« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Pier, Reviewed
The view last night from downtown Santa Monica:

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Hey! Where's Her Handout?
I'm always amazed by the expectation that other people will pay for you. A single mother lamented to the State Journal-Register:

For years now, I have wanted to be a nurse, and as a young single mother it's been hard. I lost my job in May and almost everything I had before I got my unemployment. I enrolled at Lincoln Land Community College to begin my nursing prerequisites. Shortly after, I was informed that my unemployment benefits had stopped because I was a student and had not yet found employment.

After an interview, I was denied because the state didn't believe that I could work enough with school. Now I'm being forced to make a decision that does not seem fair. Had I just been sitting around doing nothing, certifying that I was looking for work, I would still be receiving benefits. So many people do that and are supported by the state for months, years even.

Because I want to better myself, I feel that I'm being punished. Do I just give up and fall back into the minimum wage life, dependent on the system for food and medical?

No, you wait to have a child until you establish yourself as a worker and can support that child in an intact family. Once you have a family, sorry, you might not be able to follow your dream career. You might have to get another minimum wage job to support them.

Unless this woman was widowed -- and she doesn't mention it -- she sounds like yet another woman who made some bad choices and now is mad that that others aren't there to pick up the slack.

As I tell the kids at the high school when I speak there, there's a time to "better yourself" and it's before you have a kid. They're cute and all, and fun to dress up in darling little outfits, but -- bummer! -- you actually have to be able to provide for them.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Poor Woman's Prozac
It just might be semen. From Jesse Bering's SciAm column:

Given these ingredients--and this is just a small sample of the mind-altering "drugs" found in human semen--Gallup and Burch, along with psychologist Steven Platek, now at the University of Liverpool, hypothesized that women having unprotected sex should be less depressed than suitable control participants. To investigate whether semen has antidepressant effects, the authors rounded up 293 college females from the SUNY-Albany campus, who agreed to fill out an anonymous, written questionnaire about various aspects of their sexual behavior. Recent sexual activity without condoms was used as an indirect measure of seminal plasma circulating in the woman's body. Each participant also completed the Beck Depression Inventory, a commonly used clinical measure of depressive symptoms.

The most significant findings from this 2002 study, published with criminally modest fanfare in the Archives of Sexual Behavior , were these: even after adjusting for frequency of sexual intercourse, women who engaged in sex and "never" used condoms showed significantly fewer depressive symptoms than did those who "usually" or "always" used condoms. Importantly, these chronically condomless, sexually active women also evidenced fewer depressive symptoms than did those who abstained from sex altogether. By contrast, sexually active women, even really promiscuous ones, who used condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. In other words, it's not just that women who are having sex are simply happier, but instead happiness appears to be a function of the ambient seminal fluid pulsing through one's veins.

And it gets better. A smaller percentage (4.5 percent) of the sexually active women who "never" used condoms were less likely to have attempted suicide than were those who "sometimes" (7.4 percent) and "usually" (28.9 percent) and "always" (13.2 percent) used condoms.

Relax, settle down, take a deep breath--I know what you're thinking. This is a correlational study and there are scores of possible confounds, both those that the authors anticipated and controlled for in this study design (by all means read the actual article for more details--but please do note that these between-group differences in depression panned out even after controlling for the use of oral contraceptives, days since last sex, frequency of sex and duration of the relationship with the male partner) and probably some that you can come up with on your own.

Birth control pills also affect who a woman is attracted to. Now, I'm not a doctor (note "The Advice Goddess" above), but from what I've read, unless you go psycho without them and take them for mood regulation, it's probably not a good idea to take them! Best birth control in my estimation is probably the Copper-7 IUD. No hormones, no barriers.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

It Doesn't Really Get More Obscene
Ryan Zempel writes at the Institute For Legal Reform about a ridiculous lawsuit that has not a shred of humor about it:

After a fight with her boyfriend, a teenage girl sent him several text messages, including ones that said "Good bye ... My last words ..." and "If I won. I would have you. And I wouldn't crash my car." She then proceeded to drive her car into oncoming traffic at 85 mph, killing a 35-year-old pregnant woman and the woman's 13-year-old son.

The teenage girl, on the other hand, survived - and is now suing the estate of the woman she killed and the construction company which built the overpass where the collision occurred. Yes, you read that correctly: a girl driving 85 mph into oncoming traffic with the intent of causing a fatal accident is suing the family of her victims. According to her lawsuit, she's seeking unspecified damages since she's dealing with permanent injuries, mental pain and suffering, a loss of income, and past, present and future medical expenses.

While this experience was doubtless very traumatic for her, it's nothing compared to the husband of her victims, who not only has to deal with the tragedy of losing his family but is now listed in her lawsuit as the representative of his wife's estate.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Bugs That Deserve The Death Penalty And Bugs That Don't
I am not afraid of spiders (I generally lift them on a sheet of paper and take them outside), and I had no problem with this long, green visitor on my porch on Tuesday morning.

But, moths? Sweater eaters! If one gets in my house, if I can't reach to squash it with a paper towel, I go after it with the DustBuster. Vrrrrroom, vrrrroom!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Need Your Problems, On The Rocks
For the book I'm working on -- a manners book for the 20 to 40 audience -- I need "What do you do when...?" questions.

Today's category is a biggie - questions on manners related to DRINKING: everything you'd want to know about manners in bars, at parties, and in rehab...from tipping to hurling.

Your questions on this topic would be most appreciated!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Fraud Spam
My oldest friend from New York -- a guy who has a business that connects him with a lot of writers -- seems to have gotten his address book hijacked. Here's the string of e-mails I woke up to (I got one, too, but I was reading my e-mail backwards, from most recently sent to earlier).

Two other friends forwarded me theirs. Here's one (and I responded to the person who wrote me that David's home in New York with his wife and his baby, which he is -- and I know him well: if he WERE robbed in England or had some problem, he'd call his brother, not contact people he knows somewhat through business). (I've deleted last names and his business name):

Amy -- is this a real email from David??? Sounds so bizarre. Did u get it too? xo, Q

--- On Wed, 9/29/10, David DELETED wrote:

From: David DELETED
Subject: Re: Vacation Problem
To: "Quendrith DELETED"
Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2010, 6:51 AM

Glad you replied back,I have nothing left on me right now and i'm lucky to have my life and passports with me it would have been worst if they had made away with my passports.

Well all i need now is just £1,600, you can have it wired to my name via Western Union i'll have to show my passport as ID to pick it up here and i promise to pay you back as soon as we get back home. Here's my info below

Receiver's Name: David DELETED
City: London
Zipcode: WC2A 2AE
Country: United Kingdom

As soon as it has been done, kindly get back to me with the MTCN. Let me know if you are heading to the Western Union outlet now???

Thanks.

David

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Quendrith DELETED wrote:
David - is this a real email from you -- pls confirm -- Quendrith ps, if it is, will try to assist!!!

--- On Wed, 9/29/10, David DELETED wrote:

From: David DELETED
Subject: Vacation Problem
To:
Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2010, 6:01 AM

Hello,

It is with profound sense of sadness i wrote this email to you. I traveled down to United Kingdom for a short vacation but unfortunately,i was mugged at a knife point last night at the park of the B&B (Bed and Breakfast) where i lodged all my money and all other vital documents including my credit cards and cell phone were all taken away.

I have reported the robbery to the police but they are yet to find the muggers,Things are difficult here and i don't know what to do at the moment that why i email to ask if you can lend me £1,600.00 so i can settle the B&B (Bed and Breakfast) bills and get a returning ticket back home. Please do me this great help and i promise to refund the money as soon as i get back home.

Thanks

David

On something like this, you look at the return path on the e-mail. His address was clearly spoofed. It looks like it came from his e-mail address on the surface, but the return path was:

Received: from [209.107.217.39] by web83004.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:46:53 PDT X-RocketYMMF: girliegodess15@sbcglobal.net X-Mailer: YahooMailClassic/11.4.9 YahooMailWebService/0.8.105.279950 Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:46:53 -0700 (PDT)

Here's another from that address.

Oh, and when I responded to the address that looked like David's, I got an e-mail back:

I want you to know that we currently in London for a short vacation and we are been mugged over here. It not a fraud. I will much appreciate if you guys can help me back home. I promise to refund you as soon as am back home.

David.

It can seem very real to anybody who isn't very Web-sophisticated. Spread the word.

UPDATE: It turns out that they got his password to his gmail account. Horrible, horrible. I'm trying to help him with it now. Here's what may help with gmail.

How I think this could've happened: People on WiFi are often very unprotected, especially on public WiFi. There are people out there with packet sniffers who look at information you're sending out. I turn off all sharing on my laptop, and I never, ever get on a thing that says "free public Wifi." It's free giveaway of your information to the person snooping on other people's computers.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Letter To A Young Motorcycle Rider
I suspect it's the same buttwad who revved his bike at length in front of my house in the wee hours the other night. I saw his bike parked squarely in front of my house, so I typed this note in big type on a piece of paper, and Scotch-taped it to his bike seat:

Hey, motorcyle rider...see these houses here? We people in them are working people, and we have to be up early in the morning to make a living in this economy. That means we need our sleep. If you're going to park here and go to the bar, you need to be considerate of those of us who live here and walk your bike to the corner and then start it. Please don't start it in front of our houses. We were awakened by some inconsiderate, ill-raised person on a motorcycle the other night who revved it for a while in front of our apartments and houses. We're hoping that wasn't you. And we're hoping it won't be you tonight. Think about how your momma raised you. And if she didn't raise you to be considerate of other people, there's no time like now to start.

Whaddya know, it worked. He left quietly. Didn't hear a thing.

There's always a chance in cases like this that somebody will act like more of an buttwad if you ask them not to behave badly. But, I did use a subtle tactic here -- the use of "we."

I wrote about this in I SEE RUDE PEOPLE -- that coming at somebody, not as an individual, but as a member of a group in telling them to stop whatever rude fucking thing they're doing tends to be more successful.

I had an example of this in Starbucks not long ago. Yet another loud businessman was bellowing into his phone. I smiled and gestured and stage-whispered, "Would you mind keeping it down?" (I don't do it like this because I'm meek, but because it's more successful than saying, "Look, you loud, rude fuck...")

Usually, with this approach, a nice person who just wasn't being mindful will say, "Oh, sorry...wasn't paying attention..." or something like that, but this guy was having none of that. He launched into a rude litany about how I should go to the library, etc. (of course, this is because he's taking over a shared space as if it's his own), and completely expectedly (yawn) he told me I was crazy.

"Yes," I said, "It guess it is crazy to expect a guy as inconsiderate as you clearly are to act considerately."

And then it happened: The guy on the other side of me turned to him and said, "Look man, you were really loud. It's disturbing."

And all of a sudden, it was like somebody put a cork in the loud jerk.

I've seen happen this time and time again: the power in numbers in silencing the rude asshats on their phones or rude people doing any number of things. Remember that, and next time you're ruded on, maybe whisper to the person next to you and ask them support you, and you all might be less robbed of your time, thoughts, and peace of mind by the rude, and for a lot less time.

And spread the word!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Why Conservatives Should Be For Drug Legalization
Cato's Jeffrey A. Miron writes at the LATimes that legalization of drugs is consistent with conservative principles:

Prohibition is fiscally irresponsible. Its key goal is reduced drug use, yet repeated studies find minimal impact on drug use. My just-released Cato Institute study shows that prohibition entails government expenditure of more than $41 billion a year. At the same time, the government misses out on about $47 billion in tax revenues that could be collected from legalized drugs. The budgetary windfall from legalization would hardly solve the country's fiscal woes. Nevertheless, losing $88 billion in a program that fails to attain its stated goal should be anathema to conservatives.

Drug prohibition is hard to reconcile with constitutionally limited government. The Constitution gives the federal government a few expressly enumerated powers, with all others reserved to the states (or to the people) under the 10th Amendment. None of the enumerated powers authorizes Congress to outlaw specific products, only to regulate interstate commerce. Thus, laws regulating interstate trade in drugs might pass constitutional muster, but outright bans cannot. Indeed, when the United States wanted to outlaw alcohol, it passed the 18th Amendment. The country has never adopted such constitutional authorization for drug prohibition.

Drug prohibition is hopelessly inconsistent with allegiance to free markets, which should mean that businesses can sell whatever products they wish, even if the products could be dangerous. Prohibition is similarly inconsistent with individual responsibility, which holds that individuals can consume what they want -- even if such behavior seems unwise -- so long as these actions do not harm others.

Yes, drugs can harm innocent third parties, but so can -- and do -- alcohol, cars and many other legal products. Consistency demands treating drugs like these other goods, which means keeping them legal while punishing irresponsible use, such as driving under the influence.

Legalization would take drug control out government's incompetent hands and place it with churches, medical professionals, coaches, friends and families. These are precisely the private institutions whose virtues conservatives extol in other areas.

By supporting the legalization of drugs, conservatives might even help themselves at the ballot box. Many voters find the conservative combination of policies confusing at best, inconsistent and hypocritical at worst. Because drug prohibition is utterly out of step with the rest of the conservative agenda, abandoning it is a natural way to win the hearts and minds of these voters.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Are You Bothered By Customerese?
Christopher Buckley sent me a link to a piece in The New York Times about language servers and others are using (and are often told to use) on customers. Elissa Gootman writes:

Since when is someone waiting in line for 10 minutes to buy a sweater a "guest," not a customer? And why, when one is dining at a restaurant and actually wants to feel like a pampered guest, must waiters persist in asking, "Are you still working on that?" These are some of the questions that Laurie Graff raised in last weekend's Complaint Box.

"Let's understand: I was not working on anything," Ms. Graff wrote, of a leisurely dinner punctuated by such inquiries. "The server was confused. He was working. I was eating."

At the same time, she wrote: "My guest status at Bed Bath & Beyond allowed me to lift all my heavy items from the cart onto the checkout counter alone, before hauling them out to the street.

My favorite was a reader comment they printed, from joe b.

Hot Dog Clients

I was in line at a hot dog wagon and vendor said: "Please step aside so I can serve the next client." What ever happened to customer? Lawyers, accountants, and architects have clients, not hot dog guys.

I've found that there seems to be an age cutoff in whether people are enraged by "No problem!" as a response to "Thank you." Generally, people over 50 seem to get really ticked off by it.

Your customerese pet peeves? Or do you not care, and is this all annoyingly silly?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

They Don't Serve White People, Either
Two Florida women filed complaints with the Florida human rights agency claiming they were denied service at a bar because they are black. Suzie Schottelkotte writes for the Ledger:

Mildred Richardson Smith, 55, and Ida Mae Royal, 80, said managers at the Just One More bar at 112 E. Crystal Ave. told them they couldn't be served, according to the complaint filed this week. Royal said she and a friend, Emma Frazier, stopped at the bar for lunch June 3 and were turned away. In her complaint, Smith said she was turned away at the door.

Kerry Winkler, the bar's owner, denied Friday that any discrimination occurred.

"Those allegations are unfounded and unjust," he said. "We had a couple women come in and ask about lunch, and we told them we don't serve food. We have bags of snacks, like chips and things like that, but we don't have a license to serve food. We don't have a skillet or a stove in this place, so we couldn't serve food if we wanted to."

via reason

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

More Problems, Please
You've all been so great in giving me your manners questions -- "What do I do when...?" questions for my next book, a comprehensive guide to manners for people 20 to 40. The only areas in the outline that are still sparse are ones I haven't asked you about -- plus you gave me ideas for two more categories.

So, today, I'd really appreciate your questions on just two new areas, because they're biggies. First there's Dating. Please give me your "What do you do when...?" questions related to dating and relationships. Example:

•When you have an STD: When do you tell, what do you say, and do you need to contact everyone you ever had sex with?

•What do you do if you find out somebody's boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on them?

Next area is Drinking: From bloody marys to blackouts -- questions on everything from manners in bars and at parties to manners in rehab and AA.

Please feel free to post questions that aren't in these categories. Also, I could use some interesting questions (on love, sex, dating, and relationships) for my column now, so if you're wondering about something, please e-mail me your question at adviceamy at A O L dot com.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Well, The Stuff Did Come From A Farm
Somewhere. Before they trucked it in to the big wholesaler, and before the "farmer" who bought it from the big wholesaler laid it out on the table at your local farmer's market, and had you believing he planted seeds and all:

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

I Know What You Did Last Legislative Session
And before long, the voters will figure it out, too. Obamacare will soon rear its very ugly head, and the voters will perhaps finally wake from their Rip van Winkle-like sleep. Here, from hillbuzz, is what they'll discover (in addition to the at least 12% increase in costs in premiums the Chi Trib says we're all in for):

(1) Democrats have no idea the damage they did to their party on Christmas Eve in 2009, when every Democrat in the Senate voted for Obamacare without reading the bill, or even understanding what was in it.

(2) Currently, support for Democrats is at historically-low numbers.

(3) Many people have not yet noticed the increases in their health insurance, and some employers are still in wait-and-see mode with all of this, with insurance companies still going through the bureaucratic motions and panel reviews to decide what their rates will ultimately be. Since there is 2,000 pages of legislation in the Obamacare bill, and the authors of this disaster didn't understand its impact on the health industry, everything is still up in the air in terms of what this is all going to mean for families' bottom lines.

(4) Some time in 2011, at least by the summer we believe, people are going to more or less know how much Obamacare has cost them, and they should start to see the first signs of rationing and government intrusion impacting their daily lives. They are not going to like any of this, and Democrats are going to hear it from the public.

(5) In early 2012, we imagine premiums will increase again, as the chaos Obamacare has unleashed on the nation really takes hold, and an increasing number of companies decide to cancel their employees' insurance because it's actually cheaper to pay the $2,000/person penalty than it is to privately insure their people. This means insurance companies will have to further raise their rates for those still in the programs, to make up for the loss of revenue from all those canceled policies.

(6) Going into the 2012 presidential election, Democrats are going to have to face an angry sea of voters who are paying hundreds of dollars more a month for insurance, if they still have it, while receiving less benefits and services because of rationing. They are not going to be able to run away from Obamacare and pretend it doesn't exist because by this time there will be many sensational stories about people in America being denied treatment or access to doctors because of Obamacare's effects.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Without You, I'd Really Be Lacking In Problems
You guys have been so super giving me your "What Do You Do When...?" manners questions to help me get the chapter outline done so I can sell my next book (and figure out what to put in it!).

For the uninitiated, this is a comprehensive book on manners for the 20 to 40 audience, covering all the areas regular people go in their daily lives (none of this business on how to address a wedding invite to a divorcée or what to do with a fingerbowl).

Today's topics I need questions on are: Children (The Underparented Child and general manners questions about your own children or others').

