Just Enough Pleasure
I loved this article I saw on Arts & Letters Daily, about how America has gone Puritan, and how just enough pleasure -- and not too much -- is actually essential for a happy life. At Chronicle for Higher Ed, Richard Klein writes:
The agitation of love preserves the self, keeps it healthy even when--especially when--it is sick. The risk of love, which so often ends in shipwreck, is what keeps a person healthy.But there are other classic paths to health. Socrates believed in dancing every morning. We could do more for public health if the government spent a fraction of what it spends curbing smoking on promoting dancing. An Epicurean approach asks not what temptations need to be avoided in the name of health. Instead it asks, "What is health, and how do you get it?" Imagine a world in which public policy declared that pleasure is the principal means to health.
...Bartolomeo Platina, the great 15th-century scholar, papal librarian, and Epicurean, wrote De honesta voluptate et valetudine ("On Honest Pleasure and Good Health") while imprisoned in the castle San Angelo in Rome, where a vengeful Pope Paul II had thrown him. Platina starts from the classical Epicurean premise that pleasure is not only a positive value but the highest value, and that health is its necessary supplement. A person cannot be sick and still feel good. She cannot be depressed, or physically debauched from alcohol and drugs, say, and still have pleasurable feelings. Following Platina and his master Epicurus, however, the corollary is also true. Not only is health the sine qua non of pleasure (that without which there is none), but pleasure improves your health. Put another way, if you inhibit the body's pleasure, you provoke disease.
Over the gates to his garden (it was not a school), Epicurus inscribed the hedonist creed: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure." With an eye to what was fitting and measured and moderate, Epicurus indulged his senses. After all, he believed that excessive pleasure, like stoic privation, ruins one's health and weakens the will. Thomas Jefferson, himself a hedonist, agreed. In 1819 he wrote to William Short, saying that "the doctrine of Epicurus ... is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects."
In our time, it has become un-American to be Epicurean, to consider pleasure, even moderately indulged, to be the highest good. An old strain of American Puritanism to which Jefferson was immune, if not allergic, has become the new morality. Dressing itself up in the language of public health, this new morality views the least indulgence in adult pleasure as the sign of a nascent habit on the way to becoming a dangerous compulsion. In a sense, of course, that is precisely what distinguishes adult pleasures from childish ones: Adult pleasures can quickly become habitual. But without risk, there is no adult pleasure, and risk is what keeps us alive, not just living on. Perhaps that is why every single person I know has been addicted--habituated to something--at some time in life and has had a problem dealing with it. It is an all but inevitable consequence of the pleasures we seek, particularly in America, where we are publicly spurred on to consume by advertisements and stresses that excite desire. It is not all bad. Nietzsche says that nothing in life is better than our habits, as long as they don't perdure. "I love brief habits," he writes, "and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses."
This passage reminded me of Christopher Hitchens' lust for life and a few of the bad-for-you things in it:
Whenever anyone asked Julia Child to name her guilty pleasures, she responded, "I don't have any guilt." Epicureanism not only absolves us of guilt but says that our guilty pleasures might actually be keeping us healthy--mentally, physically, or both. Like Proust, the doctor's son, we might even consider it perversely healthy to sacrifice our health in order to write the greatest novel of the century. Julia Child was vigorous into her 90s not despite slathering chickens with butter, but because of it. Only you can judge, however, what your body needs and what gives you pleasure. It may be vital to know that cigarettes are bad for your health, but you might at the same time feel, like Sartre, that life without cigarettes is not worth living.
It would be great to have an antidote for too much pleasure -- pleasure to the point of destruction -- which, in a way, seems to be a petulant brat's request for a cure for "the human condition." Part of doing life is coming up with the self-discipline to overcome bad habits, excesses and addictions. The good news is, you unlearn a habit the same way you learned it, by repetition (by repeatedly not doing it, or only doing it in moderation, when you really, really want to do it, or do it to excess).
Is Portland The New Neverland?
Interesting piece by Nancy Rommelmann in the Oregonian on 20-something who are slacking or directionless or unable to find work or work that pays that much in Portland. I think, from my mail, experiences of my young friends, and what I read, that this problem isn't just Portland-based. Nancy writes:
A recent episode of the AMC series "Mad Men" showed its female characters navigating a husband's departure for Vietnam and the land mines awaiting career women in 1964."I realized, watching it, these women were all 26," says Paige Prather, who moved to Portland in August and who is also 26 years old. Unlike her TV sisterhood, Prather, who has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, has not picked a profession. Unmarried, living rent-free in her sister's attic, she is looking for part-time work in customer service, or a full-time position in the arts. Graduate school also looms as a possibility. The crazy-making multiplicity of her situation is not lost on her.
"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," says Prather. "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the DJ-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker."
***
"Is emerging adulthood a rich and varied period for self-discovery ... or is it just another term for self-indulgence?"
These were among the questions posed by Robin Marantz Henig in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" As compared with previous generations, Henig asked psychologists, why are kids taking so long to grow up? Why aren't they choosing careers and sticking with them? It's identity exploration, they said; it's brain development, it's overindulgent parents, it's the recession.
To this list Portland can add the tantalizing insinuation, much heralded in the media, that young people here make their passions their professions, in coffee and beer, music and bikes, progressive politics and as stewards of the land.
It must be a sweet song: A 2010 report out of Portland State University puts the number of 20- to 29-year-olds in Multnomah County at more than 100,000. And if one must take a dreary job, or hold down two, three, eight creative gigs to make ends meet, it can take a little savor out of the perfect Portland pie, as well as have the paradoxical effect of working hard to not get far.
Your thoughts? Your experience (or that of 20-somethings in your area)?
Political Correctness Goes To The Airport
Jeffrey T. Kuhner lays it out at the Wash Times:
The central problem with modern airport security is that it falsely assumes that every person - each of the 7 billion people who inhabit the planet-is an equal terrorist threat. The 80-year-old Irish Catholic nun, the 3-year-old toddler, the 61-year-old bladder cancer survivor whose urine bag was punctured by TSA apparatchiks - all of them, according to Mr. Obama, are potential suicide bombers. They're not. To pretend they are is to engage in leftist multicultural fantasy. It embodies the triumph of ideology over reality - the deranged belief that anyone at any time is a lurking jihadist.Islamic terrorism is not an open-ended, universal characteristic. Rather, it is a specific, narrowly defined phenomenon. It is fueled by Muslim extremists bent on waging a holy war against the West. Its perpetrators tend to be young adults from the Middle East, North Africa, the Arab world and the Muslim ghettos of Europe. Most jihadists fit this profile. What is needed is not more groping, crotch-grabbing or nude screening, but better intelligence-gathering, random checking and targeted profiling.
Washington insists on perpetrating the illusion that a Christian grandmother in Iowa poses the same possible national security threat as a 19-year-old Yemenite exchange student majoring in Islamic studies. Hence, America is squandering precious resources and manpower, as well as abrogating basic civil liberties and humiliating its population, in order to appease the sensitivities of the Muslim lobby.
Moreover, the new TSA procedures mark another major step in Mr. Obama's drive to impose state socialism. If anyone else did what TSA agents do regularly, they rightly would be charged with sexual assault. Mr. Obama has done the unthinkable: He has extended the federal government's reach into our most private, intimate body parts. Big Brother not only watches us in the nude, he can routinely molest us at will.
The administration is not restricting its unprecedented power grab to airports. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently said that trains, boats and subways also may implement the same screening procedures. If the White House has its way, Americans will be getting felt up on the Metro and Amtrak every day - morning, afternoon and night.
Ultimately, these measures are not only degrading and wrongheaded. They are profoundly illiberal, reflecting a deep-seated contempt for individual rights and civil dignity. They also reveal a radical leftist outlook that views Americans not as self-governing citizens, but as subjects of a nanny state.
Fourth Amendment-Wear
Love this. Clothes with metallic ink that reveal the Fourth Amendment when porno-scanned.
We All Fall Down
Or, many of us do, at some point. But, very, very few of us get really enormous welfare payments to help us get back up. Here's GM's little thank you note to us taxpayers for bending over:
Since When Is "Doing Right" By Somebody Glad-handing Them As They Break The Law?
The subhead on the LA Times' Hector Tobar-penned tripe about the illegal immigrant UCLA law student is "His family crossed the border illegally when he was an 8-year-old, but he has done everything right since then. Will his adopted country now do right by him?"
Yes, if it adheres to our immigration laws and deports him -- after making him sign a document pledging to pay back California and US taxpayers for any tuition subsidies they gave him.
Oh, and LA Times, he isn't "undocumented," he's an illegal alien. And the article reads like an opinion piece, not a news story. I can feel sorry for a guy who hasn't had the advantages I have as an America whose relatives immigrated here legally, but that doesn't mean we should look the other way in enforcing the law. As Milton Friedman said, we can't have open borders in a welfare state -- and we shouldn't have open borders, but the government seems uninterested in enforcing immigration laws. (In Mexico, being an illegal immigrant is a felony -- one that will get you thrown in prison.)
Tobar writes about the kid:
While he was still in high school, Perez lobbied state representatives for the passage of California Assembly Bill 540, which granted affordable, in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants.After AB 540 became law in 2001, he enrolled at UCLA and eventually earned a B.A. in political science and then his law degree. He became a student leader and worked construction jobs on the weekends to help pay for his tuition. (He still holds a construction job, in part to pay off $3,000 in law school debt.)
$3K in law school debt? How did he have so little? Is it because the taxpayers picked up the cost of his schooling in grants and loans? At the very least, California taxpayers subsidized his education with in-state reduced rates.
A couple of the LA Times' commenters ask the questions and take the hard look "reporter" Tobar should have:
LAT commenter kurtiffrig at 7:19 AM November 28, 2010 writes:
THINGS A "REAL" INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER WOULD LOOK INTO...What was the source of Luis' six figure tuition?
How did he fill out his school application and loan or scholarship forms without a Social Security number?
What financial institution would give a scholarship, loan, grant to someone who had disclosed he would be legally unable to work in America after graduation?
How many "legal" Americans have been rejected from UCLA when Luis and other illegals were accepted?
Was Luis accepted to UCLA because of their unwritten but very real racial quota system?
LAT commenter He Wei Jin at 1:50 PM November 28, 2010 writes:
Another PC sob story from the LA Times. This young man and others like him came to this country illegally. They have received the benefits of an education at the expense of American and legal immigrant taxpayers to the detriment of their own children. Now they want to be rewarded for graduating high school or college by jumping to the head of the line for citizenship.The Dream Act is a slap in the face to legal law-abiding immigrants. Why not just throw open the borders to all comers, or should amnesty be limited to Hispanics?
What about citizens? They are the ones who bear the expense of educating the children of illegal immigrants, not to mention the other benefits that they receive from the public coffers. All of the costs associated with educating illegal immigrants are funds diverted from the education of American and legal immigrant students. Do the beneficiaries of the Dream Act propose to pay back the taxpayers for the money spent on them?
I could see providing a path to citizenship for those who serve honorably in the armed forces, but what is the benefit to giving citizenship to those whose only achievement is to graduate high school or college. And what do we need with another wanna-be lawyer?
It's God's Fault
Via my man Gregg, Buffalo Bills wide receiver Steve Johnson dropped what would have been the game-winning touchdown against the Pittsburgh Steelers -- but, you have to understand, it really wasn't his doing. He blames...God!
@steviejohnson13 I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...
Beyond the fact that there's no evidence there is a god, I just love the notion all these people have that god is supremely interested in their little lives. I'm going out to the discount Paris drugstore to buy sunblock.
It Doesn't Count Unless Israelis Are Involved
Where are the cries for the sanctity of Muslim lives? The answer is oddly missing when it's Muslims doing the mass-murdering of other Muslims -- in this case, according to the video, it's Hamas gunning down a string of Fatah civilians. Doug Ross blogs:
If you rely upon legacy media for the news, you'd think that Gaza was some kind of killing ground upon which innocent Palestinians are regularly targeted by Israelis. But in Gaza, as in most places around the Middle East, the most prolific murderers of Muslims are other Muslims.The following graphic screen-captures depict a mass execution of civilians in Gaza by members of the murderous gang of thugs known as Hamas.
It's a little hard, when you murder a bunch of your own people, to argue that it's because the Israelis stole your land.
Panic At The Pompidou
My cool trash artist/graphic designer friend Little Shiva came in from Belgium for the weekend to hang with Gregg and me and do a few other things in Paris. We planned to spend Friday afternoon with her.
We had a lunch first, with my former New Yorker/now Paris-dwelling friends M. and E., and E.'s friend Pierre, so we had to figure out a place to meet in the 3rd or 4th arrondissement, because Little Shiva had a meeting around there at 6. I couldn't remember the names of cafés I like in the area thanks to a mad case of décalage horaire (le jet lag) fogging my brain, so I suggested we meet in the museum store at Georges Pompidou at 3 and go somewhere from there.
We got there first, and I could see there was no Little Shiva in the boutique (she told me she'd be wearing a polar bear mask she'd made, so upon seeing no white ears sticking up, it was pretty evident she'd had yet to arrive).
I walked out into the lobby and spotted white ears -- from a mask she'd made out of plastic bags -- and gave her a big hug. Then, she showed me her dress -- a halter dress crocheted out of the bags the Charlotte Observer comes in! I was inspired (she's a trashionista!), and she and I threw down our coats and I started taking pictures of her, as did Gregg. 
The people at the info desk behind us were amused and interested, and Little Shiva went over and gave them all some complimentary postcards. They were fine with our photo-taking...until a group of students came out of the exhibits, and into the lobby, and spotted Little Shiva, and mobbed her. She pulled out her free postcards and started giving them to the kids, and that was when the stern museum officials came over to tell her something along the lines of "There will be no art without permission."
I used my sucky French to our advantage, explaining, as Little Shiva got her stuff together so we could get out, that she is an American artist, living in Belgium, and we were just taking pictures of her same as we would any friend in the museum lobby, blah, blah, blah. We left right away, but it was, all in all, my kind of museum experience.
Really Bad At Math
A bunch of protesters got out in Pasadena to rail against the "wastefulness" of Black Friday, only this is what they said (via the LATimes quoting the Pasadena Star-News' story by Adolfo Flores):
"We're constantly consuming even in the face of a disruption in the economy," said Rene Franco, 18, of Los Angeles. "More people need to be aware of this problem."
Um, the more people spend, the better economy does, genius.
Hurt Feelings And Free Speech
FIRE's Greg Lukianoff makes some great points in this interview by Brendan O'Neill on Spiked.com:
'I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech', says Lukianoff. 'Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience. When you have students graduating from college believing that it is really, really bad if they have their feelings hurt, you are crippling them, you are preventing them from being able to deal with everyday life and debate.'In short, you're creating shrinking violets rather than thinking individuals, a generation of young adults going out into the world with their offensiveness antennae permanently switched on - more likely to say 'You can't say that' than 'Why do you say that? Let's have a debate...'. Lukianoff says we have to move away from the idea that 'words are like bullets', that speech is a form of physical assault, and recognise that being argued with, even vociferously, is not the same as being beaten up. However, he says, 'maybe words should wound. What's so bad about that? The fact that words can hurt feelings, the fact that they carry emotional charges, is all the more reason for protecting them from censorship. Because the whole point of free speech is to have deep, meaningful, robust debates. We have to have deadly serious discussions about deadly serious things - and we can't do that if everyone is listening out for potentially offensive words rather than thinking about and responding to the ideas being expressed.'
FIRE is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization I support, and which I hope you will, too, at very least, by getting the word out. They defend everybody's free speech rights on campus -- Christian, atheist, wiccan, whatever.
Molecular Biologist Jason Bell On Dangers Of The TSA Pornoscanners
Bell writes at myhelicaltryst on how the TSA scanners work and why we shouldn't go along with government claims that they are safe:
Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page).These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction and the UCSF scientists, all esteemed in their fields and members of the National Academy of Sciences have been dismissed based on a couple of reports seemingly hastily put together by mid-level government lab technicians. The documents that I have reviewed thus far either have NO AUTHOR CREDITS or are NOT authored by anyone with either a Ph.D. or a M.D., raising serious concerns of the extent of the expertise of the individuals and organizations evaluating these machines. Yet, the FDA and TSA continue to dismiss some of the most talented scientists in the country...
With respect to errors in the safety reports and/or misleading information about them, the statement that one scan is equivalent to 2-3 minutes of your flight is VERY misleading. Most cosmic radiation is composed of high energy particles that passes right through our body, the plane and even most of the earth itself without being absorbed or even detected. The spectrum that is dangerous is known as ionizing radiation and most of that is absorbed by the hull of the airplane. So relating non-absorbing cosmic radiation to tissue absorbing man-made radiation is simply misleading and wrong.
Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!
via BoingBoing
Wild Things People Buy Through My Amazon Links
Here's one from the other day: UZI Defender Tactical Ink Pen
When Sunday Is Also Monday
Get a jump on Amazon's Cyber Monday deals here.
The View Outside Our Fenêtre
From the window of the apartment we rented in Paris:
And the view from behind in le Jardin du Luxembourg:
Super day yesterday...walk through le Jardin du Luxembourg, lunch with M. and E. and Pierre at Chez Fernand in Montparnasse, and then an afternoon with Little Shiva, who came from Belgium dressed from head to toe in art she made.
both photos by Gregg Sutter
Mother Misses Flight Because Of TSA Idiocy About Her Breast Milk
Somebody commented negatively about my continuing to blog the power to abuse citizens granted to the TSA. This is an absolutely appalling display of it, with the woman imprisoned in a glass box while her flight is about to take off, and then is made to go through pointless measures clearly intended to be nothing more than harassment, and eventually misses her flight.
She requested the TSA's tape -- which came to her with 30 minutes of her ordeal missing: the parts where the TSA supervisor abused her in various ways:
More details here, in text form.
The Failed Socialist Enterprise That Led To Thanksgiving
(But, almost led to starvation and death.)
Socialism, it's pretty simple to see, is based in irrationality and an utter lack of understanding of human nature. Stossel writes of an example in American history for Real Clear Politics:
The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.That's why they nearly all starved.
When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.
After every family was assigned a parcel of land to farm privately, things changed -- dramatically -- for the better. And the first Thanksgiving could be held in November, 1623. Stossel continues:
What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. The problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free-rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty.
