Enough With The Photoshop Hysteria
Amanda Fortini talks sense on retouching in New York Mag.
Is anyone else weary of the media's hunt for retouched images to ridicule? A little more than a week ago, blogs were abuzz over unretouched photos of Jennifer Aniston, outtakes from a 2006 cover shoot for British Harper's Bazaar, in which the ever-tan actress looked less sun-kissed than sun-abused, a mere human not yet buffed to a celebrity gloss. Two weeks earlier, the pressing issue was whether Jessica Simpson -- whose career has lately consisted of public proclamations of her newfound détente with her zaftig figure -- was airbrushed to slimness on the September cover of Lucky....The issue, many critics of Photoshopping claim, is one of social ethics and emotional sensitivity. Retouched photos set an unrealistic bar for suggestible young girls, and therefore cry out to be exposed.
...But how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines -- artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching -- at face value? "Our readers are not idiots," Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, "especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23." Most of us who read fashion magazines don't feel we're confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it's not because they damage our self-esteem, nor -- let's be honest -- because we're constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it's also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, "objectively," without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you're bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.
...The age-old game of glamour creation, from Renaissance portraiture to Playboy centerfolds, has always been one of frank enhancement. Retouched pictures simply claim the traditional prerogatives of illustrations: to exaggerate, accentuate, and improve upon their subjects -- basically, to lie. For much of the last century, models and movie stars in fashion magazines and advertisements were often rendered as drawings or paintings. In The Girl on the Magazine Cover, journalism professor Carolyn Kitch explains that magazines were "dealing in ideals rather than reality," and the vaguer contours of an illustration "could represent both a specific type of female beauty," as well as more general "model attributes," like "youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility," etc. Of course, illustrations also appealed to their vain subjects, who were usually portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. In the ads of illustrator Gil Elvgren, for example, the women are libidinous fantasies -- a busty girl-next-door seductively rides a carousel to sell Coca-Cola; another, for whom busty is an understatement, shills for a Certa mattress. His pinups were even more outlandish in their homogenized well-endowedness. Not surprisingly, Hollywood starlets were eager for Elvgren to elevate them with his magic paintbrush. Similarly, Alberto Vargas, the famous creator of Esquire's Vargas girl and numerous Playboy illustrations, was favored by many Golden Age movie stars (Betty Grable Jane Russell, Ava Gardner) of his day. The melon-breasted, small-waisted sameness of his images invented something of a new pulp genre: physiological science fiction.
Green Eggs And Scam
Turkey-dwelling Claire Berlinski writes on Ricochet.com on the marketing genius of being "green":
I've stored up so many mental notes about the way the United States looks to me after a long period away that I'm not sure where to start. So in keeping with my universal advice to people who aren't sure where to start, I'll start small. For now, a quick observation: Whoever thought of this "Green" business is a marketing genius. I just can't believe what people are willing to buy, accept, and enthuse over on the grounds that it's "Green."I stayed at a hotel the other night that proudly offered normal-sized bars of soap with a big, oblong hole cut out of the middle of the bar. The shape, according to the corrugated, earth-brown wrapper, was "Green." Green how? Well, this shape (topologically identical to both a donut and a coffee mug, incidentally) reduced waste, thereby saving the planet. I know, I know: How would this reduce waste any better than, say, offering guests a mini-bar of soap of exactly the kind that has been a hotel-room staple since the Second World War? Obviously, all you have to do is call something "Green" to draw a veil of smug satisfaction over the consumer's every higher cognitive function. It's amazing.
I know I'm not reporting from abroad now, and you've all probably seen this before, but I was more than a little taken aback to learn that if I wanted clean sheets and towels, I had to leave a card on the bed (a rough-hewn brown corrugated card, dyed to look eco-friendly) requesting that the planet be fouled. Does it occur to no one that giving into this blackmail and swilling about in dirty sheets will do nothing whatsoever to save the planet (certainly not so long as coal plants and cows keep pumping their emissions into the atmosphere), but will surely save the hoteliers a few bucks and put a few chambermaids out of work in the process? I guess not.
Nick Gillespie on reason.tv on why I'm starting to hoard light bulbs:
A 15-Story Middle Finger To America
That's what Thomas Sowell rightly calls the proposed mosque/Islamic center/monument to jihad around the block from where the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed:
What may surprise some people is that the American taxpayer is currently financing a trip to the Middle East by the imam who is pushing this project, so that he can raise the money to build it. The State Department is subsidizing his travel....Our betters are telling us that we need to be more "tolerant" and more "sensitive" to the feelings of Muslims. But if we are supposed to be sensitive to Muslims, why are Muslims not supposed to be sensitive to the feelings of millions of Americans, for whom 9/11 was the biggest national trauma since Pearl Harbor?
It would not be illegal for Japanese Americans to build a massive shinto shrine next to Pearl Harbor. But, in all these years, they have never sought to do it.
When Catholic authorities in Poland were planning to build an institution for nuns, years ago, and someone pointed out that it would be near the site of a concentration camp that carried out genocide, the Pope intervened to stop it.
He didn't say that the Catholic Church had a legal right to build there, as it undoubtedly did. Instead, he respected the painful feelings of other people. And he certainly did not denounce those who called attention to the concentration camp.
There is no question that Muslims have a right to build a mosque where they chose to. The real question is why they chose that particular location, in a country that covers more than 3 million square miles.
If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society. So the question is whether those who are planning a Ground Zero mosque want to be part of American society or just to see how much they can get away with in American society?
Theunis Bates counters on AOL:
The State Department also tried to dismiss concerns that Rauf might use the tour to raise funds for the mosque. "This is what we tell anyone who participates in one of our expert trips: They're there to provide perspective on behalf of the United States, and they're not to engage in personal business as part of the program that they're participating in," Crowley said. "He has agreed to that."
Oh, and P.S., more from Bates' story:
The trip is expected to cost the State Department about $16,000.However, this isn't the imam's first government-sponsored tour of the region. He traveled twice to the Middle East during the George W. Bush administration and once earlier this year.
The real Imam Rauf is unmasked here, in a piece on PJM by Walid Shoebat. Read the whole thing.
Do Unemployment Benefits Keep People Unemployed?
I think so, and so does Robert Barro, writing in the WSJ, "My calculations suggest the jobless rate could be as low as 6.8%, instead of 9.5%, if jobless benefits hadn't been extended to 99 weeks":
I want to focus here on another dimension of the Obama administration's policies: the expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to as much as 99 weeks from the standard 26 weeks.The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion--providing for persons temporarily without work--and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.
In a recession, it is more likely that individual unemployment reflects weak economic conditions, rather than individual decisions to choose leisure over work. Therefore, it is reasonable during a recession to adopt a more generous unemployment-insurance program. In the past, this change entailed extensions to perhaps 39 weeks of eligibility from 26 weeks, though sometimes a bit more and typically conditioned on the employment situation in a person's state of residence. However, we have never experienced anything close to the blanket extension of eligibility to nearly two years. We have shifted toward a welfare program that resembles those in many Western European countries.
The administration has argued that the more generous unemployment-insurance program could not have had much impact on the unemployment rate because the recession is so severe that jobs are unavailable for many people. This perspective is odd on its face because, even at the worst of the downturn, the U.S. labor market featured a tremendous amount of turnover in the form of large numbers of persons hired and separated every month.
99 weeks is TWO YEARS. If you have two years of unemployment, why take anything but the most plum job -- I mean, after you finish writing your novel?
Of course, that's only if you've worked for a company. If you're self-employed like me, go dig a ditch, sucka...you get zippo.
Smart comment from Thomas DePew at the WSJ:
It would seem that the question is whether there are jobs that are going unfilled because people find it more profitable to stay on unemployment rather than accept something that would be lower than unemployment benefits. For example, if unemployment payments are $1500/month, then the question arises whether that floor under wages is sufficient to keep people from looking for work. Assuming that $1500 unemployment compensation is equal to $2000 per month gross wages, that translates into roughly $11-$12/hr in a private sector job.So, should someone who is unwilling or unable to find work at that wage pass on a lower-paying job, then it would at least lower the unemployment rate but drive up the under-employment rate. Less would be subsidized with government revenue, which can only help the private economy. Further, the incentive-destroying effects of government transfer payments would be eliminated.
In short, while unemployment compensation is probably more "compassionate" in the short-term, the longer-term effects are devastating, both for the private economy, the size of government, and the affected individuals. The problem with liberalism (er, progressivism) in general is that it is a short-term political philosophy, more focused on making the giver of benefits feel better than it does focus on the affected individuals and their long-term benefit. Are there any rational individuals who actually believe that a government handout is better than a private sector job? Really?!?!?
The Choice To Be In Porn
Ryan Schaffer interviews Nina Hartley on "Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography." Here's porn:
The Humanist: Specifically, would you say many women are not doing it purely by choice?NH: Absolutely not. Whether or not we agree with or approve of them, the choices made by young women are theirs. If we're to grant autonomy to people over the age of eighteen, then that means accepting their choices as valid, even if we'd never do such a thing. This includes being able to join the army and get shot or maimed, or become a miner or construction worker. Those are deadly jobs (no one has died from making porn in the thirty-seven years it's been legal) and no one thinks to tell a young adult, "Don't do that job, it's dangerous." Or if we do tell them, we accept that, being young people, they may disregard our advice.
If we accept that a young woman can consent to have an abortion or become a parent, then it stands to reason that we must accept that she can consent to make pornography. Of all the branches of sex work available porn is the safest, as it's legal to make and we have an excellent testing program in place (aim-med.org).
These are ambitious, competitive young people, strivers, if you will. Most are not college-educated, nor do they plan to be. Porn is highly paid blue-collar labor and, for many performers, beats the heck out of wearing a paper hat. As entertainers, as well as simply being young people, performers have a high need for excitement and attention, and porn fits the bill.
The Humanist: What do you think could be done to improve the industry?
NH: The widespread notion that legal porn production is a sink hole of abuse and coercion that takes advantage of poor, innocent women, is the biggest smack leveled against the business. It's almost entirely a function or projection of people's fears and discomfort about women, gender relations, sex, sexuality and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The idea that a woman could choose, on purpose, to perform in pornographic videos for her own reasons still goes deeply against the notion that women are somehow victims of male sexuality, that they're delicate flowers who need the protection of a good man, or the law.
The best protection for women everywhere, especially in the sex trades, is full decriminalization of all consensual sex work. Porn is legal to shoot in California. We pay taxes, buy permits, and the like. Any woman can pick up her phone and call her agent, or the police, and get full support if anything happens on a set.
My biggest complaint these days is how the anti-sex work camp has, for the purpose of public confusion, conflated legal, consensual sex work, specifically pornography, with illegal, non-consensual trafficking of women for forced labor (some of it of a sexual nature). There is no connection between the legal material we make here in California and any trafficking of women. Full stop.
Are there some directors or agents with less-than-stellar reputations? Of course. This is not a business of selfless do-gooders (of course, the entire entertainment business is not run by selfless do-gooders). But the world can't be made a child-safe day nursery. We either accept that performers are adults making their own choices (no matter how we may feel about those choices), or we go back to pre-Women's Liberation days, when women couldn't get credit in their own names, obtain birth control without their husband's permission, or wear pants in the work place. Do we really want those days back?
via Norm
An Objective Look At The Glenn Beck Rally
A hysteria-free look by libertarian Nick Gillespie from reason.tv:
And no, Nick's not actually an Austrian economist (Hayek/Ludwig von Mises joke.)
Were You A Lazy, Syphilitic Peasant?
They're the self-important, goofy fairy tales of our time -- people's pronouncements about who they were "in a past life."
Unfortunately, there seems to be a sudden dearth of embarrassment at proclaiming, entirely sans evidence, that you were previously, oh, I dunno, a lazy, syphilis-spreading peasant (only it's always something more interesting and aggrandizing than that, and nobody ever claims to have been the ladies' shower room matron at Auschwitz).
Lisa Miller writes in The New York Times:
IN one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office -- leather couch, granite-topped coffee table -- makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.
Belief in reincarnation, he said, "allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human."
What I want a sense of is how you say that with a straight face.
My advice? Be interesting and live an interesting life instead of making up shit about how interesting you've been for centuries.
Loved Kate Coe's comment on Facebook about the DeBell nitwit's remark that he was a caveman in a past life:
Everyone was a caveman, dude. Distressing that a guy with a medical degree believes in this.
More from Miller's piece (of course, the "separating fools and their money" aspect continues!):
Peter Bostock, a retired language teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba, says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate -- possibly Chatsworth -- in Derbyshire, England.In a twist that would make Jane Austen blush, he thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife, Jo-Anne, then embodied as a cook in the estate's kitchen. Married to someone else, Mr. Bostock could not act on his feelings.
He says he and his wife share the kind "of attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the familiar." In that spirit, the couple traveled last month to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of America's pre-eminent proselytizers on the subject of reincarnation, Dr. Brian Weiss.
On this second, sweltering day of the seminar, Dr. Weiss, a 65-year-old Florida resident with a hawk-like visage and placid blue eyes, was wearing a polo shirt the color of robins' eggs. He took a break from teaching and, over a healthy lunch, reflected on the rise of interest in the West in reincarnation. Like Dr. DeBell, he is a psychiatrist with an Ivy League pedigree (Columbia University and Yale Medical School).
Dr. Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published "Many Lives, Many Masters." In it he details his work with a patient he calls Catherine, who, under hypnosis, the book says, remembered multiple past lives, relieving her of paralyzing phobias. It has sold more than a million copies.
Now, Dr. Weiss said: "Doctors are e-mailing me. They're not so concerned with their reputations and careers. We can talk about this openly. And it's not just psychiatrists, but surgeons and architects."
Let's be open about who they are, shall we, so we'll know who's too dim to get our business.
I mean, if a doctor doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, how can he possibly find his way up yours with that latex glove?
Why Do Wealthy English Women So Often Wear Giant Flying Cockroaches On Their Head?
Fergie's latest. More misadventures in British head here.
The Ugliness Of Multi-Culti Religious Relativism
Self-proclaimed politlcal liberal Susan Jacoby wants to know "Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?"
It is understandable that American liberals, and particularly religious liberals, are wary of anyone who makes negative public judgments about other faiths. There is a long history of disrespect for various minority cultures and religions in America, although the Constitution and the First Amendment -- products of Enlightenment secularism and Enlightenment-influenced religion -- have (usually) stopped the disrespect from turning into bloodshed.But it is one thing to recognize the legal right of all Americans to believe whatever they want and quite another to maintain that all belief systems are compatible with democracy. In a free society, religion should be no more immune to criticism than atheism, and the First Amendment does not give anyone carte blanche to violate secular law in the name of faith. This crucial distinction applies to all religions, not only to Islam.
...Furthermore, the fact that some traditional religious and cultural practices are technically legal does not make them right. An 80-year-old friend of mine -- a woman of forceful intellect who used to teach Renaissance history -- now lives in a Florida retirement community where many of the part-time staff are teenaged children of recent Afghan immigrants. When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women -- a high school senior -- weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. "Oh, madam professor," the girl replied, "my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted."
My friend replied gently, "You know, Yasmin, you don't have to marry anyone in this country because your parents say so. There are organizations to help girls like you think these things through. There are college scholarships. I can give you the names of people to talk to." Another resident of this community sharply reproved my friend, saying, "We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family."
Wrong. This type of "interference" -- telling a troubled young woman that she has choices other than an arranged marriage -- is exactly what a true liberal ought to be doing. The idea that someone should ignore the tears of a 17-year-old who says she is being pushed to give up her education is utterly perverse.
Perverse isn't the half of it when it comes to the Hadith-commanded practice of stoning -- of rape victims, gay teenagers and others who are powerless before the brutality of Islam. Phyllis Chesler writes at PJM:
What does it mean when a mob of men, numbering anywhere from 50 to 200, stone a female child to death -- as happened in October of 2008 in Somalia? That poor soul was not only a 13-year-old child, she had also just been raped. Indeed, that was her sole "crime" and the reason for her torture-execution. She was forced into a hole and buried nearly up to her neck. She took a long time to die and kept crying out for her life. In addition to the 50 active stoners, 1000 more men cheered them on.
via aldaily
Critical Ass
I'm all for sharing the road with bicyclists and motorcycles. In fact, when I'm in my car, I go out of my way to do it -- waving at bicyclists so they know I see them, moving over so motorcycles have more room to get by, etc.
There's this dumbass protest ride, Critical Mass, that takes place the last Friday of every month. At around midnight, dozens and dozens of people on bikes ride through my neighborhood, whooping in unison, waking up people's kids and setting dogs barking. Asshole move.
And last night, they showed, once again, that they aren't at all about sharing the road, but taking it over. La Brea was pretty empty near Wilshire, but they took up all the lanes on one side of the road, and screw anybody in a car who wanted to get by.
Does Music Make You Exercise Harder?
John Cage makes me run away screaming. Fat black women make me run faster, and dance in place at the traffic lights, or used to when I was still running seven miles. You?
Here's the New York Times piece on the rather expected finding that music influences the effort people put into their exercise.
These days, I exercise only a little, in front of the TV. Little weights, little cardio. And I stand on one leg with my eyes closed, then the other leg, for 15 seconds each while I scramble my eggs. Balance exercise, so I'll be less likely to take a tumble when I'm an (eccentric) little old lady.
An Honor Killing In Algeria
A moving and tragic tale, "A crime against my neighbor in Algeria. June 1986," by Kahina:
Sara was 20, just finished her first year of collage in Batna. She was in love with a boy from school. But as her father had arranged a marriage for her with a Muslim man. Sara was to be married as soon as she turned 20 to this man who was 53 years old. His wife had died giving birth at home....The day came for the marriage of Sara to General Djbar. Sara was preparing herself in her room, crying the whole time. Her mother was tormented that she had no say in her daughter's marriage or life because Sara's father had already arranged the marriage.
Sara's mother went down to start to prepare the henna for the festival. Sara packed her bags and jumped out the window. She ran to our house, where I would transport her to Constantine. I drove so fast, I felt like my heart was going to explode. We met her lover in the center of the city, where he had gotten papers for him and Sara saying they were married in order to get Sara into Tunis and then into France. They papers were forged, but were the only way we could get her out safe.
I drove home so that no one would miss me. It was a good 3 hour drive back to the mountains of Aures. Once I arrived everyone questioned me. I used the excuse that I went to get a gift. They saw the gift in the auto and did not question me any more.
But then I heard screaming coming from Sara's house. Everyone went to see what happened. We found Sara's mother black with bruises on her face and arms. Her husband had beaten her because Sara was gone. How was he going to explain this to the family and the man whom she was to marry? It was a disgrace to his honor.
Read the rest at the link.
About honor killings, they are not to be punished under (barbaric) Islamic law. Robert Spencer writes:
"...a manual of Islamic law certified by Al-Azhar as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy [over 80% of the world's Muslims are Sunni] says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2)."In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.
...Why does it matter that the practice of honor killing has Islamic sanction? Because if the roots of honor killing are never discussed and always ignored, the practice will never stop. Until the Islamic roots of the practice are discussed openly and human rights groups begin calling for reform, honor killings will continue in the Islamic world -- and in Muslim communities in the West.
