that.
But, as Quenqua writes in the piece:
"There are people in this world who just don't care about you or anyone else," said Ms. Alkon, the author of "I See Rude People" (McGraw-Hill Companies) coming out this month. "They are going to inflict themselves on you, and the only way to stop them is to show them there's a cost."Ms. Alkon often posts the personal information shared by loud cellphone talkers on her blog, where they will get calls from her fans.
For the flagrantly rude who refuse to stop publicly shouting into their mobile binkies, here's a question: "Why do you think our attention belongs to you?"
These people are stealing from the rest of us, but we don't recognize it because it's not something tangible like a TV or a wallet. They're stealing our attention, our time, our peace of mind, a good night's sleep, and other stuff that's valuable but hard or impossible to hold or measure. When this happens all day, every day, in lots of small ways, life can start to feel like one big wrestling smackdown...and that's not okay.
As I write in my book, the underlying problem is that we now live societies that are too big for our brains (there are details on this in the first two chapters). We have this very old psychology, one that evolved when prehistoric humans lived in small tribes, where everybody knew everybody.
People behave well around people they know -- they have to. If that's your neighbor driving behind you, you're for sure not going to flip him the bird or tomorrow morning, you're likely to find a replica of Mount Whitney in dog poo on your front stoop.
Around strangers, anything goes, because you have no continuing relationship with them. Since most of us these days live in vast strangeropolises, if we're so inclined, we can be rude as we want and get away with it. All day, every day, over and over and over again.
Cell phone shouters are just the most prevalent type of rudesters these days. Rude drivers are everywhere -- pulling up just far enough at some busy intersection so they can turn before the light turns red, but no one else can. There are parents who take their children to adult places and let them try to crack plate glass with their screams. I cover all of these in my book -- along with people I like to say are "in the business of being rude," like telemarketers.
Know why we all get telemarketing calls? Because, instead of sending a letter you can open at your leisure, telemarketers make lots more money by stealing your time and hijacking a phone line you pay for. I don't know about you, but I have a phone line to talk to my friends, family, my editor and my boyfriend -- not to ramp up profits at somebody's carpet cleaning business.
As I do with cell phone rudesters and other practitioners of social thuggery, I impose a cost on telemarketers. When I get a telemarking call, I don't toy with the person on the phone. I figure out the company whose product they're calling about, find a honcho at the company, track down his home number and call him at home and chew him out for calling me at home. And then, I invoice him for use of my time and my phone line...and get him to pay me!
If only more people would do this, we'd price these creeps right out of "the business of being rude."
(For those who aren't in up for the detective work and interventive aspects of my telemarketing deterrent above, I suggest doing what one of my regular commenters does -- send those carpet cleaners to the closest office of the Attorney General, state or federal, right down to the correct floor number.)
And finally, a question:
What sort of rudeness really makes your blood boil, and what, if anything, do you do about it?
A note: Please go on the Times site and e-mail the article to your friends you think might be interested in it. The most e-mailed articles are the ones that crawl up the most-read list!
Back To The Echo Chamber!
Got this comment and another like it on my blog item above about the Times piece on my book:
I came here from the New York Times link, but now that I see that you're another of the right-wing nuts that abound lately, I'll take my leave.Posted by: Ev at November 14, 2009 10:41 PM
My response:
"I came here from the New York Times link, but now that I see that you're another of the right-wing nuts that abound lately, I'll take my leave."Actually, I'm not so easy to pigeonhole. Not a Republican, not a Democrat. No fan of Bush, no fan of Obama. Atheist. Fiscal conservative. Small "l" libertarian. "Personal responsibilitarian."
Oh, and forgot one: not popular with people who leap to conclusions about other people's politics, and who only feel comfortable in an echo chamber.
A pity you immediately turned tail. We like good debate around here. There are all stripes here in my comments section. Christians, atheists, an Orthodox Jew from Israel, men's movement guys, feminists, Democrats, Republicans, and libertarians (and Libertarians). Does debate scare you?
Posted by: Amy Alkon at November 14, 2009 11:02 PM
lujlp bats cleanup:
oh please EVnoone shows up to a weblog only to anounce they are leaving
If you were truly planing on never coming back after reading just one post about cell phones and telemarketers and divining political persuasion from that one compliant you wouldnt have written anythig at all youd have simply closed your browser
Posted by: lujlp at November 15, 2009 12:04 AM
Why He Stopped Believing
Confessions of a former missionary -- scroll down to read the book, printed on his site.
The myth of individual faithAs a believer I was reluctant to admit that my decision to follow Christ was anyone's but my own. While studying French in Belgium prior to our mission work in Africa, I chafed at my French teacher's suggestion that Charlene and I were merely following in our parents' footsteps in choosing the evangelical Christian faith and becoming missionaries.
...Accident of birth, benefit of doubt (ABBOD)
Several years ago one of my sisters wondered aloud whether she would have been a Christian if she had grown up in a non-Christian country to non-Christian parents. This question, one that had earlier come to my mind, had occasionally given me pause during my years as a believer.
Looking back now as a nonbeliever, I am not sure why I was only mildly troubled by the likelihood that I was a Christian (rather than, for example, a Muslim or a Hindu) because my family and society had influenced me to accept Christianity (rather than Islam or Hinduism). Over time I began to realize that my tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to the religion of my parents was no different from the tendency of individuals from other lands and other faiths to give the benefit of the doubt to the religion of their parents.
I call this tendency the Accident of Birth, Benefit of Doubt (ABBOD) principle. I will have more to say concerning this factor in chapter 5. For now I note that I consider this to be one of the most important ingredients for maintaining a religion, whether or not the religion is true.
...Why I Hesitated to Examine my Faith Critically
In virtually every domain we are well served to treat unusual or outlandish claims skeptically. If we hear on the radio that a new diet pill will allow us to shed 50 pounds with no effort, we would be remiss not to investigate what studies have been done to test and approve this new miracle drug before pulling out our credit card. It might turn out that the claims are true, but until an independent scientific study has been conducted, we risk losing our money, time, and possibly health in pursuit of an ineffective or harmful product. Likewise, if a used car salesperson offers us a deal that sounds too good to be true, we had best hire an independent mechanic to inspect it before making the purchase.
As an evangelical Christian I was encouraged to think critically about my beliefs and the beliefs of others as long as I restricted my critical thinking to a biblical framework.
Why We Should Start Electing Smart People
Because here's the sort of thing dumb people do. From a NYT piece by John Carney:
Let's start with the credit card rate freeze. The rising rates charged by issuing banks that inspired Mr. Dodd's legislation are themselves the unintended consequence of an earlier attempt to assist the consumer. Back in May, Congress passed a law requiring banks to give customers a 45-day notification before raising rates. To give banks time to adjust to the new rules, Congress decided not to put that provision into effect until February.So what happened next? Banks rushed to raise rates before the law takes effect. Many customers who may not have had their rates raised until 2010 -- or perhaps not at all, if the economy continues to improve -- found themselves paying higher rates even though they had not missed any payments. How could Mr. Dodd and his fellow lawmakers not realize that banks would pre-emptively raise rates?