What private property does -- as the Pilgrims discovered -- is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
It Seems We Should Be Groping People Prior To Immigration
Who seems more likely to you to blow up a crowd of people standing at a Christmas display, the autistic little boy who got groped at the airport or the guy born in Somalia, a hotbed of "the religion of peace"? Bryan Denson writes for the Oregonian:
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, was arrested at 5:42 p.m., 18 minutes before the tree lighting was to occur, on an accusation of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $250,000 fine....According to the FBI affidavit, the case began in August 2009 when Mohamud was in e-mail contact with an unindicted associate overseas who was believed to be involved in terrorist activities. In December 2009, while the unindicted associate was in a frontier province of Pakistan, Mohamud and the associate discussed the possibility of Mohamud traveling to Pakistan to participate in violent jihad.
The associate allegedly referred Mohamud to a second associate overseas and provided him with a name and e-mail address. In the months that followed, Mohamud made several unsuccessful attempts to contact the second associate.
Ultimately, an FBI undercover operative contacted Mohamud in a June 2010 e-mail under the guise of being an associate of the first unindicted associate.
Good job, FBI! (Look for terrorists, not tweezers!)
I'm rewriting the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled jihadists yearning to blow the infidel to smithereens...
The Day After Black Friday Deals
And then some. It seems the deals at Amazon go on for a week. Here's a link: Deals, deals, deals
Everything In The Whole World Is Bad For You
I can barely operate household tools beyond a hammer, and have always had to turn to boyfriends to put up pictures or curtains, but now even boyfriends may look at a drill or a saw and go "huh?" Via Overlawyered, schools are canceling shop classes to avoid liability risk. Actor John Ratzenberger writes for the Washington Times:
Here's how this plays out: A teenager gets hurt in high school shop class. His parents sue the school. The school district cannot afford the costs of liability risk, so they cancel vocational training. Thousands of kids in one school district go without the opportunity for hands-on skills training.This same teenager graduates high school and faces a media culture that tells him that he must go to college or be a failure. Taking a minimum-wage service job, he reads about high unemployment in the daily newspaper. Despite available technical training and vocational schools, he doesn't think that jobs really exist on the other side. The celebrity culture further stigmatizes his views on skilled work. Only low-class people work with their hands, or so goes the implied message.
Meanwhile, employers are starving for skilled workers in all sectors, from health care to infrastructure construction and repair to high-tech manufacturing. These employers, however, face an ever-increasing mountain of regulations that sap resources from recruiting and hiring into bureaucratic compliance that often has little to do with public health, safety and welfare. Skyrocketing liability insurance premiums and litigation costs drain further dollars away from training - not to mention research-and-development innovations that would create millions of new jobs. That would be too costly, too risky.
More from Ratzenberger here, in an interview with The Mouse Club:
The city of Oakland, when they cancelled their shop classes the dropout rating went up 30%. Any time you get rid of those industrial arts courses and home ec, the dropout rating goes right up. In the African American communities the dropout rate is even higher, it's 50%. A lot of kids could have this great life if somebody would teach them a skill and nobody's doing it. Everyone's got this idea that everybody's got to go to college. I think we have enough sociologists and attorneys. What we really need are plumbers. If you're a brain surgeon, that's great, but if there's not hot water coming out of the faucet before you do the surgery to wash your hands, you're not doing the surgery. So the degree of brain surgeon is useless if you couldn't find a plumber.
Ratzenberger's foundation: the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs Foundation.
I Don't Think This Will Take Much Of A Movement
Eric Felten writes in the WSJ where the TSA rules are heading the airline industry:
I'm gratified that enough Americans are still jealous guardians of their rights to have made this an uncomfortable week for the TSA. And I admire the impulse behind making Wednesday--one of the heaviest travel days of the year--"Opt-Out Day." The idea is for everyone to gum up the works by refusing the X-ray. If the TSA has to give its lengthy semimolestations to everyone, the thinking goes, they won't be able to do it to anyone. Alas, security gridlock isn't likely to discomfit the TSA much. It is Thanksgiving travelers who will bear the brunt of the nightmare--hardly the best way to build popular support for a protest movement.Instead, perhaps we should make 2011 "Opt-Out of Flying" year. Since buying a ticket means giving up "a lot of rights," the best way to protect those rights is not to fly unless you absolutely have to. It will help if you let the airlines know why they haven't had the pleasure of your company.
The old saw is that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. Tom Wolfe riffed that "a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested." We might add one more variation: A libertarian is anyone whose wife and children have had their groins groped by the TSA.
All together now: "If you touch my junk, I'm gonna have you arrested."
Roger Cohen explains the issue well in the NYT:
Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's notorious secret police chief, once said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime." The T.S.A. seems to operate on the basis of an adapted maxim: "Show me the security check and I'll find you the excuse."Anyone who has watched T.S.A. agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok?
I don't doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A. represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.
America is a nation of openness, boldness and risk-taking. Close this nation, cow it, constrict it and you unravel its magic.
...Chertoff has recently been busy rubbishing Martin Broughton, the wise British Airways chairman who said many security checks were redundant -- calling him "ill-informed." Early this year Chertoff called on Congress to "fund a large-scale deployment of next-generation systems."
Rapiscan and its adviser the Chertoff Group will certainly profit from the deployment underway (some of the machines were bought with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Americans as a whole will not.
Believing In Being Dad, Not In God
A dad gets his custody cut substantially because he doesn't believe in god:
He says he has "never imposed (his) belief system on the kids." Well, there's a pity. Every kid should learn to think rationally and not just suck down beliefs just because they're told to.
Unless there's evidence that some parent believes in physically or otherwise abusing their children, no judge has any business taking them away or dialing back custody.
It's really pretty amazing that evidence of rational thought is the devil here.
Why Claire Berlinski Is Like GM
(Or how she learned to stop worrying and love her debt.) In City Journal, Berlinski, who lives in Turkey, writes:
I used to wake up in the middle of the night, here in Istanbul, wondering how I'd pay my bills. As I've noted in City Journal, the demand for foreign news is shrinking. The wire services provide coverage from Turkey at low operating costs. To be honest, I also spend a lot of money on things I can't afford, like my cleaning lady. She's been working for me for five years and has three kids, so I can't fire her. If I go down, she'll go down, and so will my landlord, the guy who sells cleaning supplies to my cleaning lady, and the Iranian refugee who does my odd jobs. The ripple effect on the local economy, in other words, would be calamitous.Then I saw the great news about GM's success and I stopped worrying. Because GM and I are in the same position, and things seem to be working out splendidly for them.
You see, about a month ago, I asked my mother to bail me out. I knew she'd do it. She's done it before. She sent me money she's been saving toward my retirement. I resolved to stop spending money on stupid things. (There was really no excuse for that lamp, Mom, I know. Sorry! In my defense, I was sure there was a genie in it.)
With my mom paying my rent, I've been able to charge less for what I write and stay in the black. Voilà, I'm selling a cheaper product (for now) than Reuters and AP. That will teach them where to stuff their "good investment decisions" and their "economies of scale." I fired the guy who does my odd jobs--it was painful, but it had to be done. So, congratulations to me! I'm making it in this tough business climate, with a little help from Mom. America's back! And if I'm broke again in a year, I'll hit her up again. (Don't forget, Mom, that you really have no choice: no matter what you do, I'm still going to be a huge financial drag on you. If I fail, I'll end up coming home with all my cats. You don't want me sleeping on your couch, do you? And you sure don't want to see what my cats would do to that couch. Antique, I believe it is?)
All of this is, alas, a perfectly accurate description of my financial life. The reader may wonder about my mom's wisdom in going along with this plan. That's between me and her--she loves me, and it's her money, not yours. The money that went to GM was yours, however. And I suppose you must love GM as if it's your profligate kid, because surely you could not be so credulous as to believe these reports about the spectacular success of the bailout.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
Gregg and I just got to Paris, and I have jet lag and he has to work out our Internet connection, so you pick the topics today. One link per comment, or you will be eaten by my spam filter.
TSA Speedo Protester
Let's have more of this! With the sign on the back! (I hope at least a few people applauded when he got to the other side.)
I Love This Girl
A flasherman really exposed himself this time -- to punishment by law enforcement. Bold girl in Manhattan (loudly) refuses to be penis flasher's victim:
Story at CBS New York:
"They have a saying; every monkey knows what tree to climb on...you know?" one woman said.But apparently one sick man chose the wrong tree on this train. A rider posted a YouTube video of an unidentified woman accusing the man in black of flashing her on a "4" train in midtown.
"I'm like why is this person pressing up against me? Then I realize you have all this (expletive) space here. Then I see his penis out! That's it!"
And her furor didn't end there.
"Oh you're getting (expletive) arrested! I'm not leaving your side! My plans are done for tonight. I'm escorting you to the police station, okay?" the woman says.
Emily May posted the YouTube video on her website, ihollaback.org, an organization against street harassment. May said women are calling the fiery female an inspiration.
"She is my hero," May said. "So many women have walked away from situations like that feeling like their voice didn't matter, and she spoke up. And her voice is a voice for an entire city of women, many of which have seen things like this in their own lives."...Speaking out really made a difference in this case. Police were able to quickly arrest 51-year-old Mario Valdivia of Queens. He's been charged with forcible touching, public lewdness and sex abuse.
The Religious Excuse For Barbarity
Good piece by Johann Hari in the Independent about how animal cruelty supposedly isn't animal cruelty if it's done in the name of religion (that of Muslims and kosher-keeping Jews):
In Britain, it is a crime to kill a conscious cow or sheep or chicken for meat by slashing its throat without numbing it first. The reasons are obvious. If you don't numb an animal, it screams as you hack through its skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and major nerve trunks, and then it remains conscious as it slowly drowns in its own blood - a process that can take up to six minutes. So we insist that an animal is stunned before its throat is slashed, to ensure it is deeply unconscious. There isn't much humanity in our factory farming system, but this is - at least - a tiny sliver of it, at the end.But there is a loophole in the law. You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it "halal", and if you are Jewish you call it "kosher". Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".
Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal."
This has been proven by science to be false. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) is the Government's senior panel of independent scientific experts on this area, and their investigation found that "the prevailing scientific consensus that slaughter without pre-stunning causes very significant pain and distress". The FAWC chairwoman, Dr Judy MacArthur Clark, explains: "To say [the animal] doesn't suffer is quite ridiculous."
To give just one example: after you cut a calf's throat, in 62 per cent of cases, large clots form at the back of its carotid arteries, which means blood pressure to the brain massively slows and the animal doesn't black out at all. It stays conscious as it bleeds to death from its throat in agony.
Gore Admits To Being A Sleaze
He feels free to confess because that was then and this was now. From FoxNews.com, Gore is now reversing his view on Ethanol and blaming politics for his previous support:
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore reportedly has had a change of heart on ethanol, telling a conference on green energy in Europe that he only supported tax breaks for the alternative fuel to pander to farmers in his home state of Tennessee and the first-in-the-nation caucuses state of Iowa.Speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank, Gore said the lobbyists have wrongly kept alive the program he once touted.
Like you, they'll do anything to keep their job.
More from the piece:
The Media Research Center's Noel Sheppard noted that as vice president, Gore was the tie-breaking vote in 1994 when the Senate voted to authorize ethanol production. Sheppard said that those who question Gore's motives behind the climate change movement that landed the former vice president a Nobel prize and Oscar should also look to his comments on ethanol."So more than 10 years ago, Gore supported an expensive, 'not good policy' because he thought it would help him get elected president. Yet media don't believe he'd misrepresent the threat of manmade global warming in order to become extremely rich," Sheppard wrote Monday.
Parenting As A Form Of Paranoia
Katie Roiphe writes on Slate about the desperation to raise the perfect child:
Homework offers parents another fertile opportunity to be involved, i.e. immersed. I can recall my own mother vaguely calling upstairs "Have you done your homework?" but I cannot recall her rolling up her sleeves to work side by side with me cutting out pictures of rice paddies for a project about Vietnam, or monitoring how many pages of Wuthering Heights I had read. One mother told me about how her 7-year-old, at one of New York's top private schools, received an essay assignment asking how his "life experience" reflected Robert Frost's line in "The Road Not Taken": "I took the one less traveled by." And, of course, that would be a question calling out for the parent writing it herself, since the 7-year-old's "life experience" had not yet thrown up all that many roads....A quick perusal of a random calendar for a random Saturday for a random member of this generation's finest parents will reveal shuttling to gymnastics class and birthday parties and soccer, and Feeling Art and Expressing Yourself Through Theater--entire days vanishing into the scheduled and rigorous happiness of the child, entire days passing without the promise or hope or expectation of even one uninterrupted adult conversation. (Those who fall a little short can only aspire to this condition of energetic and industrious parenting.)
One sometimes sees these exhausted, devoted, slightly drab parents, piling out of the car, and thinks, is all of this high-level watching and steering and analysing really making anyone happier? One wonders if family life is somehow overweighted in the children's direction--which is not to say that we should love them less, but that the concept of adulthood has somehow transmogrified into parenthood. What one wonders, more specifically, is whether this intense, admirable focus is good for the child? Is there something reassuring in parental selfishness, in the idea that your parents have busy, mysterious lives of their own, in which they sometimes do things that are not entirely dedicated to your entertainment or improvement?
I also can't help but wonder if all of the effort poured into creating the perfect child, like the haute bourgeois attention to stylish food, is a way of deflecting and rechannelling adult disappointment. Are these parents, so virtuously exhausted, so child-drained at the end of one of these busy days, compensating for something they have given up? Something missing in their marriage? Some romantic disappointment? Some compromise of career or adventure? One can't help but wonder, in other words, what Tolstoy or Flaubert would make of our current parenting style.
The effort to control is prolonged, too, later and later into the child's life. Colleges in the US have begun to give parents explicit instructions about when it is time to leave after dropping students off at school, because otherwise they won't. Even at college, even with 17- and 18-year-olds, these parents are lingering, involved, invested, tinkering; they want to stay, in other words, and control more.
In the end, she recommends an approach that makes more sense in terms how children are largely socialized (per Judith Rich Harris, by each other, and more specifically than Roiphe gets, per Peter Gray, in age-mixed play with each other)
All I am suggesting is that it might be time to stand back, pour a drink, and let the children torment, or bore or injure each other a little. It might be time to dabble in the laissez faire; to let the imagination run to art instead of art projects; to let the imperfect universe and its imperfect children be themselves.
I do think Harris overstates the influence of socialization by other children and understates the influence of parents. Economist Arnold Kling gets into some of the problems here. But, I do agree with Harris to a degree, and Peter Gray has made a persuasive case for children engaging in age-mixed play as a way to be socialized together. (The example he gave when I heard him talk: A 9-year-old learns to be gentle and patient in playing catch with a 4-year-old, and is able to catch the 4-year-old's wild throws.)
Avoiding The Backscatter And The Sexual Assault On Your Way Back Into The Country
Matt Kernan explains (and thank you, Matt -- we need everyone to resist in whatever ways they can). This detail was essential -- it's my understanding that US officials cannot legally keep a citizen out of this country (Paul Karl Lukacs blogs about that here). Kernan sort of alludes to that as well:
As a U.S. citizen, I have the right to move freely within my country as long as I can demonstrate proof of citizenship and have demonstrated no reasonable cause to be detained."...This past Sunday, I was returning from a business trip to Europe. I flew from Paris to Cincinnati, landing in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
As I got off my flight, I did all of the things that are normally requested from U.S. citizens returning from abroad. I filled out the customs declarations, confirmed that I hadn't set foot on any farmland, and answered questions about the chocolates that I had purchased in Switzerland. While I don't believe that these questions are necessary, I don't mind answering them if it means some added security. They aren't particularly intrusive. My passport was stamped, and I moved through customs a happy citizen returning home.
But wait - here was a second line to wait in.
This new line led to a TSA security checkpoint. You see, it is official TSA policy that people (both citizens and non-citizens alike) from international flights are screened as they enter the airport, despite the fact that they have already flown. Even before the new controversial security measures were put in place, I found this practice annoying. But now, as I looked past the 25 people waiting to get into their own country, I saw it: the dreaded Backscatter imaging machine.
Now, I've read a fair amount about the controversy surrounding the new TSA policies. I certainly don't enjoy being treated like a terrorist in my own country, but I'm also not a die-hard constitutional rights advocate. However, for some reason, I was irked. Maybe it was the video of the 3-year old getting molested, maybe it was the sexual assault victim having to cry her way through getting groped, maybe it was the father watching teenage TSA officers joke about his attractive daughter. Whatever it was, this issue didn't sit right with me. We shouldn't be required to do this simply to get into our own country.
So, since I had nobody waiting for me at home and no connecting flight to catch, I had some free time. I decided to test my rights.
After putting all my stuff through the x-ray, I was asked to go through the Backscatter. I politely said that I didn't want to. The technician quipped to his colleague, "We've got an opt-out." They laughed. He turned back and started to explain.
After he finished, I said, "I understand what the pat-down entails, but I wanted to let you know that I do not give you permission to touch my genitals or the surrounding area. If you do, I will consider it assault."
The rest of the story at the link. Matt, thank you. And everybody else, let's have more of this.
Matt Welch in reason on "Editorial Boards to the Little People Complaining About the TSA: Bend Over and Take it Like a Man!"
More evidence for Radley Balko's thesis that the media is more statist than liberal (and for my contention that the unsigned newspaper editorial should go the way of the dodo bird).
In total agreement with him there. The one from my hometown disappointment, The LA Times:
Shut up and be scanned
Vile. Flying is no longer a luxury. We've grown accustomed to it and made it part of our lives. People live far across the country from their families, and commute for work. Gregg flies to Detroit every few weeks for his job. I just love the people who suggest that his choice is be subjected to radiation we don't know is safe, be sexually assaulted, or find some other means of getting there. And what would that other means be, hitchhike from California? Take the bus?
Detroit: Life Doesn't Get Much Cheaper
Tragic and moving story by Charlie LeDuff.
Free Speech In Israel
You'll find it in the Israeli part, not the Palestinian one -- as is typical of anyplace under Muslim rule. Bret Stephens writes in the WSJ of a Palestinian blogger:
Consider the predicament faced by a Palestinian named Walid Husayin from the West Bank city of Qalqilya. Mr. Husayin, 26, is suspected of being the blogger known as Waleed al-Husseini and author of an essay, posted on the Proud Atheist Web site (proud-a.blogspot.com), titled "Why I Left Islam."The pseudonymous Husseini makes no bones about his opposition to religions generally, which he says "compete with each other in terms of stupidity." But nothing seems to exercise his indignation more than the religion he used to call his own. Islam, he writes, is "an authoritarian religion that does not respect the individual's freedom of choice, which is easily noticeable from its barbaric verdicts such as stoning the adulterous, pushing homosexuals off a cliff and killing the apostates for daring to express a different viewpoint."