And the idea that this is a racial issue or racial term is absurd. Islam is not a race, and the victims of honor killing are Muslim women. It is racist now to want to protect Muslim women from being murdered?
Terrorist's Wife Wants Victims' Benefits
Rebecca Camber writes in The Daily Mail/UK:
The widow of a July 7 suicide bomber yesterday launched a High Court bid to be represented at the victims' inquest - saying she had also suffered the loss of a loved one in the atrocity.Hasina Patel, whose husband was terrorist mastermind Mohammad Sidique Khan, is seeking legal aid to challenge the coroner's decision to exclude Khan's death from the hearing for the 52 victims of the 2005 London bombings.
If the mother of one's application is granted, October's long-awaited inquest could be delayed by months of legal wrangling, to the distress of those who have waited more than five years for it to take place.
Lawyers for Miss Patel claim there should be 'no material distinction' between her and the families of those killed, because she 'equally suffered the loss of a relative'.
Oh, did she? Like the old joke goes, "They blow up so fast."
Let's just hope some clever barrister finds a way to prevent mass murder from becoming mass murder for hire -- with the British citizens doing the compensating.
Because Men Go To Hooters For The Food
From the WSJ Law Blog, Ashby Jones writes:
Hooters remains potentially on the hook for alleged weight discrimination.A Michigan judge today ruled that two former waitresses who filed a weight discrimination case against the restaurant chain could proceed with their cases.
Hooters had said the defendants signed agreements to arbitrate any discrimination claims rather than take them to court. The company has said it does not impose weight requirements on employees.
...Cassandra Marie Smith, one of the plaintiffs, alleges in her complaint that she began working at a Hooters in 2008. At the time, she weighed 145 pounds.
In a performance evaluation this earlier year, she claims in her complaint, a restaurant manager advised her "to join a gym in order to lose weight and improve her looks so that she would fit better into the extra small-sized uniform." She alleged she was put on a 30-day "weight probation" and resigned.
The official uniform for Hooters waitresses, she claims, comes in 3 sizes: extra extra small, extra small, or small.
According to this story from the Grand Rapids Press, the suit cites Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by employers based on a number of factors. Height and weight discrimination were added in a 1976 amendment by then-state Rep. Thomas Mathieu.
Hooters' response from a UPI story:
Mike McNeil, Hooters of America Inc. vice president for marketing, said at a news conference outside the Roseville restaurant that waitresses at the chain are entertainers and must keep up their "image," The Detroit News reported. But he said Cassandra Smith, 20, of Roseville said in her complaint that weight loss was not explicitly demanded of her....Leanne Convery, 23, of Harrison, who also worked at the Roseville restaurant, filed her own suit Wednesday.
The chain is known for its waitresses, who wear short shorts and low-cut tops. Both Smith and Convery said the manager put them on "weight probation."
Convery told the newspaper in a phone interview she used diet pills after she had a baby last year and exercised so hard she would come close to losing consciousness. She said many of the waitresses take pills to keep their weight down.
"I was bound and determined I wasn't going to lose my job," she said.
You know, all jobs should not be open to all people, and that's perfectly okay -- or should be.
Answering Machine With Some Really Good Answers
Hilarious answering machine message that supposedly really ran at an Australian school. It didn't. Nor did it run at Pacific Palisades High School or any other school. But, it should. Welcome to school in the Age of the Entitled:
A New Wrinkle In Paternity Fraud
Find a good guy, have sex with him, tell him you're pregnant, and keep out of sight. Robert Franklin blogs at GlennSacks.com about a woman named Carmen Johnsen who told her ex-boyfriend that he was the father of the child she was having. Being a responsible sort, he started forking over $700 a month to help Johnsen with medical expenses and so she could buy toys, clothes, and furniture for his child:
But then, five months and $3,500 later, he happened to see her in the flesh and, lo and behold, she didn't look pregnant. When he confronted her, she claimed she'd miscarried, a fact she apparently didn't deem worthy of mentioning to him.Unconvinced, he went to the police, but Johnsen produced hospital records that showed she had in fact been pregnant. But when police checked further and obtained their own records from the hospital, they determined that Johnsen's "records" were fakes.
...Backed against the wall, Johnsen played the abuse card, claiming that her ex was in some way abusive even though the two hadn't set eyes on each other in months. She attempted to get several restraining orders issued, but all were denied.
In the face of almost certain proof that she's been lying all along, Johnsen has changed her story yet again, claiming her ex had given her the money as a gift. Yeah, right. Let's see. The two broke up, he started paying her money only after she told him she was pregnant, she fabricated documents to 'prove' that she was, as soon as he learned she wasn't, he stopped paying and now she wants us to believe that he just gave her $3,500 out of the goodness of his heart. Please.
Carmen Johnsen is charged with forgery, perjury and theft. The boyfriend would like her to repay him the money she scammed. My guess is that she will. Somewhere somehow she'll find that money and repay him. That'll be called "restitution" and she'll make it rather than go to jail. That's my prediction. We'll see how it shakes out soon enough.
For years now I've been arguing for laws that require women to identify the father of any child they carry to term. If there's more than one possibility, both or all should be informed so that genetic testing can sort out the child's actual paternity. That's always seemed one of the simplest ways in which fathers can protect their parental rights. But now I'm forced to add a caveat; when the mother identifies the father, she needs to actually be pregnant.
Restitution should also be made in cases where the mother lies to a man and says children are his when they are not. Don't you think so? And if you're a man, and you want to be sure you're raising children that are actually yours, get a DNA test.
Behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuk says paternity fraud doesn't happen as often as people think. Well, perhaps not. But, it happens.
Notes From A Clinton Pollster
It's time for the guy in The White House to get real, writes Douglas Schoen in the WSJ (from a public relations perspective, unfortunately):
I first met with Mr. Clinton privately in early 1995, after the Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1954. I warned him that he could not be re-elected in 1996 unless he turned around his administration's reputation: from one of big-spending liberalism (represented by his attempt to massively overhaul the health-care system) to one of fiscal discipline and economic growth.Mr. Clinton did just that, and now Mr. Obama must do the same--and quickly. Yet the White House seems to believe its approach should be to blame George W. Bush for everything. Polls suggest that this approach is likely to have only the most limited success.
...This means that Mr. Obama should seek to persuade voters that he has, at the very least, taken steps to stabilize the economy, the banks, the financial system and the auto industry. He must emphasize that he has turned around month after month of massive job loss; to do so, he can use the just-released Congressional Budget Office report that estimates the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs. And Mr. Obama should forcefully explain how the job-promotion plan he launched has the potential to create the kind of private-sector jobs he has promised.
Moreover, he must compellingly make the case that his administration has a consistent plan and policy agenda--something it has not had to date.
Mr. Obama and his Democratic colleagues also need to stop their phony populist campaign emphasizing that they have taken on the banks and Wall Street. Populism--particularly of the left-wing type that seeks to expand the role of government with redistributive fiscal policies and increases in government spending, intervention and ownership--rarely if ever works. In the absence of a successful argument for the administration's overarching policy approach, a populist campaign would be as fruitless as blaming George W. Bush for every ill America now faces.
Beyond that, the administration must emphasize that it understands the electorate's concern about fiscal prudence, the deficit, the debt and the need to balance the budget. The independent voters who hold the fate of the Democrats in their hands are looking for candidates who champion, in a bipartisan context, fiscal discipline, limited government, deficit reduction and a free market, pro-growth agenda. If Democrats don't offer this, they will be branded liberal tax-and-spenders.
They are. Same as the Republicans -- with too few exceptions. The Democrats are somewhat worse than the Republicans, but don't kid yourself; the Republicans weren't much better, aren't much better. And until people get mad enough to stop voting in the same spend-and-spend types, little will change.
I do hear something now I didn't hear in the Bush days (and I was not a Bush voter, nor did I like George Bush). I hear -- with some frequency -- anger and disappointment at Obama from so many of the people who voted for him thinking he was The Answer (perhaps because they projected their wishes onto what largely seemed to be a blank slate; admittedly, one that spoke with some charisma while making empty promises).
A Plus-Sized Manicure
When does a business get to pass along its costs to a customer?
Because I'm frugal, I usually get my hair cut at Fantastic Sam's in Marina Del Rey ($17, if you don't have them blow-dry), but I was in a hurry before an appearance I was doing, so I went to a unisex barbershop on Main Street. The sign on the window said $24 haircuts, but they charged $30 for long hair, which I had to pay...just for a little trim on my ends.
Well, there's a nail salon that's charging fat people $5 extra -- a kind of "you might break my $2,500 chair" fee.
Lisa Marsh writes for MSNBC:
Michelle Fonville went from being pampered to put down, with one swipe of a pen.When this DeKalb County, Ga., woman received the bill from Natural Nails, a local nail salon, for her manicure, pedicure and eyebrow shaping, there was a $5 surcharge.
"I said, 'I've been overcharged,' " Fonville told WSB-TV in Atlanta. "[The manager] broke it down, then told me she charged me $5 more because I was overweight."
The salon manager, Kim Tran, told WSB-TV that she added the surcharge to compensate for chairs broken by overweight customers. Her pedicure chairs have a weight limit of 200 pounds and cost $2,500 to fix.
"Do you think that's fair when we take $24 [for manicure and pedicure] and we have to pay $2,500? No," Tran told WSB-TV.
While it's debatable whether obesity is a disability protected by the law (it is in health-related cases), on the face of it, there's not a chance Tran would have been able to know the reason for Fonville's being overweight. And without that knowledge, any kind of discrimination is a problem and potentially legally actionable.
Weighty issue
However, the incident raises practical issues related to dealing with bigger people. When is it unfair treatment for them to pay extra, as opposed to being charged more because they are getting a greater degree of product or service?Most airlines will give a larger passenger a seat belt extender free of charge, but for the safety of other passengers in an evacuation situation, the larger passenger cannot be seated in an exit row. If the larger passenger cannot fit comfortably between armrests, they will be given another seat, if available, or be asked to pay for a second seat.
Where do you...sorry...weigh in on this? Per the legal noises they're making above...should airlines just have to suck it up and give fat people two seats in case it's a "metabolic issue," which very well might be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act"?
And let me just say, I think it's the polite thing to do, buying two seats when you're fat, even if the airline doesn't make you -- rather than "annexing half my seat like you're Germany and I'm Poland," as I wrote in I SEE RUDE PEOPLE.
Here's the video:
There Are Good Regulations And Bad Regulations
Great post by somebody who just calls himself M.S. at The Economist, who the state won't let swim beyond the designated swimming area in Massachusetts, and whose daughter swims in the Amstel River in Amsterdam, right in the city limits, with no problem or hassle from anyone:
So, here's a regulation I hate: you're not allowed to swim across the lake anymore in Massachusetts state parks. You have to stay inside the dinky little waist-deep swimming areas, with their bobbing lines of white buoys. There you are, under a deep blue New England summer sky, the lake laid out like a mirror in front of you and the rocks on the far shore gleaming under a bristling comb of red pine; you plunge in, strike out across the water, and tweet! A parks official blows his whistle and shouts after you. "Sir! Sir! Get back inside the swimming area!" What is this, summer camp? Henry David Thoreau never had to put up with this. It offends the dignity of man and nature. You want to shout, with Andy Samberg: "I'm an adult!"...The park officials in Massachusetts aren't really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They're trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn't simply over-regulation as such. It's a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.
Why does he let his daughter swim in the Amstel?
...I'm pretty sure that in a well-regulated country like the Netherlands, the water is reasonably free of heavy pollutants and raw sewage. (I would not, for example, let her swim in the Mekong.) This, I think, outlines a useful distinction between different kinds of regulation. I am perfectly capable of assessing for myself the risks of swimming across a small pond in Massachusetts, or the risks of swimming in the Amstel when lots of boat traffic is around. I don't need regulations to protect me; I have common sense. What I can't assess for myself is the risk that the water is contaminated by raw sewage. For that, I need a regulatory agency that stops households and businesses from polluting the river. To generalise: for risks I can assess myself, I don't want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please just because I might end up suing the government. For risks I can't assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. One kind of regulation stops me from swimming in a pond in Massachusetts. The other kind lets me swim in a river in the Netherlands. One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer.
Commenter bonafides has a niggle or two:
First, the regulation about the swimming area is a straw man. A libertarian would note that this "regulation" is really a "rule" imposed by the owner. That is, if I own a lake (unlikely, but let's suspend disbelief) and you want to swim in it, I might allow you to, but insist that you stay in the safer shallower water near the lifeguards.A "regulation" would be a State law that says that all owners of lakes must impose "safe swimming areas" with annual inspections, certifications and taxes (etc) on "public safety" grounds. Such a regulation would also state that it cannot be contracted out of by a responsible willing adult.
Secondly, your counterpoint (the clean water regulation) is something a libertarian could agree to, as preventing a provable negative externality.
via @WalterOlson
In Praise Of Government Gridlock
David Harsanyi, in reason, hopes we get a special gift in November -- government gridlock. He makes the case for divided government:
There is no greater check on power in Washington than two strong political parties....Washington is stocked with folks who possess the extraordinary gift of believing that they have the ability to manage and organize complex economic systems--and our behavior in them.
The one thing that they won't accept is that businesses, consumers and citizens can "figure it out for themselves."
We need gridlock to help them. And us.
Blogging The Quran
What many Americans (even Muslim Americans) don't know is that being a good Muslim, according to the Quran, requires that one take the Quran literally, as the word of God, and follow all its teachings. If, like me, you read the Quran, which commands that Muslims convert or kill the infidel, you may find this...um...problematic!
Jihadwatch's Robert Spencer has been blogging the Quran for quite some time. Here is an excerpt from one of his blog items of some of the stuff I talked about on the radio, on John Phillips' show on KABC 790 am, Los Angeles, Monday night:
Sura 4, "Women," is another Medinan sura, containing laws for the conduct of women and Islamic family life.Verses 15-16 lay down penalties for sexual immorality. V. 15 prescribes home imprisonment until death (unless "Allah ordain for them some (other) way") for women found guilty of "lewdness" on the testimony of four witnesses. According to Islamic law, these four witnesses must be male Muslims; women's testimony is inadmissible in cases of a sexual nature, even in rape cases in which she is the victim. If a woman is found guilty of adultery, she is to be stoned to death; if she is found guilty of fornication, she gets 100 lashes (cf. Qur'an 24:2). The penalty of stoning does not appear in the Qur'an, but Umar, one of Muhammad's early companions and the second caliph, or successor of Muhammad as leader of the Muslims, said that it was nevertheless the will of Allah: "I am afraid," he said, "that after a long time has passed, people may say, 'We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book,' and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed." Umar affirmed: "Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession." And he added that Muhammad "carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him."
V. 16, says the Tafsir Al-Jalalayn, refers to men who commit "a lewd act, adultery or homosexual intercourse." They are to be punished "with insults and beatings with sandals; but if they repent, of this [lewd act], and make amends, through [good] action, then leave them be, and do not harm them." However, it adds that this verse "is abrogated by the prescribed punishment if adultery is meant [by the lewd act]," that is, stoning. The Islamic jurist al-Shafi'i, it goes on, requires stoning of homosexuals also, but "according to him, the person who is the object of the [penetrative] act is not stoned, even if he be married; rather, he is flogged and banished."
Next week: When to beat your wife, and what you should do first.
A WSJ letters to the editor writer explains an important distinction:
A key differentiating factor of Islam compared to the other major faiths is that Islam was not conceived as a "religion" that can be compartmentalized in the spiritual realm separate from everyday life. Instead, it was devised as a total solution to all aspects of life: spiritual, economic, legal, societal, domestic and political. Islam is an entire way of organizing society, as exemplified by Saudi Arabia in the land of its origin.The structure of their compartmentalized faiths allows Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus to coexist in a multicultural society. The prevailing Islamic understanding of the world is that a person or nation is in the Dar al Islam (the House of Islam where the entire society is organized on Islamic principles) or in the Dar al Harb (the House of War). The Dar al Harb is that part of the world that is not Islamic--yet.
The Muslims understand this. Those who are in the House of War also had better understand it at least as well as the Muslims do.
Patrick Conoley
Houston
Guess Why You're Paying 25 Cents More For That Candy Bar
It's all about your health. Because the government knows that you are so dense that you can't figure out that a candy bar has more calories -- and lots more -- than a head of lettuce.
What's next, labeling potato chips "Not a vegetable"?
From the LA Times:
Many chain restaurants and vending machines would have to display the number of calories in their food for consumers under draft guidelines released Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration.The guidelines require that calorie information be posted in the same size type as the menu item or price, whichever is larger. Vending machines would have to display the information in a "clear and conspicuous" manner so consumers could review it before making a purchase, according to the guidelines, which were authorized by the healthcare legislation passed this year.
Michael Hanlon, senior scientist for Consumers Union, praised the labeling requirement as a useful tool in guiding food choices but warned that it would not be a magic bullet in curbing the nation's appetite. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese.
Americans consume about a third of their calories from food prepared outside the home and tend to guess wrong about the number of calories in such foods.
The calorie disclosure requirement applies only to restaurants and other food chains with 20 or more locations and vending machine operators with 20 or more machines.
So, vending machine food isn't fattening unless the owner is making a nice profit from it?
Good one, Washington! Hey, FDA officials! Who do you think paid for that chair under your surely less-than-petite ass?
Best of all, you seem clueless as to why people get fat. If you knew anything about the science (and not that I support such a thing), you'd make vending machine owners put up signs, per the evidence uncovered by investigative science journalist Gary Taubes, that it's carbohydrates that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat.
Never Mind That All The Perps Are Long-Since-Dead
And that there are loads of untested rape kits piling up in Los Angeles. Forget all that...let's put scarce funds into trying to figure out the case of two babies that apparently died and got packed into a trunk in the 30s.
More here in the LA Times by Kate Linthicum and Andrew Blankstein:
Authorities said they are classifying the discovery as a "death investigation." They stressed that it's too early to tell whether this is a homicide case but vowed to find out what happened to the babies.
I love solving a good mystery (I believe I I just helped an old colleague find her college friend -- she asked on Facebook; it's easy for me; I tracked the lady down, down to her husband's name and their home address and phone number in a matter of minutes).
But, come on -- at this time, and with as squeezed as LA is and the LAPD is for funds? Can we please solve the crimes where there's some chance the perps are still out there endangering the rest of us?
Talking Points For "Moderate Muslims"
For as much we hear from them these days, it seems that there's about as much likelihood for their existence as there is for that of Sasquatch. Sam Harris tells the truth -- "Silence is not moderation" -- in the WaPo, and suggests Imam Feisal Rauf could dispel fears that there's no such thing as Islamic moderation in a single paragraph. Here's Harris' version of what Rauf should say:
"Like all decent people, I am horrified by much that goes on in the name of 'Islam,' and I consider it a duty of all moderate Muslims to recognize that many of the doctrines espoused in the Qur'an and hadith present some unique liabilities at this moment in history. Our traditional ideas about martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, and the status of women must be abandoned, as they are proving disastrous in the 21st century. Many of Islam's critics have fully justified concerns about the state of discourse in parts of the Muslim world--where it is a tissue of conspiracy theories, genocidal ravings regarding the Jews, and the most abject, triumphalist fantasies about conquering the world for the glory of Allah. While the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity also contain terrible passages, it has been many centuries since they truly informed the mainstream faith. Hence, we do not tend to see vast numbers of Jews and Christians calling for the murder of apostates today. This is not true of Islam, and there is simply no honest way of denying this shocking disparity. We are members of a faith community that appears more concerned about harmless cartoons than about the daily atrocities committed in its name--and no one suffers from this stupidity and barbarism more than our fellow Muslims. Islam must grow up. And Muslim moderates like ourselves must be the first to defend the rights of novelists, cartoonists, and public intellectuals to criticize all religious faiths, including our own."