And then there's Communication (the spoken and written word).

And, finally, Family Gatherings. Examples of questions include:

•How to set boundaries with those relatives who shout across the table to you and your significant other to ask when you're getting married or having that baby.

•How to keep holiday dinners from degenerating into political shouting matches.

•How to keep the family drunk from ruining yet another dinner.

•What to do when your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse has too many family gatherings they expect you to attend.

Please feel free to post questions that aren't in these categories. Also, I could use some interesting questions (on love, sex, dating, and relationships) for my column now, so if you're wondering about something, please e-mail me your question at adviceamy at A O L dot com.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Romeo And Shaniqua
There isn't white education or black education, there's only education. Lindsay Johns writes at ProspectMagazine about patronizing attempts to make education more "relevant" to black people instead of teaching the western canon. Yes, these efforts apparently continue:

In 2007 a home affairs select committee produced a report about young black boys in the criminal justice system, calling for the department for education and schools to consult with black community groups to make the curriculum more relevant--and to find "content which interests and empowers young black people." We can safely assume they were not talking about Ovid, Chaucer or Shakespeare.

Sadly, the canon has a serious image problem amongst black people, too. Many see it as the preserve of white public schoolboys, taught in fusty classrooms by doddery Oxbridge tutors. We have been led to see it as whitey's birthright, not ours. Meanwhile anti-racist educationalists and black community leaders rail against a racist curriculum which does not meet the cultural needs of their students, with some calling for "black schools" in which black culture--rather than an elite white culture--can be taught.

But the literary canon should not be the preserve of any one race. As both a writer of colour and an ardent (but not uncritical) devotee of the canon, I have little time for people who say that black people cannot relate to books written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, or that Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare. This denies us our shared humanity across racial divides.

Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition. It addresses our common humanity, irrespective of our melanin quotient. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens--all male, all very white and all undeniably very dead. But would anyone be so foolish as to deny their enduring importance? Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Boccacio's Decameron or Pico's Oration On The Dignity of Man are as germane to black people as they are to white. There is no apartheid in the philosophical musings of Cicero, no racial segregation in the cosmic grandeur of Dante and no ethnic oppression in the amorous sonnets of Shakespeare. These works can, if given the chance, speak as much to Leroy in Peckham or Shaniqua in the South Bronx as they can to Quentin in the home counties.

@JeffreyGuterman

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

"Who I Am" Is An Unemployed Person
A woman with some pretty creepy looking facial piercings is under the impression that this is and/or should be no problem for getting a job. From the Daily Mail, the woman's account of her meeting with a career counselor:

"The guy said: 'on first impressions do you think anyone would hire you?' He said: 'look at it this way if you were to stand behind a wall - or put a paper bag over your face do you think you would have a better chance?'

"He then backtracked and tried to say that he was sorry and hoped I wasn't offended but I was.

"He talked to me as though I was just going through a phase in my life, but this is my lifestyle choice, and this is who I am."

I can't remember if I blogged this, but I asked my friend, Lawyer Tom, the biggest difference between himself and the young associates he hires. He said he saw his place in the world as one of responsibilities and they see theirs as one of rights -- meaning, the world owes them.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Latest Gossip From The Loud Neighbors
Consideration has all sorts of fringe benefits, and the lack of it sure can have its costs.

Yep, it's time for a little more news about the actress who works on the network TV show who recently moved to my neighborhood and started noisying up the place. She throws late loud parties, often with friends singing at the top of their lungs into the wee hours, and never mind how bothered the neighbors are.

The girl also goes out into her backyard and has loud phone conversations, as does some guy friend of hers who's either living or staying with her. Sometimes, they have loud conversations together, and, again, never mind whether people with little houses just feet away from her property, have to hear them. Sometimes, at length.

Well, I've got several neighbors now filling me on the juicy stuff they can't help but overhear. The nice older lady whose house abuts the loud actress' backyard told me that she overheard the loud actress talking about sleeping with her friend's boyfriend. Last week, she overheard the guy staying at her house talking about how he has crabs.

Yesterday, my other neighbor, whose house abuts loud actress' on the other side, told me that her husband overheard a guy -- maybe the guy with the crabs -- telling the loud actress (loudly) in the backyard, "I have herpes!"

"How does that feel?" the loud actress asked.

"Not too bad except I have a wart on my penis," the guy said.

My neighbors were a little upset, because they aren't ready for their 10-year-old to be all worried and asking them, "Daddy, will I get a wart on my penis?"

Otherwise, I generally find it all rather entertaining.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Diaper Another Day
It was a really lovely Saturday morning at my writing cafe in Santa Monica. Saw friends I hadn't seen for a while, had a pleasant little exchange with the women seated at the booth table by mine. One had just had a baby...I think she said it was a couple weeks old. It was really tiny -- she had it in a car seat thingie with her. I smiled and congratulated her and got back to my writing.

I was working really hard on my proposal for my new book when...when...eeeuw...I smelled something. I looked over, and no...I couldn't believe it...the new mother's friend was changing the baby's poopy diaper ON THE BOOTH SEAT.

I was so upset, I couldn't even speak at first, and then I told the friend it was "not okay," and added that there were bathrooms they could have used. Just then, the mother came back to the table.

"You don't change a baby where food is served," I told the mother. "Nobody wants poo in their eating area."

"I'm sorry," she said, "I'm a new mother."

"I'm a new mother"? Right. Are you a new person? I mean, how do you not know that you don't change a baby where people eat food? Or where they might sit in flicked poo!

They left shortly afterward.

I went up to the counter and told the new guy -- poor guy -- that they'd been changing a baby on the booth seat, and he came over shortly afterward with a bleach-soaked rag and wiped the whole area down, seats, tables, and all.

What do you think is going through these women's heads when they're doing this, "I hope nobody notices"?

"I'm a new mother." What a load of...poo.

Now, I'm wondering what they did with that diaper.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Need More Of Your "What Do You Do When...?" Manners Questions
I'm getting my chapter outline done for my next book, thanks to all of you. For the uninitiated, this is a comprehensive book on manners for the 20 to 40 audience, covering all the areas regular people go in their daily lives (none of this business on how to address a wedding invite to a divorcée or what to do with a fingerbowl).

I'll try asking you for help on three areas today. I need questions on Bodily Functions -- meaning questions like what to do if you're a woman and Auntie Flo pays you an unexpected visit when you're sitting on your friend's cream suede dining room chairs. And anything related to stuff that comes out of or off of the body: farting, public nail clipping, etc.

I also need questions about Cellphoning -- questions about polite usage and what to do about impolite usage. Examples:

•How to politely get somebody to stop texting you incessantly, bothering you with trivial things, and how to end a texting conversation.

•What to do about somebody else's annoying sound-leaking headphones on a smartphone used as MP3 players.

•How to shut up the guy in the pharmacy line with his cellphone on speaker (without prosecutor or mortician involvement).

And finally, I need questions about The Underparented Child: How not to have yours be one of them and what to do about other people's who are.

Please feel free to post any questions not in these categories. Your help has been invaluable so far!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

D Is For Desperate
And D-listers, which is who Gail Sheehy said Obama had to reach for in hopes of filling a room. From The Daily Beast:

Six weeks before the election, President Obama couldn't fill the ballroom at the Roosevelt Hotel, despite cheap tickets on offer. And then he was met by hecklers.

...Most of us low rollers arrived early to see President Obama up close and personal. Our tickets for the general reception at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York were only $100. Some thought the email invitation was a joke. Some bought tickets for $50 from their desperate Democratic committeeman. Some bought the same day.

...Only after I received four email invitations and two personal calls imploring me to come did I call Speaker Pelosi's office to check the admission price. "You mean, to be in the room with the President of the United States is now on fire sale for $100?"

"Yup."

"How long do we get?"

"Half hour."

"How many $100 givers have rsvp'd?"

"Mmmm 250."

"Do we need to line up early to get in?"

"That's not necessary. Everybody will get in."

And everybody did--450 people in a room that holds 650. Even Obama's fire sale didn't sell out.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Reforming Children Out Of Health Insurance
All along, I've called Obamacare "health care 'reform'" and "reform" is exactly what it's turning out to be. Check this out from the WSJ, how Obamacare killed "child-only" policies:

This week, almost every big insurance company in America--including Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Humana, Coventry, some Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates and others--stopped writing "child-only" policies in the individual market. This is a niche product that parents typically buy when their employer health plan doesn't cover dependents. The exact plans vary company to company and state to state, and the insurers will still offer family policies and make good on the child-only policies that they've already sold. But most won't be writing new ones.

In other words, for-profit businesses are refusing to sell products that consumers want to buy. Exact data aren't available, but the child-only market covers roughly a million kids a year.

The reason is a regulation that President Obama mentions every time he talks about health care, as he did recently in Falls Church, Virginia: "Children who have pre-existing conditions are going to be covered." Insurers are now required to cover everyone under 19 when their parents apply for coverage, regardless of health status. The problem with this kind of "guaranteed issue" is that it encourages people, in this case parents, to wait until their kids are sick before seeking coverage.

This drives up premiums for the healthy, encouraging consumers in turn to drop coverage, and eventually it leads to what's known as a "death spiral," the industry term for an insurer with rapidly increasing costs as a result of population changes in its coverage pool. The child-only market is a particular death-spiral risk because it is so small and unstable, which explains why so many insurers left in a stroke.

The collapse of the child-only market is a preview of what will happen when guaranteed issue and the rest of ObamaCare comes on line in 2014 for adults, except then insurers will have nowhere to flee. Exiting the market will mean going out of business.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Simply Great Post On What To Eat, And Why It Shouldn't Be Sugar Or Wheat
Here's a link to the fantastic post by Girl Gone Primal.

Don't miss this video she put into her post, featuring Dr. Michael Eades and his wife, Dr. Mary Dan Eades:

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

I Need Problems
You were all super helpful on yesterday's blog item, Need Your "What Do You Do When...?" Manners Questions, asking for roommate manners questions for my next book.

For anybody who wasn't around yesterday, my agent told me I need to have more "burning need" questions -- the kind of manners/conduct questions people have a burning need to have answered.

Examples I got from the stuff you all posted on roommate issues include:

•When your roommates are your parents: How to politely live in your parents' basement.
•The Squatter: What to do about a roommate's boyfriend who is over at your house so much it's like he lives there.

Today, I'll take two topics from the top of my chapter outline, although I'm a little worried one will get neglected for the other. Please prove me wrong!

The first subject I need questions about is broadly titled The Airplane I'm looking for "What do you do when...? questions about manners on planes, in airports, at the TSA, on airport shuttles, on moving sidewalks, in making reservations, and in troubleshooting travel hell. Anything related to traveling somewhere on a plane.

The other topic is The Apology. Any questions you have related to that would be super-helpful.

And please feel free to post questions on miscellaneous other topics if they come to mind. The better the questions, the better my book will be (and the better it will sell!).

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Libertarians Are Unimpressed With The Republicans
Libertarian Party executive director Wes Benedict released the following statement:

Instead of a "Pledge to America," the Republicans should have written an "Apology to America." It should have gone something like this:

"We're sorry, America. Sorry we grew the federal government budget from $1.7 trillion to over $3 trillion. Sorry we added $5 trillion to the federal debt. Sorry we doubled the size of the Department of Education. Sorry we started two incredibly costly foreign wars. Sorry we supported the absurd and costly TARP bailouts. Sorry we created a huge and costly new Medicare entitlement. Sorry we did nothing to end the costly and destructive War on Drugs. Sorry we did nothing to reform the federal government's near-prohibition on immigration. But hey, at least we helped you by shifting a lot of your tax burden onto your children and grandchildren."

There are so many lies, distortions, hypocrisies, and idiocy in this document that it's hard to know where to start.

It is deeply insulting to see the Republicans refer to "America's founding values" on their cover. The Republican Party has no understanding whatsoever of America's founding values. They have proven and re-proven that for decades.

The document talks a lot about "tax cuts." Unfortunately, the Republican "tax cut" proposals would really do nothing to cut taxes. All their proposals achieve is to defer taxes, pushing the burden onto our children and grandchildren. The only real way to cut taxes is to cut government spending, and the Republican document does almost nothing in that regard.

The Republicans say they want to "roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels." In other words, to re-create the situation near the end of the Bush administration, after Republicans had massively increased federal spending on almost everything.

Republicans must love it when Democrats expand government, because it gives them the opportunity to propose small "cuts," while still ending up with huge government.

Don't confuse the Republicans with a party for small government. They're just the party that says they are.

It's pretty sad when the best hope of keeping this country from going under is gridlock in the House and in the Senate.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Don't Just Get Mad, Get Nancy Drew-ing
Great piece on Salon about a woman who tracked down the thief who robbed her. Her name's Amanda Enayati, and here's an excerpt from her story:

At this point, I hadn't called the cops. I hadn't filed a police report and was leaning toward not filing one. Our car was unlocked, after all. It was almost as if we deserved to get robbed. But then something peculiar happened. A woman who lived a few blocks away e-mailed to say she found some papers from my wallet, including my business card, in her front yard. She wanted to return them to me, thinking I might have dropped them accidentally. I had to wonder: What else might be dumped around my neighborhood?

After school, my kids and I set out on foot for a scavenger hunt. On one neighbor's lawn, we found the little cardboard wish boxes the kids had decorated at the museum the previous day. We found my discarded Books Inc. frequent book buyers' card, ready to be redeemed, among some bushes. (Not a big reader, this guy.) My backpack lay in someone's driveway, barely hidden by some shrubs. My BlackBerry and makeup were still inside.

For about a mile up the road, I found pieces of my life, snatched and discarded. It was like Hansel and Gretel, like the thief was creating a path to him, as if he wanted me to find him. Then, abruptly, the trail stopped.

I suppose I should have been glad to get my things back (but not that the insurance company would cancel the new phone I'd already ordered, so that's $100 I lost). But here's a note to aspiring thieves: If you're going to steal someone's personal items -- the BlackBerry with contact information for dear old friends, the wedding anniversary wallet that her husband bought her when she finished chemo, stuffed with about two years' worth of love letters from her toddlers, hopeful doctors' notes, and other scraps of paper she couldn't bear to part with -- that person would probably prefer you just dump it all in the trash. Because finding fragments of your private life on people's yards and scattered on the street, in the shrubs and gutters, is a unique kind of psychological torment. Suddenly a routine violation starts to feel really personal.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Wellesley Public School Students Visit Mosque That Sponsored Hate Speakers
Charles Jacobs posts at Big Peace of videos released that show the real deal behind the Muslim American Society running the Saudi-funded Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC):

The ISBCC is the mosque that hosted the Wellesley Middle School field trip, during which students were taught false information (video at link) about religious warfare and the treatment of women in Islamic history. During the trip some of the school boys joined in the Muslim prayer ritual.

According to APT research, there is reason to be concerned about the radical teachings being presented to Muslim youth at the ISBCC.

The Muslim American Society gives classes at the Islamic center through its educational subsidiary - the Islamic American University. The IAU is chaired by the controversial clerics Yusuf Qaradawi and Jamal Badawi, former and current trustees of the Roxbury mosque, respectively. Here are Qaradawi and Badawi on video, preaching their hate.

Before I became a post-Jewish atheist, I grew up Jewish and went to temple every weekend, and I never, ever heard them call for or lust for another human being's death. Quite the contrary. We were taught that the greatest form of righteousness was saving a life. Any life. They didn't specify that we were to save Jews' lives first; in fact, in Israel, Muslims have been impressed by how the doctors and nurses in hospitals triage based on who needs the most care...Muslim or Jew. Muslim or Jewish soldier. And if the Muslim is worse off, they get the care.

But, don't take it from me. Here's Brigitte Gabriel:

I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Moslem's shell, and was taken into an Israeli hospital for treatment. When we entered the emergency room, I was shocked at what I saw. There were hundreds of people wounded, Moslems, Palestinians, Christians, Lebanese, and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn't see religion, they didn't see political affiliation, they saw people in need and they helped.

For the first time in my life I experienced a human quality that I know my culture would not have shown to their enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis, who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I believe information, the way I listen to the radio or to television. I realized I was sold a fabricated lie by my government, about the Jews and Israel , that was so far from reality. I knew for fact that, if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds, as shouts of joy of Allah Akbar, God is great, would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets.

Those of you who grew up Christian, Catholic, etc., did your religious services include the leader standing up and telling you other people who didn't believe as you do are evil and should be slain, every last one of them?

Why do we accept this from Muslims?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Need Your "What Do You Do When...?" Manners Questions
You all posted really super, really helpful scenarios over on my You See Rude People blog I'm using to write my next book on manners. My agent told me I need to have more "burning need" questions -- the kind of questions people have a burning need to have answered.

This book has lots of topics, so I thought I'd post a topic a day to collect questions from anybody who wants to help. I'll answer them in the book, not here, generally speaking, because I'm working day and night to pull the proposal together and get it sold. This will help me do that.

Examples of the sort of questions I need:

How to get the neighbors to stop cranking the death metal at 2 a.m. without doing jail time for murder.

The protocol if you have a STD: When do you tell, what do you say, and do you have to contact everyone you ever had sex with?

What do you do if your cubicle-mate chews really loudly?

What do you do if you're a woman and Auntie Flo pays you an unexpected visit when you're sitting on your friend's cream suede dining room chairs? (What's your response?)

Today's topic, roommate issues. (And I really need help on this one, because I haven't had a roommate since the early 90s.) Please post all the uncomfortable situations or stuff you or anyone could need advice on related to roommates.

Oh, and if other questions on other issues occur to you, please feel free to post them. The better the questions I have, the better the book will be.

(Always need questions from people who need love advice. But, send those to adviceamy at aol dot com. Especially if they're interesting! But, even if they might not be.)

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Adults Who Sleep With Stuffed Animals
Just got a letter from one of them asking for advice. Are you turned off by a grown woman who goes to bed every night with a mangy stuffed raccoon?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

I See Rude People, And They've Just Eaten Pizza
There's one trashcan by the door at this Starbucks (the other is all the way in the back), and some jerk has covered it up with their pizza container.

I didn't see who left this. What I'm wondering is whether they did it in a sneaky way, like they were embarrassed, or whether they didn't even have that going for them.

I've always fantasized about tracking down the mother of somebody who does really inconsiderate, Me!Me!Me! Generation things, and asking whether this is how they were raised.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How The Oval Office SHOULD Have Been Redecorated
By David Fitzsimmons.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Welcome To Entitlementville!
Perhaps I'm a little ill-informed, because I always pay my credit card bill before it's due, but if you pay late, don't you incur late fees? There's a post up at Consumerist by Phil Villarreal with some BofA customer mewling that the bank dared charge her a late fee for paying, well, late. Here's her note:

I have been a Bank of America customer since 2004 when I signed up for a checking account and credit card as a freshman in college. I have always been responsible with my credit card, had a low limit and maintained a low balance. I was 60 days late on a payment once when I was studying abroad in India but otherwise have always paid my credit card bill on time, typically paying off the full balance and almost always more than the minimum due. The one time I had a problem with BofA, it was related to my checking account but it was minor and 4 years ago.