And that's just Husseini getting started. The essay proceeds by way of a series of questions, such as "Is Islam a religion of tolerance?" Answer: "The sacred texts of Islam also encourage blatant war and conquest of new territories." What about equality? "Islam has legitimized slavery, reinforced the gap between social classes and allowed stealing from the infidels." Women's rights? "I have a mother, a sister and a lover and I cannot stand for them to be humiliated and stigmatized in this bone-chilling way." The prophet? "A sex maniac" who "was no different than barbaric thugs who slaughtered, robbed and raped women." And so on.
This being the Arab world, it should come as no surprise that Mr. Husayin has spent the past 24 days in detention, that he has been forbidden from receiving visitors or speaking to a lawyer, that he faces a potential life sentence, and that people in Qalqilya have called for him to be burned alive.
Lovely. And no, for someone like me who has read a good deal of the Quran, the Hadith, and other texts about Islam, that last bit doesn't come as any surprise.
I Prefer Mousse
Gregg's friend Ivan Suvanjieff e-mailed him this photo of an elk that wandered into his Colorado backyard:
subject: Hunting is a sport?for what, total pussies? Here in Idledale they just jump into my bbq.
Funeral For A Swing Set
Some kid broke his arm, apparently from jumping off a swing set, and his parents brought a lawsuit, and now Cabell County, Virginia's swing sets are no more. Kerala Taylor posts at the website of playground building organization Kaboom:
Cabell County's swings never meant to harm anyone. It is true that children sometimes liked to jump off them, thinking they were Superman, and that one such child broke his arm, perhaps due in part to inadequate safety surfacing. Yet we cannot help but lament the tragic decision made by this youngster's parents to file a lawsuit, thus depriving all Cabell County youngsters of the chance to develop crucial skills, not to mention the chance to touch the sky with their toes.
If you don't want to have a kid who risks breaking his arm playing, adopt a child who's 35.
via Free Range Kids
The Attention Span Myth
Interesting piece by Virginia Heffernan on the attention span in The New York Times:
Maybe my own brain is faltering in a Web wasteland, but I don't get it. Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn't there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult "span" in the brain makes certain cultural objects more compelling than others? So a kid loves the drums but can hardly get through a chapter of "The Sun Also Rises"; and another aces algebra tests but can't even understand how Call of Duty is played. The actions of these children may dismay or please adults, but anyone who has ever been bored by one practice and absorbed by another can explain the kids' choices more persuasively than does the dominant model, which ignores the content of activities in favor of a wonky span thought vaguely to be in the brain.So how did we find ourselves with this unhappy attention-span conceit, and with the companion idea that a big attention span is humankind's best moral and aesthetic asset? In other eras, distractibility wasn't considered shameful. It was regularly praised, in fact -- as autonomy, exuberance and versatility. To be brooding, morbid, obsessive or easily mesmerized was thought much worse than being distractible. In "Moby-Dick," Starbuck tries to distract Ahab from his monomania with evocations of family life in Nantucket. Under the spell of "a cruel, remorseless emperor" -- his own single-mindedness -- Ahab stays his fatal course. Ahab's doom comes from his undistractibility.
...And speaking of sitting silently without fidgeting: that's essentially what we want of children with bum attention spans, isn't it? The first sign that a distractible child is doing "better" -- with age or Adderall, say -- is that he sits still. This is why the A.D.H.D. diagnosis, which popularized the idea of an "attention span" that can be pathologically short, grew out of the old "hyperactive" diagnosis. The hyperactive child squirmed at church and at the dinner table, embarrassing his mother.
At some point, we stopped calling Tom Sawyer-style distractibility either animal spirits or a discipline problem. We started to call it sick, even after an early twin study showed that a relatively short attention span is virtually synonymous with standard-issue irritability and distemper. But the fact that the attention-span theory makes news of what was once considered ordinary or artistic behavior is not what's wrong with it. These cultural transitions -- disruptive as they are -- happen all the time as society's demands on individuals change.
As I've said many times, I don't consider ADHD a disorder (I just have to go along with that to get Ritalin, which helps me focus better when I write). It has upsides (like quick connections my brain makes, and the fact that I'm a canary in the coal mine for whether a talk or piece writing is boring) and it has downsides: If I don't pay my bills right away, I might find them under my couch months after they were due. But, all in all, my brain is my favorite amusement ever.
The Polite Black Friday Shopper
I've described Black Friday shopping in the past as "In the name of peace, love, and goodwill among men, bludgeon your neighbor to get the last Nintendo."
It doesn't have to be that way. Politely save from your armchair with Amazon's Black Friday Deals
Thanks to all who support my writing by shopping through my Amazon links here and in Amy's Mall.
Stupidity-In-Chief
From MSNBC, the President on the TSA searches:
"I understand people's frustrations, and what I've said to the TSA is that you have to constantly refine and measure whether what we're doing is the only way to assure the American people's safety. And you also have to think through are there other ways of doing it that are less intrusive," Obama said."But at this point, TSA in consultation with counterterrorism experts have indicated to me that the procedures that they have been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing."
But, the horrible thing is, numerous security experts acknowledge that they are not! That the pantybomber would've been able to get through the search obscenity currently in practice at airports across America.
(If you aren't savvy enough to get what every minor catblogger across America is able to grasp, why are you President?)
Bennnn Dover!
@Walter Olson retweets a great line from @RicAnderson
"I'm just looking for a girl who is a lady in public and a TSA screener in the bedroom."
A Bare Of A Problem
I got this letter the other day and answered it just after posting this, but I'd love to have some thoughts from guys out there and anybody who'd like to weigh in:
I just discovered your column and I find your responses to people direct and helpful. I think you are just the person to give me some much needed honest advice.I'm a 32 year old woman with hairloss. I have done a lot of work to get medical attention (second opinions, third opinions, fourth opinions, flying out of state for opinions, etc.) and have also done my own research. The bottom line is that after years of searching, there is no cure for me.
I can't even begin to describe how emotionally difficult this has been for me. I never realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in my hair. However, coming to the realization that there is no cure for me has finally freed me from the constant panic state about my hair as I'm certain now that I've done all I can do to fix this problem.
The good news is that this is not an indication of a more serious health issue. I still have some hair, but if I don't wear some kind of covering such as a scarf, hat or partial wig it is apparent that I have a problem. In some ways I feel like I am being misleading by wearing supplemental hair.
I thought for a while about just totally shaving my head and going openly bald, but it is extremely rare to see a bald woman. As much as I don't like feeling fake, I just don't have it in me to deal with the stares and weird interactions that go along with being in public and looking very different from the norm.
I hadn't even thought about dating since my hairloss. But I'm now getting back to a good emotional state and remembering how much I used to like flirting with and dating men and would like to do some of that again.
I'd like to know your thoughts on women who wear wigs or partial wigs in general. I know that often times men who wear hair pieces are made fun of, but it is so much more common for men to be bald, it just doesn't seem the same for a woman.
I'd also like your advice on how/when to tell a man I'm interested in that most of the hair they see on my head didn't grow there. Right now I'm having a hard time imagining how to pull that off gracefully.
I assume that this will limit the men who are interested in me and I'd rather find out sooner rather than later if a man is not going to be able to get past it. But I also want to make the most of what I have to offer (I've been told I'm fairly hot other than the hair thing) and not prematurely freak a guy out.
Thanks for your help and thanks for your column,
Ready to get out again
UPDATE: The letter writer writes back -- see the comments below, "Posted by Bare" -- and my initial response to her (prior to posting this blog item) is just below hers.
P.S. You guys (my regular commenters) were great. I expected no less.
Final Straw: Time To Drop Out Of The U.N.
There have been so, so many straws, but reason's Tim Cavanaugh asked the right question -- why is being a member of the United Nations supposed to be the liberal position?
Tim Facebooked the link to a story by Sterling Wong at 365gay.com of how the U.N. gave in to pressure to drop language explicitly calling for protection for gays and lesbians in an anti-execution measure:
Every two years, the panel passes a resolution condemning extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. In 2008, the resolution included a reference to killings due to sexual orientation. In fact, it has included such a reference for the past 10 years.This year, however, Morocco and Mali introduced an amendment on behalf of Muslim and African countries which replaced the term "sexual orientation" with "discriminatory reasons on any basis." The resolution does specify that it condemns targeted attacks on racial, national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and other groups.
Many Western delegations, including the U.S., expressed their disappointment at the amendment and also voted against it. A British statement to the panel said: "The subject of this amendment - the need for prompt and thorough investigations of all killing, including those committed for ... sexual orientation - exists in this resolution simply because it is a continuing cause for concern."
...Countries which voted to remove sexual orientation from the condemnation resolution included Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and Uganda, where homosexuality is criminalized and even a capital offense in some cases.
The resolution is now expected to be formally adopted in December.
After which Iran will probably celebrate its passage by hanging even more gay teenage boys.
Pat Condell on bedbugs (and worse) at the U.N.:
And here's a step in the right declaration -- the St. Petersburg Declaration from the Institution for the Secularization of Islamic Society (not likely to happen, but it is a lovely, human rights-flavored dream by a bunch of infidels marked for death as Islamic apostates). An excerpt:
We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called "Islamaphobia" in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.We call on the governments of the world to
•reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights;•eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women;
•protect sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence;
•reform sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims;
•and foster an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation.
Endorsed by:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Magdi Allam
Mithal Al-Alusi
Shaker Al-Nabulsi
Nonie Darwish
Afshin Ellian
Tawfik Hamid
Shahriar Kabir
Hasan Mahmud
Wafa Sultan
Amir Taheri
Ibn Warraq
Manda Zand Ervin
Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi
Quiz: Which of these endorsers are not in hiding, and living in fear for their lives for leaving and speaking out against Islam?
Grabbing People's Testicles For A Living
While the TSA has just become the perfect career choice for perverts and pedophiles, it sounds like many TSA workers are upset at their new job description. Steven Frischling interviewed some of them for BoardingArea.com, and here's what they said:
"It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man's private parts, their butt, their inner thigh. Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!""Do you think I want to go to work and place my hands between women's legs and touch their breasts for a few hours? For starters, I am attracted to men, not women and if I was attracted to women, it would not be the large number of passengers I handle daily that have a problem understanding what personal hygiene is."
"Yesterday a passenger told me to keep my hands off his penis or he'd scream. Is this how a 40 year old man in business attire acts? He'll scream? My 3 year old can get away with saying he'll scream, but a 40 something business man? I am a professional doing my job, whether I agree with this current policy or not, I am doing my job. I do not want to be here all day touching penises."
"Being a TSO means often being verbally abused, you let the comments roll off and check the next person, however when a woman refuses the scanner then comes to me and tells me that she feels like I am molesting her, that is beyond verbal abuse. I asked the woman if she thought I like touching other women all day and she told me that I probably did or I wouldn't be with the TSA. I just want to tell these people that I feel disgusted feeling other peoples private parts, but I cannot because I am a professional."
"I was asked by some guy if I got excited touching scrotums at the airport and if it gave me a power thrill. I felt like vomiting when he asked that. This is not a turn on for me to touch me it is in fact a huge turn off. There is a big difference between how I pat passengers down and a molester molesting people."
One TSA worker described his work day:
"Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me, said in my presence as I patted passengers down. These comments are painful and demoralizing, one day is bad enough, but I have to come back tomorrow, the next day and the day after that to keep hearing these comments. If something doesn't change in the next two weeks I don't know how much longer I can withstand this taunting. I go home and I cry. I am serving my country, I should not have to go home and cry after a day of honorably serving my country."
Sorry, but you're still sexually assaulting me even if the government says it's your job. And it is disgusting and creepy, and worst of all, it's not making us safer, just better-trained at obeying the government.
A Letter On Opting Out Of The TSA's Peep Show Machine
Cancer and other risks...that sort of thing. PDF of the letter here. (I'm keeping it in my travel bag.)
Unfortunately, I have no letter about the psychological dangers of government-ordered sexual assault -- or that of our being turned into government-obeying sheep, as a condition of getting the distances we need to go by a reasonable method of travel.
A Little Something To Read
The other night, I organized a dinner for a bunch of evolutionary psychologists in and around LA -- from Santa Barbara to Fullerton to Redlands -- and I mentioned the little gem of a book that dinner attendee Catherine Salmon wrote with Donald Symons, Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality
It's just 95 pages, and fascinating, fun, very insightful, and written with great clarity -- always a challenge when explaining science. Here's a tiny excerpt that relates to questions I asked last week about male porn viewing and women's attitudes about it:
Just as porn actresses exhibit a suspiciously male-like sexuality, romances are, in Janice Radway's words, "exercises in the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards."
A bit that preceded that piece above:
In her ethnography of a group of American romance novel readers, Janice Radway reported that her subjects were angry about men's tastes for impersonal sex and sexual variety, and these women did not want to adopt male standards, in real life or in their erotica; they wanted men to adopt their standards.'"
This is what a female reader is going through now. A lot of women don't understand how male sexuality and female sexuality differ, and they think men are horrible for being more visually driven, when they're really just -- biologically and physiologically -- being men.
And here, Porn I and Porn II from last week.
I Can't Help It
I'm so upset -- daily -- about these vile and useless searches at the airport -- I can't help but keep blogging about them. Krauthammer had a good piece about them in the WaPo:
Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives - when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn't need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning "I rely on God," killing all on board.
But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.
The junk man's revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy. Metal detector? Back-of-the-hand pat? Okay. We will swallow hard and pretend airline attackers are randomly distributed in the population.
But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?
This time you have gone too far, Big Bro'. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don't touch my junk.
For the record, I've been absolutely irate about the searches -- and their pointlessness -- since the TSA was instituted.
George Will writes, in an aptly titled column, "The T.S. of A Takes Control":
The theory - perhaps by now it seems like a quaint anachronism - on which the nation was founded is, or was: Government is instituted to protect preexisting natural rights essential to the pursuit of happiness. Today, that pursuit often requires flying, which sometimes involves the wanding of 3-year-olds and their equally suspect teddy bears....Bureaucracies try to maximize their missions. They can't help themselves. Adult supervision is required to stand athwart this tendency, yelling "Stop!"
Gregg is taking me to Paris very soon. If I am asked to go through the peep show machine, I will opt for sexual assault instead, and then file charges against the agent who gropes me when I get home. I encourage all of you to do the same, and protest to any and every government employee you can -- and in any other ways you can think of.
Porn For Girls And Women
The real porn for girls and women is the romance novel. But, there's also the "haul" video from YouTube -- girls showing off their purchases:
Not surprisingly, there's, like, a good bit of of uptalk.
More on haul videos here.
Community Policing
Wednesday morning, at 2 a.m., two girls came screaming and yelling from a nearby bar to their car, parked on my street, and never mind the darkened houses and people sleeping in them.
Awakened by the noise, I peeked out my gate, and saw them -- and observed that these did not seem to be sober women. (One of them staggered across the street, plus I don't think sober people scream and yell at length like they did right outside houses.) But, how to stop them from driving?
Well, one YELLED to the other that they had to go back to the bar to find something she'd lost. I then called the LAPD, but I knew the police would very likely never get here in time to stop them from getting behind the wheel. (Depending on what other crimes are going on when you call, it can take them hours to arrive.)
So, a little after 2 a.m., while the screaming curs were back at the bar, looking for whatever they lost (their manners, 20 years ago?) I quick-quick typed up this note and snuck out and put it on their car, hoping it would inspire them to take a taxi. 
And whaddya know, while it's possible they just fell down some rabbit hole at the bar, it seems my note actually might've led them to take a cab, as their car was still on my block in the morning.
Lawbreakers Will Be...Handsomely Rewarded
A close friend of mine who was a Democrat (until about 20 minutes ago, relatively speaking) called me the other day. She's just over 40, and is going back to school to get a degree in...occupational therapy, speech therapy...something in that neighborhood. In California, in the part of California where she lives, it turns out that these are extremely competitive programs with very few spots.
She has a B.A. from a good university -- one she got in her 20s, when most people traditionally go to college. And now, she lives and works in California and wants to go to a California school, but there's a problem. She's on the lower middle-class end of the spectrum monetarily, and she's also white and in this country legally. Because of that, she's having a hell of a time getting financial aid or loans or getting into this competitive program -- despite working her ass off and getting great grades in the college math and science classes she's taking now to prepare herself.
She told me that she just can't believe she's paid taxes and worked throughout her life, but California is now not only allowing in illegal immigrants to state-subsidized schools (and giving them state-subsidized tuition), but is making priority spots for out-of-state students who pay hefty out-of-state tuition to make up for years of financial mismanagement in the UC system. Meanwhile, the Cal State Fresno student body president is illegal, and, from the LA Times' Diana Marcum:
On Monday, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that illegal immigrants who graduated from state high schools can continue to receive lower, in-state tuition at California's public universities and colleges. It's the first state Supreme Court ruling of its kind in the nation.The case was brought on behalf of citizens who are paying the higher out-of-state tuition rates. The group contended that lower tuition could not be offered to illegal students and denied to some citizens.
Meanwhile, University of California campuses, pushed by the state's budget crisis to boost revenues, are taking unprecedented steps to recruit out-of-state and international students for the extra revenue and geographic diversity they bring to the cash-strapped system. UC campuses collect an extra $23,000 in annual tuition from each non-resident student.
On the Cal State Fresno campus, reactions over the revelation of Ramirez's immigration status had one thing in common -- passion, said Tony Peterson, editor-in-chief of The Collegian.
"It's all either really really anti-Pedro or all really really pro-Pedro. No in-between," he said. "Pedro was pretty popular before, but where we're located in California there's a lot of farming, a lot of farmworkers. Immigration issues are big here, because we're at the heart of it."
On Wednesday, Ramirez said he had no intention of stepping down from his position unless the students who elected him demanded it.
He said he had only one concern:
"Could you leave my parents out of it?" he asked. "They've done everything for me."
Starting with smuggling him over the border.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, my friend has not become a Republican, either. Like me, she realizes that politicians are mostly self-interested, pandering sleazebags who talk like they have the public's good in mind, and vote like they're Beverly Hills princesses on an unlimited American Express Platinum card.
P.S. Illegal immigrants to Mexico don't have it quite so nice as those who sneak over the border into the US. Jerry Seper writes in the Wash Times:
Under the Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Immigrants who are deported and attempt to re-enter can be imprisoned for 10 years. Visa violators can be sentenced to six-year terms. Mexicans who help illegal immigrants are considered criminals.The law also says Mexico can deport foreigners who are deemed detrimental to "economic or national interests," violate Mexican law, are not "physically or mentally healthy" or lack the "necessary funds for their sustenance" and for their dependents.
Sounds good to me. Perhaps we should just get a Xerox of it and pass it as a law.