Love Harris' ending, speaking for himself (and me):
Find an imam who will speak this way, and gather followers who think this way, and I'll volunteer to cut the ribbon on his mosque in lower Manhattan.
How To Be Politely Godless
It's a free Café Inquiry Talk I'm giving at Center For Inquiry in Hollywood on Wednesday, August 25, 7:30 p.m. The deets:
When you sneeze and somebody says "God bless you" do you inform that person there's no evidence for the existence of any such being...or do you just say thank you? Is a more accommodationist atheist a more effective atheist? Should we really be expected to coddle grown adults who cling to silly, evidence-free beliefs? Amy Alkon, author of the science-based but very funny book, I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society, talks on these and related issues at Café Inquiry on Wednesday, August 25, at 8 p.m. (doors opening at 7:30), with a sure-to-be-lively Q&A afterward. Alkon's book will be available for sale and signing. Or you can purchase it online here for the discounted price of only $11.53.
More:
The LA Weekly called Alkon "Miss Manners with Fangs." She recognized that the manners questions of our age aren't where to put the doily or whether the man should walk on the outside but what you do when some "rudester" is shouting on the cell phone next to you at the coffee house. With her book, Alkon has come up with innovative and surprisingly effective ways to combat The New Rudeness for both the brave and the meek. Her book is based in science and was reviewed as "applied evolutionary psychology at its best" in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.Cafe Inquiry is Center For Inquiry's monthly casual get-together where you can have a coffee and chat with other people on various topics of science. A guest speaker opens the discussion with a brief intro to the subject and then the floor is open. All are welcome!
Free admission • Free Starbucks Coffee • Free pizza • Plenty of parking • Bookstore open
Held in the Steve Allen Theater lobby
at CFI-L.A.The Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles
4773 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90027
2 blocks west of Vermont
at Berendo
map
How To Get Rich While Napping
Start by getting a job with the city of San Diego. Danielle Cervantes, Lily Leung, and Jeff McDonald write for the SD Union-Trib:
They are the poster children of San Diego's broken pension system, 20 people who worked for the city in one capacity or another and now collect more money for not working than most people earn in a year. Or two.From their point of view -- the ones who agreed to interviews -- they are retired professionals enjoying their sunset years following a career spent in service of others.
They travel, they hike, they visit with grandchildren. They had nothing to do with the fateful city decisions in 1996 and 2002 to sweeten retirement benefits, they point out.
But for many residents and taxpayers, the idea of writing $12,000 checks to former city workers every month for the rest of their lives is untenable.
...One -- former Deputy City Attorney Sim Von Kalinowski -- is now a Superior Court judge in North County. Von Kalinowski, who at $144,099 per year gets the 13th-highest pension in the city, earns $178,800 a year as a judge. Add the two together, and his income is $322,899.
The judge was among those who declined interviews; a spokeswoman said it would be inappropriate because the pensions have been before the court.
Or, because it doesn't look good to go on TV sniggering with glee at the money you're bloodsucking out of the rest of us.
via reason
National Go Topless Day In Venice
A slideshow. I particularly liked the one of the Jesus guy standing next to the lady with her titties hanging out.
Hitchens Decodes Rauf
It's just too easy for the likes of Rauf to put one over on an American public that's enormously ignorant of what actual Islam actually entails -- and that goes for many American Muslims as well. Hitchens translates Rauf on Slate:
From the beginning, though, I pointed out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was no great bargain and that his Cordoba Initiative was full of euphemisms about Islamic jihad and Islamic theocracy. I mentioned his sinister belief that the United States was partially responsible for the assault on the World Trade Center and his refusal to take a position on the racist Hamas dictatorship in Gaza. The more one reads through his statements, the more alarming it gets. For example, here is Rauf's editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that:He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution--to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for "outreach" purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, "the will of the people" is a meaningless expression, because "the people" are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results. It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic.
I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy. The letterhead of the statement, incidentally, describes him as the Cordoba Initiative's "Founder and Visionary." Why does that not delight me, either?
Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter ...
As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it's easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims--to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be "phobic." A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.
Just Shut Up And Eat The Baloney
Tim Cavanaugh asks at reason, "Should we be relieved or mad as hell that Treasury Department suits seem to realize their public comments on the economy are baloney?"
...In the discussion of the Home Affordable Modification Program ... Treasury's good ol' boys let on that, hey, it was all just a dodge to help the banks:Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of "extend and pretend", but I don't think that's quite right. This was extend-and-don't-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with "the system", "the economy", and "ordinary Americans". Treasury officials are not cruel people. I'm sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those....So here is the most charitable way I can characterize these comments: They're making a variant of the "Thanks to NASA we have Tang" argument. Or a more recent cover version: "OK, so Cash-For-Clunkers didn't do squat for the environment, but look what it did for car sales." That is, they are admitting HAMP was not about keeping people in their borrowed homes at all. Instead, it was about bailing out Treasury's bank buddies.
Targeting Undocumented A-Listers
Great piece by my pal Doug McIntyre, the KABC radio host and LA Daily News columnist, on how, thanks to California Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, you could end up getting six months in jail for crashing the Golden Globes, while you get amnesty for crashing America:
In an age of crazies when phonies can crash a White House state dinner - and please don't send me your Obama jokes - SAG is rightly concerned for the safety of their high-profile members. They want to close a loophole in the law by making it a crime to crash the endless procession of glamorous Hollywood red carpet events like the Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes.In a press statement, SAG highlighted the problem: "Trespassing by its very nature puts people at risk - Illegal entry poses a threat to security - All trespassers present a real and viable danger to the public and the law must have teeth."
Portantino's bill would make red carpet crashing punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Let's read SAG's statement again:
"Trespassing by its very nature puts people at risk - Illegal entry poses a threat to security - All trespassers present a real and viable danger to the public and the law must have teeth."
Which worries you? The jackass American who wants to get into the Oscars and stand behind Angelina Jolie making a peace sign for the evening news? Orm might it be the jackass Al-Qaeda guy who wants to get into the USA so he can stand in a busy mall and pull the ripcord on his bomb vest? Because they aren't doing diddly to stop him.
Sorry, SAG, we already have far too many laws, far too many things the ordinary non-criminal person can be arrested for. SAG should feel free to pursue gate crashers in civil court, if they so desire. Or, they could just hire better security. Or, they could ask those movie stars making millions of dollars a year to endure the financial hardship of hiring a bodyguard or two, just to be extra-sure. In the words of "Save the Children" spokegirl Sally Struthers, "For the price of one of the backs of a Harry Winston diamond earring..."
Oh, and just a wee, utterly unsupported little bit of speculation: How many think Portantino will be invited to the Oscars and/or some other event to thank him for getting behind this measure, and how many think that thought may have had something to do with his support?
Legal Crap At The Bottom Of People's Email
I love when people send me e-mail with threatening legal language at the bottom -- almost as much as I love the asshats who e-mail to ask me for advice, and then have Earthlink send me a message telling me the advice I just wrote back to them, free of charge, won't be delivered unless I sign up to be white-listed. Ben Goldacre has the right take on the legal bullshit:
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. If you are anything other than a friend or an institutional professional colleague and you are writing to me about Bad Science stuff then it is reasonable to assume that I might quote our discussion in my writing, usually anonymously.
The Good Old Days Were A Pain In The Cul
USC professor Charles Fleming doesn't agree with some sour friends who were going on about how much better things were in the old days in France. On the LA Times op-ed page, Fleming writes:
When I first traveled to France in 1978, mailing a letter meant going to the Bureau de Poste to purchase a packet of aerogrammes -- the prestamped, Gauloise-blue pages that folded into their own envelope. They were as delicate as butterfly wings; a heavy mist rendered them unusable. Receiving mail meant standing in line at the American Express office -- traveler's checks and passport in hand -- and begging a clerk to please check one more time.Making a telephone call meant another trip to the Poste, to stand in another queue. You'd request a cabine with an international line and wait hours in a cavernous room, hoping to hear your name and cabine number called. The brief conversation over a crackly, echoing line cost a fortune. Local calls were hardly any easier. Public telephones did not accept coins or calling cards; they required a special token, called a jeton, which could only be purchased at the Poste or a licensed tabac.
Now, instead, you send texts and e-mails from a laptop, iPhone or BlackBerry. To telephone, you can call from anywhere using an inexpensive international calling card or purchase a cheap European cellphone and buy telephone time on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Changing money back then was another ordeal. Getting cash required going to American Express, or the Banque de France, standing in line, filling out forms, signing your checks under the watchful eye of a solemn clerk and then waiting until a different solemn clerk counted out the colorful franc notes -- attached to each other by a straight pin. The 100-franc note was broad enough to use as a picnic blanket. If you were in Italy, you left with a bundle of lire as big as a bedroll.
Today, you visit an ATM that offers a menu of instructions in English, recognizes the same bank card you use at home and happily spits out fresh euros. And you don't need much cash anyway because shops, restaurants and even some taxi drivers take credit cards.
Everything is easier. I remember rising at dawn and waiting in line for hours to gain admission to the Prado, the Uffizi, the Vatican or the Louvre. Now I buy museum tickets online and don't stand in line at all. I recall gargantuan lines at train stations too, where hundreds of travelers waited hours to find out whether a sleeping car was even available -- and then unfolding blanket-sized francs to secure one. I remember arriving in strange cities at strange hours and marching about for ages trying to find a suitable, affordable hotel room.
Not anymore. A month before I left Los Angeles, I'd already bought reduced-rate promotional tickets for the family on the French TGV train. It was all a mouse click away, as were the house exchanges we arranged last spring.
Is there some loss of old-world charm? Sure. But, things are so much easier, as they are in so many realms, thanks to technology. I'm so grateful I'm living now, and not at some earlier time in history -- especially since I'm a woman. I have reliable birth control and all these devices and clever products at my disposal that mean I can spend my time reading and thinking instead of laboring. I get a big packaged roast or a packaged, ready-to-heat turkey leg (I think it's a leg, and it's good and cheap!) from Costco that I put in the microwave for under 10 minutes, and I've got tasty food for the better part of a week. Yes, that's right -- not only do I not have to chase my dinner around the barn with an ax, I don't even cook; I heat.
Think The Government's Going To Protect You?
Think again. And pssst, best not to do it over a plate of scrambled eggs. From CNN.com:
The companies that have recalled more than half a billion eggs following a salmonella outbreak fell short of safety standards at their farms, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said Sunday."There's no question these farms involved in the recall were not operating with the standards of practice we consider responsible," Hamburg told CNN.
She said "about 1,000" people have been sickened by a salmonella outbreak that federal regulators have traced back to two Iowa egg producers.
Who figured out something was wrong in one case?
In June, company owner Jack DeCoster admitted to 10 civil counts of animal cruelty in Maine after a nonprofit animal welfare group conducted an undercover video investigation and forwarded its findings to Maine animal welfare officials. Dr. Donald E. Hoenig, the Maine state veterinarian, said the allegations included keeping too many birds in case, failing to treat injured chickens or promptly remove dead animals and improper euthanization.Hoenig said DeCoster and his company agreed to a $25,000 fine and made a $100,000 payment to reimburse the state for future monitoring of the facility.
Just Say It's Hate
As I've written before, just like calling somebody racist, saying something's all about bigotry is a highly effective conversation ender. Terrific Spiked piece by Sean Collins on "The Culture War over the Ground Zero mosque"
If opposing Park51 is bigotry, then liberals must see a nation of bigots, as polls show that a majority of Americans oppose it. Indeed, the New York Times recently reported on growing protests against mosques around the country, its implication being that the opponents of the Ground Zero mosque are not really interested in the 9/11 site, they're just anti-Muslim. But if you read the NYT story, it becomes clear that anti-mosque protests around the US have been tiny. This is similar to the approach the NYT has taken towards the Tea Party: search high and low for an isolated example of racism and use it to dismiss an entire movement.Calling the people they disagree with 'bigots' has become normal discourse for many liberals. The shout of 'bigot!' has become a way to shut down debate, to say: these people aren't worth engaging with because they are driven by base, irrational feelings. It is illiberalism in the name of liberalism.
What's also problematic about the liberal response is that it represents, not simply a toleration of Islam, but a celebration of it. Park51 is praised as a moderate, non-violent Islamic venture that should be supported in the name of diversity and ecumenical harmony. The cultural centre's founders claim that they want to bridge the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Bloomberg and others agree. The NYT calls the centre nothing less than 'a monument to tolerance'. According to Blake Hounshell, 'What's particularly tragic about all this is that the people behind the so-called Ground Zero mosque, the Cordoba Initiative, are precisely the moderate Muslims that everyone recognises are an important bulwark against extremism.'
...By focusing on the content and practices of Park51, the liberal case is no longer simply about principle of religious freedom. It is about promoting this particular centre because they agree with its aims. This inevitably raises questions, including: are the organisers of Park51 really concerned with promoting peace? Thus is the door opened for investigations into the imam and others involved in the centre. No doubt many are now diligently at work trying to find dirt on them.
The organisers, known as the Cordoba Initiative, are probably not linked to al-Qaeda or other terror groups. But there is no doubt that they deliberately chose the site in order to be associated with 9/11. Imam Rauf told the NYT that a building so close to the World Trade Center, 'where a piece of the wreckage fell', was important because it 'sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11'. Here, the organisers are playing a part in a script drafted by the US establishment itself. Until recently, liberals and conservatives agreed on the need to promote moderate Islam. After 9/11, George W Bush called Islam a 'peaceful religion' and urged tolerance. Most American politicians since, including Obama, have followed that line.
But there is a patronising assumption behind this call for tolerance: that the American masses need to be lectured because they are just one step away from vengeful, racist attacks on Muslims. Despite little evidence of such attacks, the elites have kept up the message. For instance, after the failed car bombing in Times Square in May, Bloomberg was quick to warn that 'we will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers'. Like the constant references to bigots, the continual demand for tolerance really expresses a lack of trust in the mass of people.
"Prescription Ass Effects"?
I couldn't believe I was hearing a TV commercial for a drug called "Prescription Ass Effects," yet it sounded like a typical drugs-for-old-people commercial, and not something off Saturday Night Live.
Well, I looked up and over at the TV, and leading the pack for dumbass drug names is "Prescription Aciphex."
Drug companies spend buttloads upon buttloads (sorry!) of money on every aspect of launching a drug. Were they really in the dark about this...that the effect of this drug name on people who hear it...well, "Take this drug and you can play your asspipe like a kazoo!"?
Consideration In The Toilet
Is it really that hard to figure out what the outcome's going to be for the next person?
What is it that keeps people from walking up to the counterperson at a cafe and saying, "Hey, man, you're out of toiletpaper?"
Chosen For Her Talent, Not Her Tan
The editor of Essence made the commendable decision to hire the best person for the job of fashion editor -- a person who happens to be white. Naturally, she's getting some flack for it, but kudos from WaPo fashion editor Robin Givhan and from me. Givhan wrote:
With its September issue, Essence marks its 40th anniversary by proudly reiterating its longstanding mission: The magazine "celebrates, empowers and inspires black women to be bold and beautiful," Editor Angela Burt-Murray writes in the opening pages. The issue follows with a report on the state of black women, an essay by first lady Michelle Obama and the introduction of a new fashion director.It's that last fact that has overshadowed everything else. Why? Because Ellianna Placas is white. She was a freelancer in the fashion department for six months before being hired to oversee the fashion message.
In some corners of the Internet, the reaction to her race was visceral and unforgiving -- outbursts sometimes untempered by thoughtful consideration. Some of the hurt arose from the harsh reality that there's a scarcity of women of color in top jobs anywhere in the fashion industry. Some saw the Essence position as the one guaranteed perch from which a black woman's fashion vision could shine.
Also mixed into the stew of emotion was the inference that a white woman couldn't fully comprehend a black woman's often-fraught relationship with her hair, body and sexuality -- as her feelings about her appearance sometimes carry the echoes of history and racism. And finally, there was the unspoken irritation that once again, in the beauty competition, white trumped black -- this time, on the home court.
On the other side of the debate, many saw the attacks on Placas's hiring as nothing more than reverse racism. If Vogue should be encouraged to diversify its top ranks, why shouldn't Essence? Why should whiteness be a disqualifying factor for a high-profile job at a magazine aimed at a black audience?
...n the face of weeks of frenzied vituperation on blogs -- and with only modest public support -- Burt-Murray briefly explained her decision in an essay on The Grio. (She declined to comment for this column, preferring to pass on a discussion of the magazine's anniversary if it included a conversation about Placas.) Essentially, Burt-Murray wrote, Placas was the best person for the job.
Which is why she's exactly right, even though she's white.
And from the comments, here's a silly one, reflective of the political correctization of everything:
moebius22 wrote: Maybe a White woman can succeed where Black women have failed to get Black women to stop straightening their hair, and stop using weave. Not only does it look bad, but it shows how far Black women still have to go in accepting their short kinky hair.
There's a notion that black women straighten their hair to be "more white," when maybe they just do it because they think straight hair is prettier. I straighten my hair -- pull it back in a low ponytail so it will dry straight. And believe me, and look at my picture if you don't, it isn't because I'm trying to look "more white."
Here's another one:
Martinique315 wrote: Miss Givhan's article went astray in the 14th paragraph and from there it went even further down hill. I blogged about this (http://mediastrut.com/2010/08/02/essence-mag-mistake/) and essentially pointed out that sometimes a white person is the best person for a job simply because so many black candidates have been eliminated/cut out of the industry before they even get enough experience to apply for a fashion director position.
And then there's Vogue's André Leon Talley, the grandson of a sharecropper and the son of a cab driver, who grew up poor in the south, with his grandma working as a cleaning lady.
There may be plenty of discrimination in the fashion industry, but I'd bet it isn't just against blacks, but against anybody who didn't go to the right school and whose mommy and daddy don't know the right people. Do you correct discrimination by keeping a certain kind of people out -- whether they're white or black? I don't think so.
Thank Jenny McCarthy
As Dario Ringach asked on Facebook, "What happens when you follow the medical/scientific advice of celebrities?" From NPR, "Deadly Whooping Cough, Once Wiped Out, Is Back":
California is in the midst of its worst outbreak of whooping cough in a half-century. More than 2,700 cases have been reported so far this year -- eight times last year's number at this point. Seven of the victims, all infants, have died.And here's what really worries pediatricians like USC's Harvey Karp: Doctors thought they wiped out whooping cough when they developed vaccines decades ago.
The disease hits young children hardest, especially ones who are not vaccinated or who have not yet built up full immunity. The prescribed vaccination regimen begins with a shot at two months and continues until children are 5 years old. For many children, it can take that long for complete immunity to develop -- and until then, they're vulnerable.
The California epidemic has raised plenty of questions about the role of vaccination and the increasing numbers of parents who decide not to vaccinate their children. California's Department of Public Health cites three schools in the state where 80 percent of parents have signed a "personal belief exemption" to keep their children from being vaccinated.
