Go Broke Or Break The Law
An old boyfriend, a doctor who's on an elite liver transplant team in Manhattan, makes $30 an hour when he has to wake up at 3 a.m. to do a transplant on a Medicare patient. (Seen the rents and cost of living lately in Manhattan?)
I was reminded of that by a case in which a doctor used an "unapproved IUD," which doesn't mean that he fashioned it himself out of some bits of plastic or copper, but that he imported one from Canada that had not been approved by the FDA. Rob Lowes writes on Medscape:
Ob/gyns such as Dr. Shrum typically buy the IUDs they implant in patients. If a patient is insured, an ob/gyn then bills the insurer to recoup what he or she paid for the IUD. It often is not a break-even proposition. When Arkansas ob/gyns, for example, implant a levonorgestrel-releasing Mirena IUD (Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals) in a Medicaid recipient, the state reimburses them roughly $448 for the device. Ob/gyns lose money on the procedure because they have to pay $700 to $800 for the IUD, assuming it is the FDA-approved version, which is the only legal version to use in this country.However, they can buy a Mirena IUD that lacks FDA approval from Canadian pharmacies for a little more than $200. By going with the less-expensive version, these physicians avoid losing money on the IUD procedure and instead earn a modest profit that subsidizes their care of Medicaid patients. After all, Medicaid programs across the country pay so little that many physicians turn away such patients, lest they go broke.
Conviction on Criminal Charges Could Mean Prison
The Canadian price break comes with a big risk. In June 2009, FDA agents found unapproved Mirena IUDs in Dr. Shrum's office -- a discovery that triggered criminal and civil charges.
Last October, a federal grand jury indicted Dr. Shrum with drug misbranding, healthcare fraud (for billing the state Medicaid program for unapproved IUDs), and 3 counts of money laundering (for depositing money from an allegedly illegal activity in his bank account). Dr. Shrum faces a maximum penalty of 3 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for misbranding, and a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for healthcare fraud and for each count of money laundering, according to federal prosecutors.
..."Dr. Shrum wants his patients to know that they are not in any danger and he never risked their safety," Hicks said. "There is no threat to the public safety, and instead, the only conceivable harm is to Bayer's profits."
He noted that all Mirena IUDs are manufactured in a plant in Finland. What made Dr. Shrum's IUDs "unapproved," Hicks said, was that they were purchased at a lower price than what Bayer distributors sold them for in the United States and were packaged differently.
"It is unfortunate that the government is using our criminal justice system to line the pockets of a multinational, for-profit company," he said.
Accidentally Funny
Yawn, trade secrets story about Thomas' English muffins had a funny in it -- the name of the parent company. Via USA Today, an AP story by Maryclaire Dale:
Chris Botticella of Trabuco Canyon, Calif., remains barred from starting the Hostess job while a trade-secret lawsuit filed by Thomas' parent company, Bimbo Bakeries USA, plays out.Bimbo Bakeries? If I started one, that's what I'd call it. At one point, I wanted to make a business card, "Amy Alkon, intellibimbo."
via Suki
Press One For English
Operator #1: It's kind of a problem when you call a city agency and the person there isn't versed enough in English to understand what you're reporting.
On Friday, I gave a detailed and somewhat lengthy report on a traffic hazard in my neighborhood and then, when I was done and ready to get my confirmation number (to refer to on future calls), the lady on the other end asked me if I was reporting illegal dumping. Grrr!
Operator #2: On the other hand, there was Gina -- and here's the e-mail I sent about her to the City of L.A. Bureau of Street Services. Took me a minute or two to write, that's all, and my thinking is, if you complain when things are sucky, you need to compliment when things are good, which I did:
SUBJECT: compliment about operator at Street Use Inspectors number (Gina)I've spoken twice today to a woman named Gina at Street Use Inspectors - 213-847-6000 -- and she is super pleasant and energetic, really sharp, "gets it," and is great at her job.
I too often talk to people working for the city who are the opposite...I thought somebody should know about Gina. When I complimented her on being so helpful and professional, she said, "There are some of us here who love our jobs."
Wow. Please hire more like her.
Best, Amy Alkon
The Professional Plaintiff, The ADA, And "The Chipotle Experience"
Walter Olson writes at Cato about a guy who brought suit against the Chipotle Mexican grill, one of those place you can watch your food being made behind a glass partition:
Now a Ninth Circuit panel (including famously liberal judges Stephen Reinhardt and Dorothy Nelson) has ruled that the "experience" violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, to quote the AP, "because the restaurants' 45-inch counters are too high. The company now faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages." The ruling arrives just in time for the ADA's 20th anniversary, which, as the Washington Post notes, is serving as the occasion for a virtual binge of new regulation-making by the Obama Administration and Congress.Online reaction to the Chipotle case is tending toward the negative if not incredulous, even at places like the San Francisco Chronicle ("Good Lord, people are complaining because they can't see a taco, get a life.") But it's also worth noting this significant passage (via Ted Frank at Point of Law) from the court record that the Ninth Circuit panel had to overcome:
The [district] court found that [wheelchair-using complainant] Antoninetti had failed to show irreparable injury because he had not revisited either restaurant after Chipotle adopted its written policy and because his "purported desire to return to the Restaurants is neither concrete nor sincere or supported by the facts." It also stated that Antoninetti's "history as a plaintiff in accessibility litigation supports this Court's finding that his purported desire to return to the Restaurants is not sincere. Since immigrating to the United States in 1991, Plaintiff has sued over twenty business entities for alleged accessibility violations, and, in all (but one) of those cases, he never returned to the establishment he sued after settling the case and obtaining a cash payment."
Links are live at the Cato link, and there's more there about various kinds of gaming of the legal system to make money off legit businesses. And regarding Ted Frank and his fight against class action abuses by lawyers and the courts, here's a little something I posted, off-topic, in the comments here a few weeks ago:
There's some super-disgusting stuff that goes on in class action lawsuits, especially in the Ninth Circuit. Because of that, I've volunteered to be (and am) one of two lead class members objecting to a proposed settlement. The case is one where the people supposedly being represented by the lawyers got nothing, the lawyers got $10 million. Here's Ted Frank's initial objection.And, P.S., I love Costco, and with my Honda Insight hybrid, even if I got shorted, what could it be, a few pennies? I joined this suit because I find what the lawyers and the Ninth Circuit are doing so creepy. (Too bad I can't find my initial statement for Ted...it's kinda funny!)
P.P.S. Ted told me sometimes the judge gets to put some of the settlement money toward a charity he or she likes. ("Some" like thousands of dollars.) No oversight.
Here are a few words from my declaration I wrote up for Ted:
5. I found the terms of the proposed settlement unfair to class members like me. I receive no benefit from the settlement, although the plaintiffs' attorneys propose to award themselves with fees. I object to the proposed settlement. I'm a newspaper columnist, and a girl whose book on manners was just published, including chapters on "The Business of Being Rude." This sure fits the bill. I'm very concerned with ethics, and I joined this suit because I think it's unethical and creepy the way it turned out -- no money for people like me who actually bought the gas, just lawyers making huge amounts of money. I thought that maybe because I'm a public figure, earning a living as a writer, and not some lawsuit-bringing Lilly, that my name on the suit would help draw attention to this disgusting practice of lawyers collecting big and the people they're supposedly representing collecting zero.
Do Not Pass Goat...
Do not collect $12,500 of our taxpayer dollars. In "Great Moments In Government Waste," Cato's Dan Mitchell wonders what the hell the government's doing giving a grant to some lady to market goat milk soaps and lotions? Mitchell writes:
I'm sure if you read the Constitution with enough imagination, you'll find (perhaps in invisible ink) the section stating that the federal government is supposed to provide subsidies to help specific companies market soap made out of goat milk.
I concur with him, that the government shouldn't get another penny of our money until they stop this sort of thing. (From our blogs and lips to deaf ears of sleazebag politicians.) Details on the $12,500 grant here, in New Mexico Business Weekly, which helpfully names the sleazebags stealing our taxpayer dollars (think of them as legalized bribes for voters in their district or state):
U.S. Senator Tom Udall, D-NM, and Terry Brunner, state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development, held a celebration ceremony for Milk and Honey Soap LLC to highlight the USDA's Value Added Producer Grant program. The company received $12,500 to market its products.
I'm sick of these politicians proudly sucking off the tax teat for businesses in their district. They're stealing from the rest of us -- those of us who have to work very hard these days to earn a living, who don't get business welfare from Uncle Sam. I was against it for GM (they should have been allowed to go bankrupt) and I'm against it for the goat soap lady.
The Problem With Miss Jane Brody
A friend referred me to a Jane Brody article the other day in The New York Times, and I had to set her straight on The Problem With Miss Jane Brody, namely that her grasp of dietary science seems to rival mine on the NFL draft picks.
Here, from Tom Naughton, the story of how she tried and tried to lower her cholesterol and how silly that was:
Ms. Brody's cholesterol panic began when a routine test revealed her total cholesterol to be 222. (So much for a low-fat diet keeping cholesterol down.) Since she just knows that a "heart healthy" level should be below 200, Ms. Brody dutifully stopped eating cheese and went on a diet to lose a few pounds.But - horrors! - when she underwent another test a few months later, her cholesterol had risen to 236, and her LDL had gone up, not down. Now, you'd think someone with a functioning brain would pause at this point and wonder if perhaps the whole low-fat diet theory is load of bologna. But not Ms. Brody. After all, she's been telling her readers for decades to cut the fat, cut the fat, cut the fat.
So she cut the fat. She stopped eating red meat, switched to low-fat ice cream, took fish oil, and increased her fiber intake. In other words, she did just about everything she's been telling her readers they must do to prevent heart disease.
And boy, what wondrous results! Her next test revealed that her cholesterol had risen to 248, and her LDL was up yet again.
If this were a horror movie, we'd all be screaming at the screen, "Don't go through that door, you freakin' idiot! Everyone who went through that door ended up hanging on a meat hook!"
But Ms. Brody went through the door. Mere paragraphs after recounting how her low-fat diet failed utterly to bring down her cholesterol, she reminded her readers how important it is to exercise more and cut the saturated fat from their diets. She even informed us that a former roommate lowered her cholesterol by becoming a vegetarian. ("See, this diet made my cholesterol worse, but I know someone who had good results, so you should do exactly what didn't work for me. Okay?")
Yup ... hitting myself with a hammer didn't cure my headaches, but I know a guy who knocked his head clean off and never has a headache anymore, so I still recommend the treatment. Talk about grasping at straws.
Finally, Ms. Brody reported that despite having some reservations, she began taking a cholesterol-lowering drug. And lo and behold, her cholesterol went down! (At this point in the story, you are allowed to scream, "Of course your cholesterol went down! That's why it's called a cholesterol-lowering drug!)
Now, here are a few no-bologna facts that Ms. Brody either doesn't know or can't bring herself to admit:
•For women of all ages and men over age 50, there is zero statistical relationship between high cholesterol and heart disease. (In other words, the relationship only shows up in men under 50 - and even then, it's weak.)•The Swiss have an average cholesterol level of around 240. Russians have an average cholesterol below 200. But the Swiss have a low rate of heart disease, and the Russians have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world. If you check cholesterol levels and heart-disease rates around the world, you'll see this pattern (or non-pattern) repeated over and over.
•There's never been a single study that offers any evidence whatsoever that cholesterol-lowering drugs prevent heart attacks in women.
•Cutting carbohydrates reduces your triglycerides, and eating more fat raises your HDL, or "good cholesterol." Both effects are good for the health of your heart.
More from Eades here. And, as I learned from Dr. Eades, you need to have them measure your LDL particles to find out whether they're large and fluffy or small and dense (large and fluffy is good).
All People Are Equal; All Cultures Are Not
The eloquent and enlightened Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks:
More:
You Can See Rude People On A New Kindle
Amazon calls the new Kindle
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Here's the Kindle edition of my book, I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society
Leave A Hangup At The Beep
I saw a tweet by my friend Jackie Danicki recently, about how she can't stand to listen to long phone messages. (Confession: I have been one of the guilty ones -- leaving acting class monologue-length messages -- but I try to keep it short these days.)
I'm wondering: How do people feel about getting voicemail messages these days? And also, has a good deal of phone contact become an annoyance, now that there are ways -- e-mail, texting -- to reach people so they can deal with things when it's convenient for them? (A phone call is a demand for somebody to address your issue right now, when it's convenient for you.)
I love to talk to friends, especially those who are far away, and I can't see very often. But, if you're an LA-living friend (and you're not Kate Coe, who might as well live in Upper Volta, vis a vis how long it takes when it's not 3 a.m. to get through traffic from my palce to hers)...well, why would we talk on the phone when we can put our phones away and hang out together and have a drink?
Anatomy Of An Advice Goddess
Just woke up to a really nice piece about me by Scott Faingold, in the Illinois Times.
"The Credible Threat Of Arrest"
Paul Romer writes at City Journal how wisely targeted policing really can stop crime:
In When Brute Force Fails, Mark Kleiman describes New York City's successful campaigns against fare-beating on the subways and squeegee men in the streets--a story that City Journal readers know well. The city's experience suggests that concentrated and well-publicized custodial arrests may be a relatively quick way to establish a lasting culture of compliance.Kleiman describes the squeegee men as "something between aggressive beggars and low-grade extortionists." Unprompted, squeegee men would clean the windshields of cars idling at lights and then ask to be paid. For their "customers," this experience ranged from mildly annoying to frightening. Turnstile-jumping--riding the subway without paying the fare--was even more widespread than the squeegee plague. In 1992, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that nearly 176,000 people evaded subway fares each day. Like public urination, turnstile-jumping and the squeegee racket were illegal but difficult to control, and seemingly trivial compared with more serious crimes.
In both cases, the New York Police Department dramatically reduced violations by publicly announcing its intent to punish offenders and then following through with intensive arrests. In a relatively short period, the combination of public communication and concentrated enforcement created a new, low-violation equilibrium without much need for serious follow-up enforcement. The credible threat of arrest made the squeegee scheme unprofitable--it soon vanished altogether--and reestablished the norm of paying the fare among subway riders. If the conventional economic theory of crime were correct, the behavior would return to its old pattern as soon as formal enforcement relaxed, but this has not occurred. Temporary, high-profile interventions have had a permanent effect.
In dense urban settings, rules are essential for a high quality of life. In most cases, people behave well because formal rules enforced by the state complement informal rules embodied in norms and enforced by decentralized individual action. Because the conventional economic analysis of crime treats norms as external factors beyond our control, it may be missing much of the action on the front lines. Creative enforcement strategies--like those employed in Bogotá, New Delhi, and New York--don't just change behavior. They change norms.
Sad News About Cartoonist John Callahan
My friend John Callahan, the hilarious and very un-PC quadriplegic cartoonist, died Saturday. The obit is in The New York Times today.
What it doesn't mention is that pretty much everything good in John's life was due to my dear friend Deborah Levin.
Many years ago, she spotted some crumpled cartoons he'd done on the floor of his Portland apartment, picked them up, saw something in them, and turned them into a career for him...cartoon syndication, books
Here, from NYT obit by Bruce Weber, is classic John:
Like his friend Gary Larson, the creator of "The Far Side," Mr. Callahan made drawings with a gleeful appreciation of the macabre he found in everyday life. He was, however, a man who lived his life with disadvantages, some of them self-wrought, and he viewed the world through a dark and wicked lens."This is John, I'm a little too depressed to take your call today," the message on his answering machine said. "Please leave your message at the gunshot."
Bemused by the culture of confession and self-help fostered by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera, he was uninclined in his work to be outwardly sympathetic to the afflicted or to respect the boundaries of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and his cartoons were often polarizing: some people found them outrageously funny, others outrageously offensive.
He'd always laugh at the hate mail he got from people who didn't know he was a quad, snarling at him for making fun of quads and other gimps. Quads and other gimps wrote him and thanked him for making fun of them like they were human like everybody else, not special people to be handled with kid gloves.
He was enormously politically incorrect, and got fired by the dipshits at the Miami Herald, who had a choice of Callahan cartoons to run every week, and selected one that angered their readers. I just loved it -- it was a drawing of a young Martin Luther King with a little puddle in his bed. Caption: "I had a dream."
UPDATE: More on John here.
Amy On The Radio This Morning
At 10 am, Pacific time, I'll be on KKZZ 1400 am in Ventura, California, with Bill Frank. Listen live streamed over the Internet at BrainStorminOnline.com (click the little blue "listen live" link at the top.)
UPDATE: You can also call in to the show, 805-639-0008, and please do...would love to hear from some of you I only hear from in text form here! I actually start at 10:03, there's ABC news at the top of the hour.
I'll be talking about various rudenesses, a few things from I SEE RUDE PEOPLE (which you should buy, if you haven't -- only $11.53, discounted at this Amazon link!), how I got started with my advice column, and more.
How Do I Jail Thee?
Let me count the ways. And keep counting, and keep counting. Or, in this case, let John Stossel, who agrees with me that we've become a nation with too many laws, too many ways to jail us for breaking them. An excerpt:
Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.Cross them, and we are in trouble.
The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained "undersized lobster tails" and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed.
How about this one? Four kindergartners -- yes, 5-year-old boys -- played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: "Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you." He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for "making threats," a violation of their school district's zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, "We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner." District Superintendent William Bauer said: "This is a no-tolerance policy. We're very firm on weapons and threats."
No President Left Behind
"At-risk" kids aren't the only ones who seem to be struggling with basic math. Our president is making us an at-risk nation thanks to his apparent inability with it. From the Telegraph/UK, Simon Heffer writes:
...Mr Obama and his team simply don't understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America's debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal - the young and the disadvantaged - still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America's corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was "unusual uncertainty" about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.
Mr Bernanke wants a renewal of Bush-era tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 a year, which are due to expire on December 31. So do many Democrats, who fear that removing incentives and purchasing power from the better-off will harm recovery by reducing consumption and employment. These are arguments familiar from Britain, about the equally damaging and pointless 50 per cent rate. The response, by Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is familiar too - the "rich" must take their share of the burden. It is equally specious here; the political importance of bashing the (presumably Republican) wealthy plainly exceeds what is good for the US economy.
Turning Taxes Around
Bruno Behrend at Chicagoboyz (which sounds like a gang of economists) argues for swapping a VAT (Value Added Tax on purchases) for our failing income tax system:
The solution is to make the case for a massive overhaul of the tax system, and transition the system from one that relies on income (corporate and individual and Soc. Sec.) taxation to one that relies on taxing consumption (VAT, National Sales Tax, or FairTax). This is a wonderful opportunity for a party of ideas (Republicans, before they succumbed to corrupt Hastertism) and a vibrant think tank community (before they began to resemble an echo chamber of conservo-libertarian apparatchiks promoting stale doctrine) to lay the ground work for a 3rd and 4th "American Century."
Of course, we also need to stop spending money we don't have, fix the welfare state that perpetuates poverty, and a few other thingies, but how do you feel about a tax on consumption rather than income?
via Instapundit
Sowell On Letting "The Smart People" Control Things
Thomas Sowell writes on the government of the supposedly wise few for the many:
One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, "general well-being ought to have been the consequence," but "instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood."
The same could be said of the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions of the 20th century.
The idea that the wise and knowledgeable few need to take control of the less wise and less knowledgeable many has taken milder forms- and repeatedly with bad results as well.
One of the most easily documented examples has been economic central planning, which was tried in countries around the world at various times during the 20th century, among people of differing races and cultures, and under government ranging from democracies to dictatorships.
...It is hardly surprising that conservatives, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, opposed this approach. What is remarkable is that, after a few decades of experience with central planning in some countries, or a few generations in others, even communists and socialists began to repudiate this approach.
As they replaced central planning with more reliance on markets, their countries' economic growth rate almost invariably increased, often dramatically. In the largest and most recent examples- China and India- people by the millions have risen above these countries' official poverty rates, after they freed their economies from many of their suffocating government controls.
Feminist Fun-Killers
"Common Sense Atheism" is a blogger named Luke who could use some common-sense commenters in place of the 1,000-plus uptight ladies (wymyn, sorry) clucking their dismay all over his blog.
I saw a link to a post he'd done with photos of some smarty-hottie ladies, 15 Sexy Scientists (with pics, of course)
Ooh, delish. I'll be right over.
Unfortunately, by the time I got to the post, it read:
Originally, this post had photos of 14 sexy female scientists, along with a #15 joke entry: P.Z. Myers. I took down the list because of this.