Milton Friedman said you can't have open borders in a welfare state. And he was right. And we'd better figure that out as a country before the whole country becomes California.
An Assfull Of Explosives?
Sarah Schmidt writes for CanWest about why the Israelis haven't bought scanners:
A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install "useless" imaging machines at airports across the country."I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.
"That's why we haven't put them in our airport," Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.
Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.
He told MPs on the House of Commons transport committee via video conference from Kfar Vradim, Israel, that he wouldn't reveal how to get past the virtual strip-search scanners, but said he can provide briefings to officials with security clearance.
The Israelis search for terrorists. We search for tweezers. Whose plane would you feel safer on?
And by the way, there's always a chance your plane will be brought down, your car will crash, the building will fall on your head.
Would you rather live in a society where you are considered a criminal until you prove yourself innocent (with all the strains or breaks that inflicts on democracy), or chance dying in a terror attack on a plane or elsewhere?
UPDATE: Here's the TSA taking away a heavily armed soldier's nail clippers. (Even if he doesn't have bullets in the gun, which do you think you can do more damage with, a rifle butt or a nail clippers?! Insane.)
But, Why, And What Does It Mean?
People who bleat on about women making 70 cents for every dollar men do fail to take into account the fact that many women don't negotiate when they get an offer, are less competitive than men (perhaps, in part, due to differences in testosterone levels), and take years out of their prime work decades to raise children.
I just saw a similar cry of discrimination in Newsweek, in this "Eight Jobs That Are Still Sexist" piece (that, by the way, lacks any byline at all. Was it written by an androgynous robot?):
We may have two female anchors on network television, but in print journalism, male bylines still outnumber female bylines by a rate of seven to one--despite women being the majority of journalism graduates since 1977. They're in the minority when it comes to sources, too: the Global Media Monitoring Project found that worldwide, women make up only 24 percent of the people "interviewed, heard, seen, or read about in mainstream broadcast and print news."
As for why women aren't in science and engineering...could it be that many don't want to be?
And check out "The Paycheck Fairness Act," which is anything but fair.
Your thoughts?
You'll Know If Your Hair Catches Fire
The radiation in the TSA's Rapescan, uh, Rapiscan and other-brand peepshow machines is "safe" the government tells us. In The Atlantic, James Fallows publishes a reader e-mail about . William Vambenepe writes:
One more perspective on the new scanners. I opt out not because I'm prudish (I'm French, we have no modesty) but because I am a software engineer. There is a lot of software to control these machines, and it's mostly new code. Which means it has bugs. Many bugs.Assuming the radiation level generated by the machines is safe (I have no expertise to judge one way or the other), that assumes normal operations. That's a big assumption.
In "normal" software, when there is a non-fatal bug it results in something looking strange to the user, or some incorrect transaction going through, which eventually might get caught. In these machines, unless the bug completely disables the machine, how can you tell there is problem? Your hair is not going to catch fire because the radiation level is 100 stronger than normal.
At the very least, it seems that these machines should have a fully-isolated (sharing no component with the scanner) radiation measuring device inside. I hope they do but I've never heard of that from people defending that they're safe. I've never heard them acknowledge the possibility of a software bug either, which is alarming.
Potentially dangerous machines controller by immature code overseen by poorly qualified operators within an organization with a culture of secrecy? No thanks.
Meanwhile, leave it to government to not rub two brain cells together to come up with policy. Here's Robert Poole at reason with some sense how to screen whom, starting with not treating all air travelers as equally likely to be a terrorist threat, and changing the TSA's screening model to one that is risk-based. He'd divide travelers into three groups:
1. Trusted Travelers, who have passed a background check and are issued a biometric ID card that proves (when they arrive at the security checkpoint) that they are the person who was cleared. This group would include cockpit crews, anyone holding a government security clearance, anyone already a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Global Entry, Sentri, and Nexus, and anyone who applied and was accepted into a new Trusted Traveler program. These people would get to bypass regular security lanes upon having their biometric card checked at the airport, subject only to random screening of a small fraction.2. High-risk travelers, either those about whom no information is known or who are flagged by the various Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence lists as warranting "Selectee" status. They would be the only ones facing body-scanners or pat-downs as mandatory, routine screening.
3. Ordinary travelers--basically everyone else, who would go through metal detector and put carry-ons through 2-D X-ray machines. They would not have to remove shoes or jackets, and could travel with liquids. A small fraction of this group would be subject to random "Selectee"-type screening.
Big Loko-ment
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P.J. O'Rourke
Dangerous Criminal Selling Of Groceries
I've blogged about this before, the raid on Rawesome Foods in Venice -- but there's more detail of what jerks the agents were, and how ridiculous the whole thing was.
The government should not be able to tell us what we can and can't eat.
Unconventional Cure For Depression
Via BoingBoing, a man found his 91-year-old Holocaust survivor grandma depressed and lonely, and cheered her up by dressing and photographing her as a superhero.
You're An Old Hag, And Your Psychology Today Article Sucks, Too
I wrote in I See Rude People, there are these amazing people -- people who often wouldn't say "Where's the asparagus?" to you in the supermarket -- who feel perfectly comfortable lashing out at you in ugly ways on the Internet:
Just a couple decades ago, there was no such thing as an Instant Message; there was only the rather delayed message, chiseled out in longhand or typed on a typewriter and painstakingly corrected with cross-outs or Wite-Out. After getting it down on the page, you'd have to find your address book, dig up your recipient's information, find an envelope and a stamp...you know the drill. Maybe a week later, the postman would deliver your message. Because corresponding took time, supplies, and effort, you didn't write just anything to just anybody; for example, it's unlikely you would've mailed somebody you'd never even met a letter informing them "I told you to stay the fuck out of my inbox, you low-life, dried-up twat."That message came to me by e-mail from a total stranger after an exchange in which I responded, rather politely, to a rather minor criticism he'd e-mailed me about one of my advice columns. Thanks to the growth of the Web and the affordability of computers, he and billions of other ordinary people suddenly found themselves in possession of the extraordinary ability to lash out at others extremely fast, practically free, and with little effort.
For example, on Facebook, Ginger Peterson (photos here) sent me this message:
Ginger Peterson November 16 at 11:57am
I read your article in Psychology Today, and figured it was written by a 23 year old that didn't know any better. I looked up your site, and was surprised to see that you're old. Not only that, but you have the least desirable hair color to men.
I wrote back:
Amy Alkon November 16 at 3:12pm
Dear Ginger,
I'm always amazed by people who write letters like yours above. Do you walk up to people buying things you disagree with in the supermarket and tell them their fat ass could do without the HoHos? Or are you most comfortable telling people they're old and have ugly hair from a distance?I'm fine with people disagreeing with me, by the way. A pity you didn't tell me what, exactly, you took issue with, besides what an old redheaded hag I am. -Amy Alkon
Wait -- it gets better. From Facebook, more about Ginger:
"Completing classes towards my PhD in clinical psych, and putting together a commitee for my dissertation."
Wait, better still, even more about Ginger:
Activities
Eastern Psychological Association, Psi Chi International Honor Society in Psychology, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Natural Resources Defense Council, Ageism, Rod Coronado, Radical Psychology Network, Eastern Psychological Association
"Ageism"?! Hilarious.
UPDATE: Predictably, Ginger Peterson seems to have changed her privacy settings on Facebook. I anticipated that -- and, of course, it supports my notion that she thought she'd get away with lashing out at me in a way she wouldn't do it publicly. Here are links to a PDF of her Facebook page and her pictures:
Add'l Ginger Peterson photo.
UPDATE: Ginger says she never changed her privacy settings -- a commenter said the link wouldn't work anymore, and I looked at her settings and thought they'd changed. She says that isn't the case. Sorry for the error.--The Old Hag With Ugly Hair!
Why People Voted For Obama
I always wish that Howard Stern would put a cork in it about the porn stars and do a show on politics -- and on regular radio:
There are all these people urging that we "get out the vote." If this video is any indication, that's a really bad idea.
The Dirty Business Of "Clean Elections"
Mark Meranta from Institute for Justice wrote me about the "Clean Elections" law in Arizona (there are similar systems elsewhere around the country as well, he says):
Imagine if Nancy Pelosi wanted to run for governor. If she decided to run as a "Clean Elections" candidate, every time her opponent would raise a certain amount of money from private donors, she would receive the same amount from taxpayers. That's right, publicly funded elections.This allows the government-subsidized candidate to "match" the spending--and thus the speech--of the independent group or privately funded candidate opposing him or her. The harder an independent group or traditionally financed candidate works, the more the government-subsidized candidate benefits. The system curbs speech, discourages participation and limits what voters will hear about politics.
(Excuse the annoying cartoon characters...important issue, needs to be exposed. Please blog the video and/or send the link around.)
Should Drunk Drivers Be Shamed On Facebook?
Absofuckinglutely. From LAist.com's Callie Miller:
Huntington Beach is fed up with the traditional methods of curbing drunk driving and is considering a new approach: posting the names of DUI arrests on the city's Facebook page....How bad is the Huntington Beach DUI problem? With 1,687 drunk driving arrests last year, it has one of the highest DUI rates in California for a city its size.
I think this is a great idea -- bringing self-interest into stopping people from driving drunk. If the fact that you could kill or seriously hurt somebody by driving drunk won't stop you, it's actually possible that you'll think twice about it if you see others being shamed for it, and think about how that would affect you if your boss, your mom and everybody would know.
Homemade Burgers Don't Rot, Either, McDonald's Haters
Somebody did this test that had all the fast-food haters coming out of the woodwork to say "Seeee! McDonald's is pure eeee-vil!" And then other somebodies repeated it and found (and concluded) the same thing.
The test entails leaving out a McDonald's hamburger for days, months or years, and showing children that it remains pretty much the same -- it does not rot.
The Burger Lab blogger J. Kenji Lopez-Alt responded with a more scientific approach, noting:
The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem.Thus far, I haven't located a single source that treats this McDonald's hamburger phenomenon in this fashion. Instead, most rely on speculation, specious reasoning, and downright obtuseness to arrive at the conclusion that a McDonald's burger "is a chemical food[, with] absolutely no nutrition."
As I said before, that kind of conclusion is both sensationalistic and specious, and has no place in any of the respectable academic circles which A Hamburger Today would like to consider itself an upstanding member of.
Lopez-Alt actually did some testing with a variety of burgers -- McDonald's and homemade, with and without buns:
The ConclusionSo there we have it! Pretty strong evidence in favor of Theory 3: the burger doesn't rot because it's small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast.
Without moisture, there's no mold or bacterial growth. Of course, that the meat is pretty much sterile to begin with due to the high cooking temperature helps things along as well. It's not really surprising. Humans have known about this phenomenon for thousands of years. After all, how do you think beef jerky is made?
Now don't get me wrong--I don't have a dog in this fight either way. I really couldn't care less whether or not the McDonald's burger rotted or didn't. I don't often eat their burgers, and will continue to not often eat their burgers. My problem is not with McDonald's. My problem is with bad science.
For all of you McDonald's haters out there: Don't worry. There are still plenty of reasons to dislike the company! But for now, I hope you'll have it my way and put aside your beef with their beef.
For the record, my favorite fast food burger is an In-N-Out, protein-style, with cheese, but in a pinch, I'll take a bacon-cheese Angus burger, no bun.
On a related note, Tom Naughton does a fab job taking apart the so-called "Twinkie Diet":
Despite the headlines, Professor Haub wasn't living on a "Twinkie Diet" or a "Little Debbie Snack Cake Diet." He was on a diet that includes Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack Cakes.First, let's look at a couple of daily menus:
November 12
Pumpkin Spice Donut
Coffee
Protein shake
Onion Rings
Steak
Broccoli
Macaroni and Cheese
Baked potato casserole
Dynasty Lychees
Baby carrots
Peanut butter cookies
2% milkOctober 29
Hostess cupcake
Coffee
Sesame chicken
Teriyaki chicken
Egg roll
Chicken nachos
Broccoli
Lemon zingers
Kit KatLike my Fat Head fast-food diet, nobody would mistake this for any kind of health-food diet. The guy is definitely consuming sugar. And yet he lost weight, lost body fat, raised his HDL, and lowered both his triglycerides and LDL. How can that be? Well, let's look at the numbers.
I copied the daily nutrition totals into Excel and calculated Professor Haub's average daily intake of calories and macronutrients over the 10 weeks he's been on the diet:
Calories: 1457
Fat (g): 61
Carbohydrate (g): 173
Protein (g): 54As a percent of daily calories, it works out to:
Fat: 38%
Carbohydrate: 47%
Protein: 15%Now, 173 grams of carbohydrate per day certainly isn't low, but it's not high either. Depending on whose figures you use, that's about half as many carbohydrates as an average American male consumes per day. It's also at least 1,000 fewer daily calories than an average male consumes. So it doesn't surprise me at all that Professor Haub lost weight on a "Twinkie Diet" that is actually moderate in carbohydrates and very low in calories. I'd lose weight on that diet, too. (I'd hate it, but I'd lose weight.)
via Consumerist
We're Headed Down The Tubes
One entitlement program after another. From IBD:
...The biggest problem right now isn't the short- term budget deficit -- though we agree that's a serious problem.No, it's future entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- that threaten a wave of spending in coming decades that, if left alone, will one day bankrupt our country.
Though Bowles and Simpson do some things to contain very long-term costs, they aren't nearly enough. They propose, for example, raising the retirement age for Social Security to 68 in 2050 and to 69 by 2075. They would also make minor cuts to Medicare.
But this barely makes a dent. Both programs still won't have enough tax revenues to support them, setting up massive tax hikes or program cuts in the future.
Actuaries of the Social Security and Medicare programs have calculated the total future costs of the two main programs, and the number is a breathtaking $107 trillion. That's the level of "unfunded liabilities" (read: future tax hikes) for Social Security and Medicare.
Even a few decades out, the amounts are so large they no longer seem real. So let's just put it this way: Just two years ago, only about 8 cents of every dollar in America went to pay for entitlements. Today, it's 10 cents. By 2020, it'll be 13 cents. By 2050, it rises to 18 cents -- about equal to the total size of all federal revenues today.
In short, without massive tax hikes, entitlements will, within the lifetimes of millions of Americans, swallow up the entire federal budget, Congressional Budget Office data show.
Yet, listen to any legislator talking about balancing the budget on TV -- as I did this past weekend on CNN (can't remember who it was, but they all talk the same) -- and if you ask him if he's for cutting back on any of these programs and you just hear one "no" after another.
Why The New TSA Rules Will Kill People
Claire Berlinski points out at Ricochet that our new policy of "sexually assaulted until proven innocent enough to fly" is going to cause more people to drive. Per the stats on driving versus flying, the more they drive, the more they'll die:
This simple, obvious logical point about transportation safety--quite separate from any arguments about civil liberties and decency--seems entirely to escape everyone who keeps babbling on about how we all just need to stop whining and sacrifice for the higher good of the public. Al Qaeda would have to take down a jumbo jet every day to make the risks of flying equal to those of driving. So if you want to save American lives by means of social engineering and government humiliation, make mandatory groin examination the condition for getting a driver's license, not boarding a commercial aircraft.
The Problem With The Death Penalty
I don't believe we have the right to take a human life, except in self-defense, but beyond that, there's the possibility that we may be executing innocent people. Allan Turner, Cindy Horswell, and Mike Tolson write in the Houston Chron :
A strand of light-colored hair prosecutors insisted linked career criminal Claude Jones to the robbery-murder of a San Jacinto County liquor store owner likely came from the victim, not from the accused killer, DNA testing revealed on Thursday.The new DNA testing came one decade after Jones' lawyer filed an unsuccessful execution-eve plea to then-Gov. George Bush to grant a 30-day stay so that such high-tech testing could be performed.
Jones, 60, was executed on Dec. 7, 2000, for the November 1989 murder of Allen Hilzendager during the stickup of a Point Blank package store.
Jones consistently maintained that he was innocent of the crime.
The tests do not offer conclusive proof of Jones' innocence, but raise questions about his conviction, which was largely based on the hair fragment, the only physical evidence against him.
...Bush's decision to reject Jones' plea for a 30-day reprieve the day before he was executed followed the recommendation of his staff counsel Claudia Nadig, whose confidential report to the governor made no mention of the condemned man's request for DNA testing, despite that being the reason a stay was sought by Jones' lawyers.
"I have no doubt that if President Bush had known about the request to do a DNA test of the hair he would have issued a 30-day stay in this case and Jones would not have been executed," said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which joined the Texas Observer, an Austin-based political journal, in calling for the new tests.
Just prior to the Jones' appeal, Scheck noted, Bush had endorsed the post-conviction use of DNA testing to establish guilt or innocence in questionable cases.
Had DNA testing been performed in 2000, Scheck said, Jones' conviction likely would have been reversed. "It's a pretty significant event to know someone was executed wrongly," Scheck said.
"You Have To Choose Your Future Regrets"
Andrew Anthony visits and profiles Christopher Hitchens for the Guardian:
Hitchens once wrote a line that has almost gained the status of philosophical epigram or even scientific dictum: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Although it echoes Wittgenstein's famous injunction regarding the ineffable - "Whereof we cannot speak, therefore we must be silent" - Hitchens's version is less a "no entry" sign than a civic reminder to place rubbish in the bin.In fact, you could say that in God is Not Great Hitchens ignored his own advice by conducting lengthy theological and historical research to assemble his case. His beef, in any event, is not really against faith itself, but against the way that all faiths are compelled to make irrational demands on believers and non-believers alike.
Hitchens dislikes the "New Atheist" title. "It isn't really new," he says, "except it coincides with huge advances made in the natural sciences. And there's been an unusually violent challenge to pluralist values by the supporters of at least one monotheism apologised for quite often by the sympathisers of others. Then they say we're fundamentalists. A stupid idea like that is hard to kill because any moron can learn it in 10 seconds and repeat it as if for the first time. But since there isn't a single position that any of us holds on anything that depends upon an assertion that can't be challenged, I guess that will die out or they'll get bored of it."
As for the notion that his brand of atheism is reductive or joyless, it's religion, he contests, that is "cosmically hopeless, as is all the related masochism that goes with it - you've got to spend your entire life making up for the vermin you are. What is that if not degrading? We don't do that to people. We say you may as well know you're a primate, but take heart, primates are capable of great things."
Fly The Friendly Stay Home Unmolested In Your Living Room
I suspect more and more people will unless the TSA process gets unstupid and unsexually assaultive fast. Susan Stellin writes in The New York Times:
Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, said in a speech at an aviation security conference in Frankfurt last week that the airlines would like to see an overhaul of the checkpoint screening process -- with a greater focus on finding bad people, rather than bad objects."Discouraging travelers with queues into the parking lot is not a solution," Mr. Bisignani said in his speech. "And it is not acceptable to treat passengers as terrorists until they prove themselves innocent."
