How Do You Drop Your Kids Off At A Child-Killer's?
Via Kate Coe, this story out of the NYT about a woman whose husband's ex (with whom he reunited) who shot killed her own two little girls, and is now being allowed to have the woman's teen boys living under her roof.
Trisha Conlon doesn't want her boys staying over with her ex-husband, John Cushing, and his first wife, Kristine, who claimed she was under the influence of Prozac when she shot and killed her 4- and 8-year-old daughters in their sleep. From an AP story:
After a decade of psychiatric monitoring, Ms. Cushing received an unconditional release from the State of California in 2005, when the authorities determined that she posed no risk. But that has done little to soothe Ms. Conlon. After learning that Ms. Cushing had returned to Mr. Cushing's home, Ms. Conlon went to court to alter the parenting plan for the two sons she had with him."I just don't understand how a person could have marital relations with the person who killed their children," Ms. Conlon said. "It just doesn't make sense to me."
But the court ruled against Ms. Conlon.
Commissioner Leonid Ponomarchuk of King County Superior Court said that since the boys had been spending time with Ms. Cushing since 2008 with no problems -- even if it was unknown to Ms. Conlon -- there was not evidence of a change in situation that would warrant a change of the parenting plan.
"I have to look at this dispassionately," Commissioner Ponomarchuk said. "Would I ever want my children around her? I would say no. But that is an emotional reaction coming from a parent."
In court declarations, Mr. Cushing has emphasized that Ms. Cushing was considered temporarily insane, and thus "there was no crime committed."
"There was a horrible tragedy that resulted in the deaths of our two daughters," Mr. Cushing wrote. Ms. Conlon and her lawyer, he added, "seem to feel that anyone who suffers from temporary insanity is incapable of recovering from that condition. Kristine's doctors disagree."
"Kristine M. Cushing is doing well," he wrote. "She is busy, enjoys life and loves me and my sons."
Mr. Cushing noted that he stored his guns at a friend's home when he was not using them at a range.
That must be a huge relief for the boys' mother. Are the kitchen knives also stored elsewhere?
We know an increasing amount about the brain, but we really don't know enough to guarantee that this woman is fine now, and that the Prozac defense was anything more than a grasp for her freedom. When you've slaughtered your own children in your sleep, are we really going to let you be around children?
You've got to love that teens who sext each other and are declared sex offenders for it can't be around kids, but a mother who shoots her sleeping children...no problem!
Next They'll Be Telling Us Men Don't Marry And Live Happily Ever After With Street Hookers
A Cridster comment reminded me again to blog this, the Brits' dipshitted ban against a L'Oreal ad campaign featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington on account of how they were biting the heads off puppies in the photographs.
Oh, wait -- it was just that the images were overly airbrushed, per a complaint by Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson.
Airbrushed? Wow. Really? Who woulda thunk it?
Mark Sweney writes for The Guardian:
Swinson, who has waged a long-running campaign against "overly perfected and unrealistic images" of women in adverts, lodged complaints with the Advertising Standards Authority about the magazine campaigns for L'Oréal-owned brands Lancôme and Maybelline. The ASA ruled that both ads breached the advertising standards code for exaggeration and being misleading and banned them from future publication.
"Overly perfected and unrealistic images" of women?
Doesn't that describe most people who make it as movie stars? What's next, forcing Hollywood's hotties out of work and forcing studios to hire The Women of Walmart or at least ordinary housewives to play "ordinary housewives" in the movies?
Thanks, but when I open a magazine or turn on the TV, I like to see beauty. And I think in the age of the Internet, we're all sophisticated enough to understand that Julia Roberts is over 40 and sometimes has a pimple.
"This ban sends a powerful message to advertisers - let's get back to reality."
I would say the message it's sending is that women are stupid cows who can't figure out that people in ads really don't look like that. Which is a legitimate complaint if the women are Hadza tribespeople.
The Handouts President
Holman Jenkins writes in the WSJ about Obama's high speed train fantasy:
Mr. Obama's mumbo jumbo about high-speed rail is always especially delicious. Passenger rail has spent almost a century proving its unviability in most of the U.S. as competition to cars and planes. Mr. Obama resorts to pure fantasy: "Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," he said in one of his gaudier speeches on the subject, "no racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination."Huh? Trains have been a favorite terrorist target around the world, including London and Madrid, so expect security delays. As for the ineffably swift and sure service Mr. Obama seems to guarantee, we'll refrain from mentioning the Post Office.
But the real purpose is spending without purpose, to colonize a sector of the economy and turn it into an adjunct of Democratic fund raising. That's why $8 billion in Obama stimulus funds were spread over "high-speed rail" projects that mostly had nothing to do with high-speed rail, but did happen to cover a lot of congressional districts.
...It's not that Mr. Obama doesn't recognize the desperate nature of our budget crisis. He does--and is fighting by every means possible to protect and enlarge the government's share at the expense of the private sector's.
Politics has long been defined as the process of determining who gets what. Politicians are professionally motivated to enlarge the resources under their control. Mr. Obama certainly is not a breaker of molds. His political core consists entirely of spending interests. His intellectual inspiration, Saul Alinsky, the godfather of community organizing, was all about mobilizing to gain power over resources. He wasn't particularly deep about the larger purposes of society or how resources come to exist in the first place.
Here in California, if you buy your plane ticket in advance, it's $59 from LA to San Francisco on Southwest. From a paper on the cost of high-speed rail by the Community Coalition on High Speed Rail (references for the piece below at the link), here's the price of a train compared to driving:
The CHSRA expects more than half their passengers will come from autos. In 2008 The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) said the cost of a one-way ticket between Anaheim/Los Angeles and San Francisco would be $55.1 By the end of 2009, that one-way fare had risen to $105.2 That's a 90% increase in one year. According to the CHSRA, for a family of four to ride the train between those destinations it will cost $840 round trip; and then they'll need to rent a car.If that same family were to drive that 407 miles between the state's major metropolises, and use the standard deduction the Federal government allows for business trips by car, the total cost would be $206.3 That puts an automobile round-trip at $412, including all the costs of owning the auto; that is, fuel, taxes, insurance, amortization, etc. Only counting gasoline costs at $4.50/gallon, the round trip would cost about $200. Four rail tickets are twice as much as the total cost of driving and four times the gasoline costs.
Using empirical evidence from analyzing fares on high-speed train routes in Europe and Japan, it appears the CHSRA's high-speed rail per mile rate should be about $0.44/mile to recover operating and construction costs; 80% higher than their presently-used $0.24/mile.4 Setting aside for a moment the fact that all but two of the world's high-speed rail routes are subsidized, and assuming they at least break even, the analyzed per mile rate would make a one-way SF to LA ticket cost about $190.5 Therefore, if the CHSRA's assumed private operator must charge enough to break even, four tickets for a LA/SF round trip would cost at least $1,520.
Conclusions: California's 2009 median household income was $42,548.6. For a middle class household to ride the train LA-SF once would cost them about 4% of their annual pre-tax income. CHSRA's 2009 ticket prices probably exclude middle- income households. But a more realistic ticket price definitely excludes them.
More on California's high-speed traindoggle here.
Everybody's Downsizing
The latest in emailed scam attempts:
"You have recieved a McDonald's E-Card."
What the hell happened to Suha Arafat's fortune?
"Figure Out What You Want To Do, And Then Figure Out How To Make It Happen"
(As opposed to thinking about what you can do, and letting that restrict you.)
That's what I tell the kids when I speak at the inner-city school (for the program I created, "WIT: What It Takes," to demystify "making it.")
I was reminded of this thinking when I read a really cool story in the LA Times about a new trend in chef-ing -- to skip the pricey culinary school and instead work as an apprentice. Betty Hallock writes in the LA Times:
The cautionary tale of a would-be chef goes like this: A starry-eyed youth dreams of helming a restaurant kitchen and enrolls in a $60,000 culinary program but upon graduation still qualifies only for a job as a $10.50-an-hour line cook and struggles to work off crippling school loans that, with interest, can balloon to nearly $100,000. Dream crushed.Meanwhile, Dickinson has a coveted gig at one of L.A.'s most hotly anticipated restaurants. He was a 17-year-old bussing tables for Charlie Palmer in Healdsburg, Calif., when he first considered culinary school. "I didn't have the money. I had a single mom," Dickinson says, "so I got it in my head that I'd ask Charlie if he'd sponsor me and I'd come back and work for him. He basically said, 'Don't be an idiot. Work for me for a couple of years and I'll get you in wherever you want to go.'
In a year and a half, I'd worked my way around every station of that kitchen.... I don't regret not going to culinary school at all."
Why I Don't Move To Saudi Arabia To Start Saudi HUSTLER
Well, okay, so there are practical reasons: 1. I think I might have a hard time getting into the country. 2. I'd most likely be arrested and jailed, and I might be hurt or killed.
But, Muslims are moving to Western countries and trying to reshape life there to fit their Dark Ages religion. Rebecca Camber writes in The Daily Mail of an attempt to have an Islamic takeover of certain areas of Britain:
Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: 'You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone - Islamic rules enforced.'
The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the 'zone' there should be 'no gambling', 'no music or concerts', 'no porn or prostitution', 'no drugs or smoking' and 'no alcohol'.
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, saying he plans to flood specific Muslim and non-Muslim communities around the UK and 'put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term'.
In the past week, dozens of streets in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Newham have been targeted, raising fears that local residents may be intimidated or threatened for flouting 'Islamic rules'.
As Melody, who sent this link to me, wrote in her email:
If they don't like the British laws, don't move to Britain. This is scary.
Thoughts Facebook Won't Allow To Be Seen
There were these two comments on my blog item, We're All Assumed To Be Pedophiles -- Unless We're TSA "Officers":
Studies put the average rate of pedophilia in the population between 3% and 9%. If there are 50,000 TSA agents then an extremely conservative estimate suggests a minimum of 1500 pedophiles are actively employed by the government to feel our children up. In reality it will be much worse, because pedophiles are certainly going to be disproportionately attracted to a job that allows them to get paid to feel childrens private parts.Posted by: Lobster at July 28, 2011 8:13 PM
Note that if each of those 1500 pat down only one child per day, it means that a minimum of 1500 children are sexually abused daily by the federal government. Submit to power and enjoy.Posted by: Lobster at July 28, 2011 8:17 PM
And then there was this from momof4:
So I just reposted Lobsters comments above on facebook. I've posted it 3 times. Each time, FB has it down within 10 mins. Scary.Posted by: momof4 at July 29, 2011 6:35 AM
More on this. I left momof4 a message in the comments:
momof4, this is very disturbing. Did you post both comments above?Posted by: Amy Alkon at July 29, 2011 7:39 AM
Her response:
Yep, both. The second one is what they keep deleting.Posted by: momof4 at July 29, 2011 1:12 PM
Ugly. Please share this link. On one hand, Facebook can allow or disallow whatever they want. On the other hand, free speech quashing is ugly and unhealthy. It doesn't make the action behind the speech go away -- it just refuses to let it be discussed in what, for many people, is their main forum for discussion.
UPDATE: Per commenter "K," here's what Facebook has no problem posting. I wondered if this could be a hoax. Not sure, but the first guy, with the truck picture, seems to be a real person, at the very least.
Generation Helpless
My friend Marc Danziger ("Armed Liberal") posted this on Google+, and said it was okay for me to repost:
Literally was bumped into by a young woman getting on the elevator on my hotel floor Sunday. She apologized, and we chatted on the ride down; she then followed me to the bar where I sat down. I was on alert - something odd - so I talked to her to try and sort out what was going on.She was 29; living in Brooklyn and had paid no rent for a year b/c her building was in foreclosure. But was going to sell, and she had to move. She'd never held a real job. She'd drifted from art school to architecture school, student loans and parents funding eight years of undergraduate study. She'd been staying in the hotel with her mom, who had just checked out, and she'd left the room when housekeeping had rousted her.
And she had no clue about what she was going to do this week - become homeless, find a friend to stay with, or move home. The idea of being resilient, finding a job, saving some money, getting a place just never came up.
She was nice enough, and I bought her a coffee. And the whole time I was thinking "Oh, my God, thank you my kids are nothing like this." and then "And this is where we're coming to...a generation of lost, shell-shocked kids who discover that a degree in critical theory or French Literature don't in and of themselves open the door to any kind of life."
Marc blogs here.
Confiscating The First Amendment
Mike Riggs writes at reason about the schizophrenic homeless man who died after being beaten by five cops (see the horrifying before and after photos at the link):
Kelly Thomas' father, a retired Orange County police officer, did not recognize his own son when he went watch him die at the UC Irvine Medical Center after police beat him into a coma on July 5. The officers were responding to a call about vandalized cars when they found Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic, and attempted to search him. Thomas' father says his son may have been off his meds, which would explain why he resisted arrest. Nothing explains the gang-style murder committed by Fullerton cops.
Here's the video. It's particularly heartbreaking when Thomas calls for his dad, "Dad! Dad! Dad!" while they're beating him:
Very related, via Jay J. Hector, "15 Years in Prison For Taping the Cops? How Eavesdropping Laws Are Taking Away Our Best Defense Against Police Brutality," by Rania Khalek, AlterNet:
In at least three states, it is illegal to record any on-duty police officer, even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. The legal justification is usually based on the warped interpretation of existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited.Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland are among the 12 states where all parties must consent for a recording to be legal. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested and charged with a felony. Most all-party consent states (except Illinois and Massachusetts) include a "privacy provision" that says a violation occurs only when the offended party has a reasonable expectation that the conversation is private. This is meant to protect TV news crews and people who record public meetings -- where it is obvious to all that recording is underway -- from accidentally committing a felony.
Massachusetts and Illinois are the only states that do not recognize an expectation-to-privacy provision to their all-party consent laws. While courts in Massachusetts have generally held that secretly recording police is illegal, recording them openly is not. Illinois, on the other hand, is the only state where the legislature specifically amended the state's wiretapping law to make it illegal to record on-duty police officers without their consent, even in public.
...The most pernicious prosecutions to date have taken place in Illinois, where the sentence for recording a police officer is considered a class 1 felony -- on par with a rape charge -- and can land a person behind bars for more than a decade.
It is essential that we be allowed to record all government processes, from police to TSA searches, because this is how we maintain a free society and have openness about abuses of power.
Do You Need The Government's Permission To Do Your Job?
Only one in 20 people did in the 1950s, write the Chip Mellor and Dick Carpenter in the WSJ. Today, nearly one in three people do.
Mellor and Carpenter are writing about the whacked out licensing regulations for an increasing number of jobs. For example, it takes...most unbelievably...700 hours of training to become a licensed manicurist in Alabama. (With 700 hours training, I could probably successfully remove your spleen.)
Only three states (Florida, Nevada and Louisiana) and Washington, D.C. regulate interior designers, but the barriers to entry are astonishing. Governments demand enough educational and apprenticeship hours to keep newcomers out for almost 2,200 days. They must pass an exam created by the National Council for Interior Design Qualifications, an industry group, and pay fees totaling $364.Proponents of such requirements--that is, industry insiders and the elected officials who do their bidding--justify these barriers by endlessly parroting the same worn-out phrase: public health and safety. Yet if public health and safety were truly at risk, we would expect to see florists regulated in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., not just in Louisiana as they are now.
Such inconsistencies are also present within the regulations themselves. To work as a manicurist requires only about 12 hours worth of training in Alaska and 40 in Iowa, but 600 hours in Oregon and 700 in Alabama. Does anyone believe consumers in Oregon and Alabama are in need of that much more protection from unsafe manicurists? Or that there is much difference as far as consumer complaints are concerned? Mr. Kleiner compared consumer complaints between Minnesota and Wisconsin in certain health-care occupations and found no differences in the number of complaints between tightly regulated Wisconsin and less-regulated Minnesota.
State legislators largely seem oblivious to the counterproductive effects of the licensure schemes they create. In the face of our intractable unemployment problems, they work to erect even more barriers.
...Instead of looking to the federal government to create jobs, state legislatures could have a real and immediate effect on unemployment in their states by showing how less truly is more. They can remove the barriers to job creation that their predecessors erected and enjoy the job-generating drive of their states' aspiring entrepreneurs.
Mellor and Carpenter hail from the Institute for Justice -- an organization we should all support, along with theFIRE.org, defender of campus free speech rights.
Flamenco Dancing At The Alt Weeklies Conference
Photo by my friend and fellow columnist, food nerd Ari LeVaux (FlashInThePan.net).
"Overcriminalization"
That's the term Overlawyered's Walter Olson quotes to describe what the government tried to do to race car legend Bobby Unser, who got lost on a snowmobile in a blizzard, and may or may not have gone on protected government land. It cost him over $860,000 to defend himself from Federal criminal charges. Yes, effectively, for the crime of getting lost in a blizzard:
In other ridiculousness, per the WSJ, from an article by Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller:
Unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image could land an offender in prison. So can unauthorized use of the slogan "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute."
Written details of Unser's case here:
Because of this ordeal, Bobby has become an active supporter of overcriminalization reform and is determined to help see that no one is convicted for actions they took without any intending to violate a law or knowing that what they were doing was illegal or otherwise wrongful.
Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski complained of "string of recent cases in which courts have found that federal prosecutors overreached by trying to stretch criminal law beyond its proper bounds."
Brian Walsh writes at Heritage.org:
The term "overcriminalization" may be unfamiliar, but the problem it describes is not. Vague and overbroad laws have become a prevalent part of our legal fabric. In fact, research shows that a single Congress introduces hundreds - and enacts dozens - of non-violent criminal offenses that are poorly drafted, redundant, and lack guilty-mind ("criminal-intent") safeguards adequate to protect the innocent.Equally as disturbing has been the growth of criminal law in areas typically reserved for civil fines and administrative sanctions. Actions not otherwise morally blameworthy have increasingly become the source of criminal sanction.
The cases of Unser and Schoenwetter are prime examples of such unbridled growth in the criminal law. Unser was convicted of a federal crime for allegedly operating a snowmobile in a national wilderness. If he did indeed enter it, he did so unknowingly while he and a friend were lost for two days and two nights in a ground blizzard.
Schoenwetter spent five years in prison for "smuggling" lobsters into the U.S. in violation of Honduran fishing regulations, despite the fact that none of the regulations were valid at the time. Until last June, the federal "honest services" fraud statute was also another prime example of overcriminalization. The law criminalizes depriving "another of the intangible right of honest services," whatever that means. Violations could be punished by up to 20 years in prison. It had been used to charge thousands of individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum until all nine justices of the Supreme Court ruled in a set of three cases in June that the statute was unconstitutionally vague.
The only thing standing between you and criminal charges, fines, and maybe even imprisonment maybe somebody finding a crime to charge you with. In a world where much of life is criminalized, we're all criminals.
Congresspeople Redistributing Wealth -- To Themselves
The guy in the video is pretty annoying, and then, I have nothing against people making money, but how are members of Congress increasing their net worth by MILLIONS while in office? Okay, maybe a few have spouses who are scoring financially, but this seems obscene.
See the list here of skyrocketing wealth.
We're All Assumed To Be Pedophiles -- Unless We're TSA "Officers"
Commenter Jazzhands put it so well in the comments on "Amputee's Dignity Removed By TSA":
Adult strangers aren't allowed to sit at a park that their taxes pay for, but adult strangers are allowed to touch children intimately, and look into their undergarments, as long as they have the distinction of having a minimum wage job with the government. Fantastic.
Mosque Makeovers Overseas -- Funded By U.S. Taxpayers
We're spending money we don't have...to advance Islam. Separation of church and state, anyone? Nonie Darwish points out that funding mosques (run by extremists in Egypt, for the most part) shows weakness, it does not "build bridges," as the State Department claims.
Health Care Rationing In The UK
The future of Obamacare (as played with a British accent). Oliver Wright writes in the Independent:
Hip replacements, cataract surgery and tonsil removal are among operations now being rationed in a bid to save the NHS money.Two-thirds of health trusts in England are rationing treatments for "non-urgent" conditions as part of the drive to reduce costs in the NHS by £20bn over the next four years. One in three primary-care trusts (PCTs) has expanded the list of procedures it will restrict funding to in the past 12 months.
Examples of the rationing now being used include:
* Hip and knee replacements only being allowed where patients are in severe pain. Overweight patients will be made to lose weight before being considered for an operation.
* Cataract operations being withheld from patients until their sight problems "substantially" affect their ability to work.
* Patients with varicose veins only being operated on if they are suffering "chronic continuous pain", ulceration or bleeding.
* Tonsillectomy (removing tonsils) only to be carried out in children if they have had seven bouts of tonsillitis in the previous year.
* Grommets to improve hearing in children only being inserted in "exceptional circumstances" and after monitoring for six months.
