A Closet Fit For Helen Keller
Welcome to great moments in design dunderheadedness.
This is the pitch-dark walk-in closet in room 410 of the newly renovated Hotel Durant, right by the UC Berkeley campus, where I stayed for the alternative newspaper conference.
(I turned on the bathroom light, opened the bathroom and closet doors, and brightened this considerably in iPhoto so you could see the flashlight on the shelf.)
Sorry, but how do you spend buttloads of money renovating a hotel, and put in cute school-themed touches like an old-school steel desk and student lamp, and a guest directory that looks like a school notebook, and leave the closet nighttime dark?
I asked the girl at the front desk if the flashlight with "Hotel Durant" magic markered on it is supposed to help you find your clothes. And no -- it's for "disasters." And I don't think she's talking about the small-scale kind where you show up looking like you dressed in the dark.
On a positive note, the staff here are all very nice.
Socialist Security
Another good one from Alex Epstein at Ayn Rand Center, on how virtually no one questions the need for the Social Security program, but...:
"How much, when, and in what form one should provide for retirement is highly individual--and is properly left to the individual's free judgment and action. Social Security deprives the young of this freedom, and thus makes them less able to plan for the future, less able to provide for their retirement, less able to buy homes, less able to enjoy their most vital years, less able to invest in themselves. And yet Social Security's advocates continue to push it as moral. Why?"The answer lies in the program's ideal of 'universal coverage'--the idea that, as a New York Times editorial preached, 'all old people must have the dignity of financial security'--regardless of how irresponsibly they have acted. On this premise, since some would not save adequately on their own, everyone must be forced into some sort of 'guaranteed' collective plan--no matter how irrational.
"Those who wish to devote their wealth to saving the irresponsible from the consequences of their own actions should be free to do so through private charity, but to loot the savings of untold millions of innocent, responsible, hard-working young people in the name of such a goal is a monstrous injustice.
"Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable. We should be debating, not how to save Social Security, but how to end it--how to phase it out so as to best protect both the rights of those who have paid into it, and those who are forced to pay for it today. This will be a painful task. But it will make possible a world in which Americans enjoy far greater freedom to secure their own futures."
It's not going to happen -- but I like his thinking.
It Doesn't Mean Nobody Pays
It just means the rest of us pay instead of the person who should be paying -- the person getting the education. Molly Peterson and Oliver Staley write on Bloomberg about Obama's proposed overhaul to the student loan system, forgiving student loans of people who've been paying them off for at least 20 years:
In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education," Obama said in yesterday's speech. "No one should go broke because they chose to go to college."
Nobody has to. They can go to a college they can afford -- a quality community college like Santa Monica college, where a former assistant, a first-generation American of Korean descent, went. Instead of doing a lot of Jell-O shots, she worked her ass off, got great grades, and later got a full scholarship to Northwestern.
Or, for example, students who want to make sure they earn can get a nursing degree -- like a journalist I know quit her magazine job to do after 9/11. Providing that health care isn't "reformed" into a profession where it's impossible to earn a living, a nursing degree is a great way to get employment. Of course, med school will likely begin to make less sense under health care "reform." My ex-boyfriend, who does liver transplants, told me he gets only $20/hr. on Medicare patients.
And parents (oh, the heresy!) can have only the number of children they can afford to clothe, feed, and educate, and not just have a litter of them and expect the public to pick up their costs. Condom versus college education? There's a huge savings for those who make their purchase choices wisely.
The Bloomberg piece continues:
The repayment plan reflects an understanding by the administration that student debt can handicap middle class families, said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit group.Responsible Repayment
"Policy makers have become increasingly aware over the last several years about the burden that student debt can create in already tough times," Asher said. "This proposal gives a signal that if you do need to borrow to pay to go to college, and you're responsible about repayment, you can do it in a way that doesn't jeopardize your future."
..."Let's tell another 1 million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years -- and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service," Obama said.
Let's tell people that they will be required to pay whatever they owe. Like the Spanish proverb says, "Take what you need, but pay for it." This will lead fewer people to get dumb degrees that will lead them nowhere. A girl I know from high school just wrote me that her daughter got a journalism degree. Not smart. Even back in the day when papers weren't so struggling. It takes you an hour to learn to write a lede, and to learn the pyramid structure for a story. I learned it in a single high school journalism class. Then you need to learn a thing or two about the world.
And regarding "public service," there are very few people in such a profession. Government? That's more often self-service with a public service nametag than anything else.
How National Health Care Works In Japan
In a nutshell, biglizards blogs about her Japanese dad's experience in Japan:
You see? National health care works great... so long as you're rich enough to afford the premium level of government insurance and to buy multiple additional private policies; so long as you have influential relatives; and so long as you're willing and able to brazenly bribe the doctors and bureaucrats who run the system."I am so glad we live in Japan," Mom said. "I worry about you in America, with no national health care!" Thanks, Mom, but I'm afraid "help" is on the way from President Barack H. Obama.
Great story -- scary story. Go to the link and read the whole thing.
I Got My Ph.D.
It was early Thursday morning in Vegas, at the Riviera, where I'm attending the evolutionary psychology preconference. 
Had I known all I'd have to do was check into a Vegas hotel, I would have done this much sooner.
Twins researcher Nancy Segal joked that I could tell people I got my doctorate at the University of Riviera (URLV).
Advice Goddess Free Swim
Am I ever wiped out. I've been on Islam time -- twice this week having wake up at 4 am to get to the airport so they can make sure I'm not going to blow up the plane for Allah. This morning, around 5:30 am, I got body-scanned and felt up at the Vegas airport. The lady at the scanner who gave me the boob grab explained, "We couldn't get a clear image" (of my boobs, she meant). Yeah, it's called underwire, lady.
Anyway, please throw out some topics below. I have stuff to blog, but I'm supposed to be taping a radio show a minute ago (waiting for them to call my hotel in Berkeley, where I just arrived for a newspaper conference).
Black People In Movies Must Always Set A Good Example
There was a blog item on the LATimes site about an elderly jewel thief who got arrested at South Coast Plaza. Halle Berry, reportedly, is making a movie about the woman's exploits as a jewel thief. (The woman apparently lists that -- "jewel thief" -- as her occupation.)
The woman, by the way, happens to be black. Below the piece, commenter David writes: "Is this the best African-American female that Hollywood and Halle Berry can think of to make a movie about? "
My question: Why do black actresses necessarily have to make films about exemplary people who are black? We don't expect that of white actresses.
State Of The Union In One Sentence
From Ayn Rand Institute's Alex Epstein, who summarizes the president's speech like so:
"We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics--to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems."
Epstein added:
"President Obama named dozens of problems in America and not once suggested that individual rights, liberty, or freedom were the solution."From a quick reading of the speech, some statistics:
"Number of times President Obama said 'I': 105--mainly pushing for the government programs he seeks to pass.
"Number of times President Obama said 'individual rights': 0.
"Number of times President Obama said 'liberty': 0.
"Number of times President Obama said 'freedom': 1--but it was freedom for Afghanistan."
Live, From The State Of The Computer Address
Endgadget is there, with text and pictures of Apple's new iPad.
Pro-Choice And Pro-Speech
According to my thinking, if you don't like the content of somebody's speech, the answer isn't to try to shut them up, but to out-think and out-talk them. Christopher Hitchens does it all the time. When I asked him how he out-argues the competition, he said he tries to know their argument better than they do.
As a big free-speecher (who happens to think abortion is creepy, but who is pro-choice), I'm kind of shocked (but not surprised) to learn that "progressive" groups are trying to kill a Superbowl ad with an anti-abortion message. Here's a piece on the story from FoxNews:
College football phenom Tim Tebow is about to become one of the biggest stars of Super Bowl XLIV -- and he's not even playing in the game.Tebow, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback for the University of Florida, and his mother Pam will appear in a pro-life commercial that tells the story of his risky birth 22 years ago -- an ad that critics suggest could lead to anti-abortion violence, even though none of them have seen it.
The 30-second spot, paid for by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, is expected to recount the story of Pam Tebow's turbulent pregnancy in 1987:
When Tebow suffered from a dangerous infection during a mission trip to the Philippines, doctors recommended that she terminate her pregnancy, fearing she might die in childbirth. But she carried Tim to term, and he went on to win the 2007 Heisman Trophy and guide the Florida Gators to two BCS championships.
It's a happy story with an inspirational ending, but pro-choice critics say Focus on the Family should not be allowed to air the commercial because it advocates on behalf of a divisive issue and threatens to "throw women under the bus."
"This organization is extremely intolerant and divisive and pushing an un-American agenda," said Jehmu Greene, director of the Women's Media Center, which is coordinating a campaign to force CBS to pull the ad before it airs on Feb. 7.
So, who's stopping you from ante-ing up and airing a message of tolerance, Kumbayah, and a "pro-American agenda"?
As for the notion that the ad will incite violence, these people complaining apparently haven't seen the ad. Yes, abortion is an incendiary issue, and abortion doctors have been murdered. But, short of the old "No yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater," we can't be shutting people up because some nut might get the wrong idea from the position they advocate.
Four Years For Drunk Napping
Drunk drivers can kill. Drunks sleeping it off? Well, they drool and have pretty scary-bad breath, but I don't believe it functions as any sort of death-ray.
But, never mind reason or reality.
A drunk in Minnesota with multiple DUIs was given a four-year sentence for sleeping drunk in his car. His inoperable car. Now, maybe he got in intending to drive somewhere, but unless he confessed to that or this was a jury of his mind-reading peers, they can't know that.
I have to say, a car is sometimes a very convenient place for a nap. Used mine for just that purpose recently. Most embarrassingly, I can get carsick from my own driving. All it takes is an excess of curvy roads, especially curves after dark, or stop-and-go traffic, especially with lots of fumes, and well...hello again, lunch!
Anyway, I had to go to Newbury Park. I made it there fine, but on the way to Pasadena (my next meeting of the day), there was a huge, stop-and-go traffic jam, and by the time I got on Colorado Blvd., I was ready to toss my cookies. I pulled over, and breathed for a while, and then got back in my car and drove onto a side street and found a space under a tree and napped off the nausea. In fact, I was in no condition to do anything else. Luckily, I wasn't drunk, or I would've had to get out and lie down on the sidewalk to keep from risking arrest.
Meanwhile, "could have driven" is like "could've shot you" simply because there happened to be a gun on the counter. Unless you actually offed somebody, or there's some proof you were plotting to, we have no case against you. Or rather, we shouldn't.
Yet, here, from thenewspaper.com, is the case:
Laws covering driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) have evolved over the years to cover the situations where police find a parked, but recently driven, vehicle with a drunk behind the wheel. In the 1992 case Minnesota v. Starfield, the court found a drunk passenger sitting in a vehicle stuck in a ditch guilty of DUI, but not because it could prove she really was the one who drove and caused the accident. Instead, the court ruled that "towing assistance [was] likely available" creating the theoretical possibility that the immobile vehicle could "easily" be made mobile. These defendants have been charged under an expanded definition that suggests having "dominion and control" with the mere potential to drive is a crime. Intending to sleep off a night of drinking treated as the same crime as attempting to drive home under this legal theory which does not take motive into account...."Although the facts of this case are not those of the typical physical control case in which a jury can infer that the defendant was in physical control because he drove the vehicle to where it came to rest, a jury could reasonably find that Fleck, having been found intoxicated, alone, and sleeping behind the wheel of his own vehicle with the keys in the vehicle's console, was in a position to exercise dominion or control over the vehicle and that he could, without too much difficulty, make the vehicle a source of danger," Page wrote. "Based on the totality of the circumstances, the facts in the record, and the legitimate inferences drawn from them, we hold that a jury could reasonably conclude that Fleck was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of being in physical control of a vehicle under the influence of alcohol and with an alcohol concentration of .08 or more."
This napping drunk isn't a good guy, and maybe he would've driven if he could, but he couldn't and didn't, and we have no business whatsoever prosecuting people for thought crimes.
via overlawyered
We Get Mail
A woman wrote me about my just-posted Advice Goddess column, Knit Booty Call. An excerpt of the bit that hit home for her:
Terribly sorry you aren't getting any, and that it's awful chilly in there, but it isn't like you bought a new purse that didn't quite have the pockets you need. Your right to be all about you ended the day another human being came out of your body. Those so-called "resilient" children of parents who've split up have the worst outcomes across the board -- in everything from school performance to emotional stability to their own relationships as adults. Unless your home life is so ugly that your kid would be better off if you divorced, you and Frosty need to "do what you need to do" to make this work the best you can.
The woman's e-mail:
Amy,I read your column because they are interesting, but I don't always agree with your advice - it's usually humorous though. This week's though is excellent and I commend you for telling it like it is.
My first husband and I weren't connecting and so I left him and got a divorce. Was the situation I was in horrible? No, but I wanted more and bought the lie that I deserved it and the children would be okay. I have since remarried, but the effects of the divorce on my children are pretty much as you describe.
Will Steve Jobs Save Newspapers?
And revolutionize the way we read various media?
Gregg, who always figures out what tech and life improvements I need before I even have a clue that I need them, last month got me an iPhone and a couple years of service. Because I prefer in-person, face-to-face visits with friends to those calls where somebody's on the freeway using you to pass the time, I don't use it much for chatting, but I've been happily apping up. And I have to say, it's a brilliant little machine that does so many amazing things -- even reportedly saving a guy's life in Haiti.
When I taped identity theft expert Mari Frank's radio show (airing Feb 1 on KUCI, and streamed on the Internet), she mentioned something about how she doesn't want to read the newspaper on a computer -- she likes to be able to hold it in her hand -- and she asked me about Kindle in that context.
I hadn't thought about Kindle and e-readers that way. I've always loved reading the physical newspaper. I think it's amazing that they can put out the whole thing every day (and used to twice daily). It's like a present and I love being able to hold it and thumb through it.
After getting my iPhone, and trying out the Kindle app, I was surprised to find that I love to read on it. I bought a book I needed for my column but couldn't find in bookstores near me ($9.99 on Kindle books!), and I even got a book free, P.G. Wodehouse's short stories, My Man Jeeves
"His chin gave up the struggle about half-way down..."