Not in the country we used to live in, anyway.
Three-Year-Old Body-Searched By TSA
Ed Morrissey has a comprehensive blog post at Hot Air, but here's the video:
Janet Napolitano in USA Today this morning:
We ask for cooperation, patience and a commitment to vigilance in the face of a determined enemy.
I only wish I'd had the guts to carry on like that 3-year-old when I was sexually assaulted by a TSA worker at the Las Vegas airport.
Gregg just heard Napolitano on TV in a press conference saying something like, "If you don't like the search at the airport, you have other travel options."
Gregg: "Yeah, let me hitchhike from LA to Detroit."
Thanks, Rosemary
San Diego Air Traveler Opts Out Of Peepshow Scanner And Groping, Threatened With $10K Fine Unless He Submits
Via BoingBoing, the man tells the screener he'll have him arrested if he tries to grab his "junk":
Let's have more like this guy, who said about the sexual assault they told him he'd have to endure, "What they're doing here would be illegal if they weren't the government."
This screening isn't making us safer (it won't catch contraband you stuff up your butt or your coochie); it's just making us better sheep. If you like democracy and freedom, that should worry you -- lots.
Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing about the aftermath of the guy's refusal:
After faffing around with various supervisors and supervisors' supervisors, he opted not to fly, collected a refund from the American Airlines counter, and started to leave the airport. But before he could go, the supervisor's supervisor's supervisor told him he wasn't allowed to leave the checkpoint once he entered it, that he was already in for up to $10,000 in fines, and that he would have to return and allow the man's minons to palpate his genitals before he'd be allowed to leave the airport. After he objected, he was left cooling his heels for a long time. Finally, he asked if he was under arrest, and being told that he wasn't, but that he would be sued for $10K if he tried to go, he said, "you bring that suit" and left. Most of the incident was recorded on his phone, and has been posted to YouTube.
We have every right -- and a responsibility -- to question government power grabs like this. Speaking of which, here's tape of a gutsy guy named Sam Dodson at Detroit Metro, in three parts:
As Dodson points out in the video, the peepshow scanner watcher job is the perfect one for the pedophile who has yet to be caught.
Report your (officially sanctioned) sexual assault by #TSA employees here:
http://epic.org/bodyscanner/incident_report/
UPDATE: The guy's whole story is here.
Welfare For Homeowners
Via EdMorrissey, a retweet:
@CraigWestover: Challenge to conservatives: Should US have a "Natl Housing Policy"? Why a mortgage deduction?
A link he posted went to this David Kocieniewski piece in The New York Times:
By proposing to curtail the tax deduction for mortgage interest, the president's deficit commission is sounding an alarm.The home mortgage deduction is one of the most widely used and expensive tax subsidies. More than 35 million Americans claim it, and the federal government estimates it will cost the Treasury $131 billion in forgone revenue in 2012. Its size, popularity and link to the emotionally charged American notion of homeownership has made it so politically sacrosanct that there are serious doubts whether Congress will even entertain the idea.
But by raising the specter of ending one of the most cherished tax breaks, the commission is trying to jar the public into recognizing the magnitude of the nation's budget deficit and some of the drastic steps that might be needed to close it.
Because the mortgage interest is one of a limited number of tax breaks available to middle-income Americans, the commission's proposal has also rekindled a debate about how much of the pain of deficit reduction should be borne by the middle class.
Why should the rest of us pay for your home?
Dirty Pictures, Part II
Beth Cartright posted on Facebook about my Friday blog item on men and porn-watching, and asked a question I'll pose to all of you here: "Why are so many women threatened by men's use of porn?"
If You Don't Parent Your Child...
Others will do it for you.
Gotta love this Darren person, an apparent provider of genetic material of a 2-year-old (notice how hard I'm working to not use the word parent? There's a reason for that).
Darren, writes Phil Villarreal at Consumerist "says a woman working at Kohl's grabbed his rowdy 2-year-old, making him cry. He's angry and wants to take action but isn't sure what to do."
Wants to take action? Is that code for "wants to sue"? That would be my guess.
Darren (who apparently has to pay extra for punctuation marks) wrote to Consumerist:
To set the story for you guys I was in Kohl's and i had my kid with me he is only 2 so he liked to move a lot. We made out way back to the back toward the customer service desk and while I was there my child went up to the job application computer and touched the screen when he did that some women grabbed his hand and started fussing at him.Are they allowed to do this? I walked out of the store, i didn't feel that my child needed to see my fight with that women since he was already about to cry. I really just don't feel that this is right. Is there anything i can do?
Your 2-year-old is unsupervised to the point that he "went up" to a computer and "touched the screen"? And you go apeypants that some employee stops him?
Oh, the horror, the horror.
I loved this commenter bunnymare's comment over at Consumerist:You know how real estate agents have a code? Like "cozy" tends to mean "so small you can't turn around," and "quaint" means "falling apart," and so forth?
I feel that parents describing their children are often the same. So, when I read a parent say their kid "liked to move a lot," my critical thinking starts wondering what kind of misbehavior we are really talking about. Similarly, when a parent uses a bizarrely passive construction to indicate that while he was in one location his toddler was doing something else, I am similarly taking out my block of salt.
I don't know whether it is okay here, or even (absent risk of harm to the child or another person) ever okay for a stranger to grab a child, but there is definitely more than meets the eye to this story.
Oh, and regarding the supposedly impending tears, I'd place my bets on Consumerist commenter stevenhubertron's guess:
The only reason the kid cried is because he probably was told not to do something for the first time in is life.
You Do Have Choices
Your current options when flying are as follows:
1. Allow yourself to be sexually assaulted by a uniformed government worker -- one who will not only not be charged with a crime, but who is earning an hourly wage plus benefits for the privilege of getting jiggy with your private parts.
2. Allow strangers to take naked pictures of you in a machine the government swears is safe, while various scientists dispute that. For example, from the National Post/Agence France Press:
"They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays," Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP."No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," he said.
3. Stay home or drive (surely, buses and trains do or will have similarly invasive screening procedures soon).
From a former TSA screener, the scoop on "The Invasive Pat Down":
Ok that one is bullshit. It is a terror tactic by TSA to get you to walk through the more thorough body scanner. I can't defend TSA on this one. I have talked to the TSA officers and it is no more effective than the old pat down procedure. They tested it out with trainers and each other. It is purely a terror tactic by TSA. Shame on TSA and anyone who has to get one should write a complaint in afterward. You still have to get it though if you want to get on the plane. Throwing a fit will not get you out of it.
All together now...let's wave bye-bye to the airline industry. I didn't think it was possible to dread taking a plane somewhere more than I already dp, but the choice between irradiation and loss of privacy and sexual assault and loss of privacy...well, if I don't absolutely have to go (or the destination isn't Paris), I'm not going.
Don't forget: This doesn't mean we're safer; it just means we're increasingly easily controlled.
(CNN story on the backlash against the TSA peep show scans and gropings here. My earlier blogging of The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg's thoughts/experiences here.)
Which 20-Something Men Out There Don't Watch Porn?
Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men in their 20s who had never looked at pornography - but couldn't find any, reports Jonathan Liew in the Telegraph/UK:
Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.
"We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography," said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. "We couldn't find any."
Does this describe you? At what age did your porn-watching...sorry...peter off, guys...if at all?
And here's a question: Did or does your porn-watching affect your relationship (not because your partner finds out, but because of the porn itself), or is or was it more like a benign form of male sightseeing?
And feel free to comment anonymously, i.e., not in your usual name if you're a regular commenter. Just try to take a number (Anonymous33, Anonymous10, etc.)
Don't Be Too Quick To Be Feeding The Hungry
Not without a license, that is. Walter Olson blogs at Overlawyered about a church that had to shut down its program to feed the poor because they weren't licensed as a commercial food prep facility. He quotes commenter "Density Duck":
...Our local church had to shut down its Feed-The-Hungry operation (where a bunch of retired housewives cooked simple meals and froze them to give to the local soup kitchen.) The reason is that the church kitchen wasn't certified as a commercial food-preparation facility, as one of the lawyers in the congregation helpfully pointed out to the lady in charge of the program.
Walter's covered the issue before:
The Health Department in Middletown, Connecticut issued a "citation against St. Vincent DePaul Place on Tuesday for accepting some donated food from unlicensed kitchens. The department has asked the nonprofit group, which runs a soup kitchen, to comply with the health code by accepting food that comes only from licensed kitchens."
The best, though, was the comment GregS was smart enough to leave on Overlawyered, but the elected officials killing the Feed-The-Hungry program weren't smart enough (or didn't care enough) to figure out:
Fortunately, those hungry soup kitchen patrons can fall back on the more hygienic alternative of dining on the food they find in local dumpsters and garbage cans.
And a sort of related suggestion: If you don't return your bottles for the deposit, get bags when you go to the grocery store and put the bottles out in the bags next to the trash bin so people who live by returning collectables don't have to go through the bin.
Poor People Know How To Be Poor Better Than Government Bureaucrats
Nick Gillespie at reason.tv on the payday loan industry:
Check out payday loan critic Rivlin's comment about his own fiscal hard times, and how going into credit card debt was necessary for him. He doesn't seem to get that he's essentially arguing for maintaining payday loans for the poor -- or is it that he thinks money should just be provided for them? (People who think that way never consider or care about where that "provided" money should come from.)
The Next Best Thing To A Crystal Ball
Dr. Drew's prediction about Obamacare:
Kidnapping A Father's Kid And Calling It Adoption
It's pretty crazy. We're all over men if we want them to pay child support, yet a couple was allowed to adopt a child when the child's father wanted him, and filed to maintain his parental rights, writes Robert Franklin, Esq. at Fathers & Families:
In the vast majority of cases, adoption is a fine and noble act. But Mr. Wyrembek's son has never needed adoption. He had a capable, loving father who wanted to care for him.And from the very first, that fact was public knowledge. Within 30 days of the boy's birth to a former girlfriend, Mr. Wyrembek registered with the Ohio Putative Father Registry. Then he filed suit to get custody of his son.
At any time since then, the couple that sought to adopt the boy could have done the obvious, fair, and kind thing: hand Benjamin Wyrembek his son and seek another child to adopt. Instead, they chose litigation.
In every court, Benjamin Wyrembek prevailed, because he is the child's rightful father. And every time he did, opposing attorneys filed more motions and appeals.
Media reports have emphasized the distress that the boy will surely suffer when he is removed from the only parents he has known. That distress will be heartbreaking for all, especially the child.
But let there be no mistake about the cause of that heartbreak. It is not Benjamin Wyrembek, but adoption attorneys who mistakenly believed that after enough time and expense he would give up his son.
There is a larger picture the media have overlooked. Every day, about 400,000 children in the United States need to be adopted. Millions more worldwide are warehoused in orphanages in countries such as China and Russia. They have no parents and get tragically little care.
These children are literally crying out for the love that good adoptive parents could give them. The great tragedy of the Wyrembek case is not only the effort to force adoption on a boy who didn't need it; it's also the loss of good adoptive parents by another child who did.
Who Thinks The New Cigarette Warning Labels Will Stop Anyone From Smoking?
See them all here.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
Crazy day, late night yesterday, so today, you pick the topic. Feel free to post links, but only one per post so you won't get drop-kicked into my spam folder.
Men Aren't From Mars And Women Aren't From Venus
As Steven Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate
This guy named Dabbs who was at Georgia State University (Dr. James Dabbs, psychologist) studied testosterone and found that female lawyers have higher testosterone than women in less climbing-the-ladder kinds of jobs. So I do think there are tremendous individual differences in women. But being ambitious and sensation-seeking isn't necessarily incompatible with the things that women evolved to do. Obviously women do strive for status within their own social group, just like men do. But I think that women tend to strive for status less than men do often because women have more things that satisfy them. We're much more satisfied by social outcomes than (men) are by their work, financial and career kinds of outcomes.In terms of gendered behaviors, what do you think feminists - or the public at large -- might misinterpret about evolutionary psychology, especially in terms of how it portrays males, females and sex?
I definitely think that women should be and need to be given the same opportunities (as men). But I don't think there's anything not feminist about saying that men and women are different -- to the same degree that our bodies are different, to the same degree that our hormones are different, to the same degree that our physiology is different -- I don't know why everything that's different about men and women in terms of feminist theory has to be from the neck down. Why can't it be from the neck up? Why can't women also have different motivations and brains?
If I had to use an animal example and said that most female swallows sat on the nest while the males forage for food, and if you put them in laboratory conditions, and they did the same thing, no one would argue with me about that because (the swallows) don't have culture. So I think people give culture a whole lot more (argumentative power), although it definitely matters, and it can definitely change things. But at no time in human history has a group of women made war on another group of women. And if you look at anthropological studies, women have almost never hunted, except maybe for small game. So there's this tremendous evidence that (gender difference) actually isn't bred from culture, it's actually something that's built in.
Every Day Is Backwards Day At The UN
Libya, yes, Libya, was complimented by the UN Human Rights Council. Peter Goodspeed writes for Canada's NatPo:
You would think the very day Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi made a show of ordering his security police to release 20 illegally detained journalists, the rest of the world might take note of a UN human rights report that slams Libya for arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, torture and prison conditions that don't meet international standards.You'd be wrong. Instead, many of the 47 nations, which last May elected Libya to serve on the UN Human Rights Council, lined up on Tuesday to compliment the north African state for its "significant progress in the promotion and protection of human rights."
That is almost as bizarre as a vote expected today in the UN General Assembly that will place Saudi Arabia and Iran on the board that runs a new UN Women agency, a decision branded a "joke" by Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
Iran stones women to death for adultery and values a woman's testimony at half that of a man. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive and cannot take major decisions without the permission of a male relative.
...Not so the United States, which just four days ago had its turn at a similar UN human rights review and was lambasted by friend and foe alike.
Meanwhile, as the UN is glad-handing Libya, a Christian woman has been sentenced to death in Pakistan for "blasphemy." Rob Crilly in Islamabad and Aoun Sahi in Lahore write:
Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination....The court heard she had been working as a farmhand in fields with other women, when she was asked to fetch drinking water.
Some of the other women - all Muslims - refused to drink the water as it had been brought by a Christian and was therefore "unclean", according to Mrs Bibi's evidence, sparking a row.
The incident was forgotten until a few days later when Mrs Bibi said she was set upon by a mob.
The police were called and took her to a police station for her own safety.
Shahzad Kamran, of the Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan, said: "The police were under pressure from this Muslim mob, including clerics, asking for Asia to be killed because she had spoken ill of the Prophet Mohammed."So after the police saved her life they then registered a blasphemy case against her." He added that she had been held in isolation for more than a year before being sentenced to death on Monday.
Barbarians.
A Spark Plug A Day...
A letter in The WSJ lays out yet another big old fail behind Obamacare:
I took my Mercury to the Ford dealer and was charged $90 for a "mid-level diagnostic check," in which the mechanic plugs in a computer to get readings from the engine. I asked my office's billing supervisor, "What do we get for an EKG?," for this seems similar to what the car dealer did. In both cases, wires are hooked up to get diagnostic information through a machine that is interpreted by someone. In my case it is a patient, an EKG machine and I, the doctor, do the interpreting. I was told that Medicare "allows" $12.90 for an EKG.ObamaCare does not address any of this. Is it any wonder that medical students who have, on average, $150,000 in debt to repay (plus interest) are not going into primary care?
Mark H. Gregory, M.D.
Vile Racist Campaign Against Racism
It's shocking. Should children grow up thinking they're bad people by virtue of their skin color? Richard Liebrecht writes in the Edmonton Sun:
Controversy is brewing over a city-sponsored anti-racism campaign that calls on Caucasians to recognize their "white privilege"....On the campaign's website, www.racismfreeedmonton.ca, under the "What can you do to stop racism" heading, the first line reads "acknowledge your white privilege."
"White privilege refers to all the benefits we get just for being white. Most of us are aware of how racism hurts others, but we're not aware of how it benefits us," the site reads.
It then paraphrases Dr. Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women, a U.S. college, and her 1989 paper "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack."
"Most of us have little awareness of our white privilege. We 're so used to having the benefits that come with being white that we don't even realize we have them. We also aren't aware of our privilege because the system has encouraged us not to be aware," reads the website.
Let's be honest here: There are racist whites and racist blacks, and I'm opposed to people being awarded jobs -- or being turned down for them -- based on anything but merit. Sure, it happens, but we should be working toward a color-blind society, and recognizing that what very often separates people from opportunity is lack of "financial privilege"; for example, for white guys who don't come from money but cannot avail themselves of those "diversity" scholarships and fellowships that are anything but diverse.
I'm also opposed to sexism in offering opportunities -- like this recent example by Maria Shriver:
...an event in Long Beach sponsored by first lady Maria Shriver to provide free medical, financial and educational services to low-income women.
So, if you're a low-income man, screw you, go eat out of Dumpster? Nice! Sorry, but isn't feminism supposed to be about equal treatment for all, not special treatment for people with vaginas?
Thanks, KW
Not By Genes Alone
David Berreby has a nice piece on why genes alone aren't enough to create a personality at BigThink.com:
Epigenetics is the study of how the environment activates or "silences" genes--how, for example, a stressful argument might raise your levels of "fight-or-flight" hormones, whose presence in certain regions of your brain then reduces the number of times a particular gene is used to make copies of a protein that's involved in the formation of memories. Which must some day be part of the biochemical explanation for the fact that high stress interferes with memory.When we focus on particular genes in your particular cortex turning "on" and "off," the selective forces of evolution aren't our concern. They've done their work; they're history. But your genes, all "winners" in that eons-long Darwinian process of elimination, still permit a range of human behavior. That range runs from a sober, quiet conscientious life at one extreme to, say, playing for the Rolling Stones at the other. From the long-term genetic point of view, everything on that range, no matter how extreme, is as adaptive as any other. Because the same genes make them all possible.
In other words, the epigenetic idea is that your DNA could support many different versions of you; so the particular you that exists is the result of your experiences, which turned your genes "on" and "off" in patterns that would have been different if you'd lived under different conditions. We can say that some of these versions--the one who plans ahead, behaves responsibly, wears a seatbelt, supports its children--are nicer to live with, and better for society, than an alternate version who gets into fights, lies, cheats and spreads herpes. But we can't say the Dr. Jekyll outcome is better in some objective, Darwinian sense. Quite the opposite: It makes more sense to assume that people whom the environment sculpted to be anxious, druggy or impulsive were, at some point, quite well adapted to their circumstances.