* Funding has also been cut in some areas for IVF treatment on the NHS.
The alarming figures emerged from a survey of 111 PCTs by the health-service magazine GP, using the Freedom of Information Act.
Doctors are known to be concerned about how the new rationing is working - and how it will affect their relationships with patients.
Birmingham is looking at reducing operations in gastroenterology, gynaecology, dermatology and orthopaedics. Parts of east London were among the first to introduce rationing, where some patients are being referred for homeopathic treatments instead of conventional treatment.
UPDATE: Consumers Are Pessimistic About Obamacare Consumer Protections (Suderman at reason):
Of course, it's probably a mistake to refer to the law's many new requirements as "consumer protections" at all. As Cato's Michael Cannon wrote at the beginning of the year, the law's myriad mandates "force consumers to divert income from food, housing, and education to pay for the additional coverage. That can leave consumers worse off, even threaten their health. They can also force employers to reduce hiring, leaving some Americans with neither a job nor health insurance."
How The IRS Is Going After Documentary Filmmakers
I see a disturbing pattern of government overreach in myriad areas, and this is just one more example. I know a good many documentary filmmakers, and they have many fiscal ups and downs, and do seek to make money -- of course! -- but it's a tough profession to do it in. This doesn't mean it isn't a profession -- that it's a hobby -- but that's what the IRS is trying to declare it...so they can sock filmmakers with huge back taxes.
Paul Devlin writes in Filmmaker magazine:
The business of nonfiction filmmaking in the U.S. has become ever more competitive, speculative and entrepreneurial. Often even veteran filmmakers are expected to have significant portions of their films completed to demonstrate merit before funders will participate. As a result many filmmakers are investing substantial amounts of their own money to get their films off the ground.This investment can stretch over many years as the project develops. During this time costs absorb revenue so there is little opportunity to profit until the project is complete and sales can be made. Deducting losses during the development period from other sources of income to reduce personal income tax can help ease the financial burden facing independent filmmakers.
The IRS has no problem with a taxpayer deducting expenses for an activity from the income of that activity, even when the activity is considered a "hobby." However, when expenses from that activity create losses that offset other sources of income (such as income from a "day job"), the IRS requires that the taxpayer be able to demonstrate that it is "an activity engaged in for profit."
Last year, the IRS audited my 2007 and 2008 tax returns. After conducting two arduous interviews lasting many hours each and combing through my meticulously well-documented financial records, the IRS revenue agent determined that my own documentary film business was "an activity not engaged in for profit." This is the euphemism the IRS uses for "hobby." Although he cited several factors, many years of losses provided the primary basis for his determination.
The agent's report disallowed all deductions that resulted in losses for 2007 and 2008. I was going to owe up to $80,000 in back taxes and penalties to the U.S. and New York State governments. Moreover, this meant I would not be able to deduct most of my business expenses for 2009 and 2010. I was not only being put out of business, my personal financial well-being was threatened.
I was outraged. Filmmaking was my pasttime? Clearly, the agent had no idea how much work goes into making an independent film. I did my best to describe the grueling shoots in far away places, the all-night edits, the endless fundraising and marketing, and the constant efforts to sell, sell, sell. Did he really think I had no interest in making money?
My entreaties had no effect. The agent had made up his mind. He insisted that my filmmaking was an activity not engaged in for profit and my tax deductions over the years were, therefore, not legitimate. I owed the IRS big-time.
As a matter of survival, I had to become an expert on the IRS "hobby loss rule," consulting with lawyers and accountants and doing my own research to challenge the revenue agent's determination. Otherwise I would not be making independent films again.
This is also yet another First Amendment issue. There are numerous doc filmmakers who have exposed wrongdoing -- and made substantial financial sacrifices to do it. If this is declared a hobby, we'll surely have far fewer films that show up malfeasance. In essence, the IRS will make it too personally costly to use this form of speech.
via Kate Coe
Debunking 6 Myths About Anders Breivik
Good stuff from Sultan Knish:
1. Anders Behring Breivik was a Fundamentalist ChristianBreivik described himself as not a religious person and mentions praying only once. His plans leading up to the attacks involved multiple visits to prostitutes. In one section of his manifesto he clarifies what he means by Christian.
Q: Do I have to believe in God or Jesus in order to become a Justiciar Knight?no, you don't need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy
Breivik did call himself a Christian, but meant that in a cultural sense, rather than a theological one. He emphasized that he was not seeking a theocracy, but a secular society. His idea of a Christian Europe had nothing to do with religion.
2. Anders Behring Breivik Hated MuslimsBreivik viewed Muslims as the enemy, but only domestically. He emphasized that; "Knights Templar do not intend to persecute devout Muslims"
And he contemplated collaborating with them on terrorist attacks against Europe. "An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties... We both share one common goal." The Caliphate was a useful enemy for his cause.
...Breivik spells out that he is willing to kill Europeans on behalf of just about anyone...
There might come a time when we, the PCCTS, Knights Templar will consider to use or even to work as a proxy for the enemies of our enemies.Under these circumstances, the PCCTS, Knights Templar will for the future consider working with the enemies of the EU/US hegemony such as Iran (South Korea is unlikely), al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab or the rest of the devout fractions of the Islamic Ummah with the intention for deployment of small nuclear, radiological, biological or chemical weapons in Western European capitals and other high priority locations. ...
This should put to rest any idea that Breivik was on a crusade against Islam. He was a deluded man who imagined himself leading a takeover of Europe, even if he had to serve as a Muslim proxy to do it.
Woman Blows A Wiggy Over "Go the F*** to Sleep"
Karen Spears Zacharias has a book coming out, and apparently feels she has a better shot at selling it by writing a shrill screed on CNN.com against "Go the F** to Sleep. Zacharias' stretches here are so ridiculous, her piece is somewhat funny:
"Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," says Dr. David Arredondo. He is an expert on child development and founder of The Children's Program, in the San Francisco metropolitan area, which provides consultation and training for those working with troubled youths.It is hard to imagine this kind of humor being tolerated by any of the marginalized groups Arredondo cited. Consider the lines on page 3:
"The eagles who soar thru the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you are not thirsty. That's bulls**t.
Stop lying.
Lie the f*** down, my darling, and sleep."The irony, says Arredondo, is that the people buying the book are probably good parents.
...The violent language of "Go the F*** to Sleep" is not the least bit funny, when one considers how many neglected children fall asleep each night praying for a parent who'd care enough to hold them, nurture them and read to them.
This CNN.com commenter pretty much says it:
JCC0222
Zacharius must be one of the few unfortunate baby boomers who came of age without the influence of MAD magazine. This subject which she doesn't recognize is humor, more specifically SATIRE, and satire about reading kids to sleep doesn't have the first damn thing to do with how many kids do not get read to sleep every night by loving, role-model parents. That's like saying SNL shouldn't make fun of cereal commercials (remember "Colon Blow"?) because there is still hunger in parts of the world. The argument holds no water - get real, lady...
UPDATE: BEAUTIFUL, simply beautiful response by Popehat --
A Brief But Heartfelt Response To Karen Spears Zacharias
Oh Karen, my Karen, our vile culture is rife With "fuck!" and "cocksucker!" and other such strife Nobody's polite. Nobody keeps cool. Nobody uses nice words for their stool. Instead of discoursing in the way that we should, We all swear like that guy getting blown on Deadwood.Even kids -- O, sweet Children! -- are subject to scorn,
We curse them! We rue the day they were born!
We damn their behavior, we laugh when they weep,
We employ cruel invective to tell them to sleep!Well, not to their faces. We're not all that rude.
But in private, our venting is terribly crude.
It's as if we were human, and sorry to say --
As if parenting's foibles were funny! No way!You know better, dear Karen. You know kids are no joke
You know bad words hurt those about whom they're spoke
Even if they don't hear them. Bad words hurt us all
They cheapen the culture, they lower the wall.
Between us and barbarians. For isn't it said
That the Etruscans, who cursed, are all now mostly dead?
And I loved this blog item title about Zacharias' piece by Blunt Object:
How many pearl-clutching prudes does it take to change a lightbulb?
TSA Tries To Confiscate Video At Airport Security Screening Checkpoint
America ISN'T supposed to work this way. I love this guy. I don't agree with his solution (on Constitutional or practical grounds), but he's right on his protest.
The TSA claims that you can take photos or video at checkpoints, but not if local laws prevent it. Sorry, but Federal laws trump local. The First Amendment is not supposed to go away because people decide to legislate against it in a municipality.
Amputee's Dignity Removed By TSA
Blogger "AmputeeMommy" is a 36-year-old below-the-knee amputee named Peggy who describes herself as "the Mommy to a very active 4 year old." (Robby is her son.) Here is an excerpt from her TSA story:
After Robby's second screening, he was directed by an imposing figure to sit in a chair and not to communicate with me. He was scared and asked me if everything was okay. He broke the "rule" and the consequence was a full body pat down. I was forced to sit in a chair and helplessly watch my scared little boy get patted down for explosives. I was angry and perplexed when they pulled back his hands and peeked into his diaper. When his ordeal was over, Robby sat quietly shaking in a chair staring at me.When they were done clearing a four year old for explosive materials, they turned their attention to me. I was taken through the normal pat down procedure to which I am accustomed. I was then informed, in a matter of fact tone, that the rules have changed as of today (Friday, May 28, 2010) and that further screening was necessary.
I was instructed to remove my leg. I refused, stating that it was against procedure to insist that I remove my prosthetic. Another man was brought over, who lectured me about the increased security risk and the need to keep screening procedures current. He reiterated that the rules have changed, and that he needed my prosthetic. Looking at my frightened little boy and knowing that we were becoming pressed for time, I begrudgingly removed my leg and handed it to the rude agent.
"What's that?" the man asked while pointing to my liner. I explained that it was my prosthetic liner, and that I wore it to keep my prosthetic attached. He insisted that he needed to run my liner through the machine as well.
I don't think that the general public understands how personal a residual limb is to the amputee. It is on par with one's genitals. I simply don't remove my liner in public exposing my limb, and I was humiliated by the request.
At this point, our plane was boarding. I had amassed a group of four TSA officers around me, and Robby was scared and in tears. I knew that what they were asking me to do was wrong, but I also knew that fighting at that moment would caused us to miss our plane. I just wanted to get home.
I took off my liner. I sat quietly in a chair as onlookers and gawking passengers watched me expose one of my most personal features. I felt defeated and humiliated.
My liner, which is supposed to be maintained in a hygienic manner, was thrown into a screening bin inside out and run through the machine. No care was given to sanitizing the container which I am sure is riddled with fecal matter and bacteria. I was given no opportunity or materials to clean the liner after it was contaminated. It was half-hazardly thrown into my lap as I was told that I could leave.
I put my leg on and gave Robby a huge hug. We gathered our carry-on items which had been removed from our bags and strewn on a metal table. Tears were rolling down my face as I called my family for support.
via Kate Coe
What Freedom Of The Press? (My Latest TSA Complaint)
I just filed this at their website:
My boyfriend was told he had to stop videotaping the TSA officer giving me a "pat-down" (ie, groping my breasts, hair, and near my vagina) at the New Orleans airport on Sunday, July 24, at approximately 6 am.The man (who stopped him) was a dark-haired thin man standing on the other side (the exit side) of the screening. I am a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and I blog about TSA issues, and my boyfriend was taking the video to post on my site, and as evidence of the Fourth Amendment violation that goes on every time I am groped as a condition of normal business travel.
(The fact that I needed to go to a newspaper conference in New Orleans, and then fly home to Los Angeles, is not probable cause.)
Please note that this complaint is a vociferous objection to the officer's violation of my First Amendment rights, and the very necessary freedom of the press to protect what rights that still remain. Too many TSA workers seem to think they are members of an army in some banana republic.
I unfortunately was not able to get the officer's name because my boyfriend was disturbed because I was sobbing due to the vile touching of my sexual parts, inside my waistband -- and my HAIR! -- as a form of blackmail to be allowed to travel.
But, this officer should be clearly visible on videotape of the screening travesty, telling my tall, white boyfriend to put away his iPhone that he was using to videotape. (I'm a tall, pale white redheaded woman and I was all in black, in a short sleeve shirt and long pants, with my hair in a ponytail.) The screener was a short black woman. I wept as she violated me.
The Periodic Table Of Irrational Nonsense
Hilarious.
via @JonHenke
Government's Long, Grubby Fingers
In the WSJ, AEI prez Arthur C. Brooks hones in on what the debt ceiling battle is really about:
This is not a political fight between Republicans and Democrats; it is a fight against 50-year trends toward statism. Second, it is a moral fight, not an economic one. Third, this is not a fight that anyone can win in the 15 months from now to the presidential election. It will take hard work for at least a decade....Where will it all lead? Some despairing souls have concluded there are really only two scenarios. In one, we finally hit a tipping point where so few people actually pay for their share of the growing government that a majority become completely invested in the social welfare state, which stabilizes at some very high level of taxation and government social spending. (Think Sweden.)
In the other scenario, our welfare state slowly collapses under its weight, and we get some kind of permanent austerity after the rest of the world finally comprehends the depth of our national spending disorder and stops lending us money at low interest rates. (Think Greece.)
In other words: Heads, the statists win; tails, we all lose.
He rightly says that anyone seeking national office in 2012 needs to provide Americans an escape plan. And he's also absolutely right about this: "We need tectonic changes, not minor fiddling."
He continues:
Rep. Paul Ryan's (R., Wis.) budget plan is the kind of model necessary. But structural change will only succeed if it's accompanied by a moral argument--an unabashed cultural defense of the free enterprise system that helps Americans remember why they love their country and its exceptional culture....If reformers want Americans to embrace real change, every policy proposal must be framed in terms of self-realization, meritocratic fairness and the promise of a better future. Why do we want to lower taxes for entrepreneurs? Because we believe in earned success. Why do we care about economic growth? To make individual opportunity possible, not simply to increase wealth. Why do we need entitlement reform? Because it is wrong to steal from our children.
Who Isn't A Sex-Offender These Days?
Don't be taking pictures of your daughter figure-skating in Troy, New York. Prohibited! Because of a new policy at an arena there, instituted to protect children from pedophiles. (Daughter's first axel? Sorry, parents. Do your best to commit it to memory.)
A man in England on a walk saw children building sand castles and took a picture. "An hour later, he was reported to the police and arrested," per website SOL Research: Look Who's A Sex-Offender Now!
More from the link:
Look at children in public? You're a sex offender.Florida, 2007. An unidentified man was questioned by police after he spent more than an hour watching a children's karate class.
Turned out he was thinking of enrolling his kids.
New York City, 2005. Sandra Catena took a break from her dance lessons and sat down in the park. She was given a ticket by police for violating a law designed to keep out pedophiles -- that adults are not allowed in the park without children.
Another:
Kiss your naked baby? You're a sex offender.North Carolina, 2005. Charbel Hamaty spent six months in prison for kissing his naked baby on the belly button. His wife was also arrested and she was denied contact with their children for several months for taking a picture of the "abuse."
Another:
Teenager taking naked pictures of yourself or your sweetheart? You're a sex offender.Pennsylvania. A 13-year-old girl is on the sex offender registry for life because she took pictures of herself naked.
Obama To Asthma Patients: Drop Dead
Christopher C. Horner writes at Big Government that Obama said one thing when he was campaigning to be in power:
Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven't had much sleep in the last 48 hours.
And he's promoting quite a different approach now that he's actually in power, with his FDA banning the last over-the-counter asthma inhaler "as part of an international agreement to stop the use of substances that damage the environment":
The only over-the-counter asthma inhaler sold in the United States will no longer be available next year as part of an international agreement to stop the use of substances that damage the environment.Primatene Mist (epinephrine) is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the temporary relief of occasional symptoms of mild asthma. FDA urges those who use Primatene Mist to see a health care professional soon to switch to another asthma medicine.
Primatene Mist inhalers are being discontinued because they use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a propellant (spray) to move the medicine out of the inhaler so patients can breathe the medicine into their lungs.
Just guessing here, but doesn't Al Gore's jet do more damage to the environment in a single trip than all the people across America choking for breath and sucking on their asthma inhalers in an entire year?
Who's going to ground Al to save the planet?
via @WalterOlson
"Second Verse, Same As The First..."
"...A little bit louder, and a little bit worse," as the song goes.
Did you vote for Obama thinking things would be different with him in office? Well, they are! In that he's a bit more tan than George Bush and married to a woman named Michelle instead of Laura. The Center for Public Integrity, in a piece by Fred Schulte, John Aloysius Farrell and Jeremy Borden, reports:
More than two years after President Obama took office vowing to banish "special interests" from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events......As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests and making the White House more accessible to everyday Americans. In kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted "the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests," who he said had "turned our government into a game only they can afford to play."
"They write the checks and you get stuck with the bill, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we're here today to take it back," he said.
Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah.
How Dr. Jay Wortman Cured His Diabetes With Low-Carbing
From the YouTube posting:
Jay Wortman, MD, tells the story of how he got rid of his rampant type 2 diabetes using a simple dietary change. Eight years later he is still free from the disease and needs no medication. Basically he stopped eating the foods that turn to sugar in the gut.
As have I. I eat meat and greens and butter and cheese, and not much else. People wonder how I can do this (how I can cut out carbs), but it really wasn't hard once I put my mind to it. Basically, I think of myself as from the culture where people don't eat potatoes. Or muffins or cake or rolls.
I don't just do this because I can be rail-thin without exercise by eating low-carb (I do exercise a bit because my brain likes it, and it's good for the rest of me, too). But, I eat the way I do because I recognize that it's likely (per a good bit of scientific evidence) that sugar and flour cause health problems, including health problems later in life.
I don't want to be some infirm little old (or little not-so-old) lady, and not eating French fries or a hamburger bun is a seriously small price to pay. (Especially in light of all the bacon I get to eat while avoiding the rest. In fact, I think I'll go eat some crushed bacon bits right now. Over and out!)
Wortman's blog is here.
Celine Dion: Anti-Free-Speech Bully
She used her legal muscle to shut down a blog of photos of her looking goofy, "Ridiculous Pictures of Céline Dion" blog. Of course, now, the Streisand Effect has taken effect. I had no idea of the existence of this blog until Dion tried to squash it. (I hope many people will link to the story about the take-down to show people who try to use their financial muscle to squash speech that there can be a backlash from that.)
*What I don't support is that the photos that ran on the blog were most likely lifted without payment from the sources who took the photos (no, merely crediting people when posting their work is not enough).
Red Sky At Night...
Burlesque, New Orleans.
This Morning's Serving Of Twitter Hash
@JeffJarvis writes:
There is actually developing a good story in the #fuckyouwashington hashtag. Go read why people are saying this. e.g.,@jellencollins:"for making 'debt' a four letter word and 'fuck' an appropriate response."@tamadou:"for giving yourselves special benefits and telling the American people they have to suck it up or they're selfish."
More here, at the Twitter search #fuckyouwashington:
@fredbartels #fuckyouwashington for allowing inequality metastasize to levels we haven't seen since the 1920's.
And here's mine, which I just tweeted from the New Orleans airport:
#fuckyouwashington for violating my 4th Amend rights & having a govt lackey sexually assault me as a condition of normal biz travel this am.
They just left my computer and other stuff out there on the belt for anyone to take -- and for quite some time. Gregg had already gone through and was standing outside the TSA parameters.
I protested to the TSA woman who yelled for somebody to come grope me that my stuff was just left there and she told me she couldn't leave her post. Gregg tried to videotape my groping and a TSA officer told him he couldn't. I cried while the woman put her hands in my hair, inside my waistband, felt my breasts and the middle of my bra, and went up each leg to the side of my girlparts (though there was no between-the-labia contact).
This violation was extremely upsetting -- I feel dirty, degraded, humiliated. After the TSA "officer" finished groping me, I turned to some guys (apparently Central American) who'd been looking on, shaking their heads sympathetically as I cried. "This is not what America was supposed to be about," I said to them.
I don't understand how it's illegal to say "Fuck me or you lose your job," while "Let me feel your boobs or you don't get to travel" gets a pass, with travelers acting like compliant sheep while getting groped by government workers.
The fact that I need to fly home from a business trip in New Orleans is NOT probable cause.
Night In New Orleans
Meet The Neighborhood Sex Predators
In yet another display of why overlegislating is so dangerous, two teenaged boys are on the sex offenders list for a prank. Lenore Skenazy writes on FreeRangeKids:
The boys committed their crime at age 14. And just what was it?Horseplay. Stupid, disgusting horseplay. According to NJ.com, the kids pulled down their pants and sat on two 12-year-olds' faces for the simple reason that they "thought it was funny" and were trying to get their "friends to laugh."