So...the question that's been on my mind...with the NYT's announcement that they're going to stick their big gray toe in the water of charging for content (after newspaper publishers there and everywhere sat by watching the Internet eat their lunch)...
And with the announcement of the Apple tablet upon us...
Will the Apple tablet save newspapers? Predictions in general of how media and our lives and habits will change in the wake of it? Yours, mine, ours?
*And yes, I'm an Apple fan-girl. Got my first on the University of Michigan student discount program in 1985, fell in love with how simple and fun it was, had many, many more, and I even got my boyfriend at the Apple store (at the Grove, at the iPod display).
Danger And Dangerism
Great post on the difference between fearing danger and being freaked out by everything vis a vis how much to protect your kids, and how much freedom to give them. Gever Tulley blogs:
I have had a lot of discussions with parents about which risky activities they will and won't let their children participate in, and the differences are often striking. Just as there is no necessarily rational basis for choosing which animals are eaten, there appears to be no rational basis for deciding what activities are acceptable for children.In one recent example, I was talking with a school teacher in Casper, Wyoming, and she described a typical weekend where her son and daughter, ten and eleven, would leave the house in the morning, each carrying a rifle and a backpack with food and water, only to return at dusk after having hiked around all day in the open countryside behind their house. Don't you worry that something will happen to them out there? Well, she said, there's a lot less trouble to get into out there in the woods than there is at the mall.
In suburban contexts, it is now common to find parents who drive their children to an empty lot where the child can ride their bike safely - forgetting that the drive on the freeway exposes the child to orders of magnitude more danger than peddling around the neighborhood would.
My mother is fond of telling the story of when I had been left in the care of her sister. Evidently my aunt had taken me to the beach with her children, and I had spent most of the time scampering around on the rocks like a monkey. That evening she called my mother. "I can't bear to watch him running around on those rocks, but I can't get him to stop - what should I do?" Don't watch, said my mother.
So, I propose the term "dangerism" to describe how a culture decides what is and isn't dangerous. The sources of dangerism can be traced to both personal and social sources. Our individual perception of risk is based on a combination of personal experiences and family history. The cultural aspects of dangerism are probably best described by anthropologists, but the popular news media certainly plays a part in creating exaggerated portrayals of risk.
Why do you think so many more parents are extremely overprotective now? My parents wouldn't let me ride my bike to the store when we were kids, but we could go to the park a few blocks from my house, without supervision, and hang out and play there until dinnertime. And wow, gee whiz, like all the other kids allowed the same freedom, I survived. As did my two sisters.
via FreeRangeKids
Absolutely Fantastic Review Of I See Rude People
I was completely thrilled by the review of my book in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, by Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London School of Economics, who also authors a refreshingly un-P.C. blog on Psychology Today. An excerpt, of the review he titled (making my day, week, month, year), "Applied Evolutionary Psychology at its Best":
I See Rude People is a seamless mixture of two types of stories. On the one hand, the book details her hilarious personal take on the rude, obnoxious, inconsiderate people who ruin the day for her and everyone else (people who have loud private conversations on cell phones in public places; parents who let their children run wild and cause nuisance to everyone around; telemarketers who call at all hours; liberal and progressive cyberbullies) and how she deals with such rude people in her everyday life. Then weaved with them are real-life detective stories in which Alkon tracks down individual criminals who victimized her (a thief who stole her car; a toothless black woman who stole her money via identity theft; an elderly driver who hit and damaged her car in a supermarket parking lot).Elmore Leonard, who provides a glowing endorsement of the book on the front cover, recommends the "Pink Rambler" chapter, in which Alkon tracks down a car thief who stole her 1960 Pink Nash Rambler (yes, she located one thief who stole her car out of 17 million people in the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area all by herself without any help from the police). But I personally like the Bank of America chapter better. I won't spoil the fun by revealing the details of Alkon's detective work, but here's the bottom line: do not bank with Bank of America! Your money, and your personal details, are not safe there.
Alkon uses Dunbar's (1993) "150 rule" and the Savanna Principle (Miller and Kanazawa, 2007) to explain the rampant rudeness in modern society. Humans have spent most of their evolutionary history in a small group of 150 or so genetically related individuals, where everybody knew everybody else in the group and spent their entire lives together. In such a group, because of the infinitely repeated social exchange, informal social control and "the shadow of the future" (Axelrod, 1984) sufficed to keep everyone in line within the group, whereas enemies outside of the group could be raided, exploited, raped or killed with impunity. We now live in large metropolises with millions of total strangers, but our brain still assumes that we live in the ancestral environment, where we are only accountable to informal social control of our genetic kin. Since few kin are around us these days, we feel unconstrained and behave badly. I think Alkon is on to something here.
Too Stupid To Vote
Morons in America sign a petition to repeal the First Amendment. (Let's hope they're all home sick on election day -- for the rest of their lives.)
Volokh: "Money Isn't Speech." But...
Eugene Volokh on restrictions on the Supreme Court's corporate campaign finance decision, striking down the limits of corporate financing of elections, and on the mistaken notion that money is speech:
Similarly, we wouldn't say "air travel is speech," or "computing power is speech." Yet surely a law that would limit the use of air travel or computers in political campaigns would be understood as a serious restriction on speech.The problem with restrictions on independent spending on campaign speech -- a problem recognized by Justices Brennan and Marshall and not just by today's conservatives (though Brennan and Marshall would have allowed more such restrictions than today's conservatives do) -- isn't that money is speech. It's that restricting the use of money to speak, like restricting the use of air travel or computers to speak, interferes with people's ability to speak. One can debate whether this interference is justified. But mocking the pro-constitutional-protection position as resting on the notion that "money is speech" strikes me as quite mistaken.
By the way, individual citizens are free to band together in human corporations to fund campaigns, and are more capable than ever to do so, with Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.
Basil & Very Nice
Basil & Spice just posted a really nice review of my book, too! And even cooler, McClatchy-Tribune News Service picked it up!
UPDATE: Here's another really nice one, from the Galveston Daily News, by Mark Lardas.
Just Another Single Mom
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are splitting up, and Jolie will have the kids living with her. From newsoftheworld.com, James Desborough writes:
"Brangelina" fell for each other when they played a warring couple in Mr and Mrs Smith in 2004. They have three adopted children (Maddox, eight, Pax, six, and Zahara, five), and three biological kids (Shiloh, three, and 17- month-old twins Knox and Vivienne).
Maybe you hang out together for a few years to make sure you can make it stick before you run around creating a family?
The Case For Waterboarding Jihadists
No, we shouldn't waterboard you if you rob a liquor store or mug an old lady, but Muslim terrorists live by a different standard: The Verse of the Sword, commanding them to convert or kill the infidel. And, no, we aren't having a little tiff with them; we're at war, to maintain Western freedoms, to deter their attempted mass murders, and to maintain our free Western societies. Kinda serious stuff.
Here's a exchange between CNN's Christiane Amanpour and former Bush speechwriter Thiessen, in which he claims that jihadists need waterboarding to be able to talk under Islam (he claims they need to have something to resist against for it to be kosher for them to speak). I've read similiar things about preserving life under Islam (like how lying and pretending to be an apostate to save one's life is permitted), but never this specifically. Take a watch:
Here's NRO's Deroy Murdoch on how waterboarding worked on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who directed the September 11 attacks:
U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured KSM on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him -- for just 90 seconds.KSM "didn't resist," one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. "He sang right away. He cracked real quick." Another CIA official told ABC News: "KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again."
KSM's revelations helped authorities identify and incarcerate at least six major terrorists.
...Appropriately enough, waterboarding is not used on American citizens suspected of tax evasion, sexual harassment, or bank robbery. Waterboarding is used on foreign Islamic-extremist terrorists, captured abroad, who would love nothing more than to blast innocent men, women, and children into small, bloody pieces. Some of them already have done so.
Waterboarding has worked quickly, causing at least one well-known subject to break down and identify at least six other high-profile, highly bloodthirsty associates before they could commit further mass murder beyond the 3,192 people they already killed and the 7,715 they already wounded.
Though clearly uncomfortable, waterboarding loosens lips without causing permanent physical injuries (and unlikely even temporary ones). If terrorists suffer long-term nightmares about waterboarding, better that than more Americans crying themselves to sleep after their loved ones have been shredded by bombs or baked in skyscrapers.
In short, there is nothing "repugnant" about waterboarding.
YouTube via hotair
(Supposedly) Bin Laden Takes Credit For Detroit Terror Attacks
Oh, yawn. It's supposely because of our support for Israel, not because Islam (per the late George Mason) is actually totalitarianism masquerading as religion, with a directive by the Verse of The Sword to kill or convert the infidel and install The New Caliphate across the globe (in place of our free, western societies). Adrien Blomfeld writes for the Telegraph:
He praised Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives concealed in his underpants, as "a hero".Although he did not claim direct responsibility for the attack, bin Laden said that Abdulmutallab's mission was intended to "re-affirm" the message sent to the United States on September 11, 2001.
The one-minute recording, which bin Laden directed personally to President Barack Obama, sought once again to draw a direct link between al-Qaeda's terror campaign and US support for Israel.
"America will never dream of living in peace unless we live it in Palestine," bin Laden is heard to say in the recording, which was broadcast by al-Jazeera television in Qatar. "It is unfair that you enjoy a safe life while our brothers in Gaza suffer greatly."
Despite warnings of a potentially imminent terror attack on British soil, possibly to coincide with conferences in London this week to discuss Yemen and Afghanistan, bin Laden made no specific threats, confining himself to a pledge to continue his struggle against the US.
"With God's will, our attacks on you will continue as long as you continue to support Israel," he concluded.
Right. That's it. Israel is the best thing that ever happened to Muslims, because it gives them a diversion from killing each other to kill Jews (among other infidels), as the sick book the Quran commands them to do. And by the way, about all those people calling Islam "the religion of peace" (please!) the verses before the Verse of the Sword are abrogated by the Verse of the Sword.
From an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, Bin Laden makes it clear that the Israel excuse is just a convenient excuse exploited by Muslims, and that he really doesn't give a crap about his fellow Muslims -- that is, if they have black skin:
The al-Qaeda leader is exploiting a widely held view among Arab Muslims that the humanitarian crisis in Darfur is an invention of Jews and Christians who want to take over Muslim land.Anyone who believes something that outrageous should talk to Salih Mahmoud Osman. He is a Darfurian Muslim and human rights lawyer who was in Dallas recently, sponsored by local Jewish groups, to talk about what is happening to his people. "Since this situation erupted, never once have we seen a single person from the Arab world or the Muslim community come and show sympathy for the survivors," Mr. Osman told us.
The vast majority of the world's Muslims are not Arabs, but rather Asians and Africans. Why are they acquiescing without protest to this Arab-led genocide against fellow Muslims? Does the silence from the Islamic world on Darfur mean that the world's Muslims agree with Osama bin Laden that it is more important to maintain a morally bankrupt unity against the so-called "crusader-Zionist" enemy than to stand up for defenseless people?
Osama bin Laden declares that the defense of Islam requires black Muslims to suffer and die under the Janjaweed jackboot. This is racism. This is genocide. There is much more that the West can and must do for the sake of the suffering Darfurians. But the question remains: Which side are the world's Muslims on?
Osama bin Laden would like to know. So would the persecuted black Muslims of Darfur. So would a lot of us.
As I was coming in for a landing at LAX the other day, I was looking out at the planes and the city below, marveling at what western freedom has been behind. The Muslim countries have plenty of technology, too -- thanks to us, western freedoms, and our need for a bunch of black gook under the sands where they would otherwise still be a bunch of warring goatherds killing only each other.
Margaret Thatcher's Dinner Order
From a piece in The Economist about women in the workplace:
Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. "Steak or fish?" asks the waiter. "Steak, of course," she replies. "And for the vegetables?" "They'll have steak as well.")
And on a sort of related note, something I think about a lot -- but I'll pose it as a question: Are men at their wimpiest these days, and do you think it's because of feminism?
Nuke Left
Ron Bailey writes in reason about why Well founder and Whole Earth Catalog editor Stuart Brand is for nuclear power (as am I):
Once an opponent of nuclear power, Brand is now a big backer. Where others argue that reactor generation of power is an unsafe, expensive process that produces hazardous waste and could contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Brand writes, "I've learned to disbelieve much of what I've been told by my fellow environmentalists." On safety, he notes, "year after year, the industry has had no significant accidents" in the operation of 443 civilian nuclear plants around the world. "Radiation from nuclear energy has not killed a single American," he says. Even in the deadly Chernobyl explosion in 1986, dire predictions that hundreds of thousands would die of radiation-induced cancers turned out to be wildly exaggerated.Weighing the safety tradeoffs between nuclear power and man-made global warming, Brand cites this observation from his fellow environmentalist Bill McKibben: "Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it's supposed to."
Brand is also fairly sanguine about handling the radioactive wastes produced by nuclear plants. He regards efforts to somehow isolate the wastes for thousands of years as not just prohibitively expensive but wrongheaded, arguing that we should instead figure out how to store the used fuel for a couple hundred years and leave future generations the choice of what to do with the stuff. "If we and our technology prosper, humanity by then will be unimaginably capable compared to now, with far more interesting things to worry about than some easily detected and treated stray radioactivity somewhere in the landscape," he writes. "If we crash back to the stone age, odd doses of radioactivity will be the least of our problems. Extrapolate to two thousand years, ten thousand years. The problem doesn't get worse over time, it vanishes over time." Brand's confidence in human ingenuity and future technological progress is anathema to the more ideological wing of the environmental movement.
Brand's new book: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
How To Quiet A Little Dog
By Gregg Sutter, who's been taking care of Lucy during my New York trip.
Air France And The Fat Ass Charge
From the Telegraph, Air France is going to start charging seriously overweight flyers for two seats, or not allow them on board for "safety reasons":
"People who arrive at the check-in desk and are deemed too large to fit into a single seat will be asked to pay for and use a second seat," said Monique Matze, an Air France spokesman. "They will be charged 75 per cent of the cost of the second seat, which is the full price excluding tax and surcharges, on top of the full price for the first."The decision has been made for safety reasons. We have to make sure that the backrest can move freely up and down and that all passengers are securely fastened with a seatbelt."