"This" was his subsequent post "I Apologize for my 'Sexy Scientists' Post."
Ugh. I knew it.
He wrote:
The women I know (in person) take "sexy" as a compliment, but many women take it as harassment, or as insulting and demeaning. Probably, it was my first mistake to forget that many women see things that way, as Nichole pointed out:Luke, because you are often the farthest thing from ignorant in so many areas, I think folks are understandably shocked when you expose an area of ignorance regarding something most would consider to be so obvious.
If they're feminist robo-thinkers.
More from Luke:
So I spent most of my time asking people to clarify exactly what they thought was wrong with my Sexy Scientists post. Many people, when asked to provide an argument, said something like "If you can't just see what's wrong with your post, then you really are one fucked-up douchebag."
Correct answer: "I know you are but what am I?"
Cerberus has (yawn) a different take.
And here's mine...first quoting some nitwit snarling at him in a previous comment:
"What does it take for a woman to be recognized for her mind?"Putting out noteworthy science. Great, no matter what she looks like, but all the better if she's hot, too.
My hot list:
Dr. Catherine Salmon
Dr. Martie Haselton
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky
and Dr. Helen Fisher, who's got it going on in a Helen Mirren sort of way.
Oopsy...forgot sexy librarianish lab teaching specialist and University of Illinois lecturer Joanne Manaster (joannelovesscience.com). Here she is trying to engage kids in reading about science (don't miss the talking Barbie[ish] dolls between Joanne and the Periodic Table).
And finally, from my common-sense boyfriend Gregg:
Yeah, somebody drawing attention to female scientists, what a bad thing.
Outta Luck, Bub
I get this bit of Facebook mail from some guy with an American name and very American look in his photo, but who sounds like he ran his e-mail through Google translator to change it from the Swahili:
NAME DELETED July 19 at 3:15pm ReportHi,
It takes an eye twinkle too have a crush, a second too stare at, a minute too admire, an hour to fall crazy in love, a day to go wheezy and a life time to let go. Right from the very instance i set an eye on your pics and profile i lost breathe and when i recovered, i sat back asking myself, what an angel is doing here on earth.I thought angels lives above the "BRIGHT BLUE SKY", so what on earth are you doing in this localize globalism, for you are an epitome of beauty, a Sharon of a diamond stone, a paragon of God's creation and a masterpiece of a divine architectural dexterity. All this are the factors that made me fall for you........so i need your reply....my ID, (email address deleted)
I am, of course, always courteous to guys who express interest (although I do take care to not dispense false hope), so I wrote back:
Amy Alkon July 19 at 5:53pm Thanks, have a boyfriend.
He tries again:
NAME DELETED July 26 at 2:11pm Report so you can not try me. and know if i will be better than him.
Gregg, I'm sure, is home quaking with worry.
Is there some trend on Facebook of these strange, semi-English mash notes? This is about the fifth I've gotten.
"Shit Guys Do"
My pal Tom Matlack at The Good Men Project posted a piece I really liked, asking men across the country to name their favorite "guy ritual":
Franco may have hit upon the most consummate male ritual--reading a newspaper on the toilet. When I dared bring this up to friends at a recent social gathering, I had no idea it would cause such an uproar.A woman who works in the personal wealth division of a multinational bank had some choice words about male coworkers who disappeared with the office's communal Wall Street Journal. "The guys grab it, disappear, and then bring the damn thing back twenty minutes later!" she said. "It's supposed to be for clients. Why don't you just scream at the top of your lungs, 'Hey everybody, I'm going to take a crap now!'"
The women were of one mind: this behavior is disgusting and highly unethical, made worse by occasionally leaving the toilet seat up. The guys at the party stood behind our man James Franco and the bankers looking for a few moments of peace and quiet.
Fortunately, most of the "guy rituals" below are not poop-related.
A few excerpts:
"Watching very tough soldiers say 'I love you' to one another before rolling outside the wire in Iraq."
--Michael Kamber, photojournalist"Rolling around in the grass like a dog with my dog."
--Tom Jones, waiter"Washing my piece of shit car."
--Michael Carter, landscaper"There is nothing like working on the crew, outdoors, on the first warm day of spring. The guys all bust balls all day, you give each other shit to pass the time. Everybody gives, everybody gets. Nothing serious, we bust each other's balls and bust on the world at large. It's the blue collar way. We are all in it together, getting through, bitching about things. All winter with the heavy clothes, you can never get fully warm, then suddenly you are down to your t-shirt by 10, muscles stretched out, flowing, building, putting up walls. Done, wrapped up at 3, take at look at what you put up, what you built, feels good. Cold beer by 3:45, on the front porch chillin. That is being a man."
--Don Foote, general contractor"My fake answer would be watching sports with my buds. My honest answer would be masturbation. Which one do you want?"
--Anonymous*
Barbeque For Shut-Ins
Grill your food without leaving your house! Big sale at Amazon -- 55 percent off the Delonghi BG24 Perfecto Indoor Grill.
*
Dirty Pictures: The Meat And Potatoes Of The Internet
Tom Matlack, a great guy I was on a panel with at LA Times Festival of Books, is trying to do some good with his site The Good Men Project (he has a book and a documentary by the same name).Recently, he did a little exploration of a few people's thoughts on pornography -- including mine. He link writes:
I was at a dinner party recently with the CEO of a company involved in the video infrastructure of Verizon's FiOS service. He told me (in gory detail) how the capacity constraint on the system is quite literally being driven by $14.99 pay-per-view pornography.He was understandably amused by the stupidity of guys across the country, who eagerly consume porn movies--only to turn them off after an average of 18 minutes. A porn purchase lasts 15 percent as long as a two-hour movie and still drives the capacity requirements of the entire system.
It is difficult to overstate the role that pornography plays in American life (especially, one could argue, in Utah, the nation's most prolific downloader of online porn), or the hysteria that surrounds it.
Is Internet pornography really turning us all into sex addicts? Will boys who grow up on degrading porn be unable to form healthy sexual relationships as adults? Is repetitive porn viewing really changing our brains?
And, most importantly in my mind, are we---as guys---talking honestly about any of this? Are we ready to have a frank discussion about the role that online pornography plays in our lives? Are we ready to man up and tell the truth?
I recently set out to speak with readers and thought leaders about pornography in modern America.
My thoughts:
"The hysteria around pornography is just not useful. A good bit about it is an ugly side effect of the negative part of modern feminism: unattractive women who can't get what they want, and instead of doing the logical thing, doing the best with what they have, they demonize male sexuality.We live in what are 'evolutionarily novel' times. Men evolved to be visual--it was part of continuing the human race. Women evolved to be more circumscribed about who they have sex with--they have a far greater cost per sex act (potentially being pregnant for nine months and then having a child to raise). Male sexuality isn't wrong or nefarious--we just live in times where there are forces playing on our evolved preferences.
Similar to the hysteria about porn consumption, people are beside themselves about young people 'hooking up.' Well, at a certain point, many or most will tire of that and want something more. And then they will go look for that. You can become addicted to lots of things--food, porn, shopping, collecting action figures. If it's disrupting your life, keeping you from what you want, it's a problem. Maybe not all men will want to connect or to develop themselves to a point where they can connect. This is their choice. Some will. And it's up to parents to do the actual work of parenting to see that their kids turn out in a way where they have values, and can make choices that enhance their lives."
---Amy Alkon, syndicated advice columnist, advicegoddess.com; author, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society
And about those "unrealistic" pictures in porn, that isn't the only place you'll find unrealistic images. My friend Dr. Catherine Salmon writes eloquently about this in Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy and Personal Decisions
, a fascinating book she also edited with Dr. Charles Crawford. Details in my column "When Hairy Palms Met Sally". An excerpt:
Actually, he's a man, with male sexuality, which evolved to be highly visual and variety-driven, probably because the more indiscriminate sex a guy had, the more likely he was to pass on his genes. Because women get pregnant and saddled with the kids, they evolved to be choosy and seek men who show a willingness to commit. Erotica targeted to each sex plays out along these lines, notes evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon. While men have nudie porn, women have commitment porn -- the romance novel -- with equally "unrealistic images" of male behavior. Yet, you don't see men picketing the Harlequin rack at the grocery store, complaining that women will expect a dark, imposing prince to ride up on a white horse, pledge his everlasting love (while revealing some seriously ripped abs), and carry them back to his castle.And as I quoted Salmon in my column "Leering Impaired":
Women's "commitment porn," with its formulaic happily-ever-after-gasm, "imposes a female-like sexuality on men that is...perhaps no more 'realistic' than that of pornotopia," writes psychology professor Catherine Salmon. "But no one is out there lobbying to ban romance novels because of the harm they do to women's attitudes toward men."*
It's The World's Smallest Internationally Renowned Orchestra
You were expecting the world's tiniest violin?President Obama wants you to know his finances have suffered, too. Seriously. And this news was apparently on ABC, not in The Onion.
From the Sun-Times:
(President Obama) says he and first lady Michelle Obama took a hit like everybody else when the economy nearly collapsed, telling ABC that a college fund for daughters Malia and Sasha has gone "up and down" with the stock market.Obama says the first couple is "not that far removed from what most Americans are going through." He tells the network "it was just a few years ago that we had high credit card balances, we had two kids, thinking about college. We had our own retirement accounts, wondering if we were going to be able to get enough assets in there."
Yes, it's rough when the wife is only able to pull in $317K a year -- on top of your U.S. Senate salary.
And they called George W. Bush elitist and out of touch?
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Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza? Um, Not Quite
Listen to what the Israeli Navy guy says, and the response. Clear pictures of the attacks on Israeli soldiers. The images make clear the premeditated plans for violence by the flotilla passengers:
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PC On CNN
A New Mexico hotel owner wanted his switchboard operators to use anglicanized versions of their Latino names and Jane Velez-Mitchell blew a fit on the air with the guy:WHITTEN: What I want you to, if you would, just understand- my switchboard is answered from people calling from North Carolina, South Carolina, and I can assure you, they don't understand the culture here. They don't understand- you know, they come from a different world, where I was raised- Virginia. We're not accustomed to hearing- you know, if they were speaking Austrian- or German, I would have the same issue, that I want all my people on the switchboard to understand, not just- if it was all Spanish people coming here- if I went to Spain, do you think I would change anybody's name? No, because everybody's coming here from Spain. This was not intentional, Ms. Phillips.PHILLIPS: But your assumption is that-
WHITTEN: It's to help the hotel. I'm learning. You know, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm ready to- you know, correct what I can because I've got a lot of money invested here, and I want the city to understand that's what we're here for- make a good hotel.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, my final thought is- and I don't think this man is doing something that he thinks is wrong, obviously. He's defending himself, and I have compassion for him, because ultimately, I think we need to take a 21st century look at this whole issue of discrimination, and to me, it's a question of low self-esteem, not on the part of people who are being discriminated against, but on the part of the discriminators. If that's the only way they can feel better about themselves, by saying that in some way they are superior because of an accident of birth, then I really have compassion for them, and I think they need to go in therapy and find out why they need to feel better than other people in that manner. You know, arrogance based on achievement, I can respect.
Surprise, surprise, next thing Velez-Mitchell knew, she was getting called on her little fit by Ricardo Leon Sanchez de Reinaldo (aka CNN's Rick Sanchez):
SANCHEZ: You know that argument you were having with the hotel guy a little while ago?PHILLIPS: Oh, Larry Whitten in Taos, New Mexico.
SANCHEZ: I agree with him.
PHILLIPS: You agree- okay, hold on a second. You agree with him that he should be able to fire people because they don't speak very good English-
SANCHEZ: No-
PHILLIPS: In addition to Anglicizing their names? Rick, what if someone said to you, 'Rick Sanchez, your name, it doesn't sound right, people won't understand it. We're going to change it to Rick Sanford. Let's go now to Rick Sanford.'
SANCHEZ: My real name is Ricardo Leon Sanchez de Reinaldo. I don't use it because I want to be respectful of this wonderful country that allowed us as Hispanics to come here, and I think it's easier if someone's able to understand me by Anglicizing my name, and all he said was-
PHILLIPS: But Sanchez isn't Anglicizing your name!
SANCHEZ: Well, hold on, let me finish my point. When I was listening to the conversation, I heard him say- I don't do that with all employees, only people who man the switchboard to make it easier for them to have conversations with prospective clients who are trying to call in. I- it didn't sound to me like he was being unreasonable with that demand.
PHILLIPS: Rick! It's Taos, New Mexico and he's firing people because of their Spanish-English. And by the way, Sanchez, you haven't Anglicized your name.
SANCHEZ: Yeah, I have. It's Rick Sanchez.
PHILLIPS: Rick Sanchez!
SANCHEZ: My real name is Ricardo Leon Sanchez de Reinaldo, and I'm not going to go on the air and say, make people say, 'Hi, you're watching the news on CNN with Ricardo Leon Sanchez de Reinaldo.'
PHILLIPS: But you speak Spanish. You speak Spanish on your show. You speak Spanish on your show. You've got a little picture thing where you play a little salsa music. I mean, you've got your culture in there. You're identifying with the Latin culture.
SANCHEZ: Of course I do. I'm Latin. I couldn't be prouder of being Latin. But I'm not going to let my being Latin get in the way of what is a respectful way of behaving when you're in somebody else's country. The culture of the United States is not Latin, and if you can Anglicize your name to make people in this country better understand you and to do business, then I don't think it's a bad idea, and that we need to be going- you know, that we need to be that critical. I mean- look, there's two sides to the story. It's just- it's one of those where I'm looking at it and I'm going, like- you know what? If you really think about it, it's not a bad idea.
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The Government Doesn't Belong In Your Stomach
Once you're an adult, it should be up to you to assess whether there are risks to eating unpasteurized milk and whether you're willing to take them. Well, it should be, but that's not how our our nanny state works.A couple years ago, I signed up at a new bank after Bank of America fired me as a customer (I complained that they'd failed their fiduciary duty to me for, seven times, giving my money to women with ONLY a fake driver's license in my name -- no bankcard, no PIN, no signature check). (Details in my book.)
While I was filling out paperwork at the new bank, I met the nicest guy -- sweet hippie-ish goat farmer and owner of this "underground grocery store" in Venice. Underground grocery store? I found that hilarious. What did they sell, magic mushrooms? Nope, just milk that hadn't been pasteurized and blessed by the government.
Now they've been raided, writes P.J. Huffstutter at the LA Times, accompanied by hilarious footage at the link of the cops entering the hippie grocery store with their guns drawn. To be fair, even a hippie goat farmer could go off on the police in a raid, but considering the footage, I couldn't help but laugh. From Huffstutter's piece:
With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.
...On one side are government regulators, who say they are enforcing rules designed to protect consumers from unsafe foods and to provide a level playing field for producers. On the other side are "healthy food" consumers -- a faction of foodies who challenge government science and seek food in its most pure form.
They want almonds cracked fresh from the shell, not those run through a federally mandated pasteurization process that uses either heat or a chemical to kill off salmonella and other possible contaminants. They hunger for meat slaughtered on the farm. And they're willing to pay a premium -- $6, $8 or more -- for a gallon of milk straight from the cow.
...Scientists and regulators point to epidemiological evidence linking disease outbreaks to raw milk: The milk can transmit bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria, which can result in diarrhea, kidney failure or death.
"This is not about restricting the public's rights," said Nicole Neeser, program manager for dairy, meat and poultry inspection at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. "This is about making sure people are safe."
As are helmet and seatbelt laws. But, you know what? If you're a grownup, and you're willing to either pay for your medical care or let us leave you in a little huevos rancheros-like pile on the side of the road, it should be your choice whether you wear a seatbelt, ride helmet-free, or, gasp, drink milk raw from somebody's goat.
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Jihadist Without A Cause
Will jihad become the next cool thing? Stewart Baker wonders whether the rash of home-grown terrorists has something to do with the attraction that adolescents and the disaffected feel toward groups their parents and teachers fear:In the past fifty years, adolescents have joined a host of marginalized groups their parents found dangerous - juvenile delinquents, mods and rockers, punks, skinheads, and Goths. So why not jihadis? Islamist terror certainly scares authority figures; why wouldn't Western adolescents and misfits be attracted to violent Islamism -- at least as a symbolic stance?I'm sure that's not the only explanation for the appeal of homegrown Islamist extremism to a handful of youngsters in this country. Some of it has to do with ties to a home culture among second generation immigrants. But second-generation adolescents may also be tempted to affiliate with a strong, feared movement tied to their background.
Most of us think that Islamic terror is just too serious to be trivialized into a pose for disaffected Western youth. But we may have underrated the effects of a decade of political correctness and anti-Americanism in popular culture, where the search for transgressive shock value never ends.
Take M.I.A.'s new album. It lacks much of the raw energy and boogey rhythm that enlivened her first two albums, so transgression is pretty much all she has to fall back on. And transgress she does. One cut, "Illygirl," manages to rhyme (and identify the singer with) three cultural lodestars -- her "tight jeans," "Bruce Springsteen," and "muhahedin."
For M.I.A., in other words, Islamic terrorism is already a kind of life-style fashion item, a marginalized-and-proud, third-world stance that can be easily worn to parties in Brentwood by a wealthy former British art student. And if it works for M.I.A., why shouldn't it work for an immigrant kid in New Jersey?
Baker's book: Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism
.
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Catch Me On The Radio Tonight
Tonight, 8 pm, PST, I'm on KABC radio (kabc.com or 790am in LA) with the very smart and funny John Phillips (@johnnydontlike). Should be about half an hour.*
Feng Fooey
Feng shui idiocy tucked into a piece on how more and more couples are sleeping in separate beds. Bruce Feiler, who I otherwise respect for his Council of Dads idea, writes (rather ripely) for The New York Times about "four steps to restoring honor and dignity to the American bed" (oh, gag me), and includes this nitwittery:2. Declutter it. Feng shui masters say that adjusting the environs around a bed can bring couples closer. Time to admit you're not going to read those books gathering dust on your night stand or order things from those catalogs from before the recession. To improve harmony, Steven Post, a feng shui consultant in San Francisco, recommends wrapping the legs of your bed in red (the color of romance and prosperity) or draping a red cloth over the line that separates the two box springs under a king mattress.Next, put on some red shoes, close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and say, "Take me back to Kansas!" (Or "Fuck me, Delores!" -- whichever suits your fancy at the moment.)
Finally, on a bedding note, do you sleep in the same bed with your partner (or with strangers you pick up at bars nightly...don't want to discriminate or anything), or do you sleep separately, and why...and how does this affect your life, sleep, and anything else of interest?
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The Sherrod Affair
I've come to realize she's not the story, and the video's not the story -- the reaction is the story (by everybody from the Obama administration to Peggy Noonan, with her "teachable moment," to denunciations of "conservative media," to Sherrod herself, talking about "conservative, racist people" and calling Andrew Breitbart "racist" and saying "he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery").I'm against racism, racial preferences, and affirmative action, and favor an MLK approach: "Judge people by the content of their character" (and their merit for the job or government handout).
Interestingly, people have been rather quiet about the disproportionate amount of money Sherrod got for an settlement to black farmers (other farmers got $50,000 each plus loan offsets and tax forgiveness for an average of $72K each; she and her husband got $150,000 each). Now, there was a track A and a track B, where you had to show a "preponderance of evidence" to get more money, and perhaps he and she did. Each. Nobody will ask about that now, so we won't know.
And finally, speaking of money in far greater sums, Politico's @mikeallen tweeted:
email du jour: Amazing that this sherrod story has completely eclipsed finreg, the largest change in our banking regs since great depression*
John Kerrey Sails Away From Massachusetts Taxes
The Senator from Massachusetts and oily former presidential candidate (who I voted for, while gagging, a few elections ago), is docking his family's $7 million yacht in Rhode Island, slipping out of $500K in taxes he'd owe to his own "cash-strapped" state, reports the AP:If the "Isabel" were kept at the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee's summer vacation home on Nantucket, or in Boston Harbor near his city residence, he would be liable for $437,500 in one-time sales tax. He would also have to pay $70,000 in annual excise taxes. Rhode Island repealed those taxes in 1993. That has made the state something of a nautical tax haven.Kerry spokesman David Wade said Friday the boat is being kept at Newport Shipyard not to evade taxes, but "for long-term maintenance, upkeep and charter purposes."
Maintaining $500K in one's bank account purposes, it seems.
This story is news but no news to me, but should be read by all who naively believe government and politicians are in office mainly to do good for the people (rather than themselves and the people closest to them).