Mr. Dodd's new proposal may also wind up dealing a serious blow to consumers -- and the economy. If banks find themselves unable to raise rates, many will limit their risk by severely restricting consumer credit. Many people will find their credit cards canceled, and new customers will be turned away. This will come on top of an already tight consumer credit market: banks sent out 2.1 billion direct-mail credit card solicitations in the third quarter of 2006, according to the research firm Mintel; this year in the same quarter, they sent out 391 million. A further contraction in consumer credit could devastate our nascent recovery.
The tax credit for new home buyers, now worth up to $8,000 per sale, can be credited with giving a boost to the housing market. Investment in housing rose almost 24 percent last quarter. Mr. Dodd would extend the program into next year, perhaps raising the $8,000 cap or allowing it to apply to those not purchasing homes for the first time.
But this program, too, has had an unintended consequence: large-scale fraud. According to the Treasury's inspector general for tax administration, at least 19,000 people who claimed the credit didn't actually purchase a home. Here's how: because the credit is "fully refundable," it is available to even those who don't pay any taxes or have any income at all. Thus people are buying homes under the names of their children -- including at least one 4-year-old -- to qualify as first-time homebuyers.
What I don't understand is the notion that you have some "right" to a credit card or a particular rate. I don't pay any percentage on my credit card -- because I don't buy what I can't pay for. But, if somebody's going to lend you money, why should anybody but that somebody get to tell you what it's going to cost you? And then, it's your choice: accept the offer or walk away.
In Western Culture, You Just Get Grounded
But, disobey Mommy and Daddy as a Muslim, and you might end up maimed or dead. Margaret Wente writes in the Glode & Mail of how it works:
The young woman, Eman Al Mezel, was 23 when her father lost control of her. She lived at home, and had started doing volunteer work at a local community centre. They fought bitterly over that. He pushed her into a flight of stairs. He threatened to break her legs and kill her, and then smashed her computer. When she learned he had arranged for her to marry a Syrian man, she moved out. To the horror of her family, she abandoned the hijab and her Muslim beliefs, and moved in with a male friend and his family.Ms. Al Mezel's father, Yusef, who is head of Ottawa's highly vocal taxi union, repeatedly called and e-mailed his daughter to get her to move back home. He sent his wife and other siblings to the place where she was living. In one e-mail, he told her that they could no longer "hide the problem" from her uncles and cousins, and that he couldn't guarantee the "safety of anyone" if she didn't return home.
"Eman, you know when everyone hear about, they will react crazy, and no one will care about police or other thing, you know your family." He wrote about the sharaf, the honour, of the family. He believed that his daughter had shamed and dishonored them, Ms. Al Mezel told police, and that the only way to restore the family's honour would have been to kill her.
"Attitudes such as these are quite prevalent in certain segments of the Muslim community," says Farzana Hassan, former president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, a reformist group. She says the influence of Wahhabism - a highly intolerant form of Islam that uses religion to justify the subjugation of women - has been growing in Canada. "They are not a fringe group any more."
Yoohoo...anybody beginning to see how dangerous Islam is...before it's too late?
And no, this sort of thing is not a rare occurrence -- that is, except amongst Jews, Christians, and Buddhists.
"All Cattle And No Hat"
That's what David Carr (@carr2n) called Cormac McCarthy after reading this terrific WSJ interview with him by John Jurgensen. An few snippets:
WSJ: Why don't you sign copies of "The Road"CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.
WSJ: How many did you have?
CM: 250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, "I have a signed copy of the 'The Road,'" and I say, "No. You don't."
...WSJ: Some critics focus on how rarely you go deep with female characters.
CM: This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She's committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.
Here's a link to Cormac McCarthy's books
They Aren't Naughty If They Have Brown Skin
From the skools r stupid deprtmint, My pal Heather Mac Donald does it again, taking Tucson Public Schools to task in City Journal for their recent idiocy:
As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson's school district adopted racial quotas in school discipline this summer. Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district "Equity Team" and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their minority discipline rates....The administrators want local principals to examine disparate suspension rates "in detail for root causes." I can save them some time: the root cause of disparate rates of suspension is disparate rates of bad behavior. As for the root cause of that bad behavior, the biggest one is single parenting. If the Tucson school board wants to publicize the essential role of fathers in raising law-abiding children, it might start solving the problem of disciplinary imbalance. But until then, it should let schools resolve their discipline problems in a color-blind fashion, without worrying about a visit from an "Equity Team."
Do You Watch This Slide Show And Walk Away Yawning?
Slides from Hasan's talk, published in the WaPo. Check out #42 on "The Verse of the Sword," commanding Muslims to slaughter the rest of us.
Numbers 32 through 34 are particularly comforting.
Salient quote #48: "We love death more than you love life!" (Note the "We.")
("Jinn," mentioned in the slide show, is a spirit being or demon. Disbelieving jinns are called "shaytans," or devils. I generally remember what "jinn" means by thinking of it as "genie.")
In the end, he swings around (very, very loosely) to a slide to help him pretend it's a talk in service of military knowledge of Islam -- not an hour getting off by spouting Islamic death porn before a live audience...a live audience of doctors...at least some of whom had to be psychiatrists.
My friend Howard Bloom, whose latest rethinking of human behavior, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
Nidal Malik Hasan's acts were in all probability very, very sane. But the roots of their sanity lie in a belief system that is alien to us. A belief system we have been fighting since at least 1993 when the first attempt on the World Center was made. That attempt was made by sane, rational, idealistic men. Men who believed in a compelling and widespread weltanschauung, a weltanschauung that wants to liberate the world. A consistent philosophy that wants to bring all of humanity justice and happiness. Militant Islam. A belief system that will continue to target you and me. A belief system we have to know if we are to counter it.Our nation performs its unique role in the world when it maintains its tolerance, when it maintains its ability to draw the best from cultures and peoples all over the planet and to bring them together in a common enterprise. But militant Islam uses that tolerance against us. In the Middle East and Asia, it hides behind civilians, stores its weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals, and uses what one of the most influential interpreters of Islam in the modern world, the Ayatollah Khomeini, mockingly called "Your concerns, your 'humanitarian' scruples" against us.
Among those who are, apparently, too P.C. to want to get it in the slightest, are the editorial board writers at the Seattle Times:
There is no more justification for Hasan's crimes in Islam than there was in the religious teachings of McVeigh's Christian faith.
Note to editorial board writers: See above.
Carrie On Larry
Carrie Prejean finds Larry King "inappropriate." And "inappropriate." And "inappropriate."
More here.
The Stupidest People Are Running The Schools
An aside: Are these incidents below the single best reason government should not run health care?
Mark Steyn writes of an additional idiocy from the same school district that went after the first-grade boy with the boy scout utensil set:
This is the same Christina School District that in April attempted to expel Sixth Grader Kasia Haughton. Kasia took a cake to school for her fellow students, and, in helping her pack it, her grandmother helpfully put a knife in the bag. Her teacher placed the cake on the desk, used the knife to cut it, passed round the slices, and then reported Kasia for bringing a "deadly weapon" to school. The grandmother packed the knife. The teacher used the knife. Kasia never touched it. But like those hapless Thai tourists who foolishly agree to serve as couriers of prohibited substances, she's the one who has to swing for it. As the self-same spokesdrone Wendy E Lapham droned on this occasion, any knife three inches or longer is classified as a deadly weapon. Have to follow the policy. Can't make any exceptions. Despite requiring years of expensive credentialization to qualify to serve in positions of authority, School District officials are prohibited by law from exercising any discretion, using any judgment, demonstrating any sense of proportion, or displaying other qualities hitherto associated with sentient human beings.A cake knife is not a "deadly weapon": It is a kitchen utensil.