Without "herd immunity," babies are going to die.
When Do You Intervene?
Leanne Italie and Sue Major Holmes write for the AP that mother slapped her 13-month-old baby across the face on a flight and the flight attendant took her child from her. Another woman was impressed, calling the flight attendant "my hero":
"We live in such a 'mind your own business' and 'I'll sue you for getting involved' society that I feel we're afraid to stand up sometimes for the right thing," said Jen Reynolds, 38, a stay-at-home mom to 15-year-old and 16-month-old boys in Sandwich, Ill.
As I write in my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE, it isn't just the times. We actually didn't evolve to be around strangers, let alone tell them what to do. Also, when there are many other people around, there's a chance something called "diffusion of responsibility" happens, where, in a group of many people, no one takes responsibility.
More from the AP story:
Flight attendant Beverly McCurley told officers that she saw the mother hit the child on the face with her open hand while the father yelled at the mother to stop screaming at the girl. She noted the girl had a black eye. The parents said the bruise was from a dog bite.McCurley described the mother as agitated. She said the woman also slapped the baby on the legs and told the child to shut up.
The mother later told police she "popped" the tired tot when the child kicked her, because "when she's screaming and she can't hear me say no, that's the only way I can get her to stop."
The flight attendant said she took the baby and walked to the rear of the plane. She said the father came back, took the child and stood there with her until she fell asleep. The father told McCurley the parents had several arguments about the mother hitting the child.
Have you ever intervened when you saw a child or someone being mistreated? Would you? Under what circumstances?
Baa-Baa, Fashion Sheep...
Selling ugly to gullible people never goes out of style. William Van Meter writes for The New York Times that "Don't Fuck Me!" dresses (my term) are back in:
ON a recent August night, young women in stilettos teetered precariously through the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district in Manhattan. Appropriately for the neighborhood, they were squeezed into minidresses that were as snug as sausage casings. But a few blocks south, far away from the blare of Hummer limousine horns, at the fashionable opening of the Algus Greenspon Gallery on Morton Street, a more demure look prevailed.Like a modest Robert Palmer-girl army, the women mingled in floor-length print dresses and brown lace-up boots with their hair in messy secretary buns. The genesis of the look could have been those unforgettable images of fundamentalist Mormon women that dominated the news a couple of years back. But if you squinted, what you saw was a sea of Elaines. Listen and you could almost hear the funky slap bass that played as segue music on "Seinfeld." Could it be that the stars have somehow aligned to make Elaine Benes the summer's downtown fashion muse?
Over the years, Elaine has stood out as a beacon of a faded era, in long floral skirts, blazers with padded shoulders and granny shoes with socks. Just about every inch of her skin was covered as if she were photosensitive. Unlike other 1990s series with a more easily imitable style (see "Melrose Place"), "Seinfeld" was decidedly anti-fashion. But now, if you happen upon an old episode, Elaine just looks cool -- and of-the-moment.
Not to those of us with personal style.
What's Next, Going After A Strip Club?
Is it "religious discrimination" if you get a job in a strip club and then inform them that you're going to wear a burka to work every day?
From the Telegraph/UK, a Muslim woman is suing Disneyland, which has seriously rigorous dress standards for employees, because they told her she couldn't work as a hostess with her headscarf on.
They didn't fire her -- but they told that if she refused to remove her hijab, they'd put her in a position where she wouldn't be on display before the public. (A friend told me today that that hotel she worked for -- the Grand Californian -- has employees dressed up in western wear.)
You know, I get carsick from my own driving and sometimes get airsick on planes (not in a messy way, but I get dizzy and nauseated, and have to put my head down). Because of that, I don't get to be a flight attendant, same as I don't get to be a pitcher in the pro leagues (or Little League, for that matter), since I probably can't throw a ball 30 feet, let alone have any control over where it goes.
You might be able to use the Constitution to bully Disney into letting you work in a headscarf, but is that the right thing to do?
Very possibly, this is a form of soft jihad. Roger Kimball writes at PJM:
Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance.
Or, it's possible she's just an entitled snot trying to bully Disney.
From the Telegraph article:
The local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, said it had sent a letter to Disney demanding that the firm accommodate Boudlal."There is no justification for Disney's refusal to allow Ms Boudlal to wear her headscarf at work," said Ameena Mirza Qazi, deputy executive director and staff attorney at the group.
Sure there is. It's a dress-up resort, with certain fantasy worlds they're trying to convey.
Question: Should Disney be accommodating her or are they right?
Reserved For Mr. Mitty
Something tells me it doesn't come with cup holders. 
The Scaredy President
Reminiscent of the Sherrod affair, when the White House came off like Glenn Beck's reactionary poodle, Obama is waffling again. How bad is it? Well, he's lost Maureen Dowd. From her NYT column:
Maybe, for Barack Obama, it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.When the president skittered back from his grandiose declaration at an iftar celebration at the White House Friday that Muslims enjoy freedom of religion in America and have the right to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan, he offered a Clintonesque parsing.
"I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," he said the morning after he commented on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. "I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about."
Let me be perfectly clear, Mr. Perfectly Unclear President: You cannot take such a stand on a matter of first principle and then take it back the next morning when, lo and behold, Harry Reid goes craven and the Republicans attack. What is so frightening about Fox News?
Dowd, later in the piece, even compared him unfavorably to George Bush. (There was an error in that, but Roger Kimball corrects it here.)
CNN chimed in. Ed Hornick writes:
"The danger here is an incoherent presidency," said David Morey, vice chairman of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to Obama's 2008 campaign. "Simpler is better, and rising above these issues and leading by controlling the dialogue is what the presidency is all about. So I think that's the job they have to do more effectively as they have in the past [in the campaign]."..."There is no question they are having messaging problems at the White House," Morey said. "They've lost control of the dialogue, and they've gotten pulled down by the extremes on the left and right. They've just not had a coherent set of themes."
...While many poked fun at former President George W. Bush for mispronouncing words and stumbling through sentences, observers note that he rarely had to backtrack on his answers because he employed a simple and direct messaging approach.
To me, the President comes off as weak.
Crimes Of Passion And Who Gets The Tougher Sentences
Guess: Men or women?
It Isn't Bigoted To Criticize Religion
Walter Benn Michaels writes in his terrific book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
Prejudice involves the unjustified assumption that your identity is somehow better than someone else's identity; disagreement involves the absolutely justified - indeed unavoidable - assumption that your belief is better than someone else's belief. (If you didn't think yours was better, you'd give it up.) So we think that Republicans are opposed to Democrats not prejudiced against them; and libertarians aren't prejudiced against socialists, and people who believe in God aren't prejudiced against people who don't.
David Harsanyi makes a good point over at reason:
There are those who continue to make the facile claim that any protest over Park51 is a display in un-American intolerance and contempt for the Constitution. This position treats criticism of faith--religious institutions and symbols included--as tantamount to "bigotry."...You know, though only a fraction of Catholic priests are pedophiles, the entire church is routinely broad-brushed as corrupt and depraved. I've not heard those who make generalizations about Catholicism referred to as bigots in Time magazine.
Nor have I heard those who regularly disparage Evangelicals called intolerant.
These groups inject themselves into political and cultural disputes of the day--as they have every right to do--so they become fair game. And by building the Islamic center near ground zero, the backers of Park51 insert themselves in a broader political conversation.
As a person with a libertarian political temperament, I would hate to see government shut down religious expression. As an atheist, I am distrustful of religion's influence on that freedom. But, in the end, one is a discussion about the role of government in society and the other is a discussion about civilization. Few people in this debate make that distinction.
As we know, only a fraction of Muslims are radicalized to violence. Most Muslims are peaceful--free to practice their religion unencumbered. All of this is indisputable. Prospectively speaking, unlike many other faiths, ideological Islam has a poor track record of compatibility with liberal ideals. Surely, that's worth a discussion in free society. Or is it a case of intolerance to bring it up?
I've read numerous columns claiming that "allowing" a mosque to be built near ground zero is proof of our tolerant goodness. To be certain.
But surely our ability to conduct a peaceful debate over the meaning of institutions, including religion, is also a reflection of that greatness.
What really creeped me out was Nancy Pelosi's call to investigate who's funding the opposition to the Islamic center or mosque or whatever it's supposed to be. Since when is anybody's opinion on a civic issue the government's business? Sure, private citizens or businesses can look into this if they want, but she made it sound like something she wanted to have happen on an official level. And even if it wasn't meant to take place on an official level, should the House speaker really be calling for such a thing?
And P.S. Maybe there's some organized opposition -- and good for anyone who's organized it...or is otherwise politically active. We have freedoms in this country that don't exist anywhere else in the world. We should exercise them.
The opposition I see and hear is that of the average person -- people who are disgusted by the totally unnecessary (save for showing victory over the infidel) opening of an Islamic center around the block the Islam-driven mass murder of 3,000 people.
You really want to create tolerance? Open a center teaching respect for other religions in a Muslim country -- like Egypt, where they persecute, rape, and kill Copts. Like Saudi Arabia, where the practice of any religion but Islam is prohibited.
The Special Deafness Of Parents
A friend pointed me to a woman's twitter account, then wrote back to deem her "kind of a bitch," and told me to look at this tweet:
@TasterTotsLA Glad my WAY more civil hubby heard lady yammering into phone, bitching abt our kid on the plane. I wldve told her to shut her pie hole! J/K?
I tweeted to her:
Was there reason for the lady to complain about your kid? (Not that I support public cellular yammering, either).
She wrote back:
Apparently saying "papa papa" a lot is annoying. Otherwise he stayed put and was well behaved for the whole cross country flight!
I wrote back:
Yes, it is. Repeating name, word, or banging on a table for hours is annoying, and parents should realize it and quell it.
Again, if an adult did this, calling out, "Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey...!" it would be annoying, too.
Yeah, the kid has your DNA, which makes him and his every word just so ultra cute and special to you and the guy who impregnated you. This, unfortunately, does not mean diddley to the lady who just wants to read her book.
We The Irrelevant
Thomas Sowell on how "we the people" are treated as "an obstacle to circumvent by the current administration in Washington" (I don't think it's just "the current administration"):
One way of circumventing the people is to rush legislation through Congress so fast that no one knows what is buried in it. Did you know that the so-called health care reform bill contained a provision creating a tax on people who buy and sell gold coins?You might debate whether that tax is a good or a bad idea. But the whole point of burying it in legislation about medical insurance is to make sure "we the people" don't even know about it, much less have a chance to debate it, before it becomes law.
Did you know that the huge financial reform bill that has been similarly rushed through Congress, too fast for anyone to read it, has a provision about "inclusion" of women and minorities? Pretty words like "inclusion" mean ugly realities like quotas. But that too is not something that "we the people" are to be allowed to debate, because it too was sneaked through.
Not since the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French, for an English-speaking nation, centuries ago, has there been such contempt for the people's right to know what laws were being imposed on them.
Red America
Turkey-based thinker Claire Berlinski writes at Ricochet:
Do your friends look at you as if you're an anachronistic, red-baiting fruitcake when you use the word socialist to describe recent trends in American governance? Well, let me assure you, you're not nuts. They are.Thanks to Ricochet member Okan Altiparmak and Gateway Pundit, here's a list of 70 members of Congress who are fully paid-up members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Shall we have a little look at the highlights of the platform of the DSA, folks? Just so we can all be clear what we're talking about? The emphases are mine.
An excerpt from her highlights from their credo:
Economic Democracy. Economic democracy can empower wage and income earners through building cooperative and public institutions that own and control local economic resources. Economic democracy means, in the most general terms, the direct ownership and/or control of much of the economic resources of society by the great majority of wage and income earners. Such a transformation of worklife directly embodies and presages the practices and principles of a socialist society....
Social Redistribution. Social redistribution--the shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society--will require:
1. massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector, in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs,income maintenance and infrastructure rehabilitation, and
2. a massive shift of public resources from the military (the main user of existing discretionary funds) to civilian uses.
...Electoral tactics are only a means for democratic socialists; the building of a powerful anti-corporate coalition is the end.
Berlinski continues:
The DSA's platform is not a call to expand the social-safety net so better to protect the most vulnerable and infirm members of society; it is not a call to improve access to health care; it is a call for socialism--the echt item, the discredited ideology that immiserated and enslaved and murdered hundreds of millions of human souls in the past century. The numbers of DSA members in our Congress are not trivial. Every single one of them must go in the next election.DSA members of the judiciary committee include John Conyers [Chairman!], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez, Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez. That's to say, half the members of the committee are authentic, honest-to-God Reds.
More on the DSA here, at their site. And via ifeminists, great piece, "Ten Briefly Described Problems of Egalitarianism."
Morgan Freeman On Racism
And why he doesn't want to have a "Black History Month," etc.:
White's A Color!
Grad student claims he or she got a certain grad school welcome e-mail, and asks Reddit a question:
I got an email today from my new graduate program titled, "Welcome breakfast for incoming students of color." Reddit, I'm white. Should I go?
The e-mail (the bolded info was bolded when sent, reported the student):
Dear Incoming students of color,We wanted to invite you to a special welcome breakfast for incoming students of color, scheduled for Friday, August 20th (the second day of Portal Orientation) from 9-10 in the new **** building, Room 300. Current students, faculty and staff look forward to welcoming you and sharing a morning of casual conversation, connections, and camaraderie.
Please let us know if you can attend by RSVPing to at*or@**.edu as soon as possible. We hope you'll be able to join us.
Best wishes,
The ***** community
A*a Ta Director of Graduate Admissions
Imagine the fur that would fly if they had a "Welcome breakfast for incoming white students."
Would that be racist? Is this?
Can anybody figure out which college or university this is?
It's Illegal To Eat Your Cat
But, should it be? It isn't illegal to eat your cow. Brian Palmer at Slate writes:
When police in Western New York pulled over Gary Korkuc for blowing off a stop sign on Sunday, they found a live cat in his trunk, covered in cooking oil, peppers, and salt. Korkuc told authorities that his pet feline was "possessive, greedy, and wasteful" and that he intended to cook and eat it. Korkuc has been charged with animal cruelty. Is there a legal way to cook and eat a cat?Maybe in some places, but not New York. Few states have specific laws barring the use of pets for food. The ones that do typically ban the slaughter or sale of dog and cat meat. The state of New York expressly prohibits "any person to slaughter or butcher domesticated dog (canis familiaris) or domesticated cat (felis catus or domesticus) to create food, meat or meat products for human or animal consumption." It's not clear whether the eating itself is outlawed or only the butchery. If you managed to buy dog or cat flesh from someone else who broke the anti-slaughter law, you might be OK. The law also doesn't cover ferrets, gerbils, parakeets, or other less familiar pet species. (Although the general anti-cruelty law might protect exotics.)
...Authorities won't have any trouble prosecuting Korkuc, the Western New Yorker who was marinating his cat in the trunk. Whether or not he really intended to eat his feline, keeping a companion animal in a motor vehicle without proper ventilation is illegal. Rubbing the cat with chili-infused oil, while not specifically addressed, is also a violation of the state's general cruelty law, which prohibits torture.
Worldwide, cat and dog meat seem to be at a crossroads. China pulled dog meat off the market for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and is considering a law barring it permanently. South Korea, on the other hand, has inched toward explicitly legalizing the widespread and officially tolerated dog-meat trade.
I'm not eying Lucy for more than a little lapsitting while I write today, but should we prohibit eating one animal you can own when it's a-okay to eat another?
I'm reminded of a woman who gave me a little attitude for wearing fur (a cool old mouton swing coat I bought off eBay). The woman was wearing a suede jacket at the time.
Nihilist Chic
Quote of the day:
Yolanda Savage: "Some days, it's not even worth chewing through the leather restraints."
Plug-In Identity Theft
Be careful where you or others copy your taxes, sex crime convictions, drug raid targets, payroll data, and other information you'd rather not have available to anybody who scans a copier hard drive. "These copiers are actually computers that need to be cleaned up," said one expert CBS interviewed. Scary stuff:
More information here, in this New York Times story.
Commenter Brother Bill at NYT.com has it right:
The hard copy allows scanning the original, processing it, such as rotation, despeckling, enlargement, putting two pages of copies on the same printed page, etc. Once the printout is ok, it should have a lifetime on the hard drive of at most 24 hours, or at worst 1 week.There is no excuse for storing these copies for years, unless the user specifically requested storage in a digital library, which ought to be encrypted.
This is just intellectual laziness, saving a few cents, and building a problem for decades.
Let's Get Flat
Cato's Dan Mitchell on why we should have a flat tax, and why a flat tax is a fair tax, and pro-growth.
Mitchell writes on his blog:
Being a lazy procrastinator, I filed an extension April 15 and then waited until this weekend to do my tax return. This experience has reinforced my hatred and disdain for our corrupt and punitive tax system. I don't even have a remotely complicated tax return, just a Cato salary and a few payments for articles and speeches on the income side, along with a standard set of itemized deductions for things like home mortgage interest.But even dealing with a relatively simple tax return causes lots of angst and makes me long for a simple and fair flat tax. Actually, it makes me long for a limited government, as envisioned by our Founders, in which case we might not need any broad-based tax. And I suppose I shouldn't blame the IRS. The real villians are the politicians who have spent the past 97 years turning the tax code into a monstrosity.
Live Like A Coma Patient!
I've quoted my wonderfully cranky late friend Cathy Seipp before on how she used to respond when people complained, "Why, that's a value judgment!"
Cathy: "I have values, so I make judgments!"
I was reminded of this by this bumper sticker photo Gregg took: 
"Non Judgement Day"? (Oh. Hurl.)
A "life coach" named Ruth Marcus explains on Salon blogs:
Judgment Day or Non-Judgment DayIf you think judgment day is coming soon, you might want to think again. From what I observe, our own human-made version is already here: Most of us are already busy judging each other endlessly, every day. We judge our friends when they show up late. We judge our partners when they forget a special occasion. We judge our children for making stupid choices. We judge the contents of newspapers, the decisions of city councils, the news reported by news reporters, the tidiness of street sweepers, and the volume of the neighbor's music.
The list gets longer and longer and longer once we add how often we judge ourselves: For being idiots, for being impatient, for breaking our promises, for being overly enthusiastic, for forgetting just about anything, for being unkind or too kind. Need I say more?
Judgment day is every day.
Can you imagine the effect these judgments have on each one of us, all day, every day? How about focusing on a new concept - non-judgment day. Hmmm. Could we do it? Could we get through the day without judging?
Yes, we could kill ourselves or pass out from drinking a trough of tequila (or in my case, a bottlecap-full). Consciousness is better. And the problem I see is that people are not judging, not reasoning, not that they judge too much.
Personally, I frequently look at my behavior to judge whether I've been an ass, because if I can determine I have, I might be able to keep myself from being such an ass in the future.
Earned Wealth Versus Redistributed Wealth
In the WSJ, James K. Glassman reviews Thomas Geoghegan's book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
Early on, for example, he talks about an American expatriate living in Paris with her French boyfriend, a drummer in a band: "I wondered: If she went back to America, what would she do? First, she'd have to get a job. We don't subsidize the arts [the drummer gets state support]. It might be as a cashier. She'd have a no vacation. . . . No health insurance. Second, what if she had a kid? No paid maternity leave. No cornucopia of subsidies. Third, she'd have to pay for school. Unless she threw the child into the public schools. Fourth, no child care. No one to help her. Fifth, her rocker husband would have to work."