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Whaddya Think Of The Latest Meeting People Gimmick?
From The New York Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom writes about cards people are dropping on people they find hot (and don't forget to read the bit at the link about the woman who presumed to stick a card into some guy's food):Users receive calling cards to dole out to alluring strangers they encounter in their everyday lives, be it in a club or in a subway on their morning commute. Recipients of the cards can use the identification code printed on them to log onto Cheekd.com and send a message to their admirer. A pack of 50 cards and a month's subscription to Cheek'd, where users can receive messages and post information about themselves, is $25. There is no fee for those who receive cards to communicate with an admirer through the site.Each Cheek'd card has a sassy phrase like "I am totally cooler than your date," or, for those with no regard for subtlety: "I'm hitting on you." Ms. Cheek is dreaming up specialized card sets, too. One for New York City singles will have lines like "I live below 14th Street" and "I hope my five-story walkup won't be a problem."
Willa Bernstein, 43, who uses Cheek'd, was recently making eyes with a man at the Soho Grand Hotel but was feeling shy, so she dispatched a friend to slip him a card on her behalf. Ms. Bernstein was not bold that night, but the words on her card were: "I'm looking forward to our first date."
"I felt a little bit high school," confessed Ms. Bernstein, a former government lawyer who now heads the philanthropy company Manthropy. "It was just a little intimidating to cross the room."
No matter. The next morning she awoke to find a message in her Cheekd.com mailbox. "My only regret from last night," wrote the man from the Soho Grand, "was that you didn't come over and introduce yourself in person."
Like an adult human.
That's how I met Gregg. It was the Apple store at The Grove. He was at the iPod display, all tall and handsome and brainy looking, and I went over and talked to him. I flirted, and kept flirting, he asked me out for a coke at the Farmer's Market. We talked for three hours, he walked me to my car, grabbed me and kissed me, and that was that.
Had I not approached him and flirted my ass off, and had he not talked to me and asked me out, he'd be some cute smart guy I talked to once at the Apple store about eight years ago.
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Lawbreaker, Uh, Lawmaker Charles Rangel Finally Called On The Carpet
Charles Rangel is finally getting a little look-see from the House for his blatant unethical behavior writes William Douglas of McClatchy. There will be a special House subcommittee next week on at least one ethics violation charge:Rangel, D-N.Y., has been under a lengthy probe by the ethics committee for a series of allegations that include failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in income and assets, improper use of several rent-controlled apartments in his Harlem district, fundraising efforts for a college center that bears his name, and failing to pay taxes on property he owns in the Dominican Republic.He makes the laws...surely we don't expect him to also obey them. (Laws are for the little people, wink, wink.)
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Why Discuss When You Can Just Censor?
Daily newspapers are hemorrhaging readers, and no wonder, because they focus on covering up information rather than letting it out there and disputing it if need be.Sometimes, I don't know why they even call them newspapers anymore -- perhaps out of nostalgia -- instead of cover-up papers or avoid controversy papers.
Kevin Roderick posted on LAObserved that the LA Times had promoted a woman to be a science reporter:
Eryn Brown will be the paper's general assignment science reporter, though she won't be one of those newsroom specialists who brings expertise to a beat. Brown has been, most recently, the paper's letters editor, but was a writer before that.Roderick linked to the LAT's blog item of the announcement:
Eryn Brown will be joining the Health/Science team as a general assignment science reporter. She'll be reporting both on large scientific discoveries and on the practical science behind current events. As The Times' Letters editor, a position she's held since 2008, Eryn has been distilling the often passionate and personal views of L.A. Times readers. In her new job, she'll be distilling the often passionate but scientific work of researchers and scientists. Her beat will be a broad one, covering science as it touches an array of disciplines and departments. Eryn previously worked at Fortune magazine in New York, writing features about technology, dot-com culture and heavy industry. She moved to Los Angeles in 2002, where she freelanced for The Times (including the Los Angeles Times Magazine), the New York Times, Wired and other publications. She joined The Times' editorial board in January 2006, where she wrote about the economy, water policy and healthcare.Notice any science or science reporting background in there?
I left a comment on the blog item -- one which remained unposted. I check back on the LA Times' comments I leave, when I remember, because I suspect they'll just ditch ones they don't like.
Well, that's exactly what they did.
And they did it to the wrong girl.
I left another comment (along the lines of "Where's my comment?") which also wasn't posted.
And then I wrote to the LA Times Reader's Rep to ask why it wasn't posted:
Subject: comment not published on your entryhttp://latimesblogs.latimes.com/readers/2010/07/sports-designer-movie-editor-science-writer-named.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readersblog+(Readers%27+Representative+Journal)
Why wasn't it?
Do you still have the comment?
I had an experience with another paper where they got a really racist letter in response to an article I was quoted in, and their response is to not respond to it rather than print it and expose the racism and have a discussion about it.
I took time to write down information from an epidemiologist who trains me in how to read studies. I'm super-irritated that the comment hasn't been posted. Criticism not welcomed, just pretend-welcomed? -Amy Alkon
PS Note that I have to be suspicious about my comment and check. Yuck.
The Reader's Rep wrote back:
Ms. Alkon,Thank you for following up on your comment. I had thought it was inaccurate in that Eryn Brown is not a young, inexperienced reporter, and I regret that the truncated posting I published made it sound that way. I also think it's a bit unfair to assume that she is unqualified; why not read her articles and then make that call?
However, I've thought about the comment some more, and you're right that it should be published. It doesn't violate the terms of service, and I am an advocate of transparency. I am posting it now.
Best regards,
Deirdre Edgar
Readers' representative
Los Angeles Times
http://latimes.com/readers
Twitter: @LATreadersrepShe's "an advocate of transparency"? When caught, it seems.
From her e-mail, it seems she didn't really read my post. Reporting on science takes understanding science and scientific methodology, and learning that studies have limitations, and that authors misrepresent their data or sometimes don't even understand it, just for starters.
I've recently had an experience in researching a column where I found that a study that had been chronicled in numerous books as if it were a good study had samples sizes of, I think, 9 and 26. Not cool. Then, the follow-up studies -- since the 70s! -- really didn't have sufficient evidence or they were mucked up by problems with the study design. I spent three weeks agonizing over the column, trying to dig up studies with solid evidence, and I just couldn't find them. Yet, again, if you look in numerous books that are supposedly science books, written by people considered solid researchers, the study and follow-up studies aren't approached at all critically.
But, back to my comment -- now on the site, and which I've posted below:
It's extremely disturbing that the LAT is promoting a woman to science reporter who lacks a science background. It's no small thing to report on science, and to know when studies have limitations that make their findings invalid.A recent example in the media -- a study out of University of Texas on "cougar" sex: I've read the study, and every single report in the media I read on it had sloppy errors in it.
I know times are tough but papers need to invest in training science reporters and not just promote any diligent young reporter with a notebook and a pen and a few years experience in other areas.
Here's one thing you can pass on to your reporter, from an epidemiologist who helps me be rigorous about in my assessment of studies: "There is no thing as a perfect study -- every study of humans has major flaws that handicap any attempt to draw general conclusions from it (often, however, one can draw specific conclusions, like that the authors are incompetent). Some studies just have fewer or smaller flaws than others on their topic -- so learn to think along a continuum, not just 'good data' or 'fudge.'"
Also, you don't just read one study on a topic -- you look at a body of work and see if they have similar findings.
To learn stats -- jeez, or start -- pick up a book an evolutionary psychologist/university prof recommended to me: Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials
.
Really, it's just shameful that you're promoting this woman out of nowhere to report on science. It's not like reporting on cute cat stories or quoting some Wall Street guy.
To the reporter: If you want guidance on how to do what you need to do to train yourself, please contact me, and I mean that in a helpful way, not a condescending one.
Posted by: Amy Alkon | July 21, 2010 at 11:40 AM
Well, stamped when I posted it, but actually posted by their Reader's Rep actually much later.
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The Difference Between A Douchebag And A Rapist
Somebody should explain it to some Israeli judges, because if this case is rape, millions of men and women in bars, parties and countless other venues around the world are rapists.Jo Adetunji and Harriet Sherwood write for the Guardian that an Arab man was convicted of rape for lying to a Jewish woman that he was a Jew so she'd have sex with him:
Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.
Although Kashur was initially charged with rape and indecent assault, this was changed to a charge of rape by deception as part of a plea bargain arrangement.
Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not "a classical rape by force," the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish.
The sex therefore was obtained under false pretences, the judges said. "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated," they added.
The court ruled that Kashur should receive a jail term and rejected the option of a six-month community service order. He was said to be seeking to appeal.
Segal said: "The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims - actual and potential - to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price."
Adult humans are required to develop themselves to the point where they aren't gullible as kittens.
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Welcome To Stockholmistan Syndrome
I'm an atheist who thinks the evidence-free belief in god is silly, but who strongly values our Constitutional freedoms, so I don't believe in denying people religious freedom. Tempting as it can be, we don't protect our society and democracy by crumpling up the Constitution when things get scary -- we kill it in the name of protecting it.So, while I despise the burka, and while I'm horrified to my core whenever I see a woman in one (and have, on occasion, hissed to a wearer, "How's that Verse of the Sword working out for you?") [Surah 9:5], I have to admit that banning it goes against the most vital principles of our society.
I sure won't pretend that the burka is the slightest bit good for women. It seems that's where I differ from some feminists, like feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum who must need 26 day laborers with 26 wheelbarrows to help her push around all the multi-culti shit she's peddling below. Phyllis Chesler writes:
Indeed, feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in the august pages of the New York Times, recently insisted that the burqa wearers are not coerced into wearing the shroud-like garment, nor is it really uncomfortable, dangerous to one's health, or associated with violence against women. She doesn't believe that showing one's face for purposes of identification is even really necessary--and that, of course, banning the burqa would be "discriminatory." Nussbaum deftly marshals all her arguments without even getting to the "delicate issue of religiously grounded accomodation." In her view, a ban would be "unacceptable in a society committed to equal liberty. Equal respect for conscience requires us to reject" all the arguments that have been made against face veiling.Oh yeah. And, in a response to reader comments Nussbaum brings it all back to herself. Once, a nearby construction project filled her office with dust. Allergic, she started wearing a mask and a scarf to protect herself. And she felt just fine, thank you very much. She did not feel as if she'd lost any individuality or dignity.
Martha: Tell that to a non-professor, non-teacher, non-literate ten year old Afghan girl who is being forced to wear the chaudry/burqa and to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. Tell that to someone who has been threatened with being honor-murdered if her headscarf slips or if she refuses to face veil.
Chesler quotes Stuart Schneiderman on "burkaphilia":
Burqaphilia is a philosophical affliction that besets the mind of an otherwise intelligent feminist, making it impossible for her to support a ban on the most conspicuous modern form of female oppression.When a feminist who has railed against female objectification, both real and imagined, cannot bring herself to denounce an instrument that reduces women to the status of objects, she is suffering from burqaphilia.
A feminist philosopher can explain to you with the most exquisitely twisted logic why miniskirts and lip gloss make women into sexual objects, but when it comes to a cultural practice, enforced by terror, that makes women into social non-entities, she feels that it is beneath her liberal dignity to support a ban on the practice.
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Unconstitutional Care
The ObamaCare tax penalty is unconstitutional, write Kenneth Blackwell and Kenneth A. Klukowski at the WSJ:The Justice Department announced last week that it would defend the new federal health-insurance mandate as an exercise of Congress's "power to lay and collect taxes," even though Barack Obama had insisted before the bill's passage that it was "absolutely not a tax increase." The truth is the mandate is not a tax--and if it were it would be unconstitutional.A tax is when the government takes money from individuals, puts it in the Treasury, and plans to spend it. With the health-insurance mandate, the government is not taking money from private individuals; rather, it is commanding them to give their money to another private entity, not to the Treasury. If individuals don't obey the mandate, they pay a penalty to the Treasury. But penalties aren't taxes. The mandate is legally separate from the penalty.
Even if the Justice Department were to get the mandate considered a tax, it would be an unconstitutional one. Unlike states, the federal government has limited jurisdiction. Under the 10th Amendment, the federal government has only those powers enumerated by the Constitution, and all other powers are reserved to the people or the states. Every federal action must be authorized by a constitutional provision. If there is no such provision, then the action is unconstitutional. No provision of the Constitution authorizes the federal government to command people to buy insurance.
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A Creep Called "Artist"
Art museum-showing scumbag Larry Rivers abused his daughters by making films of them as adolescents, naked or topless, being interviewed by him about their breasts.Now, NYU is abusing the girls further by refusing to remove the films from their archive. Kate Taylor writes for The New York Times:
One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister."I kind of think that a lot of people would be very uptight, or at least a little bit concerned, wondering whether they have in their archives child pornography," said the daughter, Emma Tamburlini, now 43.
Ms. Tamburlini said the filming contributed to her becoming anorexic at 16. "It wrecked a lot of my life actually," she said.
Her older sister, Gwynne Rivers, declined comment.
N.Y.U. has agreed to discuss the matter and has already, at the urging of the foundation, pledged to keep the material off limits during the daughters' lifetimes. Two years ago Ms. Tamburlini asked the foundation to destroy the tapes, but it declined.
The Rivers Foundation's director, David Joel, said that he sympathized with Ms. Tamburlini but that he could not agree to destroy the tapes.
"I can't be the person who says this stays and this goes," he said. "My job is to protect the material."
Sometimes being a decent human being takes precedence over the job you get the paycheck for.
I'm no legal scholar, but I would think "the right of publicity" would apply here. The girls were not public figures, and have a right to control the exploitation of their images, it would seem, from my (albeit non-legal and sketchy) understanding of the law here.
Can their father give that away (to himself)? I would hope not. And how about whether NYU's possession is considered commercial use, and whether the fact that they say they'll keep the materials off limits, during the daughters' lifetimes, whatever that may mean. Lawyers want to weigh in?
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Saving Ourselves With Financial Ruin
Nobel economics laureate Vernon L. Smith blogs at The Daily Beast:So what has been the government's response in the current crisis? Besides spending stimulus, it was tax incentives for new home buyers and cash for clunkers if you bought a new car. All three are programs for borrowing output, homes and cars from future production and sales. Using subsidies to pump up home sales beyond what people could afford was the problem that led to the crisis. Now the problem is touted as the solution.We are in times not seen since the Depression, when at its depth in 1934 my parents lost their Kansas farm to the bank. Such memories and the intensity of the current crisis led me and my colleague, Steven Gjerstad, to examine the last 14 recessions including the Depression. We have been surprised and dismayed to learn that in 11 of these 14 recessions the percentage decline in new house expenditure preceded and exceeded percentage declines in every other major component of GDP. Hence the sources of the current debacle are hardly new! Moreover, past recoveries in the housing market have been closely associated with recovery from recession. The latest data continue to tell us that the turnaround in housing, consumer durables, and business investment are all anemic.
Our past housing and government spending mistakes leave us with no good choices. But please no more government spending! The deficit must now be faced. Avoid any new taxes; they are unlikely to reduce the deficit without discouraging recovery.
Our best shot at increasing employment and output is to reduce business taxes and the cost of creating new start-up companies. Don't subsidize them; just reduce their taxes even as they become larger; also reduce any unnecessary impediments to their formation. This is strongly indicated by the business dynamics program of the Bureau of Census and the Kauffman Foundation which has tracked new startup firms in the period 1980-2005. The entry of new firms net of departing firms in this period account for a remarkable two-thirds more employment growth (3 percent per year) than the average of all firms in the US (1.8 percent per year). The invigorating turmoil created by new technologies, with accompanying growth in output, productivity, and employment lead to new business formation as old firms inevitably fail. Reducing barriers to that growth encourage a recovery path which does not mortgage future output.
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Wilders On Islam
JihadWatch links to MuslimsDebate.com's posting of a statement from The Netherlands' Geert Wilders:There are people who say that I hate Muslims. I do not hate Muslims. It saddens me how Islam has robbed them of their dignity.What Islam does to Muslims is visible in the way they treat their daughters. On March 11, 2002, fifteen Saudi schoolgirls died as they attempted to flee from their school in the holy city of Mecca. A fire had set the building ablaze. The girls ran to the school gates but these were locked. The keys were in the possession of a male guard, who refused to open the gates because the girls were not wearing the correct Islamic dress imposed on women by Saudi law: face veils and overgarments.The "indecently" dressed girls frantically tried to save their young lives. The Saudi police beat them back into the burning building. Officers of the Mutaween, the "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice," as the Police are known in Saudi Arabia, also beat passers-by and firemen who tried to help the girls. "It is sinful to approach them," the policemen warned bystanders. It is not only sinful, it is also a criminal offence.
Girls are not valued highly in Islam; the Koran says that the birth of a daughter makes a father's "face darken and he is filled with gloom" (sura 43:15). Nevertheless, the incident at the Mecca school drew angry reactions. Islam is inhumane; but Muslims are humans, hence capable of Love - that powerful force which Muhammad despised. Humanity prevailed in the Meccan fathers who were incensed over the deaths of their daughters; it also prevailed in the firemen who confronted the Mutaween when the latter were beating the girls back inside, and in the journalists of the Saudi paper which, for the first time in Saudi history, criticized the much feared and powerful "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice."
However, Muslim protests against Islamic inhumanity are rare. Most Muslims, even in Western countries, visit mosques and listen to shocking Koranic verses and to repulsive sermons without revolting against them.
I am an agnosticus myself. But Christians and Jews hold that God created man in His image. They believe that by observing themselves, as free and rational beings capable of love, they can come to know Him. They can even reason with Him, as the Jews have done throughout their history. The Koran, on the contrary, states that "Nothing can be compared with Allah" (sura 16:74, 42:11). He has absolutely nothing in common with us. It is preposterous to suppose that Allah created man in his image. The biblical concept that God is our father is not found in Islam. There is no personal relationship between man and Allah, either. The purpose of Islam is the total submission of oneself and others to the unknowable Allah, whom we must serve through total obedience to Muhammad as leader of the Islamic state (suras 3:31, 4:80, 24:62, 48:10, 57:28). And history has taught us that Muhammad was not at all a prophet of love and compassion, but a mass murderer, a tyrant and a pedophile. Muslims could not have a more deplorable role model.
Without individual freedom, it is not surprising that the notion of man as a responsible agent is not much developed in Islam. Muslims tend to be very fatalistic. Perhaps - let us certainly hope so - only a few radicals take the Koranic admonition to wage jihad on the unbelievers seriously. Nevertheless, most Muslims never raise their voice against the radicals. This is the "fearful fatalistic apathy" Churchill referred to.
The author Aldous Huxley, who lived in North Africa in the 1920s, made the following observation: "About the immediate causes of things - precisely how they happen - they seem to feel not the slightest interest. Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes: God is directly responsible for everything. 'Do you think it will rain?' you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead. 'If God wills,' is the answer. You pass the native hospital. 'Are the doctors good?' 'In our country,' the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, 'we say that doctors are of no avail. If Allah wills that a man die, he will die. If not, he will recover.' All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that is not worth saying. To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom. ... They have relapsed - all except those who are educated according to Western methods - into pre-scientific fatalism, with its attendant incuriosity and apathy."
Islam deprives Muslims of their freedom. That is a shame, because free people are capable of great things, as history has shown. The Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Indonesian peoples have tremendous potential. It they were not captives of Islam, if they could liberate themselves from the yoke of Islam, if they would cease to take Muhammad as a role model and if they got rid of the evil Koran, they would be able to achieve great things which would benefit not only them but the entire world.
...I wholeheartedly support Muslims who love freedom. My message to them is clear: "Fatalism is no option; 'Inch' Allah' is a curse;
Submission is a disgrace.
Free yourselves. It is up to you.
Geert Wilders
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More Than A Penis
At Details, sex columnists Em & Lo claim there's a trend of guys increasingly rejecting booty calls. Hmmm. Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just part of the continuing trend in media to come up with trends. Em & Lo write that guys are rejecting booty calls because...as the subhead says, it "seems they've got feelings too":Ben, a 30-year-old account manager in Cleveland, says that in his twenties he used to screw "like it was shaking someone's hand," but now, he says, he's had it with sleeping around. "To do that consistently over a long period of time," he says, "you really have to be emotionless, like a robot." Ben came to loathe the ambiguity of casual sex. "After going out a few times with this one woman, she let me know we'd be better off as friends--but two days later, we're having sex for the first time," he grouses. "It's like, Where are we now?"Feeling vulnerable, that's where. "It's hard to have casual sex without getting emotionally involved," says Ben, who occasionally goes so far in his just-say-no approach as to abandon a girl at a crowded bar when he senses an impending hook-up. "Eventually, one of you is going to get involved. And in my experience, it seems to be me."