Today, I received my first ever "courtesy call" from a blocked phone number, from a woman identifying herself as a BofA agent. She had all my information so I can only assume it was real. She sounded like she was 10 years old and had the most condescending voice I think I've ever heard on the phone. She was calling to tell me that I was 4 days late on my credit card payment this month. I was aware of this (having a hard month financially) and had planned on paying the bill on Friday. I told her such. She pressed me for the exact date and time I would be paying it and also the exact amount I would be paying toward my balance. I told her that I simply didn't know but she continued to ask me for this exact information 4 more times. I asked her if this was a new policy to check up on customers who were a few days late in their payments. She said "No" and continued to demand the exact time and amount I would be paying.

Finally, I told her that she was being extremely rude and treating me like I hadn't been a responsible customer in the past. Four days late is hardly absconding without paying, especially since I have always been a reliable customer. She finally told me that I would have to pay a $75 late fee, to have a good day and hung up.

Is this some kind of new BofA policy? I had already strongly considered switching banks but being treated like a deadbeat and getting a $75 late fee for 4 days is ridiculous. Not even my 60-days-late payment received a fee like that. What should I do?

Four days late is still late, and it's up to the bank as far as whether they'll nix the fee for you. I am no fan of BofA, but if this is in her agreement with them -- that she has to pay late fees if her payment is late -- well, how do you get to complain that the bank is awful over that?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Obamacareless
That health care "reform" they rammed through into law? Turns out it's not going to be so healthy. From the WashEx, a few revelations about Obamacare:

» Obamacare won't decrease health care costs for the government. According to Medicare's actuary, it will increase costs. The same is likely to happen for privately funded health care.

» Obamacare won't allow employees or most small businesses to keep the coverage they have and like. By Obama's estimates, as many as 69 percent of employees, 80 percent of small businesses, and 64 percent of large businesses will be forced to change coverage, probably to more expensive plans.

» Obamacare will increase insurance premiums -- in some places, it already has. Insurers, suddenly forced to cover clients' children until age 26, have little choice but to raise premiums, and they attribute to Obamacare's mandates a 1 to 9 percent increase. Obama's only method of preventing massive rate increases so far has been to threaten insurers.

» Obamacare imposes a huge nonmedical tax compliance burden on small business. It will require them to mail IRS 1099 tax forms to every vendor from whom they make purchases of more than $600 in a year, with duplicate forms going to the Internal Revenue Service. Like so much else in the 2,500-page bill, our senators and representatives were apparently unaware of this when they passed the measure.

If you wonder why so many American voters are angry, and no longer give Obama the benefit of the doubt on a variety of issues, you need look no further than Obamacare, whose birthday gift to America might just be a GOP congressional majority.

Great! New, earmarking, spendthrift bums of a slightly different color! (And then there are the Libertarians, always running the mangiest dogs they can find.) And mostly to blame are the people, for being so gullible, complacent, apathetic, and just plain stupid and voting in such asshats.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Unions Create New Jobs
New jobs for scabs, that is. Great piece from The Daily Show:

Working Stiffed
www.thedailyshow.com

Brilliant. Via Radley Balko.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Mr. Snazzy
Another interesting person from the gallery opening at The Loft at Liz's above Liz's Antique Hardware, on La Brea.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How "Consumer Protection" Screwed The Consumers
Great piece by my pal Ted Frank in the NYPost on "financial reform" that's leading banks to stop offering free checking and to jump the interest rates on credit cards:

The Obama-era Congress has been radically remaking the laws on relations between banks and their customers, culminating in the Dodd-Frank "financial reform" law. But what lawmakers did in the name of protecting consumers has made most of us worse off.

For example, legislators (and trial lawyers) have long argued that fees for overdraft protection and other special services -- including credit-card services -- were too high. So they've been limiting them or even banning them.

But because these businesses operate in a competitive free-market system, these fees never translated into pure profit. Instead, credit cards and banks used much of the money to cover other customer services. The fees underwrote things like free checking, rewards programs, free ATMs and other perks -- all of which, after all, cost banks money to provide.

When new laws and regulations limit the circumstances when banks can charge fees, they have to make their money in other ways.

Bye, bye free checking!

Credit-card companies used to be able to offer lower rates to consumers with less-than-pure credit because they knew they could raise your rates to reflect the greater risk of default if you failed to pay bills or otherwise acted in a way that showed you weren't a good risk. Responsible middle-class consumers who might have been unable to get credit otherwise thus could have the convenience of credit cards.

But now Congress has changed the rules. That's why we see credit-card interest rates going up, even as other interest rates are going down -- and why more consumers are being refused credit.

This has put brakes on the economy, not only because it eliminates responsible consumer spending that would have occurred but also because job-creating small businesses often rely on credit cards to invest in their businesses. The job losses are incalculable.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Cheapass Parents Who Fly
It's a subject I've blogged about a number of times before: I just can't believe that people who claim to love their children risk their lives by flying with them on their laps -- as if they could guarantee they'd be able to hang onto their child if the plane takes a dive. Eileen Ogintz writes at MSNBC about how everything on a plane must be restrained at takeoff, landing, and in turbulence -- everything but a baby:

More than 7 million children under the age of 2 fly on parents' laps on American carriers each year, according to government estimates. But you are not required to purchase a seat for your baby until they turn 2, and airlines don't charge for families to check a car seat. That is the crux of the issue that has stymied safety experts and pediatricians for years and has perhaps lulled parents into a false sense of security.

"I don't believe she'd be much safer in a seat," said Erik Kaye, a New Yorker who has flown eight times with his 15 month old, never buying her a seat. "Having flown hundreds of flights, I've never experienced turbulence so strong it would cause me to lose grip of a child," he said in an e-mail.

Well, then it for sure doesn't happen! What an ass. I've never experienced a tsunami, but if I hear one's coming, I'm not going to put on my floaties and dive into the Pacific ocean.

Take the case of the United Airlines DC-10 that crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. The parents of the four lap-held children were told to put their children on the cabin floor and hold them in that position while the adults assumed "the protective brace position." But three of the parents reported to investigators that they were unable to hold on to their babies and a 23-month-old died.

Five years later, a USAir flight crashed in Charlotte, N.C. Among the 37 who were killed was a nine-month-old baby held by her mother, who survived. NTSB investigators believed the baby might not have sustained fatal injuries if she had been properly restrained in a child-restraint system.

If you don't have the money to fly your children safely to your destination -- don't go, or don't have children. You don't get to endanger your child's life because you're a cheap fuck who figures you'll gamble that your flight won't be one of the few that babies go flying on.

Hmmm, having your little baby brain smashed against the ceiling of an aircraft because Mommy'd rather save that $300...how sweet!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Completely Honest First Date
NSFW unless you work for me.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The "Don't Hire Women" Bill
If you don't hire 'em, they can't sue you for wage discrimination under the new "Paycheck Fairness Act," which makes it easier for women to file class-action suits for punitive damages against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination. Christina Hoff Sommers writes in The New York Times:

The bill is based on the premise that the 1963 Equal Pay Act, which bans sex discrimination in the workplace, has failed; for proof, proponents point out that for every dollar men earn, women earn just 77 cents.

But that wage gap isn't necessarily the result of discrimination. On the contrary, there are lots of other reasons men might earn more than women, including differences in education, experience and job tenure.

When these factors are taken into account the gap narrows considerably -- in some studies, to the point of vanishing. A recent survey found that young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, mostly because more of them earn college degrees.

Moreover, a 2009 analysis of wage-gap studies commissioned by the Labor Department evaluated more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the aggregate wage gap "may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."

...Under the bill, it's not enough for an employer to guard against intentional discrimination; it also has to police potentially discriminatory assumptions behind market-driven wage disparities that have nothing to do with sexism.

Universities, for example, typically pay professors in their business schools more than they pay those in the school of social work, citing market forces as the justification. But according to the gender theory that informs this bill, sexist attitudes led society to place a higher value on male-centered fields like business than on female-centered fields like social work.

The bill's language regarding these "lingering effects" is vague, but that's the problem: it could prove a legal nightmare for even the best-intentioned employers. The theory will be elaborated in feminist expert testimony when cases go to trial, and it's not hard to imagine a media firestorm developing from it. Faced with multimillion-dollar lawsuits and the attendant publicity, many innocent employers would choose to settle.

Here's how the government meddling works. Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes at the WashEx:

A woman who chooses a job with a flexible schedule, perhaps part-time, in order to have time both for her family and her career thinks of herself as successful. But to President Obama, she is a social problem in search of a government solution because she might earn less than a man.

The bill requires the government to collect data from employers on the sex, race and national origin of employees, adding to red tape, paperwork and hiring costs.

It would only allow employers to defend differences in pay between men and women on the grounds of education, training and experience if these factors are justified on the grounds of "business necessity." So male supermarket managers with college degrees couldn't be paid more than female cashiers if the college degree for the manager wasn't consistent with "business necessity."

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Legs
Gallery opening at The Loft at Liz's above Liz's Antique Hardware.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

If I Break Into Your House, You're Obligated To Give Me Your TV
Barack Obama's half-auntie on his father's side, Zeituni Onyango, isn't Jewish, but she sure has chutzpah. David Knowles writes at AOL that she huffs and puffs that she's done nothing wrong by living in the U.S. illegally for years, and that the U.S. owes her citizenship:

"If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen," Onyango, 58, told Boston's WBZ news.

In her first interview since Obama was elected president, Onyango described how she came to America in 2000 from her native Kenya, fell ill and was hospitalized. Upon her release, Onyango told WBZ, she was out of money. So rather than return to her homeland, she continued to live in the country in violation of immigration laws.

After stints in a Boston homeless shelter, Onyango was eventually put in public housing and began receiving disability payments. In 2004, an immigration judge ordered her to leave the country, but Onyango remained. However, she noted that her story was less about intentionally flouting federal immigration policy and more about its ineffectiveness.

"I didn't take advantage of the system," Onyango said. "The system took advantage of me."

More here at WBZtv:

"To me America's dream became America's worst nightmare," she said adamantly. "I have been treated like public enemy number one."

And how!

She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says.

Can someone please punish me with $700 a month and free housing?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Messiah Turns Out To Be Just Another Smooth-Talking Politician
Velma Hart, at a town hall meeting with the President wants to know where he hid her hopey-changey:

Some of the transcript from The Daily Beast:

"I've been told that I voted for a man who said he's going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class," Hart said during the meeting, broadcast on CNBC. "I'm one of those people, and I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting. I don't feel it yet." Hart said her family feels their middle-class lifestyle sliding away as they sink back toward the "hot dogs and beans" era of her life. "I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now," Hart said

.

Tunku Varadarajan writes at The Daily Beast:

Velma Hart wants change; she wants it celebrated, and she doesn't want to have to point out the problems. In a way she's right: It's exhausting trying to say to everyone "Come on, give it time, he's not a miracle worker." But she's also spoiled and disillusioned, because she's starting to realize that she voted for a miracle worker, and that she was taken in by her illusions.

And yet--I have not a shred of doubt that she will vote for Obama in 2012. Illusions have a stubborn way of living on.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Let's Make A Habit Out Of This
Woman who falsely accused a man of rape is sent to jail for a year for it. Wendy Barlow writes in the Lancashire Telegraph of Elizabeth Wilkinson's false allegation:

The court heard it was all because he had rejected her days after they had consensual sex.

Wilkinson, 21, formerly of Foulridge, and now of Tinkerbrook Close, Oswaldtwistle, first spread her 'vicious lies' about him to people who knew him.

Then she called in police last September and carried on lying even when confronted with the truth and given the chance to change her story.

The real victim in her campaign, David Lord, 23, who had had his fingerprints and DNA taken, lived a nightmare for a month before being told no action was being taken against him by police.

After the case Mr Lord, who now lives in Manchester, said the claims turned his life 'upside down'.

Mr Lord, who said he had had to fight to see his children in the past, said his first thought was for them and not himself.

The dad of two said he had to be put on medication for severe depression and tried to kill himself, once by hanging.

He added: "I just couldn't handle it. Mud sticks."

Mr Lord added: "I think she deserved to go prison for what she put my children through."

via Overlawyered

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

An Interesting Approach At Customs, Continued
It's been a busy time, and I neglected to post the link to Paul Karl Lukacs' updated post about refusing to answer questions at Customs. Here's the link, and here's my prior post about it. Sorry about being a little delinquent. Working like mad on my next book.

From what I understand, if you're a U.S. citizen, you can't legally be deported or kept from returning to the country. I think there's nothing wrong with refusing to answer and potentially incriminate yourself, but I know at the border this can lead to some really unpleasant searches, and if you take Lukac's tack, you need to prepare for this. Is a search legal simply on grounds that you refuse to answer verbal questions by the officer? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say.

And finally, here's a must-watch video by Professor James Duane of Regent University School of Law on how to avoid incriminating yourself when a police officer asks you questions.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Getting To Know Your Neighbors...And Their Venereal Issues
You learn all sorts of things about people who don't care whether they're disturbing the next-door neighbors with loud phone calls they have out in their backyard.

A nice older woman whose living room abuts the backyard of a little snot of a network TV actress who moved in recently is kept up by the girl's late parties (with the girl's friends hooting and hollering and singing on guitar into the wee hours, and never mind if the neighbors want to go to bed).

The nice older woman is also forced to listen to the actress talking loudly into her phone in her backyard...and oh, the things she learns! Recently, she told me she heard the girl talking about how she'd slept with the boyfriend of one of her friends. Sunday, I ran into the nice older woman and got an update: Seems the guy she has staying at her place had a loud conversation the other day about how he has a bad case of the crabs!

The actress is damn lucky the nice older woman doesn't work for TMZ, and isn't the kind of person who'd call them and suggest they walk a dog through the alley behind her house in the afternoons. Nope, no listening device required -- other than a nice ordinary set of ears.

Rudeness can be costly!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Paternity Fraud Horror
The director of the 2005 update of "The Amityville Horror" is a victim of paternity fraud, and has sued his ex-wife, writer Ameena Meer, writes Robert Franklin, Esq. at GlennSacks.com:

Meer's daughter is now 17. Douglas and Meer had an off-again/on-again sexual relationship back in the late 80s and early 90s when Meer lived in the U.S. and Douglas in England. In 1992, she telephoned him, told him she was pregnant and that he was the father. She begged him to marry her to save her Muslim parents embarrassment at having a grandchild out of wedlock. He agreed.

Meer moved to London to be with Douglas about six months before the girl's birth, but didn't stay long. When the child was four months old, she moved back to the States and the couple divorced six years later. During all that time and up to the present, Douglas paid child support and for the girl's education and insurance. His suit claims he paid about $700,000 over the years. A combination of Meer's blocking his access and his own work that involved a lot of travel meant that Douglas has had little contact with the girl he thought was his daughter.

But recently, the young woman happened to inquire about his blood type and Douglas figured out that the chances of his being her father were remote. He got genetic testing done and the results were that there was a 0% chance that he was the girl's father.

So he's sued Meer for all the money she conned him out of. My guess is that he's sued for emotional distress as well although this article doesn't say (New York Post, 9/15/10).

Commit bank fraud, you'll likely go to jail. Same for mail fraud or all the other kinds of fraud. The one exception has been paternity fraud -- the kind that probably has the greatest potential to ruin lives. The lack of a penalty increases the potential to commit this crime -- a crime that so often pays big, at the expense of men. At least now there are readily available DNA tests -- which more men need to avail themselves of.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

I Am Pretty, Cheap
This post is for the ladies and the pretty boys. The rest of you kindly scratch your balls and move on down the page.

Tough times call for frugal beauty. I finally found a great cheap eye cream, Correctionist Multi-Benefit Eye Creme, just $12.99.

Really nice inexpensive foundation: Revlon PhotoReady Makeup, $11.19, big bottle, lasts a long time, and easy to apply.

A month's supply of Krill Oil, which Dr. Eades thinks is better than fish oil: Davinci Labs - Neptune Krill Oil, $26.88. (Yes, this is included because it helps you be beautiful on the inside.)

This stuff isn't cheap -- my French sunblock, which I buy for about $11 at a discount drugstore in France: La Roche-Posay Anthelios 60 Ultra Light Sunscreen Fluid for Face, 1.7-Ounce Bottle, $20.98. But, if you want to avoid looking like an old handbag by the time you're 50, forget all the expensive creams made out of some yak's testicles, and just wear this sunblock or other serious sunblock.

I also take 5,000 iu of Biotech vitamin D, which isn't as good as getting sunlight (per Michael Holick's The Vitamin D Solution), and got tested to see that that's the right amount for me, which it is. The only other vitamin I take is magnesium, also per Eades. He says to take one that ends in "ate" at the end. Mine's "malate," I think.

Oh, hell, let's just hear what Eades has to say:

I use magnesium citrimate, and I take 300 mg per day at bedtime. Any good chelated magnesium will do. Just look for one with 'ate' on the end of it, as in magnesium aspartate or magnesium citrate. And be careful in checking the doses because chelated magnesium isn't all labeled the same. Some list the actual magnesium on the label and will say that each pill contains, say, 150 mg of magnesium. Others add the weight of the chelating agent (the substance that ends in 'ate') in with the magnesium, so you might find a brand where the label says each pill is 1000 mg. This means the magnesium plus the chelating agent adds up to 1000 mg. The best way is to look for the RDI on the back of the bottle. Take enough pills to get the RDI each day, and take them at bedtime.

Got any cheap beauty thrills to recommend? Leave 'em below, but please, one link per comment or you will be eaten by my ugly and dangerous spam filter.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Don't Just Tell The Judges The Cost Of Prison Sentences
Tell convicted criminals, and then charge them for their prison terms, too. Monica Davey writes for The New York Times that Missouri is informing judges of the cost of various sentences:

For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer's 30-year prison term: $504,690.

Legal experts say no other state systematically provides such information to judges, a practice put into effect here last month by the state's sentencing advisory commission, an appointed board that offers guidance on criminal sentencing.

The practice has touched off a sharp debate. It has been lauded nationally by a disparate group of defense lawyers and fiscal conservatives, who consider it an overdue tool that will force judges to ponder alternatives to prison more seriously.

