Last One Out Of California, Please Blow Out The Candles
Candles? That's right. Before long, we won't be able to afford the lights. Thank the California Teacher's Union for that. They're doing the best they can to make California the Tax Me More State. From the WSJ, they're behind tax proposals to bleed Californians so they won't have to adjust their health-care benefits and pensions like workers in the private sector economy have had to do:
The Tax Foundation announced this week that California has the second worst business tax climate of the 50 states, with only New York more hostile to employers. Congratulations, but it gets worse. If a pair of ballot measures pass next week, the Golden State could soon take the tax lead and make even Albany look like Hong Kong.Proposition 24 would raise $1.3 billion of new taxes on businesses, while Proposition 25 would allow the state legislature to pass budgets and tax increases with a simple majority vote, instead of the current mandated two-thirds supermajority.
The most pernicious is Proposition 25, which is being sold as a good government measure to end the state's annual fiscal follies and pass a budget on time. But what matters more than how a budget passes is what's in it. And the two-thirds rule that has prevailed since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 has been the lone restraint on the government unions and their political valets who have spent California to the brink of insolvency.
...Proposition 24 is also deceptive, starting with its title, "The Tax Fairness Act." It is opposed by just about every iconic employer left in the state--from Disney to Hewlett-Packard to Intel--because it would take away any remaining tax incentives for investing in the state. The last time California eliminated a "business tax break"--a manufacturing tax credit--Intel stopped building plants in the state, and it has since sent more than $10 billion in job-creating investment to the likes of Arizona and Oregon.
We'd prefer no such tax carve outs and a flatter tax code (see "A California Quake," September 30, 2009), but in California they're the only break from the state's preposterously high tax rates. California imposes the fourth highest personal income tax rate on small business income (10.55%), the third highest state-local sales tax (9%), and the 13th highest corporate tax rate (8.84%).
Meanwhile, when I speak to kids at a local high school -- to a regular class, not a special ed class -- it's pretty normal for 11th graders to be reading at a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade level.
The Striking Thing For Me About The Tribe Letter
That's the Lawrence Tribe letter to president Obama trashing Sonia Sotomayor and recommending Kagan ("Bluntly put, she's not as smart as she seems to think she is...")
The striking thing to me is that there's nobody recommended in the letter who doesn't have a vagina, which makes it pretty clear, as I believe Obama did during the process, that a woman, not the best person for the job, would be appointed.
Isn't that...dare I say it...discrimination?
I mean, fine, if a woman is the best person for the job, but men should have been considered and recommended as well. There seems to have been a tacit acceptance that it would be a woman.
And sure enough, when Mr. Obama appointed Sotomayor, here's what he announced, from the Telegraph/UK, by Toby Harnden:
But his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, 54, a New York state appeals court justice of Puerto Rican heritage who grew up in poverty in the Bronx, drew immediate fire from Republicans.Announcing that he had "decided to nominate an inspiring woman who I believe will make a great justice", Mr Obama highlighted her "rigorous intellect" and said she had "faced down barriers, overcome the odds, and lived out the American dream".
He added: "What Sonia will bring to the court, then, is not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey."
Translation: "She's a woman, and a Puerto Rican, too!"
letter link via @walterolson
My Choice For California Governor
That would be Chris Christie. From a column in the LA Daily News by Doug McIntyre:
Here's a tale of two states - the Garden State and the Golden State.Last week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie canceled the nation's largest public transportation project. The $9 billion commuter rail tunnel to New York had been in the planning stages for decades. But Christie smelled a rat.
New Jersey's governor has pledged to restore fiscal sanity to a state with a huge tax burden, a gigantic deficit, a famously hostile-to-business culture, a notoriously corrupt and polarized legislature, and a population fleeing to more tax-friendly states like Florida, the Carolinas, Texas and Arizona. Sound familiar?
The difference is New Jersey's governor meant it.
An audit revealed the tunnel project was going to be billions over budget, and New Jersey taxpayers would be on the hook.
"I cannot place upon the citizens of New Jersey an open-ended letter of credit," Christie said. "And that's what this project represents."
And that's why Christie could never win an election in California. He's actually willing to make tough decisions.
What reason Saw At The Rally To Restore Sanity
There seemed to be quite a few "Nazis!" signs. Okay, you can dislike the hell out of Glenn Beck, but I have yet to hear any reports of him sticking anybody in an oven. You?
Pretty Women And Too-Pretty Women
Men tend to be looks-oriented in seeking partners, much more so than women, but getting the prettiest girl at the dance isn't always an advantage. Problems come when people date out of their league (when they date somebody much higher in status/value). A question for and about guys: Do you get the sense that there are women who are too pretty (or gorgeous) for you to date, and if so, why? Do you consciously date really cute women but not too pretty ones if you aren't at the top in the male pecking order?
(Women should feel free to weigh in with their opinions, too.)
That Crazy Little Thing Called The First Amendment
A New York City Council committee is...actually considering taking legal steps to combat street harassment like cat calls! Tracy Clark Fiory writes at Salon:
Hollaback, the anti-street-harassment group that has made a name for itself by publicizing photos women snap of their harassers, "is pushing the city to commission a study, a public awareness campaign and perhaps even legislation, including 'no-harassment zones' around schools to protect young women," the Associated Press reports. The women's issues committee says it's open to the possibility of legislation of some sort, but "a key issue would be enforcement, since the concept of no-harassment zones could encroach on First Amendment rights," says the AP.
Um, duh!
Somebody rubbing against you in a sexual way, as mentioned in this New York Post story, is already a crime. The problem there isn't a lack of laws but a lack of enforcement.
Regarding First Amendment issues, Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh wrote in 1996:
For all the reasons I mention in my discussion of workplace harassment law, I believe that hostile public accommodations environment harassment law is itself unconstitutional. But its existence also shows that workplace harassment law is indeed starting us down the slippery slope to broader speech restrictions.
Our society has really gone full-on wuss when we start trying to legislate against being offended. And, I say that as somebody who's been cat-called -- and was, all over New York City. I lived. In fact, I forgot about it moments afterward -- if that.
If somebody is a victim of persistent harassment, if they're chased down the street and intimidated, surely there's a case. But, kissing noising from construction workers, or the occasional guy who belts out "I wanna eat your pussy" ("Snack bar is forever closed to you, Bub")...well, what worked for me when I lived in New York was (depending on my mude) ignoring the cat-caller or saying something to humiliate the cat-caller, and turning the corner and continuing on my way.
Hitchens Is Right
Religion really does "poison everything." An Arkansas school board member, Clint McCance, posted the ugliest statement on his Facebook page in response to some call to wear purple last Wednesday to support gay and lesbian youth:
"Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE."
More from Queerty:
After folks started leaving comments on McCance's Facebook wall (which is now locked down), he responded:No because being a fag doesn't give you the right o ruin the rest of our lives. It you get easily offended by being caleld a fag then don't tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I don't care how people decide to live their lives. They don't bother me if they keep it thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make special purple fag day for them. I like that fags can't procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other AIDS and die. If you aren't against it, you might as well be for it.
He later wrote:
"I would disown my kids they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone."
Michael Stone writes on examiner.com:
McCance's insensitive and inhumane remarks are representative of the abuse and harassment mainstream Christianity heaps on members of the LGBT community on a regular basis. McCance, like so many Christians, used his ugly and ignorant religious superstitions as a justification for his deplorable and despicable hate speech.McCance's apology is insincere, and forced. The only thing this Christian bigot is sorry about is that he got caught.
On a side note, let's note that a school board VP -- a man in charge of kids' education -- wrote the following: "They don't bother me if they keep it thereselves."
The Big Friday Afternoon Question
What is masculinity to you?
How Obamacare Will Hurt The Economy
Obamacare actually discourages work, according to Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf. Jed Graham writes at IBD:
Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf said Friday that ObamaCare includes work disincentives likely to shrink the amount of labor used in the economy. In a speech on ObamaCare's economic impact outside the health care sector, Elmendorf said that those effects will primarily be related to the labor market and "will probably be small."Factoring in additional demand for workers in health care and insurance, CBO estimates that "the legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by roughly half a percent," he said.
The reason: The expansion of Medicaid and new health insurance subsidies will reduce "the amount of labor that workers choose to supply."
It seems people are going to have to be very, very careful about not earning too much money, lest they become ineligible for their share of the government welfare pie. From Ted Frank on Point of Law:
According to the Kaiser Foundation's Health Reform Subsidy Calculator (via IBD), a 62-year-old in a high-cost area earning $46,000 a year without health insurance is entitled to a $7,836 government tax credit. Leaving aside how our strapped government can afford that, here's what's interesting: if the same person makes a mistake and earns an extra $22 in income, he loses the entire $7,836 credit. (The cutoff, according to Kaiser, is between $46,021 and $46,022.) That's a 35,618% marginal tax rate. Indeed, the problem is so severe that our 62-year-old subject will have more take-home pay if he earns $46,000 than if he earns $55,000.
Whoops, guess legislators should have read the bill and rubbed two thoughts together about it before they voted for it! Their bad. And now all of our bad.
By the way, if you want to make my boyfriend Gregg snarl, remind him that the passage of Obamacare means that he's going to have to start 1099-ing Delta Airlines, Hertz rent-a-car, and a slew of others he spends more than $600 with annually. By the way, you'd better believe I'm going to stop my Staples spending at $599 if it means I don't have to 1099 them.
Way to tank the economy, legislaturds!
The Idiot Diet
Unfortunately, this is not a diet to cleanse oneself of idiots but a diet of idiots, tried by Judith Newman, who wrote about it in The New York Times:
A MONTH ago I went on a juice cleanse. You know what it cleans out of you best? The will to live....The idea of consuming only water or juice to rid the body of so-called toxins is not new. Virtually every major religion has some fasting and cleansing ritual that supposedly allows the body to heal, regenerate and, in a sense, apologize for being such a jerk. The Hebrew word for fasting, for example, is "tsum" -- which means, roughly, "to afflict the soul." But everything old is new again, which may be why juice cleansing has been on the rise; this year, juices and juice-cleanse companies were as ubiquitous at Fashion Week events as cigarettes and Adderall.
Cleansing's more recent popularity is traceable to the 1990s, when Peter Glickman, the Scientologist and entrepreneur, repackaged a 1940s diet called the Master Cleanse (Stanley Burroughs wrote the book "The Master Cleanser" in 1976). The Master Cleanse involves lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and 10 days of your life. Celebrities as varied as Beyoncé, Jared Leto and the Moore/Kutchers (Demi and Ashton were tweeting about it this week) swear by its energizing and weight loss effects, weight loss being not all that surprising, when you consider that you are essentially sucking lemons and a few teaspoons of sugar for 10 days. And the diet has a glorious circular logic to it. As Mr. Glickman explains on his Web site, if you experience symptoms like cravings, fatigue, irritability, headaches, pains, nausea, vomiting, hot bowel movements (!) ... congratulations! That means you were supertoxic, and the cleanse is working.
...So, what's so bad about juice cleansing? Done occasionally, for a few days at a time, apparently nothing. Done regularly, for a week or more, quite a bit.
Dr. Colbert said: "You have to ask yourself this question: With a juice cleanse, what are you really cleaning? Really, nothing. The bowel self-cleans. It's evolved over millions of years to do this."
People are movie stars because they have great chins and that little something-something, not because they have great brains (with a few exceptions). How that is unclear to anyone is the real mystery to me.
The fact that Gwyneth Paltrow (mentioned in Newman's piece as a "cleanse enthusiast" and a "detoxina") does something (well, except for making millions and millions) should be seen as reason to avoid doing it.
A Whole New Era Of Nasty In Campaign Ads?
Uh, actually, not so much. reason.tv via Tim Cavanaugh, hilarious piece on the attack ads of the past.
Fighting Fire With Affirmative Action
Wendy McElroy has a piece on ifeminists on how equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcome:
...The law was asked to accord privileges to women in order to compensate them for past wrongs and to establish a "level playing field."For example, affirmative action regulated whom a business owner could hire.
Today, almost three generations have been raised on this level playing field and have voted their conscience. Yet far fewer women than men are office holders.
One explanation is that '60s feminists were flatly wrong. Equal opportunity in life usually renders unequal results because outcomes depend on many factors other than the equality of either opportunity or access. For example, outcomes depend on the preferences of those involved, preferences that differ widely not only from group to group but also from individual to individual.
Consider how few female firefighters exist. This is not because women are barred from the profession. Indeed, fire departments actively recruit women to comply with affirmative action. The lack of female firefighters may be due to nothing more than the well-documented tendency of women to choose less dangerous, less physically demanding jobs that allow time for their families. In all likelihood, the imbalance has nothing to do with inequality.
Something similar may be at work regarding women office holders. If a majority of women do not choose a political career, if most women voters do not cast ballots for their own sex, this is a fascinating social pattern. But it doesn't necessarily say anything about women's equality: it only reveals women's preferences.
Nevertheless, politically correct feminists will proclaim that the election returns reflect the oppression of women. The definition of equality has changed once more to mean "equality of outcome," not of opportunity or access.
...As long as women are as free as men to run for office and to vote as they choose, then whatever number of women are elected is the right number for an equality based on freedom.
Here's Heather Mac Donald at City Journal on fighting fire with quotas:
A fierce constitutional battle is being waged between an out-of-control federal judge determined to impose racial quotas on New York City's fire department and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, equally determined to resist race-based hiring. U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis appointed himself the city's de facto fire commissioner last week by enjoining the department from hiring any new firefighters without his approval--and he will give his approval only to the racial hiring schemes he has already tried to foist on the department.Mayor Bloomberg has courageously refused to cave in to the judge's quota demands--a stance vanishingly rare in today's politically correct world. His refusal is justified, both legally and as a matter of policy. Judge Garaufis's rulings have been capricious and biased, creating new law while ignoring facts that undercut his radical new doctrines. And Garaufis's ultimate goal--to craft a future hiring process based on racial considerations--would put the city's residents at risk by making skin color as important a qualification for firefighters as actual preparedness.
As I've said before, I'm not interested in having a woman president, female firefighters, or having anybody else hired or elected based on anything but how good they are for the job. Anything else is sexism or racism, and surely you can't be for those?
Naomi Wolf Is Such A Nitwit
There's a piece by her about female rivalries in the November Bazaar. She writes "I've seen this dynamic again and again. When there is a female rivalry, it is not done with dispatch; blood gets left on the floor."
I know she means it to be a metaphor, but it's exactly the wrong one. Women are sneaky in their rivalries; men are more direct and the ones who would be likely to punch a rival in the mouth. As I've learned from evolutionary psychology research (and by being a living, breathing human being): Women fight wars of words, men fight with their fists.
Why Can't Chuck Get His Business Off The Ground?
Three words: Regulation, regulation, regulation. (Warning: annoying voiceover.)
Another fine effort from the Institute for Justice.
The National Day Of Parental Paranoia
That would be Halloween. Lenore Skenazy writes in the WSJ:
Even when I was a kid, back in the "Bewitched" and "Brady Bunch" costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)
Anyway, you'd think that word would get out: poisoned candy not happening. But instead, most Halloween articles to this day tell parents to feed children a big meal before they go trick-or-treating, so they won't be tempted to eat any candy before bringing it home for inspection. As if being full has ever stopped any kid from eating free candy!
So stranger danger is still going strong, and it's even spread beyond Halloween to the rest of the year. Now parents consider their neighbors potential killers all year round. That's why they don't let their kids play on the lawn, or wait alone for the school bus: "You never know!" The psycho-next-door fear went viral.
Then along came new fears. Parents are warned annually not to let their children wear costumes that are too tight--those could seriously restrict breathing! But not too loose either--kids could trip! Fall! Die!