Vulnerability is hardly the only reason a guy might take a rain check. Maybe he doesn't want a gift that keeps on giving. "The number of women who will just sit on a condom-free, erect penis without any kind of announcement or discussion is just shocking," says "Isaac," a 33-year-old L.A. artist who recently finished a one-year sabbatical from casual sex. (Some names in this story have been changed.) "They would just go for it: no latex, no discussion of STDs, not even 'It's okay--I'm on the pill.' Dude!"
Isaac says he won't have sex with someone he's not emotionally attached to. He once walked away from a no-brainer--when a "gorgeous" former student "told me she sucks really good dick"--because he felt he couldn't be giving, as he was emerging from a bad break-up. Another time, turned off by a former lingerie model's excessively dental oral technique and her weird pillow talk, Isaac did the unthinkable: "I just pulled on my pants and made a run for it--out the door, down the steps, onto the street, and into the car."
When a guy hangs up on a booty call, he might be responding to simple biology. "As men age, the refractory period, or the interval between when they are physically ready for sex, gets longer, so they might not be as easily stimulated," says Jean Elson, a University of New Hampshire sociologist who studies voluntary abstinence. Harry Fisch, the author of The Male Biological Clock, says, "Testosterone starts to decrease at age 30"--so your sex drive decreases as your spare tire inflates.
I think it's a largely a question of age and timing. "Grownups" get their panties in a bunch over teens and college kids hooking up, but I don't think it's a big deal. For a lot of people, there's a time in their life when they aren't ready for a relationship, so they run around and have a lot of casual sex. When they tire of hooking up, and they're ready for a relationship, they go look for one. No biggie, really.
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Pretending To Help The White Guy
Not only is Shirley Sherrod racist, she bragged about it in a speech to the NAACP. (Sherrod was the Georgia USDA Director of Rural Development, but has since resigned, in the wake of her comments going public.)
If you're trying to save your farm, do you really show the official that you're "superior" to them? Maybe he did, or maybe that's just the way she evils him up so she could further justify doing as little as possible for him. Ugly stuff.UPDATE: The whole tape wasn't seen -- she actually repudiates racism in the part that wasn't initially included, and it seems, went through a transformation. More within the comments. Apologies to Shirley Sherrod.
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Government Should Hire Businesses, Not Be In Business
Tamara Audi writes for the WSJ:Faced with a $118 million budget deficit, the city of San Jose, Calif., recently decided it could no longer afford its own janitors. So the city's budget called for dropping its custodial staff and hiring outside contractors to clean its city hall and airport, saving about $4 million.To keep all its swimming pools open and staffed, the city is replacing some city workers with contractors.
"These are cases where the question is being asked, 'Is this a core service at the city level?' " said Michelle McGurk, senior policy adviser to the San Jose mayor.
After years of whittling staff and cutting back on services, towns and cities are now outsourcing some of the most basic functions of local government, from policing to trash collection. Services that cities can no longer afford to provide are being contracted to private vendors, counties or even neighboring towns.
The move saves cities budget-crushing costs of employee benefits like health insurance and retirement. Critics say contracting means giving up local control and personalized services.
Boohoo. If the wastebaskets are getting emptied, do we really care? Police forces, I think that's a different story.
And for anybody who thinks government can do better than private sector businesses, witness a side comment made by boasting racist Shirley Sherrod, in her speech where she talked about screwing a white farmer. From FoxNews.com:
In a second clip from the same event posted online, Sherrod appeared to urge black job seekers to find work at the Department of Agriculture because the federal government won't lay people off."There are jobs at USDA and many times there are no people of color to fill those jobs because we shy away from agriculture. We hear the word agriculture and think, why are we working in the fields?" she said. "You've heard of a lot of layoffs. Have you heard of anybody in the federal government losing their job? That's all I need to say."
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"Someone's In The Kitchen With Discount..."
La, la, la...up to 40 percent off kitchen stuffThank you to everybody who supports this site in the downturn in newspapers by buying stuff through my Amazon links on my blog and in Amy's Mall.
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Security Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
When flying back to the U.S. from Toronto, you go through U.S. customs and U.S. security right in the Toronto airport.A guy named Mohammad manning the TSA security camera there ordered a check of my bag. His TSA henchman, who mauled all my stuff in non-disposable gloves he used to maul everybody else's stuff, found the dangerous weapon in my makeup bag: a little pair of tweezers. And they weren't even Tweezerman. Just a dull Lacross pair with the red dot from Rite-Aid.
Yet, upon their discovery, Mohammad told me, "If these were any sharper, we wouldn't let you bring them on the plane."
What, I might break into the cockpit with them, pluck the pilot's eyebrows, and bring down the jetliner?
Of course, according to the government's Rules and Regulations, tweezers -- apparently, of any kind -- are allowed.
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Listening To The Government Makes You Fat
For a little over a year, I've been eating a very low-carb diet -- no flour, sugar, fruit, or starchy vegetables like potatoes -- and I've never been healthier (according to my latest physical) or felt better. And I'm effortlessly thin, whether I exercise or not.And P.S. I never have to starve myself. In fact, sometimes, at night, I eat cheese just for fun. None of this "don't eat at night" business -- because, as I learned from Gary Taubes, it seems a calorie is not a calorie.
Steven Malanga writes in the LA Times about how the government has told Americans to eat exactly the wrong things since the first federal guidelines appeared in 1980 -- "to reduce their intake of saturated fat by cutting back on meat and dairy products and replacing them with carbohydrates":
Americans have dutifully complied, and the rate of obesity has increased sharply. Meanwhile, the progress that the country has made against heart disease has largely come from medical breakthroughs such as statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, and more effective medications to control blood pressure.Now researchers have started asking hard questions about fat consumption and heart disease, and the answers are startling. In an analysis of the daily food intake of about 350,000 people published in the March issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers at the Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland found no link between the amount of saturated fat that a person consumed and the risk of heart disease. One reason, the researchers speculate, is that saturated fat raises levels of so-called good, or HDL, cholesterol, which may offset an accompanying rise in general cholesterol.
A study out of Harvard this spring analyzed data from 20 studies around the world, concluding that those who eat four ounces of fresh (not processed) red meat every day face no increased risk of heart disease.
According to Scientific American, growing research into carbohydrate-based diets has demonstrated that the medical establishment may have harmed Americans by steering them toward carbs. Research by Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, concludes that diets rich in carbohydrates that are quickly digestible -- like potatoes, white rice and white bread -- increase the risk of diabetes and make people far more likely to contract cardiovascular disease than those who eat moderate amounts of meat and fewer carbs. Though federal guidelines now emphasize eating fiber-rich carbohydrates, which take longer to digest, the incessant message over the last 30 years to substitute carbs for meat may have done significant damage.
So far, it doesn't appear that the government will change its approach. The preliminary recommendations of a panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines urge people to shift to "plant-based" diets and to consume "only moderate amounts of lean meats, poultry and eggs."
Genius. Any of you "government will save us" types want to pipe up?
Here's a comment from the LAT site that's typical of what I hear from commenters and readers who've discovered Gary Taubes, Dr. Michael Eades, Dr. Robert Lustig, and other low-carb recommenders whose dietary advice is based in science instead of the "science" the government favors.
Oh, and on an important note, don't assume your doctor knows the first thing about what to test you for. Eades provides a slew of consistently good information on this -- for example, his post on LDL cholesterol:
(Ronald) Krauss and his team showed that large, fluffy LDL particles aren't particularly harmful whereas the small, dense LDL particles are the ones that cause the problems. He also discovered that increasing carbohydrate in the diet caused LDL to shift to a smaller, denser pattern while decreasing carb and adding fat made LDL change to the larger, fluffier non-problematic kind....If you reduce carbs and add fat to the diet, not only does your HDL go up, but your LDL makes a particle size change for the better. However, when you increase carbs and reduce fat, your HDL goes down and your LDL goes down too, but it changes for the worse. So even though the high-carb, low-fat diet decreases LDL, it doesn't decrease risk - it increases it because even though LDL is lower, it is made up of a dangerous particle size,which negates any possible value of the fall in LDL.
Getting your cholesterol measured? Ask your doctor to check if your LDL particles are large and fluffy or small and dense. Large and fluffy = good; small and dense = bad.
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Welcome To The Land Of "All Men Are Child Molesters"
It's sad, how here in the States and in the UK, men have to think twice before helping a lost child or a child in trouble. My pal Lenore Skenazy over at FreeRangeKids posted yet another letter -- this one from a Utah father -- who realized he had to let a little lost girl sob her eyes out, lest he be accused or arrested and be packed off by the law when his three youngest boys came out of the dunk tank ride:So I sat and watched uncomfortably while this poor little girl became more and more agitated and crying more and more loudly.Now, the part that bothers me the most about this is that there was a group of three women standing not 5 feet from this little girl. They ignored her completely. I finally decided to get up and do something and had gotten just a few feet from this little girl when one of the women butted ahead of me and asked her if she'd lost her mother. As she escorted the child past she hissed, "Pervert!" at me.
I kept thinking of that poor man in England who saw the little girl walking who ended up drowning and was too afraid to stop and help her. I remember thinking when I heard that that there was no way I'd just drive off and leave her ... but I know better now. I'm much less likely to help a distressed child because I'm too afraid of what might
happen to my own kids. And that's just sad. -- Alan*
Being Faceless And Shapeless Is "Empowering"
I can feel good, that as stupid as our legislators are in America (like California state senator Gloria Romero, who wanted to strip California's state rock of its title because it contains asbestos)...it seems we don't have a monopoly on legislative idiocy.Brit environment secretary Caroline Spelman, the second most powerful woman in the Cabinet, called wearing a burka "empowering" and "dignified" for Muslim women. Rosa Prince writes in the Telegraph/UK:
The controversial remarks by Caroline Spelman, who as Environment Secretary is the second most powerful woman in the Cabinet, were immediately described as "moronic" and "bizarre"....But the Environment Secretary's suggestion that wearing the burka could in fact be seen as a feminist statement will raise eyebrows.
She said that she held her view "as a woman," and claimed that her experience of visiting Afghanistan had persuaded her that "the burka confers dignity".
Her remarks are particularly controversial given that before the Taliban was driven out of large parts of Afghanistan with the help of British troops, millions of women were forced under threat of physical violence to wear the veil in public.
British soldiers still gauge the level of threat from the Taliban in a particular area by assessing whether local women feel the need to cover themselves.
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Die Waiting
A Muslim woman is now suing Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey because staffers told her only male ER technicians were available to check whether her chest pains were caused by a heart attack. Jennifer Golson writes for the Star-Ledger:SOMERVILLE -- Rona Mohammedi went to Somerset Medical Center the night of Feb. 11 with severe chest pains. After hearing she would need an electrocardiogram, she asked for a female to conduct the test.A Muslim, Mohammedi wears traditional garb, including the hijab, or head scarf. The Basking Ridge woman believes it is her religious duty to maintain modesty before strange men, and an EKG calls for wires to be applied to the chest, shoulders and wrists.
Instead of heeding her request, officials let her languish in the emergency room for five hours until 3:10 a.m., when her husband sought a transfer. She is suing the hospital for discrimination and violating the Patient Bill of Rights.
The complaint filed May 14 in Superior Court in Somerville raises the question of how far hospitals must go for religious accommodations. The rights listed in state statutes say patients can expect treatment without discrimination, and respectful care consistent with sound medical practices.
If you have a religion that makes it near impossible for you to function in Western society...might it be prudent for you to live somewhere more in tune with your beliefs?
via Overlawyered
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A Human Being Or An Egg Farm?
A woman in her 30s had a heart attack and apparently irreversible brain damage. The family was set to pull the plug, as doctors suggested, when they decided they wanted to harvest her eggs -- even though she'd never expressed any wish to have children. Stephen Smith writes for the Boston Globe:The young woman spiraled toward death, with no hope for recovery from a crushing heart attack.Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital delivered the dire prognosis to her family, who chose to disconnect the breathing machine that kept her alive. But a few hours later, they changed their mind.
The reason stunned the medical staff: The family wanted to explore whether eggs could be harvested from the woman and frozen so that she could become a mother posthumously.
"What they asked us to do made us very uncomfortable,'' said Dr. David Greer, one of the specialists who treated the woman, "and forced us to think about what is the right thing to do here, what is the ethical thing.''
They weighed her wishes and the medical consequences of an experimental procedure with no guarantee of success. The doctors discovered that the unconscious woman had never expressed a strong desire to have children. And they knew that harvesting eggs could hasten her death.
Ultimately, the doctors decided they could not medically justify the procedure, a decision accepted by the woman's husband.
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Strangling While Muslim
In a horribly obscene and bizarre bit of multi-culti-flavored injustice, a Muslim mother who strangled her daughter with a headscarf will not go to jail. Not for one day. Daryl Slade writes for Canada.com that the judge, Sal LoVecchio, acquitted the mother, Aset Magomadova, of second-degree murder and found her guilty of manslaughter in the death of her daughter, Aminat, 14:He placed her on probation for three years with several conditions, including taking counselling for grief, depression and anger management....Magomadova was charged after the deadly incident at their home the morning of Feb. 26, 2007, after Aminat refused to go to court to be sentenced for assaulting a female teacher at her school.
The devout Muslim mother claimed Aminat came at her with a knife in her sewing room, where she prayed several times a day. She said she reacted by wrapping the scarf around her daughter's neck and twice told the girl to put the knife down before the teen lost consciousness.
A knife was found in the room, but the daughter's fingerprints were not on it.
LoVecchio, who rejected a defence of self-defence, deemed the woman did not intend to kill the teen, even though medical examiner Dr. Sam Andrews testified that death as a result of such an act would have taken at least 2 1/2 minutes.
Other stories call the girl "promiscuous," leading me to suspect this was yet another honor-killing. More on her behavior here, in this Jen Gerson story in the Calgary Herald:
According to court documents released at the 2009 trial, victim Aminat Magomadova didn't fit in at school because of her poor English, weight and clothing.She fell in with a bad crowd and in 2007 claimed to be using drugs, stealing and behaving promiscuously. She had run away several times and was known to stay at youth shelters.
Of course, under Sharia law (scroll down for photos of the text right out of the manual), killing one's child is a-okay -- not subject to "retaliation" (i.e., punishment):
In Book O, titled "Justice," in section 1, "Who is Subject to Retaliation for Injurious Crimes," section o1.1 reads, "Retaliation is obligatory ... against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right..."However, o1.2 clarifies (above) that "The following are not subject to retaliation" and then lists -- after the lovely, egalitarian "Muslim for killing a non-Muslim" and "Jewish or Christian subject ... for killing an apostate" -- "(4) a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring":
Here's how it worked out for another Muslim girl in Canada -- from a FrontPage story by Stephen Brown:
Pakistani-Canadian Aqsa Parvez, 16, was strangled by her father in an honor murder last Monday in the Toronto-area city of Mississauga. Refusing to wear the Islamic hijab, Parvez, who was herself born in Pakistan, wanted to live the normal lifestyle of a Canadian teenage girl, but ran into conflict with her strict, religious father. One friend and schoolmate said the Canadian teenager was afraid of her father and often came to school wearing bruises, the result of his violence."She was scared of her father; he was always controlling her," the friend told the National Post, a Canadian national newspaper. "She wasn't allowed to go out or do anything."
Nevertheless, the Grade 11 student, according to friends, would leave home wearing the hijab but arrive at school in western-style clothes, having changed on the way. This was part of her courageous desire to live her own life and overcoming the fear in which she lived.
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This Is Your Parents' Brain On Stupid
It seems like it's an update on Reefer Madness from The Onion. It's actually not!
More on this from reason's Radley Balko here. He quotes tech radio host Kim Kommando sounding the alarm at ABCNews!!.com:
Digital drugs supposedly synchronize your brain waves with the sound. Hence, they allegedly alter your mental state.Binaural beats create a beating sound. Other noises may be included with binaural beats. This is intended to mask their unpleasant sound.
...Some sites provide binaural beats that have innocuous effects. For example, some claim to help you develop extrasensory powers like telepathy and psychokinesis.
Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.
However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files ("doses") that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.
But it doesn't end there. You'll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.
...Let's think about this for a moment. The sites claim binaural beats cause the same effects as illegal drugs. These drugs impair coordination and can cause hallucinations. They've caused countless fatal accidents, like traffic collisions.
If binaural beats work as promised, they are not safe. They could also create a placebo effect. The expectation elicits the response. Again, this is unsafe.
At the very least, digital drugs promote drug use. Some sites say binaural beats can be used with illegal drugs.
The sites also look favorably on the effects of illegal drugs. So, talk to your children. Make sure they understand the dangers of this culture. It could be a small jump from digital drugs to the real thing.
Balko writes:
The Internet sure is a scary place. Probing journalist that I am, I downloaded the "marijuana, cocaine, peyote, and opium" pack from the website I-Doser. The tracks are ambient and soothing, but that's about all they did for me.via reason
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Delta Burka
Nonie Darwish on FrontPage on women in Islam:Muslim women have no choice but to abide by Sharia, since rejecting it is grounds for the charge of apostasy, punishable by death. Having been exposed to Sharia for centuries, Muslim women have learned convoluted coping mechanisms to avoid Sharia's wrath. Engaging in their own form of Stockholm Syndrome, most Muslim women publicly defend the very laws that enslave them. Even Obama's advisor on Islamic affairs, Dalia Mujahed, stated that Sharia is "misunderstood." Muslim women end up as the guardians of their own jails. It is women who often report younger girls who refuse to wear the head cover, and some wives cover up for the honor killing of a daughter by their husband or son. Many have accepted their inferior status and wear it as a badge of honor.That is why there is no significant grass-roots feminist movement in the Muslim world today. Muslim feminists are routinely accused of apostasy -- with its death penalty hanging over their heads. The only feminist movements to speak of in the Muslim world occurred during British colonial rule and, on a smaller scale, when the French conquered Egypt in 1798. By the end of the British rule, feminism ended inside the Muslim world.
Many Muslims claim that "Islam honors women" just as they claim that Islam is a "Religion of Peace." The truth however, is just the opposite. Islam does not honor women, but rather holds their very lives in absolute bondage.
...Here are just a few examples of what Muslim women must live under:
[1] There is no age limit for marriage of girls under Sharia. A man can pay a dowry and sign a marriage contract with parents of a toddler girl and consummate the marriage at age 9. Recent cases in Yemen and Saudi Arabia exposed this tragedy when 8-year-old girls filed for divorce from their over 50-year-old husbands. Not one Muslim authority challenged the Saudi marriage high official, Dr. Ahmad Al Mubi, who stated in 2008, in an interview that aired on LBC TV: "There is no minimal age for entering marriage. The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow."
...[10] The testimony of a woman in court is half the value of a man, law o24.7. You can guess who usually wins if a man and woman face each other in court.
[11] Revered Muslim theologian Imam Ghazali (1058-1111) defined marriage for generations of Muslims without apology as: "Marriage is a form of slavery. The woman is man's slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person."
[12] For a Muslim woman to prove rape, she must have 4 male witnesses. "Proof of adultery and rape will be either confession of accused or eye-witness of four male adult Muslims." Hudood ordinance #7 of 1989 amended by #8B of 20 of 1990.
[13] A rapist may only be required to pay the bride-money (dowry) without marrying." law m.8.10, page 535. This law tells the man that all he has to do to rectify a rape is to pay a dowry to the rape victim. Rape is almost always blamed on the girl who must come up with 4 male witnesses, especially if she was not covered up the Islamic way. A Muslim preacher in Australia blamed rape by Muslim men on Australian women whom he described as "uncovered meat."
More at the link.
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Parking Garages Of The Future
Amazing. (I do wonder what happens if there's a power blackout, which we have about once a year in my neighborhood.)
via @walterolson/sullivan
... Medicare Supplemental Insurance
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I'm Not Having A Cocktail Party In The Damn Bathroom
The bathroom at my hotel has the perfect lighting -- if you're trying to stage a seduction. If you're trying to put on mascara, and are hoping to find your eyelashes in semi-darkness, it's a problem. I had to move a big lamp (the only one that wasn't attached to a surface) to be able to see.Come on hotels -- it's not 1950. Women travel for business, and need to see to apply makeup. At least give us the option in the bathroom to turn on a bright light.