The truth is, some people belong in cages, and if so, they should be in them, but the rest of us shouldn't be paying for their crimes. Prisoners should not only do their time, they should do enough work to see that they pay their way.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Dirty Electricity
The health risks of CFLs:



Here's a post about the "dirty electricity" of CFLs. I haven't had time to investigate this, so anybody who has an ability in understanding science and reading studies who wants to weigh in, please do. (Not that you all are usually bashful.)

I have one CFL-only ceiling lamp installed in my house by my landlord. I hate the light, and now that there's reason to believe it may be unhealthy, I'm not turning it on. LED light isn't the light I like, either, so I'm going to buy 200 incandescents as soon as I get paid for an article I wrote. (33 cents for 120 or more for frosted non-Phillips 100 watt at this site. Should provide me with nice light for years. After that, I suppose I'll have to slink into the hood to buy lightbulbs the way people do to score smack.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Fall Blowout Sale At Amazon
I'll say it again. Fall Blowout Sale At Amazon.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Why Are We Supposed To Pay For Her Health Care?
My health insurance is sure to go up in January, when I start paying for loads and loads of other people who had better things to buy, but, say, whose pre-existing conditions bit them in the ass at 46, and who lucked out big with the passage of Obamacare.

I'm 46, but I've been paying into my HMO every month since my early 20s. It was always on my one-two list: the first two things I paid -- rent and health insurance. Unfortunately, not everyone shares my priority. This lady who visited the ER, for example.

Dr. R. Starner Jones sent this letter to the Clarion, Mississippi Ledger:

Dear Sirs:

During my last night's shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ring tone.

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer. And our President expects me to pay for this woman's health care?

Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture - a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.

A culture that thinks I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Starner Jones, MD
Jackson, MS

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Draining The Acid Bath
Nancy Rommelmann, who writes beautiful pieces about "female fabulists," doesn't buy into the pitythink of a lot of people about the woman whose acid attack turned out to be self-inflicted. An excerpt from her blog item:

The more I write about fantasists and charlatans, the less mysterious their reasoning becomes.

This morning, the Vancouver police are apparently still baffled that a woman would make this up. That the force spent many hours and dollars on a goose chase. They do not yet say, they are angry. They say, instead, of Storro, "It's obvious to everybody here that she's got a fragile mental state." They have also just announced, they might bring charges against her. And I think they should.

But here's a bet: there will be cries that we should not further persecute someone who is obviously in enough pain to disfigure herself in a bid for attention. That had -- and I might call this the Laura Albert rationale -- Storro only been given the love and support she needed, she would not have had to resort to such drastic measures, and that she did only proves, we were not there for her when she needed it.

Read Nancy's stories here.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Big Hairy Deal
My boyfriend will notice that I've gotten a haircut the day I get my head shaved. Just how things are. Why do women get upset about that?

The way I see it, as an advice columnist and in my experience with my own boyfriend, all that matters is that I look pretty, and ideally, hot. That he notices. And that works for me.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Exactly The Right Number
My kinda end to a public cell phone call. Funny stuff...

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Doing What's (Politically) Best
School choice in D.C. becomes school sans choice thanks to the Obama administration for some kids in need. From Nick Gillespie at reason.tv:

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Criminal Discussion Of History
Defeating Washington's tour guide licensing scheme, from Institute for Justice:

Yes, describing things without a license can get you thrown in jail for 90 days. "Occupational licensing requirements are growing at a truly alarming rate," says McNamara from Institute for Justice. And the more they grow, the more our rights, like the right to free speech, will shrink. More on this here.

via @KateC

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Great Question By Walter Moore
Walter -- a very sensible guy who I voted for for mayor of Los Angeles -- asks why they always send a fire truck with the ambulance:

Doesn't that wind up costing us more money? I mean, I can understand sending an ambulance whenever there's a fire, but I don't get sending a fire truck every time someone just needs an ambulance. Do the injured typically suffer from spontaneous combustion when moved?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Stupid People In Charge Of Schools
Yet another lesson in moronism brought to you by the Broward County School Board. Samuel Burgos brought a toy gun to school in his backpack, and a teacher found it, and he was expelled last year, and is going to be expelled this school year, too, under the county's zero tolerance weapons policy.

From NBC Miami, his father said, "He made a mistake, but why the severe punishment? I don't understand that."

Being human is being fallible. Okay, so Mommy and Daddy didn't respond with quite the appropriate level of paranoia that a kid might take the wrong toy to school. Oops. Do you really expel a kid for two years for that? And if you do, should an idiot like you be running the schools?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

You're Just Dissatisfied Because Something's Wrong With You
Glenn Greenwald, at Salon, notes a desire to point the finger by the president -- everywhere but back at himself. No, according to the president, it's not that he's doing a bad job -- it's that you're a pissy jerk who's never satisfied. Obama made these remarks at a $30K/plate DNC fundraising dinner at somebody's connecticut home:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.) We have had the most productive, progressive legislative session in at least a generation.

Greenwald's take after a litany of press saying Obama's just like Bush:

What's most striking about Obama's comments is that there is no acceptance whatsoever of responsibility (I've failed in some critical areas; we could have/should have done better). There's not even any base-motivating vow to fight to fix these particular failures (we'll keep fighting for a public option/to curb executive power abuses/to reduce lobbyist and corporate control of our political process). Instead, he wants you to know that if you criticize him -- or even question what he's done ("well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that") -- it's your fault: for being some sort of naive, fringe-leftist idiot who thought he would eliminate the Pentagon and bring about world peace in 18 months, and/or because you simply don't sufficiently appreciate everything he's done for you because you're congenitally dissatisfied.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How About "Crap That Makes You Fat"?
The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to improve its image by changing its name to "corn sugar."

For anybody who hasn't seen it posted here before, here's Dr. Robert Lustig on the evidence of how utterly damaging sugar -- of any kind -- is for the human body.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Another From The Life Isn't Fair Files
Over at Jezebel, the latest thing they've found to be all huffywuffy about is a University of Texas study I read last month. It's "More than just a pretty face: men's priority shifts toward bodily attractiveness in short-term versus long-term mating contexts," by Jaime C. Confer, Carin Perilloux, David M. Buss, published in the September Evolution and Human Behavior.

Jezebel's Anna North blogs:

Scientists have discovered that men, when deciding on who to date, really do make a decision based on a woman's curvy body, not her face, let alone her wit or brains." And yes, it gets worse from there.

Loved this bit, especially, from North's Jezebel post:

What really bothers me about this study isn't that some dudes would rather look at a lady's body than her face (is one really more or less shallow than the other?). It's the idea that men have totally different decision processes for hookups and "wife material."

I'm bothered that I don't live in a mansion in Beverly Hills with servants and a moat, but this is reality, and it very often does not gel so well with my squishy wishy dreams of how I'd like life to work. Boo frigging hoo.

You want a man, put down that donut and do the best with what you have.

And more from Jezzie:

I have no doubt there are douchebags out there of both sexes who will write off someone's long-term potential based on superficial criteria.

Yes, women are shoving the bankers out of the way to date the barristas. It's rare that it goes the other way. Well, that is, in Imaginaryland, the utopian world that exists mainly in the minds of people blogging and commenting at Jezebel and other sites of its ilk. There, the big girls with the big, un-Naired mustaches are chasing after the really hot male barristas who are perpetually between jobs.

UPDATE: Jesse Bering wrote me, "I took a poke at them with this piece last year; and they never let me hear the end of it": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bitch-evolved-girls-cruel

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Who Started The Tea Party?
Don't just blame the Democrats. Andrea Tantaros writes at the New York Daily News:

...Rove, George W. Bush and many incumbents, including President Obama, are the reason we even have the Tea Party movement. Bush ran up deficits. Obama quadrupled them. To many disgruntled conservatives, Rove was behind Bush in giving us open borders, tax cuts that expire, Medicare Part D and busted budgets.

The current alternative from the left is even more cuckoo to voters: higher taxes, a new health care regime, more rights for terrorists, disregard for immigration law and constant apologies to other countries. Now that's nuts.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How To Defend Western Civ, By Robert Spencer
Robert Spencer writes on Jihadwatch of the Seattle cartoonist who is now in hiding thanks to an Islamic fatwa that's been put on her:

Molly Norris conceived of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" as a joke, but it went viral in part because it was a gesture of defiance in the face of violent threats and intimidation: if Islamic supremacists were threatening to murder Motoonists Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks, and anyone else who dared to draw Muhammad, then if everyone drew him, the thugs couldn't possibly kill us all, could they?

Well, no, they couldn't. But Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who is linked to so much jihadist activity in the United States, including the Fort Hood jihad assassin, the Christmas underwear jihad bomber, and even 9/11, called for her death. And so now she has disappeared. There is no more Molly Norris: she has changed her name and gone into hiding.

This is the sort of case that the President of the United States should be talking about. Instead of wringing his hands about the prospect of Muslim rioting over Qur'an-burning, the President should go on television and give a brief lesson about how freedom of speech is a foremost bulwark against tyranny and a cornerstone of any society that respects the dignity of the human being. He should say that the idea that Molly Norris would have to live in hiding because of a cartoon, or series of cartoons, is unconscionable, and tell the Islamic world that neither Muslims nor their prophet are harmed by cartoons depicting him, and that their violent rage over such depictions is the only thing that makes people care to draw him in the first place. He should say that to threaten people with death and to kill people over cartoons of Muhammad is sheer madness, and is a form of violent irrationality that is destructive to free societies -- and as such, it is something that the U.S. will do everything it can to resist. Molly Norris and others who are threatened will be given full round-the-clock protection, and if violent protests and riots over cartoons or Qur'an-burning break out in areas where American troops are deployed, those troops will put down those riots and protect the innocent to the fullest possible extent.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Dicking Around With Your Stimulus Dollars
Guess where $800K of your stimulus dollars went? Yes, that's right...to dickwashing lessons for Africans! Matt Cover writes for CNS::

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling - however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011.

This may be a good and even important study, but why the hell are our stimulus dollars being used to pay for it?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Christine O'Donnell's Anti-Masturbation Campaign
There's some stuff in the news that just seems too trivial or ridiculous to pay attention to, like the campaign of some religious right chick in...Delaware, I think?...Christine O'Donnell, that I've seen the right and left ridiculing. This little anti-masturbation vid did make me smile:

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Asshole Of Wednesday Afternoon
I'm on foot, and I'm about to turn the corner onto my street. Wait, who's yelling? I turn and look.

A woman is SHOUTING into her cellphone -- across the street from houses on my block.

Me, to woman: That's not very considerate, shouting into your phone, across from people in houses.

Woman: You're not in those houses.

Me: My neighbors are.

She shut up. (Maybe simply because her yell-call was done.)

Why is it so hard for people to look at houses and think, "Wow, there might be people in them...people who might not want their afternoon punctuated with a stranger yelling at some other stranger on her mobile phone?"

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Supreme Court Bends Over For Islam
Shockingly, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told George Stephanopoulos on GMA that he's not prepared to conclude that -- in the Internet age -- the First Amendment condones Quran burning:

"Holmes said it doesn't mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater," Breyer told me. "Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?"

Shocking, horrible, disgusting. So, we can burn the flag because Americans aren't violent primitives and won't kill each other for it, but because Islam is filled with violent primitives, the First Amendment goes bye-bye?

In related news, Seattle Weekly cartoonist Molly Norris is disappearing thanks to the Islamic fatwa against her. Mark D. Fefer posts:

She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program--except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It's all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" cartoon.

So, will any speech that offends anybody still be free -- unless it offends Muslims, and then the Constitution becomes a big old piece of toiletpaper?

thanks, Martin

UPDATE: Clarification by Breyer, "Suggests Koran-Burning Is Constitutionally Protected After All" (Volokh).

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Don't Be Too Quick To Brag About Your Grocery List, Lady
Over at Consumerist, a woman bragged about saving $99.48 with coupons at the grocery store, and buying 51 items for $45.46. But, which items, you may ask -- and I did, because I don't even bother going through the coupon section in the Sunday paper; not because I'm not frugal -- I am -- but because the food in there is always highly unhealthy packaged flour and sugar-filled stuff.

Here's an excerpt from Ben Popken's post at Consumerist:

Consumerist reader LadySiren, married with 5 kids, is a coupon ninja by necessity. "My kids go through a box and a half of Pop-Tarts each time they eat them for breakfast," she writes by way of explanation. Here's how, in exhaustive detail, she bought 51 items at the supermarket this week using coupons, super double coupons, and catalinas, for only $45.56, saving $99.48. Her haul is pictured.

She writes,

"I pulled my coupons over the weekend ... then spent last night doing matchups (matching coupons to catalinas and sale items to maximize savings). Here's what I was able to get today:

6 boxes Pop-Tarts
2 canisters Quaker Oats
2 packages Keebler cookies
2 boxes Snickers ice cream bars
2 gallons Turkey Hill Iced Tea
3 boxes Dannon Coolision yogurt
6 cans Spaghettios
6 boxes Tuna Helper
4 cans Progresso soup
2 packages Pillsbury ready-to-bake cookie dough
2 bags Pillsbury frozen biscuits
6 boxes Green Giant frozen veggies
3 packages Old El Paso taco seasoning
1 package Old El Paso tortillas
1 Old El Paso taco kit
1 package Kool-Aid Fun Fizz
3 lbs. 93/7 ground beef
1 package Good Nites sleep pants

And here's my comment:

Of all this food, if you know anything about evidence-based dietary medicine, here's what's healthy to eat: 3 lbs. 93/7 ground beef

Of course, what would be healthier would be 27 percent fat ground beef, which allows you to be satiated on less.

(The "Sleep Pants" probaby wouldn't be anywhere near as unhealthy to eat as the Spaghettios -- at least they wouldn't do much to your blood sugar.)

Per the exhaustive research into dietary science from the 1800s until now by investigative science journalist Gary Taubes, it's carbohydrates (sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes) that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat.

How can a mother not feed her children vegetables? They go through Pop Tarts? We didn't. My mother would sooner have fed us vodka and tonics. It's called...are you ready...PARENTING. And no, contrary to popular belief, this isn't some sort of race to make your children like you.)

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Amy The Outdoorswoman
Gregg and I got In-N-Out burgers to eat before the movies, and we were looking for a nice spot to eat them. We stopped at the Mar Vista library, and pulled into the back of the parking lot, which faces out onto a park.

And then, after I said what I said, Gregg made me write it down, and took the accompanying photo. See below:

Me: Let's go sit on a bench and eat!

Me again: Hmmm, the benches are in the sun.

Me again: There's one in the shade!

Me again: Better yet, let's sit in the car and look at the bench.

What can I say? I'm an urban girl. I get a little itchy if I'm more than five feet from pavement at any time.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

When Asshat Legislators Don't Read The Crap They Vote In
Obamacare included this cute little provision mandating that businesses track and paper-trail all transactions over $600, and report them to the IRS, reports the WSJ:

Democrats tucked the 1099 reporting footnote into the bill to raise an estimated $17.1 billion, part of the effort to claim that ObamaCare reduces the deficit by $100 billion or so.

But this "tax gap" of unreported business income is largely a Beltway myth, and no less than the Treasury Department's National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson says the costs will be "disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvements in tax compliance."

Meanwhile, small businesses are staring in horror toward 2013, when the 1099 mandate will hit more than 30 million of them. Currently businesses only have to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase from vendors and the like. Under the new rules, they'll have to report the value of goods and merchandise they purchase as well, adding vast accounting and paperwork costs.

Think about a midsized trucking company. The back office would have to collect hundreds of thousands of receipts from every gas station where its drivers filled up and figure out where it spent more than $600 that year. Then it would also need to match those payments to the stations' corporate parents.

Most Democrats now claim they were blindsided and didn't understand the implications of the 1099 provision--which is typical of the slapdash, destructive way the bill was written and passed.

...Yesterday the White House endorsed a competing proposal from Florida Democrat Bill Nelson that would increase the 1099 threshold to $5,000 and exempt businesses with fewer than 25 workers. Yet this is little more than a rearguard action in favor of the status quo; the Nelson amendment leaves the basic architecture unchanged while making the problem more complex.

Businesses would still have to track all purchases, not knowing in advance which contractors will exceed $5,000 at the end of the year. It also creates a marginal barrier to job creation--for a smaller firm, hiring a 26th employee would be extremely costly.

Punish productivity! Diminish hiring! Create lots and lots of make-work that creates nothing!

Mary McCandless had a smart comment at the WSJ:

Here's what I wrote to NC Senator Kay Hagan - and haven't heard a word back from her!

Dear Senator Hagan,

Since your office assured me you had read the entire ObamaCare bill before you voted for it, I assume you approve of the requirement in the bill that all businesses issue 1099 tax forms to all suppliers of amounts spent in excess of $600.

Does this mean that I must get the Federal Tax ID numbers for Time Warner Cable for the internet service they provide my business? Does this mean that I must get the Federal Tax ID numbers for Verizon for my phone service? Does this mean that I must get the Federal Tax ID numbers for Duke Power for my utilities? And how about Forsyth County for my property tax payments?

My main concern is the businesses to which I must provide my own tax ID number. How do I protect myself and my business from identity fraud when my tax ID number is floating around in cyberspace - passed along to who knows who?

Did you really consider the ramifications of this requirement when you were reading all 2000 pages of the ObamaCare bill that was rushed to the floor for a vote (violating your and Obama's pledge that it would be published for at least 72 hours before the vote?)

How will you protect me and my business from the fraud caused by this bill, and how I am going to get all the tax ID numbers of the vendors I do business with?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Jenny McCarthy Didn't Go To Med School
Thank the anti-vaxers. The OCReg reports that a San Bernardino infant is California's ninth pertussis death this year -- "amid the worst outbreak of the disease since 1958."

For anybody who doesn't know, there's such a thing as "herd immunity," "a type of immunity that occurs when the vaccination of a portion of the population (or herd) provides protection to unprotected individuals."

Here's cancer surgeon David Gorski at Science Based Medicine on the disproved and disproved and disproved mercury-autism hypothesis.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

What Size Government Will You Be Having?
Arthur C. Brooks and Paul Ryan write at the WSJ that Americans, when polled, overwhelmingly favor small government, but that's not at all what we've been getting:

Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate--and critical--functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state. Most Americans believe in assisting those temporarily down on their luck and those who cannot help themselves, as well as a public-private system of pensions for a secure retirement. But a clear majority believes that income redistribution and government care should be the exception and not the rule.

...Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America's free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it's only a few million tax dollars--and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose--one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America--one acceptable government program at a time.