Treating parents like idiots who couldn't possibly notice that their kid is turning blue or falling on his face might seem like a losing proposition, but it caught on too.
...We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn't dangerous and give it back to the kids. Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too.
Don't Call Him Pookie
From Dr. Helen:
I have a PJTV show up with the authors of the book, Stop Calling Him Honey and Start Having Sex: How Changing Your Everyday Habits Will Make You Hot for Each Other All Over Again. The two authors are women from LA who feel that couples get too comfortable with each other and engage in bad habits. These include peeing in front of each other, using dumb pet names that take away individuality and other things that end up causing people to live as roommates rather than lovers.
I do disagree with them on the pet names thing. Come on, does calling somebody "Honey" really suck away their individuality and sexuality? I don't think so.
I am, however, a big supporter of living apart. For example:
The course of true love doesn't always run smooth, but must it really run around the house waving a frying pan and screaming obscenities?People romanticize living in close proximity to other human beings. The truth is, humans are smelly, annoying, and leak a lot. They're often lazy and pick fights over the littlest things. Anybody who's ever been around another human knows this, but for many, being in a grown-up relationship involves understanding human nature but living in total denial of it: expecting your partner to still look longingly at you when you pick dead skin off your toes and collect it in a little dish.
...Sure, many couples prefer living together, or, in this economy, prefer it to living separately in their cars. And, if you have kids, it's best if you can say "Wait till your father gets home" instead of "I'll give your father a call and see what he's doing tonight." If you do end up living together, it helps if you each have a room of your own, where house rules don't apply -- providing you don't break any marriage vows or fire laws. Of course, it helps even more if you're both exceedingly easygoing, lobotomized, or comatose.
The reality is, you greet a guy way differently when you've had a chance to miss him than when he's always there missing the toilet. Living apart also means you're more likely to act like you're still in the pursuit phase: trying to be witty and interesting and dressing suggestively when he comes over, and not in a way that suggests you're halfway through cleaning out the garage. As for Mrs. S's notion that you can hate your way to true love, researcher John Gottman found that expressions of contempt are actually the most poisonous to a relationship. In other words, the path to true love might be a bit of a drive: whatever it takes so your boyfriend isn't always in your face, doing whatever it is you'd gnaw off your right hand to have him stop doing -- like breathing, chewing, and having large pores.
Why The US Has Turned Against Obama
Michael Barone writes in the Telegraph:
The New Deal historians taught that in times of economic distress, voters will be particularly supportive of, or at least unusually amenable to, a vast expansion of government.Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, coming to power in the wake of financial crisis and in the midst of a deep recession, acted on this theory. Oddly, Obama deferred almost entirely to the congressional leaders on the details of the legislation. Don't you worry about the small stuff, he seemed to feel; history is on your side.
They passed a $787 billion stimulus package which, not accidentally, increased the baseline budgets of many agencies - a permanent expansion of government. A third of the money went to state and local governments, to spare public employee union members the ravages of the recession that were afflicting everyone else. (Unions, which mostly represent public employees, gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle.)
...The Obama Democrats gave the theories of the Progressive political scientists and the New Deal historians as much of a fair test as a theory ever gets in our messy, real world. They clearly flunked. One reason is that the history cited in their support is not, in my view, so unambiguously on their side. Yes, voters did give Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party big majorities in 1934 and 1936 after their New Deal policies seemed to stop the deflationary downward spiral and the economy started growing again.
But FDR's expansion of government did not pull unemployment down below 10 per cent in the 1930s. If you look at polls towards the end of that decade, you see that most Americans felt government was spending too much, that uncertainty about levels of taxation and regulation was stopping entrepreneurs from creating jobs and that the unions had too much power. It is at least arguable that Roosevelt's Democrats were heading for defeat in 1940. Such a defeat was avoided because by November 1940, the Second World War had broken out. Hitler and Stalin were allies, and with their confederates in Italy and Japan were in command of or threatening most of Europe and Asia, with Britain and its empire standing alone against them. In these dire circumstances, voters understandably picked the unflappable Roosevelt over his opponent, a utility executive with no experience of public office.
In other words, in times of economic distress voters do not necessarily support big government policies.
She Was Anti-Gun Until She Got Stalked
Jennifer Willis writes on Salon
"You need to arm yourself."I blinked at the Portland police officer in my living room. This uniformed bear of a man -- packing a gun, a nightstick, a radio and who knew what else -- was responding to an ongoing stalker problem that had started several months earlier. I'd received letters, a phone call, a few packages and several e-mails from this unbalanced stranger who'd read a few newspaper stories I'd written and taken a shine to me. When the latest letter arrived -- mentioning my boyfriend, Mike, thoughts on religion, and a trip I'd taken but hadn't told anyone about -- I was seriously alarmed.
But get a gun? Surely, I'd misheard him.
"Getting a concealed carry permit isn't hard," the officer continued. "And they make ladies' purses with concealed weapons compartments."
In that moment, I understood the phrase, "blood turning to ice." I'm afraid of guns. When you get right down to it, I abhor them. I used to date a guy who owned a handgun and regularly trekked into the woods with his friends to shoot. I made him move the small gun safe from beneath the bed to another room before I'd agree to stay overnight.
But that morning was like a perfect storm of firearms. The first thing Mike had said to me when I opened my eyes -- hours before the officer made his suggestion, before my neighbor confided she'd been thinking of getting a gun for hiking and kayaking trips, before my retired military uncle e-mailed to say that arming myself probably wouldn't be a bad idea -- was, "Maybe you should get a gun."
Apparently, the Universe really wanted me packing heat.
...Whenever the dogs erupt in the middle of the night in a barking frenzy, my thoughts go immediately to my .38.
But I'm not as afraid of my stalker as I used to be, either. I'm armed now, with more than words and good intentions. He keeps sending upsetting letters, but if he ever pays a visit ... Jenny's got a gun, and she knows how to use it.
Thanks, Jay J. Hector
Ed Koch Sounds Like He's Been Drinking Some Tea
Koch, the former New York City Mayor, rants at Real Clear Politics, predicting a Republican victory in the House and Senate come November:
Why did the President and Congress insist on reinventing the wheel when it came to health care coverage? Weren't there prototypes in Europe and elsewhere developed and used for more than 50 years with proven track records that could have been used as models? Did the President and Congress have to terrify people who had insurance coverage in order to provide coverage for the additional 32 million Americans covered under the new law? Couldn't those without insurance have been attached in some way to the Medicaid rolls? Why did the President and Congress sell out to the prescription drug companies and strip Medicare of the right to negotiate volume discount purchases that could have saved U.S. taxpayers more than a trillion dollars over ten years? What rankles most for many, including me, is why have there been so few criminal prosecutions of those who are responsible for having brought the U.S. economy to its knees, destroyed the nation's prosperity and caused millions of Americans to lose their homes, their jobs and a substantial portion of their retirement savings? Why when looking at Obama's cabinet and advisers, do we see the faces of those who many hold responsible for the economic debacle?It is for these reasons, I believe, the coming November tsunami will roll across America and give the Republicans, who are undeserving of the honor, control of both Houses. The American public is enraged and wants to punish those who have been in charge of the country. They know those who will replace incumbents may be as bad or worse, but they also believe they can't do any greater damage. They are willing to put up with them until the next election to teach our elected representatives a monumental lesson -- that public service is an honorable profession and must be performed competently and honestly.
Okay, so now he sounds like he's smoking something, save for a few apparent exceptions like Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who goes after earmarks in both parties, and is rather unpopular with his own party because of it. He's one of the few who even seems to notice how broke and in debt this country is. Here's a posting from his site:
Congressman Flake: So Just How Broke Are We?Mesa, Arizona, Oct 18 - Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona's Sixth District, today illustrated the size and scope of the growing national debt.
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Terrell Owens was fined $5,000 on Friday for breaking NFL rules by sending out a pre-game tweet. The U.S. is so broke that in order to pay down our nation's staggering debt of $13 trillion, Owens would have to send out 2.6 billion tweets, or roughly 364 billion characters.
Any legislators you see out there with half a shred of integrity? List 'em below, and list the Hall of Shamers, too (much easier).
A Look At Where Obamacare Is Headed?
Americans come on this blog from time to time and crow about how wonderful Canada's national health care is. A Canadian friend of mine, on the other hand, who's living and working (legally, of course!) in the USA, has told me how thrilled she is to have American health care...well, that is, before Obamacare passed. What are we in for? Well, this article in Canada's National Post seems indirectly revealing:
From Saskatchewan, cradle of medicare, comes news that members of the Roughriders football club there are able to queue-jump public MRI waiting lists by paying $4,500 to cover their scan and two others.According to Bill Carney, spokesman for the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region, the Riders use about six MRIS a year, which are scheduled where there have been cancellations, or after regular hours. The extra money actually allows the system to fund more after-hour scans, which can be offered to patients on the long waiting list. Has this provoked outrage? Public demonstrations and remonstrations?
Hardly.
"The Riders are a special case in Saskatchewan. We have the Rider nation," Mr. Carney says. "There seems to be acceptance by the public."
The Roughriders scenario illustrates everything that is wrong about the Canadian health-care arrangement, and everything that counsels for allowing parallel private delivery of such care. Some patients, including sports figures, whose livelihoods depend on being in top physical condition, cannot wait for MRIs, and have the means and desire to pay for them. (Less wealthy or "urgent" patients would also have access, were they allowed to purchase private health insurance.) The extra money the Roughriders currently pay increases access for other patients in the public system. Should more patients be allowed to go private -- with or without paying "extra" fees -- they would remove themselves from the public waiting lists, thereby reducing wait times for everyone.
The Roughriders aren't the only group in Saskatchewan that gets speedier treatment than average. If a person is injured on the job, and treatment is covered by Workers' Compensation, that person also moves closer to the front of the line for treatment. This is the case in other provinces as well. In other words, Canada already has "two-tier" health care -- you just have to belong to the right category of sick people to access it.
Note the word "languish" in connection with Canada's supposedly wonderful public health care system:
...A compassionate society will also not let its citizens languish on waiting lists or deny them the right to spend their own money on care if they choose to do so.
I used to be of the mind that government would protect us -- when I was 12. You?
What Palin And Beck Aren't Saying
Charles Lewis writes in Canada's National Post:
I have been reading about Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for nearly a year and I suddenly realized what has been missing from all of them.For all their talk about the abuse of government, there is no real talk about self-responsibility and taking blame.
...But why do Palin and Beck and the Tea Party members never say what is obvious: Americans were spending like drunken sailors for the past few decades, taking advantage of low interest rates and cheap imported goods from Asia. They continued to rack up debt on high-interest credit cards, took the equity out of their homes for loans, and refused to start saving for the future...
...At one point there was a car for every driver's license issued in the United States. And these are often big cars, big cars that make a statement on the road. Going into many modest American homes and you will see three or four flat screen televisions. The kids have to have the best sneakers and the right clothes and as long as there was a credit card handy, then why not?
This does not mean that I lack sympathy for people who by circumstances out of their control are about to lose everything. But so many people had control -- they possessed the freedom they are always talking about to spend or not to spend -- and chose self-gratification over prudence. They could have practiced true freedom by not being restricted by mountains of debt.
At some point in the next few months the Republican will take Congress. And it is possible that the Republican will walk into the White House in 2012. But even if that should happen, and even if the new government has the guts to follow through on plans to cuts taxes and practice real fiscal responsibility, life in America will still take years to change.
As I keep saying, the Republicans aren't the part of smaller government, just smaller government than the Democrats.
Regarding material things you might want, as the Spanish proverb goes, "Take what you need, but pay for it." (No, that doesn't mean at 26 or more percent interest on your VISA. And a bunch of somebodies should get into voting booths in November and tell that to the legislators, too.)
Does Free Food Really Need A Better Spin?
California is renaming food stamps -- to encourage more people to apply, says the LA Times. Alexandra Zavis writes:
California's food stamp program has a new name, which officials hope will encourage more people to apply for the nutrition benefit: CalFresh.The new name and logo -- an abstract representation of the diverse produce available in California -- was launched Saturday at an event in Long Beach sponsored by first lady Maria Shriver to provide free medical, financial and educational services to low-income women.
"This rebranding campaign will go a long way in helping to erase the unfortunate stigma associated with this program and encourage families to seek CalFresh as a resource for putting healthy meals on their table," Shriver said in a statement.
Sorry, but there should be a stigma against using food stamps, same as there should be a stigma against being a single mother who has a bunch of kids with a bunch of different guys. Or has a bunch of embryos implanted, in the case of the litter-of-children-excreting Octomom.
My parents raised us to think it was shameful not to support yourself. More people should be on board with that. The last thing we need is to make more people comfortable with sucking off the public teat.
Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker echoes this thinking, and has a pretty good idea of what the government's job is and should be. From the Riverfront Times' Mike Applestein's e-mail interview with Tucker, she says:
No country can provide all things for all citizens. There comes a point where it just isn't possible, and it's proven to be a failure everywhere it's been tried. I am not oblivious to the plight of the poor, but I don't see any reason/sense to the idea that everyone has to have everything, especially when the economy is so bad. I see that philosophy as merely a ploy to control.My family was damn poor when I was growing up on Long Island. There were no food stamps, no Medicaid, no welfare. If you were poor, you were poor. You didn't have a TV, you didn't have five pairs of shoes, you didn't have Levi's, you didn't have a phone; you ate Spam, hot dogs and spaghetti. We all survived! I am not against food stamps, welfare or Medicaid, if only they would oversee these programs properly!
I am also against the government taking over the student loan program, car companies, bailouts and the White House taking control of the census (what the hell is that all about?); [about] any First Lady telling (I know, I know, "suggesting to") us what to eat, the mayor of New York City declaring "no salt" (screw you, pal!), the mayor/city commissioners of Anytown, U.S.A. declaring you can't fly a flag, can't say the Pledge of Allegiance and can't sing the National Anthem. I'm against a President dismissing any and all who dare to disagree; the water being turned off in (central) California, at [an] area where they've turned off the water because they want to save a one-inch fish -- turning that huge area of farming land into another dustbowl -- the insipid start of food supply control methinks! The government deciding what kind of lightbulbs we can use (all you "think green" people, three objections to this b.s.: 1) Those bulbs give off the light of a candle; 2) They're very expensive; 3) They have mercury in them - how the hell are we supposed to dispose of them?).
I am against the government now thinking about bailing out unions. The unions made the contracts which include insane pensions; the U.S. government didn't
Freedom Is, Like, Sooo Annoying!
Taranto, in the WSJ, quotes what has to be one of the creepiest remarks ever from the NYT's Thomas Friedman (from his "Meet The Press" appearance):
"I have fantasized-don't get me wrong-but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions."
What has to happen to your brain before you start getting all misty-eyed about bringing totalitarianism to this country, and as a form of improvement?
Think Of Your Gay Friends Who Would Be Dead Under Sharia Law
More on homosexuality under Islam here:
Same-sex intercourse carries the death penalty in five officially Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen. [3] It formerly carried the death penalty in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and in Iraq under a 2001 decree by Saddam Hussein. The legal situation in the United Arab Emirates is unclear. In many Muslim nations, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Algeria or the Maldives, homosexuality is punished with jail time, fines or corporal punishment. In some Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, or Mali, same-sex intercourse is not forbidden by law. However, in Egypt gays have been the victims of laws against "morality".In Saudi Arabia, the maximium punishment for homosexuality is public execution, but the government will use other punishments, i.e. fines, jail time and whipping as alternatives, unless it feels that homosexuals are challenging state authority by engaging in a gay rights movement. [4] Iran is perhaps the nation to execute the largest number of its citizens for homosexuality. Since its Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iranian government has executed more than 4000 people charged with homosexual acts. In Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban homosexuality went from a capital crime to one that it punished with fines and prison sentence, and a similar situation seems to have occurred in Iraq.