That's how one of the teens explained himself to a Somerset County, N.J., judge back in 2008. (His friend headed off a trial by pleading guilty to the same act.)
The judge then considered what he had in front of him, and rather than think, "These punks could use some community service time and maybe a suspension from school -- plus an in-person apology to the kids they sat on," he thought, "These two are sex offenders."
After all, what they had done was, technically, "criminal sexual contact" with intent to humiliate or degrade. And so sex offenders he ruled they were. That meant they were subject to Megan's Law. In New Jersey, such offenders, even as young as 13, have to register for life.
..."These lists were originally conceived by most of the voters who cheered them on as lists of people who had some sort of psychological compulsion to sexual predation," explains Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. People assume anyone on it is "a permanent menace."
These guys are more like Dennis the Menace, which is why we have to change the criteria that land folks on the registry. These young men were never "predators." And as the years go by, the idea that they pose a danger to children will become even more ridiculous. When you're 20, 30, 40 -- 80! -- you don't do the things you did as a 14-year-old trying to impress your buddies.
The Master's Degree As The New Bachelor's Degree?
Laura Pappano writes in The New York Times:
William Klein'a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor's in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents' Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.It wasn't that there weren't other jobs out there. It's that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master's. "It's pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to," Mr. Klein says.
So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers' new master's program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he'd like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master's. Browse professional job listings and it's "bachelor's required, master's preferred."
Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master's is now the fastest-growing degree.
A guy quoted in the piece said he sees the Master's as "the first cut" in hiring. What this sounds like to me is laziness and stupidity. Matt Welch, editor of reason magazine, former assistant editorial page editor of the LA Times, and author of two books, including The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, never finished school. He instead started a successful newspaper in Prague. With these standards, Welch wouldn't even make the first cut.
via Instapundit
Suck At Your Job? Better Hope You Work For The Taxpayers
Dennis Cauchon writes in USA Today that job loss by dying is more likely than firing for employees of government agencies:
Death -- rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs -- is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations....The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn't lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.
When job security is at a premium, the federal government remains the place to work for those who want to avoid losing a job. The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years.
Oh, and P.S. As for the rest of us, we'll be working in donut shops at age 90 to pay these government workers' pensions.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
At the alternative newspaper conference in New Orleans, so in case I don't post more blog items by early morning, have at it. You pick the topics.
But, one link per comment, or you comment will be eaten by the spam filter. If you want to post two comments -- or six -- no problem (if you're not a spammer). Just post a separate comment for each and wait about 20 seconds between each.
Just Arrived In A Giant Sauna
Otherwise known as New Orleans in July. I'm here for the annual alt newspaper conference, with Gregg, who has some research to do.
Government Iz Dum
From the LA Times' Greenspace blog, 3,500 pot plants were found in the Santa Monica Mountains, and workers are "cleaning (them) up":
Federal and state workers have been clearing the area for the past two weeks, hauling out herbicides, pesticides, rodent fencing, fertilizer and two miles of plastic water hose. Water had been diverted from a nearby creek to irrigate the plants, and native vegetation had been cut down to make room for the plants."Marijuana cultivation is a serious and rising problem in the Santa Monica Mountains and other park lands across the country," said Park Superintendent Woody Smeck in a statement. "The environmental damage caused by marijuana cultivation in otherwise pristine natural areas costs approximately $12,000 per acre to clean up."
The remote park land of the Santa Monica Mountains are popular locations for illicit marijuana operations. Last year, Los Angeles and Ventura County sheriff's deputies confiscated some 42,000 marijuana plants -- worth $130 million -- in the Santa Monica Mountains.
As I commented on the site:
The dumb thing is that they're "cleaning" it up. These are just a bunch of plants. Yes, people smoke them and take a little vacation from life in their head. Why is that the government's business? I know incredibly productive people who like to take a toke every now and then (the smart ones use a vaporizer to avoid lung damage). Some people, sure, are damaged by drug abuse -- or abuse of perfectly legal alcohol. I could also take a tree branch and shove it somewhere uncomfortable and do some damage to myself. Should we clear-cut the Santa Monica mountains, just in case?
Racial Quotas For Lawyers In Class Action Suit?
Not only did the ENTIRE Sirius class action settlement of $13 million go to the attorneys supposedly representing the class, for several years, the judge in the case, Judge Baer, has controversially required lawyers for the class to meet racial quotas as a condition of appointment.
Ted Frank, of the Center for Class Action Fairness, is asking the judge to vacate that part of his class certification order on the grounds that it's unconstitutional.
(If not obscene.)
The idea that discrimination is somehow resolved by discriminating is absurd, bizarre, and stupid.
Oh, and this is a trend, by the way -- this scummy deal where the attorneys supposedly representing the class walk away with all the money and the class gets nothing. Sometimes, Ted told me a while back, the judge will give some of the money to his or her favorite charities.
via @andrewmgrossman
Has Anybody Ever Picked Anybody Up In The Grocery Store
There are all these breathless encouragements by people advising on how to pick up women, "Talk to a woman at the grocery store!"
I think they're overly optimistic. Sure, you never know...and a guy can always try. If a guy looks rich and above-average in the handsomeness department, he's probably got a better chance of scoring a phone number and a date.
The reality is, there are some guys who could hit on a woman as they're looking over the embalmed body at a wake and make out. But, for a lot of guys, I'm betting the grocery store pickup attempt isn't very successful.
What's your experience?
Reading T Leaves
Seen on a T-shirt by Ken Robinson (mentioned in his TED talk below on how schools kill creativity):
"If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Feel free to comment on either or both. (It'll be a sort of comments salad. We'll see how tasty it comes out, and whether it's a big mistake.)
And speaking of making mistakes, which he talks about on the video, I think it's really important to allow yourself to screw up, and to get okay with it. I have perfectionistic tendencies, and I had to learn about "satisficing" (the perfect is the enemy of the good -- or in my case, the perfect is the enemy of the ever getting the fucking thing written). I had to master this in order to ever complete a book and to diminish the horror that used to be my weekly column writing process, where I'd gnash over a single line all day Saturday.
It's still hard -- most of the stuff I write for pay -- but I'm able now to leave things not quite perfect and go back to them, which keeps me from burning out at the end (and maybe not getting the end of something done well enough).
"God Didn't Make Man; Man Made God"
UVA psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson and medical writer Clare Aukofer write for the LA Times about scientists beginning to unravel religion's DNA -- the psychological mechanisms behind faith that evolved through natural selection:
For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior -- our ability to negotiate relationships with others -- were engaged.
Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.
In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.
People claim religion is the source of morality, but the authors write about the research by Yale psych prof Paul Bloom and his team, finding that infants in their first year of life show signs of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair.
They wind up with this:
We can be better as a species if we recognize religion as a man-made construct. We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind's greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.
No Business Wynns For Obama
Via Seeking Alpha, Business Insider posts the politically salient excerpt from a call with Vegas superbusinessman Steve Wynn discussing Wynn Resorts second quarter earnings. Note that he's a Harry Reid-supporting Democratic businessman -- but he sure is unhappy with Obama:
I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.And I'm saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.
...The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.
Oh, and the USA could learn from the guy. An earlier excerpt from his call:
We've been doing this for 40-odd years and not once in any of our hotels, starting at the Golden Nugget to Atlantic City to anywhere, have we ever had to take a special charge for bad debt beyond our normal reserve. We're very conservative in giving money away for people to gamble with. We only -- we don't encourage, we don't use credit as a marketing tool. We only give credit to people who -- as a convenience to people who are well entitled to it
What's Become Of Writing Books As A Profession
Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about what's happening to a lot of authors and how she's responded:
Books that would have sold five years ago don't sell now. Series that are growing are getting bounced from their publishers for not growing enough. Agents, unable to sell product, are telling their mystery clients to write romance novels and their romance clients to write thrillers. Other agents are starting backlist e-pub companies and robbing their clients blind. Still other agents are blaming the writers for the fact that nothing is selling well and encouraging them to sign terrible book contracts....Traditionally published bestselling writers look at their royalty statements, see that their e-books sell only 30 or 100 or 200 copies in six months, and wonder how the hell upstart self-published writers whose books have ugly covers and whose interiors need copy editing manage to sell tens of thousands of e-books each month.
...What I write back each and every time or find myself saying in conversation (often to a weeping writer) is this:
It's not you. You're fine. Your writing is as good as ever. The business is changing and you're caught in the crossfire. It's not personal, even though it feels personal. You are caught in the middle of a nightmare. The rules are changing, and no one knows where any of this is headed. Talk to other writers. You'll see. It's happening to all of us.Believe it or not, knowing that it's not personal helps. It gives the writer a chance to breathe, to look around and see that the changes in the industry are happening, and they're hurting all of us.
You don't believe me about the changes, about the ways that publishers are shifting the world beneath our feet as we try to walk forward? Then read this blog by agent Kristin Nelson about Random House's most recent royalty statements. Random House has decided unilaterally to pay its authors 25% of net on e-books even if the author's contract calls for something else, like 50% of gross. After you read her post, read what the Passive Guy, an attorney who no longer practices, has to say about this behavior.
Or what he writes about the rights grab that Harlequin is making. Read my post about the industry changes, "Writing Like It's 1999," or my post from two weeks ago about Barnes & Noble, which has since been confirmed by B&N employees and some other links you'll find in the comments section.
The Religion Of Easily Hurt Feelings
My business card used to read "Godless Harlot." I'm not exactly the shrinking violet of atheists. Religious people who comment hear regularly roll their eyes -- so loud you can pretty much hear it through the Internet -- when I post this and that criticizing Judaism, Christianity, and god-belief in general. What they don't do is say I should be killed.
That's the special stuff of Islam. Via Jihadwatch, whomever insults Mohammed, even if he later repents, must be killed. (Interestingly, you can get a pass on insulting Allah, but you're merely "called to repentence" if you do; you're not to be slaughtered.)
Here's the video:
Here's the translated transcript:
Whoever insults the Prophet (PBUH), if he later comes and apologizes, and kisses the shoes (of the ruler), and says, "I want all Muslims, every one, to return and strike me with the soles of their feet"--does the ruler have the right to accept this?I bring up this question, as it was asked of me. The answer is that it is not permissible for anyone to accept this. Then what do we do with him? We kill him! But he told you that he repented. We still kill him, even if he repents!
Kind of funny that he wears a hat like they wear at McDonald's when they're going to be scoopin' you some fries.
The High Cost Of Letting Your Kids Spend Four Years Smashed On Grain Alcohol
Bumper sticker on van on my street this morning:
Driver carries no cash - two kids in college.
Stonewalling Against Sex
What is it that lets people in a marriage think that they can deny their partner sex and have everything turn out okay?
People who get married are agreeing to have sex with just one person for the rest of their life (unless there are other arrangements spelled out). Does anyone think they'd agree to get married if they knew one would turn into none?
Dangerizing Childhood
There's been a backlash against "free-range parenting" in the wake of a sicko murdering 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, who was walking to the dentist in Brooklyn when the man picked him up in his car. Lenore Skenazy writes at Free Range Kids:
And suddenly, the idea of Free-Range Kids sounds about as sensible as letting children ride their trikes along the interstate. As the headline on one of the big "mommy blogs" read, "Boy Abducted Walking Home Alone: Is Free-Range Parenting Dangerous?"To which I would like to pose a different question, based on the fact that 25 times more children die as car passengers than as abduction victims (that is, about 1,300 children younger than 14 die in cars annually, whereas about 50 are murdered by strangers): "Is Putting Your Kid in the Car Dangerous?"
I ask only because, as a society, we have decided to focus on the least likely, most horrific, most TV ratings-garnering child deaths and base a lot of our parenting decisions on them. Gever Tulley, an author and educator in California, coined a term for this: dangerism. (And he wrote a book about it, too.) We decide, irrationally, which dangers are worth obsessing over and which we will shrug off as small, unavoidable risks.
...So the next time someone tells me, "I would NEVER let my child walk outside, because it's just too dangerous," here is how I will reply:
"I hope you NEVER put your children in a car. How could you ever forgive yourself if, God forbid, something terrible were to happen? It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to keep your children safe! Personally, I would rather have my kids stuck at home, unable to go anywhere, than take the TERRIBLE RISK of putting them in the car. Maybe at 13 or 14 they can start riding in a car, but seven or eight? Too young! Parents should know better! It's just not worth a lifetime of regret."
That's how wacky -- and stifling -- we can get when we dangerize everyday life, so let's try not to. (And let's keep the blame-the-parents impulse in check, too.)
Uncle Sugar Daddy
That's who Uncle Sam has become. Michael Walsh asks the right question about the August 2 debt ceiling deadline in The New York Post:
When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about -- the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don't believe it, just look at President Obama's veiled threat to withhold Grandma's Social Security benefits if Congress doesn't let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.
The feds now borrow 43 cents of every dollar they spend. Under Obama, outlays have soared to nearly a quarter of GDP (the historical average is just under 20 percent) -- and once ObamaCare starts to fully kick in around 2014, it will only rise.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest consume -- at the moment -- nearly half of our $3.8 trillion budget.
When Medicare began in 1966, it cost $3 billion; congressional estimates were that, by 1990, it would cost about $12 billion, allowing for inflation. The actual figure turned out to be $107 billion. Today, Medicare's future unfunded obligations total at least $36 trillion. Other estimates run even higher.
When Social Security began in 1935, most workers weren't expected to live past the "retirement age" of 65. The program wasn't supposed to have to pay off, except to widows, orphans and the odd male who somehow staggered to his gold watch.
Today, it's a national retirement program -- for an aging country whose life expectancy is pushing 80. In 1960, five workers supported a retiree; today, there are three, and that number falls to two in 2030. Yet the retirement age has failed to keep pace, slowly rising a couple of months a year for those born after 1938 and topping out at 67 for those born after 1960.
You do the math.
Enlisted Morons? Complete Savages?
That seems to be how the Navy sees their ranks vis a vis the lessons they're putting out for them. Check out this sexual assault prevention poster from The US Navy's Facebook page:
You'd think this was a prank, and maybe it was meant to be a joke by the person who wrote it, but Fox News checked it out. Fox's Justin Fishel writes:
The Navy says it's for real....Facebook followers seemed stunned and at times offended by the obvious nature of the tips. The comment page is overflowing with followers who have harsh words for the Navy, many questioning its judgment.
"Trying my hardest not to laugh," wrote Joshua Jimenez.
"Navy, April Fool's Day was a few months back," wrote Chad Hall.
Others were clearly confused by the Navy's intent.
"Not really amusing coming from the Navy. I can see some of my more uncouth friends posting something like this, but the Navy? Have some sense!" Cristina Bassitt commented.
"Some of these "tips" are the dumbest things I have ever read ... it really does look like this isn't being taken seriously," Bernadette Theberge posted.
The poster was not actually the brainchild of the Navy, but of a feminist blog called TumblinFeminist, whose most recent entry states, "I honestly feel as though you can not by definition be a feminist and be a Christian, unless you are a bad Christian- or a bad feminist. Christianity is inherently and undeniably sexist among countless other things."
People, all the time, email me offering to do "guest posts" on my blog. Hey, Navy, you really are free to say no. (And no, for anyone who's wondering I don't have guest posts here. Your first clue would be how I've posted everything here since 2003.)
Back to the poster, does the Navy not do the wee-est little bit of vetting the people creating their messages -- or read the stuff before posting?
I kept thinking, "No, surely this is a joke." I went back to the Fox story:
"The intention of posting this poster was to encourage discussion on a serious issue," Garas said. "It is a crime that will not be tolerated ... and the Navy will continue to explore ways to reach our sailors on this serious issue."Within 20 minutes of the original post the Navy replied on the comment section saying in part it's critical to remind the public of these basic ideas.
"As sad as it is, you'd be surprised how many people need to be told these seemingly basic things," the comment reads.
Unbelievable. Look up at #7. Look at them all.
How To Be Politely Suicidal
On the LA Times op-ed page, screen and TV writer Mike Armstrong chronicles his family's move to and from downtown LA, and includes this tidbit:
A few months ago I arrived home to find a body on the pavement a few feet from the front door of our building. According to one of the cops on the scene, he was a jumper from the hotel across the street.The next day, a shopkeeper on the block was furious that the police had closed him down for two hours during their investigation and cleanup. "Why couldn't he have jumped into the alley like all the rest of them?" he asked me. It's a valuable lesson for us all: Just because you kill yourself doesn't mean you have to be disruptive.
Skid row-adjacent living is best experienced while holding one of those trough-sized cokes and staring up at the big screen in a movie theater.
Can't We All Just Sing Kumbayah?
From Politico:
President Obama said Sunday that there can be no long-term solution in Afghanistan without the Taliban - but made it clear that the Taliban would have to change dramatically first."Ultimately, it means talking to the Taliban, although we've been very clear about the requirements for any kind of serious reconciliation," he told the BBC's Andrew Marr. "The Taliban would have to cut all ties to Al Qaeda. Renounce violence. And they would have to respect the Afghan constitution. Now those are some fairly bare bones requirements.
Wildly naive. For a graphic example of how wildly naive, click here for video of the Taliban executing 16 civilians. (Warning: Extremely graphic.)
And, if that wasn't enough, here's a proud Taliban occasion: A 12-year-old Taliban boy's first time beheading someone.
Leg Up
Santa Barbara. Photo by Stef Willen.
"Yes Means Yes -- Except On Campus"
There's evidence she falsely accused him of rape, and a warrant for her arrest. But, the fellow college student she accused is being kept from returning to school.
Harvey A. Silverglate, co-founder of campus free speech defender theFIRE.org, writes in the WSJ of a college student named Caleb Warner, a University of North Dakota student who insisted he had consensual sex with the woman who accused him of rape. The university didn't care. They suspended him for three years for violating the student code. Three months later, the state police filed criminal charges for filing a false police report against Warner's accuser. There's still a warrant for her arrest.
Among several reasons the police gave for crediting Mr. Warner's claim of innocence was evidence of a text message sent to him by the woman indicating that she wanted to have intercourse with him. This invitation, combined with other evidence that police believe indicates her untruthfulness, has obvious implications for her charge of rape.Nevertheless, university officials have refused to allow Mr. Warner a re-hearing--much less a reversal of their guilty verdict. When the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a civil liberties group of which I am board chairman, wrote to University President Robert O. Kelley to protest, the school's counsel, Julie Ann Evans, responded. She wrote that the university didn't believe that the fact that Mr. Warner's accuser was charged with lying to police, and has not answered her arrest warrant, represented "substantial new information." In any event, she argued, the campus proceeding "was not a legal process but an educational one."
Six weeks before FIRE received this letter, Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, sent her own letter to every college and university in the country that accepts federal money (virtually all of them). In it, she essentially ordered them to scrap fundamental fairness in campus disciplinary procedures for adjudicating claims of sexual assault or harassment.
Ms. Ali's April 4 letter states that "in order for a school's grievance procedures to be consistent with the standards in Title IX [which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational institution receiving federal funds], the school must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred)." This institutionalizes a low standard previously eschewed by most of the nation's top schools. It also sends the message that results--not facts--matter most. Such a standard would never hold up in a criminal trial.
Following this outrageous diktat, Cornell University lowered its evidentiary burden in sexual assault cases. Now, determining whether an incident constitutes sexual violence is based on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, instead of the school's prior "clear and convincing evidence" test. Stanford followed suit--in the middle of one student's sexual misconduct hearing. He was promptly found guilty and suspended for two years.
I see a constant degradation of rights in this country, from free speech rights to men's rights to Fourth Amendment rights at the airport, and I see a lot of people just looking the other way.
Don't Dough Me That Way
Lick your doughnut wrong at Drexel, and you could be in some serious trouble. Joanna Brenner posts at FIRE about some...
...particularly egregious speech codes at schools across our country, such as Drexel University's prohibition of "holding or eating food provocatively," Or Indiana University Southeast's prohibition of "faxes sexual in nature." That's right--we said faxes.
Gillespie: The Debt Ceiling Debate Is Full Of Malarkey
For at least three reasons, write Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg at reason:
1. August 2 is a phony deadline.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has pushed back the drop-dead date when the U.S. finally reaches its limit a bunch of times already: March 31, April 15, May 31 were all cited as deadlines before August 2 was inked in as Armageddon. But this time, he means it, man, really.
2. Reaching the debt ceiling is NOT the same as defaulting on our debt - which would indeed be catastrophic.
Think about it: You can max out your credit cards but as long as you keep paying the minimum amount due each month, your creditors don't go crazy. Interest on the debt is a small fraction of total outlays and the government has a series of tools - from using cash on hand to selling assets to scrimping on nonessential payments - to make sure interest payments are made and seniors aren't put on an all cat-food diet.