And as I've said before, don't kid yourselves that the Republicans are the party of small government. They're just the party of small government as compared to the party of really unsmall government, kind of like a 350 pound man is slim when compared to a 550 pound one.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Bend Over, Los Angeles Taxpayers! City Council Is In Session
Unbelievably, City Councilmen Ed Reyes and Bill Rosendahl brought and seconded an emergency motion -- one requiring "immediate action"! What was so damn urgent? Walter Moore (whom I happily voted for for Mayor over the worthless, junketing Tony Teeth) has the answer:

The urgent matter was as follows: Giving $25,000 of your money to a "non-profit" called "The Wall Memorias Project," for "various expenses incurred for this year's celebration of El Grito."

What, you may ask, is "El Grito?"

It is not Spanish for "grits," but that was an excellent guess. Instead, it is the battle cry of the war of Mexican Independence.

Excuse me, but how the hell is giving money to a "non-profit" to celebrate "El Grito" an emergency?

I wish I were making this crap up. And, as usual, there's more. There's always more, as in another motion, to spend $62,500 of your money to fund the following celebratory events: the "Blessing of the Animals," the "Day of the Dead," and my own personal favorite, the "Virgen de Guadalupe."

Luckily, there are L.A. residents who are working day and night to make ends meet -- working so hard that they sometimes don't feel so well one morning and oversleep, and get a parking ticket. The same L.A. City Council that so urgently handed over our tax dollars just jacked up the cost of a parking ticket to pay for their charitable whims. From LAist:

•Failure to Deposit a Coin into the Meter/Overtime Use of the Meter: $55
•Street Cleaning: $65
•Parking in a No Stopping Zone: $85
•Parking in an Anti-Gridlock Zone: $155
•White or Yellow Loading Zone Violations: $50
•Over 18" from the Curb: $50
•Parking in a Front Yard (yeah, you can't do that, stay on the driveway): $55 ($80 and $130 for 2nd and 3rd violations within one year).

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

$850 Million To Historically WASP Institutions
The President just pledged buttloads of money to institutions that are historically white. From the LA Times ToT blog:

We also want to keep strengthening HWCUs (Historically White Colleges And Univerisities), which is why we're investing $850 million in these institutions over the next 10 years. (Applause.) And as I said in February, strengthening your institutions isn't just a task for our advisory board or for the Department of Education; it's a job for the entire federal government. And I expect all agencies to support this mission.

Oh, of course, in the story, it's Historically Black schools that are getting the funding.

Pssst! Sorry, did I hear wrong? Wasn't this supposed to be the post-racial presidency? You know, where you do that judge people by the content of their character thingie?

And by the way, if you really want to help the black community, stigmatize single motherhood so black children won't grow up daddyless and in poverty. (72 percent of black children born in 2007 were born to single mothers.)

Kay Hymowitz in City Journal on The Moynihan report (by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and a social scientist):

But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called "the wild Irish slums"--he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot--the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to "the basic socializing unit" of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their "matriarchal" family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and "alienated."

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They "shape their children's character and ability," he wrote. "By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child." What children learned in the "disorganized home[s]" of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a "stable home" for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan's analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to "shape their children's character and ability" in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan's conclusion: "a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure."

...Liberal advocates had two main ways of dodging the subject of family collapse while still addressing its increasingly alarming fallout. The first, largely the creation of Marian Wright Edelman, who in 1973 founded the Children's Defense Fund, was to talk about children not as the offspring of individual mothers and fathers responsible for rearing them, but as an oppressed class living in generic, nebulous, and never-to-be-analyzed "families." Framing the problem of ghetto children in this way, CDF was able to mount a powerful case for a host of services, from prenatal care to day care to housing subsidies, in the name of children's developmental needs, which did not seem to include either a stable domestic life or, for that matter, fathers. Advocates like Edelman might not have viewed the collapsing ghetto family as a welcome occurrence, but they treated it as a kind of natural event, like drought, beyond human control and judgment. As recently as a year ago, marking the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, CDF announced on its website: "In 2004 it is morally and economically indefensible that a black preschool child is three times as likely to depend solely on a mother's earnings." This may strike many as a pretty good argument for addressing the prevalence of black single-mother families, but in CDF-speak it is a case for federal natural-disaster relief.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Underparented Child, Times Two, Hot Coffee Version
Sunday morning. I'm at Starbucks, where a mother is letting her two young brats ride around (and fast!) on scooters, where people are carrying hot coffee. Unbelievable.

Forseeable events: Kid knocks into somebody carrying hot liquid, hot liquid spills on kid, mom sues Starbucks.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

It'll Mean A Lot To Your Child? Well, Okay Then!
Nourished Kitchen, the mother of a four-year-old, sees a fine restaurant as one big experimentation factory for children. Here's an excerpt from her preamble and one of her tips:

Dining out with kids doesn't have to be a disaster, and, no, you don't have to relegate yourself to "family-friendly" chains with terrible service and even worse food.

...I just like to eat out. And like any devotee of attachment parenting, my husband and I tend to avoid sitters in favor of bringing our child with us nearly everywhere just as we've done since the day he was born. So in those five years of eating out with a baby turned toddler turned big kid in tow, we've garnered a few tips that make dining out with kids not only an experience that fosters their real food education, but also a pleasure.

5. Give your kid a little freedom.

While you're at it, illustrate your trust in your child by allowing him or her an extra bit of freedom. By showing your child that not only do expect them to follow standard restaurant etiquette, but that you also trust them to do so, you instill in him or her a sense of great duty and responsibility. When we're treated with love, appreciation and respect, we rise to the expectation of others and of ourselves. This is particularly true of children. So if your child wishes to visit the lobby, let her. If your child wants to engage in a conversation with bartender or ask the restaurant owner a question, let him.

Remember, the restaurant is otherwise quiet and empty the earlier you go, and the staff may have a few moments to spare; do not, however, misunderstand this tip to mean that the staff is responsible for entertaining or babysitting your child. When we eat out at one of our favorite restaurants, we often let our child sit on a bench by the door (within our line of sight). He only sits out for three or four minutes at a time before the heady joy of reveling in his new-found sense of freedom wears off and he rejoins us at the table, but the fact that we allowed him that freedom without question illustrates our trust in his ability to manage his own behavior and that means an awful lot to him, and to any child.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

County Sues Man For Being Bad Neighbor
No, he's not shooting anybody who walks past his house, he's growing too many kinds of little green shoots. From WSBTV:

DeKalb County is suing a local farmer for growing too many vegetables, but he said he will fight the charges in the ongoing battle neighbors call "Cabbagegate."

Fig trees, broccoli and cabbages are among the many greens that line the soil on Steve Miller's more than two acres in Clarkston, who said he has spent fifteen years growing crops to give away and sell at local farmers markets.

...In January, Dekalb County code enforcement officers began ticketing him for growing too many crops for the zoning and having unpermitted employees on site.

Miller stopped growing vegetables this summer and the charges were put on hold as he got the property rezoned.

He still may be sued, retroactively, for...I dunno...intent to eat and distribute salad?

This is silly, and another example of overlegislating (growing too many kinds of vegetables is against the law?!), but this is the kind of law that could be used to jail somebody otherwise innocent to pressure them to stop their free speech or shut down other rights they are exercising. People need to understand that excessive laws can be a danger and a way to extort people out of their Constitutionally protected rights.

via Drudge

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Just Say $hut Up About Drugs
The government used the threat of loss of Federal funds to quash a resolution by the El Paso City Council calling for "an open and honest dialogue on ending the prohibition in this country." Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes in the WSJ:

Thirty-seven-year-old El Paso City Council member Beto O'Rourke, a father of three, told me that before witnessing the slaughter of his neighbors and the economic decline of his city, he'd never really given the drug war much thought. But in 2008, after more than 1,660 murders, the city council sponsored a resolution condemning the violence with an amendment he offered "calling for an open and honest dialogue on ending the prohibition in this country." The resolution passed 8-0, but the mayor vetoed it on the grounds that it would make the city look bad in Austin and Washington.

When the council tried to override the veto, Mr. O'Rourke says council members received phone calls from Democratic Congressman Sylvester Reyes that "basically threatened [the city] with loss of federal funds if we continued with this resolution." Mr. Reyes's office says it only sent a message that in a moment when the congressman was trying to garner stimulus funds for El Paso, the resolution "wasn't helpful." The override failed by two votes.

In 2010, the council offered another resolution. Mr. O'Rourke told me that this one was "much more sharply worded and included a call for the regulation, control and taxation of marijuana in the U.S., given that 50%-60% of cartel revenues are marijuana sales to U.S. consumers. That was $8.6 billion in 2006 alone according to White House Office on Drug Control Policy."

The vote was 4-4 and the mayor broke the tie by voting against it. But Mr. O'Rourke says he is confident that a growing number of people here can see prohibition isn't working. He tells me that after speeches to Rotary Clubs and civic organizations he is invariably approached by many individuals who say they agree though they don't want to say so publicly. Feedback from his own constituents also runs heavily in favor of changing the policy.

Perhaps it is time to stop using character assassination and the power of the federal purse to quash this conversation.

More and more, people understand that the drug war is just idiocy. Two comments from the WSJ:

Eric Mao writes:

The special interest group, Drug Enforcement Agency, defies common sense, perpetuates the counter-productive "drug war" for its own financial gain, at the expense of taxpayers, without regard for innocent lives and the opportunity cost on national security.

Prohabition does not work. Anyone speaks against that has no creditability. The politicians with no creditability should be voted out of office, from Washington to local municipalities.

Rick Garrett writes:

The Libertarian Party has long advocated ending prohibition for any number of reasons including that prohibition doesn't work, that the government has no right to tell otherwise law abiding citizens what to do with or to their bodies, and that beyond that, anyone with eyes and a mind can see the destruction being wrecked on not only our country, but especially on Mexico and any other poor country that can not stand up to the narcos. And yet we still insist on maintaining a totally failed course. I ask myself why, and the only answer I can come up with is that too many powerful people are benefiting from the status quo. One cannot but think of the special place in hell reserved for such cynics and hypocrites.

David Pearlman writes:

I think big problems are: 1) that there is a huge industry now developed for "fighting" the "drug problem." They have a vested interest in not legalizing drugs; 2) there is a mind boggling amount of illicit money supporting a continuation of the war on drugs. This goes everywhere from the ground troops who are on the payroll to look the other way up through high level officials who are lobbied or bribed to argue against any change in policy...

Why do we still have drug prohibition? Your thoughts?

UPDATE: Here's Christine Pelisek at The Daily Beast on the sort of stuff the drug war breeds: "Maria 'Chata' Leon, mother of 13 kids, ruled over a criminal empire with connections to a human smuggling ring."

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Almost 63, And Tired
Robert A. Hall (not the CSI guy, but a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts state senate) is tired:

I'll be 63 soon. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce, and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth around" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it.

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the leftwing Congresscritters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them--with their own money.

...I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor;" of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers;" of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery;" of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to.

...I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.

...I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers--bums are bi-partisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bi-partisanship. I live in Illinois, where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats and Republicans has worked together harmoniously to loot the public for years. And I notice that the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet are bi-partisan as well.

...Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.

I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination, or big-whatever for their problems.

The rest at the link. And yes, I checked Snopes after I got this by e-mail.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

What Reason.tv Saw At The 9/12 Tea Party Rally

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Looks More Like A Truth Fest To Me
Amazingly, one of the Talking Point Memo peeps had her Twitterstream of people protesting the Ground Zero Muslim Center tweeted as her report on the "hatefest" by Josh Micah Marshall - @joshtpm:

Great live tweeting of the anti-Mosque 9/11 rally (hatefest) at GZ by r @jillrayfield @tpmmedia follow here http://bit.ly/90h4mp must see

The problem is, almost all of these people (right and left, actually) don't know the first thing about Islam. This, for example, tweeted by @jillrayfield, is absolutely true.

http://twitpic.com/2ngv5v

Ayaah Hirsi Ali, after 9/11, said something like, "Surely, Osama Bin Laden is lying that what he did is justified by the Quran." She read the Quran and found that he was not lying, and stopped by being a Muslim.

People need to inform themselves about Islam, and fast. Here's a little statement I wrote recently to explain it (so I don't have to retype the same thing):

Phobias are irrational fears. It is not irrational to fear that people with a religious book that is to be taken literally as the word of god, and which commands (Sura 9) that they convert or kill the infidel, may actually, you know...do that.

Here's the deal. There are two Islams. One is a religion, practiced by many perfectly nice people who have no idea what the Quran says. They are the Muslim version of Christmas Christians.

The others practice Islam as commanded by the Quran: as totalitarianism masquerading as religion.

I'm an atheist, and I think the evidence-free belief in god is silly, but if you want to believe in god, or in numerology or astrology, well, as long as you don't want to kill me because I don't think the moon in Capricorn has relevance to my Wednesday, well, have at it.

That's where my "tolerance" begins and ends.

Oh, and then there's this:

Furthermore, it isn't bigoted to criticize religion; that's just a convenient way to end all discussion. As
 Walter Benn Michaels writes in his terrific book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, there's a difference between prejudice and disagreement:

"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."

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Haven't They Heard Of Second Printings?
The Pentagon is considering buying and destroying every copy of a military memoir's 10,000-copy first printing. From Gawker, a post by Jim Newell:

The book, Operation Dark Heart, is a memoir by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and Army Reserve colonel who recounts his experiences in Afghanistan gathering intelligence against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Oddly enough, his publisher had allowed the Army to review a copy of the book earlier this year. After suggesting a few edits, the Army reviewers gave their okay, saying they had "no objection on legal or operational security grounds."

This summer, however, the Defense Intelligence Agency got their hands on a copy, "showed it to other spy agencies, reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified information." The book was scheduled for release on August 31, and review and advance copies had already been sent out, before its release was put on hiatus.

And while they could pay him to stop the book altogether (helloooo, free speech!...remodeled as being paid by the government to not speak?) most authors out there aren't writing to get rich (unless they're idiots).

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Libertarianism, by Elvis
"Do what's right for you, as long as it don't hurt no one."

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Allahpundit's Twitterstream
He lived in my old neighborhood, on Park Place, near the WTC. Here's his Twitterstream from that day.

Here's another, from Powerline. Dartmouth grads who died on 9/11.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How To Avoid Incriminating Yourself
Professor James Duane of Regent University School of Law tells you everything you need to know about talking to the cops:

The cop, Officer George Bruch, talks here. (There's a bit of black at the beginning, then it gets going.)

It's Sunday, maybe you have some time. This is absolutely worth watching.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

An Interesting Approach At Customs
Via Consumerist, a blog post by Paul Karl Lukacs:

I was detained last night by federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.

The end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing to answer further questions, I was released - because U.S. citizens who have produced proof of citizenship and a written customs declaration are not obligated to answer questions.

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"Why were you in China?" asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.

"None of your business," I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"I'm not going to be interrogated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own country," I said.

Rest of the story and his thoughts at the link. Your thoughts?

UPDATE: Lukacs' follow-up posted here.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Semper 9/11
Condolences to everyone who had a friend or relative murdered on 9/11 for Allah, and to all of those heroic people who lost their lives trying to save those who were murdered.

Marine Dave Karnes heard about the WTC attack while working at Deloitte Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, writes Rebecca Liss in a worthy reprint on Slate, and ended up finding two of the only 12 9/11 survivors pulled from the rubble:

When the second plane hit, Karnes told his colleagues, "We're at war." He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

The small barbershop in Stamford, Conn., near his home, was deserted. "Give me a good Marine Corps squared-off haircut," he told the barber. When it was done, he drove home to put on his uniform. Karnes always kept two sets of Marine fatigues hanging in his closet, pressed and starched. "It's kind of weird to do, but it comes in handy," he says. Next Karnes stopped by the storage facility where he kept his equipment--he'd need rappelling gear, ropes, canteens of water, his Marine Corps K-Bar knife, and a flashlight, at least. Then he drove to church. He asked the pastor and parishioners to say a prayer that God would lead him to survivors. A devout Christian, Karnes often turned to God when faced with decisions.

Finally, Karnes lowered the convertible top on his Porsche. This would make it easier for the authorities to look in and see a Marine, he reasoned. If they could see who he was, he'd be able to zip past checkpoints and more easily gain access to the site. For Karnes, it was a "God thing" that he was in the Porsche--a Porsche 911--that day. He'd only purchased it a month earlier--it had been a stretch, financially. But he decided to buy it after his pastor suggested that he "pray on it." He had no choice but to take it that day because his Mercury was in the shop. Driving the Porsche at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, he reached Manhattan--after stopping at McDonald's for a hamburger--in the late afternoon.

His plan worked. With the top off, the cops could see his pressed fatigues, his neatly cropped hair, and his gear up front. They waved him past the barricades. He arrived at the site--"the pile"--at about 5:30. Building 7 of the World Trade Center, a 47-story office structure adjacent to the fallen twin towers, had just dramatically collapsed. Rescue workers had been ordered off the pile--it was too unsafe to let them continue. Flames were bursting from a number of buildings, and the whole site was considered unstable. Standing on the edge of the burning pile, Karnes spotted ... another Marine dressed in camouflage. His name was Sgt. Thomas. Karnes never learned his first name, and he's never come forward in the time since.

Together Karnes and Thomas walked around the pile looking for a point of entry farther from the burning buildings. They also wanted to move away from officials trying to keep rescue workers off the pile. Thick, black smoke blanketed the site. The two Marines couldn't see where to enter. But then "the smoke just opened up." The sun was setting and through the opening Karnes, for the first time, saw clearly the massive destruction. "I just said 'Oh, my God, it's totally gone.' " With the sudden parting of the smoke, Karnes and Thomas entered the pile. "We just disappeared into the smoke--and we ran."

They climbed over the tangled steel and began looking into voids. They saw no one else searching the pile--the rescue workers having obeyed the order to leave the area. "United States Marines," Karnes began shouting. "If you can hear us, yell or tap!"

Over and over, Karnes shouted the words. Then he would pause and listen. Debris was shifting and parts of the building were collapsing further. Fires burned all around. "I just had a sense, an overwhelming sense come over me that we were walking on hallowed ground, that tens of thousands of people could be trapped and dead beneath us," he said.

After about an hour of searching and yelling, Karnes stopped.

"Be quiet," he told Thomas, "I think I can hear something."

He yelled again. "We can hear you. Yell louder." He heard a faint muffled sound in the distance.

"Keep yelling. We can hear you." Karnes and Thomas zeroed in on the sound.

"We're over here," they heard.

They saved two Port Authority police officers.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

A Democratic President With Some Balls
Mrs. President, that would've been. Con Coughlin, in the Telegraph/UK, wonders, as I've heard a few people wondering lately, whether Hillary would have been better:

As America prepares to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Obama's inability to get a firm grip on the deeply emotional issues involved is raising further questions about his leadership.