Places To Hide Your Valuables, Cheap
Thank you, person who bought the book safe through my Amazon links, and to everybody who shops through Amy's Mall and buys through my links.
I also found a bunch of other "diversion safes" -- places to hide valuables, like in a Barbasol can safe, a Del Monte fruit cocktail safe, an Ajax can safe, a surge protector safe, and more. Cool. Here's a link
P.S. Best not to buy the Pringles can safe in case thieves get hungry.
Pot Ruins Lives
Especially when kids turn their pot-smoking parents in to the police. Via Radley Balko and @WalterOlson, there's another story of D.A.R.E. causing a kid to snitch on Mom and Dad. Jeff Rivenbark and Tom Roussey write for WBTV:
MATTHEWS, NC (WBTV) - Two parents are facing drug charges after their child took their drugs to school and told a school officer his parents were breaking the law.WBTV is not releasing the names of the parents or the name of the school to protect the child's identity.
The 11-year-old student is in 5th grade at a an elementary school in Matthews. Police say he brought his parents' marijuana cigarettes to school when he reported them.
Matthews Police say he reported his parents after a lesson about marijuana was delivered by a police officer who is part of the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches kids about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
"Even if it's happening in their own home with their own parents, they understand that's a dangerous situation because of what we're teaching them," said Matthews Officer Stason Tyrrell. That's what they're told to do, to make us aware."
...Police say both the 11-year old and a sibling have been removed from the parents' house by social services. Police say they are staying with relatives.
Ridiculous!
Meanwhile, at a party last night, I just met a friend of one of the most brilliant and productive people I know, and he mentioned how they're very different, but the one thing they have in common is that they both smoke pot.
I don't smoke pot -- don't like how it makes me feel, and I don't want to smoke anything, because I really like my lungs -- but if you smoke pot, and don't drive or take the opportunity to go out and operate heavy machinery...why should I care any more than if you have a couple glasses of wine after work?
And P.S. My brilliant friend is brilliant enough to smoke pot through a vaporizer ("The Volcano"), which turns the pot smoke from smoke to water vapor.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topic. One link per comment, please, or my spam filter will swallow it. More blog items during the day Sunday!
Why A New Federal Harassment Law Is A Bad Idea
Azhar Majeed writes for FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending free speech rights for all on campuses) that Senator Frank Lautenberg is trying to enact a new law against harassment and cyberbullying on campus. Problem is, it could do damage to free speech rights on campus.
Plus, Debra J. Saunders writes for SFGate that Rutgers, where Tyler Clementi recently killed himself after being videotaped being sexual with another guy, already has such a policy in place -- with offenses potentially leading to expulsion:
The list includes "intentionally or recklessly endangering the welfare of any individual" - but more to the point, "making or attempting to make an audio or video recording of any person(s) on University premises in bathrooms, showers, bedrooms, or other premises where there is an expectation of privacy with respect to nudity and/or sexual activity." Under "prohibited conduct," Rutgers lists "cyberbullying.""I was a little puzzled" by the Lautenberg press release, Robert L. Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), told me. "As terrible as the Tyler Clementi case was - and it was - it was already forbidden by harassment policies that every university in America has on the books."
And: "You don't need a new law to know that that's illegal." In fact, New Jersey prosecutors have charged two students with two counts each of invasion of privacy.
Shibley is concerned, and rightly so, that a new law would "attempt to ban speech that is protected by the First Amendment." Wouldn't be the first time a student code of conduct was used to stifle politically incorrect speech. In 2007, a San Francisco State student board filed a complaint against conservative students who held an "anti-terrorism rally" at which they stepped on Hamas and Hezbollah flags because they exhibited "hateful religious intolerance."
When I mentioned that Rutgers already has the policies Lautenberg advocated, spokeswoman Gail Ribas responded, "It would be a national law."
No, it would be a national imposition. It would be another feel-good bill that a headline-happy senator offered without appearing to have asked himself if the law is redundant, necessary or likely to help. Like so much that comes out of Washington these days, it would be clutter.
"Alternative" Medicine Can Be An Alternative To Living
Beyond all the poor gullible cancer patients who dash off to quacks in Mexico or believe that wheat grass enemas trump chemo, dozens have been killed by incorrectly placed acupuncture needles, writes Ian Sample in the Guardian.
A review of patients who died soon after acupuncture found a history of punctured hearts and lungs, damaged arteries and livers, nerve problems, shock, infection and haemorrhage, largely caused by practitioners placing their needles incorrectly or failing to sterilise their equipment.Many of the 86 patients, aged between 26 and 82 years old, died after being treated by acupuncturists in China or Japan, but a handful of fatalities were recorded in the US, Germany and Australia. The most recent death, of a 26-year-old woman in China, occurred last year.
The most common cause of death was a condition called pneumothorax, where air finds its way between the membranes that separate the lungs from the chest wall and causes the lungs to collapse.
In most of the cases, doctors were certain that acupuncture was to blame, but in some the cause was less clear.
In the words of Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer:
It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride... There cannot be two kinds of medicine -- conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted.
via Instapundit
Obama Turns Velvet Underground Drummer Into A Tea Partier
Rosie Swash writes for the Guardian about Maureen "Moe" Tucker's shift:
"Anyone who thinks I'm crazy about Sarah Palin, Bush, etc has made quite the presumption," Tucker told the Riverfront Times music blog. "I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream-land be paid for? For those who actually believe that their taxes won't go up in order to pay for all this insanity: good luck!"...Tucker also said she is "amazed" that her interview was so widely criticised: "I'm stunned that so many people who call themselves liberal yet are completely intolerant. I thought liberals loved everyone: the poor, the immigrant, the gays, the handicapped, the minorities, dogs, cats, all eye colours, all hair colours! Peace, love, bull!"
She continues: "You disagree and you're immediately called a fool, a Nazi, a racist. That's pretty f'd up! I would never judge someone based on their political views. Their honesty, integrity, kindness to others, generosity? Yes. Politics? No!"
How Far Are We Going To Go With This Stupidity?
A church-going woman put up a notice on her church bulletin board that she was seeking a Christian roommate and got accused of a civil rights violation. From Grand Rapids' WOOD TV:
Nancy Haynes of the Fair Housing Center told 24 Hour News 8 the woman has every right to seek and live with a Christian roommate -- but advertising for it publicly, even on a church bulletin board, violates federal law."She can be a Christian and she can even use that as a criteria for who she wants to rent to. She just can't state that. Because to state that is a violation of the Fair Housing Act," she said. "There are certain exceptions that apply. She can actually, in practice, not rent to a non-Christian. But she can't make the statement. The statement alone is a violation of the act. What she can do in practice she can't make a statement about."
Haynes said the Fair Housing Center began investigating after someone in the congregation, who was offended, filed a complaint.
What seems fair to me is that she not waste the time of atheists like me if she doesn't want us for a roommate.
People are going to discriminate on all sorts of bases -- wanting a gay roommate or a roommate who isn't gay, only wanting to live with a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist or a Wiccan. The gay guy who wants a gay roommate isn't going to let the straight guy move in, and no vegan is going to want me and my three strips of bacon in the kitchen every morning. The Fair Housing Act is the stupid-ass, unrealistic, PC housing act, and it's about time we changed it. I know, that won't happen, but we have far too many stupid laws on the books, and this is one of them.
In short: I am absolutely for people's right to associate (or not) with whom they wish, and if I were looking for a roommate situation, I'd prefer they'd tell me if they wouldn't go for a godless harlot like me; preferably in advance, so I wouldn't waste my time trundling over.
The Hitchslap: Christopher Hitchens On Religion And God
Collected clips of Hitchens' brilliance:
Genius Device For Laptop Users Who Fly Coach
I have been able to use my laptop in the most cramped coach situations, thanks to my Keynamics AVIATOR Laptop Stand
Juan Ridiculous Firing
In the WSJ, Emilio Karim Dabul criticizes (taxpayer-funded) NPR for giving Juan Williams the ax for his comments on Muslims:
For saying out loud what many Americans think--that he gets nervous when he's on a plane and sees people dressed in traditional Muslim garb.As an Arab-American of Muslim descent, I am not offended by this because in all honesty I have had the same reaction in similar circumstances. In Berlin a couple of years ago, my flight was delayed because, we were told, one of the passengers, who was in a wheelchair, needed extra assistance. When she finally was brought into the waiting area, she was covered from head to toe in traditional Muslim dress and only her eyes were visible. What happened? I grew nervous. I got on the plane just the same, but with trepidation.
Was my response rational? Yes and no.
It was not Muslims in traditional garb who hijacked those planes on 9/11, and it certainly was not Muslim women in veils and wheelchairs. If anything, an Islamist terrorist wants to blend in, not stand out.
However, it was not a traditional sort of terrorist attack I feared in this case, but perhaps something unexpected: a traditional Muslim woman in a veil, confined to a wheelchair, who was loaded with explosives.
That may make me guilty of an overactive imagination, but perhaps not. Not that many years later, a young Muslim on an international flight into Detroit tried to light explosives in his underwear.
I mention all this for one main reason. I grew up surrounded by Islamic culture, went to Islamic events, and was used to seeing women in traditional Muslim clothing, and yet when that woman appeared at the Berlin airport, I was scared.
That's all Mr. Williams was saying. He didn't say that they should be removed from the plane, treated differently, or anything close to that. He simply said he got nervous. And for that, he was fired.
The reality is that when Muslims cease to be the main perpetrators of terrorism in the world, such fears about traditional garb are bound to vanish. Until such time, the anxiety will remain.
Oh, and P.S. The taxpayers should not be funding NPR or any other broadcast outlet but the one -- CSPAN -- that shows video of government proceedings. Donate to your little heart's content, but let's unhook this baby and a lot of other babies from the government teat.
UPDATE: Howard Kurtz writes at The Daily Beast:
His firing has backfired, handing Fox a victory and making Williams a symbol of liberal intolerance--on the very day NPR announced a grant from George Soros that it never should have accepted.After watching Bill O'Reilly lead an hour of NPR-bashing on Fox News Thursday night, it's tempting to say that the right's reaction to the Juan Williams firing is just a tad overblown.
But it's not. This was a blunder of enormous proportions. Even many liberals--Donna Brazile, Joan Walsh, Whoopi Goldberg--are castigating National Public Radio for throwing Williams overboard.NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller--dubbed a "pinhead" by O'Reilly--made matters worse by suggesting that Williams needs psychiatric attention. She later apologized.
John Boehner, who may well be the next House Speaker, told National Review that it's "reasonable to ask why Congress is spending taxpayers' money to support a left-wing radio network."
And in a triumph of awful timing, yesterday was the day that NPR announced a new grant--$1.8 million from liberal philanthropist George Soros to hire 100 new reporters. No news organization should accept that kind of check from a committed ideologue of any stripe. Even if every journalist hired with the cash from Soros' foundation is fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, the perception is terrible. (This New York Times story didn't even mention Soros' liberal views. The guy just gave a million bucks to Media Matters. Hello?) Oh, and NPR is in the midst of a fundraising drive. Good luck with that.
Boohoo For The Drug Addicts, Never Mind The Children
I like Tom Matlack who started the Good Men Project, and I like some of the stuff they post, but they really went wrong with this piece by their staff writer and editor, Ryan O'Hanlon, who writes about eugenics but clearly has no idea what it means:
Would you take $315 to be sterilized? Well, if you're a drug addict and you live in the United Kingdom, you can. Project Prevention, a North Carolina-based charity, is offering £200 ($315) to any man who agrees to be sterilized.Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris admitted her methods amounted to "bribery," but said it was the only way to stop babies being physically and mentally damaged by drugs during pregnancy.Apparently, Harris has already paid over 3,500 addicts in the United States for what she calls "long-term birth control." She set up the organization after adopting the child of a crack addict.
Um, isn't this eugenics? The idea smacks of self-righteousness, like all drug addicts are some kind of lost cause. At the same time, it's encouraging drug addicts to continue being drug addicts. Their recovery is a nonissue when they can be tossed cash and forgotten about.
My comment:
Eugenics is about trying to eliminate a race. This is about trying to eliminate babies born daddyless to drug addicted to single mothers who cannot care for them. (They also have a similar program for female drug addicts.)Moreover, they are not being forced to be sterilized -- they do it by choice. This is a great program. I wrote about why HERE.
I added:
Helpful definition of what eugenics actually is here:"Eugenics is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population," usually referring to human populations"
My favorite dimwitted comment (and there were many) was from somebody named Sheena:
You;'re a raging idiot and everything that's wrong with this world. Why don't you just die already and go to your 'heaven' where your 'god' will tell you whatever it is that you thought up in your own head for an afterlife!
My reply:
Well, first of all, because I'm a godless harlot.Maybe work on the civil debate thing, Sheena?
One reality based comment came from a woman named Judith Barrett:
Ex- heroin addict here, they are NOT going to get better until they CHOOSE to. I think it's a phenomenal idea. Have you ever seen a crack addicted or heroin addicted baby? How about fetal alcohol syndrome? It's mortifying. Addicts should put a cork in it til they're ready to be a responsible parent, less collateral damage that way.
Commenter Steven sniffled back:
Judithi'm a little disappointed in your response coming from where you do. When is society going to treat addiction like every other illness? Lets start throwing some real $$$$ to help curing addiction instead of pushing people like us to the side? The best men that I know today have recover from some addiction i think that we should be doing everything in our power to help the real problem and not be making life changing decision for men who can'T make them for themselves!
My reply:
Judith is speaking from reality. Everybody else has way too much boo-hoo sympathy for addicts and apparently knows nothing of the foster care system or dead children left in the bathtub while Mommy was out scoring smack.Read LA Weekly's D. Heimpel on what kids of drug addicts go through in foster care. You might find yourself on Skid Row afterward, chasing addicts down the street and offering them wads of cash to get snipped or get Norplant.
Commenter Chainsaw appears to be yet another with low reading comprehension:
"Consider sterilizing every musician who's been a drug addict at some point in their life - still support it?"
Me:
Um, nobody's advocating forced sterilization.
Chainsaw again:
"And why would anyone assume that a 'drug addict' is mentally, emotionally, and legally capable of sensibly making such a long-term decision?"
Me again:
And by all means, let's have somebody who isn't raise another human being.
When That Evil Bitch You Work For Is You
Quoting Kate Coe: "Scenes from Freelance Life: If you're well enough to stand up, you're well enough to work."
When editors sometimes e-mail me to say they haven't gotten the week's column, I remind them to white-list my e-mail so it won't go in their spam folder, and tell them that the only reason I'll miss a deadline is if I'm in a coma or dead.
The Employee Bowling League?!
I'm gonna get me a government job, because they're the kind that really, really pay. From MyFoxNY, the New Jersey Turnpike wasted $43 million on employee perks and bonuses. Luke Funk writes:
In one case, an employee with a base salary of $73,469 earned $321,985 when all payouts and bonuses were included.The audit says that toll dollars From the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway were spent on items ranging from an employee bowling league to employee bonuses for working on birthdays and holidays.
It took place as tolls were being increased.
The biggest expense uncovered in the audit was $30 million in unjustified bonuses to employees and management in 2008 and 2009 without consideration of performance.
One example was paying employees overtime for removing snow and working holidays and then giving additional "snow removal bonuses" and "holiday bonuses."
The Comptroller's Office audit released Tuesday says taxpayers also paid $430,000 for free E-ZPass transponders for employees to get to work and nearly $90,000 in scholarships for workers' kids.
The audit shows turnpike authority employees got bonuses and overtime for working their birthdays and holidays.