She added: "People who cannot fit into a single seat will then be fastened by slotting the belt tip of one seat into the plug of the next, stretching over both seats.
"However the charge will only apply on flights that are full booked. They will get their money back on flights where spaces are available."
People who are too big to fit in one seat should pay for two without being forced to. You know who you are. I pay for one whole seat when I fly. I'd like to luxuriate in that whole tiny little space all by myself, thanks. Try to think of the arm rest between our seats as a divider, not as a little leaning device to help you more easily store your second stomach.
No, this doesn't happen often -- and hasn't happened to me often -- but the worst was when I took a small plane as a connector flight somewhere in the south. I think the guy next to me smashing me against the window was probably 500 lbs. In between feeling sorry for me, I felt sorry for him -- and I now wish I could go back and introduce him to Gary Taubes
I write about this a bit in my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE:
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-pound man who wordlessly annexes half of your seat like he's Germany and you're Poland.
The rule for various situations, not just airlines, is that you don't get to inflict yourself on other people. There's a Spanish proverb, "Take what you need, but pay for it." More people should live by it. Fat and/or paper cut-shaped. And, more people should speak up to those who don't -- instead of meekly letting them victimize them, and sending the message that they can keep on keepin' on victimizing the rest of us.
thanks, kishke
Maiden Japan
Predictably, some Islamic nutbag in Egypt is calling for the death penalty for anybody who imports a Japanese invention designed to help girls fake virginity. From CarnalNation, via a BBC story:
Professor Abdul Mouti Bayoumi of al-Azhar University said that supplying such items is the moral equivalent of spreading vice, which is punishable by death under Islamic Sharia law. Marrying a virgin bride is a measure of prestige in many Middle Eastern countries; therefore, premarital sex is often stigmatized in these cultures. As a result, a shadowy industry has emerged through which non-virgin women can either restore their hymens surgically or via certain devices that mimick the hymen.The device in question represents a cheaper, easier alternative to surgery. The Artificial Virginity Hymen is a pad placed in the vagina prior to what will be the woman's second "first time." Body heat causes the pad to expand, supposedly making the wearer feel tighter. Following penetration, the pad will expel a small amount of fluid with the look and consistency of blood. The device is reportedly non-toxic and hypoallergenic. All the women needs to do is "add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable."
Frankly, if you want to have some fun in bed, pass on the virgins, and go for a girl who's had some practice.
Shock And Yawn
First of all, let me say for anybody new around these parts that I'm a big defender of freedom of speech and almost never ban any commenters (though it's very tempting, sometimes with certain self-named "Butthole(s) Of The Universe").
Not surprisingly, I don't think the FCC should be fining or sanctioning stations or networks when somebody utters a cuss word. If ABC becomes the "All Fuck All The Time Network," parents or people with delicate sensibilities can decide to watch CBS or any of 400 bajillion cable stations. And why should network stations, these days, have to function according to any different standards than cable stations?
I'm hoping the appellate court hearing the FCC case against Fox News (for Nicole Richie and Cher swearing on the air) will come out on the side of constitutionality. But, I also had to laugh at the notion that the word "fuck" is shocking or outrageoous these days. Not part of "polite conversation," no, but shocking? And ban-worthy?
And apparently, "bad" words are only bad when uttered in some contexts on television, and not others. (In other words, it's okay to say fuck if it's for a good fucking reason in a war drama, but not if you have big hair and wear a lot of fringe and zippers.)
From a NYT editorial:
The F.C.C.'s indecency policy is hopelessly vague. Indecency was once limited to forms of expression that were truly outrageous. Now the commission considers itself free to pick and choose among not particularly shocking content based on its opinion about the words and the context.The same epithet that the commission regards as indecent when Cher says it on an awards show may not be considered indecent when showing the movie "Saving Private Ryan." Broadcasters have no way of knowing in advance what sort of content will upset the F.C.C.'s indecency police -- and possibly subject them to enormous financial penalties. When the government punishes speech with vague rules, it has a chilling effect on expression of all kinds. Speakers, unclear on where the lines are, and fearing sanctions, have a strong incentive to avoid engaging in speech that is legally protected.
It is always risky to try to predict a case's outcome from oral argument. But it appears that the judges who heard this case understood that the commission's highly subjective standard violates the Constitution.
One More Good Reason To Live In Los Angeles
We don't usually have weather -- well, if you don't count fires, floods, earthquakes, mudslides and freeway car chases. But, day to day, in the area around the beach where I live, the weather is the kind you don't really notice or remark on, because it's never painfully cold or painfully hot.
Yesterday in New York, I was freezing my patootie off (whatever a patootie might be). And, I wasn't the only one. But, yesterday around 5, this guy (and yes, it is a man) was out in bitter-cold weather with his baby (covered up entirely under a blanket, unless it's just a show stroller), writing something in Bryant Park. 
Speculation: Apartment too small? Mean wife? Urgent need to write a paragraph struck him on his walk with baby?
It Was Them Quakers Again
It couldn't have had anything to do with Islam, that mass murder at Ft. Hood by...by...what's his name. You know, the guy they don't name in the report. Just like the religion of the guy that they don't name in the report. Mark Thompson writes at Time:
The U.S. military's just-released report into the Fort Hood shootings spends 86 pages detailing various slipups by Army officers but not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect's view of his Muslim faith. And as Congress opens two days of hearings on Wednesday into the Pentagon probe of the Nov. 5 attack that left 13 dead, lawmakers want explanations for that omission.John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission and Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, says a reluctance to cause offense by citing Hasan's view of his Muslim faith and the U.S. military's activities in Muslim countries as a possible trigger for his alleged rampage reflects a problem that has gotten worse in the 40 years that Lehman has spent in and around the U.S. military. The Pentagon report's silence on Islamic extremism "shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become," he told TIME on Tuesday. "It's definitely getting worse, and is now so ingrained that people no longer smirk when it happens."
Think Of It As A Soviet-Style Democracy
Pam Meister writes at BigHollywood:
We have a man in the Oval Office who has appointed more "czars" in one year than the Romanov dynasty produced in three centuries. These czars are not approved by the Senate, do not have to be voted in - or out - by the American people and are accountable to no one but the president. Shadow government? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.
Still FWM: The Crime Of Flying While Male
A similar case was in the news a few years ago, and I was outraged then (and blogged it then, in 2006 -- calling it Flying While Male). The sad thing is, nothing has changed. The sadder thing is, it's the lucky kid, the kid who gets to sit next to my boyfriend or my dad, or any number of a decent guys I know.
The latest in the "all men are pervs" approach to seating charts is again from British Airways. Robert Franklin, Esq., blogs at GlennSacks.com, of a man suing BA for sex discrimination. "It was totally humiliating," he said.
From The Daily Mail, Sophie Borland writes:
A businessman is suing British Airways over a policy that bans male passengers from sitting next to children they don't know - even if the child's parents are on the same flight.Mirko Fischer has accused the airline of branding all men as potential sex offenders and says innocent travellers are being publicly humiliated.
In line with the policy, BA cabin crew patrol the aisles before take-off checking that youngsters travelling on their own or in a different row from their parents are not next to a male stranger.
If they find a man next to a child or teenager they will ask him to move to a different seat. The aircraft will not take off unless the passenger obeys.
Mr Fischer, a 33-year-old hedge fund manager, became aware of the policy while he was flying from Gatwick with his wife Stephanie, 30.
His wife, who was six months pregnant, had booked a window seat which she thought would be more spacious. Mr Fischer was in the middle seat between her and a 12-year-old boy.
Shortly after all passengers had sat down, having stowed their bags in the overhead lockers, a male steward asked Mr Fischer to change his seat.
Mr Fischer refused, explaining that his wife was pregnant, at which point the steward raised his voice, causing several passengers to turn round in alarm. He warned that the aircraft could not take off unless Mr Fischer obeyed.
Mr Fischer eventually moved seats but felt so humiliated by his treatment that he is taking the airline to court on the grounds of sex discrimination-He is paying all his own legal.
If he wins at the hearing next month at Slough County Court, BA will have to change its policy.
President Johnson's Bunghole
There's just too much on tape these days. (I listened to every word.)
Obama Voter Mort Zuckerman On The Obama Disaster
Mort Zuckerman, feels as I do, that the economy should have been job one, from day one -- none of this attempt at legacy making, or yummy, Democrat-friendly socialism that the Obama administration made a beeline for. I think Zuckerman is right on in his rant on the Daily Beast, writing, headlined "He's Done Everything Wrong":
This health-care plan is going to be a fiscal disaster for the country. Most of the country wanted to deal with costs, not expansion of coverage. This is going to raise costs dramatically.In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It's now worse than it was. I've now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I've never seen before. It's politically corrupt and it's starting at the top. It's revolting.
Five states got deals on health care--one of them was Harry Reid's. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I've never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It's a bizarre form of political corruption. It's bribery.
...One business leader said to me, "In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines."
...I hope there are changes. I think he's already laid in huge problems for the country. The fiscal program was a disaster. You have to get the money as quickly as possible into the economy. They didn't do that. By end of the first year, only one-third of the money was spent. Why is that?
He should have jammed a stimulus plan into Congress and said, "This is it. No changes. Don't give me that bullshit. We have a national emergency." Instead they turned it over to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who can run circles around him.
Romper Room -- With Gin
People in New York are bringing kids to bars because, well, because these people have become parents and they miss going to bars, and never mind whether that works for the bar or for the other patrons. Risa Chubinsky writes about it for The New York Times blog Complaint Box:
I watched, appalled, as a mother began to line up a set of bottles on the bar, right beside the taps.We sat down and a baby toddled over to us. We pulled our drinks out of his grasping reach. As I looked over at the gabbing parents, I thought that this is what denial looks like. Rather than work day care, we drained our pints and left.
Though I've since tried to restrict my watering holes to places that publicly ban the too-young-to-jet set, like nearby Union Hall, I still have the occasional bar-baby encounter, the most recent one far from the fertile grounds of Brooklyn. At the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, my friends and I watched in shock as a father changed his child's diaper on a vacant table, pitying the person who would sit there next with a pilsner and kielbasa.
Chubinsky echoes a good deal of what I say about the subject in my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Your World Is Their Daycare Center There used to be kid spaces and adult spaces. In fact, I thought kids and I had a deal: I'd stay out of Chuck E. Cheese if they stayed out of the martini lounge. Nope. In New York and some other places, kids can go to bars, and do. You amble into the local gin joint and, for a moment, you're not quite sure whether you've entered an adult drinking establishment or a nursery school parking lot, what with all the Cadillac Escalade-sized strollers crowding the place.
Bar talk just isn't the same. Mommies tossing 'em back loudly debate the merits of various breast pumps. Embarrassed regulars get told "Okay, Mister, so look the other way when the lady's breastfeeding!" And hey, "Watch your language, sailor! There are children present!" Of course, even with kids in the tavern, there are still bar fights. It's the topics that've changed: "Anson took my truck!" "Did not!" "Did too!"
If you're a bar owner, don't even dream of telling parents they can't turn your place into Romper Room With Beer. That's what the owners of Brooklyn's Union Hall dared to do, with two signs, "Please, No Strollers" and "No One Under 21 Admitted." Their bar, their rules, right? Wrong. Shortly afterward, the mommies in the neighborhood declared war. "Local parenting blogs were soon bristling with denunciations," reported Alex Williams in The New York Times.
"This was a perfect winter moms' group place for those of us with infants going stir-crazy," wrote one woman on onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.com, wondering testily why local mothers could not at least drop in for "a beer once a week when it's not crowded."Um, because it's a bar, lady. Take it from another parent, commenting below Williams' story:
I have a six year old and a three year old. I like going out as much as the next person. Still, there are places that are appropriate for children, and places that are not. If it's not a place where the management and clientele can handle spilled juice, random Cheerios, and children underfoot, then don't go. It's not fair to the kids or to other patrons.Delving into the motivation of those determined to inflict their children on bar patrons, Williams quoted writer/actress Christen Clifford, who, most charmingly, sees dragging her baby to the martini lounge as a way of denying that one's youthful exploits come with a shelf life. "Psychologically, you feel like, 'Oh, my life hasn't changed that much,' " she said, "although of course it completely has."
Okay, fine, a mommy likes to dream, but why should that mean the adult social scene of the rest of us gets turned into a playdate? Guess what, lady: The feminists were wrong. Sadly, tragically, you cannot "have it all" -- not when it means making the rest of us put up with it all. So, if you're a parent, and you simply must throw back a beer or two while minding the kiddies, please feel free to pop into the liquor store for a six-pack on your way home.
Happy Ending In Haiti
Via @kausmickey, who tweets, "Proud to be an L.A. taxpayer after seeing this."
Big Fake Boobs Are Scary
Better when a woman's clothed, usually freakish when she's naked -- and that goes even for reasonably sized fakies.
We've talked about this before, but I'm writing about it for my deadline for this week -- responding to a girl who's considering implants -- and this Golden Globes picture of Mariah Careys big fake boobs frightened me.
The rest of the fashion shots are here, starting with Drew Barrymore being attacked by sea anemones.
And here's Mariah Carey's mammary history, from awfulplasticsurgery.com. Up, up, and away!
The Fire Department, The Police Department, And Capitalism
All three save lives. It's popular to sneer at the police and capitalism as sources of brutality, but as Donald J. Boudreaux writes at PJM, capitalism seems to be the difference between living and dying in the aftermath of an earthquake:
Registering 7.0 on the Richter scale, the Haitian earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. But the quake [2] that hit California's Bay Area in 1989 was also of magnitude 7.0. It killed only 63 people.This difference is due chiefly to Americans' greater wealth. With one of the freest economies in the world, Americans build stronger homes and buildings and roads, are better nourished, and have better health care and better search and rescue equipment. In contrast, burdened by one of the world's least-free economies, Haitians cannot afford to build sturdy structures and roads. (Haitian builders often add sand to their concrete because concrete is so expensive there. The result is weaker buildings.) Nor can Haitians afford the health care and emergency equipment that we take for granted here in the U.S.
Drunk, Mentally Ill, Or Otherwise Unqualified For Public Office?