Tragic, simply tragic.
Europeans have traded leisure for wealth. The only problem with this formula is that Europe has tried to have its gâteau and eat it too. Creating wealth, if only to redistribute it, ultimately requires hard work. But Europe's welfare state, and its incentives for leisure, have continued to grow. (Never mind that America has subsidized Europe's domestic benefits for decades by bearing the lion's share of its defense costs.) Mr. Geoghegan portrays Europe as warmer, fuzzier, fairer, more intellectual, more healthy and less stressful than America. Perhaps so. But if Europe is a paradise, it is an evanescent one.I suspect that Mr. Geoghegan realizes this sad fact--the unsustainability of the whole arrangement. Near the end of this stay in Berlin, he meets an American friend, living in Germany, who asks him how his trip is going. "I've never been so happy in my whole life," Mr. Geoghegan replies. The only thing that makes him miserable, he says, is the thought that he has to go back to the U.S. and to a life of "work, work, work." "You'll poison the whole experience if you worry about that," his friend says. "Just enjoy it now. And when it's over, it's over."
From this exchange Mr. Geoghegan arrives at a way of thinking about the European model. "Maybe one day," he writes, "Europeans will have to work till they drop as we do in America. So? Then the Europeans should just enjoy it now. When it's over, it's over."
Who do they think pays for this lifestyle? (Well, for one, we do -- with our tax dollars to support our military, and with our relatively free-market system that provides drugs and innovations used by the Europeans.) The rest is paid by the Europeans who actually work for a living to support the parasites crawling to the state welfare agencies to collect their checks.
There's What's Constitutional And There's What's Decent
As you've surely heard, Muslims are trying to build what they claim is not a mega-mosque but an "Islamic center" (or, as Ezra Levant calls it, "a monument to jihad") near Ground Zero...the place where, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes, Osama Bin Laden's men followed the dictates of Islam and murdered 3,000 people for Allah:
"After 9/11," Hirsi Ali writes, "I found it impossible to ignore his claims that the murderous destruction of innocent (if infidel) lives is consistent with the Quran. I looked in the Quran, and I found it to be so."
Unfortunately, most people (including many "moderate Muslims") are ill-informed about Islam. As is made very clear in the Quran (which is to be taken literally as the word of god), Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian system commanding its followers to see to the the death or conversion of "the infidel" and the installation of "The New Caliphate" around the globe.
There are, however, many people in this country -- Muslim people -- who have read far, far less of the Quran than I have (if they've even read any, and not just chanted from it in Arabic without knowing what they're reading), and who are the Muslim equivalent of Christmas Christians. For them, Islam is a religion -- one they're quite in the dark about; for example, about the evil demands the Quran and Hadith make of Muslims in order for them to be considered good Muslims. (Murdering gays, and other such charming, Enlightenment values-inflected stuff.)
While it is prohibited by law to order the violent overthrow of our democratic state, which Islam does, and which its imams command with some regularity, it's a bit tricky as to whether Islam can be declassified as a religion, since there are many Muslims who don't really understand Islam's dictates, and who practice it as pretty much just a somewhat different flavor of god belief than that practiced in Judaism and Christianity.
So, while my almost daily studies of Islam since 9/11 have led me to understand that this system, with its terrifying facility to turn legions of ordinary people into mass murderers for Allah, is probably the greatest modern threat to Western freedoms and our lives...I am not for using government prohibitions to keep the Muslims from building the mosque but for using the strongest public relations pressure possible.
I don't like that, but we don't preserve the Constitution by ripping it up in a situation like this. What we can do, for starters, is inform people -- including the so-called "moderate Muslims" about what Islam is really about.
Sam Harris has a similar view, writing at The Daily Beast:
And honest reasoning declares that there is much that is objectionable--and, frankly, terrifying--about the religion of Islam and about the state of discourse among Muslims living in the West, and it is decidedly inconvenient that discussing these facts publicly is considered a sign of "intolerance" by well-intentioned liberals, in part because such criticism resonates with the actual bigotry of not-so-well-intentioned conservatives. I can see no remedy for this, however, apart from simply ramming the crucial points home, again and again.The first thing that all honest students of Islam must admit is that it is not absolutely clear where members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, al-Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, and other Muslim terrorist groups have misconstrued their religious obligations. If they are "extremists" who have deformed an ancient faith into a death cult, they haven't deformed it by much. When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad--not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels--are practices that are central to the faith. Granted, one path out of this madness might be for mainstream Muslims to simply pretend that this isn't so--and by this pretense persuade the next generation that the "true" Islam is peaceful, tolerant of difference, egalitarian, and fully compatible with a global civil society. But the holy books remain forever to be consulted, and no one will dare to edit them. Consequently, the most barbarous and divisive passages in these texts will remain forever open to being given their most plausible interpretations.
Thus, when Allah commands his followers to slay infidels wherever they find them, until Islam reigns supreme (2:191-193; 4:76; 8:39; 9:123; 47:4; 66:9)--only to emphasize that such violent conquest is obligatory, as unpleasant as that might seem (2:216), and that death in jihad is actually the best thing that can happen to a person, given the rewards that martyrs receive in Paradise (3:140-171; 4:74; 47:5-6)--He means just that. And, being the creator of the universe, his words were meant to guide Muslims for all time. Yes, it is true that the Old Testament contains even greater barbarism--but there are obvious historical and theological reasons why it inspires far less Jewish and Christian violence today. Anyone who elides these distinctions, or who acknowledges the problem of jihad and Muslim terrorism only to swiftly mention the Crusades, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, is simply not thinking honestly about the problem of Islam.
...The claim that the events of September 11, 2001, had "nothing to do with Islam" is an abject and destabilizing lie. This murder of 3,000 innocents was viewed as a victory for the One True Faith by millions of Muslims throughout the world (even, idiotically, by those who think it was perpetrated by the Mossad). And the erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory--and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice. This may not be reason enough for the supporters of this mosque to reconsider their project. And perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps there is some form of Islam that could issue from this site that would be better, all things considered, than simply not building another mosque in the first place. But this leads me to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: American Muslims should be absolutely free to build a mosque two blocks from ground zero; but the ones who should do it probably wouldn't want to.
Be sure to read Harris' entire piece. Here's a letter I also concurred with, published in The New York Times:
Re "A Monument to Tolerance" (editorial, Aug. 4), in support of a plan to build an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero: You say that the "attacks of Sept. 11 were not a religious event," but rather "mass murder." That is certainly true, but the unavoidable fact is that the mass murder was committed in the name of Islam.That being the case, it is at best an act of colossal insensitivity for the sponsors of an Islamic center to locate it two blocks from ground zero. One need harbor no ill will toward present-day Germany to feel that a German cultural center would be inappropriate across the road from Auschwitz.
Undoubtedly, the owners of the property have a "right" to use it for a place of worship. But having a legal right to act without a decent respect for the reasonable feelings of others doesn't make it right to do so.
I hope the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose this project will continue to exercise their right to condemn it, The Times's aspersions of bigotry notwithstanding.
Howard F. Jaeckel
New York
As for "tolerance" from Muslims toward those of other religions, check out how that's working for Coptic Christians in Egypt.
More from Pat Condell:
Condell commenter Tiberian gets it right:
9/11 was a religiously motivated attack that could not have happened without Islam and the teachings of the Koran. The hijackers were explicitly motivated by a literal reading of their religion's holy text and nothing else. Their primary grievance was the presence of infidels in Muslim territory, which is forbidden by the Prophet. The attack had nothing to do with economics, imperialism, colonialism, racism, poverty, ignorance, insanity or any of the other whitewashes people try to apply when they are uneasy blaming Islam. Saying they were unusual fanatics suggests their beliefs lay outside the mainstream of Muslim opinion, which is not the case. They were unusual only in their determination and expertise. 9/11 was an Islamic act of jihad carried out by devout Muslims to honour their Prophet and intimidate his enemies (read: all infidels). A building dedicated to Islam anywhere in proximity to Ground Zero is a sickening insult to the victims.
What I've Read, What I'm Reading
I loved behavioral economist Dan Ariely's fascinating and very smart book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Right now, in addition to all my required science reading, I'm reading Sam Lipsyte's novel, The Ask
Lipsyte's book is dark and lovely, as the old curl activator commercials would say, and the writing is "delightfully nasty," in the words of top Amazon reviewer E. Jacobs. I concur. Jacobs continues: "There is no part of this book that is uplifting except for the humor itself."
Halfway through, and really enjoying it. The spare prose is a big plus. Hate books with pages and pages of unnecessary words. A bit of prose I liked, from page 31:
"The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos."
Union Jobs Versus Children's Lives
From Ted Balaker at reason.tv:
UPDATE: My late friend Cathy Seipp for reason on when children with asthma aren't allowed to hang onto their inhalers in school:
My daughter always keeps emergency inhalers with instructions in her backpack, a fact kept on file in the school's office. Despite that, no one in charge had been quite aware of this when she had that asthma attack in the first grade; apparently, she'd been wheezing too badly to speak. "Jasmine knew where the medicine was," a teacher later explained, referring to another first grader who was often in trouble for digging around in other student's backpacks. Considering how the adults at the school had handled the situation, I probably would have been just as well off leaving them out of the loop and going over the instructions with the enterprising Jasmine.I was relieved when my daughter learned to read and proved she knew how to take her medicine by herself. Plus, unlike most adults, she was careful not to leave it locked in a hot car or sitting in the sun. One day when in the fifth grade, however, she was in tears when I picked her up from school. The teacher had yelled at her when she'd used the inhaler in class, claiming that she didn't really need it.
I spoke to Ivanhoe's then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I'd been "breaking the law" for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would "confiscate" it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. "So now what we need to do," he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, "is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law." My arguments about doctor's orders went nowhere. "When your daughter is at school," Principal Baker said, "I am the ultimate authority concerning her health."
That Robert De Niro soundbite from The Untouchables that Howard Stern likes to play -- "I want him dead! I want his family dead!" -- kept echoing in my head as I left the school office. But I'd heard enough misinformed pronouncements over the years from that school -- a jellyfish is a mollusk, "Indian" should be spelled with a small i -- to consider the possibility that the principal didn't know what he was talking about. So I went home and called the Los Angeles Unified School District's director of nursing. Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker's desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly.
The Medicalization Of Normal Emotion
Dr. Martin Seligman, at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference I attended in Anaheim a few years back, noted that after World War II, people's feelings needed to be pathologized, turned into disorders, in order for treatment to be paid for (in order, for example, for me to get a prescription for Ritalin for ADHD, which I don't consider to be a disorder; merely a reflection of an atypical brain -- better at some tasks than typical brains; worse at others).
@JeffreyGuterman, a Barry University professor of counseling I follow on Twitter, tweeted a New York Times piece by Allen Frances:
@JeffreyGuterman Good Grief: Proposed change to DSM would confuse normal bereavement with major depression by Allen Frances
Excerpt from Frances' piece here:
Suppose your spouse or child died two weeks ago and now you feel sad, take less interest and pleasure in things, have little appetite or energy, can't sleep well and don't feel like going to work. In the proposal for the D.S.M. 5, your condition would be diagnosed as a major depressive disorder.This would be a wholesale medicalization of normal emotion, and it would result in the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of people who would do just fine if left alone to grieve with family and friends, as people always have. It is also a safe bet that the drug companies would quickly and greedily pounce on the opportunity to mount a marketing blitz targeted to the bereaved and a campaign to "teach" physicians how to treat mourning with a magic pill.
It is not that psychiatrists are in bed with the drug companies, as is often alleged. The proposed change actually grows out of the best of intentions. Researchers point out that, during bereavement, some people develop an enduring case of major depression, and clinicians hope that by identifying such cases early they could reduce the burdens of illness with treatment.
This approach could help those grievers who have severe and potentially dangerous symptoms -- for example, delusional guilt over things done to or not done for the deceased, suicidal desires to join the lost loved one, morbid preoccupation with worthlessness, restless agitation, drastic weight loss or a complete inability to function. When things get this bad, the need for a quick diagnosis and immediate treatment is obvious. But people with such symptoms are rare, and their condition can be diagnosed using the criteria for major depression provided in the current manual, the D.S.M. IV.
What is proposed for the D.S.M. 5 is a radical expansion of the boundary for mental illness that would cause psychiatry to intrude in the realm of normal grief. Why is this such a bad idea? First, it would give mentally healthy people the ominous-sounding diagnosis of a major depressive disorder, which in turn could make it harder for them to get a job or health insurance.
Then there would be the expense and the potentially harmful side effects of unnecessary medical treatment. Because almost everyone recovers from grief, given time and support, this treatment would undoubtedly have the highest placebo response rate in medical history. After recovering while taking a useless pill, people would assume it was the drug that made them better and would be reluctant to stop taking it. Consequently, many normal grievers would stay on a useless medication for the long haul, even though it would likely cause them more harm than good.
The bereaved would also lose the benefits that accrue from letting grief take its natural course. What might these be? No one can say exactly. But grieving is an unavoidable part of life -- the necessary price we all pay for having the ability to love other people. Our lives consist of a series of attachments and inevitable losses, and evolution has given us the emotional tools to handle both.
Check out Seligman's books
Watch The Booby!
A new and fun way to be robbed at the ATM, via The Telegraph/UK:
Police in France are looking for two attractive female thieves who bared their breasts at a man at a cashpoint to distract him before stealing his money.As he stared at one, the other then withdrew 300 euros from his account before the pair fled with the money.
..."We would advise anyone withdrawing cash from a machine to focus on what they are doing and not allow themselves to be distracted, however attractive the view," the spokesman added.
A Spending Quiz From The Rebel Economist
Via Cato's Dan Mitchell, are these examples of government waste true or false?
More information at bankruptingamerica.org.
Tiny Little Trolls
A Boston Globe article about the Good Men Project founder Tom Matlack and his colleagues led to some tiny little anony-trolls making a bunch of nasty remarks about them. (None of them, it seems, have taken even five seconds to look at Matlack's site.) Here are a few examples:
allrightythen wrote:
The Good Men Project is the wrong name.
The Sensitive Metrosexual Project is more like it.
How about, The Sensitve Whimpy Guy Project.
Don't try and redefine our gender, we're quite happy with it as it was.
Rydal wrote:
When I need advice on masculinity from two metrosexuals who don't know enough to tuck in their shirts they'll be the first to know. I wouldn't hold my breath.I get so tired of hearing this "men need to express their feelings" crap. 90% of it is an excuse for whining. My father grew up in the depression, went to WWII and was pretty much the model of the regular guy. We've never had a problem expressing thoughts, feelings or love as he approaches the end of his life. It doesn't have to be a drama coached by some woman's vision of what is the way we should express ourselves.
Didn't this crap die with Robert Bly?
MACitz2008 wrote:
Why do these wimps need their own magazine?Just send them subscriptions to Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Family Circle magazines.....along with Cosmopolitan!
Matlack responded on his site. An excerpt:
The comments started out stupid, but innocuous: "Sex and sports will always be more interesting than 'when do I start calling myself a man?' essays. Oh, and by the way...if you wrote that piece, the answer is: not yet."Another commenter wrote: "A story about a normal man playing in a gay men's softball league? Puleeze!"
Okay--standard homophobic, idiotic comment.
But then they began to piss me off. "I think the editor's name in the picture says it all: Benoit Denizet-Lewis," wrote another. "This is the de-masculinization of the American man. 20 Yeas [sic] ago his name would have been Ben Lewis. I would entitle [sic] the magazine, Men Who Act and Think Like Women. Men are supposed to ignore and repress their feelings...be strong, tough it out, brush it off, and go have a beer. We express emotion through sports. What's going to happen when all these kids with hyphenated names start marrying?"
What small-minded Neanderthals would come up with that? Really--is it some kind of joke? (For the record, twenty years ago, Benoit's name was Benoit Denizet-Lewis.)
We publish everything from far right- to far left-wing men's stories about what it means to be a man in modern America--and that is the response?
I hate registering for newspaper sites, but I was compelled to register on the Globe's to post a response to all the tiny trolls. Here's what I wrote:
I'm a syndicated columnist who met Tom Matlack when we were on the same panel at LA Times Festival of Books. And actually, my book happens to be rather topical in this particular comments forum, as it's titled "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE."Tom Matlack is a humble guy and a really good man who's trying to do some good for boys and men. At LA Times Festival of Books, he laid bare before a big audience how he'd cheated on his wife and ended up in a church parking lot and nearly lost everything that mattered to him. That's a real man -- a guy who stands up before an audience, not just to spill all for spilling's sake, but because he wants to talk about the realities of being a man and how to be a better man.
Those of you attacking him here, when most of you probably haven't the slightest notion of what he's trying to do, what is it that motivates you? Had a bad day? Thought you'd use a virtual punching bag because it takes less effort than walking down and socking the one in the basement? People you attack on the Internet are real people with real feelings.
And most of you, those of you who are so brazen here...surely you wouldn't dream of walking up to Matlack -- or anybody -- in the grocery store and voicing your comments to him. Nor do you make your nasty little jabs in your own real name. (Note that I comment in my own real name -- it keeps me from saying something on the Internet I wouldn't say to somebody's face.)
You want something manly to rail against, rail against the way men are victims of paternity fraud and get a raw deal in custody battles all too often. Then again, no, don't just rail. Do something about it -- do what Tom Matlack is doing...taking an issue he cares about and getting a conversation going, and getting people to take action to be better men.
-Amy Alkon, nationally syndicated advice columnist; blogger at AdviceGoddess.com; author, "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society" (McGraw-Hill, 2010)
In the attacks on me, there was one afternoon that one anonoweenie sat at her computer leaving nasty remarks along the lines of "Why doesn't that awful Amy Alkon do something worthwhile like mentoring a kid?"
That comment was posted right as I was speaking to a class of 30 or so inner-city high school kids as part of a volunteer speaker program I created called "WIT: What It Takes," to demystify "making it." (And by "making it," I don't mean becoming a movie star or a model or basketball player, but becoming something realistic -- something like me: a middle-class person who, through hard work, has a job she likes and a modest but really nice life.)
It's Free Advice, But You Need To Put Actual Effort Into Asking For It
How not to ask for free advice? In three separate cellphone texts in a row sent as three separate e-mails:
SUBJECT: 1/3 How do put things into words. When i realize someone you think you love isn't real. And you fall for them hard but in the end. It notSUBJECT: 2/3
real for me to realize that until three weeks of my life is wasted. And the money issue gone to waste. Now my lesson learn from the hardSUBJECT: 3/3
truth. False love.
My response:
SUBJECT: Re: 3/3If you'd like free advice, you'll need to go to a computer and put actual effort into asking a question.
"I Have No Secrets"
Yes.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topic. One link, at most, per post, or your comment will leap into my spam folder. Want to post two links? Post two comments. Will try to post more blog items later.
Just Say Neigh!
Oh, the horror...the horror. Must see. From a tweet by @Fritinancy:
Pony sweater from @anthropologie. I vote neigh.
"Race, Wrongs, And Remedies"
That's the name of Amy Wax's book, arguing against the notion that the government should be the main force that provides help to the black community. John McWhorter reviews her book at TNR:
As she puts it, "That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work."Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the "brick wall" obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix--Wax is making no moral argument--but that they alone can fix.