Their birthdays? If you're over 12, I don't want to hear about your birthday, and taxpayers sure shouldn't be paying for it.
"Everything You Do Is Offensive"
There's a piece by Brad Miller in the OSU paper, The Lantern, about the attempted spread of political correctness to the Ohio amusement park, Cedar Point:
Each year in October, during "Halloweekends," it transforms into a Halloween-themed park. Some of the main attractions this year include "Dr. Mented's Asylum for the Criminally Insane" and a show called "The Edge of Madness: Still Crazy."It makes sense that these settings could produce a scare. But, naturally, the exhibits didn't appeal to everyone, particularly the busybodies at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group for mental health.
The group wrote a letter to Cedar Point requesting that the park remove the attractions immediately.
"Both of these displays suggest that people with mental illness are dangerous and deranged and that the general public should be frightened of such people," it read.
That leads to the most basic lesson of political correctness: Everything you do is offensive. It doesn't matter that an insane asylum sounds like a great setting for a haunted house. It doesn't matter that Cedar Point's job is to make money and scare customers, and not to enhance understanding about mental illness. What matters is that one group found the attractions offensive. To Cedar Point's credit, it did not cower under the pressure and has decided to keep the attractions.
The piece reminded me of an angry e-mail I got recently from some chick...I think, with an undergrad feminist background (can't quite remember what it was, but I looked her up and it was some kind of dreary post-post-something-ist something-or-other). She's now studying psychiatry. Anyway, here's how it started:
Hi Amy, I think it's a bit irresponsible to say "quit trying to drag him to therapy. He isn't mentally ill," which associates therapy with "crazy people." As a society, we've grown so much in the last few decades in realizing that therapy can really help "normal" people get out of dysfunctional patterns and better their lives. Of course, it also helps identify people with illness so they can get help.As a psychiatry major, I was appalled to see the context in which you wrote about therapy and thought I better enlighten you, especially when the masses are listening to you for good advice. You deal often times with the very people who probably do need therapy and could truly benefit from it.
Rasa
Hmm...it seems she's double-majoring in Condescending.
I wrote back, quoting the late Albert Ellis (co-founder, with Aaron Beck of cognitive behavioral therapy). For the uninitiated, Ellis swore constantly. (If you said, "Fuck you," he'd snap back, "No, UN-fuck you. Fucking's a good thing!") My reply:
Thanks, but I added something like "he doesn't even seem troubled." Some people seek therapy because they're crazy. Some people seek therapy because they are behaving irrationally and self-defeatingly and need help changing that. Just wondering, but are you a little oversensitive about this? PS Albert Ellis would have told you that many therapists were nuts. Well, that's not quite true. He would've said something like "fucking nuts" or "motherfucking nuts" or "motherfucking fruitcake nutcases."
I LOVED her even more condescending reply!
The way we speak of others reflects our own personality... you've said a lot about yourself in that very derogatory email to me. I can't imagine you're happy in your skin.
Here's what I sent back, complete with photo:
(Quoting Rasa): "I can't imagine you're happy in your skin."Me: I'm probably just deeply deluded!
via ifeminists
Our Fat Surgeon General Tries To Sell You On Unhealth
"The good news is, we can be healthy and fit at any size or any weight," says our double-chinned surgeon general. (Helloooo, diabetes!)
Of course, it's the government that's been promoting the unhealthiest, most fat-producing diet of all, the high-carb, low-fat diet. Americans were never as fat as they are today -- back when everybody was eating roast all the time, and buttered vegetables to go with. It's the panic about fat that's caused everybody to be fat.
Speaking of fat, I've learned recently about the benefits of coconut oil, for Alzheimers, potentially, and for all of us. As much as I LOVE butter on my eggs, I've been sauteeing my breakfast Italian parsley (I eat a big clump of it for the vitamins) and my eggs in coconut oil, and I just got Gregg to get some. Get it at the health food store (non-hydrogenated, of course) -- Nutiva is a great brand to get. You can also cook with coconut milk. Get the kind that is full-fat. And the immediate benefit I perceive? It seems to keep me even more energetic and keep me from getting hungry even longer.
Whatever you do, if you want to be healthy, and you want to have weight fall off you like stones off a truck, seriously cut back on carbs, especially sugar. Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories, lays out piles of persuasive evidence that it's carbs -- sugar, flour, starchy vegetables, etc. -- that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. Dr. Eades is another wonderful resource -- an ongoing resource of information on evidence-based health, as opposed to the bullshit-based information the government and so many doctors will feed you.
By the way, I found this above video of the surgeon general over at low-carber RNicoley's blog. Nicoley writes about himself:
Tipping the scale at 230+ (5'10) in May, 2007, at 33%+ body fat, I decided to do something about it. This blog is about that continuing journey. Having lost 60 net pounds -- on the way to 10% BF -- I'm ready to reveal my "secrets." I'm enthusiastic about helping others achieve real results. The mainstream advice is mostly wrong. One need only take a look around.
Countless people who comment here have cut carbs and dropped weight -- without starving or suffering. A certain person who uncrashes this website after I crash it, among other things, has as well, and is healthier every day because of it. This sort of eating is also how I stay thin with barely any exercise -- and seem to need much less sleep, have much more energy, and rarely get hungry (and certainly not the way I did when I ate carbs, with all the blood sugar surges and drops that come with).
Silencing People Of The "Wrong" Political Persuasion
From the LA Times:
"Republicans on the Westside 'fear putting a sign in their yard, a bumper sticker on their car..."
As I commented on the LA Times piece:
A friend of mine who's a Republican in Beverly Hills had her McCain signs stolen from her front yard numerous times. It is the antithesis of democracy to try to silence others' free speech -- no matter how much you dislike their speech or the candidate they are speaking about.
Morality Without Religion
Frans de Waal writes for The New York Times:
Reverend Al Sharpton opined in a recent videotaped debate: "If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there's nothing in charge." Similarly, I have heard people echo Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming that "If there is no God, I am free to rape my neighbor!"Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. Not that religion is irrelevant -- I will get to this -- but it is an add-on rather than the wellspring of morality.
Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way.
I think he's wrong about his ideas that people do good even if there's nothing in it for themselves. Here's a bit of it:
Psychologists stress the intuitive way we arrive at moral judgments while activating emotional brain areas, and economists and anthropologists have shown humanity to be far more cooperative, altruistic, and fair than predicted by self-interest models. Similarly, the latest experiments in primatology reveal that our close relatives will do each other favors even if there's nothing in it for themselves.Chimpanzees and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, such as when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with differently colored tokens. One token is "selfish," and the other "prosocial." If the bartering monkey selects the selfish token, it receives a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner gets nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewards both monkeys. Most monkeys develop an overwhelming preference for the prosocial token, which preference is not due to fear of repercussions, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are the most generous.
He doesn't say whether these monkeys have repeat interactions or one-time interactions with each other. Also, if you develop a habit of sharing because you are rewarded for it -- perhaps in brain chemicals, perhaps socially, or both, it's very possible you'll continue to repeat that habit even if you're around people (or monkeys) you have never seen before, and have no relationship with.
Sonja Lyubomirsky writes in The How of Happiness
Litigation Welfare? No Thanks
Ted Frank writes in the New York Daily News about hearings being held on an awful idea, which is:
Establishing a right to an attorney so that, courtesy of taxpayers, low-income New Yorkers can have free legal representation in a wide range of cases from evictions to divorces to job and welfare disputes and more. But such a program will not have the results Judge Lippman and other well-meaning advocates desire.The far-reaching idea is given the misnomer "civil Gideon," after the landmark Gideon vs. Wainwright decision, which enshrined in law the idea of a right to court-appointed counsel for the indigent in criminal cases.
But there's a big difference: The unanimous Gideon Supreme Court ruling was based on a plainly expressed right in the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution, which acts as a check on the awesome power of the government to deprive someone of liberty.
In civil cases, there is no corresponding constitutional provision. And more importantly, Lippman's proposal will use taxpayer-funded attorneys to litigate cases against private citizens, effectively aggrandizing rather than limiting government power.
Lawyers can provide pro-bono representation to clients if they are so inclined. At the moment, baseless lawsuits often or usually go away because it isn't for a lawyer to bring unwinnable cases on a contingency. This will change if the taxpayer is paying.
There's Nothing To Fear But...Well, Everything
For example, there's personally going under and losing everything, the country going even deeper into debt than it already is, Obamacare ruining our healthcare system, and the fact that your great grandchildren will be owned by the Chinese. Carol E. Lee writes at Politico:
WEST NEWTON, Mass. - President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda."Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. "And the country's scared."
Obama told the several dozen donors that he was offering them his "view from the Oval Office." He faulted the economic downturn for Americans' inability to "think clearly" and said the burden is on Democrats "to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling."
My suggestions? Resign from office and take the Republicans with you.
I think a lot of people feel this way, and I think it's part of why you see more and more libertarian-bashing lately. Everywhere I go, there's a piece on what idiots libertarians are. Well, since the Republicans are the party of pretend small government, and the Democrats are the party of spending like a Beverly Hills heiress to an oil fortune, I see a lot to be happy about in regard to a party for actual small government that wants us to live by Elvis' words, "Do what's right for you, as long as it don't hurt no one."
The Porch Menagerie
Culver City, Sunday night, October 17:
College Degree Snobbery
A thinker I've long respected, Wendy McElroy, never went to college. Yesterday, I learned that Matt Welch, the brainy ed-in-chief of reason, never finished. He lost a job because of it. Investors Business Daily unhired him in '98 when they found out. He writes about it here:
[July 13, 1998] -- What do I, an obscure free-lancer, have in common with the exalted likes of Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, Hunter S. Thompson, Nina Totenberg and Ken Layne?We are, all of us, ineligible to work for Investor's Business Daily, the nation's 49th largest newspaper. Why? Because none of us has a college degree.
...Ironically, I had originally been attracted to Investor's Business Daily because of its spirited help-wanted ads in the trades, seeking candidates who "go against the grain" or "think outside of the box" or whatever.
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but what in living hell does sitting in classes between the ages of 18 and 22 have the slightest fucking bit to do with "going against the grain?" Or maybe the argument is that William Randolph Hearst would have really made something of himself if he had only stuck it out at Harvard. Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Robert Capa, Theodore Dreiser, Ted Turner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Edward Albee ... they all managed a little of the old "outside the box" without benefit of a four-year education.
Investor's Business Daily (whose motto is "For People Who Choose to Succeed") in fact spills much of its ink covering the doings of dropouts -- Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, David Geffen. Its editorial page is a living homage to Barry Goldwater (dropout), and echoes the saner sentiments of Rush "dropout" Limbaugh.
You could easily throw together a list of cretins and heroes with or without a bachelor's or master's degree, depending on your politics. It's a pointless exercise, proving only the uselessness of making a hard rule.
Before Matt became ed-in-chief of reason, he wrote for the UCSB paper, was a founding editor of Prague's first English-language newspaper, Prognosis, a correspondent for myriad wire services and European papers, managing editor of the Budapest Business Journal, a reporter for reason, and associate editorial page editor of the L.A. Times.
I've been a nerd and a voracious reader and student all my life -- outside of the realm of school. The book in my bathroom right now? Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials
Two friends and I started giving free advice on a Soho street corner as a joke, but when people started asking my friends and me serious questions, I read through all of psychology, decided Freud was largely a fraud (just making up stuff and saying it was true) and I became very influenced by Albert Ellis, who co-founded cognitive behavioral therapy with Aaron Beck.
I started thinking I should get a Master's or something and Ellis, who was a fan of my column in the New York Daily News, talked me out of it, telling me, "You know what you need to know; it would be a waste of time."
Later, I started studying evolutionary psychology and anthropology and going to their conferences and those of Council on Contemporary Families, and others, and reading their journals. Again, sans college degree. People still sometimes sneer, "What are your qualifications?" And they're basically that I know my shit, and read and study every week of my life.
UPDATE: Yet another talented, successful pal of mine just told me he doesn't have a degree -- screenwriter Josh Olson, who was nominated for the British Academy Award, the Writer's Guild Award, the USC Scriptor award and the Academy Award for his adapted screenplay for "A History of Violence."
Bribing Grandma
I'm disgusted by this sort of behavior by both parties. This time, it's Obama trying to buy the senior vote. From the WSJ:
Can our retired readers be bought for $250? Apparently President Obama thinks they can, because two weeks before Election Day he has endorsed sending bonus checks for that amount to the nearly 58 million Americans on Social Security.It's hard to imagine a more blatant vote-buying exercise, especially with polls showing that seniors have turned sharply against the Democrats this year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader (pro-tem) Harry Reid have both promised check-writing votes in the lame duck session, assuming they can fit that into all the other things they want to do before they lose their super-majorities.
The excuse for this bribery is the announcement by the Social Security Administration that, for the second year in a row, seniors will not get a cost of living increase in 2011. Prices rose by only 1.5% in the last year, having fallen nearly 2% in 2009, and seniors aren't supposed to get an increase until prices exceed their last peak.
But lest you think this is a grave injustice, Social Security recipients received a 5.8% increase two years ago. That was the largest increase in 20 years and was based on what proved to be an ephemeral increase in energy prices. Thus for 2009 seniors received a bonus increase of about $500 above inflation.
How To Screen Out Teachers With "Undesirable" Political Beliefs
Blogger David Thompson wrote about an InsideHigherEd piece by Brooklyn College history prof KC Johnson, who writes about school programs that demand that their students promote "social justice" (links live in Johnson's piece)
At the State University of New York at Oneonta, prospective teachers must "provide evidence of their understanding of social justice in teaching activities, journals, and portfolios . . . and identify social action as the most advanced level."The program at the University of Kansas expects students to be "more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment."
The University of Vermont's department envisions creating "a more humane and just society, free from oppression, that fosters respect for ethnic and cultural diversity."
Marquette's program "has a commitment to social justice in schools and society," producing teachers who will use the classroom "to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture."According to the University of Toledo, "Education is our prime vehicle for creating the 'just' society," since "we are preparing citizens to lead productive lives in a democratic society characterized by social justice."
This rhetoric is admirable. Yet, as the hotly contested campaigns of 2000 and 2004 amply demonstrated, people of good faith disagree on the components of a "just society," or what constitutes the "negative effects of the dominant culture," or how best to achieve "world peace . . . and preservation of the environment."
An intellectually diverse academic culture would ensure that these vague sentiments did not yield one-sided policy prescriptions for students. But the professoriate cannot dismiss its ideological and political imbalance as meaningless while simultaneously implementing initiatives based on a fundamentally partisan agenda.
...As one conference devoted to the concept explained, using this standard would produce "teachers who possess knowledge and discernment of what is good or virtuous." Advocates leave ideologically one-sided education departments to determine "what is good or virtuous" in the world.
Thompson notes:
This egregious and sinister treatment prompted Johnson to raise an entirely legitimate question:Must prospective public school teachers accept a professor's argument that "white English is the oppressors' language" in order to enter the profession?
And here's what happened in the wake of that question:
Of course, the heroes at FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending free speech rights on campus), led by constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff, came to his defense.
All is not well in The Academy, however. Check this out from FIRE's blog:
Columbia University's Teachers College requires students to demonstrate a "commitment to social justice" and employs "dispositions," which it defines as "observable behaviors that fall within the law and involve the use of certain skills," to evaluate students. These dispositions, "expected of Teachers College candidates and graduates" and "assessed at each transition point," include "Respect for Diversity and Commitment to Social Justice." FIRE has criticized such ideological requirements in several letters to Columbia University and Teachers College, arguing that evaluating students according to their commitment to an officially defined political belief is a violation of a student's right to decide for himself or herself what is and is not socially just. Teachers College President Susan Fuhrman told FIRE that the policy would be reevaluated in 2007, but I guess Columbia likes having ideological litmus tests, since we have seen no change to this policy yet. Is Columbia willing to try to defend this policy in public?