3. Legislating-by-Panic is no way to run a country.
The reason we're in this mess is because government can't stop spending. And the government can't even pass a budget on a year's notice. But we're expecting them to come up with a good plan for the country's borrowing in a couple of weeks? Trying to force through an expansion of the country's credit line by promising cuts in spending down the road is exactly why we're in this situation to begin with.It makes far more sense to do something like sell some TARP assets -- the government is sitting on $320 billion in outstanding direct loans and equities investments -- to cover interest payments through the end of the fiscal year than to force Congress and the president to come up with a budget that cuts spending -- and borrowing -- for real, next year, not is some distant future.
More details here. And the video:
STOP SPENDING. I have, as much as possible, cutting back in myriad ways. Of course, I'm working with my own money, and unless you're a politician (elected by a bunch of idiots who don't think too much or understand simple math) I bet you've only got yours to spend -- not an unlimited amount of other people's money.
Incompetence Pays Big If You're In The Public Sector
Diane Rado and Duaa Eldeib write for the Chi Trib that school districts usually pay hefty parting gifts to school leaders -- even if they leave under a cloud:
Stanley Fields resigned after just a year as superintendent of a suburban Cook County school district where he was put on leave, faced with firing and ultimately required to apologize to the community. Still, he walked away with a $100,000 severance payment.He also had prematurely left his prior job, at a Lake County high school district, cashing out $30,426 in unused vacation. The school board waived a $60,000 breach-of-contract payment from Fields, now superintendent in another Chicago-area school district.
Fields' experience illustrates a statewide phenomenon that is costing the public millions in buyout deals worked out in secret by school boards, a Tribune investigation found.
The newspaper's review of more than 100 superintendent contracts, financial records and severance agreements over a decade revealed that boards have handed out six-figure separation checks; district-paid health care; cash or retirement credit for hundreds of sick days; and, in one case, a Mercedes -- all to be rid of superintendents.
The severance packages are fueled by high superintendent and board turnover, fear of lawsuits, and board policies and state laws that boost buyouts -- such as sick days that can accrue to limits uncommon in the private sector, experts said. In many cases, the money funding a buyout could pay one or more annual teacher salaries.
Did you catch this? "Fields, now superintendent in another Chicago-area school district."
And, according to the Trib investigation, even superintendents who work for a short time and resign get the big payouts, and sometimes good recommendations to help them get their next job (even if their performance doesn't merit it).
No Ball Left Ungroped
I've had more than a few harsh words for former Sec of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the past, but do we really have reason to believe he might be a terrorist?
The extend we go to to not "profile" people is a wee bit ridiculous, no?
Annoying Questions Kids Ask
Using this in a column. Interested in the stuff of the "Do turtles have penises?"/"Do cats have bellybuttons?" variety. Help me out if you can! (I'd ask my neighbors' kids to come up with some for me -- they'd love this assignment -- but they're in Texas.)
Some People Just Can't Help But Give Back
A TSA love story.
Spending Like There's No This Evening
Another terrific one from Steyn in the OC Reg that lays bare the real deal in Washington and the world of Obama on spending and spending and prepping the country to keep spending:
There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called "debt ceiling" negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one's debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.Actually, it's more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there's (what's the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we're now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there's no this evening.
...When the 44th president took office, he made a decision that it was time for the already unsustainable levels of government spending finally to break the bounds of reality and frolic and gambol in the magical fairy kingdom of Spendaholica: This year, the federal government borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends, a ratio that is unprecedented. Barack Obama would like this to be, as they say, "the new normal" - at least until that 43 cents creeps up a nickel or so, and the United States Government is spending twice as much it takes in, year in, year out, now and forever. If the Republicans refuse to go along with that, well, then the negotiations will collapse and, as he told Scott Pelley on CBS the other night, Gran'ma gets it. That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue," declared the president. "Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."
But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous "Social Security trust fund," whose "trustees" assure us there's currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the Aug. 3 check run, shouldn't it? Golly, to listen to the president, you'd almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there's nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick. And that can't possibly be so, can it?
Pell grants? Student aid. "A Federal Pell Grant, unlike a loan, does not have to be repaid."
Why the fuck not?
Sorry, the days of the United States of Handoutica have to come to an end.
America Needs More Crappy Jobs
One of the best-named bloggers, the insightful "Evil HR Lady," aka Suzanne Lucas, just linked to a Walter Russell Mead blog item I'd read but had forgotten to post.
As Lucas describes it, Mead writes over at The American Interest that what's needed to save poor urban areas is, of course, jobs...but not "good jobs" but bad jobs -- private sector jobs that relatively unskilled people can do:
These jobs are unlikely to be in large scale manufacturing plants. The days when domestic manufacturing anchored an emerging urban working class and provided a ladder into the middle class are as dead as the days when family farms gave the majority of the American people secure livelihoods...Businesses that hire low skilled workers without much experience or with checkered work histories are often smelly and noxious. They are unlikely to pay particularly well. There will be lots of casual day labor involved with not many benefits -- and perhaps little information sent to the IRS. Casual construction work and small repair shops where people bang metal and use power tools all day long are the kinds of employers we need in the inner city. Working conditions are not always great -- and these industries do not always attract the most humanitarian and generous people on earth. The factories that hired illiterate and unskilled urban workers 100 years ago were offensive from many points of view; they did, however, actually hire those workers and put tens of millions of people on the thorny, difficult and uphill path toward middle class life.
Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don't exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating "good" jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.
Lucas points out:
Government restrictions often make these "bad" jobs hard to come by. Rules and regulations prevent people from starting businesses or hiring people because it is too complex. Firing is difficult and so you take a risk of bringing someone on board who will produce less than the cost of employing them, so people don't want to take that risk.
She winds up with this, which is exactly right:
...It's better to be on the bottom rung and moving up then not allowed on the ladder at all.
What's Good For The Religious Goose Is Good For The Atheist Gnocchi Eater
A "pastafarian" gets his driver's license in full pasta-prep regalia. From the BBC:
An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear".Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.
Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.
Later a police spokesman explained that the licence was issued because Mr Alm's face was fully visible in the photo.
"The photo was not approved on religious grounds. The only criterion for photos in driving licence applications is that the whole face must be visible," said Manfred Reinthaler, a police spokesman in Vienna.
No word on whether they let you get licensed if you're wearing one of those red and white-checked tablecloths over your head.
Thanks, Jay J. Hector
No Burkas Allowed? No Problem.
Here's Raymond Ibrahim on why more Muslim women are flocking to France than before they had the burka ban there:
Islam's doctrine of taysir allows for hiyla, or the relaxation of Islamic law whenever Muslims find it inconvenient to uphold aspects of Sharia law, like when they are under infidel/Western authority. In fact, some of Islam's top leaders, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for example, are great advocates of taysir, "especially for those Muslim minorities living in Europe and America."Taysir is like a broader concept of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to lie when circumstances call for it, while taysir only permits Muslims to drop aspects of Sharia law when circumstances call for it.
But there is another distinction. The Gulf women traveling to France are tourists who are not nearly as acquainted with the West as their American counterparts. They naturally assume the West is like the Islamic world--actually tenacious about its customs and laws, hardly to be pushed around by minority groups. (This is precisely why Muslims in the West shamelessly push for the Ground Zero mosque -- Muslims in the Middle East can't believe it and think it's a Zionist conspiracy.)
Muslims living in the West, on the other hand, know how easily the West can be pushed into submission...
Congress' Elected Entertainment Doesn't Disappoint
It's not that our country's about to go from being in the red to into the RED, it's gotta be a black thing.
Brian Preston on PJTattler catches the woman he calls "Our national treasure and Texas' most prominent elected Democrat, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee," joining the debt ceiling poker game:
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) on Friday strongly suggested that members of Congress are making it difficult for President Obama to raise the debt ceiling because of his race.
TSA: Court Rules Scanner Install Violated Federal Law
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals makes a ruling against the nudiescanners -- great! -- and then removes the ruling's teeth by saying there's no mandate to change anything at the airports.
Declan McCullough writes at CNET that the TSA failed to follow proper procedures (laws requiring federal agencies to first notify the public and seek comments):
"It is clear that by producing an image of the unclothed passenger, (a full-body) scanner intrudes upon his or her personal privacy in a way a magnetometer does not," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg for the three-judge panel.Ginsburg said he would not order TSA to immediately halt the full-body screening--which resulted in a near-revolt by air travelers last fall--but instead instructs "the agency promptly to proceed in a manner consistent with this opinion."
via The Former Banker
Make Your Child Pedophile-Ready
Another smart post from Mark Bennett at Defending People on the TSA, "TSA Grooming," about how his kids are no longer taking advantages of those things like a summer leadership program across the country:
Thanks to the Transportation Security Agency, such schemes are, for the Bennett kids, no more. We'll be driving--I'm not taking my kids to a place where a government goon can and is likely to, for no good reason, lawfully feel them up. (The TSA says it will only pat down children who set off the metal detector. This is small comfort: I go through enough metal detectors to know that there are lots of factors other than too much metal that will cause such machines to give an alarm.)Lots of parents will say, "what's the big deal?" and blithely subject their young children to the possibility of an intrusive patdown for the convenience of air travel. For these parents, the family vacation to the ski slopes is worth exposing their young to genital groping by strangers of unknown provenance. I have little respect for this prioritization (I might even, in a snarkier mood, call it narcissistic). If a stranger on the street offered a parent an all-expenses-paid skiing vacation in exchange for the opportunity to pat down the parent's young children, the parent would be a pendejo to accept. The difference between that situation and the TSA patdown is that the TSA isn't offering as much compensation--it won't pay for the vacation; it'll only allow access to the transportation system.
If the parent said no and the stranger touched the child on the street in the manner of a TSA patdown, no jury in the country would convict the parent for beating the stranger. In fact, after having been beaten the stranger might well find himself cuffed in the back of a patrol car and facing charges of indecency with a child. And rightly so: we teach our children that their bodies are their own to control, and that no stranger need be allowed such liberties. The parents who bundle their children onto planes to hit the slopes set a price on the children's rights to be left alone--a price that should be set only by the child, once the child is old enough.
The stranger patting down children on the street wouldn't be committing a sex crime unless he were acting with sexual intent. And most TSA screeners--assuming that they're anywhere near the norm, sexually (maybe not a valid assumption--the authoritarian personality that would lead one to seek TSA work likely has associated paraphilias)--have no sexual interest in groping a preteen child. But to the young child, there's no noticeable difference between being groped by a stranger because mommy and daddy want to go to the beach, and being groped by a stranger because that's how he gets his rocks off.
Bennett had a suggestion in an email exchange we had (I wrote him about his posts I linked to the other day): That those who have to fly should be gathering TSA screeners' names and photos, and publishing them.
I published the name of TSA lackey Magee Thedala (or Thedala Magee -- I was upset after she stuck her latex-gloved hand sideways into my vagina four times, so I didn't catch which name went first), but I wish I'd snapped a photo. Those earning a living violating our Fourth Amendment rights should be exposed for it.
Another smart Bennett post on people letting people grope their children is here. He quotes the mother of the six-year-old groped on video by a TSA worker:
Cannot believe people are allowed to touch my child in this manner. The TSA should be abolished and anyone who has groped another person cited, fined and/or jailed for personal assault. I tried to stop this and was threatened with fines, jail and delay in getting to my destination. There are better ways to keep our citizens safe from terrorists. We need to find a way to keep ourselves safe from the TSA too. "Just doing their job" is an excuse used by people who do wrong.
Bennett writes:
I cannot believe it either, but I'm not the one who allowed it."Delay in getting to my destination"? There is nowhere I need to get in enough of a hurry to be worth letting you fondle a six-year-old.
"Fines"? Now you're trying to bribe me to let you molest a little girl. Shame on you for trying. And shame on me if I let you.
"Jail"? Ha! I laugh at your "jail." You think any jury anywhere in the Southern District of Texas would convict me of anything if I interfere with this sort of treatment of a six-year-old girl? Better men have spent more time in worse jails for lesser causes. Ha!
If I went through airport security with a child, I would be anticipating that the child would be touched inappropriately by the screener--it is, after all, according to Curtis Robert Burns, standard operating procedure.** Anticipating that the screener might try to commit standard operating procedure on the child, I would be alert and prepared to speak up, and to act if necessary.
It's easy to figure out what to do, given lots of time to think about the subject. But when nasty unexpected things happen to us, we don't always have the proper response at hand. For the parent who hasn't been paying close attention to TSA's trespasses, seeing this must have been like a descent into Wonderland. For the passenger who doesn't deal with the criminal-justice system every day, the threat of jail is a terrifying thing. The TSA's threats might even, in the heat of the moment, make a person question whether what he is seeing, which he knows is wrong, is really wrong.
Wrong does not become right because a government agent says it is. Even if Meemaw and Pawpaw are already waiting at the airport to pick you up.
I write in I See Rude People that there people shouldn't take loud children on planes. I'll amend that. People shouldn't take any children on planes. Where do you really, really have to be that you'll trade letting your child be groped in order to get there?
Another Government Money-Grab (Woof, Woof)
The lady in Oak Park, Michigan who was in danger over going to jail over planting veggies in her front yard is now in trouble for having unlicensed dogs -- only she got them licensed in June when the city bugged her about that.
Ben Popken at Consumerist writes:
Though the City of Oak Park dropped the charges against her over the vegetable garden, they are now pursuing a new case against her for having two unlicensed dogs, The Detroit News reports. She got licenses for the dogs after the city gave notice to her about it in June, but the city is now pursuing misdemeanor charges against her, even though their normal procedure is drop things after the owner gets the dog licenses. If convicted, Julie could face 93 days in jail.
Julie's blog post on this is here.
But think about it, why do dogs need to be licensed?
Well, it seems there's one reason and one reason only: To enrich the coffers of big government.
I asked Uncle Google that question ("reason for a dog license"), and he spit out the Wasco, County, Oregon Sheriff's Department/Animal Control page (with the sloppily written and punctuated bit "Why license my dog" at the top):
Why license my dog? It's the law! There are other reasons to purchase a license and have your dog wear it?1. A lost dog and its owner can identified by the license tag, eliminating searches, newspaper ads, etc.
2. You will be notified if your dog should be impounded.
3. A dog wearing a current license would receive emergency medical care if injured and impounded.
My response:
1. My dog has a tag with my phone number on it, and she's microchipped.
2. My dog is three pounds and never leaves my sight except to drop her Tootsie-roll-sized poops on my postage stamp-sized bit of lawn.
3. So, if a dog's suffering, and she has no tag, all the animal control people just stand around it and laugh?
There is no practical reason I should pay government a fee because I have a dog.
What's amazing is that almost nobody questions all these money grabs by government, and more important, how government is encroaching into just about every area of our life.
"Food Plate," anyone? How much did that cost -- for government to tell us how to eat so we will be obese and diabetic. (Because, of course, the new food plate tells us to shovel down those whole grains...which evidence shows make us fat and diabetic by causing the insulin secretion that puts on fat.)
What the hell is government doing telling us how to eat? Do you think Thomas Jefferson saw that as government's role?
Tax...Cats?
Betcha thought I left "Fat" off between "Tax" and "Cats."
Nope. That's how crazy spendingandspendingandspending is getting in this country.
San Diego wants to tax cats. Gene Cubbison writes on NBC/SD:
Should cats be treated like dogs, when it comes to licensing and immunization requirements?The San Diego city auditor's office recommends doing just that -- for the sake of health, safety and "cost recovery" for taxpayers.
According to formulas used by the Humane Society of the United States, there are an estimated 373,000 cats in San Diego.
If just 5 percent had been registered at $25 a head, the auditor's office says the city could have saved $536,000 over the past three fiscal years.
You've got to love how they "save" money by squeezing it out of taxpayers.
Oh, and sorry, as Allahpundit points out at Hot Air, it's not a "tax," it's a "registration fee."
I'm sure this will matter a great deal to all the people paying $25 and getting fuck all in return.
The video:
It's Settled: Men People Are Molesters Until Proven Otherwise
UPDATE: Turns out Brid Hehir is a woman. Thanks, Lenona.
Life has gotten pretty ugly in that respect. A girl, about 12, turns and talks to a man on a train -- Brid Hehir, who wrote the story up for Spiked, about how it led to teacher's fear of "stranger danger" taking hold:
The girl told me that she was in her last year at primary school and was going to start at a 'good' secondary school nearby in September. She then asked me what I was reading and I told her a bit about the book. She wasn't really interested in my response, so I asked where she was going to spend the school holidays. She was going to Albania for three weeks and was really looking forward to it. Her family goes there every year. She'd like to go to other places, too, she said, and I suggested that maybe she could when she grew up, had a job and money.I recount this story in detail because these days it is unusual for an adult to have a conversation with a child they don't know and it was a refreshing and pleasurable experience. But the really noteworthy thing is what happened next. A young woman, a teacher I assumed, approached us and told the girl to stop talking to me. Didn't the girl remember that the school discourages children from talking to strangers?
I was flabbergasted but suggested to the teacher that by inference she didn't trust me with the child. She denied it was anything personal, but that the children were told at school never to talk to people they didn't know. I suggested that might be a problem but she reiterated that it was school policy. I suggested that maybe the school policy was wrong but she declined to respond, reiterated her instructions to the girl and walked away.
The girl and I sat in uncomfortable silence from then until her and the other children got off the train. I felt insulted, cheapened and angry by the exchange with the teacher. How has something as innocent and ordinary as talking to a school child been turned into a suspicious act?
via @FreeRangeKids
Does The Neighbor Get To Put Foul Odors Into Your Apartment?
A story out of New York, from the NY Post, by Kirsten Fleming:
For many New Yorkers, owning a 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom condo in a posh Upper East Side doorman building is a dream come true.But they don't live next door to Jane's chain-smoking next-door neighbor from hell, whose incessant nicotine habit has ensured that her own pad constantly smells like eau de Joe Camel.
"I feel like I'm living in a college dorm, and I just want to live like an adult," says Jane, a 50-year-old journalist who didn't want her real name published for professional reasons.
"Right now, all of my outlets are taped up and my windows are sealed."
Still, her apartment reeks of stale smoke that seeps through the shared wall, which happens to bump up against Jane's bedroom.
She purchased the condo 15 years ago, but the trouble began in 2008, when the human chimney rented the unit next door and began puffing on cigarettes, pot and something that "smelled like plastic."
Despite repeated complaints, Jane says her condo board has refused to broach the subject of banning smoking, even after a fire in February -- sparked by a different tenant's smoking habit -- gutted one apartment and did extensive water damage to numerous floors.
"They've banned smoking in parks, but I can't have a smoke-free bedroom," Jane says.
I would say "Your right to emit foul odors ends where my nose...and lungs, and clothes, and sofa...begin."
Acting Like A Parent Is Now "Disorderly Conduct"
A mother in Nashville rightly refused to have her daughter groped by the TSA, writes Erin Quinn in the Tennessean:
A 41-year-old Clarksville woman was arrested after Nashville airport authorities say she was belligerent and verbally abusive to security officers, refusing for her daughter to be patted down at a security checkpoint.Andrea Fornella Abbott yelled and swore at Transportation Security Administration agents Saturday afternoon at Nashville International Airport, saying she did not want her daughter to be "touched inappropriately or have her "crotch grabbed," a police report states.
After the woman refused to calm down, airport police said, she was charged with disorderly conduct and taken to jail. She has been released on bond.
Using profanity always gives people an excuse to dismiss what you're saying -- or jail you. The same goes for yelling. Dismissing you is their right, but jailing you? This shouldn't be. The Supreme Court said in Cohen v. California (the "fuck the draft" case) that sometimes the wrong words are precisely the right words to convey a message.
I don't know what this woman said, but "Don't fucking touch my daughter's vagina" sends a stronger message than, "I think screening a kid using what would otherwise be 'inappropriate touch' is really out of line."
Surprised that I'd say that as an author of a book on manners? Don't be. It isn't rude to be civilly disobedient. Quite the contrary. Civil disobedience is a call to make government and authorities act well-mannered -- in the sense that it is good civic manners to accord Americans all the rights granted us under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, including our Fourth Amendment rights.
via Lisa Simeone
UPDATE: Lisa Simeone emails a link to defense lawyer Mark Bennett's blog, noting:
Carolyn Piphus is the judge who signed off on the arrest affidavit for "disorderly conduct" against the Nashville mother Andrea Fornella Abbott.
Bennett blogs at Defending People, "Carolyn Piphus is a Fool":
(a) A person commits an offense who, in a public place and with intent to cause public annoyance or alarm:(1) Engages in fighting or in violent or threatening behavior;
(2) Refuses to obey an official order to disperse issued to maintain public safety in dangerous proximity to a fire, hazard or other emergency; or
(3) Creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act that serves no legitimate purpose.