Regulation strips law of the "reasonable man" standard. There is nothing "reasonable" because there is no longer reason: The School District officials are forbidden (even if they're still capable) from reasoning that a person in possession of a knife and cake might reasonably be intending the former to assist in the division of the latter. Instead, all must submit to the diktat of regulation.
Unless, of course, you're a Sikh. Sikhs like to carry their traditional kirpans -knives up to eight inches - and the New York City Board of Education and the Supreme Court of Canada, among many others, have ruled that boys are permitted to take them to school. Why? Because in the ideological hierarchy, multiculturalism trumps "safety". A cake knife is a "deadly weapon" but a deadly weapon is merely the Sikh symbol for "the power of truth to cut through untruth". If that isn't reason to ban it from public schools, I don't know what is. Nevertheless, if you're taking a cake to school, ask a Sikh classmate to cut it up for you.
From a NYT op-ed:
School officials who want to back away from the failed zero tolerance policy are looking to a farsighted model developed in Clayton County, Ga., a fast-growing enclave south of Atlanta. Its juvenile courts were nearly overwhelmed by students referred from their schools -- mainly for minor offenses like fistfights and disruptive conduct.Juvenile court officials met with the schools and explained the dangers of criminalizing what are essentially normal childhood behaviors. They also helped to retrain school counselors and cooperated with the schools to create a three-strikes system for dealing with minor offenses.
Under this system, the student receives a warning after the first offense. After the second offense, students and parents are required to attend a mediation session or a school conflict workshop. The third offense leads to a court complaint.
The number of children referred to juvenile court dropped by about half after the new system went into effect. With fewer low-risk students being referred to the courts, probation officers were able to focus more closely on high-risk young people, driving down felony numbers as well. Graduation rates have risen steadily since 2004, the year the new protocol was introduced.
The most amazing thing is how school has become the antithesis of teaching kids to reason, instead teaching kids that reason is futile.
Steyn via Robert W.
Paglia Hates On The Health Care Bill
On Salon. She might be left, but she's right as ever on this:
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them....And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.
...International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what's the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure.
How The Wimp Dates
An excerpt from a column I just posted, responding to a question from a guy who'd do anything to avoid possibly enduring 11 seconds of feeling like crap (if rejected) and asking a girl out:
If a hunter approached eating the way you approach dating, he'd sit in his truck sipping hot chocolate, sighing, "I really wish a deer would shoot himself in the head, wrap himself in a tarp, and use his remaining energy to bind himself to my bumper."
Comments are live at the link.
Take 13 Lives And Call Me In The Morning
Krauthammer, via NRO, thinks the real moral scandal is the attempt to medicalize mass murder:
All of a sudden we hear that he [Nidal Hasan] heard these terrible stories from soldiers who had suffered and he snapped.Well, what about the doctors and nurses and counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed who every day hear and live with the suffering of soldiers? How many of them have picked up a gun and shot up a room of soldiers?
What about civilian psychiatrists who hear every day tales of woe and suffering -- the indescribable suffering of, say, a psychotically depressed patient -- who don't pick up a gun and shoot up people.
I was a psychiatrist. I can't remember a single instance of a psychiatrist who went around shooting people. Maybe I missed the epidemic.
But all of a sudden if the shooter is called Nidal Hasan, all of a sudden everybody invents this secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome which had never existed until yesterday.
It is an example of political correctness. And all the warnings that people had had in advance and not reported is an example of how political correctness isn't only a moral abomination, it's also a danger.
See "Rude People" In Psychology Today!
The serial of my soon-to-be-published book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, is in this month's newsstand version (with the chimp on the cover), and now online.
Here's the accompanying photo you won't see in the online text-only version. Click on photo for full-size.
Here's the link to the piece.
Copies should be at Amazon this week, and I hope you'll pre-order one now! I spend way too much time every day checking my Amazon stats, and they go down, closer to one, every time somebody buys a book. (They went down to 7,000-something last week, which is seriously cool for a book that's not even out yet.)
Here's the link to order: I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Happy reading!
Photo by my man Gregg Sutter, who also shot my book cover and my new photo on the upper left.
Look Left For The Real Deal On Obamacare
From a WSJ op-ed, left-wing New Yorker writer John Cassidy tells the truth:
Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.
Political Correctness Kills
Dana Priest writes in the WaPo about a weird talk Muslim mass murderer Hasan gave -- one that nobody wanted to think ill of:
As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as a culminating exercise of the residency program.Instead, in late June 2007, he stood before his supervisors and about 25 other mental health staff members and lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, both Muslim countries, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by The Washington Post.
"It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims," he said in the presentation.
"It was really strange," said one staff member who attended the presentation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the investigation of Hasan. "The senior doctors looked really upset" at the end. These medical presentations occurred each Wednesday afternoon, and other students had lectured on new medications and treatment of specific mental illnesses.
More on his presentation at the end:
Under a slide titled "Comments," he wrote: "If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the 'infidels'; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc." [sic]The last bullet point on that page reads simply: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"
Under the "Conclusions" page, Hasan wrote that "Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please God, even by force, is condoned by the Islam," and that "Muslim Soldiers should not serve in any capacity that renders them at risk to hurting/killing believers unjustly -- will vary!"
Where Science And Babeliciousness Meet
Here's a science broad I wish lived near me: the beautiful and brainy bioengineering instructor Joanne Manaster, of joannelovesscience.com and Gummi Bear-obliterating renown...all in the name of teaching science, and teaching that science can be exciting and fun.
Here's Joanne, doing the sexy lab lady variation on the sexy librarian:
Below, she's doing in the gummi little fellas with liquid nitrogen. Here's the description from the YouTube vid below:
Looking for more ways to obliterate gummy bears in scientific ways, Joanne freezes a gummy bear in liquid nitrogen. She also soaked a gummy bear over night to demonstrate the ability of gelatin to hold large amounts of water--and then she freezes that one too.She has a "control" gummy bear (not subjected to liquid nitrogen or water) and also minimizes "variables" by using gummy bears of the same color!
More on Joanne here:
I currently work as a laboratory teaching specialist and lecturer at the University of Illinois in UrbanaBasically, if you want to learn how to do a cell or molecular biology technique, I am able to teach you how, and give you the background information you need to understand it. And I'll probably do it with more humor and enthusiasm than you might expect someone who seriously knows her stuff to do it!
I teach histology (studying tissues and organs using a microscope) for the department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Ask anyone who knows me well, and they will agree that this is my favorite topic!
I teach mammalian cell culture techniques and the concepts of stem cells and tissue engineering in the Bioengineering Department. Since histology is a fairly static subject, this is how I keep fresh and dynamic with respect to research on mammalian tissues!