On another boneheaded note, my hotel removed all refrigerators and minibars from the rooms. I had to pay $10 to have a small refrigerator brought up so I could keep four days of salami (which I always carry with me, in case somebody's serving pasta or something I don't eat).
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Advice Goddess Free Swim
I'm traveling -- you pick the topics. One link per comment or you'll get eaten by my spam filter. I'll post stuff later on Thursday.*
Welcome To Pornistan
Guess which nation's number one in dirty web searches? Kelli Morgan writes at FoxNews:They may call it the "Land of the Pure," but Pakistan turns out to be anything but.The Muslim country, which has banned content on at least 17 websites to block offensive and blasphemous material, is the world's leader in online searches for pornographic material, FoxNews.com has learned.
...Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for "horse sex" since 2004, "donkey sex" since 2007, "rape pictures" between 2004 and 2009, "rape sex" since 2004, "child sex" between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, "animal sex" since 2004 and "dog sex" since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.
The country also is tops -- or has been No. 1 -- in searches for "sex," "camel sex," "rape video," "child sex video" and some other searches that can't be printed here.
Camel sex? Gives new meaning to the term "humping."
Thanks, Chang
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Serial And Panned Cakes
Forgot to put this up yesterday. Still waking up. It's a slow process. (I just got to Toronto this morning for the alternative newspaper conference.)Just posted two Advice Goddess questions and my answers -- Serial Monotony, about a woman whose husband woke her to tell her he hadn't crossed any lines...and Searching For That Special Yum One, which tells women the kind but effective way to tell a guy they aren't interested, and when, exactly, that needs to be done.
Comments are live at the links.
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Somebody Has To Pay...Why Not You?!
That's the State of Michigan's notion in the case of Gary Harper and his back child support...for the child who isn't actually his. Ann Mullen notes in her story on WYXZ.com that DNA tests even prove it. But, never mind that. He's still on the hook for tens of thousands in child support and might get sent to jail for non-payment:Dorothy Hoose is Harper's former girl friend and the biological mom to a young man, Thomas Matero, who was born in 1988. When Hoose signed up for state aid she gave Harper's name as the father and that was it. The state considers Matero Harper's son."I don't think it's right, not at all, not one bit because he's not the father. He's not. I thought he was, but he's not," says Hoose.
All this went down when Harper was behind bars. When he got out in 2003 the state said if Harper could prove he wasn't the father, he would be free and clear. But Harper didn't have the $500 at the time for a DNA test. He had the test done years later.
"I thought it was pretty neat. I wouldn't mind to know who my father was and everything," says Matero, who Harper tracked down in Florida and who agreed to a DNA test. The test proved what Harper suspected.
"I found out that he wasn't my father," Matero says.
But none of this matters to the state. The law gives a limited window for a paternity test to be done. Harper was too late.
"...it feels like I'm being punished again, you know what I mean, all over a technicality," says Harper.
I know stories like Harper's are true -- I get them from readers and read them all the time in the newspaper -- but it's hard to believe this sort of thing is allowed to happen, and over and over and over again, in our country.
Justice anyone?
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Your Word Against Theirs
Or your video against their word? There's been a discussion on a blog item about whether suspects should be recorded in interrogations. (It turns out the FBI is only allowed...pen and paper to take down testimony...genius.) I think suspects should have the right to record themselves -- just in case they get interviewed by a bad apple, and so they can prove what was really said. Or what was done. For example:
The story -- "Busted by YouTube: Video seen by 2m proves police officer who claimed cyclist ran into him was LYING" -- in the Daily Mail:A former police officer faces jail after an internet video exposed his bid to prosecute a cyling protester for allegedly running into him was a lie.Patrick Pogan claimed activist Christopher Long (steered) into him and knocked him down during a demonstration in New York.
But a YouTube video seen by two million people so far has exposed him as a liar.
The video shows Pogan walking over to the cyclist and shoving him to the ground instead.Mr Long was acquitted of assault charges and received a £40,000 payout from the city's police.
...Pogan said he told Mr Long to stop to get ticketed for such infractions as taking his hands off his handlebars.
But the cyclist kept going, and he testified he never heard any instruction to stop.
Pogan initially reported that Mr Long steered into him and knocked him down.
But a tourist's video showed the officer striding over to the cyclist and shoving him off his bike.
From Gothamist's John Del Signore:
His boss tells the Daily News that Long is an Army veteran and "mild-mannered environmental activist." Craig Radhuber, 54, was riding behind Long Friday night and describes incident: "All of a sudden the cop picked this kid out and bodychecked him. I couldn't believe what was going on. [The officer] body-slammed this kid off the bicycle so hard that he went from the lane to the curb."The officer seen in the video, rookie Patrick Pogan - a third-generation cop and the son of a retired New York City detective who worked on the Joint Terrorism Task Force - wrote in his police report that Long was observed "forcing multiple vehicles to stop abruptly or change their direction to avoid a collision." Radhuber, the witness, tells the Times that "there was no traffic behind us - there was no traffic to weave in and out of. The police officer looked to see who he was going to pick off."
According to Officer Pogan, Long rode his bike straight into him, knocking them both down and causing a "laceration" on his arm. This account would seem to contradict the incendiary video, shot by a tourist. Long was arrested for attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, and, apparently Officer Pogan wrote in his report that Long told him: "You are pawns in the game. I'm going to have your job."
Bill DiPaola, a director of Time's Up, told the Times he arrived just after Long went down. "He got up and was dazed. They put their knees on top of his head and were smashing him into a phone booth." Long, who was not wearing a helmet, was bruised but not hospitalized, and spent 26 hours in jail. After the video surfaced yesterday, Pogan was stripped of his gun and badge pending an investigation. But his father defended him to the Daily News, saying, "You gotta do what you gotta do to make an arrest." And in discussing the video with the News, an unidentified NYPD source says, "The video is bad - what can you say?"
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Lez Chat
The real deal.
From Tig Notaro*
The Periodic Table Of Swearing
Brit version.*
Fatwa Announced By Religion Of Peacers Against "Draw Mohammed Day" Originator
Story here. A quote:"The proper solution to this growing campaign of defamation" is "the execution of those involved," al-Awlaki said, according to Agence France-Presse.To show my opposition to religious thuggery and my support for free speech and other Western values, here's my dog dressed up as Mohammed. (I don't draw.)
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Anonymous Until Proven Guilty
A man falsely accused of rape explains to the Independent's Mark Hughes why rape suspects should be given anonymity until convicted:In his cell at HMP Addiewell, Jason Duncan knew it was only a matter of time before the story he had concocted for his own safety would fall apart.Falsely accused of rape, the 22-year-old steel worker had decided it was better to tell fellow inmates that he was in prison for a shooting. But then one morning, a week into his time on remand, the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser landed on the wings, complete with his name and charge details on the front page.
"In prison, if you are in for anything relating to a sex offence you are the lowest of the low," he explained. "My lawyers and even the prison staff told me that I would be in serious danger if other prisoners found out what I was charged with. So I concocted this story about being a career criminal who was in over a shooting. People seemed to believe it, but when my name was in the paper they realised why I was really there. I didn't leave my cell again."
The jury took less than an hour to acquit him and a friend who were charged with rape of a woman at knifepoint:
In reality, the woman - whom Jason knew - had invited them into her home following a night out.Jason said:
"I fully agree that rapists should be named and shamed. They are the scum of the earth and their names and photographs should be in every newspaper. But in my opinion that should only happen when they are convicted...."People have to realise that cases like mine do occur. But because I was not entitled to anonymity my name was plastered across the newspapers with the word rape next to it. I will forever be linked with a rape accusation, even though I have been acquitted."
via ifeminists
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Heather Mac Donald On Glenn Beck's Faith
Adventures in the use of reason from Heather, who writes at SecularRight.org about Glen Beck on America being "God's chosen country," and how "everything we have" supposedly "comes from God":Perhaps a lack of prayerfulness and faith led to the election of Obama, in Beck's view. By implication, then, a greater prayerfulness may have given the country George W. Bush. That religious devotion didn't prevent 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the financial meltdown. But of course, the list of catastrophes that faith has not prevented is endless. To arbitrarily pluck just some recent misfires that neither preemptive nor post hoc religiosity could cure: the flash flood that killed at least 20 campers at an Arkansas campsite on June 11, the barge crash that killed two young Hungarians on a Philadelphia tour boat on July 7, or the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil that killed 11 workers. At present, putting one's faith in Paul the octopus seems to be the wiser course.Is it presumptuous to expect God to have prevented these catastrophes or to have intervened once he caught wind of what was happening? A believer might so reprimand us. Then why does Beck think that God will respond to anything Beck or his listeners may pray for now? Yet the governors of Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Mississippi declared a coordinated day of prayer in June to ask God for help with the oil spill. Wouldn't God already have noticed that something was awry without the day of prayer? Or does he require a threshold number of bended knees before he rouses himself? Of course, at some point the oil spill will be contained, so if we just wait long enough, we will have clear evidence of God's responsiveness to prayer. The many intervening human agents will be merely agents of his will. So did the neighbors of Abby Sunderland, the publicity-seeking, would-be world circumnavigator, see God's hand at work in her rescue from the Indian Ocean this June, even though the crew and captain of the French ship Île de la Réunion might seem to be more proximate causes of her salvation than the Almighty. Let the 16-year-old forswear all human assistance the next time she capsizes, and we might have a better demonstration of God's power.
If science and technology followed the logic of religious thought, we would be lucky to be living in mud huts. I posit that wearing fluffy sweaters prevents cancer. Here, in confirmation, are dozens of sweater-wearing people who didn't get cancer. Oops! Just found some other warmly-clad sweater-wearers who succumbed to the disease. Never mind! Their fate is beyond human comprehension, but what I do know is that these other more relevant people were saved by their sweaters.
Is it unfair to hold religious belief to the same standards as scientific, rational thought? I don't see why, since religion is making an empirical claim about the world, and since its most vocal proponents on the right love to sneer at non-believers for their obstinacy in rejecting religion's truth claims.
Glenn Beck may think that faith will save America from Obama. I'd put my bets on old-fashioned politics.
via @mcmoynihan
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Looks Like Manslaughter
Radley Balko in reason on Johannes Mehserle:Early in the morning of January 1, 2009, in a now infamous incident captured on video by dozens of cell phones and replayed across the globe, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed 23-year-old Oscar Grant as Grant lay on his stomach on an Oakland BART platform. Last week, a Los Angeles jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Because the jury had the option to convict Mehserle of second-degree murder, and perhaps because the jury contained no blacks (Mehserle is white, Grant was black), the verdict has enraged civil rights groups and sparked protests and rioting in Oakland. The Department of Justice is now looking into the possibility of trying Mehserle a second time under federal civil rights law.The jury got it right. There's ample evidence that Mesehrle was negligent--likely criminally negligent. There's evidence that Mehserle and his fellow officers may have used excessive force the night Grant was killed. There's also evidence that Mesehrle's fellow officers tried to cover up the shooting by confiscating the cell phones of BART passengers who recorded the incident (generally speaking, police can ask for your name and address to later obtain a court order for video of evidentiary value, but they aren't permitted to take your cell phone or camera at the scene). There's evidence that one of Mehserle's fellow officers used a racial slur just before Grant's death. But there simply isn't any evidence that Mehserle is a murderer.
Mehserle claims he mistakenly grabbed his gun while reaching for his Taser. This is not only plausible, it's the explanation most supported by the evidence. In the video, Mehserle's body language just after the shooting indicates surprise and shock. That's supported by witness statements that Mehserle exclaimed "Oh my God!" several times after he fired, and then put his hands to his head, a gesture that indicates disbelief. These aren't the actions of a man who intended to kill someone. There's simply no basis for the accusation that Mehserle intentionally executed a man in front of dozens of witnesses.
...Mehserle shouldn't ever work as a cop again. And he should be sending a portion of his paycheck to Oscar Grant's family for the rest of his life. Grant's family should also get money from the city of Oakland, which failed to train Mehserle properly. But involuntary manslaughter sounds about right. A mistake shouldn't send a man to prison for the rest of his life.
It's happened before -- a Madera police officer said she mistook her Glock for her Taser and accidentally shot and killed a 24-year-old man. Charges were not filed.
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Just Assume Everything Is Misogynist
Researcher Jesse Bering, who blogs at ScientificAmerican.com, made the mistake of mentioning that he was grossed out by women's post-sex excretions, and got the evil eye from a feminist researcher for it:I described an old study by biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, in which the authors tested their clever hypothesis that human male masturbation is an evolutionary adaptation because it makes room for "fitter" sperm (younger, more potent and thus more likely to lead to fertilization of the egg during intercourse). As part of their basic methodology, the researchers examined the collected contents of women's vaginal flowbacks, self-contained globules of mucous that are laden with misfit sperm and other materials and that are routinely ejected from vaginas after unprotected heterosexual sex.I have enormous respect for Baker and Bellis, who at the time of this study were in the vanguard of experimental science in evolutionary biology. Yet in my description of this indubitably gag-worthy procedure, one in which women squatted over a glass beaker and hastened their flowback with a cough, I made the obviously tongue-in-cheek statement that the investigators must have had stomachs of steel. It was this expression of mine, this "stomachs of steel" quip, which a faithful reader of "Bering in Mind" informed me had infuriated a not-so-delightful woman named Dr. Emily Nagoski.
So for successfully pushing my buttons--a difficult task, I should say--I'm going to give Nagoski here her two minutes of lackluster fame. According to her blog (rather fittingly summed up by the title "Sex Nerd"), Nagoski is a Massachusetts-based sex educator/feminist who, judging by her unflattering write-up of my post ("Misogyny and Cervical Mucus in Scientific American") wants people to talk about cervical mucous as the glorious compound it is. To her, my acknowledging getting blue in the gills at the thought of some intrepid laboratory workers dipping their microscopes into the lukewarm, two-day-old vaginal secretions of strangers was somehow outrageously sexist of me. Nagoski thus refers to me as an "anti-feminist."
Here it is straight from the horse's mouth--Nagoski's bizarre line of reasoning in which she demands my apology on behalf of all women everywhere, a sentiment meeting with a small chorus of angry "hear-hears" by other feminist readers of her blog (along with a few more level-headed dissenters):
Apparently collecting ejaculate requires no particular digestive toughness, but ejaculate in cervical mucus requires industrial strength gastric abilities. Should we conclude that Dr. Bering himself has felt nauseated by the fluids of any female sex partners he may have had? Indeed, the blatant, unapologetic, flinching gynophobia made me wonder if he's gay, which it turns out he is, but that doesn't make it okay for him to discuss female fluids as physically disgusting.
It's just ["f"-expletive] rude, man. Your personal disinterest in cervical mucus doesn't make it okay to describe it as gross in a science magazine. You owe women an apology, and, if you plan to write about sex science in the future, you need to get over your ["bs"-expletive]."Oh, brother," as my dad says. If you want to make a mountain out of a molehill, Nagoski, then be prepared for the avalanche that follows. Here we go.
Days-old cold semen congealed at the bottom of a laboratory beaker isn't exactly pleasant food for thought to me either. Forgive me for failing to explicitly point out that the prolific liters of seminal fluid being vomited out of all those faceless, arabesque chambers of vas deferens in this study also made me squeamish. My aversion to the genital secretions of both sexes runs deep and strong. And I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that, in striking contrast to your own love affair with mucous, this is the case for most people, human nature being what it is. (Nagoski muses, " Maybe I should write a poem to fluids, dribbling, oozing, leaking, smelly, sticky, stain-the-sheets sex juice. Help everyone appreciate their beauty and wonder"). Most people are in possession of brains doing exactly what it is that they're designed to do, helping their owners to avoid harmful agents of infection and disease pumped out by the thoughtless glands of other human beings.
If the seminal fluids of one of my male friends' somehow got on my skin without my deliberately inducing it to land there, I'd experience the very same disgust as I would if the vaginal secretions of one of my female friends did so. Curiously, though, if such secretions came from your body, Nagoski, I'd writhe on the ground like the devil himself just spat on me, suggesting to me an intriguing, empirically testable idea that interpersonal liking acts as a moderating variable on degree of disgust toward others' bodily fluids. (Not sexist: I'd do the same with, say, Bill O'Reilley's semen, which given my personal distaste for him I can only imagine would similarly burn like acid.)
Oh, and post-sex flowback from women who squat over beakers is much, much grosser than ejaculate alone.
Must we really be all precious about the icky post-sex stew that comes out of women's vagina's, and if we aren't, is this really yet another way to classify us as...haters?
(I think Ms. Nagoski has no idea that she's unintentionally hilarious.)
Meanwhile, on a more serious note, men in general are falsely made out to be batterers whenever there's a sports match on.
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Three Reasons The New Financial Regs Won't Fix Anything
But will screw consumers. Nick Gillespie at reason.tv on how they replaced "too big to fail" with "too big to fail":
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Snakebites About To Get Deadlier
The coral snake is found throughout Florida, parts of Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas and Arizona, but only about 100 people get bitten every year. Unfortunately, after October 31st of this year, writes Glenn Derene in Popular Mechanics, there may be no antivenom (antivenin) left:That's the expiration date on existing vials of Micrurus fulvius, the only antivenom approved by the Food and Drug Administration for coral snake bites. Produced by Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, the antivenom was approved for sale in 1967, in a time of less stringent regulation.Wyeth kept up production of coral snake antivenom for almost 40 years. But given the rarity of coral snake bites, it was hardly a profit center, and the company shut down the factory that made the antivenom in 2003. Wyeth worked with the FDA to produce a five-year supply of the medicine to provide a stopgap while other options were pursued. After that period, the FDA extended the expiration date on existing stock from 2008 to 2009, and then again from 2009 to 2010. But as of press time, no new manufacturer has stepped forward.
..."It's ridiculous that we're losing a technology that we already have," says Joe Pittman, a snakebite treatment specialist at the Florida Poison Information Center in Tampa. "It's even more ludicrous that we have a product that's available, and we have to jump through so many hoops to get it approved." -- on a Mexican antivenin that's likely more effective than the current one, yet not approved for sale by the FDA due to lack of testing--which no one will pay for.
"Nobody in this situation is being a bad actor," says Eric Lavonas of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center. "We just don't have a system set up to deal with it." With no adequate replacement for coral snake antivenom, hospitals are likely to appeal to local zoos, many of which maintain small stocks for their staff. But zoos are under no obligation to provide the medicine.
If and when shortages do occur, many hospitals will have no other option but to intubate coral snake bite victims on ventilators for weeks until the effects of the toxin wear off -- potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per bite. "It's probably going to end up costing us far more not to deal with this than to deal with it," Lavonas says, "both in human suffering, and in dollars and cents."
Via NumberSix
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"When Bread Is Assured, Circuses Fill Men's Minds"
Dalrymple on snobbery, the World Cup, how things have changed, and what it says about our societies:In 1998, the French team won the World Cup and there was a burst of national euphoria as a result. The team of 1998 was composed of blancs, beurs, noirs - that is to say, whites, Arabs, blacks - and this was taken, briefly, as evidence of the success of France as a multicultural and multiethnic society. Huge crowds greeted the successful team as it paraded in the modern equivalent of a Roman triumph. Preposterous triviality could go no further.
Twelve years later, when the French team lost miserably in the same competition, the opposite sentiments were widely expressed, at least in the newspapers and on the air. The team was now predominantly black and Arab; anyone who knew France only through its national football team would place the country somewhere between North and Equatorial Africa. One prominent white in the team, a spectacularly ugly and thuggish-looking man, so ill-educated that he could barely string a few words together, let alone a sentence, in his native language, had converted to Islam. Another white in the squad, a blonde Breton who was notably better-educated than his colleagues, had to be excluded from the team because none of the others would co-operate with or pass the ball to him.
When the Marseillaise was played before a match started in which the French were to play, the team refused to sing it or accord it any respect. While it is perfectly normal for many Frenchmen not to know all the words - which is probably as well, since they are horribly bloodthirsty, and include the hope that the impure blood of aristocrats may irrigate the ploughed furrows of the peasantry - almost all know at least the first four lines. The players appeared to be expressing their disdain for the country they supposedly represented and that had enabled them to become multi-millionaires by the age of 20. At the root of their resentment would not be injustice, but remembered slights, real or imagined.