Please be named Kennedy, or be closely related. Compelling piece on the American royalty Joe Kennedy bought, by Daniel J. Flynn on City Journal:
What 30-year-old not named Kennedy, and known primarily for womanizing, reckless driving, and getting kicked out of Harvard for cheating, could have won a Senate seat without ever having held a regular paying job save a two-year stint in the army? But it was the era of Camelot, and as one Bay State politico put it, "Running against a Kennedy is almost like running against the Church."So powerful was the Kennedy name in postwar Massachusetts that a South Boston High School dropout fortuitously named John Francis Kennedy, unrelated to the clan, traded in a job at a Gillette stockroom for three terms as state treasurer. Nepotism made Robert F. Kennedy--a lawyer who had never tried a case before a judge--attorney general of the United States. The Kennedy brand inspired Massachusetts voters to reelect Ted Kennedy seven times after he drunkenly got into the car crash that killed Mary Jo Kopechne 40 summers ago at Chappaquiddick. A district in Rhode Island continues to send Patrick Kennedy to Congress, despite his bipolar mental illness, candid 2003 boast that he'd never worked a day in his life, and rehab stints for OxyContin, alcohol, and cocaine abuse.
"I spent a lot of money for that Senate seat," patriarch Joe Kennedy said prior to Ted's initial run. "It belongs in the family." Now, as Ted fights brain cancer, reports have his wife, Vicki, and nephew Joe angling for the job. Will the Kennedys need to hold an internecine primary to keep the seat--held by a Kennedy for 55 of the last 57 years--in the family? Such a display would be a symbolic reversal of the kind of political shenanigans that the Kennedys once unleashed upon opponents. When Jack Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946, for instance, the family recruited an unknown Joseph Russo to put his name on the ballot and siphon votes from Kennedy rival Joseph Russo. The skullduggery helped Jack win a commanding plurality in the ten-person primary.
Tax-And-Bribe Democrats
From the WSJ:
Democrats seem impervious to embarrassment as they buy votes for ObamaCare, but their latest move makes even Nebraska's Ben Nelson look cheap: The 87% of Americans who don't belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do.The Senate bill was financed in part by a 40% excise tax on high-cost insurance coverage. The White House backs this "Cadillac tax" as one of the few remaining cost-control tokens. But Big Labor abhors the tax because union benefits tend to be far more generous than average, and labor leaders and House Democrats have been throwing a political tantrum for weeks.
So emerging from their backrooms, Democrats have agreed to extend a special exemption from the Cadillac tax to any health plan that is part of a collective-bargaining agreement, plus state and local workers, many of whom are unionized. Everyone else with a higher-end plan will start to be taxed in 2013, but union members will get a free pass until 2018.
Ponder that one for a moment. Two workers who are identical in every respect--wages, job, health plan--will be treated differently by the tax system, based solely on union membership.
Gatorade Massacre Averted!
Idiot administrators at a tech magnet school, no less, evacuate the school when a student brings in his science project -- a Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached, and no substance inside.
Susan Shroder writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune:
SAN DIEGO -- Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.
The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.
...A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.
Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.
Commentor tamooj on the Union-Trib site summarizes well what's wrong with the story and the school:
My unanswered questions:Q. Why didn't the vice principle simple ask the student what the item was? A few electronic components in a gatoraide bottle made by an 11 year old can't really be a credible threat.
Q. Why didn't anyone at a TECHNICAL SCHOOL quickly determine that this was a non-issue?
Q. If this basic science project was a simple electronic motion detector, why did it take the police & fire department over 3 hours (!) to determine it was harmless, especially after asking the reportedly cooperative student for details?
Q. If, after determining this was all just silly over-reaction, why did the police decide it was then necessary to search the students garage? Were they turning this into a training exercise or just escalating the situation to avoid looking silly too?
Q. Why would any kind of 'counseling' be recommended if this was all just a silly over-reaction? Why would a public official make such a damning public pronouncement about family whom they just declared innocent of any wrongdoing? Doesn't this expose the city to tort litigation?
Q. While over-reactions in ambiguous situations may be (judgmentally) required if a credible threat to public safety exists, why were such actions taken in this case, and what process or policy changes will be put in place to prevent future expensive over-reactions in similarly non-threatening cases?
Q. What censure or official rebuke of the decision makers at the school, police and fire departments will be undertaken?
Q. How will the school mitigate or repair any social or psychological damage to the child and his family?
Q. How will the school prevent over-reactions like this one from having a chilling effect on students who wish to safely explore science and technology beyond the core curriculum?
Q. Why are journalists such as yourselves not asking any real, meaningful questions? Why are you simply (and lazily) just reiterating the "official statements" that officials in CYA-mode issue, and calling this the whole of the story? Sigh.
via Walter Olson and Simple Justice (from whom I nicked the "Gatorade Massacre")
Everywhere Is Disneyland
South Central L.A. is about to become a theme park. Randal C. Archibold writes in The New York Times of the latest in neighborhoods to have tour buses passing through:
LOS ANGELES -- The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell "I Got Shot in South Central" T-shirts.Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls "the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations" of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.
To German tourists, is my guess.
Alfred Lomas, 45, a former gang member and the creator of the tour ($65, lunch included), said this drive-by was about educating people on city life, while turning any profits into microloans and other initiatives aimed at providing gang members jobs.But aside from its unusual logistical challenges -- the liability waiver describes the tour as "inherently dangerous" and warns of the risk of death -- the venture has also generated debate about its appropriateness. Chicago has a tour of Al Capone sites and Las Vegas has one devoted to the mob -- but this gangland lore is still happening.
And the reality.
The odds of seeing an actual gang member on the street at the appointed hour -- Saturday morning -- are low, though Mr. Lomas said four or five members will be on the bus to keep watch and offer their stories. Many of the sites, like the location of the Symbionese Liberation Army shootout in 1974, take a lot of explaining to link with contemporary gangs (Mr. Lomas's research was done on the Internet and by talking to old-timers.)
Wanna see a gang member? I'll drop you off in the hood in Venice for free. But, I have to tell you, it's really not that cute or entertaining, violence and death that doesn't have the patina of history on it.
My old neighbor in Venice, a former gang member who went straight, was murdered with a screw driver on Brooks and Electric in Venice, around the block from the old Eames studio and Dennis Hopper's place.
And one of the German guys who lived in the apartment upstairs from me on Santa Clara in Venice back in the 90s was pistol-whipped not far from where our neighbor (Mark, the former gang member), who lived across the street, was killed.
Me? I'll take my thug violence on screen, thanks.
A Conservative Commentator Comes Out For Gay Marriage
Conservative commentator Margaret Hoover writes pretty rock-solidly on Foxnews.com about why gays and lesbians should be able to marry the person they love just like the rest of us:
Gays and lesbians are our friends, neighbors, doctors, colleagues, sisters and brothers. Does it sit well with you that because of their sexual orientation, a factor outside one's control, that they should have less rights and protections in the eyes of the law? While increasing acceptance of gays marks my generational experience--Ellen DeGeneres is welcomed into the living rooms of millions of Americans daily, an impossibility in even my childhood-- many who are older than me fear that if gays and lesbians can marry, what's next? They worry that homosexual marriage degrades the integrity of heterosexual marriage. They fear that their children might be exposed to alternative lifestyles that will impact them negatively, or argue that the purpose of marriage is procreation. If you are uncomfortable with gay marriage, I encourage you to pay attention to this trial, the plaintiffs, the defense and the spectrum of experts, historians, psychologists, economists, political scientists, who will testify as to the effects and detriment of Proposition 8. In the words of NAACP chairman Julian Bond, "The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others."Some Republicans support gay rights, but prefer progress through legislative action or majority rule at the ballot box, rather than judicial action. But what if a democratic election imposes mandates that violate a citizen's constitutional freedom? In the event that majority rule insufficiently protects individual liberty, our system of checks and balances puts forth that it is the role of the courts, to guarantee and protect the rights to individual Americans.
That's why the Supreme Court, in 1967 Loving v. Virginia, legalized interracial marriage -six years after our current president was born to an interracial couple. At that time 73% of the population opposed "miscegenation." How long would it have taken to change popular opinion, for the minority to democratically win their constitutional rights? As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously asserted, "Justice delayed is justice denied."
For those of you who would label me a "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) for taking this stand, I direct you to Vice President Cheney, whose conservative credentials are impeccable, and who answered a question on the topic before the National Press Club audience on June 1, 2009 by saying simply, "...freedom means freedom for everyone."
Please visit Facebook page Republicans for Marriage Equality and American Equal Rights Foundation to follow the details of the trial.
The Lefty Version Of Pat Robertson On Haiti
Genius Danny Glover says the earthquake in Haiti was caused by our response at the climate change summit in Copenhagen.
thanks, Kishke
Protecting People Out Of Business
Meet another casualty of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), mandating expensive testing for lead and other substances, via Overlawyered.
Kitty Boyce worked for 18 years to build her resale shop, The Kids Closet, located in Rochester, IL, into a well-known resale shop. With its colorful signage, brightly decorated interior and whimsical whale logo, The Kids Closet built its reputation on offering customers quality second-hand children's products at great values.Shortly after being voted the "Number One Place to Shop Resale" by the Illinois Times, Kitty announced that because of CPSIA she was converting her store to sell predominately teen and adult clothing, home accessories and furniture, and changing its name to Remarkable Resale. The loss of revenue in her shop due to the changes in inventory forced her to lay off several employees.
..."CPSIA has been devastating for us," said Kitty. "We just decided to get rid of all the toys and furniture. It's just not worth the risk."
...This winter, ask Congress how denying a perfectly safe used winter coat to a child whose parents can't afford to buy a new one is protecting that child's health.
Nice! Just when more people than ever are out of work, and need used clothes for their kids more than ever, we'll make it impossible to run a small business or buy from one!
The Hate Crimes Prosecution Isn't For Those Who Made The Death Threats
Dutch Parliament member Geert Wilders, whose film Fitna warns of the threat to Western civilization from Islam, will be tried for a hate crime in The Netherlands, writes Bob Unruh on WND:
The film calls on Muslims to remove "hate-preaching" verses from the text of their holy book....Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, has been living under 24-hour protection from police since 2004. Al-Qaida has called for his murder.
...Wilders has called the prosecution an "attack on freedom of speech."
"In this country, you are apparently allowed to criticize only if you are politically correct in how you express yourself," he has said.
Blogger Diana West wrote on Wilders' website, "It is not just the repression ... of Islam that Wilders is outspoken about... He is equally if almost singularly outspoken about the political remedies necessary to halt the extension of Islam's law. Such remedies include stopping Islamic immigration and deporting agents of jihad. These are simple measures any democratic state that wished to repeal Islamization would take. ... It is a political trial, then, in the worst sense, that we are about to witness. And it is about more than the future of freedom of speech. The trial of Geert Wilders is about the future of freedom."
European countries like Britain and The Netherlands are, more and more, having their own laws used to protect those who seek to destroy western freedoms and western societies. Many Muslims in Europe seek to turn European countries -- those have (stupidly) taken in mass quantities of immigrants who will not assimilate -- into Saudi Arabia II.
Visit Europe while it's still Europe. (Before you have to put on your Chanel burka before entering France.)
TSA Myths And Realities
The reality is, brains are not employed in creating or applying the rules -- in who gets extra look-up-your-ass checks by TSA workers, who, by the way, are not required to have a high school diploma. (These people wouldn't get a job cleaning the toilets at El Al, where highly trained profilers aren't looking for questionable items but questionable people.)
Lizette Alvarez, in The New York Times, writes of the "Myth/Buster" item from the TSA website, and the reality:
Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.
"Meet Mikey Hicks," said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. "It's not a myth."
Michael Winston Hicks's mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name "was on the list," she recalled.
The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.
After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year's vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.
"Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch -- someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he's a criminal," Mrs. Hicks recounted. "A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don't catch him. But my 8-year-old can't walk through security without being frisked."
...Mrs. Hicks said the family was amused by the mistake at first. But that amusement quickly turned to annoyance and anger. It should not take seven years to correct the problem, Mrs. Hicks said. She applied for redress in December when she first heard about the Department of Homeland Security's program.
"I understand the need for security," she added. "But this is ridiculous. It's quite clear that he is 8 years old, and while he may have terroristic tendencies at home, he does not have those on a plane."
Once again, a note to all of those who think it's a great idea to insert government into health care -- do you want this sort of hassle when you're trying to get a CT scan?
via ifeminist
Travel Silly
One of the dumber pieces I've read recently, especially in light of my trip to New York yesterday, is the Jim Kavanagh piece on CNN, "Toting carry-on bags? Etiquette will take you a long way."
It first notes that bag fees are going up -- two bags to New York (I had to take a portable printer) -- were $50 on US Air, and that's with the pay-early discount.
Nevertheless, I checked what would be considered luggage and took only a bag with my purse, water, an extra pair of socks, my travel neck pillows, and a little bag of snacks on the plane. I put that under my seat and put my (small!) laptop bag in the overhead.
No sooner did I turn my head for a moment than some tiny butterball of a woman was trying to jam her huge carryon into my computer. Hard.
Um, no. And I said so.
The flight attendant ended up shuffling some other people's bags and coats, moving my computer over, and making room for her luggage, but I'm amazing at the body bag-sized carryons people are allowed to bring on -- of a size that means others don't have a reasonable amount of space for a reasonably sized carryon.
And they will continue to bring them on, so they don't have to pay for luggage, but maybe you pay with a cracked laptop screen, or have to hold your coat on your lap on the plane.
That's why I snarled when I read this from the CNN piece:
• Obey government and airline rules on the size and number of items.You can use the template at the gate, but it's better to know your items comply before you get there.
Dimension limits can vary, so what works on one airline may not work on another. Be sure to check with your specific carrier's Web site, and get out your tape measure.
Right. That's gonna happen. If I'm the bitch taking your ticket at the gate.
But, I'm for sure going to be the bitch on the plane who says you can't crack her laptop screen or have my tiny share of overhead space just because you brought all of downtown Ft. Worth in your carryon.
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Is Being The Sexiest Girl In Your Elementary School Class...
...really something kids should be aspiring to?
I write in my book about how some mommies now dress (and act) like 8-year-olds and their 8-year-olds dress like tiny hookers. Tell me something -- if you're wearing fishnets and high heels at 8, what do you have to look forward to at 12...and then some?