Over the summer (2008) I did some consulting/technical work with two labs in the Department of Bioengineering (Dr. Insana and Dr. Bhargava) trying to create 3D cell cultures of breast and prostate tissue, but not in the same culture.....hmmm, wait, that could be interesting, but probably not very useful.
...Which reminds me, if you're a rabbit with erectile dysfunction, you're in luck!
The Health Care Bill Of Goods
Harvard Med School's Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, reviews pans the just-passed health care bill on that famous right-wing site, The Huffington Post:
Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
It gets worse, she observes -- if a similar bill emerges from the Senate and successfully mates with the one from the house, expect skyrocketing costs, shrinking benefits, increased deductibles, less coverage and other such fun.
Hope for change! For as little as humanly possible.
More here from the WSJ:
The bill is instead a breathtaking display of illiberal ambition, intended to make the middle class more dependent on government through the umbilical cord of "universal health care." It creates a vast new entitlement, financed by European levels of taxation on business and individuals. The 20% corner of Medicare open to private competition is slashed, while fiscally strapped states are saddled with new Medicaid burdens. The insurance industry will have to vet every policy with Washington, which will regulate who it must cover, what it can offer, and how much it can charge.We have little sympathy for the insurers, or for that matter most of the other medical providers who signed on to this process only to claim now to be appalled by the result. The insurance lobby--led by Aetna CEO Ron Williams--made the Faustian bet that it could trade new regulations for more new subsidized customers who would face a tax penalty if they didn't buy their insurance. The Pelosi bill includes the regulation but guts the tax penalty because it's unpopular. Insurers will thus have to cover more sick people with fewer dollars, as healthy folk opt out of coverage until they are sick.
This writing was on the wall months ago, but the insurers chose to play an inside game rather than shape public opinion. Judging by their weekend statement--criticizing the House bill but vowing to seek "bipartisan" reform--they will now throw themselves at the mercy of the Senate. Good luck with that. The real victims are their customers, most of whom will pay more for insurance as the new mandates raise costs.
One Employer Is Still In Full Hiring Mode
I'm betting at least a few will guess who. I did. Those still wondering, click here.
The Verse Of The Sword
And who it got this time (more on that below). But, first, here it is, the verse from the Quran commanding Muslims to murder anyone who doesn't believe in Allah:
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the jizya (poor-tax), then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. - Qu'ran, 9:5
Here's a bit on it from muhammadsquran:
From the above, we can draw a number of important conclusions:
* Allah commands Muslim to slay "idolators" wherever they can be found on the earth
* Muslims are not to wait for them, they are to actively seek them out
* Muslims should lie in wait, ambushing them, and gathering intelligence
* Idolators are to be fought continuously until they "embrace Islam"
* This Ayah forever abrogates previous peace treaties, and no idolator has a promise of safety from Muslims since this was revealed
* The reason the Muslims are to fight, is so that idolators will have no choice but to die or "embrace Islam" (i.e. become Muslims).I wonder which of the so-called "moderate Muslims" believes himself/herself to have a superior understanding of the Qur'an to that of Ibn Kathir (one of the most prolific Qur'anic commentators of all time)? Perhaps this great scholar of Islam just missed the mark and got this one wrong.
...Those Muslims who interpret this verse to be a command to fight TODAY are able to draw from a broad base of Islamic jurist-prudence. It is the liberal Muslim, most often influenced by Western cultural values, that has a lack of historical support within Islamic theology. Also of note, is that Surah 9 (At-Taubah) was one of the last Surahs added to the Qur'an. Muslim scholars have ruled that this one single verse abrogated as many as 128 other verses within the Qur'an. Muslim's final "marching orders" found throughout Surah 9 are slanted to violence and warfare. It should come as no surprise that we see people all over the world acting on the commands of the Qur'an and violently fighting against non-Muslims.
And now, look at this sweet-faced man profiled on CNN -- after being gunned down in cold blood by the Muslim murderer at Ft. Hood.
Robert Spencer writes on Jihadwatch:
Fort Hood jihadist's coworkers saw warning signs, but said nothing for fear of seeming bigotedSo this is what it has come to -- this is the fruit of the long-term efforts by groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others, to stigmatize and demonize everyone who speaks honestly about the threat of jihad and Islamic supremacism. People are afraid to speak up about what they see, when they know it is wrong.
And all it cost this week was 13 dead and 38 wounded.
And what if it had been a fundamentalist Christian who was the murderer. (Of course, modern Christian preachers do not command their followers to go kill the infidel like far too many Muslim imams do.)
From Instapundit, a quote from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg:
I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I've argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.
The Wages Of The Pill Paranoids
We're so terrified that somebody might get high that we needlessly leave people suffering horrible pain. NYT's Tierney takes on the issue, often covered by Sullum in reason:
At a news conference Wednesday, Dr. Portenoy and the other co-chairman of the Mayday panel, Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer of the University of California, Los Angeles, said patients' needs had to be better balanced against the concerns of law-enforcement officials, whose prosecutions of Dr. Hurtwitz and other doctors have made physicians reluctant to prescribe opioids. Dr. Zeltzer said doctors were especially reluctant to prescribe such painkillers to young people, and she cited the example of a teenager who had been incapacitated for six months until finding a doctor willing to prescribe opioids."Don't assume that your doctor knows what to do to treat your pain," Dr. Zeltzer advised patients.
She and the other members of the panel urged better pain-management training in medical schools and more money for pain research, which, according to the report, receives 1 percent of the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
The panel also urged the federal Department of Health and Human Services to reform the way doctors are reimbursed for treating pain. Dr. Portenoy said that the current system had "misaligned incentives" encouraging doctors to preform procedures like injections and surgery and that doctors who performed those procedures could make 10 times as much per hour as doctors who treated pain in other ways.
I deal with the drug paranoids in getting Ritalin, an ADHD drug I've probably been taking for over a decade. Luckily, my troublesome last shrink, the short guy, retired. He had "The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind" and other vintage tomes on his shelf, and never gave me one drop of advice or counsel; he just fought with me to make me come in once a month (instead of once every six months, as I had been until my previous doctor retired).
His interest, of course, wasn't in protecting me, but in protecting himself from the drug police. Before I had to see the short guy, I had two old Jews (old New Yorky men) prescribing for me. They got me from the start -- saw me for who I am: an ambitious nerd who is more productive and less unfocused writing on Ritalin, not some prescription junkie who's going to risk all to sell pills for $5 on the playground.
Meanwhile, to try to keep the short guy from killing one of my writing days once every month by making me come in (plus part of another day dropping off and collecting my Sched. 3 prescription), I kept bringing in stuff like my book deal, the finished manuscript, so he could see where the pills were going. In a way, I can't blame him for trying to hold out on me -- the government makes doctors this way. My convenience and productivity or his medical license? "See you next month!"
Of course, I'm a persuasive girl (big pain in the ass, plus debate ability), and I always eventually managed to squeeze six months out of him...or accidentally/on purpose call when he was on vacation and get one of the unretired old Jews to prescribe them for me.