...But what really mattered to people in France was victory or defeat in the sporting contest, not the state of society. Football was more important to them than anything else, and a victory - or at any rate, a more dignified defeat - would have anaesthetised their thoughts about the country's social problems.
It seems to me very odd, and not at all reassuring, that a country such as France, with a practically unrivalled history of achievement in all the major fields of human endeavour, should have been precipitated into an orgy of self-examination by something as trivial as a failure in a football competition, when it is utterly indifferent to questions of incomparably greater importance: for example, why it is completely incapable, after a continuous and millennial history of wonderful architecture, of erecting a decent building, one that is not an eyesore? (It is not alone in this, of course.) I have never seen this question so much as raised, let alone answered, though I do not think any reasonably alert person could drive through France without asking himself it....The glory and civilisation of France was thus reduced to eleven men on a field successfully, and admittedly with great skill, kicking a ball about. Zidane, incidentally, was a player of Maghrebian descent, the great hero of the 1998 competition and a man who looks considerably more intelligent than any of the players today; he blotted his copybook slightly when he head-butted another player, an act that he explained by saying that you can take a boy out of a slum, but you can't take a slum out of a boy.
Thanks, Crid
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What Is It With Girls And Birthdays?
Women take it super-personally if a guy doesn't remember their birthday and make a big to-do about it -- even if it's a guy they haven't been dating for very long.Now, maybe this is just an offshoot of a family culture that made birthdays a big deal. But, I tend to suspect that women who make a huge deal out of birthdays might not feel that great about themselves and their day-to-day lives, and use their birthday to make up for it -- like couples who are hateful to each other year-round and go all-out on Valentine's Day.
For a lot of guys, remembering a girl's birthday is probably a chore akin to going to a French movie -- maybe not too terrible, something they'll do for somebody they love because it means something to them...but you don't see Frank and Biff and Joe celebrating each other's special day. I think this sort of thing just doesn't come naturally to guys.
Your thoughts?
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Cougars Gone Wild
You'd think young women would be the most sex-mad. Well, not according to "the first study to examine changes in women's reproductive behavior across the life-cycle as a function of an evolved psychological adaptation." Yes, according to this study, it seems girls with aging eggs have more fun.This very interesting study -- published in Personality and Individual Differences, and sloppily and incorrectly reported in various newspapers and on blogs -- is by University of Texas' Judith A. Easton, Jaime C. Confer, Cari D. Goetz and David M. Buss.
As TIME's John Cloud writes, their research suggests evolutionary forces push women to be more sexual -- and in some unexpected ways -- with women who'd passed their peak fertility years but weren't yet in menopause the most sexually active, with the most active sexual fantasy lives:
Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26; the older women also report having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America's most sexually industrious.By contrast, men's sexual interest and output, usually measured by reported number of orgasms per week, peaks in the teen years and then settles to a steady level (an average of three orgasms per week) for most of their lives. As I pointed out in March, most men remain sexually active into their 70s. According to the new study, as well as the one I wrote about in March, women's sexual ardor declines precipitously after menopause.
Why would women be more sexually active in their middle years than in their teens and 20s? Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches.
Here's how their theory works:
Our female ancestors would have grown accustomed to watching many of their children -- perhaps as many as half -- die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s -- so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex.
However, after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it's harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman's remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex.
An interesting passage from the study, which I have, and have read: "Contrary to our prediction, women in a relationship classified as reproduction expediting did not fantasize more about someone other than their current romantic partner, but instead equally fantasized about their current romantic partner and other individuals. Women with high fertility did fantasize more about their current partner than other individuals, although this was not the case for menopausal women." (As they wrote earlier, "Menopausal women are no longer able to conceive, and therefore their psychology should not function to increase opportunities for conception.")
(Some caveats: study uses self-reported sex data [I always discount this because people lie about sex], and subjects were university students and self-selected participants off a Craigslist ad, where, as Cloud pointed out, people go seeking hookups. They also didn't control for hormonal birth control "which may also affect sexual motivations and behaviors.")
UPDATE: David Buss weighs in (in an e-mail exchange with me, which he gave me permission to publish) with a more nuanced view on self-reported sex data. (I wrote back to him to ask if I'd gotten the blog item right -- because I'd rather admit that I'm wrong and correct what I've published than look like I know it all...a problem with far too many reporters out there, I think). Buss writes:
In my judgment, you can't simply discount self-report studies, though, for several reasons. Yes, of course people lie, but one has to ask whether that distorts the findings in ways that produce artifactual results. Take affairs. Self-reports will surely underestimate the incidence of affairs, so if the goal is to obtain precise percentages of affairs, the findings will be misleadingly low. But that simply means that self-reported affairs are lower-bound estimates of actual rates. And there is no reason to doubt that the men and women differ in affair rate, as the self-reports reveal.Second, in many cases in which self-reports have been able to be verified by independent data sources, such as observers, friends, or spouses, or by demographic or laboratory data, the results almost always confirm the self-reports. Example: my 37 culture study of mate preferences found that men expressed a preference for younger women, and women expressed a preference for older men [as a spouse]. Demographic data confirm that the average actual age differences between brides and grooms correspond almost precisely to the self-reported preferences.
Third, for some sexual topics, self-reports are the ONLY legitimate data source. Sexual fantasies are a prime example.
Yes, you always want to try to verify scientific findings with more than one method or data source. But there's not reason to believe that self-reports should simply be dismissed because some people sometimes lie.
By the way, Judith A. Easton was the lead author and Jaime C. Confer was the second author, and Buss contributed to the writing. I'm so shocked at how, in story after story, "reporters" said Buss wrote the study, or quoted him as if they'd actually interviewed him (for example, Nick Collins, in the Telegraph/UK), who just pulled bits out of the study and made it look as if he'd interviewed Buss. (On the bright side, this suggests that Collins actually read the study instead of simply reporting what the UT press release said.)
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Your Restaurant, Your Rules
That's my thinking, anyway. You want to say, "No shirt/no shoes/no service," or "naked lunch or none at all," or "no babies," as an Ottawa restaurant did -- well, I think that's your prerogative.Of course, I'm a free-market broad, unlike the woman in Ottawa who brought an INFANT to a "trendy wine bar." Drew Halfnight writes for the Nat Post:
In a case that has polarized Ottawa's parents and foodies, a family has filed a human rights complaint against a trendy wine bar that turned away a dinner party because it included a three-month-old baby.Halle-fucking-luyah. More of this, please, restauranteurs.
Yes, I know, your unique and special 3-month-old booboo has the table manners and couth of an English lady. That must be why Trieste Rathwell said she was "dumbstruck" after her 3-month-old was not welcomed into Taylor's Genuine Food and Wine Bar, which opened last month in Ottawa:
John Taylor, Sylvia's husband and the eatery's prominent chef, said last night in an interview the incident had been the result of a misunderstanding, adding, "we welcome kids at all times." He added his wife "has been so torn up by this."Ms. Taylor previously told the Citizen the policy was "for everybody's comfort," but added it was not firm or permanent.
"We told [Ms. Rathwell] we weren't adequately equipped to handle either strollers or infants, mostly because there's nowhere to change them," she said. "There's no baby-change table. There's no space."
Ms. Taylor also said she has "customers who have paid for babysitters and they don't want to sit right next to a baby. We thought in this neighbourhood, wouldn't it be nice to have an adult place?"
If I lived there, I'd dine there in support. A few months ago, at my favorite restaurant, the one we go to for a romantic dinner whenever Gregg has to catch a plane to Detroit, somebody brought their baby in. It made noise throughout our dinner -- little shrieks, crying. It was really unpleasant.
As I said in my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE (in the "Your World Is Their Daycare Center" section), I thought kids and I had a deal: I'd stay out of Chuck E. Cheese if they'd stay out of the martini lounge (and I'll add fine adult dining places to the list).
And a quote from my book:
Delving into the motivation of those determined to inflict their children on bar patrons, (The New York Times' Alex) 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.
Thanks, Robert W.
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Race And Gender Quotas Mandated For Financial Industry
Unfair will from now on be fair...it's eternal backwards day from now on. Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes at Real Clear Markets:WASHINGTON - What one finds when reading congressional legislation is invariably surprising. Take the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for instance, which was created by merging Senate and House bills. When the Senate returns from recess one of its first actions will be to vote on the bill, which passed the House on June 30.I was searching the bill for a provision about derivatives. What did I find but Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major power grab, the new law inserts race and gender quotas into America's financial industry.
In addition to this bill's well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.
The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.
Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.
...How to define "fair" has bedeviled government administrators, university admissions officers, private employers, union shop stewards and all other supervisors since time immemorial - or at least since Congress first undertook to prohibit discrimination in employment.
Sometimes, "fair" has been defined in relation to population numbers, for example, by the U.S. Department of Education in its enforcement of Title IX, passed in 1972 as an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which pertains to varsity athletic opportunities for male and female undergraduates.
These days "fair" means passing over the best person for the job if they're white or have a penis, and hiring the person with more melanin or a vagina. Nice.
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You'll Have To Buy Your Hamster In Oakland
My mom wouldn't let me have a dog growing up, but I was allowed to have a hamster. I remember him fondly. His name was Squeaky, and I taught him to do somersaults over a pencil. Unfortunately, my sisters took him outside when I wasn't home, and the neighbors' little girl sat on him.Okay, enough with my hamster horror, now onto the fruits and nuts -- those in charge in San Francisco of the Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. Carolyn Jones writes for the SF Chron:
Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.That's the law under consideration by San Francisco's Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country's first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.
That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.
"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don't know what they're getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That's what we'd like to stop."
San Francisco residents who want a pet would have to go to another city, adopt one from a shelter or rescue group, or find one through the classifieds.
The Board of Supervisors would have final say on the matter. But not before pet store owners unleash a cacophony of howling, squeaking and squawking.
"It's terrible. A pet store that can't sell pets? It's ridiculous," said John Chan, manager of Pet Central on Broadway, which has been in business 30 years. "We'd have to close."
Clearly, these nitwits have brains on par with those of hamsters. People aren't going to stop euthanizing small animals -- they'll just euthanize small animals they've bought from pet store owners in nearby cities who haven't been run out of business by the clueless numpties in charge in San Francisco.
UPDATE: The measure has been tabled -- after several hours of hearings.
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"For Quality Assurance Purposes..."
"...We're using a pen and paper and scribbling notes while you talk"?Doesn't that sound dumb in light of all the capabilities we have to record conversations? Well, that's business as usual at the FBI.
I know, unbelievable.
Steve Chapman writes in reason:
Agents conducting an interrogation of someone they have detained need a record of what the suspect says. So what do they do? They grab a pen and take notes down on paper. Then they type up an account, just as their forebears have been doing since the Taft administration.The written account--which is not even signed by the suspect--is all prosecutors have when they want to use incriminating statements against a defendant. It's the FBI's word against the suspect's as to whether he actually said what the agent recalled.
The result at trial is often unpleasant for the prosecution. "You can imagine how the cross-examination goes," sighs Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney for Arizona, who does a convincing impression of an incredulous defense attorney. "'Agent Dokes, do you have a recording device? Do you know how to operate it? Agent Dokes, why didn't you use a recording device?'"
Charlton, who was fired by the Justice Department in 2006 for trying (without success) to force the FBI to record confessions in Arizona, had been sorely frustrated by its policy. "We lost cases, we had to plead down cases, we had to drop cases just because of this policy," he recalls in a phone interview.
The Justice Department, finally waking up to the arrival of the 21st century, now has a task force reexamining the virtual ban on recording, which by any reasonable standard is as obsolete as J. Edgar Hoover. But the FBI shows no openness to change.
Reexamining? (I can only imagine how long this will take.)
As for the contention that recordings inhibit people from speaking, I agree with Thomas Sullivan, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, that people being recorded soon forget about the recorder and just keep talking. If that's not the case, we could allow agents to -- wow -- use their discretion and not record them!
On the bright side, FBI agents aren't forced to take down conversations with quill pens and inkwells or chisels and stone tablets.
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Some People Go On Outward Bound
Some people temporarily join the Maasai. And this girl looks and sound like about the last girl you'd expect to do that.
More here:In September 2009 in Loita, Kenya where two American females, Nkashumpa (white folk), were recognized as Maasai warriors or Morans. Mindy Budgor and Alexandra Stillman lived in Kenya's Forest of the Lost Child with a group of seven Morans who taught them how to be warriors, surviving on goat, goat head soup, cow, cow head soup, and blood.*
Would You Sign A Prenup?
Why or why not? Mary Pilon writes in the WSJ:New Yorkers Laura Jackson and Gary Zaremba met on a dating website in 2005. Two years later, Mr. Zaremba, a 52-year-old real-estate developer, popped the question. Ms. Jackson accepted.Then he popped another: "Will you sign a prenuptial agreement?"
He had been through a divorce, had a college-age son and several real-estate investments. She, a publicist and also 52, had never married.
"When he first mentioned it," Ms. Jackson, now Ms. Jackson-Zaremba, says, "I thought, 'Oh, my God.' It definitely took a little bit of the romance out."
Baby boomers looking to protect their assets are increasingly turning to prenuptial agreements--legal contracts drawn up before a marriage that dictate what happens to assets in the event a couple should part ways, either by divorce or death.
"They used to be for the rich and famous," says Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and a lawyer in Nashville, Tenn. "It's become more commonplace in the market as an estate-planning opportunity for boomers."
...Tanya Porter, 60, and her husband, Darrell, 72, signed a prenup when they were married 27 years ago for one overriding purpose: to ensure their assets would go to their children from previous marriages in the event of a divorce or death. Today, many things in the agreement are moot, with stocks sold, cars long since traded in and kids all grown up. "It's funny now to reread it," says Ms. Porter, now a full-time wedding planner in Englewood, Colo.
In recent years, as more couples have drafted prenups, the documents have expanded to spell out terms of the marriage itself, addressing issues such as adultery, intimacy or weight gain, Ms. Moses says. Some prenups also determine things like what religion children will be raised as, or where they will attend school. However, child-support and custody agreements typically aren't included in prenups because those are to be determined separately by the courts.
Because prenups are general legal contracts, same-sex couples may be able to draft financial agreements, even if their state doesn't legally recognize the union, she says. "People are free to contract," Ms. Moses says.
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Hello, Unintended Consequences!
I blogged previously about the upcoming ban on regular light bulbs in favor of the crappy CFLs, but I didn't know which Oval Office politician to blame. (Oh, did you think there's much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans? There is: Democrats are the party of really, really big government, and Republicans are the party of pretending to be for small government.)Turns out George Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which establishes performance criteria that incandescent bulbs can't meet, writes Deroy Murdock. Not only that:
Scarier still, just drop one onto your kitchen floor. Its internal mercury is highly toxic. If spilled, it requires something approximating a Superfund cleanup. The Environmental Protection Agency warns that if a CFL breaks on one's apparel or bedspread, "Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage" (emphasis added).CFLs should be discarded at recycling centers. Hundreds of millions of busy Americans, however, will toss these dangerous bulbs in the trash, atop table scraps and junk mail. CFLs will clog landfills from coast to coast. Decades hence, mercury will have leeched into the environment. Americans will wonder why people are suffering brain, kidney, and lung damage. Medical visits will yield lawsuits. And yet another national disaster will erupt, courtesy of Washington, D.C.
And it's a quality of life issue -- for me, anyway. And I drive a hybrid car -- a 2004 Honda Insight -- with about the same pickup as my Goodwill-bought vacuum cleaner. But, I chose to drive that car. Meanwhile, I'm going to be stockpiling incandescent bulbs in plastic storage boxes in my garage. I think I'll buy a few bulbs every time I go to the store. More from Murdoch's column:
"I think the incandescent light bulb was one of the great contributions to the art of architecture in the 20th century," says Howard M. Brandston, a legendary lighting designer renowned for relighting the Statute of Liberty before its rededication on July 4, 1986. "Lighting played a huge role, as essential as the structures themselves. That was thanks to Thomas Edison.""If the federal government insists on banning the incandescent lamp, it significantly will decrease the quality of life in every home in America," Brandston tells me. "The CFLs cannot be dimmed properly. When you dim one, the spectral power distribution and color quality of the lamp make people look cadaverous. Most people who wear makeup will not need to do so to look like the Bride of Frankenstein."
"Here we have the government entering all of our homes. Our homes are our castles," says Brandston, a former adjunct professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a founder of its Lighting Research Center. "Now they are telling us how to light our homes, and they are putting onerous burdens on us in terms of handling these toxic CFLs. The government should not enter our homes, tell us how to live, endanger our health, and ruin our quality of life."Republicans and thinking Democrats running for Congress this fall should pledge publicly to repeal the federal ban on Thomas Edison's monumental creation. Why not try something worthy of the Spirit of '76? Keep traditional bulbs, CFLs, halogens, and everything else on the market, and allow Americans to purchase whatever bulbs help them pursue happiness.
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Gaza Mom Wants Baby To Grow Up To Murder The Israelis Who Saved Him
From Islamo-Nazism, Shlomi Eldar, the Gaza correspondent for Israel's Channel 10 News and an Israeli Jew, went on the air to raise $55K for an operation for a Palestinian baby:After the report airs he is flooded with phone calls from Israelis who want to help. In one such call an Israeli Jew, who lost his son in a battle with Palestinians, offers to donate all the money right away, as long as he stays anonymous.Eldar develops a relationship with the mother as a result of his efforts to save the baby, and he is rewarded by hearing from her that she'd like the baby to grow up and perpetuate a suicide bombing on Jerusalem:
She also explained to Eldar exactly what she had in mind. "For us, death is a natural thing. We are not frightened of death. From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem....And Eldar was angry. "Then why are you fighting to save your son's life, if you say that death is a usual thing for your people?" he lashes out in one of the most dramatic moments in the film.
"It is a regular thing," she smiles at him. "Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it's for Jerusalem, then there's no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing."
That was enough to drain Eldar's motivation and dissolve all the compassion he had felt for Raida and Mohammed.
"It was an absolutely terrible rift," he recalls. "After I saw how intensely she fought for her son's life, I could not accept what she said. I had seen her standing for hours, caressing him, warming him up, kissing him. At the time I also had an infant of Mohammed's age at home. I couldn't understand where it came from in her. I was devastated. It was all so paradoxical, too, because just as she was talking about the shahids, two Jewish women entered the room and brought her toys and a stroller as presents."
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Calls For Accuracy In Media So Piss Some People Off
Check out the comments here.*
The End Of Failure
When I talk at the school (via my program, WIT: What It Takes, to demystify "making it" for inner-city kids), I tell the kids about embracing failure. (About a number of my failures, specifically.) How sometimes going the wrong way is what it takes to know which way is the right way. How not being too afraid to fail helps you take on tasks that are just a little too big for you, and that's how you maybe rise to the occasion. (Or fall on your ass or your face and get up and try again.)Michael Goodwin writes in the New York Post that losing the freedom to fail -- which we are -- sounds like a good thing, but it's anything but:
Misguided social perfectionists have given failure a bad rap, and too many of us have bought into their foolish view.The economic meltdown of 2008 and 2009 put on vivid display this clash of old versus new American values. Bankruptcy laws were written for this very kind of moment, but many who bet the farm and lost demanded exemptions as America's addiction to borrowing swiftly morphed into an expectation of bailouts.
Trillions of taxpayer dollars and guarantees were poured into the breach.
Letting someone fail when we have the power to prevent it seems so robber-baron-ish, so social Darwinist, especially when the shock waves could ripple across the country. This Gilded Age comes equipped with safety nets for those in danger of losing their gilt.
Wherever you look, failure is an endangered experience.
The social-promotion movement has turned much of our nation's educational system into a global joke. Instead of demanding that students meet academic requirements that will prepare them for college or the workforce, today's educrats find it easier just to pass little Johnny along, even when he is illiterate. When Johnny gets bigger and still can't read, they pass him along again, sending him out into the world, which usually finds it has no use for him.
All this is done, of course, in the name of compassion. Armies of psychologists and other captains of the self-esteem movement wail that holding Johnny back until he is actually ready for the next grade will destroy his psyche. In the real world, self-esteem comes from mastering new skills and achieving goals. But the anti-failure forces have turned the idea on its head: They think they can give Johnny self-esteem first, and only later ask him to earn it.
This disastrous egalitarianism is now so entrenched that many of Johnny's teachers are themselves products of the same social-promotion disaster. Naturally, flunking bad teachers -- and booting them out of the schools where they don't belong -- runs afoul of ironclad union protections. Better that all students should just be passed along so teachers can keep their jobs.