My good friend Sergeant Heather -- the most stylishly dressed woman I know -- has a rule for her elementary school-aged daughter: She can't wear skirts or dresses to school. She has to wear pants. And the only kind of shoes she's allowed to wear to school are sneakers, so she can run and play, and be athletic -- which she is.
My mother, too, took the sensible-shoe approach. We had those really ugly good-for-your-feet oxfords for school, and black patent leather mary janes for special occasions. These were flats, of course, with the little strap that buckled across the middle of the foot, not heels suitable for the coquettish little girl look on the runway.
Here's a different sort of mother, from an AP story by Jamie Stengle, which opens on a description of a pair of sparkly peekaboo heels -- the favorites of 6-year-old Helena Bell, who got them for a wedding:
"She's worn them to the point where the jewels have fallen off," says Helena's mother, Dana Bell of Woodland Hills, Calif. "It's not my preference, but I've stopped fighting it."
Word to Mrs. Bell: "Fighting it" is what was known to previous generations as "parenting." Stengle's story continues:
The heels aren't allowed at school, but the first-grader slips on her white treasures first thing when she gets home and wears them to church every Sunday. "I think if it's within reason, it's OK," her mom says.
You have 6-year-old who's into looking big-girl sexy, and that's "within reason"? Is it just me, or has Backwards Day been going on for eons?
It Isn't Free Market Capitalism
It's the very fucked-with market. People like to blame our country's problems on free-market capitalism, but that's not the system we're living under. Stossel lays it out well at reason, calling what we have "crony capitalism":
The word "capitalism" is used in two contradictory ways. Sometimes it's used to mean the free market, or laissez faire. Other times it's used to mean today's government-guided economy. Logically, "capitalism" can't be both things. Either markets are free or government controls them. We can't have it both ways.The truth is that we don't have a free market--government regulation and management are pervasive--so it's misleading to say that "capitalism" caused today's problems. The free market is innocent.
But it's fair to say that crony capitalism created the economic mess.
...What is crony capitalism? It's the economic system in which the marketplace is substantially shaped by a cozy relationship among government, big business, and big labor. Under crony capitalism, government bestows a variety of privileges that are simply unattainable in the free market, including import restrictions, bailouts, subsidies, and loan guarantees.
...We don't have to look far to see how crony-dominated American capitalism is today. The politically connected tire and steel industries get government relief from a "surge" of imports from China. (Who cares if American consumers want to pay less for Chinese steel and tires?) Crony capitalism, better know as government bailouts, saved General Motors and Chrysler from extinction, with Barack Obama cronies the United Auto Workers getting preferential treatment over other creditors and generous stock holdings (especially outrageous considering that the union helped bankrupt the companies in the first place with fat pensions and wasteful work rules). Banks and insurance companies (like AIG) are bailed out because they are deemed too big to fail. Favored farmers get crop subsidies.
If free-market capitalism is a private profit-and-loss system, crony capitalism is a private-profit and public-loss system. Companies keep their profits when they succeed but use government to stick the taxpayer with the losses when they fail. Nice work if you can get it.
Unfortunately for all of you commenting here -- like me, you probably qualify as the other side of "too big to fail," which is "too small to bail." So, if you make really ill-advised business decisions, well, be prepared to eat it.
The Passengers Are Running On Terrorist Time
Soon, with as long as it takes to get through the TSA search process, we'll have to be at the airport the day before a flight. (This is kinda bad if you're taking the shuttle from LA to SF or DC to NYC.)
I had to wake up this morning at 3:15 am for my 6:30 am flight to New York, and Gregg took me to the airport at 4 (and that's only because I live really close to it). Got there around 4:20 and there were no US Air skycaps outside, and long lines of passengers inside...and nobody to wait on them!
Here's a picture I took of the US Air desk. (Unfortunately, you can't really see the tumbleweed blowing behind it.)
Apparently, it's like this every morning. So, US Air passengers, be sure you get to the airport bright and early -- at least two hours before your flight -- so you can spend those extra few minutes you would have spent sleeping standing in line.
PS In case there's any question in anyone's mind, yes, the terrorists have won.
From The Guy Who Said 9/11 Happened Because Heather Has Two Mommies
And because men in the West Village wear leather pants with the butt circles cut out.
In Haiti, in the wake of human tragedy from the horrible earthquake, Pat Robertson sees a light at the end of the rubble -- for scaring a little business back to the church and for a moment in the media spotlight for Pat:
I'm Number Three
More than ever, this country seems ready for a third party. JB Williams, in The Economist, sees dissatisfaction right and left, as do I:
Most independents correctly see Democrats as outright Marxists and Republicans as spineless "go along to get along" centrists today. Although they still believe in our founding principles and values of individual freedom and liberty, along with free-market prosperity, they see no one in Washington DC who believes in these things with any real conviction today.As a result, they have migrated away from both parties and find themselves in search of a new political home which represents the principles and values they once thought both parties believed in.
This means that the old strategy of moving "center" to grab the "independents" based upon an old perception that the independents are "centrists," is dead wrong.
Don't confuse "non-partisan" with anti-American. The reason they have no loyalty to either political party is because neither political party has any loyalty to the Constitution.
The vast majority of independents simply want their constitution back and they don't believe that either political party will deliver on the false campaign slogan anymore.
The Hard Facts
Never in U.S. history did voters have two less deserving presidential and vice presidential candidates to choose from than in the 2008 election. People likely to read this column, don't need me to count the many ways that Obama and McCain were the bottom of the well in terms of the U.S. leadership talent pool.But despite this well known fact, Ralph Nader came in a distant 3rd with a mere .56% of the national vote, a grand total of 739,278 voters.
The "conservative" ticket put forth in 2008 was the Libertarian ticket with Bob Barr and Wayne Root, which snagged the imagination of a whopping 523,433 voters, a lousy .40% of the national vote. They didn't even beat Ralph Nader!
The Libertarians need to stop putting up weirdos and losers for president and run a candidate with the charisma of an Obama or Sarah Palin. At least that's a step in the right direction that's possible. The stuff Williams suggests at the end of his piece seems largely unrealistic.
Any ideas on how to clean up the ginormous mess this country is in?
The Latest Fad In California Schools
Alice Waters has all the children of immigrants coming full circle, writes Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, with her program to put gardens in the California schools. Great piece. Here's an excerpt:
IMAGINE THAT AS a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.It's rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation--one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become "eco-gastronomes" and discover "how food grows"--a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker's son might have learned at his father's knee--leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse.
...I started to ask Michael Piscal, founder and CEO of the Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools, which runs 15 successful charter schools in South Los Angeles, what he thought about the Edible Schoolyard and school gardens in general, but he cut me off. "I ignore all those e-mails," he told me bluntly. "Look," he said, when pressed, "there's nothing wrong with kids getting together after school and working on a garden; that's very nice. But when it becomes the center of everything--as it usually does--it's absurd. The only question in education reform that's worth anything is this: What are you doing to prepare these kids for college? If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That's all that matters to me."
...My state is full of semiliterate 14- year-olds. Let their after-school hours be filled with whatever enriching programs the good volunteers and philanthropic organizations of California care to offer them: club sports, choruses, creative-writing workshops, gardens. But until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise, we become complicit-- through our best intentions--in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its fate. The state, which failed these students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.
As somebody who speaks regularly at a school of mainly inner-city kids, I'm with Flanagan. The last class I spoke to had 11th graders who read at a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade levels. These kids don't need to learn to pick lettuce -- they need to learn what they need to know not to.
Asshats With Deep Pockets
The North Face goes after The South Butt. Matt Straquadine posts on amlawdaily:
It's one of the most chuckle-inducing trademark claims in recent memory: The North Face Apparel Corp. has sued 19-year-old University of Missouri freshman James Winkelmann for trademark infringement and dilution. According to its motion filed in December in the U.S. district court for the eastern district of Missouri, The North Face says Winkelmann, a biomedical engineering student, has caused it "irreparable harm" by producing his parody clothing line, The South Butt (motto: "Never Stop Relaxing").Last week Wilkelmann and his attorneys filed an irreverent reply brief, which is excerpted below, along with a motion to dismiss the suit. According to his filing--as well as to his website and his attorney, Albert Watkins of St. Louis firm Kodner, Watkins, Muchnick, Weigley & Brison--Winkelmann started the clothing line as a joke. Winkelmann says he was inspired after to do so after noticing that all his friends were buying North Face gear even though they weren't mountaineers. He decided to poke fun at the idea by coming up with a "South Butt" logo; slapping it on T-shirts, jackets, and sweatshirts; and selling the clothes via a Columbia, Mo., pharmacy and the Web.
The North Face didn't find the joke funny. The company learned that Winkelmann had moved to trademark the South Butt name, and in August sent him a cease-and-desist letter. Winkelmann--who Watkins claims had sold less than $5,000 worth of South Butt merchandise by that point--ignored the demand.
Idiots. The South Butt parody, in my opinion, gives cachet to North Face, a boring line of clothes for people whose idea of camping goes beyond staying in a bad hotel.
And besides, haven't they heard of a crazy little thing called "the First Amendment"?
I'm guessing they thought they could bully him into pulling his line.
In this business, we call it free advertising and publicity.
And here's a bit more: Buy The South Butt items here.
via Walter Olson
The Wheels On The Bus
Go "Shut the hell up already!" From Metropolitan Diary in The New York Times, my kinda bus driver:
The Short Line bus driver reviewed the cellphone policy ending with: "Be courteous to your fellow passengers." Then he added, "If I hear any cellphone conversations, I'll put you off the bus at the next stop with your luggage, and then you'll have plenty of time to talk, because the next bus will be in three or four hours."The ride back to Manhattan was almost silent.
Whoa! I thought, now this is a man we need to drive in New York City. Jane Seskin
Legal Bigmouth Announces Layoffs
Well, shouts them into his cell phone. On the train. David Lat blogs at AboveTheLaw about a bloviator on his cell phone blowing it bigtime:
Last night, we received this information, from a law student traveling from D.C. to New York:This afternoon I boarded a train from Washington bound for Penn Station.... I, along with all of the other passengers, were sitting quietly when the man directly behind me decided to make a phone call using his bluetooth. He was talking so loudly that I think most people in the car were able to hear him.His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates. I wouldn't have believed it except for the fact that he identified himself to the call as Bob Robbins, who I learned is the leader of the firm's Corporate & Securities practice section, and was talking to Rick Donaldson, who I learned was COO. What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!
"Partial Scarecrow package in car five, please!" (Heart and brain desperately needed.)
Isn't discretion a big part of a lawyer's job description? And this isn't some junior associate. If I were a client there, I'd fast-become a client somewhere else.
Marriage Went Public Long Ago
And it should be a right available to all consenting adult members of the public -- the right to marry the consenting adult of their choice. Robert A. Levy makes "the moral and constitutional case for a right to gay marriage" in the New York Daily News:
Thomas Jefferson set the stage in the Declaration of Independence: "[T]o secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men." The primary purpose of government is to safeguard individual rights and prevent some persons from harming others. Heterosexuals should not be treated preferentially when the state carries out that role. And no one is harmed by the union of two consenting gay people.For most of Western history, marriage was a matter of private contract between the betrothed parties and perhaps their families. Following that tradition, marriage today should be a private arrangement, requiring minimal or no state intervention. Some religious or secular institutions would recognize gay marriages; others would not; still others would call them domestic partnerships or assign another label. Join whichever group you wish. The rights and responsibilities of partners would be governed by personally tailored contracts - consensual bargains like those that control most other interactions in a free society.
Regrettably, government has interceded, enacting more than 1,000 federal laws dealing mostly with taxes or transfer payments, and an untold number of state laws dealing with such questions as child custody, inheritance and property rights. Whenever government imposes obligations or dispenses benefits, it may not "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." That provision is explicit in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, applicable to the states, and implicit in the Fifth Amendment, applicable to the federal government.
Here, from an AP story by Lisa Leff and Paul Elias in the Houston Chron, conservative litigator Theodore Olson, who's joined forced with liberal lawyer David Boies, quotes the Supreme Court's description of matrimony:
"In the words of the highest court in the land, marriage is the most important relationship in life and of fundamental importance to all individuals," said Olson, who represented George W. Bush during the Florida recount in 2000 and later served as his solicitor general.Olson had barely launched into his opening statement when Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who is presiding over the trial without a jury, interrupted him to ask how Proposition 8 could be discriminatory since California already allows gays to enter into domestic partnerships that carry the same rights and benefits of marriage.
"If California would simply get out of the marriage business and classify everyone as a domestic partnership, would that solve the problem?" the judge asked.
Olson answered that such a move would resolve the constitutional issues but likely wouldn't be politically feasible.
"I suspect the people of California would not want to abandon the relationship that the proponents of Proposition 8 spent a tremendous amount of resources describing as important to people, and so important it must be reserved for opposite-sex couples," he said.
Olson went on to argue that as long as marriage remains available only to opposite-sex couples, the state will be "relegating gay men and lesbians to badges of inferiority that forever stigmatize their relationships as inferior."
If societal attitudes toward gays and marriage are changing, Walker asked, "why shouldn't the courts just stand back" and let the political process decide the issue?
"Because this is why you have courts, and this is why we have a Constitution, and this is why we have a 14th Amendment," Olson said. "We have courts to declare that our citizens -- loving, upstanding citizens -- are being hurt every day, to declare those measures unconstitutional, and that's why we are here today."
Religion Poisons Everything
Skip through to Hitchens at around the two-minute mark.
Thanks, Cridster!
I Sign Rude People
On both coasts.
I'm reading/signing my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, tomorrow night (Tuesday) at Vroman's in Pasadena.
Tue, Jan 12, 7:00pm
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd
Pasadena, California 91101
On Friday, January 15, at 7pm, I'll be at Barnes & Noble on 6th Ave. and 8th Street in New York City, reading from my book as part of Susan Shapiro's Secrets of Publishing Panel, a reprise of her highly successful panel by the same name that she did recently for LA Press Club.
Barnes & Noble Greenwich Village
396 Ave of the Americas at 8th Str.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-8780
TSA Workers Are Going To See Your Piercings
No, not just the ones in your nose. The ones in your labia. Loud and clear.