It's A Medium, Not A Message
Poor David Brooks. He finds the combination of love, dating, sex and cellphones so terribly disturbing. The truth is, human nature hasn't changed; it just has more technology and plays out faster. Brooks wrote in The New York Times:
As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists "use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead."Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, "everyone is on somebody's back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts."
The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don't want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. "Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries," a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. "I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands," a TV producer writes. "He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond."
Wow...people have nicknames for people they're dating. Definitely caused by the choice of free ringtones.
Actually, there are times when people are looking for relationships, and times they aren't, and this is reflected in how they talk about and treat their dates. This has been true for centuries, and I'm not just talking about short period in which there have been cell phones in the 20th and 21st.
The column is a actually kind of sad. Typical demonization of technology by an old fogey. Brooks' final words:
Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
Oh, please.
Again, when people are ready to pair up, they will. Trust and reciprocity are a part of that. Until then, text your way to those "continencies" until you weary of it. Not really anything to get teary-eyed over.
Make Your Doctor Appointment Fast!
That is, before you need to get elected to Congress to get in to see a doctor. (Expect Soviet-style waits, dearies.) Betsy McCaughey lays out the nightmare that is the Pelosi plan that the pandering fools elected to The House just passed. A few choice tidbits from her WSJ piece, but don't be lazy -- go read the whole thing!
• Sec. 59b (pp. 297-299) says that when you file your taxes, you must include proof that you are in a qualified plan. If not, you will be fined thousands of dollars. Illegal immigrants are exempt from this requirement.• Sec. 412 (p. 272) says that employers must provide a "qualified plan" for their employees and pay 72.5% of the cost, and a smaller share of family coverage, or incur an 8% payroll tax. Small businesses, with payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000, are fined less.
Once again, in an age when almost nobody stays at a company for life, they maintain the utter idiocy of having health care connected to employment.
Here's more:
While the bill will slash Medicare funding, it will also direct billions of dollars to numerous inner-city social work and diversity programs with vague standards of accountability.• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community "entities" with no required qualifications except having "documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers" to "educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities" aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. "Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program."
These programs will "enhance the capacity of individuals to utilize health services and health related social services under Federal, State and local programs by assisting individuals in establishing eligibility . . . and in receiving services and other benefits" including transportation and translation services.
• Sec. 222 (p. 617) provides reimbursement for culturally and linguistically appropriate services. This program will train health-care workers to inform Medicare beneficiaries of their "right" to have an interpreter at all times and with no co-pays for language services.
• Secs. 2521 and 2533 (pp. 1379 and 1437) establishes racial and ethnic preferences in awarding grants for training nurses and creating secondary-school health science programs. For example, grants for nursing schools should "give preference to programs that provide for improving the diversity of new nurse graduates to reflect changes in the demographics of the patient population." And secondary-school grants should go to schools "graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds including racial and ethnic minorities."
Discrimination is fine as long as white people are the excluded ones, huh? I do talks at an inner-city school to try to demystify making it. Kids there are from poor families, for the most part. Some of those poor kids are white. So...if the whites want to become nurses or secondary-school health science teachers...they'll have to work nights at the BK drive-in because they're a little short on melanin?
(I'm guessing being born poor and Asian means you're screwed, too.)
Maybe Listen To Ludvig This Time Around?
Mark Spitznagel writes in the WSJ that Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists when he warned of a credit crisis in the 20s...predicting the Depression. I didn't read it it in the original German -- "not exactly a beach read," writes Spitznagel. In fact, I never read it at all. But, Spitznagel makes von Mises' thinking remarkably simple to understand:
Taking his cue from David Hume and David Ricardo, Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our "time preferences," or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.
Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system--the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse.
The system is dramatically susceptible to errors, both on the policy side and on the entrepreneurial side. Government expansion of credit takes a system otherwise capable of adjustment and resilience and transforms it into one with tremendous cyclical volatility.
I just love this guy. Per Spitznagel:
Mises's solution follows logically from his warnings. You can't fix what's broken by breaking it yet again. Stop the credit gavage. Stop inflating. Don't encourage consumption, but rather encourage saving and the repayment of debt. Let all the lame businesses fail--no bailouts. (You see where I'm going with this.) The distortions must be removed or else the precipice from which the system will inevitably fall will simply grow higher and higher.
Spitznagel writes that while von Mises turned down a bank job, not wanting his name on any part of the crash, it's a pity Keynes, who lost big in the stock market crash was so dapper, and good English-writing, and so filled with such completely wrong but well-spoken ideas.
Ludvig von Mises Institute is here. And here, from a just-blogged 1964 Murray Rothbard essay, from a quote by Frank Chodorov, is where we're headed:
The state is an antisocial organization, originating in conquest and concerned only with confiscating production.... There are two ways of making a living, Nock explained. One is the economic means, the other the political means. The first consists of the application of human effort to raw materials so as to bring into being things that people want; the second is the confiscation of the rightful property of others....The state is that group of people, who having got hold of the machinery of compulsion, legally or otherwise, use it to better their circumstances; that is the political means.
Rothbard continued:
(Albert Jay) Nock would hasten to explain that the state consists not only of politicians, but also those who make use of the politicians for their own ends; that would include those we call pressure groups, lobbyists, and all who wrangle special privileges out of the politicians. All the injustices that plague "advanced" societies, he maintained, are traceable to the workings of the state organizations that attach themselves to these societies.
LA Skyline
photo by Gregg Sutter
The Single-Parented Brain
This is a study on animals, not humans, but it seems likely that we'll soon have evidence from MRIs and other tools to measure what it means to the brain to be the child of a single parent or a family that breaks up.
Shirley S. Wang writes in the WSJ about small rodents called degus, related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, and research by German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and her colleagues on what happens when they remove Daddy. An excerpt:
Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.In a study the researchers presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago earlier this month and recently published in the journal Neuroscience, half the degus were raised with two parents, while the others were raised by a single mother, the father having been removed from the cage one day after the birth of his offspring.
Dr. Braun and her colleagues found that in the two-parent families, the degu mothers and fathers cared for their pups in similar ways, including sleeping next to or crouching over them, licking and grooming them, and playing with them. The fathers even exhibited a "nursing-type" position.
When the mother was a single parent, the frequency of her interactions with her pups didn't change much, which means that those pups experienced significantly less touching and interaction than those with two parents.
The researchers then looked at the neurons--cells that send and receive messages between the brain and the body--of some pups at day 21, around the time they were weaned from their mothers, and others at day 90, which is considered adulthood for the species.
Neurons have branches, known as dendrites, that conduct electrical signals received from other nerve cells to the body, or trunk, of the neuron. The leaves of the dendrites are protrusions called dendritic spines that receive messages and serve as the contact between neurons.
Dr. Braun's group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they "caught up" by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.
"It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids," says Dr. Braun, 54 years old.
Meet The Victims At Ft. Hood
"Allah Akbar!" 13 innocent people dead.
Tragedy Or Jihad?
Everybody wants to believe the lone crazed gunman theory -- and stay way-clear of Islam.
First, if you're wondering why the guy was able to gun down so many soldiers: I heard from an army spokesman (a major, I think it was) speaking to CNN that they aren't allowed to carry guns on base. That's right -- you're trained to go shoot people in wars, but you drop your Second Amendment right at the base entrance. As in so many of these shootings, like the Virginia Tech massacre, this never would've gotten to the point it did if soldiers were allowed to carry around more than their good looks.