A typical take on race has no room for stories such as this one. In 1987, a rich philanthropist in Philadelphia "adopted" 112 inner-city sixth-graders, most of them from broken homes. He guaranteed them a fully-funded education through college if the kids would refrain from drugs, unwed parenthood, and crime. He even provided tutors, workshops, after-school programs, summer programs, and counselors when trouble arose. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Thirteen years later, of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen were felons; the forty-five girls had sixty-three total children, and more than half had their babies before the age of eighteen. Crucially, this was not surprising: The reason was culture. These children had been nurtured in communities with different norms than those that reign in Scarsdale.
What this means, Wax points out, is that scrupulous recountings of the historical reasons for black problems are of no significant use in finding solutions. She notes:
The black family was far more stable 50 years ago, when conditions for blacks were far worse than they are today. Black out-of-wedlock births started to climb and marriage rates to fall around 1960, long after slavery was abolished and just as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Perhaps a more nuanced explanation for the recent deterioration is that the legacy of slavery made the black family more vulnerable to the cultural subversions of the 1960s. But what does this tell us that is useful today? The answer is: nothing.One of the most sobering observations made by Wax comes in the form of a disarmingly simple calculus presented first by Isabel Sawhill and Christopher Jencks. If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent. Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.
By 2005, the National Center For Health Statistics reported that the rate of out-of-wedlock births for blacks stood at almost 70 percent. As I've said before, black leaders like Jesse Jackson should be stigmatizing single motherhood in the black community.
I try to do that myself, when I speak at an inner-city high school about once a month during the school year, telling kids that all the stuff I'm showing them that they can do, if they just work hard, will not come to pass if they have a baby as babies. Plus, they'll surely end up raising their child in poverty.
Well, I talk to kids once, for an hour and a half, in one of their high school classes. I want to get my volunteer speaker program to be established in schools across the country, from the youngest grades on, but that hasn't happened yet. Also, it's just one tiny drop in the bucket, and really no substitute for a mommy and a daddy in the home.
Per the Weekly Standard link above, from a story by Duncan Currie:
The connection between family breakdown and child poverty is well established. In a 1991 American Sociological Review article, David J. Eggebeen and Daniel T. Lichter estimated that if black family composition had remained constant from 1960 to 1988, the black child poverty rate in 1988 would have been 28.4 percent instead of 45.6 percent. If black family composition had remained constant from 1980 to 1988, Eggebeen and Lichter said, the black child poverty rate in 1988 would have been 40 percent instead of 45.6 percent."This implies that changing black family structure in the 1980s accounted for roughly 65 percent of the increase in official poverty among black children," they noted. "Black family shifts in the 1980s also accounted for 51 percent of the increase in deep poverty, and about 90 percent of the growth in relative child poverty." Family breakdown also had an intensifying effect on the child poverty rates of whites, but it "had a much greater effect on the child poverty rates of blacks."
Link to Wax's book: Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century
Share Link Is Under Construction
It's not picking up the permalinks yet, just the main link to my blog. Sorry about that. Gregg's working on it and should have it up soon! (Welcome to Movable Type hell!)
Every Woman Wants Her Lloyd Dobler
I'm thinking about how a guy can win a woman back.
Women get a lot of their ideas about what romance should be from movies. I'm writing a response to a guy who got freaked out and broke up with his girlfriend, and I think the bedroom window/boombox scene from "Say Anything," is the ideal or an ideal for women in romantic gestures from men. (Not that he should necessarily do that, as he lives in San Francisco, and would surely wake a bunch of neighbors.)
For those not familiar with the movie, that's the scene where John Cusack, as Lloyd Dobler, tries to win his girlfriend back by standing under her bedroom window, raising a boombox over his head, and playing Peter Gabriel's "In Her Eyes."
Many or most women love extravagant romantic gestures from their boyfriends and husbands. A guy who breaks up with a woman probably needs to resort to some (along with showing that he understands where he went wrong, and showing remorse) to have any hope of getting her back.
Have you ever won somebody back or been won back? Know of any super-romantic gestures that worked -- or backfired?
"That Is Not Okay, What You Asked Me!"
Welcome to Entitlementville, the Mommy & Me version!
Late afternoon at the neighborhood coffeehouse: Relaxing ambience, music playing softly, sun streaming in, people reading the paper and books, a girl on a laptop.
And then, a child, about two, with his mother and her friend, starts bang-bang-BANGING! a plastic cup on the table at the neighborhood coffeehouse...repeatedly...for several minutes.
Because parents who are asked to actually, you know, parent, tend to get defensive, I make a point of trying to not set the defensiveness off. I went over and smiled at the mother and gently asked, "Would you mind not letting your child bang the cup like that on the table?" I think I added something about wanting to hear the nice music...
The child's mother just stared at me. The woman's friend looked at me like I'd just squatted and used the floor by her chair as a toilet.
"Is there a problem?" I asked. They just kept staring.
On the bright side, the mother did stop her kid from banging. Unfortunately, it seemed he had only two activities he'd mastered, banging on the table and howling at the top of his lungs. When he started howling about a minute later, they packed up. (Phew!)
On their way out, about five minutes after the banging stopped, the two came over to me and the friend told me how un-"okay" I was for what I asked...then scurried out before I could really speak.
Oh, sorry, because you used your diaphragm as a frisbee, the rest of us should have our reading or quiet enjoyment of the coffeehouse punctuated with the kid's bang-bang-banging on a table?
Would we let that go if an adult was doing it?
Oh, and P.S. What's not okay is the fact that I had to ask.
Rapists, Muggers, And Thieves
Don't be discriminating against them next time you're hiring. The government may charge you with having racist hiring policies. And no, I'm not kidding.
Sam Hananel writes for the AP that companies using credit reports or criminal records to screen out job applicants may be breaking anti-discrimination laws as the government increases its scrutiny of hiring policies that hurt blacks and Hispanics:
A blanket refusal to hire workers based on criminal records or credit problems can be illegal if it has a disparate impact on racial minorities, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency enforces the nation's employment discrimination laws."Our sense is that the problem is snowballing because of the technology allowing these checks to be done with a fair amount of ease," said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC.
With millions of adults having criminal records -- anything from underage drinking to homicide -- a growing number of job seekers are having a rough time finding work.
As are people with squeaky clean ones. Who would you rather hire?
Sure, you can choose to give somebody a chance, but being forced to by the government?
Adrienne Hudson ... a single mother ... was fired from her new job as a bus driver at First Transit in Oakland, Calif., when the company found out she had been convicted seven years earlier for welfare fraud.Hudson, 44, is fighting back with a lawsuit alleging the company's hiring practice discriminates against black and Latino job seekers, who have arrest and conviction rates far greater than whites. A spokesman for First Transit said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
"People make mistakes," said Hudson, who is black, "but when they correct their mistake, they should not be punished again outside of the court system."
via Patterico
One In Twelve
One in 12 babies born in the USA in 2008 were born to illegal immigrants, according to a new study. Miriam Jordan writes in the WSJ:
Amid a heated national debate over illegal immigration, some Republican politicians have been calling for changes to the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," in order to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to unlawful residents.Late last month, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham announced his support for reconsidering automatic U.S. citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants. He said the status quo enticed people to enter the country illegally and have children to qualify for U.S. benefits.
Under U.S. law, children have to wait until they reach the age of 21 before they can petition for permanent legal residency for their parents.
...Proponents of amending the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in 1868, say it was intended to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves after the Civil War, not the offspring of illegal immigrants. Their proposals are expected to appeal to conservative Republican voters as immigration emerges as a central issue in November's elections.
GOP opponents of repealing birthright citizenship say it undermines the party's electoral prospects among Hispanics, the nation's largest minority and fastest-growing group. Generally, Democrats are strongly opposed to repeal.
Do we continue to reward lawbreaking with a seriously big prize -- American citizenship? This seems like idiocy to me, especially considering the hoops people who have to immigrate legally must go through.
Oh, and on the Democratic note, "Harry Reid doesn't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be Republican."
Gays Get The Death Penalty Under Islam
Gays get the death penalty under Islam, per Mohammed's wishes in the Hadith: "Whomever you find committing the sin of the people of Lut, kill them, both the one who does it and the one to whom it is done." (The "people of Lut" are sodomites)
Oh, that death penalty thing goes if they're just teenagers, too:
Here's more from the Ask A Scholar section at IslamOnline.net:
Name of Questioner Ahmad - United KingdomTitle
Death Fall as Punishment for HomosexualityQuestion
Respected scholars of Islam, As-Salamu `Alaykum wa Rahamtu Allah wa Barakatuh. I have read in a newspaper that an Iranian man who was convicted of raping and killing his 16-year-old nephew is to be executed by being thrown off a cliff in sack; and if the man survives the fall down a rocky precipice, he will be hanged. What is your comment on this issue?
Date
22/Jul/2002
Topic
Sexual perversity
Answer:
Wa`alykum As-Salaam Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear brother in Islam, we do really appreciate your question, which shows how far you are interested in getting yourself well-aquatinted with Islam and its teachings. May Allah bless your efforts in the pursuit of knowledge!
First of all, it should be clear that this man committed two heinous crimes: 1) homosexuality, and 2) murder. Each crime is sufficient to warrant death penalty.
...As to the issue of how the homosexual person is judged in an Islamic State, the Companions of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him differed among themselves on this issue, and this led to different views maintained by Muslim Jurists. For example, in the Hanafi school of thought, the homosexual is punished through harsh beating, and if he/she repeats the act, death penalty is to be applied. As for the Shafi`i school of thought, the homosexual receives the same punishment of adultery (if he/she is married) or fornication (if not married). This means, that if the homosexual is married, he/she is stoned to death, while if single, he/she is whipped 100 times. Hence, the Shafi`i compares the punishment applied in the case of homosexuality with that of adultery and fornication, while the Hanafi differentiates between the two acts because in homosexuality, the anus (a place of impurity) may also be involved while in adultery (and fornication), the penis/vagina (which are reproductive parts) are involved. Some scholars hold the opinion that the homosexual should be thrown from a high building as a punishment for his crime, but other scholars maintain that he should be imprisoned until death.
Based on the above fact, we can conclude that, the judge is invested with full discretion as to whether this man is to be thrown from a high place or not, as a punishment for his crime. However, if the man survives death fall, the judge has the right to sentence him to death."
Christopher Elliott Quotes From My Book On MSBNC
Way cool! I've been a fan of travel columnist Elliott for years. Here's his story, "Plane Angry," and his quote from I SEE RUDE PEOPLE:
When JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater dramatically walked off the job -- jumped actually -- he became a poster boy for all that's wrong with air travel today."It's no secret that the air travel experience -- which includes the TSA experience, delays, cancellations -- is not as comfortable as it could be," said Geoff Freeman, the executive vice president of the U.S. Travel Association, which represents the American tourism industry. Research by the association suggests that 41 million people are avoiding air travel every year because of the so-called "hassle factor."
Those hassles, from crowded planes to tightened security to fees for checked baggage, have made air travel an intolerably bad experience, which is why passengers are lashing out.
"Air travel has become like flying below Greyhound ... in the baggage compartment under the bus," says Amy Alkon, author of the book "I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society." "There are those who still find coach seats adequately roomy -- mainly small-boned children under eight, and armless, legless midgets. Better hope you have one of the latter seated next to you, and not some 300-pound man who wordlessly annexes half of your seat like he's Germany and you're Poland."
Many airline insiders say flight attendants get no respect, and Slater's case is arguably a direct result of that. The passenger involved in the altercation apparently ignored the crew member's instructions to sit down, which is a federal offense.
UPDATE: Per Gawker, Slater seems to be a good egg.
HOPA They Keep Calling You That
Very fake looking post of very cute girl who appears to quit her job with signs on dry erase board -- and supposedly gets all tweaked that her boss accidentally let her overhear his call in which he called her a HOPA (a HOt Piece of Ass).
My father's advice, paraphrased: Worry when they stop calling you hot.
UPDATE: Boring reveal. Yes, it's a hoax.
The Green Economy Is Anything But
Joel Kotkin writes at City Journal on California's green economy and the effects of draconian environmental rules (like standards for being "carbon neutral") on the economy as a whole:
Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Time, for example, that venture capital, high tech, and, above all, "green" technology were already laying the foundation of a miraculous economic turnaround in California. Though there are certainly opportunities in new energy-saving technologies, this is an enthusiasm that requires some serious curbing. One recent study hailing the new industry found that California was creating some 10,000 green jobs annually before the recession. But that won't heal a state that has lost 700,000 jobs since then.At the same time, green promoters underestimate the impact of California's draconian environmental rules on the economy as a whole. Take the state's Global Warming Solutions Act, which will force any new development to meet standards for being "carbon-neutral." It requires the state to reduce its carbon-emissions levels by 30 percent between 1990 and 2020, virtually assuring that California's energy costs, already among the nation's highest, will climb still higher. Aided by the nominally Republican governor, the legislation seems certain to slow any future recovery in the suffering housing, industrial, and warehousing sectors and to make California less competitive with other states. Costs of the act to small businesses alone, according to a report by California State University professors Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian, will likely cut gross state product by $182 billion over the next decade and cost some 1.1 million jobs.
It's sad to consider the greens such an impediment to social and economic health. Historically, California did an enviable job in traditional approaches to conservation--protecting its coastline, preserving water and air resources, and turning large tracts of land into state parks. But much like the public-sector unions, California's environmental movement has become so powerful that it feels free to push its agenda without regard for collateral damage done to the state's economy and people. With productive industry in decline and the business community in disarray, even the harshest regulatory policies often meet little resistance in Sacramento.
In the Central Valley, for instance, regulations designed to save certain fish species have required 450,000 acres to go fallow. Unemployment is at 17 percent across the Valley; in some towns, like Mendota, it's higher than 40 percent. Rick Wartzman, director of the Peter Drucker Institute, has described the vast agricultural region around Fresno as "California's Detroit," an area where workers and businesspeople "are fast becoming a more endangered species than Chinook salmon or delta smelt."
Three Things You Don't Know About Islam
Very clear and interesting explanation of a few essential points:
Where The Grills Are
At Amazon, on sale
Thank you to all who support this site, and my writing, in the downturn in newspapers by buying through my Amazon links and through Amy's Mall!
Turn The Other Ass Cheek
Hilariously, in the wake of churchgoers protesting at their strip club, strippers turned the tables and protested at the church. Chris Morran writes at Consumerist:
For the last four years, the pastor at New Beginnings has led a protest outside the Foxhole every weekend. Beyond just voicing their disapproval of the strip joint, the church members also videotape the license plates of the bar's patrons and then post the info online.So the crew at the Foxhole decided to give the churchgoers a taste of their own medicine, sitting outside the church in skimpy outfits and cooling each other down with Super Soakers as they grilled up burgers.
They also held signs with Bible quotes like:
Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing
Revelations 22:11: He that is unjust, let him be unjust still...The pastor says the protests outside his church of only served to confirm the churchgoers' feelings. "They have now seen the evil firsthand," he says. "This has just made us stronger."
The Foxhole owner sees things differently. "They're just mad," he said, "because their wives won't let them come to my club."
The fun continues in this Holly Zachariah story in the Columbus Dispatch.
The Reign In Spain
About Michelle Obama's summer vacaction, I agree with The Atlantic's Megan McArdle:
I don't think there's anything wrong with Michelle Obama vacationing in Spain; they have the money, so why not? But I agree with Doug Mataconis that, while there's nothing actually wrong with it, it's really quite unbelievably politically stupid. When we're in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, it's not a good idea to take a luxury vacation that most of your countrymen could never possibly afford in the best of times, at considerable taxpayer expense for the security, in a foreign country. Whether or not people should resent it, they will, and his party's already in big enough trouble without reinforcing the Red State sense that this administration is full of out-of-touch elites. I'm astonished that Obama's advisors gave this trip the green light.
And that's the disturbing thing. This is the White House. A junior publicist at a tiny P.R. firm in East Nowhere would know better.
Short memories, too, in the White House. July, 24, from the Chicago Sun-Times, the President says he can relate to ordinary Americans' financial struggle:
President Obama says he can relate to the plight of Americans striving in the struggling economy to pay bills while saving for their kids' education.
Psst! Let me know when I can cut back by going to a luxury hotel in Spain instead of putting off going to the dentist.
What's The Opposite Of A Raise?
A Decline? Whatever it is, we should be giving it to Federal workers. Dennis Cauchon writes at USA Today that Federal workers earn twice their public counterparts (and don't forget the pensions):
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.
The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.
Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.
"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Not to anybody who's making that kind of money while so many of the rest of us are struggling.
In short, what the data show:
•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.
via @Cato
I'd Rather Be Slowly Eaten By Fire Ants
Here's some weekend fun I saw advertised on a coffee shop bulletin board:
When Big, Hairy Government Met Sally
There's a cost to all these elected numpties voting in all these things that go on the national tab, and it isn't paid in Monopoly money. New Jersey-based Bogen Communications president Michael P. Fleischer writes in the WSJ about an employee he's calling Sally (not her real name):
When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally's pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits. Bottom line: Governments impose a 33% surtax on Sally's job each year.
"Marriage Is A Fundamental Right"
Where, in the Constitution, is the right to same-sex marriage? The same place as the right to interracial marriage. Plaintiffs' lawyer Ted Olson speaks, most eloquently, in an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace:
UPDATE - This comment below, from lovelysoul, is so right-on that I have to post it as part of the blog item:
He makes a strong case that marriage is, indeed, a constitutional right. If not, interracial marriage wouldn't have been protected. There is simply no just reason why any of us should seek to discriminate and prohibit gays from marrying the person of their choice. You may not like it, just as you may not like interracial marriage, but you can't prohibit it. We all get to choose ONE ADULT person (at a time) to marry. That's fair across the board. Equal protection.It does not open up the case for polygamy or marrying children - or all the other fearmongering suggestions - because that isn't allowed for ANY of us. The main issue is that, as it stands, some of us have special rights and privileges, while others don't. That disparity cannot stand.
Flunk And Flee!
Obama's econ gurus are scurrying like cockroaches when the lights come on. Julie Mason writes at SFExaminer.com:
The shakeup in President Obama's economic team comes at a critical point for the White House, creating more uncertainty as the economy slumps and midterm elections approach."It does make one suspicious that some of these senior economic advisers know the economy may go back into recession and they are escaping before it's even more obvious," said Chris Edwards, a tax policy expert at the Cato Institute.
Christina Romer, Obama's top economic adviser, resigned last week on the eve of a jobs report showing sluggish growth and no change in the nation's 9.5 percent unemployment rate.
Romer's departure follows a decision by Peter Orszag to step down as Obama's director of management and budget.
The two were the highest profile economic advisers at the White House, outside of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who raised eyebrows last week with an op-ed in the New York Times touting economic recovery.
Obama, who appears increasingly flummoxed by the slow economic turnaround despite massive government investment, asked for more patience for his policies to show results.
Romer claims she's leaving so her kid can attend high school in California. Hmm, this wasn't considered when taking the job? She's also going back to the world of academia, where repeatedly failing to come up with practical solutions is often the express bus to tenure.
Do Traffic Signs And Signals Make The Roads More Dangerous?