(In case you didn't see this image in the comments from Raddy.)
And no, this won't protect you from terrorists who swallow their explosives like the drug mules, do.
Next up: Exploratory surgery for anybody boarding a plane! Or we could just hire the Israelis to run our security, and let them give that little extra searchy and questioning something to those with something suspicious about them. This means we wouldn't waste time bending over old Mrs. Johnson, with the dangerous crop of chin hair, like the old lady behind me in Toronto who stood on hard floor for an hour and 20 minutes waiting to be felt up with the rest of us.
UPDATE: Vinnie B. tweeted me that it's a hoax -- photoshopped. On deadline now, so I'll leave you the link to the hoax claim:
http://www.bluegrassbulletin.com/2010/01/drudge-report-posts-hoax-photo-without-explanation.html
They still won't be able to look up your poop chute with this thing. Open wider, Mrs. Johnson!
Terrorism And Car Theft Are Kinda Different
I just don't get it. President Obama has decided to try the Panty Bomber in a regular court of law, like a common criminal, instead of in a military court as the terrorist he is. Philip Sherwell writes for the Telegraph:
The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.
The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 - even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state."He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up," Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal."
Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush.
"It's The Visas, Stupid"
Joel Mowbray writes in the Wash Times about what the Abdumutallab report ignored -- the fact that the Panty Bomber had a valid visa when he boarded his Detroit-bound flight. That his father's report didn't result in the immediate revocation of his visa, but only his being put on the watch list, per our policy requirements. The visa thing seems to be a real problem -- one the president needs to deal with:
As part of this larger power struggle, DHS has been thwarted in many of its attempts to open Visa Screening Units (VSUs), which were mandated for every visa-issuing post as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Nearly eight years later, there are only 14 VSUs, or just over 5 percent of all embassies and consulates. There is no VSU in Nigeria, even though DHS has wanted to establish one.Lack of funding is partly to blame, but several ambassadors have successfully rebuffed efforts to create VSUs in their countries - fearing that enhanced security enforcement would slow visa processing, angering local government officials.
State shouldn't need encouragement to understand the crucial role of visas for foreign terrorists who wish to strike on U.S. soil. As we learned from the Sept. 11 Commission report, al Qaeda wasn't even able to recruit 30 operatives for 9/11. Their good fortune - and our tragedy - was that they recruited mostly in Saudi Arabia, a country which enjoyed 98 percent visa approval rates before Sept. 11.
What the Sept. 11 Commission acknowledged - but strangely shrugged off as insignificant - was that not one of the terrorists whose applications we could review afterward actually qualified for the visas that they all received. (Four of the application forms were destroyed by regular policy before Sept. 11.) In other words, had the visa law been followed, at least 15 of the terrorists wouldn't have gained entry to the United States in order to carry out the attacks.
Yet with that painful history, State's sole response to the warnings from Mr. Abdulmutallab's father was to "nominate" the young Muslim fanatic for inclusion on the terrorist watchlist. While this led to him being named a "possible terrorist," State's policy is to deny or revoke visas only for known terrorists.
And while it is welcome that Mr. Obama has ordered a review of "visa issuance and revocation criteria," a more decisive step must be taken.
Any probable cause of terrorist connections needs to result in visa denials and revocations unless the evidence can be disproved or reasonably deemed illegitimate. Even when we have no specific information, as was the case with most of the 9/11 terrorists, State should enforce the visa laws as strictly with young Muslim men from known terrorist hotspots as it does with, say, poor (or even middle-class) Filipinos.
"Moderate" Squeaks
I noticed a comment and got an e-mail about how wonderful it is that Canadian imams are denouncing terror attacks on Canada and the US. Here's the e-mail:
Dear Amy,Maybe some people are trying to act reasonably?
Here's my response:
Perhaps some people want to work on the PR? Far too little, far too late. And FYI, it's bullshit, because the Verse of the Sword abrogates all the nice, peaceful words before it, and Muslims are supposed to emulate Mohammed, who was a mass murdering pedophile. Thanks, anyway, though, for sending.
More on lying to protect Islam, taqiyya, as a part of Islamic culture, below. But, first, this, from the courageous defender of free speech and Western values and freedoms, Ezra Levant, about the top signer on the imam list:
One of those Jew-haters is Syed Soharwardy, a vicious, anti-Semitic bigot who trivializes the Jewish Holocaust, spreads blood libels against the Jewish Talmud, says Israel is perpetrating a Holocaust of its own against Palestinians, publicly calls for sharia law to be implemented in Canada, and participated in a pro-terrorist rally in the Jewish neighbourhood of Calgary, replete with a flag of Hezbollah.I first came to know this odious man up close, when he hauled me before the Alberta human rights commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Before that, the little thug actually tried to have me arrested by the Calgary Police Service for publishing those cartoons, as if we were back in his beloved Saudi Arabia, where the police take care of the infidels.
Syed Soharwardy is anti-Semitic scum.
Calgary's Official Jews freaked out when I publicized the words and deeds of this bigot, because they had so publicly cast their lot in with him. Some of the OJs wrote public comments on on my blog, and others wrote to me directly. All of their comments were the same, in that they ignored Soharwardy's anti-Semitism, and instead railed against me for my criticisms. In other words, they weren't embarrassed that they were friends with Soharwardy. They were embarrassed that they were caught.
So what did the Official Jews do about it? I mean, we know what they'd do if it were a white WASP who was espousing such bigotry: they'd press for his prosecution, as they did with Jim Keegstra.
But not with Soharwardy. They actually contacted him, and asked him to take down some of the most grotesque anti-Semitic comments from his website, so they wouldn't have to explain themselves to grassroots Jews who were asking the Official Jews what the hell they were doing.
To be clear: they didn't get Soharwardy to renounce his anti-Semitism. They didn't get him to explain it. They simply got him not to be so showy about it -- it was too embarrassing for them. Could he please take down the page from his website where he says the Jewish Talmud licenses Jews to murder non-Jews? If it's not too much trouble, sir?
Here's Warner MacKenzie, on the ex-Muslims' site, Islam-Watch, about taqiyya, the Islamic principle of lying for Allah:
The word "Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing, precaution, guarding." It is employed in disguising one's beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies. In practical terms it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralising any criticism of Islam or Muslims.Falsehoods told to prevent the denigration of Islam, to protect oneself, or to promote the cause of Islam are sanctioned in the Qur'an and Sunna, including lying under oath in testimony before a court, deceiving by making distorted statements to the media such as the claim that Islam is a "religion of peace". A Muslim is even permitted to deny or denounce his faith if, in so doing, he protects or furthers the interests of Islam, so long as he remains faithful to Islam in his heart. (See endnotes)
Like many Islamic practices, taqiyya was formed within the context of the culture of Arab tribalism, expansionary warfare, Bedouin raiding and inter-tribal conflict. Taqiyya has been used by Muslims since the 7th century to confuse, confound and divide 'the enemy'.
A favoured tactic was 'deceptive triangulation'; used to persuade the enemy that preparations for a raid were not aimed at them but at another tribe altogether. The fate in store for the deceived enemy target was an unexpected plunderous raid, enslavement of the women and death to the post-pubescent males.
Here, from MacKenzie's piece, is one lie-detector test -- although taqiyya may once again prevail:
Manipulative ambiguity and Semantics:Sheik Hilali and the late Yasser Arafat are both on public record as (a) 'condemning' the 9/11 attacks, in ambiguous terms, to the Western media and (b) praising suicide bombings, or " martyrdom operations", to their Arabic speaking audiences .
Islamic spokesmen will rarely unequivocally condemn a specific act of terrorism and direct questions will be skillfully evaded.
(NB: because Muslims regard Islamic attacks as "jihad", and not terrorism, their spokesmen can truthfully deny any support for terrorism.)
Interviewers would be better advised to ask the more precise question "do you believe in jihad against the unbelievers?
P.S. The Quran makes jihad a duty for Muslims.
Barack Obamanomics
Matt Welch writes in reason about the flawed and simplistic thinking behind Barack Obama's whack economic policies:
So when President Barack Obama slaps a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires, as he did on September 11, he does it in the name of ensuring that (as he put it in a campaign promise) "China is no longer given a free pass to undermine U.S. workers." In this yin-yang formulation, there is a single pie of domestic American tire consumption, and China's slice is growing bigger at the expense of domestic producers. Forget the overall U.S. economy, with its 99.9 percent non-tire-industry workers (and its government-owned, money-hemorrhaging auto companies), all of whom are happy to take advantage of cheaper tire prices. And forget a once-starving country that has catapulted more human beings out of poverty within a generation than any nation in the history of the world.Most of all, forget the famous formulation by Adam Smith, dating back to the Declaration of Independence: "If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage."
..."The truth is," first lady Michelle Obama said in April 2009, "in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
It's an alluringly simple vision, this notion that public policy challenges can be solved merely by lifting some gold off one end of the scale and plopping it down on the other. You see it every day, for example, in California, where for decades the conventional wisdom has held that the proximate cause of the Golden State's periodic fiscal meltdowns is Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that caps annual property tax increases. If only those greedy homeowners gave up a bit more of their pie, presto! No more budget problems.
Oh, and the Dems aren't the only guilty ones. As I've said before, the Republicans aren't the party of small government; just the party of big government that's smaller than the Democrats' idea of it:
President George W. Bush increased federal education spending by 58 percent in real terms, and Obama is on track to at least double that record. How much gold can the education establishment consume before the current crop of governing Democrats begins to entertain the notion that the root problem of public schooling isn't a lack of funds?
Reiding Obama
Chris Cillizza at the WaPo's The Fix writes about Reid's remarks chronicled in Game Change
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect" in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign."I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words," said Reid in a statement. "I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments."
Translation: "I deeply regret getting caught."
How Screwed Is Life In The PC UK?
Two "youths" try come into a woman's backyard and try to break into a woman's garden shed. After she scared them off by waving a kitchen knife, she's warned by police that she acted illegally. Roya Nikkhah writes for the Telegraph:
Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear'Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.
Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" - even in her own home - was illegal.Jonathan Shalit, Miss Klass's agent, said that had been "shaken and utterly terrified" by the incident and was stepping up security at the house she shares with her fiancé, Graham Quinn, who was away on business at the time.
He said: "Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home. All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off.
Citizens of the UK, please lie down and be victimized. Thank you.
Why Not Just Pay For Your Kids Until They're 45?
At Examiner.com, DC Scotus Examiner Hans Bader writes of a really bad idea in Virginia. An excerpt:
Married parents don't have any legal obligation to pay for their adult children's college education or living expenses. But a bill just introduced in Virginia's legislature would require divorced parents to pay for such expenses.HB 146 would extend child support beyond age 18 to age 23 when the "child" is attending college. Right now, child support in Virginia usually ends soon after the child reaches the age of majority.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a similar provision providing for post-majority support as a violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. It reasoned that since married parents do not have to support their adult children, it was discriminatory to force divorced parents to do so.
via Walter Olson
Osama Bin X-Ray
An epidemiologist friend taught me the term iatrogenensis -- negative affects caused by a doctor's care -- after conscious sedation for an endoscopy knocked out my usual cognitive ability and a good bit of my memory for about three weeks. Medical procedures and drug-taking don't come without side-effects; without costs.
Because of that, and because I'm loathe to get dental X-rays, or get them as often as the dentist would like me to, I've been wondering about the radiation from these full body scanners they're installing or talking about installing. And that's what Matthew L. Wald writes about in The New York Times:
WASHINGTON -- The plan for broad use of X-ray body scanners to detect bombs or weapons under airline passengers' clothes has rekindled a debate about the safety of delivering small doses of radiation to millions of people -- a process some experts say is certain to result in a few additional cancer deaths.The scanning machines, called "backscatter scanners," deliver a dose of ionizing radiation equivalent to 1 percent or less of the radiation in a dental X-ray. The amount is so small that the risk to an individual is negligible, according to radiation experts. But collectively, the radiation doses from the scanners incrementally increase the risk of fatal cancers among the thousands or millions of travelers who will be exposed, some radiation experts believe.
Full-body scanners that are already in place in some airports around the country and abroad use a different type of imaging technology, called millimeter wave, that uses less powerful, non-ionizing radiation that does not pose the same risk.
But those machines also produce images that are less clear. And in the wake of the attempted bombing of an airplane traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam on Dec. 25, the United States is turning to backscatter scanners for routine security checks. Congress has appropriated funds for 450 scanners to be placed in American airports. On Thursday, President Obama called for greater use of "imaging technology" to spot weapons and explosives.
...The health effect of small doses of radiation is not observed, but inferred from the visible effects of higher doses. Dr. Makhijani said that if a billion passengers were screened with the dose assumed by the radiation protection council, that would mean 10 more cancer deaths a year.
Are You Taking Magnesium?
Dr. Michael Eades writes in The Protein Power Lifeplan
The lipid hypothesis of heart disease is rapidly being supplanted by the inflammatory hypothesis, which, for my money, is much more on the mark. The researchers who have spent their careers doing cholesterol research are not going down without a fight, however. Whereas most of the speakers at medical conferences always used to show graphs demonstrating that as cholesterol levels went up, so did the risk for heart disease. Now most speakers are showing graphs demonstrating that elevated cholesterol in combination with an elevated C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation) is a better gauge of heart disease risk. I predict that over the next few years, the cholesterol part of these graphs will slowly disappear.As the inflammatory hypothesis becomes more accepted, more and more physicians will be checking C-reactive protein levels along with a few other inflammatory yardsticks to determine the inflammatory status of their patients. If the C-reactive protein level is found to be elevated, then steps can be taken, not just to reduce the C-reactive protein, but to treat the underlying inflammation so that the C-reactive protein a marker of this underlying inflammation will normalize.
One easy step in the inflammation reduction process is to make sure magnesium intake is high.
Eades writes in his blog comments:
I use magnesium citrimate, and I take 300 mg per day at bedtime. Any good chelated magnesium will do. Just look for one with 'ate' on the end of it, as in magnesium aspartate or magnesium citrate. And be careful in checking the doses because chelated magnesium isn't all labeled the same. Some list the actual magnesium on the label and will say that each pill contains, say, 150 mg of magnesium. Others add the weight of the chelating agent (the substance that ends in 'ate') in with the magnesium, so you might find a brand where the label says each pill is 1000 mg. This means the magnesium plus the chelating agent adds up to 1000 mg. The best way is to look for the RDI on the back of the bottle. Take enough pills to get the RDI each day, and take them at bedtime.