Everything Old Is New Again
Welcome to the Middle Ages. Tim Ross writes in the Telegraph:
Opponents of the veil claim it oppresses women and presents a barrier between those who wear traditional dress and the rest of society.But in a new report from think-tank Civitas, Alveena Malik, a former faith adviser to the last Labour government, said the test of whether religious symbols are appropriate should be based on whether they are practical.
Politicians in France and Belgium have voted in favour of banning the full veil, or "niqab", and other European countries are thought to be considering similar action.
In a new report, Women, Islam and Western Liberalism, Mrs Malik said: "We in Britain need to take a different direction from others in Europe and to accept the veil as part of a modern British way of life."
"As part of a MODERN British way of life"? Right.
Here's modern.
And here's Ahmadinejad's wife.
A few words from dhushara.com on why women must be veiled under Islam:
The need to cover the woman entirely comes from a mistaken notion that because women are beautiful and attractive, they are entirely awrah (sexual parts), and thus must be entirely concealed, even to covering one eye, or they will pose a shameful threat to themselves and to their family, through being uncontrollably attractive to strange men....Mashad, 10 April 2008 (AKI) - A top Shia cleric in Iran has said that unveiled women are a serious danger to Iranian society as they cause men to be "transformed into beasts". "Women without the veil are a danger that the authorities underestimate," said Hojatolislam Seyyed Ahmad Elmalhoda, a powerful cleric who leads the Friday prayers in Mashad, a site considered sacred for Shia Muslims as it houses the shrine of Imam Reza. "This situation is very serious in that if men see these bad women, they will turn into beasts, and then the whole of society will have to pay the consequences." According to the Shia cleric, women who do not respect conservative Islamic dress rules are "sources of all that is bad in society." "Respecting the chador (a long, black cloak that covers the arms and legs and is usually worn with a hijab) is the law of the state and the authorities must severely punish anyone who does not respect this law, in the same way that they punish thieves and murderers," said Elmadhoda.
What kind of societies are these people running? I mean, I wear tight, body-hugging skirts all the time and see girls running around So Cal in itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny outfits, and they are not being dragged out of Starbucks or Target or the supermarket to be raped in the parking lot.
Civilization: It's a beautiful thing. Let's invite everybody to join it!
One Of The First Bills Jerry Brown'll Sign: College Ed For Illegals
Why prosecute illegal aliens when you can reward them for breaking the law?
I Love New York
Columbus Circle, with Time-Warner Center in the background:
The President's Bad Attitude About Business
In the WSJ, Ken Langone gives the President a talking to about how impossible he's making it for people to start businesses:
A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that's build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.We opened the front door in 1979, also a time of severe economic slowdown. Yet today, Home Depot is staffed by more than 325,000 dedicated, well-trained, and highly motivated people offering outstanding service and knowledge to millions of consumers.
If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it's a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase--never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.
The president also seems to hold the view that American business is screwing workers and customers and ruining the economy, to boot. Not all businesspeople are ethical -- but without healthy businesses, unencumbered in every which way by the state, we're not going to have a healthy economy.
How one gets to be President of the United States while not understanding how vital the free market is to this country -- and the continuation of democracy -- is just amazing to me. Then again, perhaps the rumors are true: that the last thing this president and many Democrats want is a free market.
Just remember: Politicians always come out on top in a socialist kleptocracy.
Don't Call It Capitalism
Call it what it is, what WSJ commenter David Perlman calls it -- "crony capitalism":
Wall Street is a den of agnostics who ask: What will you do for me and how much will it cost? They don't make the laws, but they will pay what it takes to get the laws they want.Of course, lawmakers should be beyond purchase, but too many are not.
The net result is crony capitalism, nee fascism, wherein the connected are bailed out at the expense of the rest. Goldman Sachs, AIG, GM, Chrysler, etc...These are all the poster children for America's disgust with business. The bailouts of these and other former and unfortunately continuing titans of industry are as egregious as any of the corruption in Greece. Maybe more-so, because at least in Greece everyone acknowledges the cheating and theft for what it is, whereas here the payouts were formulated in backrooms and justified with catastrophic stories that enabled the cheats to maintain not only their riches but, to some degree, their reputations.
It is these heinous deals that have mortgaged our country's future, and that infuriate the average person. But none of them would be possible if the government itself were beyond reproach. The average person doesn't hate business, although that is the story the sensationalistic and sound bite oriented media would spin. They hate the CRONY capitalists who make up only a small fraction of business, but who have robbed the public coffers of so much.
The real problem is that government is now so big that the spoils available to those with the appropriate clout and bribes are of such grandeur that they can, indeed, destroy our country. I don't see how you begin to fix that, except by substantially reducing the size of government.
Harlem Afternoons
Wednesday afternoon on the upper-upper East Side of Manhattan:
photo by Gregg Sutter
Finally! A Governor Who Can Add!
The WSJ writes about some sensible governing going on in New Jersey:
Chris Christie sure has a knack. The New Jersey Governor keeps shocking the political class on behalf of taxpayers, most recently by terminating work on a new passenger-train tunnel that was supposed to run under the Hudson River into Manhattan.Mr. Christie lowered the boom last week, citing cost overruns from a federal audit that had revised the tunnel price to as much as $14 billion, up from $8.7 billion only two years ago. "The only prudent move is to end this project," he said. "I can't put taxpayers on a never-ending hook."
Reaction in liberal land: OMG. The tunnel was the country's largest public works project, and believers in the virtues of all government things immediately bemoaned his decision as one more sign of the decline of Western civilization. "Killing the ARC Tunnel will go down as one of the biggest public policy blunders in New Jersey's history. Without increased transportation options into Manhattan, New Jersey's economy will eventually be crippled," Senator Frank Lautenberg said.
Well, well. To govern is to choose, or ought to be. And the reason New Jersey and so many other states can't afford new "infrastructure" is because the politicians who've been running the state have blown the budget on everything else. For years, Democrats in Trenton have steered ever-more state revenues to government employees and their pensions, while squeezing state spending on the core purposes of government such as roads. Mr. Christie is telling them that the jig is up, and that a government that tries to do everything ends up doing nothing well.
A pity that the decision on financing California's boondoggle on train tracks was left to the registered idiots, uh, voters, who think they only need say yes to everything under the rainbow and somebody will turn on the printing press and make lots more pretty green dollars to pay for it.
Meanwhile, the elected rock star in The White House has been spending like a Beverly Hills princess -- making George Bush look like an actual fiscal conservative instead of a lip-service one (not an easy task).
Victor Davis Hanson notes in the New York Post that we'll learn in November about how sick Americans are of this:
In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. Under a supposedly conservative administration, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion.Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he'd been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people. So he took Bush's last scheduled budget deficit of more than $500 billion -- in a Keynesian attempt to get the country out of the 2008 recession and financial panic -- and nearly tripled it by 2010.
Obama's new red ink will add more than $2.5 trillion to the national debt -- with near-trillion-dollar yearly deficits scheduled for the next decade. All of that will result in a US debt of more than $20 trillion.
What exactly is it about big deficits and our accumulated debt that is starting to enrage voters?
First, the public is tired of the nonchalant way that smarmy public officials take credit for dishing out someone else's cash without a thought of paying for it. Each week, President Obama promises another interest group more freshly borrowed billions, now euphemistically called "stimulus." But the more public money he hands out, the more voters wonder where he's getting the cash. The next time a public official puts his name on yet another earmarked federal project, let him at least confess whether it was floated with borrowed money.
...We are humiliated by what we owe. If we can't pay it back, we'll at least want political payback. It's that simple this year.
I don't think a whole lot of people are that smart. Or that we have that many good choices. You?
As my late and much-missed friend Cathy Seipp wrote a few years back, let's have fewer people, not more, getting out to vote:
It's bad enough MTV's Rock-the-Vote campaign frantically urges 18-to-30-year-olds, no matter how ignorant, to get to the polls.Look, voting is a privilege as well as a right and if you don't vote, you should be ashamed of yourself. But the reason you should be ashamed of yourself is that not voting is lazy and idiotic. Should the lazy idiot constituency be encouraged to influence society even more than it already does? Should contemporary parents fool children even more into thinking that the world revolves around them?
In his book "The Vanishing Voter" (based on the Vanishing Voter project at Harvard), Thomas E. Patterson admits that "in most locations, it takes about as long to drive to the video store and rent a couple of movies" as it does to vote. Yet he agrees with the theory of increasing voter turnout by coddling. Taken to the logical extreme, his solutions -- making Election Day a national holiday; eliminating the Electoral College; keeping polls open even longer -- might include assigning government workers the task of physically carrying citizens to voting booths and then singing them to sleep that night with politically informed lullabies.
Many things in life are hard; voting is not one of them, and parents promising to vote the way their children want in return for finished homework sends a message about as useful as school principals who eat worms if a class improves its grades. In the eternal words of Marge on "The Simpsons," "One person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn't."
Smuley Boteach Talks Libertarian On Being Gay
The rabbi writes in the WSJ:
I once asked Pat Robertson, "Why can't you simply announce to all gay men and women, 'Come to Church. Whatever relationship you're in, God wants you to pray. He wants you to give charity. He wants you to lead a godly life." He answered to the effect that homosexuality is too important to overlook, as it is the greatest threat to marriage and the family. Other evangelical leaders have told me the same.But with one of every two heterosexual marriages failing, much of the Internet dedicated to degrading women through pornography, and a culture that is materially insatiable while all-too spiritually content, can we straight people really say that gays are ruining our families? We've done a mighty fine job of it ourselves, thank you very much.
The excessive concern about homosexuality that is found among many of my religious brothers and sisters--in many Muslim countries being gay is basically a death sentence--stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of sin. The Ten Commandments were given on two tablets to connote two different kinds of transgression: religious and moral. The first tablet discussed religious transgressions between God and man, such as the prohibitions of idolatry, blasphemy and desecration of the Sabbath. The second tablet contained moral sins between man and his fellow man, like adultery, theft and murder.
Homosexuality is a religious, not a moral, sin. A moral sin involves injury to an innocent party. Who is harmed when two unattached, consenting adults are in a relationship? Homosexuality is akin to the prohibition against lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating bread during Passover; there is nothing immoral about it, but it violates the divine will.
I am in favor of gay civil unions rather than marriage because I am against redefining marriage. But gay marriage doesn't represent the end of Western civilization. The real killer is the tsunami of divorce and the untold disruption to children who become yo-yos going from house to house on weekends.
We're All Drug Warriors!
Next time things seem a little pricey at CVS, you might thank the Federal government for that. CVS just got fined $77.6 million for not playing cop well enough in the face of people trying to buy stuff to make meth. From the Sun-Sentinel:
NEW YORK -- CVS Pharmacy Inc. has agreed to pay $77.6 million in fines and returned profits in a case alleging improper control in the sale of an ingredient used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors said Thursday.The U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles said CVS, the largest operator of retail pharmacies, repeatedly failed to properly monitor sales of pseudophedrine, which is contained in some cold medicines and is also used to make meth.
Through failing to monitor these transactions, the pharmacy helped methamphetamine traffickers in Southern California and the area around Las Vegas to get their hands on "large amounts" of pseudophedrine, the prosecutors said in a statement - adding that the sales fueled a rise in methamphetamine production in California.
As part of the pharmacy's agreement with prosecutors, CVS will pay a $75 million fine, the largest civil penalty ever paid under the Controlled Substances Act, the prosecutors said. They also said CVS will forfeit $2.6 million in profits received from illegal transactions.
"This case shows what happens when companies fail to follow their ethical and legal responsibilities," said U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. "CVS knew it had a duty to prevent methamphetamine trafficking, but it failed to take steps to control the sale of a regulated drug used by methamphetamine cooks as an essential ingredient for their poisonous stew."
Rite-Aid, on the other hand, hassles you like hell if you want to buy cold medicine...but should this be the job of the drugstore?
You'll Need A Master's Degree In Parking
When and where to leave your wheels, Manhattan-style:
Time To Change Phone Companies!
The morons at Verizon think they're going to charge me $3.50 to pay my bill online, and keep me as a customer? Um, wrong. I use this form of payment, not only for convenience, but because it helps me eliminate the identity theft risk of sending checks in the mail -- lest the bill get waylaid and lest somebody get my checking account number. (More on that in I SEE RUDE PEOPLE, the Bank of America chapter.)
David Lazarus writes at the LA Times:
Beginning Oct. 16, Verizon Communications will charge $3.50 for any nonrecurring payment using a credit or debit card. In other words, if you don't sign up for their regular bill-paying program and prefer to pay each month with plastic, you'll pay more.And it doesn't matter whether you speak with a service rep, use the company's automated phone system or pay online.
"It's a way to encourage customers to sign up for automated bill pay," explained Jon Davies, a Verizon spokesman.
Charging me $3.50 to pay you is a form of encouragement -- encouragement for me to call up and switch to ATT. Goody. Bet I'll even get a new customer bonus. Way to go, Verizon!
Capitalism Saved The Miners
Daniel Henninger writes at the WSJ:
If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.
This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.
This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
...The U.S. has a government led by a mindset obsessed with 250K-a-year "millionaires" and given to mocking "our blind faith in the market." In a fast-moving world filled with nations intent on catching up with or passing us, this policy path is a waste of time.
An Infestation
Band bugs:
If Only Harriet Tubman Had A U-Haul
Great moments in misguided marketing campaigns -- U-Haul hitching its wagon to the Underground Railroad:
Immigration Shouldn't Be Color-Blind
The color we should be looking for, though, is green. Spurning immigrant entrepreneurs makes no economic sense, writes the WSJ:
Consider the barriers we now put on immigrant entrepreneurs.Start-ups are responsible for most net new jobs in the U.S., and immigrants are almost 30% more likely than non-immigrants to start a business. None of this is news to economists, writes Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for America Policy in a new paper, but a focus on start-ups "is largely non-existent in the current policy debate over jobs and the economy, most of which centers on how to encourage existing firms to hire more employees."
The U.S. created an immigrant investor visa category (EB-5) in 1990, but steep minimum capital requirements put it out of reach for most potential recipients. The average start-up company in the U.S. begins with about $31,000. Yet to become eligible for an EB-5 visa, an individual must invest at least $500,000. It's no wonder that fewer than 3,700 people received EB-5 visas last year--including spouses and children--and most of them went to immigrant investors looking to expand existing U.S. ventures, not create new businesses.
Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard Lugar of Indiana have introduced legislation that would award a conditional green card to immigrant entrepreneurs who receive at least $250,000 from a U.S. venture capitalist. The immigrant would receive permanent residence status if the enterprise employed at least five workers or reached $1 million in revenue within a year. This would improve the status quo, but the capital requirements would still remain needlessly high. In retail and manufacturing, for example, start-up costs average $98,000 and $175,000, respectively.
Mr. Anderson, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official, says the U.S. would do better to discard capital requirements and welcome any foreign national who can present a business plan that passes muster with the Small Business Administration. As with the EB-5 visa, the individual would receive a green card only if the business created a certain number of jobs for U.S. workers within a set period of time.
All You Need...
Wisdom from my late friend Marlowe Minnick: You can fix a hell of a lot of things in life if you just have duct tape, Wite-out, and a Sharpie.
It's The Beginning Of A Movement, Really It Is
The lone protester outside Fox News on Sixth Avenue. 
I'm in New York with Gregg for Elmore Leonard's 85th birthday and the publication of his 44th book Djibouti
Advice Goddess Free Swim
As mentioned above, Gregg and I are in New York for a few days, and I won't have time to blog much until sometime Tuesday afternoon, so you pick the topics. (One link per comment or my spam filter will have its way with you.)