When I heard of the shooting, and then heard the shooter was Muslim, I instantly thought of "The Verse of the Sword" from the Quran, commanding Muslims to kill the infidel:
Koran 9:5: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful."
Here's Col. Terry Lee on troubling statements Hasan made about how "Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor," and how we shouldn't be at war (in the Middle East). Now, this is one guy's word against a guy who isn't talking right now, and I, too, thought we shouldn't be in Iraq -- then again, I just blogged and blathered on about it; I didn't hurt or kill numerous people:
Most troublingly, the AP's Brent J. Blackledge writes that federal agents grew suspicious of Hasan -- and apparently took their sweet time doing anything about it:
At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades.They had not determined for certain whether Hasan is the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, said law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the case.
One of the officials said late Thursday that federal search warrants were being drawn up to authorize the seizure of Hasan's computer.
A formal investigation hadn't been opened? Well, why the fuck not?
As for not being able to determine for certain whether Hasan authored the posting, I'm reminded of how the cops in Los Angeles don't have access to Facebook or Myspace. A cop friend used to call me when she needed access from the station, and I'd look stuff up for her.
As for what took so fucking long, I've tracked down rude anonymous commenters to their cell phone number or their number at their government job in 20 minutes. Why couldn't the government do much more than sit around with their thumbs up their ass wondering?
On point piece on Pajamas Media by Phyllis Chesler, "The Jihadist Is Always The Victim":
According to Hasan's cousin, he had been "picked on," harassed by other soldiers because he was of "Middle Eastern origin." This may be true--and if true, terrible--but so what?Let's assume it's true: I know many people, including soldiers, including female soldiers, who have been brutally harassed. They do not shoot 44 people down in cold blood.
...Jihadic literature raves about Muslims being attacked (not by other Muslims which is often the case) but by Jews, Americans, Zionists, Crusaders, infidels. Terrorist leaders talk about Muslim Holy lands being "occupied" by the invader. They therefore fly two planes into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon because Muslims are fed up with taking all that abuse lying down. (And that's before America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq).
The attackers are really self-defenders. The jihadist is always the victim.
Ask any of the Muslim fathers who have honor murdered their daughters in America in cold blood. They'll tell you the same thing. She attacked my honor. I had to defend myself. It was an act of pure self-defense. This is precisely what Zein Isa, another Palestinian, and a member of the Abu Nidal terrorist gang, said about killing his 16 year old daughter, Palestina ("Tina") Isa in 1989 in St Louis, Missouri.
Male Muslim jihadic rage? That is equivalent to 4000 pounds--the weight of the car that Faleh AlMaleki drove over his daughter Noor who died of her profound injuries in Arizona. Ironically, AlMaleki has just been placed on a suicide watch in Arizona--and his compatriot in crime, Muzammil Hassan in Buffalo, is trying to plead temporary insanity ("extreme emotional disturbance") to explain why he finally beheaded his wife Aasiya, whom he had continually battered.
So: The 4000 pound father in Arizona is really the victim, as is the Buffalo beheader.
Sudden Jihad Syndrome, Personal Jihad Syndrome, call it what you will--these terrible acts should not be psychiatrically diagnosed and excused. At the risk of being called a racist, allow me to suggest that we must connect the dots before it is too late. Islam now=jihad=hate propaganda=9/11=the tragedy at Ft Hood.
That means Islam now, and its followers of all colors and ethnicities, is at war with the entire world, is dreaming of a Caliphate to be achieved through violence. I doubt that Major Hasan is a Sufi Muslim.
Here's a sweet little congratulatory note for the guy from a convert to Islam.
UPDATE: From a Phillipe Naughton Times of London story about the heroic police officer, Kim Munley, who shot and brought down Hasan:
It emerged today that Major Hasan, a Muslim who had argued with his comrades against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and had been trying to get out of the Army, shouted "Allahu akbar" - Arabic for "God is great" - as he launched the attack.Lieutenant-General Robert Cone, the base commander at Fort Hood, said that soldiers who witnessed the rampage heard him shout out the invocation as he opened fire.
Regarding "god is great," of course, there's no evidence there's a god, but if your particular imaginary Big Guy In The Sky condones (and even commands, through your particular book of holy fables) the murder of anybody who doesn't believe as you do...well, then he's a petty little shithead.
SECOND UPDATE: Three good links from Instapundit here.
THIRD UPDATE: An even more explosive link from Instapundit here (thanks, Martin!) -- on how he was supposed to be presenting a medical paper but instead went into creepy stuff from the Quran! An excerpt:
He talked about how if you're a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire. And I said well couldn't this just be his educating you? And the psychiatrist said yes, but one of the Muslims in the audience, another psychiatrist, raised his hand and was quite disturbed and he said you know, a lot of us don't believe these things you're saying, and that there was no place where Hasan couched it as this is what the Koran teaches but you know I don't believe it. And people actually talked in the hallway afterwards about 'is he one of these people that's going to freak out and shoot people someday?
I believe it's political correctness that keeps people from reporting these things -- also, being so unacquainted with the actual barbarianism that is actual Islam, and finding it so unbelievable vis a vis western civilization and enlightenment values -- that they simply find the ultimate eventuality of actual Muslim values hard or impossible to believe.
*And remember that many Muslims in the U.S. don't practice actual Islam -- they're more like Christmas Christians. Many have never read the Quran. And a reported 80 percent of Muslims worldwide are illiterate -- not surprising, considering their religion is quite anti-science and anti-learning beyond what's in the Quran.
Organ Transplant Regulations Are Killing People
I've blogged on this a number of times, and a friend of mine, Virginia Postrel, actually gave a kidney to another woman, AEI's Sally Satel. I'm blogging this again because Thomas Sowell has an eloquent piece up about it on Investors.com. An excerpt:
On the most basic economic principles, it should be expected that more organs would be supplied at some price than at no price. How high that price would have to be depends on the value of the organ to the potential donor, as well as the risks of the operation and the increased risk to a kidney donor if, for example, the remaining kidney were to malfunction at some future time.For people who are paid while living for an organ to be transplanted after death, even a heart has no postmortem value to the donor, nor would the financial costs or medical risks of a transplant be a deterrent.
Where parents or other family members are allowed to sell the organs of someone who died unexpectedly, there may be psychic costs for some upon realizing that a loved one's body is to be cut up or there may be psychic benefits in knowing that their loved one is passing on the gift of life to another human being.
It is unnecessary for third parties to weigh the balance, since each individual is different and all can make their own decisions on such personal matters, as can living organ donors.
Current prices paid for organ transplants, in countries where paying is legal, provide only the most general and potentially misleading idea of what such prices would be in a free market. Given the many countries in which organ sales are illegal, that illegality restricts the world supply, causing prices to be higher than otherwise in those countries where such transplants are legal.
Where organ transplant sales take place despite being illegal, the price paid must be higher than the free-market price, as with all black markets, for the risks of the illegality to seller or broker must also be compensated, for this activity to continue.