More on the RDI here, but look at other sources as well. I haven't read this woman's book, The Magnesium Miracle
UPDATE: A note about Dr. Eades from Purple Pen, who gave me permission to post her e-mail to me from the other day:
Hi Amy,
I decided to buy Protein Power after your recommendation to Dr. Eades site. I am amazed at the results of a no-carb diet! I used to think that my stomach always felt sick because I ate meat, boy was I wrong! Once I stopped eating bread, rice, fruits and sugar I can tell you my stomach has never been soo normal and plain wonderful. Also I dont have any gas,not any at all just like you said on your blog. I have a lot of energy. And the most important thing is.....I've lost weight. After taking my anti-depressants I went from 100 lbs (underweight) to 155. Of course everyone recommended I go on a low fat high carb diet and do nothing but exercise. The thing about one of my anti-depressants is it is known to cause diabetes, so Im assuming that I am very sensitive to sugar and thats what caused the weight gain. Eating meat causes you not to overeat and Im seeing the results, feeling great and loosing a ton of weight.
Thanks so much for your advice!
The Oddest Thing I've Gotten A Kickback From Recently
Thank you, whomever bought this on Amazon through my Amy's Mall links. I got $5.28 from your purchase. Sure is odd-looking! It's the Bosu 3D System Balance Trainer
Now, I'm not knocking balance-training. The same epi friend I mentioned above -- a friend I met through Gary Taubes -- told me I have to learn to stand on one leg for 15 seconds each day with my eyes closed to help maintain balance from now through when I get to be an old bag...although I feel like an old bag every time I see myself on HDTV!
PS All you have to do to give me a kickback from your purchase, which I truly appreciate, is click on the "powered by Amazon.com" logo on Amy's Mall. Thank you all so much -- that, and my private sessions, are helping keep me afloat in the downturn in newspapers. And cool-ray...I picked up a paper yesterday!
The Terrorists Have Won
I was in Toronto, promoting my book. I had a fantastic time in Canada -- until I had to leave. These days, if you're taking a plane, parting is such...hellish stupidity.
Before I left LA, I called the airline to find out what the restrictions would be for flying to and from Canada, in the wake of the Panty Bomber. Could I bring my travel bag, which is just big enough to hold my purse, neck pillow, and warm socks for the plane, and could I bring my laptop bag? No problem, I was told. And it was no problem on my flight from O'Hare to Toronto.
However, when I got to the airport in Toronto to catch my flight back to LA, I heard an announcement that passengers could only take only a small purse on the plane (12 inches or less), and a laptop or small personal item.
I was furious. Thank you, Islam! I flashed on "the Verse of the Sword," commanding Muslims to convert or kill "the infidel," and then to my car ride to my hotel the day before.
Being a chatty girl, I talked the whole way with the driver taking me to the hotel, who turned out to be a Muslim guy -- a congenial fellow, who explained that he wasn't like those evil Wahabi, and who was surprised at how much I knew about Islam (even including knowing about Qutb).
He made some claims about how the Quran advocated peace, and said that the terrorists bastardize Islam. I politely explained that "the Verse of the Sword" abrogates the verses before it, and then, when I mentioned that many Muslims had never read the Quran, he said he actually never had.
We were having a very civil chat, and eventually, I asked him, with sincere curiosity, why you don't hear "moderate Muslims" speaking up, and he couldn't answer. Nobody's ever given me an answer on that. Anybody got any ideas?
But, back to the airport: To be able take my purse with me instead of checking it, I was told I'd even have to pack the shrug (a tiny sweater that's just arms) and the Pashmina shawl I carry everywhere in my purse, because I'm often cold. They weren't budging on making me check them, so I told them I'd take them out of my purse and wear them peasant style, and managed to keep them with me.
Luckily, anticipating security stupidity, I'd tucked an empty nylon duffel bag into my suitcase before I left LA, so I was able to check that through with my laptop bag and plane bag in it, both of which are small enough to fit under the seat in front of me if I take out my neck pillow.
Upon adding this extra piece of luggage, and upon being made to carry my laptop in one hand instead of in my little laptop backpack, my luggage situation went from easily manageable by me to a mess. I struggled from the check-in area to Customs with a laptop in one hand, my purse in the other, my passport between two fingers of one of those hands, plus a rolling duffle and my nylon duffle precariously on top of it that kept knocking the rolling duffle over. Thanks, Islam!
After Customs, there were two security interventions: the man and woman who tried to separate me from my woolens, and then there was the nice and apologetic Eastern European lady at the metal detector who had to hand-search my purse. She did that, and found a dangerously bright pink lipstick, but nothing else of note.
Finally, I was through security, and ready to find my gate.
Whoops, seemed there was something of a wait: a GIGANTIC line blocking access to the gates, with men in one line and women in another, all the way down the corridor. We all stood and stood and stood, for over an hour. I think I waited about an hour and 20 minutes, standing, waiting to get up to the search area. There was a long table of searchers, searching every person who got on the plane.
An Indian woman (also very nice and apologetic) again pawed through everything in my purse. Then, it was time to feel me up. I asked her if I could just lift up my shirt and show her my boobs. I'd rather expose myself than get felt up by a security worker at the airport. No go, apparently. She did apologize that I couldn't just expose myself. She felt me up all over, and finally let me go to get on the plane.
I'd gotten to the airport at about 2:20 for a 5:40 flight -- a fake international flight, since Canadian flights really aren't considered quite "international" -- and "security" checks used up much of that time. Yes, along with all the old people and everybody else (save for a woman with a cane from fighting in Afghanistan, who I asked the hall monitor lady to let through to the front, which she did), I spent three hours straight standing up, shuffling forward, and being searched, thanks to "the Religion of Peace."
Just makes you want to book a flight pronto, now doesn't it?
P.S. Canada is spending buttloads of money to buy full-body scanners, which, like the search process we all went through on Thursday, would not have detected the Panty Bomber.
We Hear Stories
Got this letter from a lady in Canada, who prefers I don't publish her name.
I just saw you on CTV morning news in Toronto Canada. Way to go!My daughter worked at the local Diary Queen. She told me that they would get verbally abused by grown ups all the time. These are teenagers working for minimum wage.
One night I was waiting in my car in front of the store as they were closing shop, my daughter and another 16 year old girl. A man in a big pick up truck drove around and through the drive thru. The 16 year old girl was just locking the door. The man did not see me. He yelled at the girl Are you closed. She said Yes. Then he yelled You fucking bitch! This was a man in his forties. The girl was near tears. She was shaking. I got out of my car and yelled Pardon. I wanted to confront him and tell him off but he quickly sped away. Can you believe this man. What a wimp. He can take his frustrations out on a 16 girl but cannot confront me.
Btw, I would have loved to have had the opportunity to discuss this with him...lol
The Central "Intelligence" Agency
Con Coughlin writes in the Telegraph that it's the fault of the CIA that flying has become such a nightmare lately:
In Saudi Arabia last September, a suicide bomber went one better than Abdulmutallab and concealed an explosive device in his anal cavity. One shudders to think how British security officials would respond after a similar attempt here.Security checks at airports undoubtedly serve their purpose in protecting flights from terrorist attacks, but they have their limits. By far the best way to prevent al-Qaeda from achieving its objectives is to have good intelligence, as was the case in the 2006 Heathrow plot. And the main reason the world's transport network has again been plunged into chaos is that Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land at Detroit on Christmas Day was as much a failure of intelligence as a mark of al-Qaeda's resourcefulness.
...And, as if Abdulmutallab's bombing attempt was not a crushing blow for the CIA's morale, the organisation is also trying to come to terms with a suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA officers last month at their base at Khost, close to Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. US officials say that those killed included five of their leading experts on al-Qaeda, who agreed to attend the meeting because they believed they would receive key information as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Instead, it now appears they were set up by the Haqqani clan, the pro-Taliban tribe that is widely held to be protecting bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership in north-west Pakistan. The CIA officers were so convinced of the bona fides of their source, a Jordanian doctor, that they did not even bother with basic security procedures - such as searching his belongings - before allowing him on to the base, with the inevitable catastrophic consequences.
If this is how the CIA takes care of its own security, we should not be surprised by its failure to address that of the wider public. Professional and effective intelligence-gathering lies at the heart of the battle to defeat Islamist extremists. Unless there is an immediate improvement in the approach and performance of the world's largest intelligence-gathering operation, we stand little chance of success.
Commenter Leo on the Telegraph site writes:
I wonder how long it'll be before an attempt is made, in the vicinity of a western airport, to bring down an airliner with a surface-to-air missile.What will happen then - all houses and businesses within five miles of an airport to be razed to the ground?
Here's commenter AC from the Telegraph site:
Nev Cooper asks about the ESTA - pre travel authorisation - and asks why it appears to not have been insisted upon with the detroit bomber. I have recently had to fill out those details myself for travel to the US, and it relies on the honesty on the person filling it out. I cannot quite recall the phrasing, but it asks you if you are planning a terrorist attack or are a member of a terrorist group. Um, perhaps the bomber ticked 'no'.? It is like the various forms I filled out when I was applying for residency here. It asks me if I have ever commited war crimes, or if i am a terrorist. The answer to all these things is no, but do you think potential terrorists are sitting there scratching their heads saying 'well, I had better answer truthfully'? Obviously not.
Splish, Splash, I'm Taking Less Of A Bath
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More Advice Goddess Free Swim
In Toronto, promoting my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE, so feel free to get some topics going today.
Because We've Already Got So Many Brilliant Japanese Scientists
Just what the US needs! No, not more highly-educated tech brains out of Japan. We're granting (and I can barely type it without retching) "diversity visas" to people from that bastion of peace, love and goodwill for us...Yemen!
Yes, that's right. CNSN News' Matt Cover writes:
The State Department has awarded 1,011 special "diversity visas" allowing Yemeni nationals to immigrate to the United States since 2000, the year 17 U.S. sailors were killed when the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists in the Yemeni port of Aden.The "diversity visas" are designed to encourage immigration from countries that do not otherwise send significant numbers of immigrants to the United States.
The State Department roster of all countries whose nationals have received "diversity visas" to immigrate to the United States in 2010, for example, shows that 2 of these immigrants will be from Luxembourg, 3 from the Solomon Islands, 4 from French Guiana, 5 from Reunion, 6 from Cape Verde, 7 from Malta, 8 from Guinea-Bissau, 9 from Comoros, 10 from Suriname--and 72 from Yemen. Nationals of the four states listed by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism--Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria--also received "diversity visas" from the State Department to immigrate to the United States in 2010. These include 98 from Syria, 298 from Cuba, 1,084 from Sudan, and 2,773 from Iran.
That the U.S. would encourage immigration from Yemen during the past decade is of interest because of the terrorist problem in that country.
In a word...duh!
Clearly, the war on drugs needs to start in The State Deparment.
How Israel Screens For Terrorists
Hint: It's not by cavity-searching old Mrs. Smolovsky. A three-minute video by Martin Himel for the WSJ:
Note that their employees don't seem to be people who only got into the security biz because McDonald's wasn't hiring that week.
And over at Slate, here's what we're spending our security dollars on, from a piece by Anne Applebaum:
Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its lavish expansion, the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once got spent on a gym; $500,000 went toward artwork and silk plants; and untold millions are spent every year in overhiring, since the determination of when there will be long security lines at an airport has never really been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels. As for the Department of Homeland Security, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it; more biochemical suits for Grand Forks County, N.D., than the town has police officers to wear them; and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment apparently needed for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the "needs" of the constituents of other important members of Congress....And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against the critics, repeatedly allocating money to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members, and then declaring itself shocked--shocked!--to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland-security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.
...Imagine, instead, that the TSA's vast budgets were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network, one that could have made the security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the underwear bomber's father.
Thanks, Patrick!
They're All Innocent
I finally answered one of the many letters I get from convicts every week for this week's column deadline (should be in papers this week, next week or the week after, depending on where you live).
Like most of these prisoners who write me, this guy claims, 1. he's innocent, and 2. says he's looking to pick up chicks, and wants my help. (The best is when they write to me -- a girl who gets mail for a living -- in hopes I'll become their pen pal. Or, rather, penn pal...heh heh.)
I know the kind of girl who goes for a guy in prison (usually seriously fucked up, in case you're wondering) so I was having no part of helping him find a woman. I did want to get a quote about why a girl goes for the felons from Dr. Barbara Oakley, one of the sharpest people out there on sociopaths, psychopaths and the people they eat for lunch, as she shows in her book Evil Genes
Barb couldn't talk, as she got called to write an op-ed for a big paper lickety-split, but she did e-mail me this:
Got a letter from a prisoner who wanted my help in making a newspaper do a retraction about the murder he'd committed. He'd raped and murdered a little girl, but that wasn't the problem for him. The problem was that the newspaper said that he'd raped and murdered the little girl while he was out on parole--but he wasn't on parole at the time. He wanted me to make them retract their false statement. Hah!
A Science-Based Diet
Read this. Great piece on heart disease in Men's Health by Nina Teicholz, whose name I think I found (glowingly) mentioned on Dr. Michael Eades wonderful blog -- and, I think, by Eades himself, who I respect greatly for his evidence-based approach to how to eat. (That's evidence-based eating, as opposed to hearsay-based eating, which is probably how your doctor and most doctors advise you to eat. And if you have an ass the size of Kansas, that's probably why.)
The article title? Echoing Gary Taubes'
Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat -- about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.
In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease.
Scientists, confused by the finding, argued that the tribe must have certain genetic protections against developing high cholesterol. But when British researchers monitored a group of Masai men who moved to Nairobi and began consuming a more modern diet, they discovered that the men's cholesterol subsequently skyrocketed.
Similar observations were made of the Samburu -- another Kenyan tribe -- as well as the Fulani of Nigeria. While the findings from these cultures seem to contradict the fact that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease, it may surprise you to know that this "fact" isn't a fact at all. It is, more accurately, a hypothesis from the 1950s that's never been proved.