For a president battling disastrous poll ratings, the announcement that a hitherto unknown Florida pastor was planning to burn copies of the Koran should have provided an opportunity to show he had what it takes. As Commander-in-Chief, Mr Obama has an unequivocal duty to protect the hundreds of thousands of American men and women serving on the front lines of their country's conflicts. And General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, had already issued a warning that Americans would be at risk from attack by Islamist extremists if the book-burning stunt went ahead.

Yet it took an international outcry from the world's leading Muslim nations before Mr Obama could be persuaded to intervene. Suddenly aware that relationships with key regional allies such as Indonesia and Pakistan were being imperilled by the publicity-seeking antics of a small-time cleric in rural Florida, the president finally made a statement. Speaking on American television yesterday morning, he appealed to Terry Jones, who leads a congregation of just 50 followers, to abandon his plans on the grounds that they would become a "recruitment bonanza" for al-Qaeda.

Mr Obama's ponderous response was in stark contrast to the sure-footed approach of Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State. Speaking earlier in the week at a Ramadan dinner for Muslim leaders, she denounced Mr Jones's proposed stunt as "disrespectful and disgraceful".

I may not agree with her on a number of issues, but she's not somebody you can accuse of being a shrinking violet. Hillary talks tough the way Bush talked tough. Like we're still America, not France with much huger portions.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Welcome To Detroit's City Hall
Photos by Gregg Sutter.



Curling irons?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Slim Jim?
Question for all you women -- would you date a man who's much, much thinner than you? One of those "built like a papercut" guys? Why or why not?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

How America Kills Entrepreneurs
John Stossel writes in reason of how so many states just regulate them to death, utterly unnecessarily (except as necessary to preserve the income of those they'd compete with). My favorite was the monks who were stopped from making caskets:

To sell caskets legally, the monks would have to obtain a funeral director's license. That required a year-long apprenticeship, passing a funeral industry test and converting their monastery into a "funeral establishment" by installing embalming equipment, among other things.

The state board and the Louisiana Funeral Directors Association--the profession's lobbyist--say the law is designed to protect consumers. But that's what established businesses always say about absurd regulations they demand. An unusually candid funeral director told The Wall Street Journal, "They're cutting into our profit." Well, yes, free competition does do that. That's the point.

Another funeral director said that the law must remain unchanged because casket-making is a complicated business: "A quarter of America is oversized. I don't even know if the monks know how to make an oversized casket." Does that even deserve a comment?

...Case No. 3. Melony Armstrong of Tupelo, Miss., wanted to expand her African hair-braiding business. But Mississippi bureaucrats told her that to teach workers how to braid she needed a full cosmetology license. That required 1,200 hours of classes. Next, she needed a cosmetology instructor's license--2,000 more hours.

The courses and license had little to do with her profession. They were simply barriers to entry favored by her competition. Fortunately, IJ won that case.

Case No. 4. Dennis Ballen has a bagel shop located far off the main roads in Redmond, Wash. He couldn't afford to advertise on radio or TV, so he paid someone (typically unemployable people with quirky personalities) to stand on the road with a sign directing traffic to his store. It worked. The sign brought him two or three new customers a day.

Then Redmond police slapped him with a cease-and-desist order, warning he could face a year in jail or up to $5,000 in fines if he didn't stop displaying the sign. Ballen estimates that he would lose at least $200 a day in business if he complied. He and IJ sued the city and won the right to employ the sign-holder.

It's great that IJ and some determined entrepreneurs win a few victories for free enterprise. But in a country with a real free market, such lawsuits would be unnecessary.

(These cases are from Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm that works to free entrepreneurs from these sorts of opportunity-killing regulations.)

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Burning Questions
Commenter Bob Royfills writes in The New York Times:

Suppose we try a bit of role reversal. Koran burning is a vile and stupid idea, without question. But suppose someone in, say, Afghanistan proposed to burn a Bible. How many death threats would result? How many Afghans in the United States would be in fear of their lives? And, to the point--what explains this difference?

Another smart one is from James:

Instead of burning copies of the Koran, we should hand them out and encourage people to read them. And if we could add readings from the Hadith and fourteen centuries of history, so much the better.

The media - particularly this instance of it - likes to write of Islamophobia, but a phobia is defined as an irrational fear. Spend some time learning about Islam, and if you do so with an open mind, you are likely to start thinking that a fear of Islam might indeed be eminently rational.

Perhaps this marks me as intolerant, but I ask you: when we read almost daily of acts which if perpetrated by any other group would be denounced as monstrous crimes, why should I tolerate those who by their silence (if nothing else) acquiesce to such acts?

Anna's comment is reminiscent of some of the things Crid was posting the other day:

"The mosque project near ground zero upholds a great American principle, but it's not a sensible idea"

Of course, not.

What all these comments of the last couple of weeks have shown is the illiteracy of the population. I am terrified by the shallowness of the culture where the majority of people believe that if you smile(or rather show your expensive teeth), you are friendly, you are good and, if you use the words "Freedom, peace, tolerance, the Constitution" all the time everywhere, you are just wonderful. No need to know anything, no need to study any culture, one's own including, no need to think, just smile and repeat "Freedom, peace ..." Several hours of hard work of memorizing platitudes and slogans - and you are set for life. Or at least until reality knocks.

Of course, comments "are no longer being accepted" after just 23 of them have been posted.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Muslim To Muslim
A Muslim who builds mosques around the country calls Imam Rauf on the crap he's been peddling to a gullible American public and its gullible pundits, most of them wildly uninformed about Islam.

In the WSJ, M. Zuhdi Jasser has some questions for Rauf in a piece subheaded "He may not appear to the untrained eye to be an Islamist, but by making Ground Zero an Islamic rather than an American issue he shows his true allegiance." An excerpt:

I must ask Imam Rauf: For what do you stand--what's best for Americans overall, or for what you think is best for Islam? What have you said and argued to Muslim-majority nations to address their need for reform? You have said that Islam does not need reform, despite the stoning of women in Muslim countries, death sentences for apostates, and oppression of reformist Muslims and non-Muslims.

Bret Stephens on the book-burning Florida Pastor

You now lecture Americans that WTC mosque protests are "politically motivated" and "go against the American principle of church and state." Yet you ignore the wide global prevalence of far more dangerous theo-political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and all of its violent and nonviolent offshoots.

In your book, "What's Right With Islam," you cite the Brotherhood's radical longtime spiritual leader Imam Yusuf Qaradawi as a "moderate." Reformist American Muslims are not afraid to name Mr. Qaradawi and his ilk as radical. We Muslims should first separate mosque and state before lecturing Americans about church and state.

Imam, tell me if you can look into the eyes of children who lost a parent on 9/11 and convince them that this immodest Islamic center benefits them. How will it in any way aid counterterrorism efforts or keep one American any safer? You willfully ignore what American Muslims most need--an open call for reformation that unravels the bigoted and shoddy framework of political Islam and separates mosque and state.

There are certainly those who are prejudiced against Muslims and who are against mosques being built anywhere, and even a few who wish to burn the Quran. But most voices in this case have been very clear that for every American freedom of religion is a right, but that it is not right to make one's religion a global political statement with a towering Islamic edifice that casts a shadow over the memorials of Ground Zero.

As an American Muslim, I look at that pit of devastation and contemplate the thousands of lives undone there within seconds. I pray for the ongoing strength to fight the fanatics who did this, and who continue their war against my country with both overt violence and covert strategies that aim to undo the very freedoms for which so many have fought and died.

Imam Rauf may not appear to the untrained eye to be an Islamist, but by making Ground Zero an Islamic rather than an American issue, and by failing to firmly condemn terrorist groups like Hamas, he shows his true allegiance.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Jools For Less
On the Amazon. Sale on sparkly baubles, fake to fine.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

My New Favorite Restaurant
"Restaurant bans screaming kids, business booms," is the headline on Ben Popken's piece on Consumerist. The signs at the restaurant read, "Screaming children will not be tolerated." I'm all for signs like that -- along with "no cellphones" signs. You?

By the way, I pretty much stopped going to The Rose Cafe because they wouldn't put signs like that out (I wrote a letter to the owners asking them to), and I just didn't want to sit there and endure the cellular shouting over the classical music they play (which I always loved). It used to be a serene (and friendly) place to be in the morning. Not any more. But, back to the subject at hand, here's the video:

From the WECT report by Max Winitz:

The owner of the Olde Salty restaurant, Brenda Armes, is tired of having her customers complain to her about children misbehaving and screaming when others are trying to enjoy a quiet meal.

Armes says the signs have worked.

"It has been a good thing for us," Armes said. "It has brought us in more customers than it has ever kept away."

...Armes says that if a child is screaming, a restaurant employee will ask the parent to take them outside to calm down. They will not be asked to leave the restaurant for good.

"We want to attract the type of people that come in knowing they aren't going to have to sit behind a table with a bunch of screaming children," Armes said.

How the hell can you argue with that. I'd patronize that restaurant in a hot second, even if they served baked tofu. Well, maybe I'd stop in for a celebratory glass of wine, in that case, before I left and got a burger.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The War On Drugs Is A War On Black Men
John McWhorter writes on The Root that blacks are marching on Washington without marching for what they should be (and, in my opinion, what we should all be for), an end to the War on Drugs:

The most meaningfully pro-black policy today would be a white-hot commitment to ending its idiocy.

The massive number of black men in prison, described on The Root site here, stands as a rebuke to all calls to "get past racism," exhibit initiative or stress optimism. And the primary reason for this massive number of black men in jail is the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs destroys black families. It has become a norm for black children to grow up with their fathers in prison and barely knowing them. Data are unanimous in showing that children, especially poor ones, do better with two parents. We see the young black man in a do-rag pushing a baby carriage as a welcome sight rather than as a norm. That must stop.

The War on Drugs discourages young black men from seeking legal employment. Because the drugs' illegality keeps their price high, there are high salaries to be made in selling them -- not at first as a low-level runner, but potentially as one rises in the hierarchy. This makes selling drugs a standing alternative to legal employment, especially if one has a poor education.

The idea that selling drugs is the only choice available is refuted by the simple fact that immigrants, including black ones, regularly make do -- as do plenty of black American men who happen not to "go the wrong way." Was the man who installed your cable TV a white guy with a degree from Vanderbilt? Did the last security guard you saw have blond hair?

...What will turn black America around for good is not more theatrical marches but the elimination of a policy that prevents too many people from doing their best. After welfare reform in 1996, countless people thought that black women would wind up shivering on sidewalk grates. They underestimated the basic human resilience of black people. In the same way, if the War on Drugs is ended, the same people will assume that young black men will wander about jobless and starving. They will not, because they are human beings with basic resilience and survival instincts as well.

Meanwhile, studies suggest that addiction rates do not rise when anti-drug policies are pulled back, and surely a new regime would include more diligent rehabilitation processes. The New Prohibition: Voices of Descent Challenge the Drug War is a key and readable source on all of this -- highly recommended. Just as surely, however, the current policy will not do; it makes drugs no cheaper, while having the principal effect of destroying black communities. It must stop.

I'm oversimplifying? Frankly, I don't think so. What is the unsimplified version? And crucially, what proposals follow from it? Forty more years of sonorous phrasings about responsibility, expectations, institutional racism, "getting on board" and baggy pants? Surely we can do better than that.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Imam Rauf On "The Religion Of Peace"
Robert W. pointed me to this link by Atlas Shrugs, about the violence Rauf said, on CNN, will come, if Muslims don't get their way on the building by Ground Zero:

"If we don't do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world," Rauf said. "... If we don't handle this crisis correctly, it could become something very dangerous indeed."

This crisis could become much bigger than the Danish Cartoon crisis which resulted in attacks on Danish embassies in various parts of the Muslim world [and hundreds of non-Muslims were slaughtered]

The Danish cartoon jihad was a crisis manufactured by the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference) months after the Danish cartoons had actually run in order to impose the sharia/blasphemy laws on the non-Muslim world. Now it has become the operational threat template for Islamic supremacism.

He said moving the project to another location would strengthen Islamist radicals' ability to recruit followers and will increase violence against Americans.

This is based on the false assumption that they are fighting us because we are doing things they don't like. Actually they are fighting us because of imperatives within the Islamic faith. They will never like us unless we convert to Islam or submit to Islamic rule. If we stop doing things they dislike, where will we draw the line? How far will Sharia advance in the U.S., with Americans afraid to stop its advance for fear of offending Muslims and stirring them up to violence? The Muslim Students Association is already pushing for halal cafeterias, segregated dorms, segregated gym facilities on campus. This is incompatible with American freedom. Where do we draw the line? And when did America decide to surrender in installments? Has America so "fundamentally changed" that we cave to jihadist bullies or threats made Peter Lorre-ish imams with delusions of caliphs on the Hudson?

He said again that if he knew ahead of time the controversy this would create, he wouldn't have made the plans to build the center at the currently planned site. Liar. He loves it. Rauf's contempt for us oozes from his every enlarged pore.

Yeah, who would've thunk it...anger inspired by a mosque, etc., in (what would've been) the shadow of the WTC, had Muslims not, exactly per the directives of the Quran, destroyed the infidel tower on the Hudson.

I'm also worried about the plans by a church in Florida to burn the Quran because I'm pretty sure it will incite violence in the Muslim world -- in a way violence would not be incited in, say, the libertarian world if you burned copies of The Fountainhead.

While I'm all for the freedom to burn books, I'm not at all for book burning. In fact, I think the smart thing to do would be to read the Quran.

Americans are wildly uninformed about what's in it, and about the requirements of Islam (like that the Quran be taken literally and unquestioningly as the word of god). When I hear commentators speaking about Islam and the Ground Zero building on TV, or read people writing about it, it's frequently from the very American view that any belief system is okay. And make no mistake, I am all for the first amendment.

But, as I've blogged recently, there are two Islams. One is a religion, practiced by many perfectly nice people who have no idea what the Quran says. They are the Muslim version of Christmas Christians.The others practice Islam as commanded by the Quran: as totalitarianism masquerading as religion.

I'm an atheist, and I think the evidence-free belief in god is silly, but if you want to believe in god, or in numerology or astrology, well, as long as you don't want to kill me because I don't think the moon in Capricorn has relevance to my Wednesday, well, have at it. That's where my "tolerance" begins and ends.

And again, disagreeing with somebody's belief system isn't bigotry but mere disagreement. Democrats aren't haters because they disagree with Republicans, and people who think Islam, correctly practiced (with women having the rights of pets, and the slaughter of gays for being gays) is barbarism, isn't a hater, but somebody who's informed themselves about Islam.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Good News In Book Proposal Land
It's been intense the past few weeks, but I have a 30-page book proposal and chapter outline, and two chapters written and edited, as of yesterday. They've been vetted to pieces by my editorial assistant, my middle-grade fiction-writing neighbor, and a very smart 21-year-old friend who just graduated from Rutgers, and we're all thinking the package is pretty good.

I have one more read-through, and my editorial assistant has to go through my chapter outline to see that there's nothing in there that would leave anyone going "huh?" and then I'll send it to my agent. She may have a few further revisions, but I'm pretty thrilled with what I have, and hope it will sell, and well!

The book is a manners book targeted to people 20-40, and it's funny, too.

More as I know it!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Advice Goddess Free Swim
I've been working like mad to get my book proposal for my next book, plus two sample chapters finished. Almost there!

Wednesday should be yet another crazy day for me, so it's a good day for you all to post the stuff you want to talk about. Please just post one link per comment or you'll go to my spam folder.

Oh, and thanks to all of you for all your help on my You See Rude People blog items. And, for making it worth it for me to crawl from my couch to my desk in the wee hours to post blog items.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

More Affordable Healthcare!
It just costs more, thanks to Obamacare. Janet Adamy writes in the WSJ:

Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats' efforts to trumpet their signature achievement before the midterm elections.

Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.

These and other insurers say Congress's landmark refashioning of U.S. health coverage, which passed in March after a brutal fight, is causing them to pass on more costs to consumers than Democrats predicted.

The rate increases largely apply to policies for individuals and small businesses and don't include people covered by a big employer or Medicare.

About 9% of Americans buy coverage through the individual market, according to the Census Bureau, and roughly one-fifth of people who get coverage through their employer work at companies with 50 or fewer employees, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. People in both groups are likely to feel the effects of the proposed increases, even as they see new benefits under the law, such as the elimination of lifetime and certain annual coverage caps.

Many carriers also are seeking additional rate increases that they say they need to cover rising medical costs. As a result, some consumers could face total premium increases of more than 20%.

While the increases apply mostly to the new policies insurers write after Oct. 1, consumers could be subject to the higher rates if they modify their existing plans and cause them to lose grandfathered status.

Kevin Sack asks the right question in The New York Times:

Can access to primary care be maintained, much less improved, when an already inadequate and inefficient system takes on an expected 32 million newly insured customers?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Misunderstanding Muslims
Martin Peretz poses the question in TNR, are we "misunderstanding" Muslims like the NYT claims?

I want to believe that Muslims are traumatized by the unrelieved murders in Islamic lands. Frankly, the only demonstration against a mass killing (after all, they happen nearly every day) I've read about was last week in Pakistan when some 30-odd people, not designated and not guilty of doing anything except going to a Shia shrine were blown right then and there. A day or two after two bombs went off taking the lives of what turned out--you can read it about in the recent Tehran Times--to be just under one hundred Shi'ites in two town different towns.

This intense epidemic of slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half...without protest, without anything. And it has been going for decades and centuries before that.

Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world? This world went into hysteria some months ago when the Mossad took out the Hamas head of its own Murder Inc.

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

"Leave Our Kids Alone..."
Contrary to popular belief these days, it isn't a bad thing for kids to be left to their own devices.

I rode my bike all over, went to the park myself, got dropped off at the library for hours and checked out a big laundry basket of books of my choice (then got slipped Helter Skelter by the Goldsmith girls, who were a little older and had a cool mom). And whaddya know, somehow I avoided the path straight from suburbia to snorting heroin and turning tricks in the gutter.

John Rosemond in The Jewish World Review on today's overparented child, and how different his childhood was:

Clue: When I began school, my mother made it clear that my homework was my responsibility. She helped me figure out the answer to the occasional problem, but I was free to determine when I did my homework, in what order, in what posture, and whether the radio in my room was on or off. I don't think my mother ever asked me if I had homework or had finished it. She never checked it either. Therefore, most of the schoolwork I did at home was done imperfectly. I still managed to get through high school on time and go to college, then graduate school. Oddly enough, most people my age report having grown up in my mother's care.

I don't know how old he is, but I don't recall ever asking my parents for help with my homework (I also didn't have much homework, save for the occasional volcano to build or report on Georgia). School was really easy for me, which was unfortunate. I barely had to work to get good grades. Luckily, I read piles of books on my own.