(b) A person also violates this section who makes unreasonable noise that prevents others from carrying on lawful activities.
Tennessee Code 39-17-305.
Does this look like probable cause to you?:
Nashville Airport Arrest Affidavit (excerpt):
On 07/09/2011 at approximately 1340 hrs I was dispatched to the central screening point at the Nashville International Airport for report of a passenger that was refusing screening. Upon my arrival,I made contact with the subject, identified as Andrea Abbott, who was involved in a verbal altercationwith TSA screening agents. Abbott was being verbally abusive toward the TSA agents stating her daughter would not be screened. I advised Abbott that she and her daughter would have to be screenedor they would be escorted by me out of the secured area of the airport. Abbott then became verballyabusive toward me as well as the TSA agents. Abbott stated she did not want her daughter to be"touched inappropriately," have her "crotch grabbed," or be further screened. Eventually Abbottagreed to allow her daughter to be screened by TSA. Abbott retrieved her cell phone and wasattempting to film her daughter being screened. I advised Abbott to put her cell phone away. Again,Abbott was verbally abusive. After her daughter was screened TSA advised Abbott would have to bescreened as well to continue down the concourse. Abbott stated this was "bullshit" and becameverbally abusive toward TSA and myself again. I advised Abbott numerous times she was disruptingthe screening process and flow of passengers through the area. Abbott refused to calm down. At thistime I placed Abbott under arrest for Disorderly Conduct (TCA 39-17-305). Ms. Abbot was loud inher speech and very belligerant therefore she was arrested for disorderly conduct.
From another one of Bennett's blog items -- about how his family drove around the East Coast rather than flying, and why that was the better way to get around, vis a vis the TSA searches (and what we need to do about them):
Fear is still the order of the day, the "whatever it takes" quislings are still running the show, and we're still expected to submit ourselves and our loved ones to the not-so-gentle ministrations of the mall-cop wannabes in the security line in order to get on a plane (or maybe a train, or a ferry, or a subway, or a bus...).So was the additional risk of driving justified? You bet!
Our days of driving around the country free from TSA interference are limited, if many more people don't get off their complacent fear-raddled fat American butts and stand up for our shared freedom, but we'll keep enjoying these days while we can.
At What Point Do We Decide There's Too Much Government?
Popehat blogs that Colorado is looking to regulate doll ethnicity (among other things) in child care centers, copying out of the recently proposed Colorado Department of Human Services Proposed Child Care Center Rules, which have gotten a certain amount of coverage. From Popehat:
Speaking of toys, maybe your kid isn't Anglo. Mine aren't. Do you care if the child care center has non-white dolls? Would you like to donate (for instance) an Asian doll, like we did, so your kid will have a doll that looks like him or her? Or do you not care? It doesn't matter, your government has regulated doll ethnicity for you:DOLLS SHALL REPRESENT THREE (3) RACES.
As a redhead, dolls have never looked like me, save for Raggedy Ann and Andy, which someone gave me as a gift when I was little. Somehow, I've survived -- I guess because I didn't know that I was supposed to be disturbed that Barbie was blonde and toasty-tanned (in one version).
I guess I could also have been disturbed that she had a Malibu Dream House when my family lived in a suburban tract home in the Detroit suburbs (perhaps somebody should have mandated that there be a Barbie's Suburban Tract Home).
Even more tragically, the poor dear had a boyfriend with just a flat piece of plastic where his mantool was supposed to be. Alas.
Another point in Colorado's micromanagement attempt is based on bad science, and prohibits whole milk (on the wrong supposition that fat makes people fat, when it's carbohydrates that cause the insulin secretion that put on fat).
And then, there's this. Popehat blogs:
If this level of state control creeps you out, don't worry. The government will never be able to regulate the core of your child-care experience -- the personal relationships you develop with your kids' teachers and child-care workers, relationships that often develop into friendships. The government can't regulate human interaction on that level . . . .CHILDREN SHOULD BE GREETED INDIVIDUALLY AND PLEASANTLY UPON ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE
If you're a nursery school teacher and we need to legislate that you do this...well, obviously, we also need to write a law that you should continue breathing at all times while the children are present. Just for starters.
via @Overlawyered
Sam Harris On Literal Interpretations Of Religious Books
Great point, too, about how nothing in the religious guidebooks (the Bible, the Quran) could have been written by an omniscient being who could see into the future -- foresee electricity, for example:
Radio Redhead
Catch me on radio tonight, 8pm, Pacific, for about an hour on KABC.com (LA's am 790), streamed live, with the fabulous, fast, furious, funny John Phillips, @johnnydontlike.
Meet Canada's Second-Class Citizens: Muslim Females
You have to see the photo at Steynonline.com, of the Muslim girls (who apparently have their period) being made to sit, quarantined, behind all the other Muslim children...given space to pray in a public school. The public school setting slides this toward what would otherwise be called something like "institutionalized discrimination," but in this case, it's worshipped as "multiculturalism." Steyn writes:
Imagine if you're a soi-disant moderate Muslim, genuinely so. You came to Canada because Yemen's a dump, and you don't want to waste your life there. And your daughter loves it, and wants to be Canadian, and be just like the other girls in her street. And then she goes to Valley Park Middle School: What if she doesn't feel it's a religious obligation to attend Friday prayers (as some Muslims argue)? Think there's much chance of being able to opt out easily at Valley Park? What if she wants to dress as she wishes to rather than as the Wahhabi/Salafist imam orders? What if she doesn't want to tell the creepy perve imam whether she's menstruating or not? What, in other words, is her chance of being able to attend Valley Park as a regular Canadian schoolgirl?..."Diversity" is where nations go to die. If local Mennonites or Amish were segregating the sexes and making them enter by different doors for religious services in a Toronto grade-school cafeteria, Canadian feminists would howl them down in outrage. But when Muslims do it they fall as silent as their body-bagged sisters in Kandahar. If you're wondering how Valley Park's catchment district got to be 80-90 per cent Muslim is nothing flat, well, Islam is currently the biggest supplier of new Canadians, as it is of new Britons and new Europeans. Not many western statistics agencies keep tabs on religion, but the Vienna Institute of Demography, for example, calculates that by 2050 a majority of Austrians under 15 will be Muslim. 2050 isn't that far away. It's as far from today as 2011 is from 1972: The future shows up faster than you think.
A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else: First it's Jews, already fleeing Malmo in Sweden. Then it's homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, "the most tolerant city in Europe". Then it's uncovered women, already targeted for rape in Oslo and other Continental cities. And, if you don't any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Egypt to Pakistan.
More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end less space for you.
via Michael Pizolato
Barack Lied, Healthcare Died
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made a fibby about his mother's struggle with cancer, saying she spent the months before her death in 1995 fighting with insurance companies that were trying to deny her coverage for the treatment she needed. He told that story again and again, as President, during the national health care debate.
The truth came out in a biography about his mother, written by former NYT reporter Janny Scott. Byron York, of the Wash Ex, calls the biography "generally admiring," and goes on to say:
Scott, who had access to Dunham's correspondence from the time, reveals that Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," Scott writes. "Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month."...A dozen years later, her son turned her ordeal into a campaign pitch for national health care. But the story Obama told, Scott writes, was "abbreviated" -- the abbreviation was to leave out the fact that Ann Dunham had health insurance that paid for her treatment. "Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition," Scott writes, "it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."
via FoxNation
"We The White People"?
I had to check my little Cato Institute copy of the Constitution on my phone to be sure, but no, the Preamble says, "We the people of the United States..."
Well, Joe Dejka writes in the Omaha World-Tribune that $130K in Federal porkulus dollars have paid for a manual for every teacher, administrator, and staff member in the Omaha Public Schools to be more culturally sensitive.
And by that they mean, to help them understand that:
American government and institutions create advantages that "channel wealth and power to white people," that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should "take action for social justice."The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and "ableism," defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.
...School board President Sandra Jensen said the district doesn't endorse everything in the book, nor does she expect employees to adopt the authors' positions. The book is intended to open a dialogue, she said.
"The purpose of providing this resource is to help staff see that people come from a multitude of different backgrounds which cause them to respond differently to the same set of facts, depending on their personal perspectives," she said in a statement. "Recognition that one might have a certain perspective is critical to treating all people equally."
...The book that OPS bought, "The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change," includes a worksheet for teachers to score themselves on a continuum of cultural sensitivity. The continuum ranges from "cultural destructiveness," as evidenced by genocide and ethnocide, to "cultural proficiency," depicted as the highest level of awareness.
Only those educators who acknowledge the existence of white privilege in America, that "white" is a culture in America and that race "is a definer for social and economic status" can reach proficiency, the authors contend. Those who score poorly on the worksheet are asked in the book what they will do "to align yourself with the values expressed."
Jensen said the district will not use the book to evaluate or judge employees.
Right.
Vile.
The article goes on to say that the book says teachers must "reject the 'color-blind' approach to teaching in which teachers treat all children the same." Instead, the article says, "the group identity of students of color should be recognized and esteemed, the authors say."
Isn't school about teaching kids to read, write, understand history, government, literature, and science, and do math? I mean, instead of fighting racism by making one race more special than all the others? That's no more right if there's black supremacy than if there's white.
Here's a suggestion for teaching kids identity in schools: Teach them that they're American, and what the rights and responsibilities of that entail.
UPDATE: FIRE's Adam Kissel covered this here:
What K-12 school boards choose to do is outside of FIRE's mission, but journalist Joe Dejka is correct that the push for "cultural competence" in education is "a trend across the country." This in itself is not necessarily a problem for individual rights--educating people about different cultures is perfectly possible to do in a non-coercive way--but FIRE will continue to fight such teacher education programs on the college level when they require individuals to hold and espouse specific values that violate their freedom of conscience.
Somehow, I Escaped Death By Hoodie
All of you commenting here also apparently escaped a tragic end as a result of wearing a hoodie in your youth.
As Chris Morran writes at Consumerist about more meddling by the Consumer Product Safety Commission:
When I was a young thing, the drawstring on your hooded sweatshirt was something to chew on or play with while being bored to death in school. But as of 2006, such drawstrings have been considered strangulation hazards in children's clothing. That, however, didn't stop Macy's from selling hoodies, jackets and other kids' clothing with drawstrings, which is why the retailer now has to pay a penalty of $750,000.
From the CPSC's website (see more photos there):
Federal law requires manufacturers, distributors and retailers to report to CPSC immediately (within 24 hours) after obtaining information reasonably supporting the conclusion that a product contains a defect which could create a substantial product hazard, creates an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death, or fails to comply with any consumer product safety rule or any other rule, regulation, standard or ban enforced by CPSC....On June 29, 2011, the Commission approved a final rule that designates children's upper outerwear in sizes 2T through 12 with neck or hood drawstrings, and children's upper outerwear in sizes 2T through 16 with certain waist or bottom drawstrings, as substantial product hazards.
Of course, life itself is a substantial hazard. Should we take the precaution of offing all the kiddies lest they risk serious injury or death simply by waking up and getting out of bed?
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Child Protective Services Horror Story
I got this letter from a regular commenter here, who allowed me to share it. I know who she is, but told her I'd post it without her name:
Hi Amy,I had to write and tell you what's going on considering the amount of your blog that you devote to false accusations and repercussions for those false accusers. Yesterday I was having a leisurely day with my daughter who is almost 14. We had stayed up late reading and slept in. When I got out of bed I was so hooked on my book that I decided to lounge on the couch with my book until a knock on my door at almost 1 pm. It was Child Protective Services. I was being investigated for abuse of alcohol to the point of intoxication on a regular basis with my minor children present. I was also being accused of being in an intoxicated state and putting my children in the car and driving around town. I was told that the worker would need to speak to my 10 and 12 year old. I informed the worker that I do not have a 10 or 12 year old and gave her the correct ages of my three children. Despite me correcting her, she asked me several times to produce my 10 and 12 year old children for an interview with her.
My daughter was upstairs and I called her down to answer the worker's questions. When the worker asked my daughter the last time she saw Mom drunk, my daughter laughed and said, "never. I have never seen my mother drunk." She was then asked the last time she saw Mom drinking and she said that she couldn't remember because it has been so long and that Mom does not drink regularly. That wasn't good enough for the worker who pushed it asking my daughter was it last week or last month. My daughter told her again that its been a long time since she saw me even have a glass of wine. The worker was extremely rude to me and when I asked her what to expect next she insinuated that I had a history with CPS and asked if I was in recovery. I told her that the only history with CPS were founded reports against my abusive former husband and that I was never the subject of any allegations and that no I was not an alcoholic and therefore not in recovery. Sadly, as rude as she was to me, and she was rude, I made a point of being respectful and polite because this is a woman who had control over my future with my kids. She left and told me I would hear from someone today.
When I didn't receive a call today by 2:30, I called CPS and asked who the caseworker assigned to my case was. I was transferred to her and the caseworker wanted to know how I found out who she was, as if I had committed some secret act and found her. I explained that I called because I had been expecting a call that didn't come and that I take this situation very seriously. I explained to her that I was extremely upset that anyone would make such allegations and that I was not in the habit of drinking regularly and that I would never drink and drive. She told me that she had no record of anyone talking to my daughter the day before and then insisted to me that they spoke to my other child. She also repeatedly asked where my 10 and 12 year olds were. I explained to her that I do not have a 10 and 12 year old and told her the correct ages of my kids and explained that my sons were out but I would make sure that they were available for when she wanted to come over. She then insisted to me that they spoke to my son but needed to speak to my daughter. After some confusion over who they actually spoke to, on her part, she asked to speak to my one son because my other son is not a minor.
The worker that came today was a different worker and my son who is 16 told her he was upset that we had to go through this and that he has never seen me drunk. He told her that while he has seen me have a glass of wine that it is occasionally and never to the point of intoxication. She asked him if he knew what intoxicated was. He then pointed out to her that not only did she not have the correct amount of children in her report, but whoever called it in did not even have the correct last names. They were named in the report with my maiden name which I use and they do not. He asked her how a report could be taken seriously with so many important errors and she responded that they must follow up all reports. She asked me if there is a lot of traffic in my house and I could only assume that she meant parties and my son told her that while friends are always welcome this is not a party house and rarely are there ever more than four guests here at a time and that usually that means each kid has one friend over. She asked again about my drinking habits and whether or not I drink and drive with the kids in the car. I was honest with her that I came from an alcoholic back round and that my kids and I lived with my parents for a period of time after my divorce almost 6 years ago and that we became estranged from my family due to issues of alcoholism in that house. My ex husband and I were not drinkers and did not even stock a liquor cabinet and my children have not seen my family in almost 6 years due to what I considered unhealthy conditions in the house due to alcoholism. I did explain to the worker that I take it very seriously because of my back round and that drinking and driving was not something I ever did, even in my youth.
At the conclusion of the interview the worker made the claim that I told someone in confidence that I can't be blamed for my drinking because its a disease and not my fault. I told her that I never uttered those words to anyone in my life. My son actually laughed at the picture she painted of me and then told her again how unfair it is that anyone could make these types of allegations against us. I asked what recourse do I have and I was told probably not much because callers can be anonymous and most likely the District Attorney's Office would not pursue charges against the caller. I have to wait 60 days for the findings of their investigation. I am not worried about guilty findings because I know that the allegations are not true but its sickening that someone would be so malicious as to make such allegations against me and anonymously. I did call the DA's office and plan on filing a report. I don't know if the person making these charges will be satisfied that they caused a problem for me and be done or if in a week or a month they will make another call with worse allegations. I will do whatever I can to find out who made this up, but the reality is there isn't much I can do.
I was very clear to the worker about any drinking. I told her that I am not against people drinking or social drinking but that I've always made a point to be careful because there is a history of alcohol abuse in my family. She asked me if I've ever been drunk and I told her that yes, I have gotten drunk in the past when I was younger. She wanted to know how old my kids were at the time. It was ludicrous that she would ask me that considering my kids told her they never saw me drunk. I told her honestly that while I know I've been drunk in my life, it has been a very long time, as in years, since I was intoxicated and never in the presence of my kids. This was such a waste of resources that two workers in two days were visiting me for false reports when there are kids who really are in danger. I understand that they have to follow a report but when they can't even get the ages and last names of my kids correct, shouldn't that be a clue that someone is being malicious? If someone who knew me or my kids called out of genuine concern, wouldn't they have known at least the general ages of my kids? And how sad that I may never be able to face my accuser in court or have the satisfaction of seeing that my accuser faces charges for falsely accusing me of abuse or neglect of my kids!!
Sorry for making this so long but you always post about false accusers of sex crimes and while this isn't a sex crime and I'm not facing years in jail, I do think its an act of malice and that the accuser should pay for this. I think it shows just how messed up our system is and that even the people in charge of investigating don't aren't always competent. The worker today had a very heavy Haitian accent and was very hard to understand. She also felt that I shouldn't be bothered by this at all. Her feeling was that if I know what goes on in my house and heart it shouldn't matter what other people think. That's easy for her to say when she's the investigator and not the subject of the investigation. I did tell her that I'm not worried about a guilty finding because I know that these charges are untrue but that I am concerned that anyone could get away with malicious false reports. Thanks for listening.
I asked this:
And a question -- is there any recourse that you have? A false accusation is very serious. I don't have to tell you that. If people can make false accusations without any possibility of punishment, well, it leaves the field open for false accusations...and for children to be taken away from good parents.
I'm awaiting permission to also post her reply.
Your rights, in respect to CPS investigations, laid out here.
A Girl's Gotta Do Her Homework
Have a little jokie in a column I'm doing -- just two words -- but even for a wee joke, I have to be accurate.
Accuracy, in this case, required hitting up the Vermont Prisons for some info. My email:
From: Amy Alkon
Sent: Mon 7/11/2011 11:41 AM
To: Lawhorn, William
Subject: time-sensitive to Mr. Lawhorn from syndicated columnist Amy AlkonJournalist on deadline
Dear Mr. Lawhorn,
Sorry to have to ask you this, but I have a question for my nationally syndicated advice column about nudism in Vermont, and this woman's boyfriend is actually a sex offender (he's not merely going naked but doing it for sexual gratification). I want to make the point to her that this is a crime, and I need to know the facts on whether someone incarcerated in Vermont is allowed to go naked in jail. Again, sorry to have to ask you this...but I need to be factually correct for the column, and I'm guessing they must wear a prison uniform, same as all the other prisoners. I would be very grateful for your reply.All the best, -Amy Alkon, (Los Angeles)
Mr. Lawhorn's polite and informative reply:
Hello Amy,
This is a unique request. The Vermont Department of Corrections does not allow inmates to go naked in jail. We have facilities that are in uniform and some that are in plain clothes; but clothing none the less. It is a crime for inmates to expose themselves beyond the normal showering or using the restroom facilities and inmates who violate this are subject to criminal charges or administrative rule violations (or both) depending upon the circumstances.
I hope this answers your question.
Respectfully,
William Lawhorn, Director
Facility Operations
Vermont Department of Corrections
What Islamic Absurdities Say About Islamic Calls For Violence
The breastfeeding fatwa, from the Top 10 link below, is particularly hilarious:
The Fatwa: Ezzat Attiya: Adult Breastfeeding in the WorkplaceIn May 2007, Ezzat Attiya wondered how unrelated men and women could work together in the same office, when Islam forbids men and women who aren't married or related to be alone together. His answer: let her suckle him FIVE TIMES. Yes, that's right, an adult female breastfeeding an adult male coworker will defuse all sexual tension in the office. See, the female worker will now be the male worker's foster mother, and they can be alone together anytime. Attiya's ruling was intergalactically mocked, and quickly condemned on the homefront as well. He was later suspended from his job, pilloried in Arab newspapers, and issued a hasty retraction saying it was a "bad interpretation of a particular case."
Source: "A Fatwa Free-for-All In the Islamic World," New York Times, Michael Slackman, Monday, June 11, 2007.
Raymond Ibrahim writes at FrontPage:
Consider: If Muslims are still compelled to be true to things like "adult breastfeeding," simply because 7th century Muhammad said so, is it not logical to accept that they embrace their prophet's even better documented and unequivocal words concerning the infidel?Look at it this way: the issue of adult breastfeeding is embarrassing for Muslims; far from providing them with any sort of advantage or benefits, it places them, especially their women, in a ludicrous position (indeed, it is ranked first in this list of "top ten bizarre or ridiculous fatwas"). So why is it still a relevant issue among Muslims? Because Muhammad once commanded it. Thus, like it or not, Muslims must somehow come to grips with it.