Easy Writer
Do something with your life and you won't have to run around defacing the plants.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Taxing The Rich Doesn't Just Affect The Rich
Harvard prof and textbook author N. Gregory Mankiw writes for The New York Times about the talk of raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Dems say these taxpayers can afford to fork over a bit more; Republicans say raising taxes for this set will hurt the economy. Mankiw uses himself as a case-study, noting that paying more taxes wouldn't cause him day-to-day hardship, but...
Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.Now let's put taxes into the calculus. First, assuming that the Bush tax cuts expire, I would pay 39.6 percent in federal income taxes on that extra income. Beyond that, the phaseout of deductions adds 1.2 percentage points to my effective marginal tax rate. I also pay Medicare tax, which the recent health care bill is raising to 3.8 percent, starting in 2013. And in Massachusetts, I pay 5.3 percent in state income taxes, part of which I get back as a federal deduction. Putting all those taxes together, that $1,000 of pretax income becomes only $523 of saving.
And that saving no longer earns 8 percent. First, the corporation in which I have invested pays a 35 percent corporate tax on its earnings. So I get only 5.2 percent in dividends and capital gains. Then, on that income, I pay taxes at the federal and state level. As a result, I earn about 4 percent after taxes, and the $523 in saving grows to $1,700 after 30 years.
Then, when my children inherit the money, the estate tax will kick in. The marginal estate tax rate is scheduled to go as high as 55 percent next year, but Congress may reduce it a bit. Most likely, when that $1,700 enters my estate, my kids will get, at most, $1,000 of it.
HERE'S the bottom line: Without any taxes, accepting that editor's assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family's marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered?
Without the tax increased advocated by the Obama administration, the writing assigment would end up yielding his kids about $2K -- giving him twice the incentive to keep working. And the same goes for a lot of people -- actors, actresses, your orthodontist. Mankiw contends that as their tax rates increase, their services will be in shorter supply.
Charred-Topper
Over 1,000 people entered a contest to be a columnist for McSweeney's, and Stef Willen, the wonderful young woman who edits my writing, was one of the five winners.
Thanks to her win, she now writes a twice-monthly column for McSweeney's. Her first is her winning entry, Total Loss: A Column About Inventorying Other People's Tragedies. It's wonderful writing, and extremely interesting -- it's about her part-time work as a fire insurance investigator, counting the charred remains of people's lives.
I think you'll enjoy reading it, and I hope you'll vote for it. The column that gets the most votes wins the grand prize, and she's totally deserving, and you'd make me thrilled to pieces if she wins.
Please vote HERE!
And share this with friends, ask them to read her piece, and vote, too!
Coconut Oil And Alzheimers
I wrote to one of the handful of people I trust to interpret scientific studies, and one of the very few practitioners of truly evidence-based dietary medicine, Dr. Michael Eades. Here's my e-mail:
Subject: I know that the plural of anecdote is not data!But, this seems rather interesting.
Another link, with video of the guy and his doctor wife.
Here's what Dr. Eades e-mailed back:
Hey Amy--There is little doubt that ketones help with Alzheimer's (and a lot of other problems as well). And coconut oil contains MCT, which convert to ketones. Another fat that converts to ketones in the omega-3 fat alpha-lenolenic acid, found in flaxseed oil. Problem is, these oils will convert in minimal amounts in the face of a high-carb diet. There is some conversion, but not as much as there could be. High-carb diets themselves have been fingered as culprits in Alzheimer's, which some, myself included, refer to as diabetes of the brain.
Aside from the Alzheimer's issues, coconut oil is terrific for all kinds of things. Has a high content of lauric acid, which is an immunostimulant. We use it to cook just about everything in and even use it in shakes. Terrific stuff.
Best--
Mike
Dr. Eades on ketones here. More on coconut oil in a comprehensive report from Dr. Mary Enig here.
UPDATE: Gary Taubes just e-mailed me:
Hey, Just saw your recent blog (google alert) and noticed you're doing coconut oil. Question: have you tried Coconut butter? There's only a couple of companies that make it, and the one we've used is Artisana. They might sell it now at Whole foods or the Santa Monica coop in your neck of woods. Anyway, it's weirdly delicious, which coconut oil is not. Best, gt
The Car I've Been Waiting For
I've dreamed of having access to a driverless car that could be programmed to come to my house and pick me up and take me where I wanted to go. Maybe these would be publicly available cars we'd all pay a fee per use, or maybe private cars. Well, now, according to a New York Times story by John Markoff, Google has a car like this in the works:
Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.
Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided -- more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today's personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.
Got a future-tech item on your wish list? If so, what is it?
UPDATE: Here's why Ted Frank thinks this sort of car cannot become a reality.
The United States Of Paperwork
Peggy Noonan in the WSJ on the blizzard upon us:
No matter what level of life in which you operate, you are likely overwhelmed by forms, by a blizzard of regulations, rules, new laws. This is not new, it's just always getting worse. Priests are forced to be accountants now, and army officers, and dentists. The single most onerous part of ObamaCare is the tax change whereby spending $600 on goods or services will require a 1099 form. Economists will tell you of the financial cost of this, but I would argue that Paperwork Nation is utterly at odds with the American character.Because Americans weren't born to be accountants. It's not in our DNA! We're supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant--to be romantic about it, and why not--to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren't meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren't meant to wear green eyeshades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!
There is I think a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn't a new rebellion--it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism--but it's rising again.
For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, "the elites," especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules, and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn't have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.
Gregg still can't believe that he's going to have to 1099 Delta and Hertz. I have to hire the neighbor's kid to sort through a bunch of paperwork. Every time I think of it it makes me a little queasy. Paperwork is what we all do in lieu of actually producing something.
We Have Far Too Much Government
And it's costing us far too much money, and when we're trillions beyond broke. reason has some ideas for slashing the state. Here's one of them by Peter Suderman:
Cancel the Federal Communications CommissionThe Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees everything from TV and radio to wireless phones and Internet connections. But none of these tasks is a core government function. From regulating speech to subsidizing broadband, just about everything the FCC does is either onerous, constitutionally dubious, ineffective, or all three.
Take its role as broadcast censor: Under a policy that was recently overturned by a federal appeals court, the agency has spent decades enforcing an arbitrary, inscrutable code governing what speech and images are acceptable on the public airwaves. Are four-letter words forbidden or not? Which ones? And when? What about breasts or bottoms, or lower backs? Does it matter if the context is medical, accidental, or unattractive?
The FCC's answer to all of those questions is yes, no, maybe, or all three, depending on whether the words and pictures in question meet its definition of "indecency." But that test is performed using guidelines that are clear as mud: "An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." Naturally, judgments about who counts as an average person and what constitutes a "contemporary community standard" are left entirely to the commission's whim.
...In addition to the agency's $338 million budget, a 2005 study by economist Jerry Ellig estimated FCC regulations hit consumers with up to $105 billion a year in additional costs and missed services. Rather than facilitate communications technology, the agency has made America's consumer electronics offerings substantially more expensive.
The best alternative is a world in which spectrum is freely tradable private property rather than a government-managed resource, interference is treated as a tort, and no one worries about whether their next on-air word will result in a seven-figure fine--in other words, a world with no FCC at all.--Peter Suderman
They Won't Give You A Baby
They will give you some pretty nice savings in this sale in the baby store at Amazon.
Thank you all for supporting me and my site through the kickbacks I get from Amazon when you shop at Amy's Mall and my Amazon links.
Those Nefarious Lunch Ladies!
I'm pretty sure the lunch ladies at my old elementary school were running a human trafficking ring...same at yours? Yes, they give you a little extra macaroni, and that's actually a secret code for...um...um...
Amazing story out of Ireland. One of the cafeteria ladies gave a kid -- a kid who happened to be related to her -- a biscuit, when he asked and she was warned that this behavior could be seen as "grooming" the kid (presumably for sex work!). From the BBC:
Pat Lavery had been asked by a pupil for a biscuit and she in turn asked a colleague to give one to the child.Her husband said the school warned her that this could be seen as grooming.
The incident happened in May 2008 at St Mary's primary school in Brookeborough, but the details have just emerged.
Dinner lady, Mrs Lavery, who was a relative of the child, had to attend three meetings, firstly with the acting principal then two with the school principal.
One of the meetings with the principal lasted over an hour and he wanted her to attend a fourth.
Mrs Lavery decided to leave her job as she felt she had been subjected to a "grilling".
A few somebodies should be subjected to an immediate firing.
via ifeminist
Waivering On Obamacare
Peter Wehner writes for Commentary about the waivers the government has been giving out for the limited benefits plans known as "mini-meds" (like the policies that cover McDonald's workers):
In the words of the Times, "the waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies."This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government.
...This story is part of a broader, unfolding one: the collision between Obama's promises on health care and reality. Promise after promise - including bending the health-care cost curve down, the cost of premiums being lower, and no person being forced to give up their existing coverage - is being shattered. On almost every particular, what Obama said would happen not only isn't coming to pass; the opposite is occurring.
In McDonald's' case, from Crain's Chicago Business:
So-called "mini-med" plans such as the one Oak Brook-based McDonald's offers to nearly 30,000 employees have relatively low premiums and limited benefits. Plans for individual coverage under the McDonald's plan start at $14 a week for benefits capped at $2,000 a year."We need to work with companies to see what is available," said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, at a press briefing Monday. "Our goal isn't to destabilize the market. The bottom line for some will be: Is this coverage better than no coverage at all?"
The fast-food giant drew attention last week for a memo it sent the department, warning that its mini-med plan would not comply with a section of the new health care law requiring 80% to 85% of premiums to be paid out in benefits. McDonald's denied reports that it might drop the coverage if it doesn't get a waiver.
Horrible, Horrible, Horrible
This is Sharia. This is a video of woman in Pakistan being stoned to death (an act Mohammed approved!) because she was seen with a man. Horrible. (The link goes to a blog post -- you don't have to watch the video unless you want to.)
More on stoning here and here.
More on the haram offenses under Sharia from religioustolerance.org:
Within Sharia law, there are a group of "Haram" offenses which carry severe punishments. These include pre-marital sexual intercourse, sex by divorced persons, post-marital sex, adultery, false accusation of unlawful intercourse, drinking alcohol, theft, and highway robbery. Haram sexual offenses can carry a sentence of stoning to death or severe flogging. An eyewitness account of Soraya M, a woman executed by stoning, can be read on an anti-Iranian web site. Caution: do not read this if you have a weak stomach; it is quite graphic.
The Soraya M. site is no longer up. Here's a Wikipedia account.
Sorry, But We Don't Have "Weather" Here
If the sky so much as sniffles, people in Los Angeles drive like there's three feet of snow on the ground, the power goes out, and we lose Internet service. The news and the utilities attribute this to "weather." Sorry, we don't actually have such a thing here, although I do live in the tsunami danger zone.
At my house, Time-Warner, the cable Internet there's no competition for, was out twice in two days. My experience is that they maintain the lines only when they go out due to salt water from the ocean, which they do about once a year. (Hello? It's not like the Pacific ocean, about a mile from my house, is a big secret.)
Meanwhile, my electricity went out three times this week for hours at a time. Maybe our exorbitant monthly payments to the DWP could go to infrastructure? It's like we live in a third world country, the way the lights go out whenever the sky gives the slightest tinkle.
Get Fired Because You're Too Fat To Do Your Job?
Time to sue! The EEOC says obesity qualifies as a disability:
The EEOC has filed suit against Resources for Human Development (RHD), a national non-profit human services organization, claiming it fired a child-care worker because she was obese.The agency claims the firing violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Did employer 'perceive' worker was disabled?
The case involves Lisa Harrison, who worked with young children of mothers undergoing treatment for addiction in an RHD-run facility in suburban New Orleans.
Harrison was fired because RHD perceived Harrison as being substantially limited in a number of major life activities, including walking, because of her weight, the EEOC claims. But the agency says Harrison was able to perform all of the essential functions of her position.
Before the EEOC filed suit, Harrison died. Her private interests will be represented in the lawsuit by her estate.
Walking seems to be kind of an essential part of childcare -- running after the little yelps seems to be another. What happens if a kid falls off the swingset. Do you painstakingly make your way over to the injured kid, breathing heavily and laboriously, and eventually get there? That seems a really good quality in a childcare worker!
All jobs are not open to all people. I cannot be a professional race car driver (I get car sick from my own driving if there are more than three curves in quick succession). Should that profession be forced to let me in? (I'd finish a race several hours after all the rest of the contestants.)
P.S. For those who want to lose weight, and without starving or suffering, read here and here.
via ifeminist
Guess Who's Flying First Class
Air marshals! By bumping paying passengers. From the WSJ:
They almost always fly first class--something some airlines would like to change. With cockpit doors fortified and a history of attackers choosing coach seats, some airline executives and security experts question whether the first-class practice is really necessary--or even a good idea. It could weaken security by isolating marshals or making them easier for terrorists to identify, airline executives say.With more threats in the coach cabin now, first-class clustering may not make as much security sense. Security experts say bombers are a bigger threat today than knife-wielding attackers trying to get through secure cockpit doors, and Transportation Security Administration checkpoints are heavily focused on explosives, whether hidden in shoes, liquids or under clothes. Some believe bombers try to target areas over the wing--a structurally critical location and also the site of fuel storage--to cause the most damage to the aircraft.
...By law, airlines must provide seats to marshals at no cost in any cabin requested. With first-class and business-class seats in particular, the revenue loss to airlines can be substantial because they can't sell last-minute tickets or upgrades, and travelers sometimes get bumped to the back or lose out on upgrade opportunities. When travelers do get bumped, airlines are barred from divulging why the first-class seat was unexpectedly taken away, to keep the presence of a marshal a secret. Bumped travelers--airlines can't disclose how many passengers are affected--typically get coach seats and refunds on the cash or miles they paid for the better seat.
In a recent episode, the Air Transport Association said, a flight from Europe to the U.S. was about to depart with at least six marshals already on board in multiple cabins when a rival carrier canceled a flight. Marshals from that flight came over to demand first-class seats on the flight that was leaving. The airline refused, saying it would cancel the flight rather than empty the first-class cabin. Marshals backed off, airline officials say. Mr. Minerly of the Federal Air Marshal Service said he was unfamiliar with the incident, and that the agency does not comment on specific cases.
My Cousin Stimmy
A few months ago, at a writer dinner I attend regularly, Mickey Kaus' friend and mine, screenwriter and really nice guy Dale Launer, told me about an idea he had to kick-start the economy.
The way he explained it to me, the problem is, people aren't spending. They're so worried, any money they get, they sock away. Because they aren't spending, stores aren't ordering new merchandise, trucks aren't delivering it, and merch producers aren't making it, and well, there's the economy circling the bowl.
Dale's idea to change this stems from his pretty keen understanding of human nature (in my opinion) and I think he's on to something.
First, he lays out why neither party has the solution for getting people spending. The Democrats' solution is The Stimulus Package, to "prime the pump" or "kick start the economy" by building roads, bridges and schools:
This would be a great idea if the economy went south because of fallen bridges, washed-out roads and bad schools. But that's not what happened.What did happen is a failure of consumer confidence which means that when people get spooked, they stop buying.
And now, the Republicans:
They insist cutting business taxes would create jobs. Which makes no sense. The goal of business is to make profit, not to employ people. Ergo, in times of boom or bust, a business employs as few people as possible because it strengthens the bottom line. Are we to assume a business would use money from a tax cut just to hire someone for the hell of it? No. You employ more workers only if it makes you more money. And if makes you more money by employing more workers, you'd do it anyway. Tax cut or no tax cut. After all, the cost of labor is deductible.What about a payroll tax cut? Even if you put more money in the pockets of working men and women - how do you know they'll actually spend it? They're not spending now because, again, this is an issue of behavior.