As for my school achievement, my parents looked at my report card, but that was pretty much it. I was expected to do well, and I did. Wrote my papers on the typewriter the night before they were due and got As. And they say schools have gone downhill today. Hmmm.

But, another story from Rosemond, also similar to how I was raised:

Clue: My mother ignored me most of the time. Do not confuse being ignored with being neglected. I was not neglected. Mom left me alone to figure out how I was going to spend my time. She didn't talk to me much, either. Days might go by when no more than the occasional pleasantry would be exchanged between us. Nonetheless, I always knew that if I truly needed her, she would be there. I never wanted for love or attention, albeit I received little of the latter. Mom did insist that if I was bored, I was to keep it to myself lest I put myself in danger of chores. Again, if the reports of my peers are true, my mother had thousands of children. Where were they?

Rosemond writes that there's a collapse now of the boundary between childhood and adulthood, and I sure see it. Kids get everything when they're kids, and there's nothing to look forward to. And the upshot of that and all the overprotectiveness and indulgence of parents now:

Very few of today's children enjoy any of the above. They are overseen, supervised, directed, and micromanaged from morning until night by well-intentioned adults who claim to care about children but seem to know nothing about childhood. And so, the variable most lacking in the lives of children who currently live in the Land of the Free is freedom itself.

Is there stopping this trend? Is it too hard to raise kids like kids used to be raised when so many kids today are being raised like Rosemond describes above? They're adults already, yet never adults, because Mommy and Daddy do it all for them. (And then Mommy and Daddy wonder why they can't evict their 36-year-old from their basement.)

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Have We Overreacted To 9/11?
Farheed Zakaria thinks so. He writes in Newsweek:

Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden's terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda's best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda's intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities.

Here's how we reacted post 9/11:

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That's more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet--the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built--at a cost of $3.4 billion--to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year--136 a day!--which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, "Many could be produced in an hour using Google." Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian "Christmas bomber" reported his son's radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber's own incompetence and some alert passengers.

Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government's powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers's heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government's fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

While I am not anti-security or anti-military, I see beneath a lot of this the mistaken assumption that government will protect us.

via @DrEades

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Not-So-Free Exercise Of Religion
Hitchens, on Slate, points out that religious tolerance has always had its limits, and that taming religion has always been one of the chores of civilization:

Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.)

...Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.

Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Do I Look Rude In These Pants?
Over on my YOU SEE RUDE PEOPLE blog, where I really appreciate all the comments you've left to help me figure out what content to put in my next book, there was a little tiff in the comments on The Sidewalk.

A commenter calling him or herself AAK got tweaked by a remark about fat people from a comment by momof4:

"I started working as a crossing guard at the kids school last week. WOW. Parents honking at me when I stop them to let kids cross. Parents blowing right past me and my stopsign, nearly hitting me and a kid who was on the crosswalk. Parents blithly hauling their kid across the street when I'm NOT stopping traffic. Parents ignoring me when I smile and say "good morning".

Or, when I'm walking with my stroller (it's an in-line one, takes up no more width than a thin person) and a few people are walking abreast (and they're ALWAYS fat) coming towards me, and none of them will move aside to make a skinny path by, so i am forced to yank my stroller either into the road or up into a yard. Those things are heavy!

AAK posted this in response:

Excuse me...why does no one mention that this cute little dig "and they're ALWAYS FAT" is, itself, a flagrant display of rudeness?

Has no one taught you that calling people FAT is RUDE?

Make sure your own nose is clean before you go handing out tissues to others.

A question (which I posted there):

Why is it rude?

Would it also be rude if she said "and they're ALWAYS SKINNY"?

I have an idea why AAK is saying this. We treat being fat like a birth defect, in part, I think, because people have been so lied to by the government and the medical establishment about how to lose weight (and how easy it actually is if you just cut carbs per people like Taubes, Eades, and Lustig).

I wrote about the fat as birth defect notion here, in Things That Go Plump In The Night:

Of course, it's the height of political incorrectitude to advise a fat woman that she'd be more attractive if she lost weight, or even to call her fat. She's just "differently weighted," a "person of width!" And sure, those would be appropriate ways to refer to this woman if her fatness were a birth defect, or if she came down with conjunctive fatty-itis. But, like most people who are fat, she doesn't have a thyroid condition or "metabolic issues"; she just neglected to close her mouth when her hands were full of Ho Hos.

I wrote about how easy it is for many or most people to lose weight here, in Thick And Tired Of It:

Yeah, sure, "real women have curves," but these days, far too many real women's curves also have folds. The sad thing is, if you're like so many Fatty Pattys desperately trying to lose weight, you've probably been approaching it all wrong -- thanks to the advice of your doctor, Dr. Oz, much of the medical establishment, and numerous supposed scientists at prestigious universities. It's actually obscene how many "authorities" lazily and intransigently promote hearsay-based dietary medicine; for example, claiming saturated fat consumption causes heart disease when the evidence for that simply doesn't exist.

For actual evidence-based science on losing weight, sans hunger and suffering, turn to Dr. Michael Eades' blog at proteinpower.com and to investigative science journalist Gary Taubes' exhaustively researched book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Taubes shows that it's carbohydrates -- sugar, flour, and easily digested starches like potatoes -- that drive the excess insulin secretion that puts on fat. Per Taubes' title, it seems a calorie is not a calorie, and the fewer carbs you eat, the slinkier you will be. If this sounds like the Atkins Diet, that's because it basically is. As Taubes told me, "Doctors have been saying Atkins is a quack for so long, they never bothered to check whether he actually got the science right. Unfortunately, he did and they didn't."

Now, I'm guessing momof4 doesn't walk up to people and comment on their body weight in public -- any more than than she walks up and comments on the shape of their nose.

Is it really rude to make a physical observation about strangers she's seen in public in a blog item? And again, would it also be rude if she criticized them for taking up the sidewalk and said that those who did were "ALWAYS skinny"?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The More We Know, The Queasier We Are
I don't care that Rahm Emmanuel said "Fuck the UAW." I care about the revelations that show who we have -- and how little we have -- sitting at the big desk in the Oval Office. Chris Stirewalt blogs on Politico of the revelations by former car czar Steven Rattner in his leaked-to-the-HuffPo new book:

-When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: "Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer..."

-Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.

-"[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup."

-"If his team had linked arms with the outgoing administration, as President Bush's advisers had proposed, billions of dollars could well have been saved."

-Rattner says Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual dictated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's schedule, public appearances and staff selections.

-He says Obama economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair as enemies who slowed down decision making with infighting

-Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: "Why can't they make a Corolla?" he has Obama asking.

Well, I agree with you there. But, my answer would be because the government didn't let them go bankrupt, and made them their big corporate welfare ho instead.

I'm not shocked that there's politicking going on in The White House. I'm sure it went on in the last administration and many before it. But, Obama wasn't supposed to be that kind of president -- well, at least that's what the people who believed in his star power thought.

How badly is Obama doing? He's even lost Krugman and Tom Friedman. From Krugman's appearance on This Week:

But what is true on all of this is that Obama has had no vision. He has not articulated a philosophy. What is Obama's philosophy of government? He wobbles between sounding kind of like a liberal. Then he says, well, the conservatives have some points, too. He concedes the message.

There's never been anything like what Reagan did, which was to say, "We've been on the wrong track. We're going to follow a very different track. That's going to change things. You need to, you know, support us in this."

Friedman:

Look, I'm for more health care. I'm glad we've extended it to more Americans. But the fact is, there is a real, I think, argument for the case that Obama completely over-read his mandate when he came in.

He was elected to get rid of one man's job, George Bush, and get the rest of us jobs. I think that was the poor thing. And by starting with health care and not making his first year the year of innovation, expanding economy and expanding jobs, you know, I think, looking back, that was a political mistake.

...You know, one of the criticisms certainly I've had -- and many others have had -- this is not, I think, original -- there's been no narrative to this administration. To me, I think Barack Obama was elected for one thing, which I'm not sure he ever fully understood, to do nation-building at home, to do nation-building in America...There's never been a unifying message. I've worked here since 1989. I personally -- just as a reporter, a columnist in Washington -- have never seen a worse communicating administration, just at the basic, technical level of, "Hey, we've got a good plan. You know, maybe someone out there would be interested in writing about it," not since I've been to Washington.

Suddenly, Glenn Beck is looking a little irrelevant.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Days Of Whine And Roses
Great post by Megan McArdle in The Atlantic on people who congratulate themselves for the sort of jobs they took -- for giving up Big Law or a highly paid spot at McKinsey for public sector or other lower-paid work:

You know how much credit I deserve for giving up highly paid professional work in order to spend my days boring the hell out of you all with my breezy explanations of present value calculations? None. Am I performing a public service? I hope so. I take my profession seriously, and like to think that I am adding something to the public understanding. But that was my choice. I knew what I was giving up when I made it, and I also knew what I was getting. Which is to say, a job that I absolutely love more than anything I've ever done, a chance to speak to interesting people and see amazing things all the time.

Getting to do those things involved a tradeoff. I don't get to spend my vacations at charming Provencal cottages or swank Caribbean resorts. I don't get to buy the $1.1 million dollar mansion in LeDroit Park that I daydream about. (Hey, the owner could be my long-lost great uncle . . . ) I have to watch the food budget, and I can't buy the designer clothes I'd really like to wear.

I took the job because I think this is a great tradeoff. My classmates who went to banks and consultancies mortgaged their late twenties and early thirties doing work I would have found much less rewarding; they are enjoying the payoff now--at least the ones who didn't simply lose everything when Lehman and Bear went down. I don't want to say they "deserve" it, because almost anyone in that sort of position has had an enormous amount of luck along with their hard work, starting with being born to the right family. But I don't begrudge it to them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

And so do the folks who took jobs in government or academia or the non-profit sector. Maybe a few of them really "made a sacrifice" for some obscure reason involving widowed mothers and villanous landlords with a penchant for late-night visits to the railroad tracks, but most of them took the job because they thought they'd like it better. The kind of people who are actually willing to make the sacrifice of doing something they hate in the name of the greater good tend to join monestaries or the army, not the Political Science department at Penn State.

At the end, she also rightly takes to task those who call attendees of Ivy League schools the best and the brightest. Wendy McElroy, who was on the streets in her teens and never went to any college at all, is one of the best and the brightest. Attendees of Ivy League schools are among the richest and most privileged and some are smart, too, but let's not use that as a vetting too for who is and isn't intellectually worthwhile.

Terrific piece by McElroy here on the non-traditional path to becoming educated, along with a guide to etiquette in intellectual encounters. In a way, I've taken a non-traditional path to being educated, too. I went to college, but I studied film and liberal arts. After college, I educated myself in a serious way in psychology and evolutionary psychology and related subjects, and continue to do so every day.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Bedbugs, A Horror Story
What one family had to go through after staying in the wrong Estes Park, Colorado hotel. (Nope, isn't just a New York City thing anymore.) Karen Schwartz writes on AOLnews of the Burkhart family's story:

She remembered the mysterious bites from Estes Park, and since the suitcases were stored in the master bedroom closet, it followed that her bedroom was the center of activity. The bugs had gotten into everything in the closet and master bathroom. They had spread to other rooms in the 3,000-square-foot home, traveling on Burkhart's pillow to the living room and family room couches when she had a restless night.

After failed attempts to treat the bugs themselves, they called commercial exterminators and went through three before they found one that knew how to deal with the insects. The company looked under baseboards with mirrors, inspected ceilings and pulled off faceplates.

And the Burkharts purged. All bedding, drapes, pictures, clothes, books and toiletries were removed from the master bedroom. Everything was taken out of the desk, and eventually the desk itself was tossed because the paper-thin bedbugs had gotten into the cracks. The carpet from the master bedroom was torn up and thrown out. They filled three huge commercial trash bins with the belongings.

"Our new mattress -- I loved that mattress -- but it was gone," Burkhart said. "They say you can encase them in plastic, but at that point there was no way we were going to take chances."

More painful than the loss of the mattress was the loss of her late father's chair.

"There was no way of treating that chair to be sure they'd be gone," she said. "It was a keepsake. I held my babies in that chair. It was a big chair for us to lose. "

I'm bringing a flashlight and a loup when I travel.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Arrive Two Hours Before Your Flight So Some Guy Can Grab Your Balls
I think I got one of the new, invasive TSA feel-ups they're talking about.

I got it from a female TSA agent in January when I went to a conference in Vegas and was flying out to San Francisco. As I blogged then:

This morning, around 5:30 am, I got body-scanned and felt up at the Vegas airport. The lady at the scanner who gave me the boob grab explained, "We couldn't get a clear image" (of my boobs, she meant). Yeah, it's called underwire, lady.

By the way, if I wanted strangers to have a clear picture of my boobs, I'd do a sex video and post it on YouTube.

And if I wanted to get that intimate with a woman, I'd be in a relationship with somebody named Geri or Gina instead of Gregg.

Lesley Ciarula Taylor writes for thestar.com about new screening methods the TSA is testing at Logan and McCarran airports:

Rather than the old method that restricted pat downs to the backs of hands and made genitals and breasts off-limits, the new one allows TSA agents at those airports to use the palms of their hands to "slide down" someone's clothes.

"Essentially, people being are being groped," Calabrese told the Star on Tuesday. "The inside of their thighs. Women's breasts are being cupped."

Travellers are candidates for an "enhanced pat down" if they decline to go through a full body scan machine or set off a metal detector but the source can't be found, according to the TSA's Blogger Bob.

"Pat downs are designed to address potentially dangerous items, like improvised devices and their components, concealed on the body," TSA spokesman Greg Soule said.

Do you feel safer?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Blair: Radical Islam Is World's Greatest Threat
Of course, those who know a bit about Islam know that it's not "radical Islam," but "Islam," practiced as commanded by the Quran, that is the world's greatest threat. (The Quran is to be taken literally as the word of God, and it commands Muslims to convert or kill the infidel and install the new caliphate around the world.)

But, here's Blair's bit from a BBC interview:

Mr Blair said radical Islamists believed that whatever was done in the name of their cause was justified - including the use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Mr Blair, who led Britain into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, denied that his own policies had fuelled radicalism.

Asked about the argument that Chechens, Kashmiris, Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans were resisting foreign occupation, he said Western polices were designed to confront radical Islamists because they were "regressive, wicked and backward-looking".

The aim of al-Qaeda in Iraq was "not to get American troops out of Baghdad [but] to destabilise a government the people of Iraq have voted for", he told the BBC's Owen Bennett Jones in a World Service interview.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Where In The World Is Moderate Islam?
Finally, somebody has an answer. Joshua Gilder reviews Robert Reilly's new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, on NRO:

It's a common problem. Each time some new offense is perpetrated in the name of Islam -- whether it's the latest suicide bombing in a public square or a woman's being beaten and mutilated by her own family -- it is mostly Western leaders and the press who voice their disapproval. The more one looks for the larger Muslim community to denounce the violence, the more "moderate Islam" seems to vanish like a mirage in the desert. Why this is so -- what happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future -- is the subject of Robert Reilly's brilliant and groundbreaking new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. Reilly is a veteran of the Reagan White House, director of the Voice of America under George W. Bush, a board member of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and a frequent contributor to numerous national publications. He has made a deep dive into Muslim thought and history to discover the sources of the present Islamic condition.

...Reilly does in fact locate the elusive moderate Islam -- back in the 8th and 9th centuries, when the rationalist Mu'tazilites dominated Islamic thought under Caliph al-Ma'mun. The period is often referred to as the "golden age of Islam," when that civilization produced some of its highest achievements in philosophy and science. It didn't last. In 849, the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja'afar al-Mutawakkil, the Mu'tazilites were overthrown. Holding Mu'tazilite beliefs became a crime punishable by death, and the decidedly anti-rationalist Ash'arites soon came to dominate the faith, as they would continue to do, in one form or another, through the modern era.

...Fundamentally, Ash'arism was a rejection of "natural law" and reason in favor of an all-powerful God of pure will and power. The idea of an ordered universe that behaves according to certain ordained laws -- whether moral or physical -- would have been understood by the Mu'tazilites. For the Ash'arites, this was blasphemy, an outrage against God's omnipotence.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Tropic Of Cancer Patients
What do you do, what do you say, and what don't you do or say for a friend who has cancer, terminal cancer, and/or a serious illness?

I know too much about this, unfortunately, thanks to losing a friend, Cathy Seipp, to cancer, and from being part of the team of friends who cared for her.

But, if you're a cancer patient, or know a cancer patient, or have experience in this area, or just ideas about it, please weigh in. I'm writing something about this, and would appreciate your thoughts, experiences, and impressions.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Islamization Of Paris
Shocking. Thuggery disguised as religion.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

What Color Is Your Hypocrisy?
It's a diverse group, the global high priests of being green. You'll so often find them jetting -- yes, jetting -- around the world, on private jets, to preach about how saintly it is to save energy by CFL-lighting your house so it looks like a mental ward.

The latest preacher of green to get caught talking green while guzzling black gold is Jesse Jackson.

Jackson, Henry Payne writes in The Michigan View, had his Cadillac ESCALADE SUV stolen and stripped while he was in Detroit last weekend leading the "Jobs, Justice, and Peace" march promoting government-funded green jobs:

Read that again: Jackson's Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large.

Living on less is for the little people, don'tcha know? Vrrrroom, vrrroom!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The High Cost Of Not Educating Kids
Welcome to the most expensive school in U.S. history -- of course, part of the broke-ass LAUSD. Allysia Finley writes for the WSJ:

At $578 million--or about $140,000 per student--the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

The K-12 complex isn't merely an overwrought paean to the nation's most celebrated liberal political family. It's a jarring reminder that money doesn't guarantee success--though it certainly beautifies failure.

...Talking benches--$54,000--play a three-hour audio of the site's history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.

The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district's profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district's Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

Mr. Rubin admits that the Roybal Center project was "a tremendous screw-up" that "should have been studied closer beforehand." The project was abandoned for several years, only to be recommenced when community activists demanded that the school be built at whatever cost necessary in order to show respect for the neighborhood's Latino children, many of whom were attending an overcrowded Belmont High School.

The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. But even though many Roybal kids can't read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.

Expect more such over-the-top and inefficient building projects in the future. Los Angeles voters have approved over $20 billion of bonds since 1997 and state voters have chipped in another $4.4 billion of matching funds. Roughly a third of the cost of the Kennedy complex will be shouldered by state taxpayers.

Friends, voters, morons...this would be a most excellent time to wake the hell up: When you vote in a bond issue, the money to pay for it doesn't come from leprechauns. Really.

Oh, did I mention that my neighbor started a library in her son's charter school? With donated books and shelves. She donates her time as librarian, and other parents pitch in.