Stossel writes at reason:
It ... turns out that government roads often run more smoothly when drivers have more, not less, freedom.This sounds paradoxical. Politicians often sneer at libertarians, saying, "You want to get rid of traffic lights?!" Well, yes, actually. In some cases, traffic moves better and more safely when government removes traffic lights, stop signs, even curbs.
It's Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous" order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing. The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings--to pedestrians and other cars--rather than just to signs and signals. It demonstrates the "Peltzman Effect" (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.
In Drachten, Holland, lights and signs were removed from an intersection handling about 30,000 cars a day. Average waiting times dropped from 50 seconds to less than 30 seconds. Accidents dropped from an average of eight per year to just one.
On Kensington High Street in London, after pedestrian railing and other traffic markers were removed, accidents dropped by 44 percent.
"What these signs are doing is treating the driver as if they were an idiot," says traffic architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie. "If you do so, drivers exhibit no intelligence."
More at Wilson Quarterly, by Tom Vanderbilt:
A year after the change, the results of this "extreme makeover" were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection--buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example--but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals--of the electronic or hand variety--more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman's ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he "would have changed it immediately."Not surprisingly, these kinds of counterintuitive findings made news. But often, the reports reduced Monderman's theories to a simple libertarian dislike for regulation of any kind. Granted, he did occasionally hum this tune. "When government takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can't develop their own values anymore," he told me. "So when you want people to develop their own values in how to cope with social interactions between people, you have to give them freedom." But his philosophy consisted of more than a simple dislike of constraints. He was questioning the entire way we think about traffic and its place in the landscape.
From a commenter under Vanderbilt's piece:
New York
I had the unique experience of picking up a rental car in Manhattan the day after the blackout in August 2003. Being a visitor to New York, I was rather nervous about driving in Manhattan, a city where streets seem to be dominated by cabs with their own set of rules.The whole purpose of renting the car was to drive up to Boston with family for a wedding. When I picked up the car from a Upper East Side rental place, the first thing I noticed was that the traffic signals were not working at all.
Much to my surprise, as I navigated around central park to Columbus circle, where we were staying, the traffic was surprisingly light, and the cars that were moving about the area were doing so at a very moderate pace. There was eye contact (including smiling and waving) between drivers at intersections, directional signals were being used, and it was one of the more civil and pleasant driving experiences I've ever had in my life.
Of course, once we made it to I-95 going north, it was a traffic jam of nearly biblical proportions, and it took us nearly 7 hours to get to boston (about 200 miles). Ultimately though, my Manhattan driving experience was nothing less than lovely, and I don't think I ever want or need to do it again.
Posted by: TomH | 8/29/08
Black Conservatives On Spit, Sherrod And The Tea Party
What do you see and hear?
Jack Cashill writes at American Thinker:
I checked with my source on the scene, Greg Farrell, to get a timeline on the passage of the Black Caucus members from the Cannon Building to the Capitol and back. According to Farrell, they left the Cannon Building about 2:30 PM on March 20th and returned about 3:15 PM. He had no reason to exaggerate.I asked because at 4:51 that same day, McClatchy reporter William Douglas posted an article on the McClatchy website with the inflammatory headline, "Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at black congressman."
In other words, Douglas, with an attributed assist from James Rosen, managed to interview representatives John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver, and Barney Frank, compose an 800-word article, and have it edited and formatted for posting within a 90-minute window.
During that same 90 minutes, Douglas would have received and incorporated a press release from Emanuel Cleaver, making the easily disproved claim that he had "been spat upon and that Capitol Police had arrested his assailant."
Only two possibilities present themselves, neither of them good: Douglas had started writing this enormously consequential article in advance and/or he assembled it with a reckless indifference to the facts. A simple call to the Capitol Police would have killed the spitting story and a review of the video footage would have thrown the screaming of "nigger" by multiple "protestors" into such serious doubt that no responsible paper would have printed it.
There's No Such Thing As A Free Ride
Not to the guy who's giving them, anyway. Bob Gough writes in the Quincy News of a guy who was trying to stop drunks from driving by offering them free rides home (although he apparently accepts donations):
The operator of the Courtesy Rides service which picks up people who choose not to drink and drive has been arrested again for violating the city ordinance which was created to stop him.Jonathon Schoenakase, 1711 Melview Road, was arrested at 1:30 Saturday morning after he picked up a plain clothes Quincy Police officer from the Phoenix night club. The arrest was made after Schoenakase drove to the 48th and Harrison area and he was released on a notice to appear.
Lt. Jason Simmons says the sting was conducted following complaints about Schoenakase's continuing operations from "other licensed operators".
Yes, you read it right -- the "sting."
Laws and ordinances should protect people from legitimate danger.
What's the danger here, that the other taxi drivers won't make as much money?
And if you live in Quincy and drive a drunk friend home, or maybe just some drunk girl you met at the bar, and she presses a little money on you for gas, are you breaking the law?
Related post -- The Unlicensed Lemonade Stand. As I wrote there, pertaining to both the dangers of unlicensed car services for drunks and 7-year-old lemonade dealers, "How about it's my job to use my brain, decide if there's a risk, and decide if I'm willing to take it?"
Easy Intelligence Test
Are you a politician? Yes? Then you're probably going to vote like a drooling idiot.
Witness the latest from Megan McArdle on "Housing Insanity":
If you want to know why us libertarian types are skeptical of the government's ability to prevent housing market bubbles, well, I give you Exhibit 9,824: the government's new $1000 down housing program.No, really. The government has apparently decided, in its infinite wisdom, that what the American economy really needs is more homebuyers with no equity.
Shocking Salaries
What we pay public employees in the city of LA. Via RonKayeLA, KPCC scoops the City Controller, who recently released the salaries, with a better salaries database -- searchable and better organized. In Ron's words:
In just a few seconds, you can find out that 81 city employees are paid over $200,000 and 243 over $150,000.It's nice work if you can get it and you clearly don't have to work that hard, obsiously.
Play around with KPCC's database by salary, position and department and report back what you find interesting.
The Unlicensed Lemonade Stand
The latest idiocy from the too many laws, too much stupidity in enforcement department is reported by Scott Hensley on NPR.org:
Drinking lemonade from a little girl's unlicensed stand is a health risk we'll take any day of the week.One girl's entrepreneurial dream is a health inspector's poison.
But we would have been out of the luck last week in Portland, Ore. Some knuckle-headed health inspectors shut down the entrepreneurial dream of 7-year-old Julie Murphy.The little girl was selling glasses of lemonade for 50 cents a pop at a local art fair. Her crime? She didn't have a $120 temporary restaurant license, the Oregonian reports. A clipboard-toting health inspector told the girl and her mom that they'd have to shut down the stand or get nailed with a $500 fine.
"I understand the reason behind what they're doing and it's a neighborhood event, and they're trying to generate revenue," Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department, told the paper. "But we still need to put the public's health first."
How big a risk was Julie's rogue lemonade concession? Well, there was a reported outbreak of stomach flu at a Florida shrimp festival in 2007, when at least 48 people got sick after drinking lemonade sold at stand run by a bunch of high school cheerleaders.
How about it's my job to use my brain, decide if there's a risk, and decide if I'm willing to take it?
Back End
They say you never see it in Hollywood. Apparently, they're wrong.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Officer Shot By Two Scumbags...And Lives
Dashcam footage of the officer being shot, and the officer talking about what happened. Do you think these scumbags are in the country legally? If so, you would be wrong.
We are paying millions to keep Mexican and other Central American illegal alien criminals in our prisons. We should pop them on buses and send them directly to Mexico or their country of origin, so they can pay the cost of feeding and caging them.
Joe Sharkey Went To Brazil And All He Got Was This Lousy Lawsuit
This variety of libel tourism preys on the writer/professional traveler. This time, the Brazilians are going after New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey. Interesting piece on HuffPo by Blake Fleetwood, a former New York Times/Daily News writer, about what happened after travel writer Sharkey, whose work I like, wrote about his near-death experience on a flight over the Brazilian jungle:
Sharkey is being sued for $280,000 (which he will certainly lose, since he is not defending the suit in Brazilian Courts) after which he will most likely be indicted for the criminal charge of causing "dishonor to Brazil" -- an extraditable offense -- which might result in several years jail time in Brazil. If they can grab him. He has no plans to go to Brazil anytime soon.But Sharkey is nervous, he feels abandoned and left hanging in the wind by most journalist organizations.
Despite 14 years of writing for The New York Times --- his business travel column appears every Tuesday -- he is technically a freelance writer and is not being represented by the Times' lawyers. He was on a freelance assignment for another magazine. He also feels that many press organizations and journalism magazines basically treated him like a pariah, an insignificant freelancer.
...Fortunately for Sharkey, last week the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bi-partisan bill that protects U.S. writers and bloggers from defamation suits in countries that have less robust protections of free speech than in the United States. Foreign libel judgments would not be enforced unless they conformed to U.S. standards.
On July 27th, the House of Representatives passed the same bipartisan legislation authored by Senators Partrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) which the President is expected to sign shortly.
The bill known as "Rachel's Law" was named after Rachel Ehrenfeld, a U.S. writer who was sued in England by a Saudi billionaire that she had accused of financing terrorist groups. The British court ruled against her by default, ordering her to pay $230,000 in damages and legal fees.
Ehrenfeld's book was never published or sold in Britain. It is a suit that never could have been filed, much less won, in the U.S.
Now Sharkey and Ehrenfeld will at least be safe in the U.S. But the new law will not protect them outside of the country, which will surely hamper their ability to travel and practice their professions.
The Talibanization Of Childhood In Britain
Muslim parents are denying their children numerous simple childhood pleasures in the name of Islam, writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Daily Mail, like drawing pictures, taking music lessons, having a teddy bear or a pet:
How about the daughter of a relative of mine, who was having a birthday-party and invited all the girls in her class. The Muslim pupils organised a boycott because she had invited 'unbelievers'.In one secondary school, a talented Muslim pupil was cast in the leading role in the George Bernard Shaw play Caesar And Cleopatra.
Her parents didn't seem to object, and all was going well until the dress rehearsal, when she turned up at school with bruises on her face, crying and refusing to go on stage.
The local imam had summoned her family and warned them that acting in plays was 'worse than whoredom'.The father, an engineer, refused to be cowed, but the mother, scared of what people would say, beat her daughter and threatened to take her out of school (which she duly did).
In my role as chair of the BMSD, I am advising young people in such hard situations.
Take 13-year-old Femida, who lives in a refuge with her Jordanian mother, a wedding singer.Her father, a convert to Islam, had become more and more authoritarian.
Mother and daughter fled after he took a hammer to the CD player and TV set, and tried to throttle his wife.
'He was screaming that he wanted to kill my voice so I could be a good Muslim,' says Femida.
...Free-thinking Muslims have lacked courage to oppose what is going on, while politicians do nothing for cynical reasons - best, they think, not to antagonise possible voters.
Meanwhile, the liberal position is to let people be and do what they wish within the law.
BSMD is an acronym for British Muslims for Secular Democracy.
Ben at Eye On Islam vets Ms. Alibhai-Brown's piece, which he calls "a rare note of Muslim protest against the 'extremists'":
Ms Alibhai-Brown could have admitted that Islam itself, at least as it has been institutionalised by the most respected Islamic scholarly and spiritual authorities throughout history, is a totalitarian belief system that contributes to the disturbing trends she outlines in her article, and articulated a plea for a grass-roots reform of Islam that would eradicate its political character and reject any assumptions - even long-held, cherished ones - that contradict modern constructs of democracy, freedom and human rights. But she does not do this. Instead, she blames Wahhabism - a "version" of Islam which has only existed since the eighteenth century, long after the aforementioned totalitarian impulse was institutionalised in the Islamic world.She ignores other things, as well. She ignores the Qur'anic and hadithic teachings that are used to justify the banning of music and art, as well as domestic abuse and honour killing. The problem is that she ultimately has no valid explanation as to why so many Muslims end up becoming "radicals" when Islam is supposed to be a Religion of Peace, and she has no clear method in mind for making this trend change. That is sad, and while I wish her well, I also have little hope that she will succeed in modernising Islam when she fails to acknowledge where the problems are coming from in the first place.
Rude People In The 'X' Zone
Did an interesting hour with syndicated radio host Rob McConnell, on his 'X' Zone show. In case you didn't hear it on a station near you (it runs on stations across the U.S. and Canada), you can get it three ways:
On iTunes.
As an 'X' Zone podcast.
On The 'X' Zone Jukebox.
My book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, is available for only $11.53 at Amazon. Do pick your copy up today! (And maybe even get copies for all the rude people in your life. Not to worry -- they won't think you think they're rude; rude people always think it's all the other people who are.)
Can You Tell If Somebody's Going To Be, Um, Energetic In Bed?
(As opposed to just lying there like a big old trout.) If you can tell, how? Loving food? Showing lust for life? Being a physical person and liking to dance? I think those things tend to be indicators that a person's got a hungry personality and that they'll be motivated to move and groove in bed. Your thoughts?
P.S. I'm talking about a person you've just met, and are maybe on a date with, or are contemplating dating.
"Wearable" And "Art" Don't Usually Go Together
People pretend they do, and you always see "wearable art" advertised in one of those glossy mags you get in a hotel, but the truth is, clothing is usually either wearable or sculptural/artistic, and not both. And if it is truly sculptural, that usually means it makes you look like you're wearing a big, expensive garbage bag.
This dress -- and other designs -- by LA-based Sarajevan emigré, Naida Begeta, are exceptions. From her line Kao Pao Shu: 
I haven't been shopping lately at all thanks to the economy, but when I do, I buy stuff on eBay, cheap; at designer resale stores on the 75 percent off rack, or at thrift stores.
There are only really three designers I've bought new clothes or things from, or wanted to, and the thing they have in common is that they do create actually wearable art.
The first was in New York, hat designer Amy Downs. Here I am in one of her designs, made out of the plastic mesh on cheap baseball hats and ribbon and net. I have a few of these Amy Downs "Easter bonnets," too. Unfortunately, it's really hard to convey from these photos how beautiful and clever and wonderful her hats are in person.
The next designer is Ralph Kemp, young Paris designer who was doing his own wonderful, affordable, line of sculptural clothes, but seems to have left the business -- or maybe is designing for somebody else. Great guy, as well. I'm wearing a Ralph Kemp jacket here -- polyurethaned cotton that looks and feels like leather but can be washed in a washing machine. You're missing the cool, sculptural sleeves, notched so they stand out in sort of chunky triangles on the arms. But, the jacket fits beautifully, and is beautifully cut, and I bought it on sale for maybe 120 eu.
Last night, I went to a party at Begeta's design studio in Santa Monica. My friend Laurie Pike, fashion editor of LA Magazine, wrote about Begeta's line, Kao Pao Shu a few months ago. I was so struck by the jacket in the photo that I did something I haven't done in years -- tore the page out of the magazine, and ended up sending the designer a fan letter (via e-mail), which is probably how I ended up getting invited to the party. (Parties I go to typically have people yelling at each other about politics at them.)
The designer is very un-LA, really sweet, and even admired my outfit. (I was just wearing my usual -- evening dress skirt, cropped leather jacket bought for $19.99 off eBay, huge tacky glass "gem" earrings in chartreuse and a matching scarf with a little bit of sculpture to it...how I dress every day to go out and write in a cafe, pick up the mail, etc.)
I'm working like mad on my next two books, and when I get an advance for my next one, I'm going to get one of her jackets, and one of her extraordinary ribbon-sculpture bags. Here are a few jackets on her site. Like the one Naida is wearing in the LA Mag shot, I like the ribbon'y ones that fit close to the body. In satin, especially. Yum.
(Okay, boys, it's safe to come back to the blog.)
And no, in case you're interested, of course Gregg didn't have to go. I called him when I left the party and was walking back to my car, and he was home, falling asleep dreaming of explosions on the sun.
Sherrods Accused Of Exploiting Workers
Ron Wilkins is a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is an Africana Studies professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Wilkins bio on a piece on Andrew Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's Counterpunch notes his history with the Sherrod's New Communities, Inc.:
In 1974, under an assumed name, he hired-on at New Communities Inc. The Emergency Land Fund, an Atlanta-based black land retention organization, which shared oversight responsibility for NCI's progress, wanted to know the basis for NCI's continued poor performance. The author's secondary purpose was to develop agricultural skills. For his role in organizing NCI's workers, management eventually fired him from his $40 per week position, evicted him from the rent-free shack on NCI property and orchestrated his arrest, on bogus charges, by FBI agents and Lee County, Georgia Sheriff's deputies in the midst of an NCI labor protest. The charges were later dropped.
Wilkins writes, from his personal experience, of exploitation by the Sherrods of black workers -- and not just black workers but black child laborers in the 1970s, and corroborates this by including a link to a PDF from a United Farm Workers newspaper from 1974. His link doesn't go to the exact paper, so I've picked up the permalink. Scroll down to the Children Farm Workers Strike Black Co-op on left (on page 2). Here's a screen shot I took of it.
An excerpt from Wilkins' Counterpunch piece:
Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it's no illusion; this is fact.The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod's supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers-many of them less than 16 years of age-in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.
When I first noticed the story of her firing and the association of Shirley Sherrod's name with the rural black poor and concern for "black land-loss", I wondered if the person being praised was the same Shirley Sherrod whom I knew. One piece posted on the July 23rd Alternet and captioned "Shirley Sherrod and the black Land Struggle" even claimed that she "devoted her entire life to economic justice". The mistreatment of black workers at NCI under the Sherrods is a matter of record that contradicts this claim.
If confession is good for the soul, then Mrs. Sherrod took a first step toward her redemption by admitting the error of her ways in her earlier attitudes toward poor white farmers. Mrs. Sherrod says she began to see poverty as more central than race. So, should indigent black child farm laborers warrant less reflection by Mrs. Sherrod? What lessons does she have to share from her tenure as management when she had power over her own people working under deplorable conditions at the same New Communities, Inc.(NCI) identified in the current issue? Shirley Sherrod could have included this chapter of her history in the same confession speech. Justice and integrity require at least as much accountability from Mrs. Sherrod to the poor black farm workers of NCI as to the white farmers she came to befriend. This lack of full disclosure of the whole truth is a "sin of omission" that trivializes the suffering of poor black farm workers and exacerbates the offenses of NCI.
Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.
Don't forget that each of the Sherrods, Shirley and her husband Charles, got $150K for pain and suffering ($300K total, to the two of them) as part of a $13 million settlement for discrimination by the USDA against minority farmers.
Tom Blumer writes at the Washington Examiner:
If Charles and Shirley Sherrod are the civil-rights crusaders they now claim to be and not still the brutal managers they appear to have been, they would be tracking down those who used to work at NCI and distributing their $13 million USDA settlement to them. Right? After all, it was arguably won on the backs of exploited labor.
Marriage Equality For All Couples
Robert A. Levy and John D. Podesta write at Cato in early June about the case at heart of the California court decision to overturn Prop 8:
The Perry case ... was brought by two couples whose relationships are marked by the sort of love, commitment and respect that leads naturally to marriage. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier and their four children, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, ask for no more, and deserve no less, than the equal rights accorded to every other American family. But they are blocked from obtaining marriage licenses under California's Proposition 8.The plaintiffs' legal team, headed by former Bush v. Gore antagonists Theodore Olson and David Boies, has demonstrated that no good reason exists for the denial of fundamental civil rights under Proposition 8. We support that position.