The solution? Simple. Get people spending. Unfortunately getting them to spend is not simple because people won't spend until they start feeling confident, and they won't feel confident until they start spending.
Dale's idea for getting people shopping again? He calls it "Consumer Direct Stimulus":
There's a number of ways to do it, but the most workable would be a government-issue credit card with a hundred bucks in the account, an expiration date. Give it a validation period of say, one week.Use it or lose it.
Here's what would happen -- it would immediately feed money into the economy exactly where it is needed -- the marketplace.
When we talked, he explained that cards would be given out in a staggered way -- with one group getting them this week, another the next, and so on.
From being in the human nature business, I know a bit about habits and how they form, and they do it through repetition: repeatedly doing something or repeated avoiding doing something. Repeat and repeat behavior, and that behavior becomes your personal culture: that now you're a person who doesn't eat sugar, or a person who doesn't eat meat -- or a person who goes into stores and buys clothes and cosmetics again.
Children Of Gay Parents
Wendy Lee Walsh, Ph.D. writes at MSNBC:
The longest running study on Lesbian and Gay families has found that children in those families are as well-adjusted and healthy as those who are raised in heterosexual families. The study, called The U.S.A. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) is the longest study of it's kind. It has been going on for 24 years and follows children of lesbian families who received donor sperm. Launched by an international team, including lead researcher Nanette Gartrell, M.D., Distinguished Scholar, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law and Associate Clinical Professor, Psychiatrist and Center of Excellence in Women's Health, the researcher says she was motivated to begin the study because it was a first."(I had) the desire to document the first generation of planned Lesbian families and follow the children from conception to adulthood."Results from Gartrell's study and others show that far from abnormal, these children may even have a big advantage. Sociologists at the University of California reviewed data from 21 studies on Gay parenting, and found their kids may even be ahead of the game. Since lesbian and gay parents may show more understanding for social diversity and are less likely to behave in narrow traditional gender roles, the children tend to be more nurturing, less aggressive, more open to diversity themselves.
This got me thinking about what's really normal for kids. After all, in terms of our anthropological roots, we've been an industrialized culture with religious mores for only a short period of time. In some ways we are trapped in the biology of our hunter/gather ancestors and that might be more "normal" for us. So what did families look like back then?
Some provocative answers to that question are in the 2009 book Mothers and Others
by UC Davis professor, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (no spelling error). Often called the preeminent scientist on motherhood, Blaffer Hrdy blasts holes through any notion that humans ever survived well in small nuclear families. Instead she makes a great case for an elaborate system of parents, relatives, and even non-biological same-sex friends. She calls members of this extended family "alloparents" and gives plenty of stone cold facts about how humans evolved, gained intelligence and grew the capacity for empathy through multiple, consistent, caregivers. Makes us rethink the value of nannies and day care workers. In some ways, a large gay and lesbian community might look a lot like this ancient family model.
But before you think that the encouraging results of this study show that our culture is as "all right" as the kids in the study, Dr. Gartrell warns that one dismal fact came out of the study. Lesbian mothers have one huge challenge: discrimination. "The biggest challenge is protecting their children from homophobic stigmatization." Some of the kids are targeted because of their parents' sexual orientation.
Women Of Gaza: The "Progressives" Remain Silent
Women in Gaza are harassed and hurt for not wearing the hijab, writes Phyllis Chesler:
Asmaa writes: "In Gaza, you will come across repressive rules, hurtful comments, stupid words and contemptuous looks, and scorn for the women not wearing hijab. In the small world of Gaza, we need someone to defend the rights of women who don't wear hijab, or the jilbab, or the niqab. It's a system that establishes the idea that women should be treated as bodies."Asmaa goes on to explain that, in Gaza, Christian Arabs are required to wear hijab as well as Muslim Arabs.
Although the head of Al-Azhar University recently snatched the niqab from a girl's face and said that face-covering is not religiously required by Islam--Asmaa decries the fact that the university still demands that female students wear the hijab, headscarf, if they are to graduate. And, they must take their official photo wearing hijab, not bare-headed, even if they are bare-headed in their daily lives.
She writes about how young girls are being forced to wear hijab in secondary schools. When they resist, as her younger sisters did, they were forced into the blazing sun "in an attempt to force them to wear the hijab...the headteacher at the time said to me,
'I want to receive God's reward because of them.'"
And in Australia, a Muslim woman leader and member of Hizb ut-Tahrir also defended the right of Muslim women to both face-cover, body cover, and head-cover. Yesterday, in Sydney, a Muslimfemale speaker addressed a 2000-strong rally which opposes a proposed burqa ban. She said that a ban is 'un-Australian" and that Islamic values are "superior" to "flawed" western, secular values. According to Fautmeh Ardati,
"The western secular way of life, robs a woman of her dignity, honor, and respect, where she is considered little more than a commodity to be bought and sold...I feel empowered by the knowledge that I am in control of displaying my beauty to whom I choose."
Although some Muslim women will defend their "choice" to wear the Islamic veil, it is a "forced" choice, not a "free" choice. Girls and women have been honor murdered in the Islamic world and by Muslim immigrants in the West for refusing to do so; they have also been harassed, insulted, beaten, fired from their jobs, and forced into permanent spinsterhood in Muslim communities, world-wide. They have also been misinformed about Islam and believe, wrongly, that the Qur'an requires them to cover their faces, their bodies, and their heads. However, like men, women are merely told to dress "modestly."
From The "'Bout Damn Time!" Files
From the LA Times, the California Supreme Court is hearing a case that would bar illegal immigrants from receiving in-state tuition at public colleges. Well, better late than never!
The court is reviewing an appeals court ruling that said the state is barred by federal immigration law from giving illegal immigrants in-state tuition, which can be as much as $19,000 a year cheaper than fees charged to out-of-state students.At issue is a 2001 state law that provides the lower tuition for students, including illegal immigrants, who attend and graduate from a California high school.
...The case was brought by a conservative group on behalf of out-of-state students who paid higher tuition at California colleges than illegal immigrants who graduated from California high schools.
And people wonder why the state is going bankrupt? (I guess the illegal immigrants filled up all the math classes.)
Know what you get if you're an illegal immigrant in Mexico? A prison cell.
Where's The Outrage?
Robert Spencer writes at Human Events:
It should be front-page news in every newspaper in the country: Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris has given up her job, her home, and even her identity because of death threats for Islamic supremacists. That Islamic jihadists can force an American citizen into hiding for exercising her freedom of speech is bad enough; that her cause has aroused only indifference from the media and the nation's leading officials is even worse.Norris was a popular cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly. Her life changed forever a few months ago when she announced "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" on Facebook. It was a lark, but with a serious point about violent threats and intimidation: if Islamic supremacists were threatening to murder European cartoonists Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks because of their cartoons of Muhammad, and anyone else who dared to draw him, then if everyone drew him, the thugs couldn't possibly kill us all, could they?
And now Norris herself has become a living illustration of how right her point was in the first place, and yet the political and media elites are not standing with her. "On the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI," the Seattle Weekly explained, "she is, as they put it, 'going ghost': moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program-except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab."
This is in sharp contrast to the Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is receiving protection from the New York City Police Department because of threats he has allegedly received. In even sharper contrast, Gainsville, Florida authorities have announced that they plan to bill the abortive Koran-burner Terry Jones $180,000 for security costs for the Koran-burning event that he ultimately called off after a blizzard of international publicity, all negative - despite the fact that they never bothered to warn Jones beforehand that he would be footing the bill.
Molly Norris's cause should be taken up by all free people - not least the President of the United States. Obama could have explained that human beings control their own reactions to things. If Muslims chose yet again to riot and murder because of Terry Jones or Molly Norris, that would be a choice they would be making out of an unlimited array of other choices. Instead, Western authorities have fallen into the Islamic supremacists' trap and are starting to behave in just the way they want them to: thinking that they must not do certain things, because if they do, there will be violence from Muslims. Yet that violence is in every case solely the responsibility of the perpetrator, not of anyone else.
Your First Amendment Right To Be A Jerk
The tiny hatebag church led by Fred Phelps most odiously pickets dead soldiers' funerals, like that of Marine Matthew Snyder -- and they're rightly protected by the First Amendment (though there's a Supreme Court case questioning this). From the WSJ:
As the family grieved, the protesters waved signs saying "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "God Hates Fags" and "Don't Pray for the USA." Church members believe that American deaths overseas are God's vengeance for our immorality, including the country's tolerance for gays.Matthew's father, Albert Snyder, sued for emotional distress and a jury awarded him $2.9 million of compensatory damages and $8 million in punitive damages. That verdict was overturned by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court will now determine whether such speech can be regulated and whether the law permits tort liability for hurtful speech.
Content-based speech regulations strike at the core of the rights the First Amendment was designed to protect--a bulwark against crackdowns on provocative political statements. In its decision overturning the jury verdict, the Fourth Circuit noted that the topics addressed by the Westboro Baptist Church, including gays in the military, the role of the U.S. overseas and the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic church, qualified as speech about issues of public concern.
Because the protesters stood at a distance of roughly a thousand feet from the funeral, they neither posed a physical threat to the mourners nor disrupted the service. Unlike the rules against malicious falsehoods covered by libel law, no such standard is applicable to a church peddling hateful ideas. In its own brief to the Supreme Court, the Westboro church calls its protests "loose, figurative hyperbolic speech . . . which would not cause a reasonable person to believe actual facts were asserted."
Awkwardly for a church that claims to be morally upright, its constitutional argument is bolstered by the Supreme Court's unanimous 1988 verdict in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, which pitted evangelist Jerry Falwell against the pornographic publisher. The Justices ruled that the evangelist could not receive damages to compensate him for emotional distress created by a parody in the magazine. In its decision, the Justices noted that it is "the central tenet of the First Amendment" that "the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas."
To Snyder's family -- I am truly sorry for your loss and grateful for your son's service, and sorry for what these horrible people put you through.
Freeloaders On Fire
Jon Swaine writes for the Telegraph of a couple who lost their home after firefighters were told not to put out the fire in it because the couple hadn't paid their subscription fee for firefighting service:
Mr Vowell explained that there was no county-wide fire service and it was too expensive for the city's officers to serve surrounding rural areas like the Cranicks' as well.Rural residents can gain access to the service by paying the annual fee. But "if they choose not to," Mr Vowell said, "we can't make them".
Check out the statement of the guy who lost his home. He apparently figured other people would pay the subscription cost, and somebody would feel sorry for him and put out any fires at his house:
Mr Cranick said: "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong." His wife said the couple had offered to pay the fire fighters whatever was necessary for them to extinguish the flames, but the officers refused.
It's kind of like Obamacare. In my early 20s, I signed up for Kaiser Permanente HMO, health care that's affordable for a middle-class writer like me. (Once you're in, you're in, and it goes up only in standard increments, by age.)
At 46, I've paid into the system for a long time, but I'm healthy and need very little care. But, now, I'm expected to pay for all those people who gambled that they'd stay heathy, and who come down with serious diseases at 46. Yes, my health care costs will go up to pay for them after I've been paying for me all these years. That's really not working for me. You? How do you feel about paying the freight of all the freeloaders?
Advice Goddess Free Swim
I got a little waylaid on Monday, so today, you pick the topics. One link per comment, or your comment will be gobbled up by my spam filter, The Very Hunger Spammerpillar.
I'll try to post more blog items on Tuesday.
Think Before You Park
This bike was even further forward, blocking half the ramp, and another one was blocking the other half with its wheel when my friend Tom rolled up to try to go to Starbucks in his motorized wheelchair, followed by his service dog. He ended up pushing through the bikes (the wheels turned and he was able to get through) and I only saw him after he had.
I'm guessing that the people who parked their bikes there didn't think they'd be blocking anybody, but it's something to consider. Tom's a great guy who made his way across Australia in his wheelchair and wrote a book about it (can't remember the title, and I don't know his last name). I'd rather have him around than not.
Heather Mac Donald On Where The Violence Comes From
Mac Donald writes for City Journal:
On the one-year anniversary of the beating death of a Chicago teen by his fellow students, Chicago remains in denial about the driving factor behind such mayhem: the disappearance of the black two-parent family...."The enemy" attacking Chicago's young people is not a nameless force but something quite specific: the disappearance of paternal responsibility. All five of Albert's suspected killers, as well as Albert himself, came from fatherless families. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators and victims in Chicago's four-decades-long juvenile murder spree have come from single-parent homes. In Cook County, 79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children; the black illegitimacy rate in inner-city Chicago is undoubtedly higher still. If anyone associated with the anniversary events--attended mostly by women--or in the press mentioned such family breakdown, much less called for an effort to change it, the record does not reflect it.
At the margins, mentors and social workers can give fatherless boys a better chance of growing up to be law-abiding, stable adults, if those mentoring programs are infused with the kinds of masculine virtues promoted by the Boy Scouts. But as long as the norm in black communities is for boys and men to father children without raising them, the killing will continue. No amount of government or even voluntary social-services program can compensate for the disappearance of the black family. Without a marriage norm, boys have little incentive to develop the habits of self-discipline and deferred gratification that make a male an attractive and capable lifetime husband and father--and that also inoculate him against a life on the streets. When boys grow up in a world where it is perfectly normal for males to conceive children and then disappear from those children's lives, they fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility. Procreation becomes merely a way to become a "player."
Without an acknowledgement of the real source of black crime, the usual excuses come flooding in. Writing on the one-year anniversary of Albert's death, a local activist complained in the blog Chicago Now that federal stimulus money for youth employment in the city was running out. But holding a government-subsidized job is not the precondition for staying away from crime. Nor does the availability of jobs guarantee that boys will become law-abiding adults and responsible fathers. The reality is often the opposite: males are pushed to seek and hold stable employment by the expectation that they will have to support their children as in-home fathers and husbands.
Wisdom from an earlier piece by Mac Donald:
Here is a thought experiment for Petro: if you could provide every black child with a social worker or with a father, whom would you choose? The choice, in my view, is clear. Would there be some terrible fathers (as there are everywhere), in the one case, and some absolutely inspirational social workers, in the other? Of course. But a community that relies on fathers to raise children, rather than Petro's favored "direct social services," is going to be overwhelmingly more likely to produce law-abiding, successful children than one in which it is normal for boys and men to conceive a child and then disappear. No amount of government programs can compensate for the absence of men in their children's lives.
It's time for black leaders to strongly and repeatedly stigmatize single motherhood in the black community as the way to give children the absolute worst shot in life. And that's black leaders from the president on down.
OJ Simpson: The Evidence That Wasn't Presented
Timothy Lynch writes at Cato that OJ didn't get off because Johnny Cochran was *that* brilliant but because Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden were *that* incompetent:
How incompetent? Three examples. First, after the nationally televised slow- speed chase, the police recovered a "To Whom It May Concern" note written by Simpson's own hand after he was charged with the murder, but before he was arrested. Defense attorney Robert Shapiro said he had little doubt that it was a suicide note. But an innocent person would very likely be outraged about being charged with a murder and eager to find the real killer. Prosecutors never presented the note to the jury.Second, after the chase, the police also recovered several key pieces of incriminating evidence, but the prosecutors failed to use them during the trial. Officers found a fake mustache, a fake goatee, and, most damning, a receipt that showed the items were purchased two weeks before the murders-yet the prosecutors never asked jurors to consider why Simpson would need the elements of a disguise just prior to the murder of his wife and Ron Goldman.