Maybe that's why one of the classes -- a regular eleventh-grade class, not a learning-disabled class -- was filled with kids reading at the first, second, and third grade levels. They wrote me really sweet letters about what they got out of my talk -- letters that were really sad in how little command of writing, spelling, and grammar that most of them have.
G.M. should have been allowed to fail and somebody should have cared enough to hold these kids back until they learned the stuff of first, second, and third grade.
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Wafa Sultan Testifies For Wilders
Slow start, thanks to the interviewer, but she gets going.
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Our Elected Morons
As I'm fond of saying, California is so debt-laden, we're in danger of breaking off and falling into the Pacific Ocean. But, never mind the truly serious issues. Democratic state senator Gloria Romero is fixing to strip California's state rock of its title because it contains asbestos (the only thing dumber than the fact that we actually have a state rock, which is serpentine).Jessie Schiewe blogs at the LA Times about Cali Senate Bill 624:
...which has been passed by the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources but still has a long way to go in the Legislature, would strip serpentine of its state-rock title, held since 1965. Why? Because the rock "contains the deadly mineral chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, exposure to which increases the risk of the cancer mesothelioma" and because "California should not designate a rock known to be toxic to the health of its residents as the state's official rock."And California voters should not designate clueless numpties to represent them, but they sure keep doing it.
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Which Amy The Advice Columnist Does Your Paper Run?
A reader sent the same question to Amy Dickinson and me (the one in mine has a bit more detail because I corresponded with the reader at length, as I often do, to find out more, while the other Amy ran what we both got the first time).Here's mine, Gilbert Grope:
I met a nice man (so I thought) who lives about 40 miles away. On our second date, we had drinks in my neighborhood. He drank too much, and asked to hang at my house so he wouldn't drive under the influence. I didn't like this because I'm used to guys using this ploy for sex, but he said if I didn't let him in, I was making him drive drunk. I grudgingly allowed him in, and he immediately started making moves on me. Eventually, I tried to send him home, but he said he was still in no position to drive, so I kicked him out early in the morning. What were my obligations here? Every man I asked said I shouldn't have risked letting him in. As one said, "Better a strange drunk on the road than a strange drunk in your home, where he could rape you." I have yet to ask a woman who can give me a definitive answer; they're all as conflicted as I am.--Manhandled
If a stranger comes to your door and says, "I'm too drunk to drive home," you don't say, "No problem, I'll make up the bed!" Yet, this guy's a near stranger, one you didn't want in your home -- even before he took the post-date sex ploy to a remarkable new low. Yeah, forget the usual lame lemme-in tactics like "I'd love to meet that cat I've heard so much about!" or "Mind if I use your bathroom?" No, it's "Mind if I cause the fiery death of a family of five?"
A guy might present you with an either/or situation, but that doesn't mean those are your only choices. In this case, you should've told the guy to cab it to a motel. (To borrow from your friend, "Better a strange drunk cabbing to Motel 6 than a strange drunk turning your home into Motel Sex.") If your date insists on driving drunk, call the cops, report a drunk driver, and give them a description of his car. Of course, it's possible he isn't really drunk, just trying to con his way in, but that's for the cop who stops him to determine: "I can touch my finger to my nose just fine, Officer, but I'm having real problems getting my hand up a girl's shirt."
It isn't surprising that all your girlfriends are "conflicted" about what you should've done. In fact, other women would have given in like you did -- not necessarily because they're weak or dumb, but because they're women: the gender that evolved to be the nurturers, peacemakers, and consensus builders of the species. (All great until a drunk guy swinging a set of car keys is standing at your front door.)
Recognizing that, as a woman, you have a hardwired tendency to be a pleaser is the best way to avoid succumbing to it. You have to decide before you're in a dicey situation that your comfort level and safety take priority over possibly coming across as rude or unsympathetic. Keep in mind, as Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear
, that "'No' is a complete sentence," and if you let somebody talk you out of it, "you might as well wear a sign that reads, 'You are in charge.'" Get his book, start a reading group with your "conflicted" girlfriends, and in the future, see to it that your door policy is determined by you, not Jim Beam and Captain Morgan.
Here's hers -- asking for suggestions from readers!
I recently met a very nice man who lives about 40 miles from me. We had a very nice date and he was a perfect gentleman. I eagerly accepted a second date with him, in my town. He drank more than he should have. As we drew the evening to a close, he asked if he could hang at my house for a while so he wouldn't drive under the influence. I did not like this, but if I said no that meant I could be putting him on the road to, at best, get a DWI or, at worst, kill someone. (I don't know how intoxicated he was; he seemed fine to me.) Against my better judgment, I allowed him to come to my home, where he immediately tried to become intimate with me. I did try to send him home, but he said he still was in no position to drive. I allowed him to stay and kicked him out in the early morning. I want to know - what are my moral obligations in this situation? Do I tell him to drive home, make him sleep in his car (which means he'll drive home) or allow him to sleep on my couch (which puts my safety in danger)?
WONDERINGYou are morally obligated to protect your own personal safety. You are also obligated to do your best to protect others'.
You should never, never let someone into your home because you've been pressured to do so.
If someone claims to be too drunk to drive, you should believe him - regardless of how he seems to you.
If you're not able to call a cab to take him to his home (ask the restaurant manager about a taxi service), I'd suggest letting him sleep in his car with you holding the keys. You could then deliver the keys along with a cup of coffee in the morning and send him on his way.
I'll run other suggestions from readers.
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Phyllis Chesler And Sergeant Heather On Why Abuse Victims Cave
My friend in the LAPD, Sergeant Heather, worked domestic violence cases for a while, and learned something very important -- something I often tell people who write me about their own or another's domestic abuse situation.If you tell a victim they're in danger, and that they (and maybe their children) must leave their abuser, they often or even usually respond by getting defensive and staying with that abuser.
Sergeant Heather told me that she found that the best way to get victims to leave their abuser is to send them to group sessions with other victims. They hear what others are going through, or have gone through, and their defenses are down, and they can admit there's a problem.
The psychology of domestic abuse victims in a group situation is relevant vis a vis the Afshan Azad case -- but in reverse. Azad the young Harry Potter actress who asked for the charges to be dropped against her brother and father who threatened to kill her and "badly bruised" her over her relationship with a Hindu man.
Phyllis Chesler writes at Pajamas Media:
When a woman's batterer is finally arrested, she is often the first to plead with authorities to let him go. He is her provider, perhaps the father of her children; she "loves" him. More to the point: she is now really afraid that he will kill her because his abuse has been publicly exposed and he has been arrested for it.When a woman turns to the law -- which is there to protect her -- she may be endangering herself even further. As powerful as the law may be, criminals do not obey it and police officers cannot be everywhere and at all times. When the law is not looking, the further outraged abuser will exact vengeance. He will kill the woman who turned to the law, who publicly shamed her husband and family.
This is what Muzzammil ("Mo") Hassan did in Buffalo when his wife Aasiya finally got an order of protection against his savage beatings and verbal and psychological abuse. He beheaded her. This is what husband-batterers of every ethnicity tend to do -- not behead, but murder battered wives when they leave or turn to the law. This is one reason that so many battered women stay.
Interestingly, according to my most recent study in Middle East Quarterly, only among Muslim batterer-murderers do the woman's family of origin and/or the husband's family of origin sometimes collaborate in her honor killing. This never happens in western cases of domestically violent femicide.
...I can only imagine the pressure that Afshan's mother Nelofar and her other brothers and extended family members have been exerting on poor Afshan. Just as incest victims -- not their attackers -- are blamed and ostracized; just as battered women who finally get orders of protection or even kill in self-defense are blamed and ostracized; just imagine the pressures being brought to bear on Afshan.
I would strongly advise Afshan not to go home -- ever again. Poor Aqsa Parvez did so (her mother lured her there with sweet talk) -- so that her father and brother could honor-kill her for refusing to wear hijab and for being "too western." The Said sisters, Sarah and Amina, also listened to their mother, who lured them home with the promise of a reconciliation; they were honor-murdered within hours. Yes, as I've written many times before, mothers, sisters, aunts, women as well as men, all play a collaborative role in honor killings. Like men, women also uphold patriarchal and status-quo values.
Chesler advises:
Afshan: You are playing the part of Padma, a powerful witch, in the next and last Harry Potter movie. How would Padma handle this situation? Channel her strength. Defend yourself; protect yourself. As to your longing to be loved by and reunited with your family -- perhaps you must give it up, tragic and unjust as that might seem. Even if you give up your Hindu boyfriend, it is too late. You have already shamed your family publicly. Their honor will require nothing less than your death.Why not contact the women in Britain who are campaigning against honor killing? They will support you. Why not contact Diana Nammi, the co-founder of the London-based International Campaign Against Honour Killings who may be reached at http://www.stophonourkillings.com/.
UPDATE: How sneaky and disgusting. Phyllis Chesler blogs that there's no evidence Afshan dropped the charges. The father and brother's defense attorney spoke to the press in a way that that seemed to be the case. More here.
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Who's Yer Daddy? That Would Be Uncle Sam
Guess who's been milking the welfare teat? Hint: The initials are BP.David Kocieniewski writes in The New York Times:
According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon -- a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.With federal officials now considering a new tax on petroleum production to pay for the cleanup, the industry is fighting the measure, warning that it will lead to job losses and higher gasoline prices, as well as an increased dependence on foreign oil.
But an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.
And for many small and midsize oil companies, the tax on capital investments is so low that it is more than eliminated by var-ious credits. These companies' returns on those investments are often higher after taxes than before.
"The flow of revenues to oil companies is like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico: heavy and constant," said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who has worked alongside the Obama administration on a bill that would cut $20 billion in oil industry tax breaks over the next decade. "There is no reason for these corporations to shortchange the American taxpayer."
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This Seems A Little Nuts
Somebody sent me this quote:"But the greatest insult to our troops in the field, and to the officers who lead them, may be a new battlefield medal designed by the Obama team. It is called the Courageous Restraint Medal and is awarded to soldiers and Marines who demonstrate uncommon restrain in combat by not firing their weapons even when they feel threatened by the enemy. Would we be surprised to learn that the preponderance of these medals were awarded posthumously?" --Paul HollrahChecked Snopes. Nope.
Seems it's true. And here's Hollrah's original column.
UPDATE: The information above is apparently inaccurate. See comments below.
NEW UPDATE: Hollrah responded in a classy manner. I don't agree with him, but he was polite and accountable for what he initially wrote. The editor's reply to me, on the other hand, was ugly and rather shocking. See the comments below.
Other brief entry on this here: "Calls For Accuracy In Media So Piss Some People Off"
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Obama: Let's Pep Up That Muslim Low Self-Esteem!
Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator, in conversation with Al Jazeera's Imran Garda:
Transcript at WeaselZippers:I am here in the region - its sort of the first anniversary of President Barack Obama's visit to Cairo - and his speech there when he gave what has now become known as Obama's "Cairo Initiative" where he announced that he wanted this to become a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. When I became the NASA Administrator - before I became the NASA Administrator - he charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."They'd surely feel loads better if they were less focused on killing the Jews and more focused on emulating them.
Thanks, Martin
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Shocker: Yoohoo Not Good For You
Not so shocking -- man suing. Katie Drummond writes for AOLNews:In an allegation that should surprise nobody, a Brooklyn, N.Y., man is claiming that the popular line of Yoo-Hoo chocolate-flavored beverages aren't healthy.Timothy Dahl, 35, might not be unearthing groundbreaking nutritional secrets, but he is raising eyebrows -- by suing the makers of Yoo-Hoo beverages for $5 million.
Dahl claims the company is guilty of false advertising, by promoting Yoo-Hoo as "good for you" and boasting that it "contains seven vitamins and minerals and no preservatives."
Rather, Dahl alleges, the drink is a veritable stew of hydrogenated oils, sugar and byproducts -- with very little real milk thrown in to boost its nutritional profile.
Yoohoo is good for you like Kelloggs sugary cereals are good for you. Basically, they're better than starving. Doesn't anybody with an IQ over the speed limit know this?
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Would You Move For Love?
Some people are attached to a place, or a way of living, and for other people, it's no big deal to, say, leave San Francisco for Suburb #24561 in Anywhere, USA.I grew up in the Detroit suburbs (I was miserable), lived in and loved New York City, and love Los Angeles. A big part of my life is where I live -- living in a place that's a big city and a cultural center. So, no, I'm not going to Omaha. Not for anyone or anything.
You?
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How Deep Is Your Sleaze?
Eric Lipton and Ron Nixon write in The New York Times about how companies manage to find their way around bans on earmarks to profit-making businesses:TOLEDO, Ohio -- Just one day after leaders of the House of Representatives announced a ban on earmarks to profit-making companies, Victoria Kurtz, the vice president for marketing of a small Ohio defense contracting firm, hit on a creative way around it.To keep the taxpayer money flowing, Ms. Kurtz incorporated what she called the Great Lakes Research Center, a nonprofit organization that just happened to specialize in the same kind of work performed by her own company -- and at the same address.
Now, the center -- which intends to sell the Pentagon small hollow metal spheres for body armor that the Defense Department has so far declined to buy in large quantities and may never use -- has $10.4 million in new earmark requests from Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio.
The congresswoman, who has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Ms. Kurtz's family and her business's lobbyists, thought the quickly hatched nonprofit organization was a convenient solution.
"They met the requirements of the reform," Ms. Kaptur said in an interview. "Yes, they did."
...Ms. Kaptur said she was pleased that the Ohio defense contractors could form alliances that allowed her office to resubmit the earmark requests. Her first commitment, she said, is to help the Pentagon defend the nation. But if she can deliver government money to local businesses, that is a bonus, she said.
"I am a member who does fight for my region and my state," she said, then adding, "I don't fight mindlessly."
You fight unethically, Marcy Kaptur.
I would hope that people of your district don't reelect you. We all need to stop voting for sleazy politicians, even when their sleaze sometimes benefits us when we're in their district. It's bad for the country, and it's important to remember that sleaze doesn't keep to neat boundaries. If Kaptur can stomach the stuff above, there's a whole lot of ugly in her that we have yet to see.
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Me Talk Sophisticated One Day
Sean Collins, on Spiked, jumps on my issue with McChrystal -- that as a general and commander of our forces in Afghanistan, how dumb/naive/self-destructive do you have to be to shoot your mouth off, and have aides that follow your lead, when a journalist is tailing you like a dog? Collins writes:What's striking is how juvenile most of the remarks are. They are not witty or clever, nor do they represent an off-the-cuff 'truth' that everyone recognises but is afraid to say. About an upcoming dinner with a French minister, an aide of McChrystal's said 'It's fucking gay'. Preparing for questions about an earlier run-in with vice-president Joe Biden over counterterrorism strategy, an aide suggests McChrystal respond by saying 'Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?' Hilarious.There have been plenty of conflicts in the past between presidents and generals. But most of those showdowns were mainly about the content of the task - military strategy and execution. McChrystal's indiscretions are petty and personal, and thus different than the insubordinate words of General Douglas MacArthur (who was fired by President Harry Truman for threatening to take the war to China in 1951) or Navy Admiral William Fallon (who resigned in 2008 after publicly criticising the Bush administration's policy towards Iran).
McChrystal also seems embarrassingly naive about letting a journalist from a hippie magazine hang around with him and his aides. Military brass are supposed to be known for their hardcore discipline, but McChrystal's decision not just to speak to the media himself, but to allow his aides to do so as well, displayed a shocking lack of discipline. I know that values associated with the military, such as loyalty and commitment, are not revered in society today, but you still don't expect a top military officer to abandon them.
The start of Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone piece here:
McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him."The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
... "What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
...Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
UPDATE: More from IBD.com, from E.J. Dionne:
Paradoxically, Karzai's supportive comments underscored why McChrystal had to be relieved. One little-noted passage in Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article pointed to McChrystal's central problem."The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai," Hastings wrote. "It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so."
A military strategy is supposed to fit the facts on the ground. But McChrystal was trying to invent an alternative reality to fit the facts to his counterinsurgency strategy, trying to turn Karzai into something he isn't. The open split on the American side has reduced Karzai's incentives to alter his behavior.
Then there was the breathtaking immaturity on display in the Rolling Stone piece, the kind of thing Gen. David Petraeus, his successor, can be counted on to avoid. There was also a profound contempt shown toward almost everyone outside McChrystal's tight inner circle. What signal did McChrystal think he was sending through Hastings? Worse still would be indifference on McChrystal's part to the potential impact of the article. The key to counterinsurgency strategy is its awareness of the effect of politics, governance and public opinion on the chances of success.
A piece of this sort was destined to undercut whatever McChrystal was trying to do, and the arrogance that came through in the article plays badly, given that McChrystal's military strategy has not seemed to work very well so far.
But Obama is not off the hook. On the contrary, he stuck with McChrystal, despite ample evidence that the general would go around the White House to push his own preferences.
Moreover, Obama's approach to Afghanistan was always a delicate balance, a Goldilocks strategy that was neither too hawkish nor too dovish: Escalate now to speed withdrawal. It was a nice idea, and maybe it can still allow us to leave a modestly improved situation behind.
The problem is that this careful equilibrium required everyone in the administration to pull together, accepting that the policy was settled and was not open to constant challenge. It required very big egos to get along. It required Karzai to change. It required Obama to have real authority over our military.
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A Mom Who Takes The Right Stuff Seriously
From LA Times Magazine, a piece by Leslie Gornstein on "Mad Men" star Christina Hendricks:You've said you started dying your blond hair red at age 10. How exactly did you sell that choice to your folks?They did it to me! I was obsessed with the Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables. I decided I was Anne of Green Gables. There was something that spoke to me about her, and I wanted to have her beautiful red hair. So my mother said, "Let's just go to the drugstore and get one of those cover-the-gray rinses!" My hair was very blond at the time, but it went carrot red. And I was over the moon. I went to school the next day and felt like myself. And then I went back [to that color] over and over again. What a cool mom, right?
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This Is Your Vagina On Islam
Afshan Azad, 22, the Harry Potter actress, had her Muslim father and brother threaten to kill her for dating a Hindu man. The brother was also charged with assaulting her and causing her "actual bodily harm." Phyllis Chesler blogs at NRO:Yes, this alone is a capital crime in Islam.My 2009 and 2010 studies in Middle East Quarterly have shown that "honor killings" are all too real and on the rise. Women have been honor-killed for refusing to veil themselves, marry their first cousins, or remain in dangerously abusive marriages, for wanting to choose their own husbands, and for behaving in "western" ways.
While Hindus and Sikhs do, to a much lesser extent, honor-kill their women, in Europe 96 percent of honor killings in the last 20 years were Muslim-on-Muslim. The average age of European women who were honor-murdered was 21; 66 percent were honor-murdered by their family of origin; 44 percent were murdered by multiple perpetrators; 68 percent were gruesomely tortured. Nearly half of thesewomen lived in England.
While the British police are exceptionally sensitive to this problem and have helped potential honor-killing victims, the problem is vast and growing. Afshan Azad now needs to be in hiding and protected, on a permanent basis, from her own family. Perhaps she and her actor friends could lead a campaign against honor killings. I would be honored to join them.
Carolyn Black writes at CBSNews of something the girl's brother said:
"We are going to get trouble from the community now. It is bad news for our safety, her safety."Few in the media are informed enough to understand what the guy means by that. There's a passage in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
, that explains -- how women, under Islam, are:
"the breeders of men, and women's honor lies in their purity, their submission, their obedience. Their shame is to be sexually impure, and it is the worst shame of all, because a woman's sexual disobedience defiles herself, her sisters, and her mother, as well as the male relatives whose duty it is to control her.No Muslim man has any standing in society if he does not have honor. And no matter how much honor he builds up through wise decisions and good deeds, it is destroyed if his daughter or his sister is sexually defiled. This can happen if she loses her virginity before she's married, or if she engages in sexual intercourse outside of the marriage -- and that includes rape. Even the rumor that she may have had sex is reason enough to label her "defiled" and lead to loss of honor for her whole family. A father who cannot control his daughters, a brother who cannot control his sisters, is disgraced. He is bankrupt socially and even economically. His family is ruined. The girl will not fetch a bride-price, and neither will her sisters or her cousins, because the mere suspicion of independent feeling and female action in their family taints them too.