Although we serve, respectively, as president of a progressive and chairman of a libertarian think tank, we are not joining the foundation's advisory board to present a "bipartisan" front. Rather, we have come together in a nonpartisan fashion because the principle of equality before the law transcends the left-right divide and cuts to the core of our nation's character. This is not about politics; it's about an indispensable right vested in all Americans.
Over more than two centuries, minorities in America have gradually experienced greater freedom and been subjected to fewer discriminatory laws. But that process unfolded with great difficulty.
As the country evolved, the meaning of one small word -- "all" -- has evolved as well. Our nation's Founders reaffirmed in the Declaration of Independence the self-evident truth that "all Men are created equal," and our Pledge of Allegiance concludes with the simple and definitive words "liberty and justice for all." Still, we have struggled mightily since our independence, often through our courts, to ensure that liberty and justice is truly available to all Americans.
How Can You Be This Clueless?
My bedroom is eight feet from the back doors of an apartment court where all the apartments share a wall with each other.
Girl, Meg Ryan haircut, acoustic guitar, is PLAYING IT AT 5 a.m., with her back door open, BELTING OUT SONGS AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS.
I get up out of bed, put on clothes, find shoes, go out there, and say, from the other side of the chain-link fence, "It's 5 a.m!"
Girl's in there with a guy, doors open. They're silent. Laughing a little.
"Is that funny?" I ask.
"Oh, sorry," she finally says.
We Don't See As Much As We Think We Do
First look at the video...
...And then go to the link.
Prop 8 Overturned
Great news. Laws against gay marriage are a violation of the Constitution, ruled Judge Vaughn R. Walker. Maura Dolan writes at the LA Times:
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice.. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court....Vaughn added: "Plaintiffs seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships, and plaintiffs' relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States."
Ultimately, the judge concluded that Proposition 8 "fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional."]
Walker, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, heard 16 witnesses summoned by opponents of Proposition 8 and two called by proponents during a 2½-week trial in January.
Why Claire Berlinski Is For Banning The Burka
I've written previously about the burka:
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.
Berlinski, who lives in Turkey, writes at NRO:
One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.But that was when I could still visit the neighborhood of Balat without being called a whore.
The French National Assembly's recent vote to ban face-covering veils including the burqa -- which conceals even the eyes -- is the latest such measure taken by governments across Europe. In April, the Belgian parliament became the first to ban the burqa; shortly afterward, police in northern Italy fined a woman for wearing a niqab, which covers the entire face save for the eyes, appealing to a 1975 law prohibiting the covering of the face in public. Conservative backbencher Philip Hollobone has called for a burqa ban in Britain. Last week in Spain, a measure to ban the burqa was narrowly defeated. The broad term for veiling, curtaining, or covering is hijab, and all forms of it, even those exposing the face, have been banned in French public schools since 2004.
Let's be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against religious freedom and freedom of expression. They stigmatize Muslims. No modern state should be in the business of dictating what women should wear. The security arguments are spurious; there are a million ways to hide a bomb, and one hardly need wear a burqa to do so. It is not necessarily the case that the burqa is imposed upon women against their will; when it is the case, there are already laws on the books against physical coercion.
The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one's face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.
All true. And yet the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized. The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand up now against veiling -- and the conception of women and their place in society that it represents -- within a generation there will be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk comfortably or safely.
Now, don't be lazy -- go to the link and read her whole piece. Very compelling stuff. Her conclusion?
Banning the burqa is without doubt a terrible assault on the ideal of religious liberty. It is the sign of a desperate society. No one wishes for things to have come so far that it is necessary.But they have, and it is.
Your thoughts?
Everything Is Racism
(Or maybe you're just vulgar and a bad example for kids who look up to you.)
P. Diddy bought a Maybach for his 16-year-old, and when Nightline's Martin Bashir asked him about it, Diddy cried racism. Jam Donaldson writes for BVBlackSpin, that Diddy told Vibe magazine about the Nightline interview, "The whole thing about giving a Maybach to my son, that's really like a racist question," and said Bashir wouldn't have asked Steve Jobs about what car he bought his kid. Donaldson agrees, but points out a criticial difference:
Men like Jobs and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have not made a fortune promoting luxury lifestyles and defining themselves by them.A tenet of hip-hop is ostentation and glamour and luxury. Diddy's image, probably more than any other entertainer, is built on throwing wealth in the faces of others who look on with a mixture of awe, envy and delight. He brags at every opportunity about his wealth, so why shouldn't it be fair game in an interview? The image of boundless wealth, big mansions and fancy cars is how hip-hop has defined itself, and whether he wants to admit or not, Diddy is one of the main architects.
...I believe the question was less about race and more about the fact that he is not taken seriously.
You can't be a media whore and then get mad if someone asks you a question you don't like. If you don't want to be questioned about what you give to your children, don't do it on TV. You can't have it both ways, Diddy. I can't remember the last time Bill Gates bragged to the world about how much money he had.
I also think that the question is more relevant to Diddy than to America's wealthiest business leaders, because of the impact that his lifestyle has on young people.
Many young people want to be like Diddy, because he's rich. Not because he worked hard and built a mega-empire from nothing. Unfortunately, the message of hard work and the story behind Diddy's rise to power is lost on a generation who believe they are entitled to big Sweet Sixteen parties and Maybachs without lifting a finger.
We have collectively failed as a community in this regard. Diddy, along with the rest of us, are culpable in raising a generation who just want to be "rich." They don't want to work hard, they don't want to excel in school. They just want be a baller. And if they can't be rich, at least they can look rich, even if it means begging, borrowing and stealing to accomplish it. Somewhere along the line, we forgot to teach our young people the most important four letter word of all: WORK.
via The Root
"The Pot And Pussy Platform"
She doesn't have the usual gubernatorial look (looks more ready to talk about her platform bra than her platform), but she does sound more qualified than the other candidates. reason's Nick Gillespie writes at Big Government about Kristin Davis, who ran the escort service that provided former New York governor Spitzer with call girls, and who's running for governor of the state of New York:
She wants to legalize marijuana and prostitution and collect tax revenue from them; she wants to open casinos in the state's great vacation areas; she wants to legalize gay marriage and address a legal system that nets the poor and unconnected and leaves the big fish to swim free.Besides running prostitutes, what qualifications does she possess for the top job in Albany (as if that isn't enough)? She was valedictorian of her high school and worked at a hedge fund, which pretty much makes her more qualified than Andrew Cuomo and whoever the Republican candidate is. But judge for yourself in this, the best campaign video so far this year (in a non-Basil Marceaux category).
The video:
To Get A Leg Up, Be Sure You Have A Leg Of The Right Color
"Diversity" punishes Asians and poor whites and lots of others, writes Russell K. Nieli on Minding The Campus:
When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
...Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
Since university admissions are no longer fair, what would be fair for students to do? To be "judged by the content of their character" and their educational merits alone, do Asian and poor students need to take measures into their own hands, and claim on their applications that they're African American? No, this wouldn't be a lie. After all, technically we all are African, according to Steven Pinker. In The Blank Slate
P.S. If anybody's African-American, it's Charlize Theron.
Another Use For Your Shoe Phone
(One of my favorite Maxwell Smart devices.) And now, for the next time you find yourself corkscrew-free: How to open a bottle of wine with your shoe. Fantastic.
via @DrEades
Welcome To Reality. Leave Your Head At The Door
Phyllis Chesler tells the truth Westerners don't want to believe about Islam. Unpleasant, yes, but true, too. Chesler writes at PJM:
Many battered women stay with their batterers because they have been warned that if they ever leave, turn to the police, or "tell" anyone what is really going on, their batterer will then be justified in killing them.Cult members are routinely warned that if they break free and "tell" anyone about abusive cult practices, not only will they be shunned, stalked, and punished, but their relatives, including children, who are still prisoners of the cult, or true believers, will be punished too.
By now, many Westerners may believe this is true about batterers and about cults; but they will not believe that it is also true about fundamentalist Islam. Trained in favor of religious tolerance, concerned that if one religion is restricted that all religions might be; genuinely uninformed about non-western religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, etc., they assume that all religions are alike in terms of their virtues and that sinners of every religious persuasion exist despite--not because of-their religion.
When it comes to Islam such views may be wrong.
Many Muslims are not religious. Many Muslims who are religious are not fanatic fundamentalists or radicals and tend to lead (or would like to lead) quiet, peaceful lives. But an increasing number of Muslim religious and political leaders are quite hostile to human rights and freedom of religion as universal values. These leaders point to passages in the Qur'an or Hadith that justify cross-amputation, stoning to death, arranged child marriage, polygamy, and wife-beating as religious rights. They believe that infidels should either convert, be killed, or are to be held hostage and subordinated economically, physically, and psychologically--or are to be exiled, jailed, tortured or murdered.
Fundamentalist/political/radical Muslims are very clear that any Muslim who criticizes or exposes the truth about Islam must be intimidated, harassed, and attacked--and that any Muslim who actually converts to another religion must be killed, on sight, by any Muslim, or preferably by a member their own family, who is expected to cleanse their shame and restore their honor and the honor of Islam by murdering such an apostate.
As my studies in Middle East Quarterly have shown, Muslim girls are honor-murdered in the West (North America, Canada, Europe) for refusing to wear hijab, having non-Muslim friends, including friends who are boys, refusing to marry a first cousin, wanting to marry a non-Muslim. Imagine how much more grievous a sin it is for a Muslim to choose a Christian God.
Is this stuff we should be "tolerant" of? I sure don't think so, but I don't know what the solution is. As much as I despise burkas, for example, I don't think we win or preserve Western values and democracy by selectively pretending the Constitution went out for a smoke.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali thinks there's hope in sending in moderate Christians to persuade Muslims to trade in the god of stoning and beheading for the the god of "turn the other cheek." (Obviously -- see above -- this could have some drawbacks for the safety of those Christians.) As for other measures, I think spreading the word about what Islam's really about is a really good place to start.
For those who are interested in learning more, see Jihadwatch.org and thereligionofpeace.com. I also highly recommend Hirsi Ali's book, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
The World Is Not Your Toilet
Imagine that, we who live in my neighborhood prefer not to have it smell like a giant men's bathroom. So, when I see people using my neighborhood as a toilet, or otherwise abusing people who live here, I like to photograph them and post their pictures around the neighborhood and/or on my blog.
A friend in my neighborhood is another refuse-to-be-victimized type. She e-mailed me this:
So TUESDAY night about 11 PM I hear two chicks outside talking. Next thing I know, I hear pissing.I go outside, and this chick decided to urinate - right up against our gate in front of our building - she just dropped trou and squatted on the sidewalk with her butt on private property. Her friend was in the car and had turned on the engine.
So I come out (with a white facial mask on- all I was missing were the rollers on my hair and a bathrobe) and turned on the hose and hosed her down as much as I could - while screaming bloody murder at her and calling her the worst names I could think of. She just kept saying 'I'm sorry' and jumped in the car and fled.
You know, I don't go to Silverlake to pee on people's front yards, why do they come here to do so??
In Paris, they've taken this sort of thing pro. Susan Ferreira writes in the WSJ:
PARIS -- Hidden behind dark sunglasses, Jean-Pierre Rebete follows his target into a narrow Paris alley."We've got one," he whispers to his partner, who bolts to block off the other end of the street.
The man in the alley zips up his jeans and turns away from the wall. Busted. Mr. Rebete hands him a ticket and informs him of his rights.
Mr. Rebete is a special agent in Paris's war on public urination. Part of an elite, 88-member force called the Brigade des Incivilités, or Bad Behavior Brigade, Mr. Rebete scours the streets for all sorts of boorish offenders. Dressed in civilian clothes and driving an unmarked car, he tickets everyone from litterbugs to people handing out unauthorized flyers to Parisians who don't pick up after their dog.
But what the French call urine sauvage, which translates to "wild urine," is the hardest to crack. While France's capital has campaigned with some success to have Parisians pick up after their pets, the city is still struggling with the presence of pipi. Urine is hard to escape in certain parts of the city, be it on the street, in the Metro or in parks.
Members of the Brigade say there is no high season for urinary offenses, but summertime heat heightens the stench.
City hygiene workers scrub down and spray tens of thousands of square meters of walls and sidewalks every month. But according to Mr. Rebete, a former sanitation worker himself, the products they use -- a combination of disinfectant and deodorizer, blasted through a hose with hot water -- are no match for the streams that seep into the city's stone streets.
"It just masks the smell," he says. "It doesn't wash it away."
I'm Neither, Which Are You?
Which party represents you? Is there one? I wonder if more and more Americans are feeling rather unrepresented by their elected sleazy, pandering, expensively suited, supposed representatives.
As a fiscal conservative who's socially libertarian and a "personal responsibilitarian," I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and I'm disgusted with the sleaze brimming up to the top in both parties. Neither represents me.
And by the way, the Republicans are not the party of small government, they just say they are -- although they are the party of somewhat smaller government than the Keynes-loving Democrats.
And while the Republicans are the anti-science party, the Democratic president hasn't done much beyond moving his lips in favor of equal rights for gays. (And P.S. My thinking, if gays don't have full rights, including the ability to marry the person they love, they shouldn't have to pay full taxes.)
There's more, but I'll turn the floor over to Professor Bainbridge, who writes, "Let's tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement":
1. A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.2.Tom Tancredo calling President Obama "the greatest threat to the United States today" and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies--however misguided--is an impeachable offense is just nuts.
3. Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, who IBD column was, as Doug Marconis observed, "a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama's record in office." Actually, it's more foaming at the mouth.
4. As Doug also observed, "The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine." Indeed, "when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create "compassionate conservatism" won our over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government's role in education, and two wars. That's not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity." Yet, today's GOP still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism.
5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?
6. The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.
7. Trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama's war.
8. Birthers.
9. Nativists.
10. The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?
(Bainbridge) Update: Patterico says the foregoing are "reasons that conservatives should not support the Republican party," not reasons for being embarrassed about being a conservative. Fair enough. I'd accept that as a friendly amendment, but we're not friends.
More from Patterico -- who is a friend and a great guy -- on the "snooze" of a piece that inspired Bainbridge's thoughts, "intelligent" design proponent Klinghoffer's op-ed in the LA Times.
And via Jonathan H. Adler at Volokh, it ain't so hot to be a liberal, either.
And now that you've run through all that, let me take your political temperature. (I won't ask you to bend over -- that's the government's game.) But, do please post your readings below.
Paternity Fraud Pays Off!
The California Supreme Court declined to review a Court of Appeal decision that has a homeless man, Hari Wilburn, paying tens of thousands of dollars in child support for a child a DNA test says is not his!
From the National Coalition For Men, in 1991, Cathy Tate named Wilburn the father of her 5-year-old child Alexis in a court proceeding, but he was never properly served. Seventeen years later, in 2008, based on a 1991 support order by the court, Tate asked the probate court to snatch up tens of thousands of dollars Wilburn was about to inherit from his deceased mother. More from the link:
Wilburn's family tracked down 22-year-old Alexis and asked her to take a DNA test, which excluded Wilburn as Alexis' biological dad. Wilburn's family hired an attorney, who filed a motion challening the support order. Alexis swore under oath that Wilburn never acted as her dad and she only saw him a few times in her life. The court denied the motion, ruling Wilburn should have challenged the order sooner, despite the fact that he was homeless and living under a bridge. On appeal, the Third District Court of Appeal upheld the order on the same grounds, and the California Supreme Court has now declined review."This is totally unjust," said Angelucci. "It is wrong to force a man person to pay child support for a child that is not his, especially when he never acted as the dad."
Yes, but it continues to happen and nobody seems to be doing anything to change it.
(Note: Behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuk challenges the 30 percent of DNA paternity tests figure in the NCFM piece.)
via ifeminists
"Someone's In The Kitchen With Discount..."
Dinah's at the computer, shopping Amazon for 40 percent off
If you need to add something to get free shipping, I (humbly and saleswhorishly) recommend my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, only $11.53 with Amazon's discount!
Others I've really enjoyed recently:
Tyler Cowen's The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
Dan Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
And for those interested in anthropology, I just got (but haven't yet read) Frank Marlowe's book, The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania (Origins of Human Behavior and Culture)
The @Sky Is Falling! The @Sky Is Falling!
A tweet by @Shariwrites:
Sad. Letters from camp replaced by Blackberry conversations and FB chats. :(
Why is this sad? How is this sad? Or...is this sad?
And I ask this as somebody who enjoys sending letters and postcards and writes both rather regularly (I buy beautiful antique postcards to send as thank you notes after I'm invited to dinner. They look like they've been lost in the mail for 70 years).
On a related note, have you seen Peggy Orenstein's silly New York Times Mag piece about Twitter?
According to Orenstein, Twitter isn't what it is for me -- a way to catch political news and science stories I might otherwise miss, along with witty bits from various people -- it's part of a "performance culture, of the packaged self," that "erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity."
Oh. Hurl.
Hilariously, she quotes some University of Michigan Institute for Social Research metanalysis that found that the sharpest decline in empathy in college students was in the year 2000. Um, Facebook launched in February, 2004. Twitter was created in 2006.
Whoopsy!
Government Makes You Fat
Steven Malanga at City Journal writes:
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--that is, with a high glycemic index, like potatoes, white rice, and white bread--give people an insulin boost that increases the risk of diabetes and makes them far more likely to contract cardiovascular disease than those who eat moderate amounts of meat and fewer carbs. Though federal guidelines now emphasize eating more fiber-rich carbohydrates, which take longer to digest, the incessant message over the last 30 years to substitute carbs for meat appears to have done significant damage. And it doesn't appear that the government will change its approach this time around. 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."The public-health establishment has been sluggish about reversing course before. Starting in the 1970s, for instance, the American Heart Association advised people to reduce drastically their consumption of eggs as part of a goal to limit total cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams a day (a single egg can have 250 milligrams). The recommendation, seconded by government and other public-health groups, prompted a sharp drop in the consumption of eggs, a food that nutritionists praise as low in calories and high in nutrients. In 2000, the AHA revised its restrictions on eggs to one a day (from a onetime low of three a week), but it also recommended reducing consumption of other cholesterol-heavy foods to compensate. Similarly, the federal government's dietary guidelines still recommend intake of no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol daily, which makes egg consumption difficult unless one excludes most other animal products. To what purpose? A 2004 article in The Journal of Nutrition that looked at worldwide studies of egg consumption noted that the current restrictions on eating eggs are "unwarranted for the majority of people and are not supported by scientific data."
...Now the Bloomberg administration is trying to push food manufacturers nationwide to reduce their use of salt--and the nutrition panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines similarly recommends reducing salt intake to a maximum of 1,500 milligrams daily (down from 2,300 a day previously). Yet Dr. Michael Alderman, a hypertension specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, observed in the New York Times that because sodium is an essential component of our diets, the city's effort amounts to a giant uncontrolled experiment with the public's health that could have unintended consequences. And in 2006, Harvard Medical School professor Norman Hollenberg concluded that while some people benefit from reduced salt intake, the evidence "is too inconsistent and generally too small to mandate policy decisions at the community level."