Third, detectives tape-recorded an interview with Simpson just a day after the murders. Simpson, asked about a wound on his hand, admitted that he had cut himself the previous night and that instead of immediately applying a bandage, he dripped blood around his estate. When a detective asked him the cause of the cut, Simpson's reply--again, on audiotape--was, "I have no idea, man." Unbelievably, the jury never heard his bizarre admission that he was bleeding all over the place right around the time of his wife's murder. Instead, prosecutors took weeks to present DNA evidence--and then, in response to the defense claim of a police frame-up, offered up a lame, "Yes, racist cops exist in the LAPD, but this case is not a frame-up."
He says these are just a few of the many blunders recounted in the book about the case, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder
A friend who's in law enforcement told me Nicole's head was almost entirely severed.
via Overlawyered
Need More Problems
Yours, that is -- for my next book, on manners for the 20 to 40 audience. What I'm looking for are your "What do you do when...?" questions on a number of topics.
Today's topics? First, Ground Transportation:
Manners on the road, in the parking lot, and on public transportation, and anecdotes about the badly behaved -- like those men on the subway who spread their knees way out, squeezing those on either side...like they're just so HUGE that they can't possibly keep their legs together. Right. Ron Jeremy doesn't sit that way.
Second category I need your questions on, Shopping (in malls, strip malls, street fairs, the grocery store, the farmer's market, and beyond). A sample question:
Is it okay to go to a store to check out a product then buy it cheap online?
And last, I need your questions about Travel, from polite couch surfing to vacations in foreign places.
Of course, if you need love advice, I need those questions, too, and will answer them now. In fact, I need good love/dating/sex/relationship questions now for my column. But, send those to adviceamy at A O L dot com; don't post them here.
Geert Wilders' Speech In Berlin
Here's a long excerpt from the whole thing posted at JihadWatch:
Abul Ala Maududi, the influential 20th century Pakistani Islamic thinker, wrote - I quote, emphasizing that these are not my words but those of a leading Islamic scholar - "Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle ... to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth, which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam."Ali Sina, an Iranian Islamic apostate who lives in Canada, points out that there is one golden rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. In Islam, this rule only applies to fellow believers, but not to Infidels. Ali Sina says "The reason I am against Islam is not because it is a religion, but because it is a political ideology of imperialism and domination in the guise of religion. Because Islam does not follow the Golden Rule, it attracts violent people."
A dispassionate study of the beginnings of Islamic history reveals clearly that Muhammad's objective was first to conquer his own people, the Arabs, and to unify them under his rule, and then to conquer and rule the world. That was the original cause; it was obviously political and was backed by military force. "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah,'" Muhammad said in his final address. He did so in accordance with the Koranic command in sura 8:39: "Fight them until there is no more dissension and the religion is entirely Allah's."
According to the mythology, Muhammad founded Islam in Mecca after the Angel Gabriel visited him for the first time in the year 610. The first twelve years of Islam, when Islam was religious rather than political, were not a success. In 622, Muhammad emigrated to Yathrib, a predominantly Jewish oasis, with his small band of 150 followers. There he established the first mosque in history, took over political power, gave Yathrib the name of Medina, which means the "City of the Prophet," and began his career as a military and a political leader who conquered all of Arabia. Tellingly, the Islamic calendar starts with the hijra, the migration to Medina - the moment when Islam became a political movement.
After Muhammad's death, based upon his words and deeds, Islam developed Sharia, an elaborate legal system which justified the repressive governance of the world by divine right - including rules for jihad and for the absolute control of believers and non-believers. Sharia is the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, among other Islamic states. It is also central to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which in article 24 of its Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, proclaims that "all rights and freedoms are subject to the Islamic Sharia." The OIC is not a religious institution; it is a political body. It constitutes the largest voting block in the United Nations and writes reports on so-called "Islamophobia" in Western Countries which accuse us of human rights violations. To speak in biblical terms: They look for a speck in our eye, but deny the beam in their own.
Under Sharia law people in the conquered territories have no legal rights, not even the right to life and to own property, unless they convert to Islam.
Before I continue, and in order to avoid any misunderstandings, I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions. It aims to impose Islamic law or Sharia upon the whole world. The way to achieve this is through jihad. The good news is that millions of Muslims around the world - including many in Germany and the Netherlands - do not follow the directives of Sharia, let alone engage in jihad. The bad news, however, is that those who do are prepared to use all available means to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.
In 1954, in his essay Communism and Islam, Professor Bernard Lewis spoke of "the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition." Professor Lewis said that "The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, ... has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. ... The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same."
The American political scientist Mark Alexander states that the nature of Islam differs very little - and only in detail rather than style - from despicable and totalitarian political ideologies such as National-Socialism and Communism. He lists the following characteristics for these three ideologies.
* They use political purges to "cleanse" society of what they considere undesirable;
* They tolerate only a single political party. Where Islam allows more parties, it insists that all parties be Islamic ones;
* They coerce the people along the road that it must follow;
* They obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control;
* They turn the educational system into an apparatus for the purpose of universal indoctrination;
* They lay down rules for art, for literature, for science and for religion;
* They subdue people who are given second class status;
* They induce a frame of mind akin to fanaticism. Adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance;
* They are abusive to their opponents and regard any concession on their own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival's part as a sign of weakness;
* They regard politics as an expression of power;
* They are anti-Semitic.
...Politicians from almost all establishment politicians today are facilitating Islamization. They are cheering for every new Islamic school, Islamic bank, Islamic court. They regard Islam as being equal to our own culture. Islam or freedom? It does not really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire establisment elite - universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians - are putting our hard-earned liberties at risk. They talk about equality, but amazingly fail to see how in Islam women have fewer rights than men and infidels have fewer rights than adherents of Islam.
...One of the things we are no longer allowed to say is that our culture is superior to certain other cultures. This is seen as a discriminatory statement - a statement of hatred even. We are indoctrinated on a daily basis, in the schools and through the media, with the message that all cultures are equal and that, if one culture is worse than all the rest, it is our own. We are inundated with feelings of guilt and shame about our own identity and what we stand for. We are exhorted to respect everyone and everything, except ourselves. That is the message of the Left and the politically-correct ruling establishment. They want us to feel so ashamed about our own identity that we refuse to fight for it.
The detrimental obsession of our cultural and political elites with Western guilt reinforces the view which Islam has of us. The Koran says that non-Muslims are kuffar (the plural of kafir), which literally means "rejecters" or "ingrates." Hence, infidels are "guilty." Islam teaches that in our natural state we have all been born as believers. Islam teaches that if we are not believers today this is by our own or by our forefathers' fault. Subsequently, we are always kafir - guilty - because either we or our fathers are apostates. And, hence, according to some, we deserve subjugation.
...In my speech near Ground Zero in New York on September 11, I emphasized that we must stop the "Blame the West, Blame America"-game which Islamic spokesmen are playing with us. And we must stop playing this game ourselves. I have the same message for you. It is an insult to tell us that we are guilty and deserve what is happening to us. We do not deserve becoming strangers in our own land. We should not accept such insults. First of all, Western civilization is the freest and most prosperous on earth, which is why so many immigrants are moving here, instead of Westerners moving there. And secondly, there is no such thing as collective guilt. Free individuals are free moral agents who are responsible for their own deeds only.
Assume All Men Are Pedophiles?
We've got some really nasty assumptions about men in this society. An L.A.-based professor I know posted this on his Facebook page:
One downside of being male:Walking my 5 year old daughter to kindergarten in the morning. Lots of smiles and friendly "good morning!"s from fellow parents and their kids.
Drop her off, then walk back alone, childless, through the steady stream of kids and their parents still en-route to school. But things have changed: no smiles, no eye contact, and no more friendly "good morning."
This is the thinking that makes a man ignore a lost toddler and drive on, lest he be dubbed a pervert for trying to help one. (The child drowned.)
The Republicans Are Not The Party Of Big Government
They're the party of GINORMOUS government, while calling themselves the party of small government. Sullum writes at reason:
In fact, says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, "President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ." Republicans controlled Congress for six of Bush's eight years, and their fingerprints are all over Bush's budget busters, including the trillion-dollar wars to replace dictators with democrats in Iraq and Afghanistan.The Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003, is expected to cost something like $800 billion during its first decade, further darkening Medicare's already dire fiscal outlook. It passed the Senate with 42 Republican votes and the House with 207.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program, which the Republicans now promise to "cancel" because it exemplifies the "bailouts" that have "rightly outraged" the public by "forc[ing] responsible taxpayers to subsidize irresponsible behavior," received 34 Republican votes in the Senate and 91 in the House. The yeas included House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.)--all of whom are pictured in the Pledge to America as models of fiscal rectitude and all of whom also supported the reckless Medicare expansion.
As of last week, however, the Republicans pledge to "make the decisions that are necessary to protect our entitlement programs for today's seniors and future generations." Such as? Sorry, that's all you're getting before the elections.
"Let's not get to the potential solutions," Boehner said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. "When you start down that path, you just invite all kinds of problems." Aren't solutions that invite problems what Congress is all about?
Boehner's insistence that an "adult conversation" about entitlements need not include any discussion of what to do about them suggests a certain lack of seriousness. Likewise the Pledge to America's complaints about Obama's "massive Medicare cuts" and its treatment of anything pertaining to "seniors" (one-third of the budget) as a sacred category.
The Culinary Un-Snob
I love a fine French dinner probably twice as much as the next person, but I left this in the comments on another entry, and I thought I'd do a whole blog item on it -- a paean to fast food:
Fast food is one of the triumphs of modern America. I love it. It's completely amazing that you can be hungry, drive into a lane, talk to a box, pay less than $5, and have pretty delicious food come out a window around the building a minute or two later.
Fork Over Millions First, Think Later
Jeremy Olshan writes for the New York Post that New York City is spending $27 million to change the street signs from all caps to upper and lower case:
Federal copy editors are demanding the city change its 250,900 street signs -- such as these for Perry Avenue in The Bronx -- from the all-caps style used for more than a century to ones that capitalize only the first letters.Changing BROADWAY to Broadway will save lives, the Federal Highway Administration contends in its updated Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, citing improved readability.
At $110 per sign, it will also cost the state $27.6 million, city officials said.
...Studies have shown that it is harder to read all-caps signs, and those extra milliseconds spent staring away from the road have been shown to increase the likelihood of accidents, particularly among older drivers, federal documents say.
..."Safety is this department's top priority," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last year, in support of the new guidelines. "These new and updated standards will help make our nation's roads and bridges safer for drivers, construction workers and pedestrians alike."
This is completely dim, at least in Manhattan. I lived in New York City and biked, rollerskated and ran all over town. Traffic doesn't move fast enough to make that extra sign legibility as valid a change as it may be in other places.
But, hey, nobody think. Just spend those taxpayer dollars as fast as you can!
via Consumerist
How To Tax The Millionaires And Billionaires Away
Stossel writes at reason about "progressives" who want to tax those making more than $200K a year. These nimrods say it's wrong for the rich to be "given" more money:
Sunday's New York Times carries a cartoon showing Uncle Sam handing money to a fat cat. They just don't get it.As I've said before, a tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less. What progressives want to do is take money from some--by force--and spend it on others. It sounds less noble when plainly stated.
That's the moral side of the matter. There's a practical side, too. Taxes discourage wealth creation. That hurts everyone, the lower end of the income scale most of all. An economy that, through freedom, encourages the production of wealth raises the living standards of lower-income people as well as everyone else.
How's that tax 'em blind thing working for various states? Not so well, it seems:
New York billionaire Tom Golisano isn't stupid, either. With $3,000 and one employee, he started a business that processes paychecks for companies. He created 13,000 jobs.Then New York state hiked the income tax on millionaires.
"It was the straw that broke the camel's back," he says. "Not that I like to throw the number around, but my personal income tax last year would've been $13,800 a day. Would you like to write a check for $13,800 a day to a state government, as opposed to moving to another state where there's no state income tax or very low state income tax?
He established residence in Florida, which has no personal income tax.
Whoopsy! The Government's Been Telling You All The Wrong Things To Eat
And they'd like to continue telling you all the wrong things to eat. And if you listen to them (and eat a low-fat, high carbohydrate diet), you're likely to get fat, fat, fat!
But, published in the current edition of the journal NUTRITION, there's a critique of the proposed 2010 USDA dietary guidelines, and the "science" they're apparently based on. Adele H. Hite and the other scientists who authored the report are calling for an independent audit before the new guidelines are finalized. Here's the abstract:
Concerns that were raised with the first dietary recommendations 30 y ago have yet to be adequately addressed. The initial Dietary Goals for Americans (1977) proposed increases in carbohydrate intake and decreases in fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt consumption that are carried further in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) Report. Important aspects of these recommendations remain unproven, yet a dietary shift in this direction has already taken place even as overweight/obesity and diabetes have increased. Although appealing to an evidence-based methodology, the DGAC Report demonstrates several critical weaknesses, including use of an incomplete body of relevant science; inaccurately representing, interpreting, or summarizing the literature; and drawing conclusions and/or making recommendations that do not reflect the limitations or controversies in the science. An objective assessment of evidence in the DGAC Report does not suggest a conclusive proscription against low-carbohydrate diets. The DGAC Report does not provide sufficient evidence to conclude that increases in whole grain and fiber and decreases in dietary saturated fat, salt, and animal protein will lead to positive health outcomes. Lack of supporting evidence limits the value of the proposed recommendations as guidance for consumers or as the basis for public health policy. It is time to reexamine how US dietary guidelines are created and ask whether the current process is still appropriate for our needs.
Christmas Comes But 169 Days A Year
Recently taken photo, at a Target, I believe.
Photo by Gregg Sutter
It's Suddenly Too Easy To Ruin Lives
Just with the press of a button.
I love technology and the freedom and ease it adds to my life, but we got so much technology so fast that we are really playing catch up in how to deal with it. It's the wild, wild West for kids, especially, with few or no rules for where public and private divide, and probably more computing power in the average kid's jeans pocket than they had in NASA when we first put a man on the moon.
Here's an excerpt from "The Mobile Savage," a column I wrote about a guy who had his presence at a private dinner party tweeted by some jerk who was also a guest. Here's an excerpt:
We've come to the point where everyone -- from assassins and terrorists to 8-year-olds -- has in their pocket a level of telecommunications power that, just decades ago, would have taken up an entire wing at MIT. This is simultaneously thrilling and terrible. The average person now has the power to expose injustice, ruin lives, and upload video of you picking your nose in your car that's viewed around the world before you even have a chance to roll and flick.If you're a movie star, spare us the whine that you can't make tens of millions of dollars on a movie and also pick up a quart of milk without having 100 lenses trained on you to see whether you go for skim or 2 percent. But, as an ordinary (or relatively ordinary) citizen at a private dinner party, you do have the expectation of privacy. Sure, assume people might tell a friend or two something you said, but nobody has the right to release your whereabouts and dinner conversation to your friends, enemies, and five utter strangers who now get mobile broadband on their houseboat in Belarus.
The answer isn't throwing away technology but coming up with some guidelines. I have them -- I'm putting them in my next book, a manners book for people 20 to 40. But, for those times when people have no idea what the rules are, then empathy (which I always say is the root of manners) is the best guide.
Unfortunately, on a related note, there's a terrible story out of New Jersey, at Rutgers, where a kid killed himself after his roommate streamed video of him making out with a guy. Lisa Foderaro writes in The New York Times:
It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate's intimate encounter live on the Internet.
And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast -- Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist -- jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.
The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material.
...The Middlesex County prosecutor's office said Mr. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using "the camera to view and transmit a live image" of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.
Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide.
You also have to wonder whether Ravi would've posted the video if Clementi had been making out with a girl. I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