What, then, of Muhammad's other commandments--commandments that, if upheld, far from embarrassing Muslims, provide them with power, wealth, and hedonistic joys--that is, commandments that jibe quite well with mankind's most primitive impulses? I speak of Muhammad's (and by extension Sharia's) commandments for Muslims to wage war ("jihad") upon the infidel, to plunder the infidel of his wealth, women, and children, and to keep him in perpetual subjugation--all things that define Islam's history vis-à-vis the non-Muslim.
In other words, the Muslim mentality that feels the need to address adult breastfeeding, simply because Muhammad once advised it, must certainly be sold on the prophet's constant incitements for war and conquest.
Living in an era where the Muslim world is significantly weaker than the infidel world, and so currently incapable of launching a full-on offensive, one may overlook this fact. But the intention is surely there. One need only look to how non-Muslim minorities, especially Christians, are treated in the Muslim world--where they are persecuted, kidnapped, raped and ransacked--to be sure of it.
Never Hurts To Ask*
A Marine Corps sergeant asks Mila Kunis to the Marine Corps Ball -- and she says yes!...urged on by Justin Timberlake:
(*Best to avoid asking feminist atheists. You can identify them by the frequent use of the word "misogyny" to describe normal male/female interactions...like a man verbally expressing interest in a woman a single time and then accepting it and going away when she lets him know she is not interested.)
I'm a Friend of the Corps, myself.
How Fair Is The "Perp Walk"?
Remember those guilty as hell Duke lacrosse players...who actually ended up not being guilty...after being practically burned at the cross by everyone from higher-ups at their university to the international press?
There's supposed to be trial by jury in this country, but it's gotten to the point where there's a trial by press first when police parade some person accused of a crime before the cameras.
Andrew Cohen, writing in The Atlantic, feels the French were right to deem this an abuse of justice, vis a vis the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. Cohen writes:
Of all the discordant notes that have been sounded since the arrest last week of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the most disappointing may have come from Michael Bloomberg. Of the now famous "perp walk" of the world's most famous rape suspect, the mayor of New York City said: "I think it is humiliating, but you know if you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime." Then, perhaps sensing that he had gone too far in prematurely adjudging Strauss-Kahn guilty, the mayor added: "The real sad thing is if someone is accused and does the perp walk and turns out not to be guilty, then society really ought to look in the mirror."
Cohen calls the perp walk "the result of one of the most cynical conspiracies in all of modern-day criminal justice":
It is an officially-sanctioned and eternally re-enacted plot between the media and the police, the overt act of which benefits both parties -- and prosecutors as well -- at the expense of the suspect. It is done so flawlessly and routinely now that hardly anyone in America even realizes anymore how prejudicial and unfair it is to a defendant. We simply take it for granted today that the public image of a presumedly innocent person can lawfully be manipulated by the government and its agents. That's why so many of us were so surprised when the French expressed outrage over the way Strauss-Kahn was treated after his arrest. Sometimes, it takes an outsider to see clearly the truth.The police naturally have an interest in publicly displaying their fruits of their labor -- a suspect who looks guilty, as we all would if marched about in handcuffs after sleepless hours in detention -- and the media naturally have an interest in publishing the images they receive from the walks. (If I had a dollar for every time a perp walk was broadcast on television B-roll over the past 15 years I can tell you flatly that I wouldn't be sitting here writing this column). At fault are both the law enforcement officials who arrange to "walk the perp" at a specific time and place -- there is a reason the cameras are almost always there, folks -- and the reporters and producers who endlessly replay the images and take convenient cover under the First Amendment's free press rights. They use the First Amendment as a putative shield, even as they use the images themselves as a sword that cuts deeply into the Sixth Amendment fair trial rights of the accused.
The Difference Between Being Able To "Grow A Baby" And Being A Parent
The Octomom's children were acting up on a plane and "3rd Rock" star Kristin Johnson asked that they pipe down, according to The Daily Mail:
But apparently, the mother-of-14 did not take too kindly to Johnston's comments, telling her: 'How would you like me to keep eight two-year-olds quiet?'To which the actress allegedly responded: 'Get more help!'
Suleman's representative told TMZ that she shouted back: 'Why don't you grow a baby and get a life.'
LA Sheriff's Department Has A Muslim Public Affairs Unit
It's paid for with public funds.
Separation of mosque and state, anyone?
More about the LASD's Muslim Community Affairs Unit from TheUnitedWest.com, via a somewhat sloppily written piece on their site:
Steve Whitmore, LASD Senior Media Advisor, confirmed the Muslim Community Affairs Unit receives taxpayer funds approximating $128,400 per year for two full time Deputies. When this reporter asked Mr. Whitmore if any other , religions, had a LASD Community Affairs Unit and received equal taxpayer funds, Whitmore replied, "There are no other religious Community Affairs Units in the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department."For the LASD to meet the Establishment Clause threshold for "government neutrality toward religion" Sheriff Baca would have two options. First, Sheriff Baca would have to establish and manage Community Affairs Units with two Deputies and a $128,400 budget, for each recognized religion under his jurisdiction. The second option would be to dismantle the Muslim Community Affairs Unit in accordance with the Establishment Clause.
...The MCAU has another function, "The unit also trains department members about Islam and Muslims, touching on issues such as religious beliefs and customs. Academy recruits also receive a two-hour class on Muslim cultures and background as part of the cultural awareness training program." A program tasked with teaching Shariah Compliant Islamic values to incoming police recruits, while excluding the values of every other religion in Los Angeles County.
...A 2008 Pew Research Center survey reveals the citizens of California are 42% various Christian denominations, 31% Roman Catholic Christians, 2% Jewish, 2% Latter Day Saints, and 1% Muslim. The rest of the citizens are either non religious or of other minority faiths.
"According to the latest hate crime report from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, 88 percent of all religiously based hate crimes in 2009 were against Jews. Hate crimes that targeted Muslims (3 percent) ranked slightly above those directed at Scientologists (1 percent). In fact, the commission found that attacks against Christians (8 percent) outnumbered attacks against Muslims." It could be argued statistically, that if any religion needs a LA Sheriff's special religious Community Affairs Unit, it's the Jews and Christians not the Muslims.
Terry Sanderson states, "if there is one public service that absolutely must be secular it is the police force. There should be not one whisper of sectarianism in the force and all this talk of Muslim police officers must stop. They are police officers who are Muslim, but when they are at work they must be simply police officers full stop. They must serve the whole community without fear or favor. This goes also for police officers who are Christian, Hindu, Atheist or indifferent."
Here's video on this:
Door Number One
Fiscal hell (California, Inc.) can be so alluring. Front gate, Venice.
Teasing Is Love Without The Sap
Boyfriend's latest:
"You're laughing like a really cute hyena."
Put Government On A Tax Diet
I invest days of my life preparing to get my taxes done. We all do. A flat tax would change that.
Of course, along with a flat tax, our government itself needs to be put on a massive diet, with numerous agencies disbanded. So many Americans have gotten to the point where they believe it's government's job to meddle in (and subsidize) every area of our lives, and that has to change.
Unfortunately, saying "that has to change" is rather pie in the sky, since bureaucracy protects itself, and since it's the rare person (and certainly the extremely rare politician) who will release their lips from the teat for the good of the country. Because of this, I'm not sure if it's possible to roll back government in the way we should -- and must.
End of an empire impending? What's your prediction? Any suggestions for solutions?
Back to the flat tax...in the OC Reg, Peter Rush calls for a flat tax, which he says should more correctly be called the "fair tax":
It is the type of tax envisioned, proposed and supported when the 16th Amendment was passed in 1913 allowing for direct taxation of citizens by the federal government. The tax that was supported in the amendment was 1 percent on the first $20,000 of income - $425,000 of earnings today considering inflation over the last 98 years - with a surcharge of 6 percent for income exceeding $500,000. The form and instructions were four pages and the return was filed on a post card.Over the years, the tax code has become an incomprehensible monstrosity that imposes taxes and grants exceptions based upon political power rather than economic reason. It has become a major source of campaign funds for politicians. And it has created the most feared of all government agencies, the Internal Revenue Service.
To stay competitive, the United States must reform the tax system and a return to the simplicity envisioned when the 16th Amendment was proposed and passed is a good starting point....Critics' objection that the flat tax is unfair to the poor is demonstrably wrong. Depending upon the threshold set for the personal deduction, people on the lower side of the economic scale would owe no taxes.
The other major objection to the flat tax is that it won't raise enough money to fund the government. As is now evident to all thinking Americans, government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
In 1970, the federal tax revenue was $192 billion; in 2010, tax revenue was $2.1 trillion - and it still isn't enough money to pay for all the programs politicians want.
Salt Is A Vegetable
Or it seems that way in the amounts I use it. Just love the stuff.
And, I'm not worried. Over a decade ago, I read Gary Taubes' award-winning piece on salt from Science. And from time to time, I read other work that shows that salt isn't the dietary horror it's been made out to be. The latest, I found from a tweet by Dr. Michael Eades (@DrEades). Melinda Wenner Moyer writes in Sci Am:
For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine--an excellent measure of prior consumption--the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
...Some physicians argue that although tiny blood pressure drops will not have a big effect on individuals--they will not really affect your risk of having a heart attack--they may end up saving lives at the population level, in part because a small percentage of the population, including some African-Americans and elderly individuals, seem to be hypersensitive to salt. For instance, a study published in February 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that cutting salt intake by about 35 percent would save at least 44,000 American lives per year. But such estimates are not evidence, either; they are conjecture. And low-salt diets could have side effects: when salt intake is cut, the body responds by releasing renin and aldosterone, an enzyme and a hormone, respectively, that increase blood pressure.
Oopsy!
(Let's hope you -- and bajillions of New Yorkers -- haven't been taking your dietary advice from Michael Bloomberg.)
Newsflash! Rich Man Drinks Expensive Wine!
Silly report at TPM by Susan Crabtree about Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, "a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare," who -- shockingly -- "spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis."
So...he ordered it and couldn't pay? Or...he ran out on the check? Nope.
But, he and the wine did catch the eye of another diner. Writes Crabtree:
Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan's table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.
"We were just stunned," said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. "I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week."
She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors' safety net, and she didn't know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists. She snapped a few shots with her cell phone to record the wine purchase.
Then, Feinberg rudely marched over to their table and accosted them:
She approached the table and asked Ryan "how he could live with himself" sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor. Some verbal jousting between Feinberg and the other two men ensued. One of the two men said he had ordered the wine, was drinking it and paying for it. In hearing how much the wine cost, Ryan said only: "Is that how much it was?"
Read Ryan's interview with TPM here -- scroll down:
TPM: ...she was saying, is it appropriate for you guys to be ordering that kind of wine $350 dollars-a-bottle?Ryan: "A.) I didn't order it. B.) I had no idea what it would cost, and C.) ...I bought one of these bottles even though I drank a glass, and I always pull my own weight for my meals."
TPM: That was very smart. ... But do you think it's appropriate now that you know how much the wine cost to be drinking [such expensive wine] when you're advocating cuts for seniors?
Ryan: "I think it's stupid to pick up that much for a bottle of wine under any circumstance."
TPM: But you had to pay for it...
Ryan: "Yeah, I was like this is ridiculous. Who buys wine that expensive? It surprised me, and I think it's stupid under any circumstance to pay anything close to 100 dollars for a bottle of wine.
TPM: So you wouldn't do it again?
Ryan: "Well, of course not, because I think it's too much money to pay for wine. Yeah, I don't really know what exactly it cost. It was expensive. But um, 250 maybe it was 250, I don't really remember."
Matthew Hurtt has it right, in his take on the woman's thinking:
Because Paul Ryan believes government should live within its means, he can't buy a $350 bottle of wine. Well, let's see. According to Ryan's most recently available tax returns, he's worth anywhere from $590,000 to $2.4 million, which means that two bottles of wine at $350 each is somewhere between .03% and 1.19% of his total net worth. Clearly, he's drinking the cheap stuff.And if Ryan and his two other dinner associates went dutch (this becomes important later), then the wine purchase is a fraction of that (approx. 1/3, according to my math).
...If Ryan's net worth were broken down hourly, he'd earn anywhere from $295 to $1,154 an hour. In the 90 minutes Ryan and his friends sat at the restaurant, he'd make more than enough to pay for one bottle -- maybe even two.
But that's the sneaky part. Miss Crabtree slides that bit of wealth envy into the column like it matters. It doesn't. At all.
Feinberg (CV and website) asserts her economics background once again. And she was outraged. For what? Because Ryan was spending money... money he had earned? FOR SHAME!
Whether Ryan spends HIS MONEY on fine wine or lights dollar bills on fire, it's really none of anyone's business. What's done with the taxpayers' dollars, on the other hand, should be of concern to all of us. Hurtt points to a link by Erick Erickson:
Ms. Crabtree felt the need to go to DEFCON 1 for this outrage that a member of Congress and his two economist friends would buy expensive wine with their own money. She's never, ever written horribly about Barack Obama using taxpayer money for fancy wine at State Dinners. She's never written salaciously about the liquor bills on Nancy Pelosi's government funded plane.But by God you get some failed Rutgers economist out on a birthday date with her husband at a hotel restaurant who gets all jealous that she's not cool enough to hang out with Little Eddie Munster and his econ pals and . . . well . . . fire up the broom stick and quill pen, we've got a hot story and a little scandal on our hands.
And regarding expensive wine, I was talking about this this evening with Gregg. A friend of his in France once ordered wine that was something like $150 while at lunch with us (I saw what he was ordering and I about fainted). It was good and all, but not $150 worth of good. To me $40 wine tastes fantastic, and anything more expensive than that is just wasted on me, and probably on a lot of people.
(Note to the universe: The 80s [and even the 90s] are way over.)
Still, if you order sushi and fine wine for lunch, or a steak made from a cow that spent its entire life having its ears massaged while sleeping on velvet pillows, I don't think it's a sign that you hate poor people, but a sign that you like sushi and fine wine or pampered cow.
As long as you don't plan on running out on the check, and as long as we taxpayers aren't paying for it, have at it!
P.S. Ryan tips nicely. (He produced the receipt after TPM later approached him outside the Speaker's Lobby after a vote.)
Government As Your Daddy
I have a daddy -- one who, if he taught me anything, taught me to turn out the lights when I leave a room. But, I love me my incandescent bulbs, which I am hoarding, thanks to the government telling me how I'm allowed to light my house.
(Thanks, but I'll pass on the mental institution lighting of CFLs, no matter how many people tell me they're really wonderful, and that it really isn't a big deal that in the room where my landlord installed a CFL-only overhead, that I have to have a big flashlight for times when I can't wait five minutes for the light to come on.)
There was this quote from Energy Secretary Steven Chu that says it all about what the Obama administration thinks should be the business of government. From a conference call with reporters, reported on ChristopherFountain.com:
"We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money," he said.
Before it's too late in your state, buy 120 incandescents for 33 cents here, like I did, at WhatWatt.com. $7.90 shipping for any size order. They were very nice and refunded my money immediately for the six bulbs that broken in transit.
The Grass Is Misdemeanor...
An Oak Park, Michigan woman, Julie Bass, faces 93 days in jail for growing vegetables where her ugly suburban lawn was supposed to be (excuse the editorialization, but I hate the flat, time-sucking suburban lawn). Alexis Wiley writes on My Fox Detroit:
"The price of organic food is kind of through the roof," said Julie Bass.So, why not grow your own? However, Bass' garden is a little unique because it's in her front yard.
"We thought it'd be really cool to do it so the neighbors could see. The kids love it. The kids from the neighborhood all come and help," she said.
Bass' cool garden has landed her in hot water with the City of Oak Park. Code enforcement gave her a warning, then a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor.
"I think it's sad that the City of Oak Park that's already strapped for cash is paying a lot of money to have a prosecutor bothering us," Bass told FOX 2's Alexis Wiley.
"That's not what we want to see in a front yard," said Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski.
Why is that something for Kevin to decide?
He's going by a city code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. "Suitable"? Is that really what we want the role of government to be, micromanaging every aspect of citizens' lives, down to what they do with property they own?
If you aren't causing a fire or traffic hazard to all the other houses in the neighborhood, shouldn't you be able to grow whatever the hell you want on your own land?
We should all be very, very worried about all the overlegislation we've let creep up on us. If you can't reel a person in on First Amendment grounds, there's always the illegal growing of vegetables.
via Gawker
When Women Confuse Being Asked Out With Being Raped At Knifepoint In An Elevator
It's amazing how an atheist can so easily make being a feminist sound like a religion.
There's been some brouhaha between a blogger who leads (and is known as) Skepchick (real name: Rebecca Watson) and Richard Dawkins that professor friends who follow me on Facebook have been asking me to comment on.
Who is Rebecca Watson? From her bio on her site:
Rebecca leads a team of skeptical female activists at Skepchick.org and appears regularly on the Curiosity Aroused podcast, the weekly Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, and the Little Atoms radio show. She currently lives in London but travels around the world delivering entertaining talks on science, atheism, feminism, and skepticism. There is currently an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it. You can follow her every fascinating move on Twitter: @rebeccawatson.
I vaguely know who she is. (I think I follow her -- and about 500 other people -- on Twitter.)
I had a long and rather fruitful writing day, so I didn't check into the brouhaha until I got home. Gawker lays out what happened here.
Basically, at 4 a.m., some guy at a conference committed the heinous crime of asking her out while riding the elevator with her.
I couldn't believe it. That was why people were going after Richard Dawkins, because he made light of what a big deal she made of it?
After Watson flew home from the conference, she posted a long and dull video about it on her blog (I'm reminded of why I haven't started podcasting yet -- I'm terrified of boring people).
Here's the part about her elevator experience:
Just a word to the wise here, guys. Don't do that. I don't know how else to explain how this makes me very uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out: I was a single women in foreign country in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I--don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
Wait, once again?
don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
Oh, hurl.
Men "sexualize" women. Ladies, they want to have sex with you, your sister, your sister's friend, your sister's friend's friend, the cashier, the waitress, the lady with the big luscious ass who's crossing the street, and her sister and her sister's friend. If men weren't like this, the planet would be filled with plants and cockroaches instead of human beings.
If it is troubling to you to be sexualized, stay home, or only leave the house in a big black burka.
But enough from me. Here's Dawkins' response to Watson's mewlings:
Dear Muslima Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ... don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so ...
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
Watson's response (before calling for a ban on Dawkins' books) -- and go read it...not to be missed:
[To] have my concerns--and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault--dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they've done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.
Be sure to read the comments on her site. I think the words "male privilege" are some kind of secret code you have to use to be one of the tribe.
And my thoughts, which I posted on a grad student's Facebook page while watching Watson's video. My first impression:
First of all, her video is boring. Also, some guy asks you on in an elevator. Good for him, putting himself out there, going for what he wants. Verbally. Not at gunpoint. Boohoo, does the 4 am coffee suggestion not work for you? Say, "No, thanks."
Regarding her bit about the drink invitation making her "incredibly uncomfortable":
It makes me "incredibly uncomfortable" when people wear flipflops in public. I tough it out. You don't have a right to not be offended. The notion that women should not be offended is infantilizing. I'm listening to the video now. If I hear the word "misogyny" one more time, I'm going to be over my lifetime ration.
On Watson complaining about the need to explain where the jokes were:
It's probably hard to know when she's joking ("straw man/straw person") because if that woman has a sense of humor, they probably have to give her a colonoscopy to find it.
On Dawkins:
Dawkins has never come off as the most likable person, but I find him more likable than ever now. My dad told me to worry when men stop asking you out, when construction workers stop whistling. You want to "have the power"? When somebody whistles at you, smile and wave and be on your way. Don't be (and act) all offended down to your ugly feminist-approved shoes.
On my little diatribe:
Yeah, I know...I'll work on doing better in the political correctness department. Uh...eventually. Uh..on the day Rebecca Watson blows Dawkins in an elevator.
Four words: Grow. The. Fuck. Up.
Here's how this plays out for a woman whose entire existence doesn't revolve around being a victim, women as victims, and seeing men as victimizers of women every time they open their mouths or so much as salt their food:
A guy asks you out. You're not interested. Say, "Thanks, think I'm going to turn in." Forget it happened.
UPDATE: PZ Myers' tepid huffings and puffings on my odiousness here.
Mrs. Accountability
Better late than never -- a mother sees her kids in a surveillance video of rioting and theft, and decides to turn her kids into the police. She's one of three mothers who did that.
via Jonny T
It Was Inevitable
Yep. "Caylee's Law."
Scott Greenfield blogs at Simple Justice:
Via Josh Blackmon, it appears that the genius of crowdsource is pushing at Change.org for, ta da, a new law named after Caylee Anthony. Because bizarre, outlier events demand a new law? Nah, because every time a child dies, no matter how bizarre the circumstance, society must prevent it from ever happening again. Because no new bizarre event will take the life of another child if we pass a law named after the last one.