Perhaps the highest price of all for illegal organ transplants is the absence of the quality of medical care and organ screening that would be expected if the operation took place under normal and legal conditions.
via Insty
How To See "Rude People" Much Sooner Than Everybody Else
I wrote to Amazon:
Some of the readers of my syndicated column and blog want to pre-order but they're getting a message that books are set to get to them December 2. I know they came to McGraw-Hill's warehouse last week, so you may be getting them in the next few days, if you don't have them already. Will you ship them when they arrive to you, or do you wait until November 27?
Amazon wrote back:
For your type of release date, we'll ship the books when they come in. When we placed the purchase order with your publisher, we requested that they arrive well before the book's stated publication date.
I then wrote to my editor:
Books just got to our office, which means they'll get to amazon--and you!--extremely soon. Probably to amazon in the next two or three days!
So, if you pre-order my book here -- I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Thanks to everybody who's already pre-ordered. My book's Amazon ranking was down to 10,070 yesterday (from way up in the hundred thousands) and was in the top 25 in its category...not bad for a book that has yet to be published! And a total thrill for me.
I worked really hard on this thing! I hope you all like it.
Requiring Actual Proof Of Guilt
Men accused of domestic violence can have their children and more taken away from them upon mere accusation -- with no evidence required. The Connecticut Supreme Court just changed this -- and other states should follow...and it's just amazing that this even needs to be said.
Christian Nolan writes for Connecticut Law Tribune that a Stamford man lost his freedom and the right to visit his kids after he was arrested two years ago for allegedly throwing his wife down the stairs and kicking her in the head, supposedly in front of their two toddlers:
But the defendant, Fernando A., whose full name is not released in court records, said the two were divorcing and his wife fabricated the attack story to gain leverage in family court proceedings. Fernando A., however, never got a chance after his arraignment to object to the order of protection issued against him that prevented him from seeing his children.His lawyer, Steven D. Ecker, of Hartford's Cowdery, Ecker & Murphy, asked for an evidentiary hearing after the arraignment, but Superior Court Judge James Bingham denied the request. Ecker challenged the denial up to the state Supreme Court.
In an opinion to be officially released this week, a divided court ruled that a defendant must be granted an evidentiary hearing at which the state must prove, by the civil standard of a preponderance of evidence, that the order of protection is a continued necessity.
"All we were asking for is a hearing within a reasonable time after someone is kicked out of their home and prohibited from any contact with their children," said Ecker. "It seems appropriate a court would permit a hearing to consider both sides of the story. That doesn't seem particularly controversial."
There are about 19,000 protective orders currently in place in Connecticut. And in a year when domestic violence cases have repeatedly made headlines in the state, it's no surprise that the Fernando A. appeal drew interest from various advocacy groups, including the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.
"Victims should be protected," said Anne C. Dranginis, of Hartford's Rome McGuigan. "In many of these cases, victims have suffered trauma or fear and are trying to calm down children."
What about when the accusee becomes the victim? Loses everything that matters to him, on the sheer weight of he said/she said?
Domestic abusers, whether they're men or women, should be punished. But, let's join modern legal times, and stop the Salem Witch Trial approach...countrywide.
Welcome To The Doctor Shortage
What do you think...do you want to spend years and countless thousands of dollars going to med school, and then more sleepless years doing your medical residency, if, on the other end, the pay will be peanuts (but the malpractice insurance sure won't)?
Herbert Pardez, president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, writes in the WSJ about how we're about to "reform" ourselves right out of doctors -- especially the primary care kind:
The fundamental reason why medical students are not entering primary care on their own is that they can't afford it. Medical-school tuition can cost a student as much as $50,000 a year. Some doctors start out owing hundreds of thousands of dollars before they are even able to open a practice. Going to medical school is a little like taking out a mortgage, only without getting a house in return.Once doctors do start treating patients, they are squeezed between what they earn from government programs and insurance companies on one side and escalating malpractice insurance rates on the other. Meanwhile, specialists can often charge more and pay less in other costs than primary-care doctors. The reality is that many physicians cannot afford to go into primary care.
To address the shortage of doctors and the incentives that compel young doctors to eschew primary care, Congress needs to think about how to increase doctor pay, institute malpractice reform, and provide subsidies to reduce the amount of debt doctors have to take on. Residency caps should also be raised so teaching hospitals can train more doctors. Without these actions new doctors would be foolish to enter primary care...
Newsflash to anybody who slept through a little thing called the U.S.S.R. -- socialism is irrational. Few people are going to work like hell if they make little money on the other end (like the $30/hr. I believe my old boyfriend makes for Medicare liver transplant jobs). Few people smart enough to be your doctor.
Euphemistically Speaking
The greatest in idiotic office-speak, from the BBC:
2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really." Anonymous, England
It's Now Illegal To Be A Crazy Cat Lady
Own more than three cats without a kennel license, and you'll be breaking the law in Dudley, Mass.
I hate cats, but I hate overregulation more. It's sprouting up in every sector, from business to petty stuff like this.
We're all felons, now, writes Radley Balko, quoting Ayn Rand:
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."--Ayn Rand
Incoherent Reader Rant Of The Week
It's actually too boring to print, but I was amused by the ending:
BTW, I believe that Wanda Sykes is funny. You are not funny. (but thems my unedumacated umpinnion, ya see?)
I wrote back:
Be sure to walk up to people in the grocery store and tell them they're unattractive. I'm sure it will brighten their day.
I always suspect people who write me letters and e-mail like this would never have the balls to say so much as boo to me or anyone else in public.
Thanks To Everybody Preordering My Book
Woke up to this rather lovely stat on Amazon -- not bad for a book that's not even out yet!
Order yours here: I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Have Another Bowl Of Bitchy
A reader didn't like my advice to a woman to return the heirloom engagement ring her fiancé gave her after the relationship broke up. She wrote, in one of the questions from the Advice Goddess column I just posted:
You gave bad advice, telling that poor girl to return her engagement ring to the fiance who broke up with her. The ring was his mother's. Well, this girl's the dumpee, so that ring is now hers. My advice? Sell it to finance a fabulous vacation with her girlfriends.--Know Better
My reply here, in Seconds On Carats. Comments are live at the link.
Not included in the question is her snide remark that I should "leave the advice to the professionals." I'm assuming she has a degree in therapy. Always amused when people think that confers some special wisdom. Those who do are either therapists or haven't met many therapists.
How To Say "Keep Your Underparented Brats At Home" With A Smile
The Mommy Mafia gets very offended by signs in bars banning children, and signs in cafes telling children they must behave. Here's a clever way around offending them that still gets the message across, a sign posted in New York's 9th Street Espresso:
Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free dog.
via TBTI
"There Is No Freestanding Constitutional Right Not To Be Framed"
Absolutely sick stuff from an excerpt from a WaPo editiorial. The header of this blog post is a quote from a brief filed by Iowa prosecutors hoping to persuade the Supremes to dismiss a lawsuit against them for allegedly fabricating evidence and causing two men to spend 25 years in prison:
It's a breathtaking proposition that the justices should roundly reject when they hear the case Wednesday.According to court documents, the prosecutors took a leading role in 1977 in investigating the murder of a recently retired white police officer at an Iowa automobile dealership where he was working security. The prosecutors allegedly coaxed a witness to offer a version of events that implicated two African American men, Curtis W. McGhee Jr. and Terry J. Harrington; the witness gave several different statements over time and had trouble keeping his facts straight. Prosecutors also allegedly coerced other witnesses to lie and withheld evidence that pointed to a different culprit.