The first scientific indictment of saturated fat came in 1953. That's the year a physiologist named Ancel Keys, Ph.D., published a highly influential paper titled "Atherosclerosis, a Problem in Newer Public Health." Keys wrote that while the total death rate in the United States was declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.
The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a "remarkable relationship" and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat- causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.
At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys's assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared.
Keys was a scientific sleaze, guilty of selection bias -- but was rewarded for his shoddy science by having the American diet based on his crappy work.
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Advice Goddess Free Swim
Full day in Portland today, with 5 a.m. wakeup and TV and radio and a wonderful night reading my book and talking at Powell's.
Wiped out, will blog more in the morning. So, have at it! And one link per comment, please, so you don't get drop-kicked to spamland.
Why College Kids Binge-Drink
Prohibition explains it, and explains why I didn't drink during college, and neither did a guy I spoke to last night, who got drunk at his parents' party at 14.
I got drunk at my cousin's wedding when I was 15, because I knew my parents, specifically my dad, would be there to take me home safely. And then my dad laughed at me for throwing up, which made getting drunk that much more humiliating. Even before the wedding, alcohol was always offered to me by my dad -- a taste of whatever he was drinkiung. I thought it tasted like crap, plus it was no big deal since it was freely offered, so I never accepted. But, I got drink in a safe situation when I was curious because my parents didn't demonize alcohol. Smart.
From the WSJ, an excerpt from a piece by Thomas Fleming, a former president of the Society of American Historians:
Prohibition corrupted and tormented Americans from coast to coast. A disrespect, even contempt for law and due process infected the American psyche. Rather than discouraging liquor consumption, Prohibition increased it. Taking a drink became a sign of defiance against the arrogant minority who had deprived people of their "right" to enjoy themselves. The 1920s roared with reckless amorality in all directions, including Wall Street. When everything came crashing down in 1929 and the long gray years of the Great Depression began, second thoughts were the order of the day. Large numbers of people pointed to Prohibition as one of the chief reasons for the disaster.In 1933, a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made the repeal of the 18th Amendment one of his priorities. But the evil effects of this plunge into national redemption linger to this day, most notably in the influence of organized crime, better known as the Mafia, in many areas of American life.
In 2010, with talk of restructuring large swaths of our economy back in vogue, Prohibition should also remind us that Congress, scientists and economists seized by the noble desire to achieve some great moral goal may be abysmally wrong.
Book Party In Portland! Tonight, 6:30 pm, Ristretto Roasters
Then I'm doing an I SEE RUDE PEOPLE reading Monday night, at the fabulous Powell's.
From Willamette Week:
The blunt redheaded author of I See Rude People comes to Portland to chastise all of us for our generation's deterioration of manners, common courtesy and respect for others. And she does so by being witty and cute. In fact, she does it twice--on Sunday with refreshments at the fab North Williams location of Ristretto (3808 N Williams Ave., 288-8667) and then Monday at Powell's. Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 6:30 pm Sunday, Jan. 3 at Ristretto Roasters; 7:30 pm Monday, Jan 4 at Powell's. Free.
If you're in town, do come! To both. Books will be on sale at the Powell's event.
Oh, and if you aren't in town, I highly recommend mail-ordering Ristretto Roasters' coffee. As I've said before, "it's like drinking velvet."
A Girl And Her Luggage Are Soon Parted
At LAX, United Airlines is having luggage processing issues, the Portland baggage issues guy told me. They have been for the past few days, he said.
But, hey, never mind telling passengers that, or -- gee whiz! -- fixing the problem pronto. Just let passengers pay $15 or $20 a bag to put their luggage on the plane, only to get to their destination without it.
I kinda need mine, since I'm in Portland for a TV appearance and book events, and then going on to Toronto to be on the CBC. They finally delivered it to our hotel, lucky me.
Dimmer Ladies Go To Duke?
According to two really vile-thinking feminists there, Duke women are easily talked into bed by smartypants men there. A sign that women should be told to smarten up? Nope. An excuse to criminalize being male!
Naturally, these feminists assume that women don't want to have sex with the men who make moves on them. (Hey, you wymyn...lots of us enjoy that sort of thing...seek it out, even!)
Now, in light of the hell the Duke lacrosse players went through after they were falsely accused of rape, you'd think Duke would be a little bit careful in this arena. Quite the contrary, writes Stuart Taylor Jr. in National Journal. Taylor sees a disregard of due process and a bias against white males, not just at Duke, but across academia:
The two stated reasons for the revised sexual-misconduct rules, as reported in the student newspaper, The Chronicle, almost advertise that they were driven by politically correct ideology more than by any surge in sexual assaults."The first was... fear of litigation, as expressed by Duke General Counsel Pamela Bernard," as Johnson wrote in his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland. "Yet the policy Duke has developed seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. The second factor was a development that those in the reality-based community might consider to be a good thing: Over a three-year period, reported cases of sexual misconduct on college campuses as a whole and at Duke specifically (slightly) declined."
But for many in academia, Johnson explains, "these figures must mean something else -- that a plethora of rapes are going unreported." Indeed, Sheila Broderick, a Duke Women's Center staff member, told The Chronicle without evidence that Duke had a "rape culture." And Ada Gregory, director of the Duke Women's Center, said that "higher IQ" males, such as those at Duke, could be "highly manipulative and coercive."
The revised policy requires involving the Women's Center in the disciplinary process for all known allegations of sexual misconduct and empowers the Office of Student Conduct to investigate even if the accuser does not want to proceed.
Duke's rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit "verbal or nonverbal" consent, which must be so "clear" as to dispel "real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion" (emphasis added).
The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her -- but not him -- the right to be treated with "sensitivity"; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.
The revised policy, among other things, shows that Duke is still in the grip of the same biases, indifference to evidence, and de facto presumption of guilt that led so many professors and administrators to smear innocent lacrosse players as rapists (and as racists) for many months in 2006 and 2007. The centerpiece was the full-page ad taken out by the "Group of 88" professors, as critics call them, in The Chronicle on April 6, 2006, about three weeks after the woman claimed rape.
This ad stopped just short of explicitly branding the lacrosse players as rapists. But it treated almost as a given the truth of the stripper's claims of a brutal gang rape by three team members amid a hail of racist slurs. It praised protesters who had put lacrosse players' photos on "wanted" posters. It associated "what happened to this young woman" with "racism and sexism." It suggested that the lacrosse players were getting privileged treatment because they are white -- which was the opposite of the truth.
My advice? Don't be sending your children to Duke -- or any college or university where there's a poisonous attitude toward men and the belief that all women are helpless victims.
Welcome To Thugville: Population One
Meet "The Underparented Child," all growed up. Well, in form, anyway.
It's 9:40 Friday morning, the day after everybody's been out all night on New Year's Eve, and a white guy, early 20s, parks his tricked-out pickup across from a row of houses, opens the doors and turns on the megabass. Super-loud. Like, it shakes the foundation of my house loud.
He then proceeds to clean out his truck, change his clothes, and hang out a little. All to a booming base line.
I called the cops with a noise complaint (and my neighbors probably did, too), but the police couldn't get here before he strolled off, so I left him a little love note on his thugmobile. 
Here's the text of the note:
You low-rent thug. What was your mother off doing when she was supposed to be teaching you manners? Did you not have a daddy in the house to teach you that you're not the only person in the world and that you need to be considerate of other people?It's Sunday morning, the day after New Year's, and people are sleeping. Yet, you park your thugmobile across from a row of houses, open your thugmobile doors, and play booming music. We called the cops with a noise complaint on you -- they couldn't get here before you took off. We hope to have them get you when you leave. They have your description, your license plate number, and a description of your thugmobile.
Maybe go in for some manners retraining. The root of manners is empathy. That means having concern for others outside yourself. Babies are only concerned with themselves. You behave like an infant who shaves, one who never had proper parenting.
Grow up. Learn some manners.
For the record, the cops aren't going to search the streets over a noise code violation (I mean, come on, they don't even have the time or resources to catch serious criminals). But, this guy didn't think twice about baboom-bass-ing a neighborhood out of its beds; he's probably not going to put the cop-job reality thing together, either.
Quite frankly, if you're a loud, rude, narcissistic jerk, you deserve to worry that the cops are after you. Maybe you'll never give a bent monkey turd about anybody but yourself, but maybe the fear of getting hassled by the cops for it in my neighborhood will lead you to act a little more like you do.
If Men Are So Irksome To You
Marry a plant.
All people are annoying -- including (okay, maybe especially) yours truly, with my crazy writing schedule, ADHD, and general wacky-broad-ness, including my tendency to tell off, prank, and otherwise have at people who behave badly. Gregg's rule: No doing that when he's with me, but he'll always be good for bail.
Gregg has always been very sweet and extremely patient with me, and I try to make him happy. From my end, it really doesn't take much: be sweet, be kind, be rational and appreciate all the wonderful things he does for me. So far so good -- after seven years together December 12, and just last week, slow-dancing together in my doorway upon his arrival. (Hint to guys: Chicks like this. Well, this chick ate it right up, anyway.)
On the flip side, there are articles like this -- "Ten Things All Women Hate about All Men" -- in Pravda. This ugly piece reminds me of a story of an old man who was mean to his wife, wouldn't speak to her for years at a time, and then she died and he went to her grave every day.
Here's an excerpt from the piece -- supposedly from an opinion poll about what wives hate about their husbands. And yeah, I know, I think the writer thinks she's funny. The contents of the piece are actually just so creepy and hostile it's a little scary:
Have you ever thought something like "Men are terrible creatures.. They wage wars, start conflicts and then blame us for everything saying that all they do they do it for women. They demand impossible from women expecting them to do dishes, cook, work, and look like women on magazine covers. At the same time, men are incapable of doing anything they consider unpleasant. They behave as though it's a man's world, but do they have a right to it? What can a person demand if he is not capable of doing his own dishes? It turns out that even the most peaceful and loving wives feel this way once in a while. We conducted an opinion poll to find out what are the top pet peeves wives have about their husbands. 1. SelfishnessThis one is the basis for all other faults since a selfish man is convinced it is his world, and you are entitled to follow him wherever he goes whether you want it or not.
Me: Don't like selfish people? See that you don't marry one. The piece continues:
The reality is not that bad. Of course, men can be selfish, but please understand them. They feel lonely because they cannot bear children. Men's games for the right to be on top cause additional stress. It is not easy to keep trying to prove something to yourself and the world all life long, hence selfishness.2. Indifference to the wife's family
He is always ready to take care of his own family, but keeps telling you that your mother (sister, friend) does not know much about life.
Me: For best results, find a man whose opinion you respect. Then, when he tells you somebody "does not know much about life" he'll probably be right.
You can get offended or try proving that you relatives are, in fact, very bright people. But it is a waste of energy. Just tell him: "No matter what they are like, I still love them and they will always be a part of my life." If he does not want to celebrate you grandma's birthday, don't be upset. You can party just fine without him.3. Dirty dishes
Even clearing a plate can be a problem, let alone washing it . But in his family, his mother was the one who did dishes, and he expects the same from you. Even if you work 5 days a week and not 2 like his mother and hate doing dishes. Try leaving his dish unwashed after every meal. It will take him some time to notice, but he will.
Ugly.
Here's how it works at my house, right after dinner (the dinner Gregg has brought over, since I don't cook; I heat):
GREGG: Take my plate?ME: Okay, sweetie!
Am I persecuted? No. I'm happy -- that my boyfriend, who'd just spent probably 45 minutes in Whole Foods or at Monsieur Marcel getting us dinner, doesn't have to get up off the couch.
I read between the lines of this Pravda piece, and I see a woman who hates men because she can't have one. And what a lucky thing that is for the man she doesn't have.
Some Men Get Walked On
A screenwriter once called Gregg "Detroit-ornery." Somebody at The New York Times called him "apocalyptic and threatening" (he was just protecting Elmore's prose). Lucy just calls him...well...see for yourself:
Snobby Arabia
It sounds like the fundy Muslim version of entitled Montana Avenue (Santa Monica) mommies. From Sprinklesblog, the blog of an American woman living and working in Saudi Arabia:
Unlike the western perception that Saudi women are oppressed and desperate to 'break free', most are utterly convinced that unless you meet their religious standards you are an evil influence, going to hell and that you'll take them with you uness you conform. Whose abaya is longer, whose veil is looser, who wears it on the head or on the shoulders (allowing one to imagine a neck!) who says the most mash'allahs or alhumdil'allahs, all these can determine whose children are allowed to play with who or who will get blanked at the grocery store. It's often a competition to see who is holier and the converts try harder than the locals to be accepted. I'm sure part of their animosity towards western women is that we do not conform, buy in, play, compete or care what they do in their lives. Many new expats are confused when they experience this attitude and take it personally. Although there are exceptions to Every rule, most western cultures are 'live-and-let-live' and your beliefs or religious code are between you and God. It usually takes them awhile to understand that in Saudi, religion is horizontal, not vertical.There are too many stories to mention, they only get worse and I only get angrier. Like their argument that abayas should be allowed to be worn in the compound pool. Never mind that abayas are a hazard and the women might drown themselves, how about my 18 month old splashing around in her armbands who got tangled up in one as it floated behind a woman who was totally oblivious. It didn't stop there, as I walked past derogatory comments were made, before I even stripped down to my bathing suit by women assuming I didn't know Arabic and a complaint was made that the western women at the pool were indecent. No live and let live here! Sorry people but if you want to live in a western compound you have to deal with western standards of health and safety. In fact, western standards are why you want to live here right? You can't have your cake and eat it too! These women want it both ways. Hide away under black robes, suspicious and accusatory of any and all attention, but expect the world to revolve around you. Ah the hypocrisy...
via Kate Coe
Hold The Mayo
Have a peek at what's to come after health care "reform." The Mayo Clinic, praised by the president as a national model for efficient health care, is quite efficient. They like to get paid adequately for it, and they're seeing they do by turning away Medicare patients at one of its Arizona primary-care clinics. David Olmos writes for Bloomberg:
More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government's largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won't affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering "the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm." Mayo's move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.
"Many physicians have said, 'I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,'" said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. "If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn't make sense to do more of it."