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Never Mind Reporting On The Health Risks
The New York Times leaves ya guessing on the latest trend in eyewear -- contact lenses called "circle lenses," from Asia, that are turning up in American high schools and on college campuses.These lenses, which are sometimes in weird shades like lime green and purple, make eyes look bigger because they cover not only the iris, like standard contact lenses, but also part of the white. Catherine Saint Louis writes for the NYT:
These lenses might be just another beauty fad if not for the facts that they are contraband and that eye doctors express grave concern over them. It is illegal in the United States to sell any contact lenses -- corrective or cosmetic -- without a prescription, and no major maker of contact lenses in the United States currently sells circle lenses.Yet the lenses are widely available online, typically for $20 to $30 a pair, both in prescription strengths and purely decorative. On message boards and in YouTube videos, young women and teenage girls have been spreading the word about where to buy them.
The lenses give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea. Fame-seekers there called "ulzzang girls" post cute but sexy head shots of themselves online, nearly always wearing circle lenses to accentuate their eyes. ("Ulzzang" means "best face" in Korean, but it is also shorthand for "pretty.")
...Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., was a bit surprised, too. When first contacted last month, she did not know what circle lenses were or the extent to which they had caught on. Soon after, she wrote in an e-mail message, "Consumers risk significant eye injuries -- even blindness" when they buy contact lenses without a valid prescription or help from an eye professional.
A real risk to the eye... or more of a risk to eye doctors' income? Can't you get your prescription from a doctor...same as I did before I ordered my glasses from eyeglassdirect.com? (I paid $39.95 to have the prescription filled and mailed to me -- inserted into Borghese reading glass frames I got for $14.99 at CVS. Seems the real loser in my case is whomever didn't get the several hundred dollars I would have paid otherwise.)
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To Live And Breathe Is Criminal
I've been worried and disgusted by the constant law-passing in this country. It's hard to have any idea what's legal and illegal anymore -- which makes it easy for any citizen to be arrested. If they can't get you for what they want to get you for, they can get you for some minor offense you had no idea was illegal.Brian Walsh writes at InsiderOnline:
In the 109th Congress alone, federal legislators introduced over 200 bills proposing new or expanded non-violent criminal offenses, a number that does not include the bills proposing new or expanded criminalization concerning violence, firearms, drugs, pornography, or immigration violations. Many offenses in these bills would have duplicated existing federal criminal statutes or provided redundant penalties for crimes already punishable under state law.Walsh reports that The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers came up with a proposal for reform -- one that would Congress to deliberate over and provide factual and constitutional justification for every expansion of the federal criminal law:
For every new or modified criminal offense or penalty that Congress passes, it should report:•A description of the problem that the criminal offense or penalty is intended to redress, including an account of the perceived gaps in existing law, the wrongful conduct that is currently unpunished or under-punished, and any specific cases or concerns motivating the legislation;•A direct statement of the express constitutional authority under which the federal government purports to act;
•An analysis of whether the criminal offenses or penalties are consistent with constitutional and prudential considerations of federalism;
•A discussion of any overlap between the conduct to be criminalized and conduct already criminalized by existing federal and state law;
•A comparison of the new law's penalties with the penalties under existing federal and state laws for comparable conduct;
•A summary of the impact on the federal budget and federal resources, including the judiciary, of enforcing the new offense and penalties to the degree required to solve the problem that the new criminalization purports to address
•A review of the resources that federal public defenders have available and need in order to adequately defend indigent defendants charged under the new law; and
•An explanation of how the mens rea (i.e. criminal-intent or guilty-mind) requirement of each criminal offense should be interpreted and applied to each element of the offense.
Criminalization in the Executive BranchCongress should also require the federal departments and agencies to collect and report similar information on criminalization in the executive branch. This information should be compiled and reported annually and, at minimum, should include:
•All new criminal offenses and penalties that federal agencies have added to federal regulations and an enumeration of the specific statutory authority supporting these regulations; and•For each referral that a federal agency makes to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, the provision of the United States Code and each federal regulation on which the referral is based, the number of counts alleged or ultimately charged under each statutory and regulatory provision, and the ultimate disposition of each count.
Congress should always be required to determine the true cost of new criminal offenses prior to enactment. The United States is already saddled with more than 4,400 federal statutory criminal offenses, tens of thousands of regulatory criminal offenses, an overworked federal judiciary with an ever-growing case load, and a crowded and expensive prison system. The federal government's failure to assess and justify the full costs of any new or modified criminal offenses or penalties is irresponsible.
via Overlawyered
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The Rules Of The Game Theory
Game theory "attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others."Michael Shermer uses it to explain why 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis came out about doping. From LATimes.com:
The answer comes from game theory and something called the Nash equilibrium, conceived by the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash (of "A Beautiful Mind" fame), in which two or more players reach an equilibrium when none has anything to gain by unilaterally changing his or her strategy, as long as the other players do not change their strategies.Here's how it works in sports. Players will do whatever they can to achieve victory, which is why well-defined and strictly enforced rules are the sine qua non of all sports. The rules clearly prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but the incentive to dope is powerful because the drugs are extremely effective, the payoffs for success are so high, and most of the drugs are difficult if not impossible to detect. If tests can be beaten with countermeasures, or if the governing body of the sport doesn't fully support a comprehensive anti-doping testing program (as in the case of Major League Baseball and the National Football League), the incentive to cheat increases. Once a few elite athletes in a sport cheat, their competitors must also cheat (even if they only suspect others are doping), leading to a cascade of cheating through the ranks.
If everyone is doping, there is equilibrium if and only if everyone has something to lose by violating the code of silence. In criminal organizations such as the Cosa Nostra in 19th century Sicily and the Mafia in 20th century southern Italy, the code of silence is called omerta, an agreement among members that if you get caught, you keep your mouth shut and fall on your sword. Something like the omerta code operates in the dirty underbelly of doping in sports, in which a positive test leads to an obligatory statement of shock and denial by the guilty party, followed by a plausible explanation for how the drug mysteriously appeared in the blood or urine, ending in fines paid and/or time served and often eventual return to the sport, no names named.
Disequilibriums can arise when not everyone is doping, when the drug testers begin to catch up with the drug takers, or when some cheaters have nothing to lose and possibly something to gain by turning state's evidence. Which brings us back to Landis and his former teammates, who, if Landis' charges are true, have been in a state of relative Nash equilibrium for a decade. Landis said in his admission: "I don't feel guilty at all about having doped. I did what I did because that's what we [cyclists] did, and it was a choice I had to make after 10 years or 12 years of hard work to get there, and that was a decision I had to make to make the next step." But when Landis lost his savings, his home, his marriage and his livelihood, he reached a state of disequilibrium, and when he was turned down from even riding in the Tour of California in May, he apparently decided that he had nothing left to lose and now wants to clear his conscience and clean up his sport.
Radley Balko at reason on steroid use. Jose Canseco defends steroid use in reason here. Matt Welch on Bill James on steroid use in reason here.
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The Ugly Party vs. The Grown-Up Party
I concur with Michael Gerson's classifications. From his piece in the WaPo:My political friendships and sympathies are increasingly determined not by ideology but by methodology. One of the most significant divisions in American public life is not between the Democrats and the Republicans; it is between the Ugly Party and the Grown-Up Party.He quotes Weigel's posts on Journolist:
When Rush Limbaugh went to the hospital with chest pain, Weigel wrote, "I hope he fails." Matt Drudge is an "amoral shut-in" who should "set himself on fire." Opponents are referred to as "ratf -- -ers" and "[expletive] moronic."This type of discourse is an odd combination between the snideness of the cool, mean kids in high school and the pettiness of Richard Nixon rambling on his tapes. Weigel did not intend his words to be public. But they display the defining characteristic of ugly politics -- the dehumanization of political opponents.
Unlike Weigel, most members of the Ugly Party -- liberal and conservative -- have little interest in keeping their views private. "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh," Ann Coulter once said, "is he did not go to the New York Times building." Radio host Mike Malloy suggested that Glenn Beck "do the honorable thing and blow his brains out." Conservatives carry signs at Obama rallies: "We Came Unarmed (This Time)." Liberals carried signs at Bush rallies: "Save Mother Earth, Kill Bush."
...The rhetoric of the Ugly Party shares some common themes: urging the death or sexual humiliation of opponents or comparing a political enemy to vermin or diseases. It is not merely an adolescent form of political discourse; it encourages a certain political philosophy -- a belief that rivals are somehow less than human, which undermines the idea of equality and the possibility of common purposes.
I have to say, as somebody who is neither left nor right, but a politician-despising fiscal conservative/social libertarian/"personal responsibilitarian," the ugliness that has come my way has been from the left. And, I've found that conservatives, like my Christian friend Tom, disagrees with me on a number of issues, but he doesn't have to toss me aside as a human being and hate me for merely existing the way I've experienced from some on the left.
For example, I was against the Iraq war, and conservatives would tell me to my face that they thought I was a nitwit and why, but when some on the left didn't like something I posted, they attacked me anonymously, en masse, and among other things, tried to destroy my blog comments section with hundreds of posts asking "Are you a tranny?" and "Do you have a penis?" and 30-page spam posts every minute from the TOR server the Chinese dissidents use to access the Internet.
And, oh yeah, while we're at it -- here's the seventh grade loser contingent on Mickey Kaus.
Grow the hell up, already. If you have nothing to say about the guy's politics, unplug your computer and masturbate, for god's sake.
via Cathy Young
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The Fiction That Muslims Will Stop Trying To Blow Us Up If We Get Out Of Afghanistan
It's Islam that commands them to do it, not the fact that we're fighting the people who throw acid in the faces of little girls who want to go to school, who stone women for adultery when they're raped, and all the charming rest. Joel Mowbray writes at the Washington Times about why Obama's apologetic stance toward Muslim countries is a poor strategy:At his 2003 sentencing hearing, convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid explained his utter lack of remorse. "Your government has sponsored the rape and torture of Muslims in the prisons of Egypt and Turkey and Syria and Jordan with their money and with their weapons. I don't ... see what I have done as being equal to rape and to torture, or to the deaths of the 2 million children in Iraq. So for this reason, I think I ought not to apologize for my actions. I am at war with your country."His attempted attack occurred in December 2001, long before the Iraq war and just two months after the war started in Afghanistan. Thus his list of grievances includes neither war.
Regardless of actual events, the Jihadist narrative places Muslims as victims and the West (or specifically America/Israel) as the aggressor. In the 1990s, for example, the United Nations-approved sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the Jihadists' cause du jour; this was Reid's (flatly untrue) reference to "the deaths of the 2 million children in Iraq."
Our enemies need no extra fodder for recruitment and motivation. Their propaganda is no doubt bolstered by having real wars in Muslim lands to cite, but they've proven how little they actually need. Embassies were burned and people murdered over cartoons.
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama has unprecedented credibility in the Muslim world for an American president, given his Muslim father and stepfather and formative years spent in Indonesia.
Rather than focusing on apologizing for America, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit and unique status to remind Muslims that though imperfect, America has been as good as any nation to the Islamic world, from stopping the genocide of Bosnian Muslims to helping Afghans defeat Soviet aggression.
Although he won't win the hearts and minds of hardened Jihadists, Mr. Obama could convincingly sell America's virtues to tens of millions of Muslims worldwide--or perhaps more.
If he continues his apologetic posture, however, his only success might be perversely reinforcing the rallying cry used to inspire attacks against America.
Mowbray, like so many Americans, is not that informed about Islam, and doesn't understand that, as a former terrorist noted: You don't win against the Islamists with concessions or shows of weakness. To the Islamists, they are invitations to attack again.
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100 Greatest Movie Insults Of All Time
Some of these are really funny. Your favorite?
via Instapundit
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Why Poor Kids Are Fat
Salon commenter Angel Quattrano's view (on the story, "Is the USDA adding justice to the basic food groups?" -- with the subhead "For the first time ever, our official dietary guidelines might address access to healthy food for poor people"):The issue for a lot of people is that they don't live anywhere near a real store that sells real food (fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat) to the Real Americans (TM) who happen to be local residents, even if they wanted to try to eat their 5-9 recommended servings a day of fruits and vegetables.Caitlin Flanagan goes shopping and finds:
As a pro-(Alice)-Waters friend observed to me in a recent e-mail, "There's only 7-Eleven in the hood."As it happens, I live fewer than 20 miles from the most famous American hood, Compton, and on a recent Wednesday morning I drove over there to do a little grocery shopping. The Ralphs was vast, well-lit, bountifully stocked, and possessed of a huge and well-tended produce section. Using my Ralphs card, I bought four ears of corn for a dollar, green grapes and nectarines (both grown in the state, both 49 cents a pound), a pound of fresh tortillas for $1.69, and a half gallon of low-fat milk for $2.19. The staff, California friendly, outnumbered the customers, and the place had the dreamy, lost-in-time feeling that empty American supermarkets often have.
But across Compton Boulevard, it was a different story. Anyone who says that Americans have lost the desire and ability to cook fresh produce has never been to the Superior Super Warehouse in Compton. The produce section--packed with large families, most of them Hispanic--was like a dreamscape of strange and wonderful offerings: tomatillos, giant mangoes, cactus leaves, bunches of beets with their leaves on, chayote squash, red yams, yucca root. An entire string section of chiles: serrano, Anaheim, green, red, yellow. All of it was dirt cheap, as were the bulk beans and rice. Small children stood beside shopping carts with the complacent, slightly dazed look of kids whose mothers are taking care of business.
What we see at Superior Super Warehouse is an example of capitalism doing what it does best: locating a market need (in this case, poor people living in an American inner city who desire a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and who are willing to devote their time and money to acquiring them) and filling it.
More on the new USDA guidelines, which are based in about as much science as your horoscope in tomorrow's paper, via Sally Fallon Morell at Weston A. Price:
"The revised Guidelines recommend even more stringent reductions in animal fats and cholesterol than previous versions," says Fallon Morell, "and are tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. While the ship of state sinks under the weight of a crippling health care burden, the Committee members are giving us more of the same disastrous advice. These are unscientific and grossly deficient dietary recommendations.""Basic biochemistry shows that the human body has a very high requirement for saturated fats in all cell membranes; if we do not eat saturated fats, the body will simply make them from carbohydrates, but excess carbohydrate increases blood levels of triglyceride and small, dense LDL, and compromises blood vessel function," says Fallon Morell. "Moreover, high-carbohydrate diets do not satisfy the appetite as well as diets rich in traditional fats, leading to higher caloric intakes and often to bingeing and splurging on empty foods, resulting in rapid weight gain and chronic disease."
The proposed guidelines will perpetuate existing nutrient deficiencies present in all American population groups, including deficiencies in vitamins A and D found in animal fats, vitamins B12 and B6 found in animal foods, as well as minerals like calcium and phosphorus, which require vitamins A and D for assimilation. Moreover, low intakes of vitamin K2, are associated with increased risk of heart disease and cancer. The main sources of vitamin K2 available to Americans are egg yolks and full-fat cheese. Incredibly, the Guidelines single out cheese as an unhealthy food!
Fallon Morell notes that by restricting healthy animal fats in school lunches and diets for pregnant women and growing children, the Guidelines will accelerate the tragic epidemic of learning and behavior disorders. The nutrients found most abundantly in animal fats and organ meats--including choline, cholesterol and arachidonic acid--are critical for the development of the brain and the function of receptors that modulate thinking and behavior. Studies show that choline helps the brain make critical connections and protects against neurotoxins; animal studies suggest that if choline is abundant during developmental years, the individual is protected for life from developmental decline. The National Academy of Sciences recommends 375 mg per day for children nine through thirteen years of age, 450 mg for pregnant women and 550 mg for lactating women and men aged fourteen and older. These amounts are provided by four or five egg yolks per day--but that would entail consuming 800-1000 mg cholesterol, a crime by USDA standards. In their deliberations, the committee referred to this as the "choline problem." Pregnant women and growing children especially need to eat as many egg yolks as possible--yet the Guidelines demonize this nutrient-dense food.
The Guidelines lump trans fats together with saturated fats--calling them Solid Fats--thereby hiding the difference between unhealthy industrial trans fats and healthy traditional saturated fats. Trans fats contribute to inflammation, depress the immune system, interfere with hormone production, and set up pathological conditions leading to cancer and heart disease, whereas saturated fats fight inflammation, support the immune system, support hormone production and protect against cancer and heart disease.
More here.
Contrary to what the (witch, apparently) doctors behind the USDA report say, if you eat a very, very low carb diet and plenty of fat and protein (lots of eggs, cheese, meat, bacon, butter-soaked vegetables), you're liable to end up 46 and fat like me!
P.S. As Gary Taubes wrote in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the first food pyramid was created by an aide to George McGovern with no science experience. Keep up the good work, USDA!
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Who's Your Oval Officer?
This is a poll with limited choices, so don't be choosing the old man (John McCain), Courtney Love, etc.Inspired by a Rasmussen poll (no cheating and looking it up!) if you could choose between Hillary Clinton for president or Barack Obama -- and only between those two -- which would you pick, and why?
Feel free to state your party affiliation -- Democrat, Republican, Wiccan, Green, Libertarian, independent, etc. -- and/or anything else we might find interesting.
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"Getting Stoned"
You see or hear those words, and you probably picture somebody rolling a fatty.Under Islam, it means something entirely different.
And no, it's not in the Quran. You'll love this. Story goes, a goat ate the leaf the bit about stoning was written on. But, it is in a number of the Hadiths, writings of Mohammed's speech and actions, or actions he approved of.
And now, an Iranian mother, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, faces stoning under Islamic law after being convicted of adultery. From a Daily Mail story by Michael Theodoulou:
Under Iran's Islamic penal code, adultery is punishable by stoning to death or flogging, while hanging is the penalty for murder and other crimes such as drug trafficking.Stoning sentences were widely carried out after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, but have been rare in recent years.
Men killed in this way are buried to the waist, while women are buried deeper, to stop the stones hitting their breasts.
If a prisoner manages to pull free during a stoning, he or she is acquitted or jailed, but is not executed. It is easier for a man to drag himself free because he is not buried so deeply.
In December 2008 a man convicted of adultery escaped death by stoning by dragging himself out of the pit he had been buried in for the punishment.
But two other alleged male adulterers were killed by the barbaric method in the same incident, which took place in the north-eastern city of Mashhad.
And check out the story of the 13-year-old rape victim previously stoned to death at the order of the Iranian mullahs.
Does somebody want to tell me I'm a "hater" for having issues with a religion behind such things?
Bring it on.
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Give The Lady A Goddamn Cookie!
Great post by Lenore Skenazy, who, sadly, was looking for an assisted living situation for her Alzheimer's-afflicted mom when she overheard this conversation:I happened to arrive at snack time, when one of the ladies was asking for another cookie. "No," the attendant told her patiently. "It's not good for you! You can't HAVE another cookie."Whereupon, big surprise, the woman asked for another cookie. And the cycle began again.
That incident came to mind when I read this fantastic article about the focus on safety, and sometimes ONLY safety, in caring for the elderly. It seemed to me, at the assisted living place, that if a woman has lost a lot of her mind and yet KNOWS she wants a cookie -- give her a cookie! If it shortens her life a little, so be it! At least it's making whatever time she has left here WORTH IT. Ultimately, I didn't want my mom to be at a place that would deny her life's little pleasures in pursuit of something supposedly more important: more days on this planet without life's little pleasures.
It's like denying seriously ill people, like cancer patients, or other suffering people, opiates or seriously large doses of opiates after they become acclimated to the dose they're taking. They're suffering, in constant pain, maybe soon to die...so what if they get addicted to Oxy, or get a little pleasure out of it?!
You get joy out of Puritanism? Great. Live a life of self-abnegation. Don't tell a little old lady who's lost her mind that she can't have a cookie or people like cancer patients that they can't get themselves out of horrible pain or -- horrors! -- even get high.
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Whistleblower At The DOJ
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Islam Is About Controlling Women
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others point out. Here's how it plays out in Islamic countries:
Mohammed married Aisha when she was 6 and had sex with her at 9, and what Mohammed did is to be emulated by Muslims...and this is the result:
From FaithFreedom.com:In Islam, there is no place for ethics, morality or conscience. Islamic morality is quite different and stands on two notions - Halal (permitted) and Haram (not permitted). To a sane non-Muslim individual, marrying a 6 or 8-year-old girl by an over 50 man, may appear to be highly immoral, unethical and vulgar. But to a Muslim, such an act is Halal, as Prophet Muhammad had done it. So, application of personal sense morality and ethics does not play any role. Whatever the Prophet did is Halal and every Muslim has the right to emulate the Prophet.Here are women's rights under Islam.
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