For example, in this paper Seth Pollak and his co-authors found that physical abuse and neglect have an effect on children's perception of emotions in others: physically abused 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds more likely to see signs of anger in the expressions of people in photographs. In an emotionally comfortable home, it's easy to see that as a defect to be cured. But, as Edward Tronick said at the conference, being hypersensitive to anger is a pretty good adaptation for an abused kid.
Very interesting stuff.
Where The Government Belongs
Steve Chapman lays it out at reason:
Now, there are many places where the government ought to be: between a citizen and a mugger, between the polluter and the sky, between us all and al-Qaida. But the space between a diner's hand and a diner's mouth is not one of them.The nice thing about eating is that the person who makes good or bad choices is the one who reaps the reward or penalty. If I scarf a cheesecake, you don't gain weight. And if I decide that consigning myself to the Big and Tall Store is not such a bad option, it's not your place to stop me from doing so.
You don't like what's in a Happy Meal? Don't let your kid have one.
High-calorie food is not one of those substances that presents a mortal threat to innocent bystanders. Guzzle a liter of Fanta, and you can still be trusted behind the wheel of a car. Walk by a KFC, and you don't have to worry about secondhand fat.
...As it happens, soda taxes may affect only the people who don't need affecting...
...Restrictions on fatty food are no more promising. Suppose a 5-year-old has a Happy Meal every week (which is how often new toys appear). Economist Michael Anderson of the University of California at Berkeley tells me that while a child who dines on fast food may get a couple of hundred extra calories, that's not much compared to the 11,000 calories she is likely to eat in a week.
Besides, people who are diverted from the Golden Arches have plenty of other cheap, tasty, artery-clogging options. "If they don't eat at McDonald's, are they going to go home and eat broccoli and brown rice?" asks Anderson.
Taking The Patient's Wallet Out Of The Equation
In my 20s, I choose to have adequate but not Cadillac health care -- the Kaiser HMO -- because I chose to go into a profession I love rather than choosing what I do based on the ability to earn lots of money.
That said, as an American, I feel I have a charmed life: I have food in my refrigerator, a small but very cute house I rent, a car to drive, and a washing machine and dryer I share with my neighbors. All of these things are luxuries, really, to people in other places and certainly to people in other times -- and I do remember to be grateful, and kind of in awe that I get to live this way.
But, back to health insurance, say you remove from the equation the fact that I'm paying for my health care, and how the care I choose is directly connected to the fact that I can't afford to have health care like Blue Cross that may go up if I get sick or for some other reason. (Kaiser's cost is fixed by age -- and you can choose lesser or more comprehensive plans.) Well, if I weren't paying, then I'd have little reason to be fiscally prudent. Just give me whatever I can squeeze out of that nebulous entity called "the government," aka "other taxpayers," aka, "This is a stickup. I don't care that you have to work 10 hours a day as an accountant -- I have a cool job that doesn't pay so much, so I'm going to bleed the money out of you."
Of course, I don't think that way. I think people should pay for and be responsible for their own costs, unless they are mentally incompetent, physically disabled, or otherwise wildly out of commission to be working, self-supporting humans. A Spanish proverb I like: "Take what you need, but pay for it."
Well, it seems that being able to rely on "other people's money" for medical bills is what's killing the family doctor, according to Blue Cross exec and brother to a primary care doctor Richard M. Hannon. He writes in the WSJ:
Medicare introduced a whole new dynamic in the delivery of health care. Gone were the days when physicians were paid based on the value of their services. With payment coming directly from Medicare and the federal government, patients who used to pay the bill themselves no longer cared about the cost of services.Eventually, that disconnect (and subsequent program expansions) resulted in significant strain on the federal budget. In 1966, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990 the Medicare budget would quadruple to $12 billion from $3 billion. In fact, by 1990 it was $107 billion.
To fix the cost problem, Medicare in 1992 began using the "resource based relative value system" (RBRVS), a way of evaluating doctors based on factors such as education, effort and specialized training. But the system didn't consider factors such as outcomes, quality of service, severity or demand.
Today most insurance companies use the Medicare RBRVS because it is perceived as objective. As a result of RBRVS, specialists--especially those who perform a lot of procedures--do extremely well. Primary-care doctors do not.
The primary-care doctor has become a piece-rate worker focused on the volume of patients seen every day. As Medicare and insurers focused on trimming the costs of the most common procedures, the income and job satisfaction of primary-care doctors eroded.
...So who really killed primary care? The idea that a centrally planned system with the right formulas and lots of data could replace the art of practicing medicine; that the human dynamics of market demand and the patient-physician relationship could be ignored. Politicians and mathematicians in ivory towers have placed primary care last in line for respect, resources and prestige--and we all paid an enormous price.
Thomas Friedman Is Naive
Friedman writes:
Finally, we need to dry up the funding for terrorist groups, and the mosques, schools and charities that support them. And that means working to end our addiction to oil. It is disgusting to listen to Republican politicians lecturing President Obama about how he has to stay the course in Afghanistan while they don't have an ounce of courage to vote to increase the gasoline tax or renewable energy standards that would reduce the money we're sending to the people our soldiers are fighting.
I'm no fan of the Republicans (or the Democrats), but this is just my "party vs. your party" ridiculousness.
"Ending our addiction to oil" by gas-taxing to death people without jobs or who are clinging to solvency like rats on driftwood to make so they cannot get around except by bike? Please. Let's think about that for a moment: I don't have kids, but if you have three, and live in the midwest, where it's cold, will you be able to get them to school on a tandem bicycle?
Ending our dependence on oil will happen when somebody invents a means of powering vehicles and the rest of our society that does not depend on oil. That is most likely to happen if we do not continue putting onerous restrictions on business and otherwise doing whatever we can to kill the free market. And is stopping the flow of oil money really the one thing that has to be done to stop funding terrorism? I don't think so. I think that economic horse left the barn long ago.
The TSA And Your Ass Crack
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on the futility in the latest in our loss of privacy at airports, reflected in this conversation he had with a TSA dude. (No, of course, we aren't safer; just a little more worn down in giving up our privacy):
I answered, "If you're a terrorist, you're going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina." He blushed when I said "vagina.""Yes, but starting tomorrow, we're going to start searching your crotchal area" -- this is the word he used, "crotchal" -- and you're not going to like it."
"What am I not going to like?" I asked.
"We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained.
"Resistance?" I asked.
"Your testicles," he explained.
'That's funny," I said, "because 'The Resistance' is the actual name I've given to my testicles."
He answered, "Like 'The Situation,' that guy from 'Jersey Shore?'"
Yes, exactly, I said. (I used to call my testicles "The Insurgency," but those assholes in Iraq ruined the term.)
..."But what about people who hide weapons in their cavities? I asked. I actually said "vagina" again, just to see him blush. "We're just not going there," he reiterated.
I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. "Nobody's going to do it," he said, "once they find out that we're going to do."
In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? "That's what we're hoping for. We're trying to get everyone into the machine." He called over a colleague. "Tell him what you call the back-scatter," he said. "The Dick-Measuring Device," I said. "That's the truth," the other officer responded.
Three lessons he takes away from it?
1. The pat-down will not stop dedicated and clever terrorists from smuggling stuff on board up their asses. (When he served as a military policeman in an Israeli army prison, he said many of the prisoners "bangled" contraband up their asses. "I know this not because I checked," he writes, "But because eventually they told me this when I asked."
2. The effectiveness of the pat-downs doesn't matter much "because the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check."
3. That by the time terrorists make it to the airport, it's generally too late to stop them. "Plots must be broken up long before the plotters reach the target," Goldberg writes. "If they are smart enough to make it to the airport without arrest, it is almost axiomatically true that they will be smart enough to figure out a way to bring weapons aboard a plane."
Goldberg blogs about pilots speaking out about the demeaning experience that is the pat-down here.
More on why Goldberg opts out of scanning here:
"People are cows," I say."What do you mean?"
"I mean they'll do whatever the federal government tells them to do," I say.
"How come you don't go through the machine?" he asks me.
I give him several more answers than he expected:
1) I prefer to limit my exposure to radiation, which the back-scatter imager produces;
2) I don't think this new technology will stop terrorism;
3) I find the idea of the government taking pictures of my genitalia a discomfiting invasion of privacy;
4) I find the specific pose a person is forced to take inside the machine -- hands up, as in a mugging -- particularly debasing."Okay," he says, "have a nice flight."
Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder?
It's actually not, blogs Satoshi Kanazawa at Psychology Today -- contrary to the widely held (and incorrect) belief that what people consider beautiful varies widely from culture to culture and from person to person. Nor is beauty in the eye of the media -- contrary to the other widely held (and incorrect) belief that what we consider beautiful in the west was hammered into us by Playboy, Vogue, movies and TV shows (it was not -- it seems to be innate). In Satoshi's words:
Within the United States, both East Asians and whites, and whites and blacks agree on which faces are more or less beautiful. Cross-culturally, there is considerable agreement in the judgment of beauty among East Asians, Hispanics, and Americans; Brazilians, Americans, Russians, the Aché of Paraguay, and the Hiwi of Venezuela; Cruzans and Americans in Saint Croix; white South Africans and Americans; and the Chinese, Indians, and the English. In none of these studies does the degree of exposure to the western media have any influence on people's perception of beauty. How is it possible for people from such diverse cultures to agree broadly on who is beautiful and who is not?It appears that people from different cultures share the same standards of beauty because they are innate; we are born with the knowledge of who's beautiful and who's not. Two studies conducted in the mid-1980s independently demonstrate that infants as young as two and three months old gaze longer at a face that adults judge to be more attractive than at a face that adults judge to be less attractive. Babies are wonderfully hedonistic and have no manners, so they stare at objects that they consider to be pleasing. When babies stare at some faces longer than others, it indicates that they prefer to look at them and find them attractive.
In the most recent version of this experiment, newborn babies less than one week old show significantly greater preference for faces that adults judge to be attractive. Another study shows that 12-month-old infants exhibit more observable pleasure, more play involvement, less distress, and less withdrawal when interacting with strangers wearing attractive masks than when interacting with strangers wearing unattractive masks. They also play significantly longer with facially attractive dolls than with facially unattractive dolls. The findings of these studies are consistent with the personal experiences and observations of many parents of small children, who find that their children are much better behaved when their babysitters are physically attractive than when they are not.
As for what humans find beautiful, here's another post by Satoshi on the details. I go into some more detail in my just-published Psychology Today piece, The Truth About Beauty.
Mobile Savages
To always be reachable by cell phone is not a sign you're important, it's a sign you're 14.
Mommy Madness
Erica Jong writes in the WSJ:
Today's bible of child-rearing is "The Baby Book" by William and Martha Sears, which trumpets "attachment parenting." You wear your baby, sleep with her and attune yourself totally to her needs. How you do this and also earn the money to keep her is rarely discussed. You are just assumed to be rich enough. At one point, the Searses suggest that you borrow money so that you can bend your life to the baby's needs. If there are other caregivers, they are invisible. Mother and father are presumed to be able to do this alone--without the village it takes to raise any child. Add to this the dictates of "green" parenting--homemade baby food, cloth diapers, a cocoon of clockless, unscheduled time--and you have our new ideal. Anything less is bad for baby. Parents be damned.
As I wrote in my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society:
These days, too, American familial roles are clear. There are kings and queens and there are lowly serfs -- serfs called parents whose single greatest fear is not being liked by their children. As a result, as I wrote in a column, "The parental 'no' has officially joined the ranks of chronically missing items like The Holy Grail, Atlantis, and Britney Spears' underpants."I was responding to an e-mail from a mother wracked with guilt because she longed for a break from accommodating her kids' requests "for food, more food, different food, a checkers partner, a Lego partner, and someone to read 'Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb' for the 40th time since breakfast." Like so many parents these days, she had her role all wrong, I told her:
You're supposed to be your kids' mom, not their full-time birthday clown. This means meeting their needs, as opposed to falling prey to their ransom demands; i.e., "Send in the cupcakes or I'll scream my lungs out until spring!"If you're keeling over from reading "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb" 40 times, it's because you didn't say no 39 times. "No" is also the correct response when besieged with requests for a chunky peanut butter sandwich with all the chunkies removed. But, children can be such finicky eaters! Correction: American children can be such finicky eaters, because their parents tend to confuse parenting with working room service at a five-star hotel. In France, on the other hand, the kids' meal is whatever the parents are eating; brains, livers, kidneys and all. And while the kids can pick out bits they don't like, their choice is clear: eat or starve.
Saying no to your kids will not turn them into meth-smoking, liquor store-robbing carjackers. Actually, throwing up a few boundaries might even serve to prevent this -- and less dire but extremely annoying outcomes (just what society needs, another 35-year-old snot who was denied nothing during childhood).
"Revenue Cocaine"
That's what Cato's Dan Mitchell calls new sources of revenue for politicians. Like the wild amounts of airline taxes passengers in the UK are made to pay. Not surprisingly, they're stopping people from flying. From a Telegraph/UK story by Myra Butterworth:
The duty, which is paid by all travellers on leaving Britain and added automatically to the price when a ticket is booked, is to increase by 50 per cent to some destinations....The tax was introduced in 1994 at the rate of £10 on long-haul flights, but increased by the previous Government, which said it was a necessary "green measure".
The duty is split into four bands, with Egypt and the Caribbean being particularly badly hit.The increases mean a family of four flying to the Caribbean will pay £300 in duty compared with the old rate of £200 or £160 last year.
Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways, has branded the higher taxes a "disaster". Earlier this month, he called the duty a "disgrace".
£300 is $487.32. Imagine having an extra $500 tacked onto your family's flight cost and sucked right up by the government.
It's what we're in for if we ever get a VAT, warns Mitchell. Expect politicians to start it out at a "reasonable" 7 percent or so. Start it out. The temptation of snorting revenue cocaine is just too hard to resist after that, and up, up and away! (For the taxes that is, not the airline passengers, who will be staying home in droves.)
Here's what it's doing to Caribbean tourism.
Another story in the Telegraph advises passengers that they can avoid the huge taxes by flying to Europe before catching long-haul flights. When your government makes you take an extra plane just to avoid being taxed blind, something is very, very wrong.
Like We're All Shocked Olbermann Gave $ To Democrats
It's not like anybody is under the impression the guy's non-partisan. Why was he "suspended...indefinitely without pay"? My guess: He's a little pricey.
Why Thomas Sowell Ditched Karl Marx
From a RWN interview by John Hawkins:
When I asked around for some questions, columnist David Harsanyi said he'd be fascinated to know whom you read because you're such an influential guy. Who influences Thomas Sowell?I think life itself has influenced me more than any given individual.
I mean, after all I was a Marxist when I went to the University of Chicago and I was a Marxist after I took Milton Friedman's course. So it's really only when I got to have experience working as an economist in the government that I suddenly began to unravel how government in fact works. So then I could go back and read things that Milton Friedman has said and understand them better now that I had some experience to compare it all to.
I mean there have been a lot of great writers whose things have been very informative, but the actual change of position was really from life experiences. I can think of, you know, books by Banfield -- by, oh heavens, Frederick Olmsted, about the antebellum stuff and so forth. In fact I have a whole list of suggested readings on my Web site.
Well, one last question prompted by your last answer. You said you used to be a Marxist and that changed. Talk a little bit about how you moved from Marxism to conservatism.
It occurred during the summer of 1960 when I was an intern of economics in the U.S. Department of Labor. One of the things that concerned me was the question of the effective minimum wages on employment of low income workers. Of course, there are two theories. I was assigned, for example, to study Puerto Rico and so I discovered that after the minimum wage increases, in particular in industries in Puerto Rico, unemployment would increase.
So I said well, how can I test this? Well, the people who were defending them said no, no, employment went down because a series of hurricanes struck Puerto Rico and in those years destroying the sugar cane. So I said what we needed to do then is find out how much sugar cane was standing in the field before the hurricane struck -- and I could see the people in the room were dumbfounded.
To me, it was just a question of finding out what the facts were. They obviously were not interested in the facts because the labor department was benefitting from administering the minimum wage law.
And they're still not.
I realized then you can't depend on the government because the government is not some brooding presence in the sky. The government is an organization with its own interest which it will serve over and above whatever interest it is supposedly being set up to serve.
Sowell's new book: Dismantling America: and other controversial essays
Community Poo-licing
Most of us will never be held up at gunpoint, but increasingly, we're all victims of these many small muggings every day -- small acts of social thuggery by the rude that end up stressing us out and making our lives feel like one long wrestling smackdown.
As I point out in my book I See Rude People, rude people are actually stealing from us -- our time, our sleep, our safety (when they speed through our neighborhoods or text while driving), and our attention (when they take over what should be shared space by shouting into cell phones).
The problem is, probably because we didn't evolve to be around strangers, most of us don't have it in us to go after rude people or even just tell them off. I'm one of those who will -- and then there's this guy, who went after a very shitty neighbor, in Kate Murphy's story in The New York Times:
STEVE MILLER is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. So he was nonplussed last year when he discovered that someone had been tossing plastic bags of dog excrement into the sculptured shrubs around a palm tree in his front yard."It was a pile of at least 10 bags," said Mr. Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pa., before retiring to Florida in 2005. "I had my suspicions, but wanted to find out for sure which one of my neighbors was doing it."
So Mr. Miller went to a local electronics store and bought a $400 do-it-yourself video surveillance kit. In so doing, he joined the ranks of outraged homeowners who are recording their neighbors' misdeeds. Attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, these homeowners are posting the videos online to shame their neighbors or using them as evidence to press charges.
With their cameras hidden in bushes or dangling from windows, these homeowners are outing not just littering dog owners, but also bottle snatchers and car scratchers. Although Mr. Miller's surveillance system came with two motion-activated cameras, he used only one of them, anchoring it with a zip tie to a concrete balustrade outside an upstairs window and running the wire inside, where he plugged it into a DVR.
A month's worth of video footage clearly showed one of his neighbors slinging bags of dog feces into his yard. "You'd see him come from all directions and even turn around afterwards -- like I was his dumping destination and not just a convenient stop on his way," said Mr. Miller, who showed the video evidence to his community's security patrol. "They were stunned, and wrote the guy a citation for improper waste disposal, littering and leash law violations."
Moreover, the neighbor had to pick up all that he had tossed. Mr. Miller also had some fun at the neighbor's expense, posting a video on YouTube with a suitably silly soundtrack and narration. The video has had more than 4,000 views.
"He never apologized, so that's why I posted it," Mr. Miller said. "But I did wait until after he moved."
The video:
The poo-dropping neighbor has gotten off pretty lucky so far, although I'm guessing his identity will come out in the wake of the Times piece.