The law makes it a felony "for a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to not notify law enforcement of the death of their child, accidental or otherwise, within 1 hour of said death being discovered. This way there will be no more cases like Casey Anthony's in the courts, and no more innocent children will have to go without justice."
Naive.
The law also makes it "a felony for a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to not notify law enforcement of the disappearance of a child within 24 hours, so proper steps can be taken to find that child before it's too late."
Josh notes some faults, observes Scott:
1 Hour! And if someone tells the police on the 61st minute, they go to jail. 24 hours! What about a sleepover in the woods?
Scott adds:
On a more serious note, if a parent was inclined to murder her child, would fear of a prosecution under this law stop her? Would the sentence be death plus a year?
Note "The Ted Frank Rule." In Ted's words:
"My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person."
via @WalterOlson
Pay Raises-A-Plenty In The White House!
It's got to be hard for a guy to be mindful of how fiscally screwed so many of the people of this country are when he's just gotten an 82 percent pay raise.
That's right.
Special assistant to the president for economic policy Matthew Vogel got an 82 percent raise ($59K) to an annual salary of $130,500. John Cook reports at Gawker:
The White House released its annual salary report last week, and as usual, it's nice to work for Barack Obama: Most staffers who were there for more than a year got a salary bump. A bigger one than you did.The last time we checked in on White House salaries, we found that an astonishing 75% of continuing staffers got raises from 2009 to 2010--a huge number given the fact that, according to compensation experts, most companies had skipped routine raises that year in reaction to the economic crisis that the White House was busy failing to solve. This time around--from 2010 to 2011--the ratio is a little less dramatic. Of the 270 White House staffers who have been there for more than a year, 146--or 54%--received raises. The average salary increase was 8%. If you look at only staffers who got raises, the average increase was twice that.
That's a much bigger raise than the average white-collar worker got. According to a survey conducted last year by the human resources consulting firm Mercer, most firms were projecting a 3% increase in base pay for executives. White House workers did nearly three times as well.
This is typical of what happens under socialism. Everybody is equal but some people are more equal than others.
Here in California, some prison doctors and nurses are doing a very good job off sucking off the public teat. Jack Dolan writes for the LA Times:
More than 1,400 state employees were paid in excess of $200,000 last year, according to compensation data made public for the first time Tuesday on Controller John Chiang's website.Of those, 790 were prison doctors, dentists or nurses. More than 300 others were psychiatrists and other medical professionals working for the Department of Mental Health.
One prison doctor collected $777,423 in 2010 and a dentist took home $599,403, according to the website. The president of the state's stem cell research agency received $482,234.
The database lists state positions by title and allows users to sort by department, salary range and total wages.
Chiang, a Democrat who has received millions in campaign contributions from state employee unions, did not include workers' names even though that information is public and has been provided upon request for years.
...Roper denied that the identities of employees were left out to avoid upsetting the politically powerful employee unions.
The omission frustrated open-government advocates who say taxpayers have a right to see exactly where their money is going.
"The name, the position and the amount of money being paid to public employees should not be concealed," said Robert Fellmeth, executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego.
Here's a voice from the real world, from the LAT's comments:
beecnul8r at 8:09 PM July 6, 2011
I worked in the real world...the one that actually contributes to our economy...unlike government employees. Never have I ever heard of a public or private company allowing workers to accumulate sick pay, vacation pay, et al. It is absurd. Vacations are meant to get employees out of the daily rut. By allowing workers to not take them and accumulate the pay (at higher future pay rates) means defeating the very purpose. It is ridiculous that state employees are hauling out this kind of taxpayer money. Hey, Brownie, time to yank in this absurd policy and start clamping down. You need to get a real cost cutter on board and let him/her cut away BIG TIME at all these frivilous policies and costs. No wonder we are in debt up to our elbows. Who creates this mess? What kind of idiots are there in Sacramento that they don't know how to rid this state of cronyism, unionism and all the other social "isms" that are bankrupting this state and the USA.
D.C. Taxi Heist
Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie on how D.C. is trying to make free enterprise less free. Medallion systems are a racket that force cab drivers to rent their cars from politically connected companies, taking the cab drivers' money and forcing them to become workers instead of owners:
Of course the guy behind the bill is a taxi company magnate. Crackhead former mayor and current D.C. council member Marion Barry is also behind the bill. Medallions will cost $10K.
The American Pancreas Has Had It Rough
Dr. William Davis blogs at The Heart Scan Blog:
If you've lived the life of most Americans, your pancreas has had a hard life. Starting as a child, it was forced into the equivalent of hard labor by your eating carbohydrate-rich foods like Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Hoho's, Ding Dongs, Scooter Pies, and macaroni and cheese. Into adolescent years and college, it was whipped into subservient labor with pizza, beer, pretzels, and ramen noodles. As an adult, the USDA, Surgeon General's office and other assorted purveyors of nutritional advice urged us to cut our fat, cholesterol, and eat more "healthy whole grains"; you complied, exposing your overworked pancreas to keep up its relentless work pace, spewing out insulin to accommodate the endless flow of carbohydrate-rich foods....Baby your pancreas. If this were a car with 90,000 miles on it, but you want it to last 100,000, then change the oil frequently, keep it tuned, and otherwise baby your car, not subjecting it to extremes and neglect to accelerate its demise. Same with your pancreas: Allow it to rest, not subjecting it to the extremes of insulin production required by carbohydrate consumption. Don't expose it to foods like wheat flour, cornstarch, oats, rice starch, potatoes, and sucrose that demand overtime and hard labor out of your poor pancreas. Go after the foods that allow your pancreas to sleep through a meal like eggs, spinach, cucumbers, olive oil, and walnuts. Give your pancreas a nice back massage and steer clear of "healthy whole grains," the nutritional equivalent of a 26-mile marathon. Pay your pancreas a compliment or two and allow it to have occasional vacations with a brief fast.
Some who comment here fail to understand that the only reason to cut carbs from one's diet as much as possible isn't just to lose weight. It's about longterm health.
Napolitano's Lies
Steve Watson writes at Prisonplanet that the TSA and Janet Napolitano "publicly mischaracterized" the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, claiming that NIST had tested and confirmed the safety of full body scanners:
Internal emails between NIST and the DHS, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), show how NIST was "a little concerned" by a USA Today article published November 15, 2010, in which Janet Napolitano, the head of DHS, claimed that NIST had "affirmed the safety" of the airport scanners.In the private email response, NIST stated that the Institute had not, in fact, tested full body scanners at all for safety, and that the Institute does not even undertake product testing.
The email (below) states that the director of NIST was "not looking for corrections", but wished to "offer clarification", that the agency "doesn't want any mischaracterization of their work continued."
Redacted emails at the link.
Napolitano also claimed that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory had also affirmed the safety of the scanners, but another EPIC obtained shows that the Johns Hopkins study actually found that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the "General Public Dose Limit":
At the time we pointed out that Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine had publicly stated two days previously that "statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays"."...we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," Love said.
In addition, several other scientists have continued to speak out over the health hazards associated with the x-ray technology, noting that the body scanners are far from safe.
It is now even more clear that Napolitano's statements to the public regarding the body scanners were misleading at best, and at worst were outright lies.
All those who've been going through the scanners on the government's word they're safe, aren't you feeling a little scammed now? Maybe you can turn this into a good thing, and come to understand that bureaucracy's job is promoting and strengthening bureaucracy, not looking out for little old you.
Your Boarding Pass And Your Colonoscopy
What terrorists might do has been used to justify obscene violations of our Fourth Amendment rights. How far up your ass might the TSA go? Well, there's a piece in the Washington Post that says the U.S. has warned airlines that terrorists are interested in surgically implanting bombs inside humans to attack. From the AP:
People traveling to the U.S. from overseas may experience additional screening at airports because of the threat, according to the Transportation Security Administration."These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same activity at every international airport," TSA spokesman Nick Kimball said. "Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies."
Placing explosives and explosive components inside humans to hide bombs and evade security measures is not a new idea. But there is new intelligence pointing to a fresh interest in using this tactic, a U.S. security official told the AP. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security information.
I think we need to do as the Israelis do, and accept that there's some risk to life, and hope that we don't get offed. It's far safer than chipping away at the rights this country was founded on.
You're Not Just His Baby Brother; You're His Body Farm
Richard P. Grant blogs at The-Scientist.com about a mother who had IVF to give birth to a baby to be used as a marrow donor for her 11-year-old with leukemia:
The mother went through standard IVF, and ten fertilized embryos were cultured and biopsied three days after insemination-at the 8-cell stage. The embryos were genotyped using nested PCR of of HLA-DRB1 alleles. Then,Two embryos identified to be HLA identical to the patient were transferred 6 days after fertilization to the mother's uterus and one singleton full-term pregnancy resulted in the birth of one healthy male sibling.-from Goussetis et al., 2011
As Stefan (Bielack) says, this is not the first example of preimplantation genetic diagnostics used to select donors for transplants. And of course, we're not (quite) at the level of cloning humans. But it does focus attention on the ethics of breeding humans as organ donors. Stefan has a number of questions: is it acceptable to expose putative donors to the extra risks associated with IVF? What psychological consequences arise when a donor learns that his reason for existence as a spare parts depot? Will the designated donor be called upon to sacrifice a part of their body if the recipient requires a solid organ donation?
Big Men, Loose Zippers
Dumb post from May by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on "Why Powerful Men Can't Keep Their Pants On" at Huff Po. His notion:
The biggest mistake we make in determining why powerful men cheat is to believe they're looking for sex. If it's sex they're after they have wives who can cater to their needs. No, these men are looking for something else entirely: validation. Men cheat not out of a sense of entitlement but out of a sense of insecurity. And the bigger they are the harder they fall, not of arrogance but out of fear and weakness.What makes men slowly climb the ladder of success is a desire to prove they're a somebody. They want to be and feel important. They seek to rise from the poverty of namelessness and the penury of anonymity. It is not the promise of their potential that drives them, but the fear of being a nonentity. They absorb the noxious lie of a culture bereft of values that only money and power will rescue them from being a nobody. Therefore, even as they ascend the ladder of 'success,' they do so with a gaping hole in their center. And whatever accomplishments they will shove into that hole -- money, fame, power -- it goes in one end and comes out the other. They never feel good about themselves. They are never content. They are defined by insatiability and characterized by voraciousness, which explains why Wall Street bankers who were earning tens of millions of dollars a year still felt it was not enough and cut corners to make even more.
The first rule of success is that there is nothing on the outside that can compensate for a feeling of failure on the inside. External accouterments of success -- from armored limousines to an army of personal bodyguards -- can never protect you from the din of demons who whisper to you that for all you have achieved you are still are a big zero.
And that's why these men turn to women to make them feel good about themselves. They want to feel desirable. They seek to silence the inner voices that taunt them as to their own insignificance. Because of its power, sex has a unique capacity to make insecure men feel -- however fleetingly -- like they're special. Having women desire them makes them feel desirable.
Oh, please. They take sex because it's there, in variety, because they can. Because it would be fun to have a little strange, and the little strange is right there bending over sweeping up a broken glass, and seems willing, and Maria is nowhere to be seen.
It's like the silly notion that gay men are promiscuous. Men are promiscuous. Gay men are promiscuous because they're into partners who will participate.
Regarding the evolved male preference for sexual variety, as the late Margo Wilson and her husband and partner Martin Daly pointed out: Sperm are cheap; eggs are expensive.
And while the Big, Important and Presumptuous Rabbi doesn't get it, the commenter on top when I saw the story did. RalphKenolEsq wrote:
"A man is as faithful as his options." --Chris Rock. Powerful men have more options.No need for psychological analysis. No need to make it complicated. As to the blather about it not being about sex, well, former MLB player David Justice answered that pretty bluntly.
And Icecube answered him (sans spell-check):
Oppurtunity?
The Conservative Case For Higher Taxes?
Steven Hayward feels there is one and writes at Powerline:
Maybe it will help if I qualify this by saying that I think taxes should be raised sharply on the middle class and the poor, many of whom currently pay almost no federal income tax at all, while cutting the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, and the highest marginal income tax rates. Feel a little better? I thought not.But here's the case: one problem with our current tax policy is that at the moment the American people as a whole are receiving a dollar of government for the price of only 60 cents. (I don't say a "dollar's worth of government," but let's leave that snark for another time.) Any time you can get a dollar of something at a 40 percent discount, you are going to demand more of it. My theory is simple: if the broad middle class of Americans are made to pay for all of the government they get, they may well start to demand less of it, quickly.
...But more to the point, the argument should be cast in terms of a creating pro-growth tax reform. Froma Harrop of the Providence Journal has a typically idiotic column out today saying Americans want higher taxes. It is not even worth the bother of debunking. There is one highly useable sentence in it: "Today, high-tax Sweden has only 7 percent unemployment, while ours is 9 percent. How come? Before the 2008 economic meltdown, Sweden prudently maintained a budget surplus equal to 3.6 percent of its economy." Never mind that Sweden isn't exactly putting its shoulder to the wheel in the fight against terrorists (or anything else), and just focus your mind on one fact: yes, it is a high tax country, but its corporate income tax rate is one-third lower than the U.S. rate (26% for Sweden; 39% for the U.S.). So, my opening bid is--yes. By all means let's emulate Sweden's tax rates, starting with a one-third cut in our corporate income tax rate, and a hike in middle class income tax rates. Deal? I didn't think so.
Via Instapundit, who writes:
I agree with him, and make a similar case -- the libertarian case for higher taxes? -- here.
(Instapundit link goes to a free PDF of his paper, "Divine Operating System," surveying "a number of proposals for reining in the growth of federal government power and spending, ranging from the creation of a new house of Congress with the sole power to repeal bills, to more mundane proposals such as a balanced budget amendment and term limits.")
Casey Anthony Verdict
Guilty only on the charges of lying to law enforcement officers. I haven't been paying much attention to the case -- just seen it in passing on the news. Your thoughts?
Evolutionary psychologist @GadSaad tweets:
Casey Anthony found not guilty. I am assuming that the killer in the OJ Simpson case is also the one who murdered the little girl.
And then there's this:
@SavannahGuthrie Max sentence for each count of lying - 1 year (she was convicted of 4 cts). Theoretically max of 4 yrs
The Unlicensed Lemonade Stand
Right-on op-ed in the WaPo from Jason Orr, from the Institute for Justice, about kids who had their lemonade stand shut down, and who received a $500 fine for selling lemonade without a license (which was later nullified):
The message delivered was simple: America is the land of the "opportunity" to seek permission from a bureaucrat before trying to do something good for your community.
(The kids were raising money for pediatric cancer research -- but it should make no difference whether they're selling for charity or for spending money.)
The blame for this situation rests not with the county government but with a judiciary that has practically stopped enforcing constitutional limits on government power in the economic sphere....If the Montgomery County children took the government to court to defend their economic liberty, a judge would require them to counter every conceivable justification for the county's regulation, including purely hypothetical ones. In practice that burden of proof is very hard to meet. Essentially, the courts have decided that some constitutional rights, such as the right to earn an honest living, are so trivial as to warrant little meaningful judicial protection against government encroachment.
Apologists for the regulatory state believe that tight regulations on every potentially harmful activity -- regardless of how unlikely the harm -- are justified to prevent accidental death, disease or consumer fraud. But genuine threats to public safety can be addressed without requiring children to obtain a license and liability insurance before squeezing a single lemon. Courts could instead take economic liberty seriously and overturn burdensome restrictions that have no plausible basis in reality. Regulators should be required to justify their encroachments on citizens' liberties -- not the other way around. But for this to happen, judges would have to become more engaged in deciding constitutional cases instead of deferring reflexively to the supposed wisdom of legislators and regulators.
A nation of entrepreneurs like ours needs an engaged judiciary that will consider the purposes of laws, weigh the facts instead of hypothesizing them, and overturn as unconstitutional laws that infringe on vital liberties such as the right to earn an honest living -- or the right for children to operate a simple lemonade stand.
I'm An Organ Donor, But Don't Think Anyone Should Get To Yank Yours Without Consent
Terri Judd writes in The Independent that the British Medical Association has been campaigning for "presumed consent" -- meaning that people will be presumed to be willing organ donors unless they opt out:
Laura Tukenburg, a medical student, pointed out that over the four days of the conference, 12 people would die from lack of an organ for transplant. "We have a significant problem in this country. There are not enough organs for donation and that means our system needs to change," she said.
You can encourage people to donate their organs (I realized I should do it as soon as I gave it a moment's thought). You can encourage a system where people can sell their organs. You can kill yourself and save numerous other people's lives. There are a number of options here. What isn't right is yanking people's organs without their explicit consent.
Dr Evan Harris added: "It is ethical because the default should be to save lives. It is better for relatives because there is many an occasion where relatives regret saying no out of grief. But I have never heard of relatives regretting saving a life."
I've never heard of anyone catching two fly balls in one game. And maybe 99.999 percent of relatives won't regret having their loved one hacked up to save some other people's loved one's life. But, unless that person provides their explicit consent, there should be no hacking.
And again, I say that as an organ donor, but also as somebody who understands that there are people (probably with religious and other beliefs I find utterly silly) who are strongly against having their organs removed, and that's their right.
Here's AEI's Sally Satel (with Nadey Hakim) on why organ sales should be allowed. And a note on Sally: When Dr. Barbara Oakley introduced us by email, I wrote back to Sally, "I believe you have my friend Virginia's kidney." (Virginia Postrel is cool as hell.)
via ifeminists
Do You Regret Having Children?
Or maybe regret not having them?
I have a few friends who are kids (friends' children -- I don't go looking for kids to befriend in parks or anything), but I'm seriously glad I figured out really young that I didn't want to be a mom.
A woman with the pseudonym Jill Scott writes in the Daily Mail that she regrets becoming a mom. (In typical Daily Mail style, they headline the piece "Am I monster for wishing I'd never had children? The confession that fills a mother with shame"):
My friends and I routinely share our most profound emotional secrets. But I have learned, over the years, that there is one place a woman will never ever go - an admission she will never make.However difficult her experience of motherhood, however crushing the sacrifices she has made for her family, a woman will never say that she wishes she had not become a mother.
Sometimes they'll bemoan their lot, often complaining about the day-to-day frustrations of raising a family.
But to admit that becoming a mother was a mistake? Not something I have ever heard a woman do.
Which leaves two possibilities: that no other mother shares my experience, or that some of them dare not admit the truth.
So let me say it for all those who will not or cannot: I regret having had children.
Does that make me a monster? A freak? Or just more honest than others in my position?
Before you rush to judge, let me explain a little more about my experience of motherhood.
From the moment I had children, I felt I was in a slow drift away from myself.
It seemed as if any spontaneity in my life was gone, any future possibilities limited to the small world I had established for myself in a suburban home.
Most perturbing of all, these narrow horizons were exactly what I had once wanted. The only future I ever envisaged for myself was as a wife and mother...
Continued at the link...
The "Pursuit" Of Happiness -- Not The Guarantee Of It
Good Michael Godwin column in the New York Post about the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.":
That glorious ode to freedom contains a little-noticed limit, one that carries a special meaning for our fractured nation today. The Founders, we can say safely, would have zero tolerance for the soul-sapping entitlement culture of modern America....They were wise men whose vision was shaped by knowledge of history and the human condition, and that wisdom led them to put "Happiness" in a different category. America would make no guarantee beyond the opportunity to attain it -- "the pursuit of Happiness."
When it comes to results, you are on your own. Theirs was the original Tough Love.
...But in the frenzy of our entitlement mania, where happiness is viewed as an "unalienable Right," we are losing the freedom to fail. That loss is a major factor in America's decline. Much of the unprecedented growth of government aims to protect people from the consequences of failure and the vagaries of life.
...Never mind that you lived with the old values, that you sacrificed and worked and saved for what you have. Now you must pay and pay again for those who didn't. Oh, and shut up about it, too.
America On The Fourth
By Howard Owens. Liked his photo of the guy on his porch by the flag.
Feel free to post links to photos you like or stories about the Fourth. One link per comment, or you will go to my spam folder, and I am on deadline, so it's not the best day for spam comment retrieval!
If You Have No Ability To Pay, Maybe You Don't Get To Own A Home!
George Will writes about Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's "scalding new book," "Reckless Endangerment," which the authors call "a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home":
In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, "whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum."
I'm one of those people, vis a vis the price of housing in the Los Angeles market. This led me to think, not that the government should give me a handout, but that I should rent!