Tragically, the benches there are wooden and remain mute. But, the kids are learning.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

If Ya Can't Treat A Car Like A Car, Ya Ain't Rich Enough To Drive It

Blog commenter Gee, who took this photo, writes:

In regards to your requests for rude parking, I believe this picture says it all. It was taken at the Irvine Spectrum the day after Christmas.

Thanks to everybody who's been contributing/venting on my new little blog, YOU SEE RUDE PEOPLE, which I'm using to figure out what I need to put in my next book.

I'm working day and night to finish two or three chapters (proposal's pretty much finished, agent really likes it), and your comments and stories are super helpful (and amazing and enraging and entertaining).

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Helicoptering In To Win Custody
Terrific piece on ParentDish by my pal Lenore Skenazy on how it's the overparenter who is increasingly winning custody -- for example, the parent who texts his or her kid 30 times a day and photographs each message:

All in the hopes that the judge will reward them.

What's disturbing is the judge just might. After all, we are clearly in an intensive parenting moment. A mom who lets her third grader walk to school could be considered "negligent" for ignoring the extremely tiny chance he could get kidnapped. A dad who lets his daughter knock on a neighbor's door could be considered "lazy" for not escorting her there and back. When the courts start actually codifying things like, "A good parent is one who drives his kids to school every day," helicopter parenting becomes literally the law of the land.

The belief behind it is that the more we love our children, the more hours we clock by their side. The problem with this is that if you take the time to teach your child how to tie his shoes, you don't have to spend the rest of your life tying them. Which means you don't have to spend quite as much time squatting next to his sneakers. Which could mean that, in the eyes of the law, you -- literally because you taught your child some independence -- are a bad parent. At least compared to the one who is still bending down, making bunny ears, year after year.

Why are we rewarding parents for stunting their kids?

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Coddle Call
Lawyers and litigious parents grubbing for dollars -- dollars for what used to be normal, expected childhood accidents from play -- are killing all the fun of childhood. From an IBD editorial:

Fearing lawsuits over injuries, a West Virginia county is removing swing sets from elementary schools. A minor, local issue? No. America's litigious society has changed the way kids play.

Roughly a year after a child broke his arm jumping off a swing like Superman and his parents are settling a lawsuit for $20,000, Cabell County, W.V., schools are yanking swing sets from school playgrounds. The lawsuit was one of two filed in the last year against Cabell County schools over swing set injuries, the West Virginia Record reported Thursday. School safety manager Tim Stewart, who is overseeing the removal, said he sees "a high potential when it comes to swings and lawsuits."

What's happening in Cabell County is not an isolated case. Local governments, fearful of lawsuits, have been for years closing pools, stripping playgrounds of equipment and banning outdoor games.

A Massachusetts elementary school has told students they can't play tag. One Boston school forbids handstands while another in Needham, Mass., doesn't allow students to hang upside down from the monkey bars. A pool in Hazleton, Pa., closed some years ago after a swimmer sued for $100,000 because he cut his foot running and jumping into the pool, though he'd been warned not to.

"There is nothing left in playgrounds that would attract the interest of a child over the age of four," Philip K. Howard, lawyer and author, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2008.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Geishas With A Pen
Wonderful piece by my talented biographer friend David Rensin on LAObserved, on what it's like to be a "professional collaborator" on books. He's a master at disappearing and letting his subject speak, making it so natural you have no idea how excruciatingly hard it is until you try it yourself. He's written 13 books, 11 of them collaborations. He writes about collaborating:

I appreciate that Rutten used the word "collaborator" because too many people call it ghost-writing. While technically true (especially if you're relegated to a thank you in the acknowledgments), ghosting always makes me picture a celebrity/mogul's wife who tells the writer, "I want to do a romantic mystery about a Hollywood wife whose billionaire husband cheats, so she kicks him out, and then he dies. So she hangs with her girlfriends, goes shopping, and they solve the murder. Then she meets the one-in-a-million hunk who won't force her to give up her identity, shows her the meaning of life and fantastic sex - and still lets her go shopping. Can you do that? Great. Let me see it when it's done."

Actually, in my experience, and the same goes for a number of excellent writers I know, the collaboration plays out over many meetings during which the "author" and "collaborator" discuss the project, make outlines, tape endless sessions of biography or comedy or adventure story, and put in a lot more work than the collaborator ever lets the unsuspecting "author" know is necessary. The late super-manager and super-Mensch Bernie Brillstein used to love telling people that I'd lied to him about how much work his memoirs required. Hell, we spent a year figuring out what it wasn't about before we settled on what it was about. Then we spent a year writing, reading, editing, rewriting.

The book collaborator is also a psychologist, confidant, interlocutor, and supportive friend. We defuse fears, hang out, massage egos, play Devil's Advocate, call our "authors" on the bullshit - gently. We have to be both honest and kind. And politic. Otherwise we're worthless.

Call us Geishas with pen.

Then the collaborator goes home and does the typing, bringing to bear his/her inherent ability to structure a story, embody the "author's" voice in the author's own words, make it funny and dramatic, and do all the stuff that we've learned to do well because, after all, this is not what the "author" does, otherwise he/she would write their own books instead of make movies/write songs/live on the edge/save lives/make jokes/do big science, etc.

Regarding Rutten's comment that a collaborator would likely have trimmed away the good stuff: balderdash. If anything, it's the "author" or manager or wife or agent or sibling or personal trainer who wants to excise passages that are intentionally or unintentionally too revealing. Every "author" wants to look good; collaborators want the goods. More to work with and make a fully-rounded story. Then we want to translate the "author's" authenticity to the page in a way that lets everyone still respect themselves in the morning.

Of course collaborators want to make sure that the "author" doesn't make a fool of him or herself. So we do research to get dates and names right. We advise. But we don't trim off the highs and lows like fat on a fine steak. Who wants to read, much less write, a boring book?

David's site: Tell Me Everything. His last book: All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora.

My David Rensin favorite (in addition to all of his Playboy Interview pieces): the hilarious and amazing The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up.

And, very all in the family, here's David's son Emmett's hilarious book, co-authored with Alexander Aciman: Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Why The ADA Act Was Bad For People With Disabilities
Stossel writes on TownHall:

The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?

Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.

How could employment among the disabled have declined?

Because the law turns "protected" people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the Overlawyered.com blog, says that the law was unnecessary. Many "hire the handicapped" programs existed before the ADA passed. Sadly, now most have been quietly discontinued, probably because of the threat of legal consequences if an employee doesn't work out.

Under the ADA, Olson notes, fairness does not mean treating disabled people the same as non-disabled people. Rather it means accommodating them. In other words, the law requires that people be treated unequally.

The law has also unleashed a landslide of lawsuits by "professional litigants" who file a hundred suits at a time. Disabled people visit businesses to look for violations, but instead of simply asking that a violation be corrected, they partner with lawyers who (legally) extort settlement money from the businesses.

...Finally, the ADA has led to some truly bizarre results. Exxon gave ship captain Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab. Hazelwood then drank too much and let the Exxon Valdez run aground in Alaska. Exxon was sued for allowing it to happen. So Exxon prohibited employees who have had a drug or drinking problem from holding safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it -- employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their "right" to those jobs. The federal government (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supported the employees. Courts are still trying to sort it out.

James T. writes in the comments:

Some years ago, the city fathers of NYC tired of complaints of people urinating in alleys (and worse) and planned to kiosk rest rooms along the streets. Every so often there would be one that met ADA standards. They were sued. All had to meet ADA standards. Result: Everyone, including the handicapped are still urinating against buildings. It was just too expensive. Project dropped. Another personal knowledge incident. A young couple started a decorating service on the second floor of an old building and prospered for several years. The one or two people who could not climb the stairs were perfectly happy with the youngsters hauling tons of samples, etc to their homes. Along comes the ADA litigation queen. Not good enough, they were a public business, they had to meet ADA standards. Business closed. Five workers, not including owners were out of jobs. The young couple went south, where the could rent a one story building. This is just another example of employment disappearing from the northeast.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

You Fix It By Killing It
A doctor -- pediatric urological surgeon and Emory med school faculty member Hal Scherz -- founded an organization called Docs4PatientCare. He and his fellow members are telling voters not to believe Democrats who say they'll "fix" Obamacare; it needs to be repealed.

I sure agree. I also think health care needs to be available across state lines, that it needs to be untied from the workplace, and that it's not fair, that I (now 46), after paying monthly since my 20s for care, will, in a few years, have to start paying for other people who haven't paid a dime into the system, and who come down with some big disease in their 40s (for example).

At the WSJ, Scherz posts the letter he and his fellow members of Docs4PatientCare are enlisting doctors across the nation to give to their patients -- asking them to vote to repeal Obamacare:

"Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world."

Our doctor's letter points out that, in addition to "badly exacerbating the current doctor shortage," ObamaCare will bring "major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and by bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick that will force delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery."

We cite the brute facts of ObamaCare's passage:

"Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition--up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill--the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicago style threats and is determined now to resist any 'repeal and replace' efforts. This doctor's office is non-partisan--always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this legislation."

Then we address the Democrats' evasive campaign maneuver:

"In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill."

The letter's final lines are the most important:

"Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our health care system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever."

This message is going out to an electorate that is already frustrated over what they see happening to health care. Missouri voters rejected ObamaCare overwhelmingly in August, voting by a margin of 71%-29% to reject the federal requirement that all individuals purchase health insurance. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen has assessed that ObamaCare is "a disaster" for Democrats. And around the country many little-noticed primaries have reflected voter rage--including the Republican primary victory of surgeon, political newcomer, and advocate of repeal Daniel Benishek in Michigan's first district.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Bullshit Smells Prettier When It's Yours
My old line about us invading Iraq and taking out Saddam went like this: Somebody -- not you -- robbed a bank. Somebody should pay. They can't find that somebody who did it, but you'll do. They throw you in jail for the rest of your life for bank robbery.

Saddam was not a nice man (that business about gassing the Kurds, just for starters). But, I think we shouldn't disproportionately be the world's policeman (that's what the broken United Nations should be for). I'm also against "nation building," as the last occupant of the White House also claimed to be -- just before he sent troops into Iraq to do just that. (Yeah, I know, "weapons of miscommunication"...or something like that.)

About that poop on Iraq coming out of the Obama White House, David Harsanyi writes at reason that:

...The president, who once accused the Bush administration of intentionally sending soldiers to die in Iraq to create a political distraction, now asserts that "America is more secure."

Harsanyi asks, how is Iraq doing now?

Remarkably well, you'll be pleased to learn.

Economically, Iraq is the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world; oil production is back; living standards are improving; about 20 million Iraqis have cell phones. When it comes to political freedom, Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East--which, let's be honest, is like finishing fourth in the weak NFC West.

And what's in it for us? Little that's good, Harsanyi continues:

...If the Islamic radical leadership of Iran--which many experts believe filled the vacuum left by the toppling of Saddam Hussein--is, as many believe, an imminent nuclear threat, we are powerless to stop it.

And if every military action in defense of U.S. interests now comes with an obligatory 10-, 20- or 40-year Marshall Plan, you've made it even more politically unpalatable.

There are other questions that make the claim "we're more secure" highly suspect. If we do leave, where is the evidence that Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter) will blossom into a secular democracy and an ally in the war against Islamic radicalism?

Doubtlessly, it is Islamophobic to bring this up, but Americans are dying not only in the war on terror but also to codify Shariah. Brooks claims that in Iraq, "the role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed." Surprisingly? Actually, that's just a polite way of saying--and I quote directly from the Iraqi Constitution--"Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation."

That's one reason many of us regret our support of the Iraq war. Though I am not reflexively isolationist, I am reflexively suspicious of social engineering. And nation building is social engineering on the grandest of scales.

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

You See Rude People
UPDATED AGAIN: More categories are posted, and I'll try to post the rest by end of day tomorrow. Please drop by to leave your comments, and share the page and the individual entries with friends.

And feel free to include really great episodes of good manners, too.

UPDATED: I posted a few more entries -- I'm on deadline now, but I'll continue to post them today and over the next few days. As soon as I have them all up (all I need your help on -- there will be more categories, and fun surprise categories in the book), I'll also post a "Miscellaneous" and a "Suggest A Category," but please wait until I do. (There's a good chance I'm covering the one you'll suggest.)

...

That isn't the title of my next book, but it's a big part of it. I've got the proposal written, and most of one chapter. My agent loves it, and as soon as I finish the other chapter, sometime in the next few weeks, she'll take it to publishers.

I need your stories -- the rudeness you see that makes you grind your teeth into a fine powder.

I've started a blog for this (Rude People -- it's listed over there under "Main Menu") and will be adding entries in the next week or so. Here's the URL:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/you_see_rude_people/

Oh, and by the way, right now, I especially need comments on The Sidewalk, one of the two chapters I'm including with the proposal.

So...come on over, and please vent!

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

Kids Being Groomed For A Surveillance State
Very troubling news from PogoWasRight on the creep of the surveillance state. In the latest blithe attempt to eliminate kids' expectation of privacy, aConnecticut school district wanted to require students to carry an RFID card-chipped ID so their location could be tracked:

The surveillance capability included locating the student if they were off school premises and in town. Today, I came across another news story from earlier this month that also involves tracking students. KTVU in California reported that the Contra Costa County School District began introducing a tracking system for preschool students that would alert staff when a student leaves school premises. In order to accomplish that, students will reportedly be required to wear a jersey that contains the RFID tag that uses Wi-Fi to send signals to sensors located throughout the school.

I realize that some might argue that these are just little pre-schoolers and of course, we want to protect their safety, etc., but keep in mind that one of the major justifications for the program is to save staff time in terms of having to manually record attendance, etc. In exchange for that time and cost-saving, what price do we pay psychologically as a society? It strikes me that schools are grooming our youth to simply accept being tracked and monitored wherever they go and that anything they do, anywhere, can be used against them in school or elsewhere.

Is this really how we want to raise our children? To be sheep who accept being tracked and who have little sense of privacy or entitlement to privacy?

@glukianoff

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« August 2010 | Home | October 2010 »

The Lobbyist Suckups (aka Legislators) Are The Last To Know
It seems to me that many people in this country have awakened from their long, Rumplestiltskin-like slumber, and noticed that we have a bunch of thieves, idiots and incompetents running the country in Washington. Oh, and make that thieves, idiots and incompetents that a majority of Americans went "Oh, sure!" about on election day. Well, you get what you go, "Oh, I'm a Democrat!" or "I'm a Republican!" and blacken the little circle for on election day.

Brent Budowsky writes at TheHill.com:

I stand with the vast majority of Americans, who believe that Washington has become a fossilized town that is sickeningly out of touch with an America that hungers for leaders who lead, a Congress that acts and a president who stops telling voters they need teachable moments from him and starts listening to what voters, including many of his friends, are telling him.

The president has gone rogue. And Democrats. And Republicans. And everyone in this capital with eyes that don't see and ears that don't hear what an unhappy nation is telling them. Voters pray for action, but all they hear is self-praise from those who don't listen, and all they see is vanity and self-indulgence from those who don't care.

The American economy is becoming a factory of economic unfairness. Those whose greed almost caused a depression make giant fortunes, demand gargantuan bailouts and gorge on gluttonous bonuses paid for by hard-hit Americans who find their jobs destroyed, their hopes crushed, their dignity insulted and their voices silenced.

In this audacity of greed, the few with the most demand even more, while the many who pay the bills and suffer the pain are sold the great big lie of our times: that the cruel and unusual economy that is a factory of pain for patriots is "the new normal."

The Federal Reserve Board rewards massive hoarding of money from bailed-out banks that refuse to lend, while Mount Olympus from Washington to Wall Street tells Americans to downsize the dream.

Throughout the nation there is outrage in the land, revolution in the air, insurrection in the wind from the left, right and center. The political ground is shaking from gale-force winds of a national demand for powerful change in the way our corrupted and tone-deaf capital does business.

I'm a fiscal conservative, and a libertarian, so I don't see eye to eye with Budowsky on policy. (When he writes "the few with the most demand even more," I'm guessing he isn't including unions in that or the public "servants" breaking California and other states with their outrageous pensions.)

But, I sure am against welfare -- for the GMs of this world, and the kind that's supposed to help poor people, but mainly helps keep poor people poor, and keeps them pumping out more generations of poor people into the welfare system...like the classroom of daddlyless 11th graders I spoke to a couple months ago who read at the first, second and third grade level. And no, it wasn't a special ed class.

Capitalism grows an economy. Socialism kills it.

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Taxi To A Forced Marriage
Women in Islam are basically property. They have half the rights of a man, which is why, under Islam, it takes two women's testimony to equal that of one man in court.

Many Muslim women, as the property of their fathers and families, are forced to marry men not of their choosing. Primary under Islam is not the women's wishes, but the public relations picture of the family: do they have an obedient little doggie of a daughter, who will marry the old man she's never met that Daddy has picked for her?

That's what Ayaan Hirsi Ali was told to do. Her father ordered her to marry a much older Canadian relative that she'd never met. She ran away to The Netherlands to avoid this forced marriage, and stayed free. Others aren't so lucky -- especially those who get picked up by this taxi driver in the UK, Zakir, a forced marriage bounty hunter. Nadeem Badshah writes for The Hindu:

Zakir's job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their "destiny" of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: "I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn't about the money.

"It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the 'taxi driver network', so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.

"I didn't harm any of the girls: among aapnes [the Asian community; literally 'ours'] discipline is up to their families. Only a couple of occasions I had to speak forcefully to them because they wouldn't come home. But it is obviously not a career, so I stopped. I got tired of chasing people around." Zakir prowled the streets of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds and Sheffield.

According to women's groups, bounty hunters are more common in places such as Yorkshire and Lancashire because the large south Asian populations are more closely knit, entrenched in conservative values, and there is a better chance of finding women who disappear in the north than in London. The community grapevine is a powerful tool in those areas; word spreads quickly about a person's whereabouts and welfare. And while this can nurture a closer community and ensure everyone looks out for one another, it can also be used to patrol the behaviour of those who do not conform to the unwritten rules -- meaning young women may be ostracised by disapproving elders for wearing "western" clothes or speaking to a boy.

Immanuel Kant said that people are not means to an end but ends in themselves. This is an example of classic Western values -- autonomy for the individual, and equal rights for women. Do we really want to be so welcoming of people who stand for spreading Sharia law?

I'm not talking about ripping up the Constitution. What I think is urgently necessary is that everybody start educating themselves about the realities of Islam -- as I have been since 9/11. Once you do, you'll understand that it's not "Islamophobia" to fear the spread of Islam.

I mean, can any of you stand up and say we should be tolerant of what Badshah writes about above?

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