The great thing about what Miller and other videotapers are doing? Well, first I should explain that in I See Rude People (based on Robin Dunbar's research on the human neocortex and his projection of the maximum human group size -- of 150), I came to the conclusion that we're rude because we're living in societies too big for our brains. We lack the constraints we'd have from the potential of a person being shamed in a small-town/small tribe setting. A little excerpt from my book:
What good is knowing that we're living in societies way too big for our brains if there's really no reasonable way to change that? I mean, what are we going to do, ship 99.999 percent of New York City back to Poland or Cleveland or Potsdam or wherever they or their ancestors came from, then prohibit the people still left from interacting with more than 150 people -- ever?Although we can't physically recreate a society more in tune with our psychological limitations, the good news is, we can artificially recreate it. What we have to do is mimic the psychological effect the small town/small tribe environment has on people behaving badly -- how the possibility of being caught, shamed, and losing status or getting booted from the fold dissuades people from getting their rude on. And again, while social exile today isn't the death sentence it would have been back in the Stone Age, our genes are still playing and replaying the same old tune in our heads: "It's hard out there alone on the savannah, dude!"
Ironically, the road back to the civility of the 150-person village goes straight through the Global Village. It takes only the Internet and one pissed-off person with a cell phone camera to strip some willful jerk of the protections of obscurity. The pissed-off person posts the photo on their site or one of the many jerk-exposing sites cropping up, and with a little linkie-love from a few bloggers and maybe a news story or two, the perp gets his (or hers).
Who's Your Nanny?
San Francisco lawmaker Eric Mar wants to hold the government, restaurants, and big companies "accountable for the health of our children." Oh, silly me -- I thought that was the job of the parents. Another Ted Balaker production from reason.tv:
By the way, it's entirely possible to eat healthily at McDonald's -- or In-N-Out, or other fast food places. Since carbohydrates cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat (see Gary Taubes), you just order, say, the bacon-cheese Angus burger without the bun.
By the way, they didn't have Happy Meals until I was in my mid-teens, but that didn't stop my sisters and me from wanting McDonald's like crazy when we were kids. (We only got it if we were out with my dad somewhere or if we were driving home from up north -- northern Michigan. On our way upstate, my mother always packed us some dreadful healthy snacks.)
The Natural Look
Yeah, right, sure. The trick, when you're wearing makeup, as one female commenter here once noted, is to spend enough time carefully applying it that it looks like you really aren't wearing much -- or any. Over at Observations of a Nerd, Christie Wilcox blogs:
But, I hear my female readers saying, MY (boyfriend/husband/whoever) says that I look prettier without makeup! Well, it's true that when you poll men about their makeup preferences, as many as one in five says their significant other wears way too much makeup, while one in ten wishes that women didn't wear makeup at all. While that's certainly a nice sentiment, their actions speak louder than their words. Study after study has found that when shown pictures of women with and without their makeup, men consistently rate images with makeup as more attractive, confident, and healthier. Men also think women wearing makeup come off as more intelligent and having higher earning potentials and more prestigious jobs. I'm not saying wearing makeup is more likely to get you hit on at a bar... but Nicolas Guéguen is. He found women wearing makeup were approached sooner and by more men.When you look at the science, it's no wonder that more than $40 billion dollars a year is spent on cosmetics. Makeup works, and it does so because our bodies are programmed to perceive sexual signals from the coloration of our faces. Makeup tricks our brains just enough for it to be worth the time and effort if you want to look hotter. Of course, modern media and the way women are portrayed certainly helps boost sales. But makeup has been used for centuries in disparate and diverse cultures in strikingly similar ways for a reason. In the end, we are drawn to makeup is that it taps into our primal urge to find a young, healthy mate who will produce lots of kids so that we can pass on our genes.
I referred to some of Guéguen's work here.
Interesting Article On Co-Sleeping
Lysa Parker interviews Dr. James McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. An excerpt:
When one looks at traditional care- giving patterns among humans, they are very much reflective of those caregiving systems we see in monkeys and apes. For the first year or two of life, the baby is rarely if at all out of contact with the caregiver. One reason this is true, both for nonhuman and human primates, is that all primates are born neurologically undeveloped at birth. For all intents and purposes they complete their gestation after the womb. Monkeys and apes are born with between 45 and 60 percent of their brains, compared to 80 to 90 for other kinds of mammals. Monkeys and apes too are born relatively undeveloped. They need to be in the arms of their mothers to get physiological support, to be kept warm, to make sure that they're able to keep up with the troupe, and breastfed on demand because they need breastmilk for a year, two years, sometimes three years of life.While we may think that monkeys and apes are undeveloped at birth, human infants are much more so. Human babies are born with only 25 percent of their brain volume relative to adult size. Not only that, they are so undeveloped at birth that they can't cling onto their mother's chests as can all monkeys and apes. We as a species have babies who are neurologically extremely immature, which is to say their central nervous system depends on a microenvironment that is like the in-utero environment, full of sensory exchanges -- heat, sound, movement, transportation, feelings, and of course access to mother's breast as driven by the internal needs of the baby.
That was my introduction to parenting, and my unexpected, dramatic turn of career occurred in the second or third week of my child's life. Because he had been fed cow's milk in the hospital against our wishes, he suffered from intestinal cramping. In order to help him I would literally dance with him practically all night, move him in my arms and rock him to music, which kept me awake and kept him happy. I also noticed that when I lay down with him, if I breathed slowly and had him next to me [where he could] hear my breathing, I could actually regulate his breathing. Our bodies seemed at some point really breathing in synchrony and both resting and calming together. I found that a young infant human could actually monitor and indeed respond to my own breathing -- a highly significant though not surprising finding given the knowledge I had acquired about the physiological effects of separation on little primate babies.
I started putting two and two together and asked, "Why am I so surprised that my son is syncopating his breathing with mine, when in fact human babies depend on external sensory cues and signals from the mother whose body is always there for them?" The more I started thinking about my son's experience and my own, I started wondering whether some instances of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) occur because the more extremely immature babies who depend on breathing cues, touch and smells to arouse and engage them, would depend on those external cues to which they could become en-trained and be reminded to breathe should that be an issue. Even having the caregiver simply there to touch might be a proactive way of offsetting the congenital deficiency that manifests itself in the form of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
One problem is when older children are allowed to co-sleep. According to McKenna, it has long term benefits for the children (while UCLA researcher Dr. Paul Okami found neither positive or negative ones at age 18 from his 18-year study of 205 families), but it can have really negative consequences for the parents' sex life and the marriage. Some women, especially, take all their loving energy, turn it away from the husband and direct it to their children. Dangerous.
The Comment Too Horrible For Jezebel To Publish
They have a blog item expressing their HORROR at my failure to parrot feminist talking points, and how I instead wrote in Psychology Today that women should take a more realistic approach to beauty -- to realize that making themselves as beautiful as they can be allows them access: to men, to jobs, and more.
The commenters there are all expressing their disgust and horror that I would say such vile things, but their comments there are moderated and it seems some of them aren't getting through. Naturally, they've got standards...comments must be "interesting and constructive"! (more on that below).
As for the comment for them too awful to publish? No, it wasn't this one by laramee:
laramee 03:16 AMI wouldn't take Amy Alkon that seriously. She's a well-known joke in literary and psychology circles.
She's scrapes a living as a freelance writer trying to self promote. She sits at home in a dumpy apartment in Los Angeles penning gross generalizations about how women should look, behave, and dress. She can afford to make such obscene generalizations because, well...she ain't got a whole lot going for her life. No real career? check. No marriage? check. No kids to raise? check. It's always easy to tell other women how they should look when you're a self-absorbed writer sitting in your apartment and you've vested nothing into life. Except for an insipid little dog that a 12 lb. cat could sit on and squash.
She has a book out on rudeness in society; yet she doesn't hesitate to refer to children as "crotch fruit" or women who have children as "breeders." She's about as anti-feminist and anti-woman as they get.
Not only that, she has no degree in any of the evo psych topics she spouts off about. But this doesn't stop her from trying to make herself appear smarter than she really is by constantly name dropping researchers.
Dear Jezebel readers: you are all much, much more clever than this charlatan who calls herself an "advice goddess." I wouldn't worry about her too much at all.
She's a total nobody.
skahammer promoted this comment
Mireille is Cattery-Operated approved this comment
There was this bit of dissent below it. (Oh, and for the record, my insipid dog and I do not live in a dumpy apartment but in a very cute house, and I often "name-drop" researchers when I quote them in my column, as it's kind of rude and bad form to use somebody's work without crediting them):
skahammer 07:13 AM@laramee: But if the author's process were so flawed, then it would be easy to substantively critique her reasoning -- instead of simply resorting to a crude and dubiously relevant ad hominem attack, right?
This may in fact be the kind of non-substantive critique which makes the original argument look stronger.
Meanwhile, what was Jessica's comment and why was it not published? Here's her e-mail exchange with the Jezeseventhgradegirlbullies, starting with a note to me at the top:
Amy -I've copied and pasted the entire conversation, from the automated response to my comment (including my comment, almost identical to the one I posted on your blog) to the most recent email from the comment moderator (Morning Gloria), oldest to newest, top to bottom.
They have been polite, to be fair, but they haven't given me good answers, either. I'll update you with the comment moderator's answer, as I've now forwarded her the link AND the original comment.
I really enjoyed your article.
Best,
Jessica
Thank you for commenting on Jezebel. To confirm your email address and submit your comment, please click this link:
http://jezebel.com/ccs?id=31829031&cs=9dad25cd3ccd0720585acf7c57ea2ec7We will assign you a username, which will be visible to others, based on the part of your email address before the @ sign. For example, matt.jones@gawker.com's username would be matt.jones. Your complete email address will NOT be published on the site. If you want a completely anonymous username, you should create an account manually on our site, which will allow you to choose your own username. You can do that here: http://jezebel.com/#register
Even after you click the above link, your comment will not display on the site until your comment is approved. We will notify you if your comment is approved.
Your comment:
---------------------------------------------------Ugh. I'm so completely disgusted by so many of these entitlement complex-oriented comments. I'm pregnant. I was slightly overweight to begin with, so I've read a lot about how to avoid excessive weight gain during pregnancy and stay in shape. I'm working hard on it. And it's for both my husband AND me. What's wrong with doing something to keep myself attractive for him? He keeps his well-paying software development job in part for me! I work, too, but I make much less money. All of these arguments about the excuses of letting oneself go - kids, finances, whatever...what the hell, having kids should force you to run around, burning calories, and eat healthier, because you surely don't want to raise kids on a bunch of damned junk food. I just don't get it. Or, I guess I do, and it makes me sad. Many commenters think that the world owes them something. Newsflash: the world doesn't owe any of us anything, regardless of gender, shape, color, or anything else.
---------------------------------------------------
(e-mail from Jessica to Jezebel when her comment was not posted:)
Hello,
I read your critique of Amy Alkon's article about beauty with interest. I occasionally check Amy Alkon's blog, and because of references made in her blog, also occasionally check Jezebel. I do not always or even frequently agree with either Amy or the things I read on Jezebel, but am very very interested in the different perspectives. I read things like this to broaden my horizons.
I would like to express my disappointment to you, therefore, that Jezebel has seemingly made the decision not to post comments that disagree with the status quo among the commenters. It tells me that authors and webmasters at Jezebel are unwilling to broaden their own horizons and consider the viewpoints of others.
My apparently unapproved comment was not abrasive or rude, but in this case, I did agree with Amy's evaluation, although I respected your criticism of the subject as valid. However, once the criticism among the (approved!) comments denigrated into attacks on Amy's living situation and childlessness - as if that somehow makes her writing less valid (how incredibly feminist and progressive!) - I was appalled.
I'm sure that the site has enough viewers who enjoy martyrdom and two dimensional victimhood with an unwillingness to compromise or learn more without my patronage, so I suppose I'm just venting in that familiar feminine manner. The Jezebel site has lost all credibility with me, not because of a post I disagreed with - no, rather, it's because the site refuses to acknowledge or even allow the opposition viewpoint. Jezebel's designers and writers should peruse the comments at both Amy's blog as well as the Women of the Web blog - wowowow.com - to see what free speech is really about.
Best,
Jessica F.
(e-mail from Jezebel to Jessica:)Hi Jessica,
I am forwarding your email to our commenter moderator, Morning Gloria. Comments are not automatically approved because we do not want spam and/or crude, lewd, sexist, racist, bodysnarking comments. There are just a few moderators in the threads who promote, demote and approve comments, and they do not do so full time, around the clock. This means that sometimes comments are left unapproved. Your comment was not singled out, and if there hundreds of comments, it was probably overlooked due to the volume of comments. Generally, a reader must leave a few comments before he or she becomes an approved commenter, which keeps us from having spam and hate-speech filled posts.
But just so we're clear, while "free speech" is a human right, monitoring our comments on our site does not impact that right. Your unapproved comment is not the same as a government silencing you from holding your opinion. In any case, your message has been passed along to our commenter moderator, and she can attempt to find and approve your comment. You may reach her at commenters@jezebel.com if you have further questions.
Best,
Dodai
(e-mail from Jessica to Jezebel)I want you to know that I really appreciate your response, and I will forward the link to the comment moderator as she's instructed so that I can specifically understand why my comment hasn't been approved.
I do appreciate your time and this exchange.
Best,
Jessica
(e-mail from Jezebel to Jessica:)Hi Jessica,
Dodai Stewart forwarded me an email you sent her wherein you complained that opposing viewpoints are not allowed in Jezebel comments. This is absolutely not the case. Dozens of people audition to comment every day, and many are not approved for a variety of reasons, none of which is "disagreeing.". As the head moderator, I want jezebel to be a community of commenters who can civilly converse about a range of issues, with a healthy serving of snarky humor on the side. I have left commenter accounts unapproved for breaking community rules, for being abusive toward the site or toward other commenters, for not contributing to the discussion, and for straight up being boring. If your comment wasn't approved, it was for one of the above reasons, not for disagreeing. It is also possible that you commented some time after the article was originally posted and no moderators saw you unapproved comment. This happens fairly often, as we all have jobs and don't have the time to scan through the archives every day.
If you'd like me to specifically address why your comment wasn't approved, please provide me with a link to the comment in question or to your commenter account.
Thanks for reading,
MorningGloria
JessicaF sent me the e-mail with their comment warden's final say "on the matter":
I'm not going to approve commenters that say things that I don't deem as really interesting contributions, full stop. In addition to finding the comment condescending, I didn't find the comment interesting OR constructive.And discussing the subject of an article is different than discussing other comments on the article.
At any rate, it is unfortunate that you're upset about this, but I'm afraid I've said all I have to say on the matter.
Enjoy the day,
Mg
Right. Like their published comments on the subject were all so FASCINATING and "constructive" (my "insipid dog" and where I supposedly live are meaningful to a discussion of something I've written?). Clearly, it's all about the echo chamber!
Interestingly, this laramee person probably knows more about me than a lot of regular commenters here. Clearly, I'm of little interest to her, save for her daily study of everything I do and say!
There is one good thing that came out of this. While I'm used to being attacked by people who get upset that I'm not politically or feministically correct, a young researcher I know who had her work (unfairly) savaged by Jezebel is not. I wrote to her to tell her Jessica F.'s experience, and suggested that there were surely some dissenting comments that weren't published when they wrote about her study.
Jezebel: The single best place on the 'net for women still trapped in seventh grade.
P.S. Hilariously, judging people by looks seems no big deal to the Jezebellies when feminist talking points aren't being violated. Advicegoddess commenter "a random guy" accidentally went to the wrong link on Jezebel (looking for his comment that remains unposted) and found this and a few other comments like it:
cyrcaline 09/15/10"People judge people on looks! Everyone outraged! News at 11!" ::yawn:: Part of being an individual is that you get to have your own weird criteria and hangups vis a vis interactions with other people. Though I'm a little jealous of the social permission men get to say 'I judge on looks' whereas I when I was a younger girl I was encouraged to 'give that young man a try, he's got a great personality'. Life's too short to date people you wouldn't fuck.
I completely agree.
Yoohoo, Washington
David Harsanyi at Real Clear Politics on what the people were saying on election day:
Exit polls showed that this election was a rejection of the progressive agenda of "stimulus," of Obamacare, of cap and trade. Exit polls show that there was great anger with government - not government that didn't work, or government that didn't do enough, but government that didn't know its place. The Senate seats that Republicans lost were to Democrats who sounded more conservative than their opponents.Smart people will almost certainly pontificate about the end of the purist days when public servants were respected and government was creating jobs. All, of course, imagined. They will lament all this irrational angst. They couldn't help themselves but to continue to mock and deride their ideological opponents.
The right wing - and I learned this from much of the news coverage - came out in droves with a predisposed aversion to change; they were paranoid, suspicious, uneasy, unhinged, or in other words, they had the appropriate attitude for the times. This, laments the smart man, means gridlock exactly when we need government most - which, let's face it, according to the left, is always.
But now there's hope.
...In many ways, in fact, 2012 portends to be a more consequential year, where either the country continues to trend in the direction of limited government ideals, or the massive bureaucratic institutions built in the past two years will be cemented for the long run.
No matter what happens, for now, we can look forward to two glorious years of hyper-partisan acrimonious gridlock: Washington's most moral and productive state.
Michael Moynihan in reason on why there's no hope in California:
The voters of California are the worst people on Earth: Back in 2003, they elected (and then reelected) an Austrian action hero that turned out to be as awful, if not worse, than the governor voters recalled. And now those very progressive, wheat grass-drinking Californians managed to elect Jerry Brown (insert Dead Kennedy's reference here) and prolong the career of Barbara Boxer, while voting against the legalization of marijuana. And if that weren't bad enough, the San Francisco city council yesterday approved a measure to ban Happy Meals, to be replaced by Sad Meals featuring Lori Berenson trading cards and tofu sticks in the shape of Cuba. But remember, their auras smile and never frown.
Clearly, before long, everything but breathing will be banned and the state will be so weighted down by debt it will break off the continent and fall into the Pacific Ocean.
Econ (Minus) 101
Hilarious Second City video of a guy asking Obama supporters whether he's a Keynesian (the best is the sweatshirted woman who flies into a rage):
via @walterolson
Daschle: Find Out What's In Health Reform Before Repealing It
Just love that suggestion from Tom Daschle, from Real Clear Politics:
We've got to make sure we know what's in the bill before we start talking about repealing or changing it in any dramatic way," former Senator Tom Daschle (D) said on MSNBC.
Um, actually, as Dr. Michael Eades tweeted:
I would say we needed to find out what was in the healthcare bill before we passed it.