...Prosecutors need to be able carry out their duties without fear that they'll become the targets of personal lawsuits if defendants are found not guilty or charges are dropped. But such lawsuits face high hurdles. The Supreme Court has recently -- and correctly -- made it even more difficult for plaintiffs to make officials personally liable unless there's convincing evidence that they were directly involved in knowingly violating a clearly established constitutional right. Mr. McGhee and Mr. Harrington have shouldered that burden and should be allowed to proceed with their case.
via @radleybalko
Yet, They Keep Voting In The Same Incompetent Losers
Peggy Noonan writes in the WSJ that people have figured out that we're "governed by callous children":
The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can't figure a way out. Have you heard, "If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better"? Or, "If only we follow the Republicans, they'll make it all work again"? I bet you haven't, or not much.This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I'm not sure we're fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.
Part of the reason is that the problems--debt, spending, war--seem too big. But a larger part is that our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths--spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone--well, not those in government, but most everyone else--seems to know that won't work. It's not a way out. It's not a path through.
Noonan talked to an insurance industry friend of hers about new proposed regulations on the industry:
Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress "are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area." The executive said of Washington: "They don't understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who've said to me 'I'm done.'" He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, "They don't understand that if they start to tax me so that I'm paying 60%, 55%, I'll stop."
(Here's an example, not from Noonan's piece, but from the LA Times comparing how it works in low-tax Texas versus high-tax California.)
She writes about America's current ruling class:
Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"--they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.
They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases--"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"--and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.
We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists--they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.
The Menace On The Road Who Shares Your Genes
Moving piece in The New York Times by Michelle Huneven. An excerpt:
He did not go gentle into the carless life. He had Hertz bring him a car, but because he had no license, the agent wouldn't leave it. Then he started sending letters threatening me with legal action, disinheritance, prison. Some were short, scrawled bursts of curses and name-calling; others were closely argued legal rants.
My only complaint is that it took her way too long to take away her elderly father's car. It's lucky no one was hurt or killed, and it's clearly only chance and luck that made that the case.
I write about my 70-something hit-and-run driver in my soon-to-be-published book, I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
*Thanks to all of you who've been pre-ordering my book -- at one point this Friday, my book was down to 16,040 in Amazon's top-selling products ranking, and in the top 100 in books in my category (and the only book in that number that has yet to be published).
You can read an excerpt in this month's Psychology Today, the one with the chimp on the cover (and no, that's not a picture of me).
All You Need Are Working Ovaries
To have a child. And to be the cause of a terrible tragedy.
Suddenly, that lady who runs an organization, projectprevention.org, that pays women to have their tubes tied, etc., is looking like even more of a hero. Make your tax-deductible donation to her organization here.
Thanks, Patrick
The Bully Bill
The WSJ writes that Pelosi is willing to do just about anything, even lose seats in 2010, to pass this disastrous health care bill:
At this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level--for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate. Most of the money goes into government-run "exchanges" where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level--that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016--could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.
At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this "firewall"--which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on "free" health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.
Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.
Here's how it will work in the real world, from WSJ commenter Bruce Cochener:
Our calculation is that the tax is less than half our present employee insurance costs and our costs would go up to meet the requirements of this bill, meaning that we will be compelled to drop employer insurance on our 350 employees putting them in the "public option". If onybody in the private sector believes they will keep their employers insurance program, they haven't thought it through. any company not dumping those employees is looking at extinction.
Much more at the link. As I've said before, the only hope we have is for as little change as possible.
The Adult Dependent
For how long do you get to suck off your divorced spouse's funds? Jennifer Levitz writes in the WSJ about "The New Art of Alimony":
Paul and Theresa Taylor were married for 17 years. He was an engineer for Boston's public-works department, while she worked in accounting at a publishing company. They had three children, a weekend cottage on the bay and a house in the suburbs, on a leafy street called Cranberry Lane. In 1982, when they got divorced, the split was amicable. She got the family home; he got the second home. Both agreed "to waive any right to past, present or future alimony."But recently, more than two decades after the divorce, Ms. Taylor, 64, told a Massachusetts judge she had no job, retirement savings or health insurance. Earlier this year, the judge ordered Mr. Taylor, now 68 and remarried, to pay $400 per week to support his ex-wife.
"This is insane," Mr. Taylor says, adding that the payments cut his after-tax pension by more than one-third. "Someone can just come back 25 years later and say, 'My life went down the toilet, and you're doing good--so now I want some of your money'?"
The nature of marriage has changed dramatically over the decades. Women now make up almost half of the American work force. But alimony, a concept enshrined in ancient law, has remained remarkably constant. Now, the idea that a husband should continue to support his wife forever, even after the demise of their marriage--long a bedrock of divorce law--is being called into question. Pressures are mounting to change a practice that some see as outdated and unfair.
A commenter there did say this:
Women are at an extreme disadvantage if they have children. They have often taken time out of their careers to take care of children, and have many obligations to those children for years that most men do not even understand in the least. You can not imagine how much time goes into doctor's, dentists and orthodontists appointments, parent/teacher conferences, after school activities, helping with homework, play dates, birthday parties, baking cookies for some party or fund raiser at school, shopping for clothes, food, etc. for the children, etc. The list is enormous.
But, since 1982? This women had a chance to get her life together, and she didn't take it.
Here's an excerpt that relates from one of my columns:
I'm not saying women shouldn't follow their dreams, but if your dream involves roping off air in art galleries, you'd better have a backup plan, and not one you met at a bar. This starts with acknowledging that, in the real world, "How will you be paying for that, Ma'am?" isn't answered with "I'm living happily ever after!"
A Bunch Of Potheads At The LA Times
From Sara Libby's post at TrueSlant:
Why are all the L.A. Times columnists using medical marijuana?L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, one of the paper's premier writers (Robert Downey Jr. played him in this year's movie "The Soloist") is the latest writer there to devote a column to obtaining medical marijuana. He describes the panic process he went through before he met with a doctor in Glendale to obtain pot to treat his back pain.
"My back problem wasn't as obvious. Should I limp when it was my turn? ... I was in a panic. I'd had a headache or two. Why hadn't I gone with migraines, and was it too late to switch?"
Unsurprisingly, Lopez's doctor (who turned out to be a gynecologist who admitted he knew nothing about back problems) was given a recommendation for marijuana use.
Sound familiar? It should. Lopez is at least the third L.A. Times columnist to write about his experience obtaining marijuana from a California doctor.
Actually, there was a fourth -- from the comments below Libby's post, Michael Goldstein writes:
Make that four LA Times writers. I wrote this piece for the LA Times Magazine in 2007, before any of the other three. And unlike Sandy Banks (and I'll bet Steve Lopez) I actually smoked the stuff and commented on its power. Of course, as a freelancer I didn't have to pee in a cup.
via Ed Padgett, the pressman blogger