Meet George W. Obama
President Obama warned voters against "going back to the failed policies of the past decade." Um, as Ted Balaker points out at reason.tv, there's no going back to the failed policies of the Bush-Obama era...because we never left them:
Balaker writes:
Check out the record: George W. Bush backed bank bailouts; Obama backed bank bailouts. Bush bailed out automakers; Obama bailed out automakers. Bush signed a stimulus package; Obama signed a stimulus package. Bush vowed to clean up Wall Street by passing a package of complex financial regulations; So did Obama. Bush championed a massive new health care entitlement; so did Obama. Bush spent like mad, and so did Obama.At a rally in Minnesota President Obama explained that "the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." What's madder still is doing the same thing over and over--and doing it on a bigger scale--and expecting different results. Take spending increases. Obama rips Bush for "turning record surpluses into record deficits," even though Obama's spending record tops Bush who topped every president since Lyndon Johnson. And from stimulus packages to health care entitlements, Obama's strategy is to take a bad Bush policy and make it worse.
Of course, there are areas where the two presidents really have governed differently, and Obama amplifies those while stumping for fellow Democrats (Tax the rich!). Some stump speech applause lines seem to rely mostly on audience ignorance. (Attention rally attendees: Bush did not cut education funding. He increased it by 58 percent.) And from deficits to the drug war to pork politics, you won't find much change to believe in.
Reality Is Such A Bitch, And So Am I
Hello, Amy "Eva Braun" Alkon here, traitor to the feminist cause with my just-posted Psychology Today piece on the truths about beauty. As always, I tell it like it is:
We consider it admirable when people strive to better themselves intellectually; we don't say, "Hey, you weren't born a genius, so why ever bother reading a book?" Why should we treat physical appearance any differently? For example, research shows that men prefer women with full lips, smaller chins, and large eyes--indicators of higher levels of estrogen. Some lucky women have big eyes; others just seem to, thanks to the clever application of eyeshadow. As the classic commercial says, "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline." (If it increases her options, who cares which it is?)...To understand what it takes to be beautiful, we need to be very clear about what being beautiful means--being sexually appealing to men. And then, instead of snarling that male sexuality is evil, we need to accept that it's just different--far more visually-driven than female sexuality. To focus our efforts, we can turn to an increasing number of studies by evolutionary psychologists on what most men seem to want. For example, the University of Texas' Devendra Singh discovered that men, across cultures, are drawn to a woman with an hourglass figure. Men like to see a woman's waist--even on the larger ladies--so burn those muumuus, which only reveal your girlish figure in a Category 5 hurricane, and if you don't have much of a waist, do your best to give yourself one with the cut of your clothes or a belt.
Too many women try to get away with a bait-and-switch approach to appearance upkeep. If you spend three hours a day in the gym while you're dating a guy, don't think that you can walk down the aisle and say "I do...and, guess what...now I don't anymore!" A woman needs to come up with a workable routine for maintaining her looks throughout her lifetime and avoid rationalizing slacking off-- while she's seeking a man and after she has one. Yeah, you might have to put five or ten extra minutes into prettying up just to hang around the house. And, sure, you might be more "comfortable" in big sloppy sweats, but how "comfortable" will you be if he leaves you for a woman who cares enough to look hot for him?
Whoops, seems I failed to parrot the feminist talking points. Shockingly, they're hating on me for it over at Jezebel (now who would've predicted that?)!
Furthermore, the culture of lookism thrives on competition and exclusion. It creates an atmosphere in which things a young woman has no control over -- acne, a big nose, a non-hourglass figure -- trump the things she does have a say in: Sense of humor, book smarts, kindness. We're left with a system in which those who luck out in the genetic lottery win at life, hard work and merit be damned.
Basically, there's a big "is"/"ought" conflict here. I write and give advice for the way things are. To tell women attractiveness "shouldn't" matter is ridiculous. It will not stop mattering, no matter how many feminists bleat for decades that it "should."
Men prefer attractive women (and research shows that male preferences tend to be similar across populations and cultures), and attractive women tend to do better in many spheres, so it behooves women to try to be as attractive as they can -- within reason. In Lisa Kudrow's words on plastic surgery:
There's a line between looking like yourself and looking like a character from a Batman movie.
By the way, regarding another bit of "is"/"ought," somebody should put the word out to the Jezebellies that life is filled with "competition and exclusion." You don't help young women, or any women, by sitting around howling that things should be different, but by telling them how to compete and be included.
An example: I don't have a high-powered publicist to promote my book -- or any publicist -- yet I got myself on The Today Show, and in a media environment that's more competitive than it's ever been. How? Instead of just complaining that it's difficult to get a book noticed (my joke: you can't get on TV these days unless you have adulterous sex with a celebrity), I took steps to try to get noticed. I had Gregg make me up a special, attention-getting envelope, and when we were in New York, he dragged around with me all over media Manhattan as I left off books and packets in the envelope he made.
A couple of weeks went by, and I didn't hear from anybody, but I still felt good about our little effort. As I write in my book I See Rude People, the best way to feel like you're not a victim is to act like you're not a victim...even if you don't end up triumphing in the end. In this case, my feeling was, "Well, at least I gave it my absolute best shot." And then, last Tuesday, the phone rang, with a number I recognized to be the New York City number for NBC.
Amy On The Today Show: Is Civility Dead?
Here I am in my appearance from this morning on The Today Show, right at the top of the piece!
If you don't have my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, do buy a copy at the link! Only $11.53 with Amazon's discount.
The Truth About Beauty
My piece in the December issue of Psychology Today debunking myths we cling to about beauty is now online, and it seems I'm enraging more than a few readers with my departures from the feminist talking points. Here's an excerpt:
There are certain practical realities of existence that most of us accept. If you want to catch a bear, you don't load the trap with a copy of Catch-22--not unless you rub it with a considerable quantity of raw hamburger. If you want to snag a fish, you can't just slap the water with your hand and yell, "Jump on my hook, already!" Yet, if you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're "beautiful on the inside," that's all that should count. Right. And I should have a flying car and a mansion in Bel Air with servants and a moat.Welcome to Uglytopia--the world reimagined as a place where it's the content of a woman's character, not her pushup bra, that puts her on the cover of Maxim. It just doesn't seem fair to us that some people come into life with certain advantages--whether it's a movie star chin or a multimillion-dollar shipbuilding inheritance. Maybe we need affirmative action for ugly people; maybe make George Clooney rotate in some homely women between all his gorgeous girlfriends. While we wish things were different, we'd best accept the ugly reality: No man will turn his head to ogle a woman because she looks like the type to buy a turkey sandwich for a homeless man or read to the blind.
There is a vast body of evidence indicating that men and women are biologically and psychologically different, and that what heterosexual men and women want in partners directly corresponds to these differences. The features men evolved to go for in women--youth, clear skin, a symmetrical face and body, feminine facial features, an hourglass figure--are those indicating that a woman would be a healthy, fertile candidate to pass on a man's genes.
These preferences span borders, cultures, and generations, meaning yes, there really are universal standards of beauty. And while Western women do struggle to be slim, the truth is, women in all cultures eat (or don't) to appeal to "the male gaze." The body size that's idealized in a particular culture appears to correspond to the availability of food. In cultures like ours, where you can't go five miles without passing a 7-Eleven and food is sold by the pallet-load at warehouse grocery stores, thin women are in. In cultures where food is scarce (like in Sahara-adjacent hoods), blubber is beautiful, and women appeal to men by stuffing themselves until they're slim like Jabba the Hut.
Men's looks matter to heterosexual women only somewhat. Most women prefer men who are taller than they are, with symmetrical features (a sign that a potential partner is healthy and parasite-free). But, women across cultures are intent on finding male partners with high status, power, and access to resources--which means a really short guy can add maybe a foot to his height with a private jet. And, just like women who aren't very attractive, men who make very little money or are chronically out of work tend to have a really hard time finding partners. There is some male grumbling about this. Yet, while feminist journalists deforest North America publishing articles urging women to bow out of the beauty arms race and "Learn to love that woman in the mirror!", nobody gets into the ridiculous position of advising men to "Learn to love that unemployed guy sprawled on the couch!"
Now, before you brand me a traitor to my gender, let me say that I'm all for women having the vote, and I think a woman with a mustache should make the same money as a man with a mustache. But you don't help that woman by advising her, "No need to wax that lip fringe or work off that beer belly!" (Because the road to female empowerment is...looking just like a hairy old man?)
Continued at the link to Psychology Today.
Social Thuggery
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." --Eric Hoffer
Hoffer wrote the classic book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,
Here's a review by Jonathan L. Widger on Amazon:
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."--Eric Hoffer, The true BelieverNone of the terrorists of September 11 were destitute. Some even had wives and children. Nevertheless, they committed suicide for their cause. Anyone wanting to understand this horrible irony would do well to read Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) was a self-educated US author and philosopher who was a migratory worker and longshoreman until 1967. He achieved immediate acclaim with his first book, The true Believer.
According to Hoffer, the early converts to any mass movement come from the ranks of the "frustrated," that is, "people who..feel that their lives are spoiled or wasted." The true believers' "Faith in [their] holy cause is to a considerable extent a subsitute for [their] lost faith in [themselves]." He says that we are prone to throw ourselves into a mass movement to "supplant and efface the self we want to forget." He then adds, "We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it."
Hoffer offers a general insight about mass movements, which seems to prophetically explain why there is currently widespread anti-Western sentiment within Islamic countries:
"The discontent generated in backward countries by their contact with Western civilization is not primarily resentment against exploitation by domineering foriegners. It is rather the result of a crumbling or weakening of tribal solidarity and communal life.
"The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing West offers to the backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal existence. Even when the Westernized native attains personal success--becomes rich, or masters a respected profession--he is not happy."
Further along, Hoffer mentions those who "want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society."
Why should individualism, freedom, and self-advancement be hated? Again, I can do no better than quote Hoffer:
"Freedom aggravates as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably muliplies failure and frustration...Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join mass movements to escape individual responsibility...."
In light of the above quotes, there is little wonder that the terrorists chose to destroy the Twin Towers. These were architectural symboles of individualism and self-advancement.
But Hoffer's book does more than give us insight into the psychology of the fanatic. It causes us to soberly contemplate ourselves. For who has not experienced failure, frustration, and a sense of futility at one time or another? The true Believer is one of those few books I consider to contain ideas approximating to true "wisdom."
The Case For Repeal
Reason Foundation's Manny Klausner sent me this link to a Yuval Levin piece in The Weekly Standard on why Obamacare needs to be repealed:
The law will spend a trillion dollars over the next decade and increase taxes by half a trillion; create a massive new entitlement on top of those that are already threatening to bankrupt the government; impose a vast array of new rules and mandates on providers, insurers, employers, and consumers; insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients; increase the burden of Medicaid costs for the states; and cause millions of middle class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today and pay even higher premiums.Rather than reducing costs, Obamacare will increase national health expenditures by more than $200 billion--according to the Obama administration's own actuary. Rather than pave the way for entitlement reform, it will take the resources that future policymakers might have used to improve the structure of Medicare and use them instead to construct a new entitlement that will grow more expensive more quickly than Medicare itself. And all of this to increase the portion of Americans who have health insurance from just under 85 percent today to about 95 percent in 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. There are far better ways to contain costs and so increase access to coverage--above all, by increasing the control consumers have over how their health care dollars are spent. Opponents of Obamacare proposed a variety of such approaches this year.
All this we knew, and said, last spring. But today, we know even more about why the law must be repealed. We know with far greater certainty, for instance, that Obamacare will make it very attractive for both large and small employers to stop providing insurance coverage, thereby sending millions more into the subsidized exchanges than the CBO accounted for, and thus sharply increasing the cost of the law and with it the deficit. We know that Obamacare will make it more difficult for many providers of nonstandard insurance (like colleges insuring young students, or employers providing bare-bones plans to part-time workers) to offer coverage. We know that it will drive up premiums--since it has already begun to do so. We know that it will create massive administrative headaches for businesses and consumers--for instance, requiring companies to file 1099 forms with the IRS for any vendor whom they pay more than $600 in a given year, and requiring a prescription to buy over-the-counter drugs with money from flex spending or health savings accounts.
We know that the people who designed the bill and the people charged with implementing it were not aware of a lot of this.
Gotta love those legislators who close their eyes and vote for legislation they haven't read -- legislation that will not only cause the price of my health insurance to skyrocket but will have me 1099-ing the airlines and Staples.
Tuesday On Today
I think I'll be on the Today Show tomorrow (Tuesday), in about a 30 second clip, in their piece on the decline of civility in the 8 a.m. hour (assuming I didn't end up on the video version of the cutting room floor).
If you haven't read my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, I hope you'll pick up a copy. Only $11.53 with Amazon's discount at the link above!
I'll post a clip when it's up on MSNBC (unless I come off dour and nervous, in which case I'll pretend I can't find it).
The Politics Of Polarization, Resentment, And Division
Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen write in the WaPo of the divided states of America that have replaced Obama's post-partisan America:
In a Univision interview on Monday, the president, who campaigned in 2008 by referring not to a "Red America" or a "Blue America" but a United States of America, urged Hispanic listeners to vote in this spirit: "We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."Recently, Obama suggested that if Republicans gain control of the House and/or Senate as forecast, he expects not reconciliation and unity but "hand-to-hand combat" on Capitol Hill.
What a change two years can bring.
We can think of only one other recent president who would display such indifference to the majesty of his office: Richard Nixon.
We write in sadness as traditional liberal Democrats who believe in inclusion. Like many Americans, we had hoped that Obama would maintain the spirit in which he campaigned. Instead, since taking office, he has pitted group against group for short-term political gain that is exacerbating the divisions in our country and weakening our national identity.The culture of attack politics and demonization risks compromising our ability to address our most important issues - and the stature of our nation's highest office.
Getting Around Our Govern-nannies' Lightbulb Ban
Good news out of Germany -- an entrepreneur has come up with a way around the EU ban on incandescent bulbs of over 60 watts. Via Reuters:
Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs -- by producing them in China, importing them as "small heating devices" and selling them as "heatballs."...Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light -- he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent -- they could be sold legally as heaters.
...Costing 1.69 euros each ($2.38), the heatballs are going down well -- the first batch of 4,000 sold out in three days.
Thanks to the arrival of my check from Psychology Today (I have a piece in the December issue about the uncomfortable truths about beauty -- on newsstands in November), I will soon begin buying and hoarding bulbs. In case you hadn't heard, the elected pandering idiots who have run up the deficit so enormously that your great-grandchildren will be cleaning house for the Chinese have, in their great wisdom, decided that we can no longer have incandescent bulbs after 2014.
Those damn Democrats! Oh, whoops...seems the bill was signed into law by Mr. Small Government In Name Only, aka President George Bush, aka the man who seemed to have lost his VETO stamp his first day in office, and only found it again the day he and Mrs. Bush were clearing out.
My solution, unless any Americans come up with some good loopholes? Check out this webpage, see the item second from the bottom -- the 100-watt, 5,000-hour bulb that's 33 cents each when you buy 120 or more. I'll be buying 200 of them. You?
P.S. If anybody can find bulbs cheaper than 33 cents each, please let us all know. (I like 100-watt frosted.)
"Radical Fatherlessness" In The Black Community
I keep calling for it -- that single motherhood in the black community, especially (with the highest out-of-wedlock rates of any community) must be stigmatized by black leaders. From the Globe and Mail from 2005:
Who is doing the killing and who is being killed in the wave of reckless public violence that has struck Toronto? Black boys and young men with no fathers in their homes. Yet as politicians at all three levels and black community leaders scramble for answers to the anarchy, no one has dared talk about the crisis of fatherlessness in the black community.The silence is inexcusable. Growing up without a father present is now the norm for many black children in Canada, particularly those of Jamaican ancestry. Nearly half of all black children under 14 in Canada have just one parent in the home, compared to slightly under one in five of Canadian children as a whole, census figures from 2001 show. Two in three Jamaican-Canadian children in Toronto are being raised by a single parent. The U.S. trend of "radical fatherlessness" -- in which the majority of children in an apartment building, on a street or in a neighbourhood lack fathers -- is hitting Toronto like a tsunami.
Other countries have begun to acknowledge that the widespread absence of fathers contributes to crushing rates of school failure, teen pregnancy and violence. In Britain, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who is black, last month criticized the "almost casual acceptance" that most black children grow up fatherless.
...Some may argue that it takes a village to raise a child. But the truth is that the urban public-housing village is drenched in social toxins such as drugs, violence and poor role models. And in that toxic village, fatherless boys are left to themselves to determine what it means to be a man. Where do they look? To one another, and to those of influence in the public realm such as U.S. gangsta rapper Fifty Cent, himself a fatherless boy whose vision of masculinity glorifies lethal violence.
More of that, please.
In a 2008 piece in The Weekly Standard, Duncan Currie writes:
The connection between family breakdown and child poverty is well established. In a 1991 American Sociological Review article, David J. Eggebeen and Daniel T. Lichter estimated that if black family composition had remained constant from 1960 to 1988, the black child poverty rate in 1988 would have been 28.4 percent instead of 45.6 percent. If black family composition had remained constant from 1980 to 1988, Eggebeen and Lichter said, the black child poverty rate in 1988 would have been 40 percent instead of 45.6 percent."This implies that changing black family structure in the 1980s accounted for roughly 65 percent of the increase in official poverty among black children," they noted. "Black family shifts in the 1980s also accounted for 51 percent of the increase in deep poverty, and about 90 percent of the growth in relative child poverty." Family breakdown also had an intensifying effect on the child poverty rates of whites, but it "had a much greater effect on the child poverty rates of blacks."
...More recently, a 2002 study by Rector and two of his Heritage colleagues concluded that "if marriage were restored to 1960 levels," the black child poverty rate "would fall by nearly a third." A separate 2002 study by Urban Institute economist Robert Lerman, which relied on data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, found that "married couple households were much more likely to avoid poverty than all other types of households," and that "the apparent gains from marriage are particularly high among black households."
Due to America's racial history, blacks were uniquely vulnerable to the debilitating cultural trends of the post-1960s era and to the perverse incentives created by the federal welfare system. And indeed, today it is culture--not racism or a dearth of economic opportunities--that poses the biggest threat to black family structures, and thus to black progress.
When I talked last at the inner-city school, I told the kids that getting pregnant or getting a girl pregnant before you're established as a person, and in your career, and married is damaging to any children you might have (they are forced to grow up in poverty, etc.). The teacher gave me a gentle talking-to afterward, and said they were all kids from single mother homes (I'd guessed that) so it was better not to say that. Well, I think somebody has to. That talk is way, way, way overdue.