There was a torrent of compassion-speak: "Special care should be taken to ensure that standards are appropriate to the economic culture of urban, lower- income, and nontraditional consumers." "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor." Government having decided to dictate behavior that markets discouraged, the traditional relationship between borrowers and lenders was revised. Lenders promoted reckless borrowing, knowing they could off load risk to purchasers of bundled loans, and especially to Fannie Mae. In 1994, subprime lending was $40 billion. In 1995, almost one in five mortgages was subprime. Four years later such lending totaled $160 billion.As housing prices soared, many giddy owners stopped thinking of homes as retirement wealth and started using them as sources of equity loans -- up to $800 billion a year. This fueled incontinent consumption.
Under (James A.) Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, "the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world." Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie's obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae's lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company's results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson's $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
via Instapundit
P.S. That's Dr. Helen's link to the book (The Instawife). Somebody may as well make some money off Amazon while I'm working on a solution.
Nitrite Idiocy
Saturday evening, I read a really dipshitty and wrong article by William Neuman in The New York Times on nitrates ("If there is no such thing as a healthy hot dog, how do you limit the damage at this weekend's weenie roast?").
Ridiculous.
I tweeted links to a few pieces with the truth about nitrites:
@amyalkon Why I don't worry about the nitrites in a hot dog: http://bit.ly/kGhEz9 & http://bit.ly/dvl2V
Additionally, Michael Ruhlman blogs about the "'No Nitrites Added' Hoax," with products (like pricey bacon at Trader Joe's) trumpeting that on the package.
Of course, I buy cheap bacon at Costco or the supermarket (in bulk if it's on sale), and try to get the Oscar Mayer low sodium bacon if it's on sale because it tastes great (and any bacon generally has enough sodium to salt a suburban road in every package).
Ruhlman lays out the reason behind my money-saving choice:
Please, if someone can tell me what is wrong with nitrates (in green vegetables) and nitrites (in curing salts and in our bodies, a powerful antimicrobial agent in our saliva, for instance), I invite them to do so here. In the 70's there were studies finding that at high temps, they could form nitrosamines, cancer causing compounds. I don't disagree, but burnt things containing nitrite are bitter and unpleasant so we're not likely to crave them in harmful quatities.Aspirin is not bad for you, right? Helps with a morning head and achy joints. It's even taken for its heart benefits. But eat enough of it and it's toxic.
The fact is, most nitrate we consume comes from vegetables. Nitrate we consume coverts to nitrite in our body, which is a anti-microbial agent in our guts. Sodium nitrite in bacon cures the bacon (more info in my safety concerns for charcutepaloozians) and then converts to nitric oxide, so, while I'm not chemist, I have heard others suggest that you're not actually consuming any nitrite by the time the bacon gets to you. Again, almost all the nitrate and nitrite in your body comes from veggies. It's an anti-oxidant. Studies are coming out now saying it's good for the heart.
A study in the Journal of Food Protection put it this way: "Since 93% of ingested nitrite comes from normal metabolic sources, if nitrite caused cancers or was a reproductive toxicant, it would imply that humans have a major design flaw."
Bacon is one of the greatest foods on the planet, but the food marketers are going to figure out a way to make you buy their bacon. So what they do is use celery powder and celery juice (note the asterisk on the label above) as their nitrate source (celery is loaded with nitrate) and are therefore are allowed to say no nitrites added. Why go to the trouble? Because we don't know any better. Can we really be this stupid? I have only one word to say on this beyond an emphatic yes.
Ruhlman via @MelissaMcEwen
Top 10 Creationist Arguments
Good vid, neatly and rather amusingly debunking a lot of hoohah:
"Security" Has Become The Excuse For Everything
A Miami woman named Sandy DeWitt was escorted off a U.S. Airways flight for snapping a photo of a U.S. Airways employee (likely a gate attendant) in the boarding area who she found rude. DeWitt said the employee's name was Tonialla G. Carlos Miller blogs at pixiq.com:
DeWitt snapped a photo of her nametag because she planned to complain about her in a letter to US Airways. But the photo didn't come out because it was too dark.However, once DeWitt was settled in her seat, preparing for take-off, Tonialla G. entered the plane and confronted her.
"She told me to delete the photo," DeWitt said in an interview with Photography is Not a Crime Saturday morning.
DeWitt, who already had her phone turned off in preparation for take-off, turned the phone back on to show her that it didn't come out, but deleted the photo anyway.
"I complied with her wishes but it's not something I would normally do," she said. "It just wasn't usable."
But Tonialla G. wouldn't let the issue go. She then walked into the cockpit to inform the pilot that DeWitt was a "security risk."
Next thing DeWitt knew, she was being escorted off the plane by two flight attendants. Her husband followed.
"I announced to the other passengers that I was being removed because I took a photo," she said. " I announced that photography is not a crime."
There's a smart comment beneath the blog item from somebody named Ezra Ekman:
The flight attendant made a knowingly false statement about the security status of a passenger, with the intent to punish that passenger for behavior that is not only legal but, so far as we are aware as yet, does not even violate that airline's policy or posted rules. It's one thing for a flight representative to tell someone to stop and then punish them for not following your directives. That, at least, is (somewhat) supported by the FAA, assuming that the flight attendant's directive is legally supported. (We'll ignore that aspect for now.) But to claim that someone is a security risk (again, ignoring the reason why for the moment), *after they've already complied with your order* is a flat-out lie.Airports have signs posted that "security is not a laughing matter". I can only assume that this means they take this sort of thing seriously. So how will they handle an issue in which a passenger exhibited *no* risky behavior (who did something that, while the flight attendant may not have liked, was still legal), and the flight attendant lied to the pilot and to other flight attendants, thereby causing them to make a security decision they may not have otherwise if made aware of the facts, resulting in punitive action against and cost to the passenger (in adjustments to their schedule, possible missed connections and car/hotel reservations, as well as a possible hotel cost that night), as well as additional cost to the airline itself due to a delay in the airline's schedule, two (her plus husband) lost seat revenue, and the cost of obtaining two seats on another airline - in this case, Southwest.
While this may just be a case of a flight attendant having a bad day or disliking having their picture taken, the fact remains that the flight attendant is in a position of power (that of being able to accuse a passenger of being a security risk and removing that passenger from the plane on such grounds), and this flight attendant seems to have clearly abused that power. In my mind, termination should be a given. What is questionable is whether or not there are grounds for legal charges stemming from making a false report. What happened here is just wrong, and that flight attendant has no business being in charge of passengers.
For what it's worth, the passenger broke no laws, unless there is some kind of local statute against photography on planes, which would surprise me. Taking a photograph in airports (including screening areas, so long as it is not of the X-ray machine screens themselves) is not against TSA regulations. Just google "tsa photography section 2.7" (without the quotes), and you'll find everything you need to know. Now, taking a photo on private property (I suppose a US Airways plan could be considered their private property) is subject to restrictions if signs were posted, but it doesn't sound like any were. Once the passenger is notified of a no-photography policy, they must stop or could be subject to trespassing charges, but the passenger did stop. And, prior to being asked to stop, any photographs taken are the private property of the photographer. Any request to delete them has no legal grounds, and being forced to do so could constitute destruction of property.
Know your rights, kids. ;-)
18 Years Of False Imprisonment, Zero Dollars
The Supreme Court just gave the thumbs up to prosecutorial misconduct.
Lincoln Caplan writes for The New York Times of a man who's lost everything -- twice -- for a crime he did not commit:
In an important prosecutorial-misconduct case this term, the Supreme Court's conservative majority threw out a $14 million jury award for a New Orleans man who was imprisoned for 18 years, including 14 on death row, for a robbery and a murder he did not commit. One month before John Thompson's scheduled execution, a private investigator discovered that prosecutors had hidden evidence that exonerated him.After his release, Mr. Thompson won a civil lawsuit against the Orleans Parish district attorney's office, which had been led by Harry F. Connick, for its gross indifference to the incompetence of the prosecutors who violated his constitutional rights.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 5-to-4 majority in Connick v. Thompson, said the D.A.'s office was not liable for failing to train its lawyers about their duty under the Constitution to turn over evidence favorable to the accused.
The lawyers had kept secret more than a dozen pieces of favorable evidence over 15 years, destroying some. That failure to provide training, the court said, did not amount to a pattern of "deliberate indifference" to constitutional rights.
This says prosecutorial failure to turn over evidence (and probably prosecutorial misconduct in general) is no big deal.
What Caplan called Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "powerful dissent," which she read from the bench, is here. An easier-to-read version is here, and includes the story of the specific misconduct. An excerpt from Ginsburg's opinion:
In Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83, 87 (1963), this Court held that due process requires the prosecution to turn over evidence favorable to the accused and material to his guilt or punishment. That obligation, the parties have stipulated, was dishonored in this case; consequently, John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them isolated on death row, before the truth came to light:He was innocent of the charge of attempted armed robbery, and his subsequent trial on a murder charge, by prosecutorial design, was fundamentally unfair.The Court holds that the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office (District Attorney's Office or Office) cannot beheld liable, in a civil rights action under 42 U. S. C. §1983, for the grave injustice Thompson suffered. That is so, the Court tells us, because Thompson has shown only an aberrant Brady violation, not a routine practice of giving short shrift to Brady's requirements. The evidence presented to the jury that awarded compensation to Thompson, however, points distinctly away from the Court's assessment. As the trial record in the §1983 action reveals, the conceded, long-concealed prosecutorial transgressions were neither isolated nor atypical.
From the top down, the evidence showed, members of the District Attorney's Office, including the District Attorney himself, misperceived Brady's compass and there-fore inadequately attended to their disclosure obligations. Throughout the pretrial and trial proceedings against Thompson, the team of four engaged in prosecuting him for armed robbery and murder hid from the defense and the court exculpatory information Thompson requested and had a constitutional right to receive. The prosecutors did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight. Based on the prosecutors' conduct relating to Thompson's trials, a fact triercould reasonably conclude that inattention to Brady was standard operating procedure at the District Attorney's Office.
What happened here, the Court's opinion obscures, was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer's misconduct. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that misperception and disregard of Brady's disclosure requirements were pervasive in Orleans Parish. That evidence, I would hold, established persistent, deliberately indifferent conduct for which the District Attorney's Office bears responsibility under §1983.
I dissent from the Court's judgment mindful that Brady violations, as this case illustrates, are not easily detected. But for a chance discovery made by a defense team investigator weeks before Thompson's scheduled execution, the evidence that led to his exoneration might have remained under wraps. The prosecutorial concealment Thompson encountered, however, is bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility--made tangible by §1983 liability--for adequately conveying what Brady requires and for monitoring staff compliance. Failure to train, this Court has said, can give rise to municipal liability under §1983 "where the failure . . . amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights of persons with whom the [untrained employees] come into contact." Canton v. Harris, 489 U. S. 378, 388 (1989). That standard is well met in this case.
The full court's decision is here.
Now, I don't like that taxpayers must pay these awards, but prosecutors are working on the public's behalf. You lose 18 years of your life because of prosecutorial treachery; somebody should give you a cookie, or 14 million cookies.
via Lisa Simeone
Constitution, Schmonstitution: California On Amazon And Sales Tax
Amazon's Jeff Bezos explains why California's interference in interstate commerce is unconstitutional:
California is acting like we affiliates are sellers, but we are not. We're merely advertisers for sellers who may be in California -- or New York or Canada.
More on "nexus" from the OC Reg:
First, we agree with Amazon president Jeff Bezos that the law is unconstitutional. A 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said a company must have a physical presence in a state, referred to as a "nexus," to be required to collect the state's sales tax. The Legislature, a bit too cleverly, seeks to expand the definition of nexus to include any in-state affiliate with a hyperlink to an out-of-state retailer....Meanwhile, online shoppers easily can avoid paying sales tax, which in California can exceed 9 percent, by finding sellers that don't have to collect it.
Third, attempts elsewhere to wrest more in online sales taxes have backfired, including in Rhode Island and North Carolina, where tax receipts declined.
...We hope a court can untangle this web of immediate impacts and unintended consequences yet to be seen or understood.
*We* do, too. And surely, dragging this through the legal system will take no time at all.
More on the unconstitutionality in this Rebecca Madigan piece in the OC Reg:
The Constitution's commerce clause protects interstate commerce and states if a business doesn't have a physical presence - a nexus - it doesn't have to collect sales tax for that state. Why? Because if a business isn't located in California, it has no electoral voice in California elections, and it gets no benefit from those collected tax dollars. The founders called this "taxation without representation."...Second, all California businesses and consumers are obligated to pay sales tax for online purchases where a sales tax was not collected. This is a "use tax," a type of levy in place more than 75 years. If use-tax collection is implemented correctly, it will garner California far more additional tax revenue than these baseless "virtual nexus" schemes. Currently the Board of Equalization is campaigning to educate and collect additional unpaid use taxes.
...In 2010, California affiliate marketers earned $1.9 billion and paid $151 million in state income taxes (plus business taxes, employment taxes, etc). Legislation such as AB153 and SB234 guarantees elimination of some or all of these tax payments. Affiliate marketers will see income drop 25 percent to 35 percent, which would translate into the layoff of thousands of people statewide and businesses closing or moving to other states.
Look there! -- I believe it's the Joads, heading back east to Delaware.
Claire Berlinski On The TSA And The Sheeple
Berlinski writes at Ricochet:
Now, I don't think you have a "right" to fly in a commercial aircraft, so I don't think the TSA's searches are a violation of one's "rights." But I do think the American public's collective willingness to go along with what any thinking person can see is a ritualized, invasive, offensive, time-wasting and humiliating farce is a very bad omen about our political culture.It's alarming both because there should be some kind of enraged reflexive reaction--"Hey, we shouldn't put up with this, this is insane!"--and there just isn't. Most people seem willing just to submit to it; the objections to these practices seem to be confined to the political periphery. Is there a single 2012 candidate who has made this a campaign issue? Why not?
And it's alarming because it suggests no one party to this farce can think his or her way out of a paper bag. To see a stunning lack of common sense, on this scale, and to see a national willingness to believe that somehow it must all make sense and we should just trust the people who say it does--well, that's really disturbing.
Narcissism With A Side Of Falafel
Nathalie Rothschild on Spiked on the Gaza flotilla:
The flotilla organisers claim to be acting in solidarity with Palestinians, and no doubt there are many Palestinians who welcome the global media spotlight and the pressure on Israel to ease the blockade on Gaza. But it is a curious type of solidarity that is so singularly narcissistic and self-satisfying.For instance, Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and one of the most high-profile crew members of the US ship, has said: 'Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: what else would I do?' Now aged 67, Walker has apparently found a new purpose in life, namely to bring 'letters of love' to the 'children of Palestine'. She sees herself as an experienced elder, bringing words of wisdom and comfort to Gaza's children.
Her focus on Palestinian children is not simply a soppy cliché; rather it's a way of placing herself in the role of mother. She and her boat companions want to care for and protect Gazans, maternally, to feed them and nurture them and give them 'love'. Palestinians are deemed to be helpless not only because they live under a de facto occupation, but because, in the view of the flotilla activists, they are incapable of securing their rights without the benefit of the life experiences of the likes of Walker.
... this is a media stunt disguised as a risqué act of self-sacrifice. This becomes most clear in the activists' insistence that they are putting their lives on the line 'for Palestinians'. In an article for the CNN News website, Walker speculates about what will happen if the Israeli soldiers 'insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us', while Naiman, writing in the Huffington Post, says he is participating 'in this voyage at risk to my life'.
Oh, please. I saw the "peaceful" types on the flotilla beating an Israeli soldier with a pipe.
Indeed, for all the hyping up of the flotilla's non-violent resistance and the crew's ostensible backing of the Palestinians' right to self-determination, in fact the flotilla crew are a war-thirsty, interventionist bunch.
Here's the violence that went down the first time from the "peaceful" operation, and the deal on all the tons and tons of medicine, food, and fuel Israel ships into Gaza (contrary to what the propaganda says):
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. One link per comment, or your comment will be eaten by my spam thang. Want to post two links? Post two comments.
I'm sleepy now (after a trip to Pasadena from the West Side in LA holiday weekend traffic that took about as long as the stagecoach from the East Coast to the West), but I'll put up more blog items tomorrow.
TSA Q&A
From the comments on this TIME piece about the elderly leukemia victim's diaper search:
Question: What kind of a man knowingly surrenders his own daughter to one of us government workers to be molested, standing by passively even as her private parts are fondled while she screams "Daddy Daddy, please help me!"Answer: an American man.
I speak only to you men when I say you gutless cowards will be lining up to hand over your wives and daughters in our airports, it will happen hundreds of time each day across our USA. You had better start explaining to your children that we government employees are allowed to touch their private parts whenever we want; it will make the whole thing a lot less dramatic. Seriously, the 1st time is always the worst. The next time you get molested will not feel as disturbing as we accommodate you to our abuses.
-Ksiadz_Robak
via Lisa Simeone
Amazon Just Cut Me Off -- With About A Day's Notice
Danny Sullivan echoes how I feel with "An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos On Terminating The Amazon Affiliate Program In California":
Dear Jeff-Thank you for your letter today, informing me that after seven years of being one of your affiliates -- and having earned for you about $150,000 in that time -- that you "deeply regret" unilaterally terminating my contract with Amazon to be an affiliate. I also especially appreciated the part where you reassured me that this action wouldn't affect my ability to keep buying from your company. Nice touch.
I deeply appreciate that after so many years of supporting your company, and earning my 4.5% cut over those years (as I figured today, looking at my stats), that you've decided that I should be a pawn in your fight with my state. That type of loyalty really makes me want to support you in the future, should you restore your program. It also encourages me to want to continue shopping with you.
Jeff, I'm fortunate. Unlike the case with many of your affiliates, this won't have a big economic impact on me. Having affiliate links here on my personal blog is more a hobby than anything else. I've got a successful day job.
But I don't like unfairness in general. I also don't have a lot of time to waste. And right now, I feel like you've just delivered a double-dose of both.
Cut The Program & Keep The Links
I'm not sure how many affiliate links I have on the blog. Not that many, maybe 25 to 50 in all. But until about an hour ago, those links were worth something to you. Now, because of your squabble over the sales tax issue, you've decided to just take for free what you'd previously paid for. If I don't find time to track down and kill those links, you keep grabbing orders that get made through them and keeping the cut I previously received.
Over the next day or so, you're going to get a lot of orders this way. Bigger affiliates will eventually move. Plenty of smaller ones won't be bothered to change. But those small ones that don't will add up into plenty of money for your company. You, of all companies, really understand how all that long tail stuff can mount up, right?
I'm not a big fan of class action lawsuits. They just enrich lawyers and let the plaintiffs end up with a $20 coupon to buy goods from the same companies that wronged them in the first place. But thinking about all those links that will keep earning you money for free, I kind of hope someone files a suit against you. They probably won't win, but you deserve a little hassle, too.
I Get To Be Your Pawn With Only 10 Hours Notice?
You want to just up and terminate my contract with you with only ten hours notice? Hey, to be honest, I don't even know what my contract is -- or was -- with you. I suppose you granted yourself these rights. Most big businesses tend to do so.
But really, it only occurred to you today to give your California affiliates this notice? I've checked. You've sent nothing to us about this. Nothing yesterday. Nothing in the past month. Nothing at all, not until now. Since you clearly want to make us your pawns, maybe you could have told us sooner?
Then again, it might not have made a difference. See, I think you should collect sales tax. I don't care what your "it's unconstitutional" arguments are. Go argue them in court, with the people you're upset with. But collect sales tax in the meantime. I'll give you a simple reason why. It's fair.
Read the rest at the link. And please tweet and post the link to his letter on Facebook.
You've all been tremendously generous in buying through my Amazon links and the money has helped me make ends meet every month. I thought this program would go out on September 30. That it's so suddenly ended is a big and bad blow, and Amazon has lost tremendous good will with me. I wrote to them this morning telling them I need this money and asking them what I can do -- if I can incorporate in another state, etc.
Maybe I can have somebody take over my account and then pay them a percentage every month. (I would, of course, pay taxes on what I earn -- and I'd have to pay the taxes of the person who takes the account over...this starts to get really complicated and probably illegal.) And I'm not a business genius -- I have no idea whether it would be legal to incorporate as an LLC.
And no, I didn't vote for that bozo Jerry Brown.
TSA: They're Too Busy Turning Us Into Sheeple To Catch Anybody
They're very, very busy groping bajillions of boobs and balls daily, and getting Americans used to being violated in the name of "security," so you'll have to forgive the TSA if they miss a guy sneaking onto the plane -- repeatedly -- with bogus documents.
Andrew Blankstein and Howard Blume write in the Los Angeles Times that a "Nigerian American" man, Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, was able to "pass undetected through security":
The saga began June 24, when Noibi got on the plane at JFK.Noibi was not on the list of passengers for the flight, which would be mandatory "for each paying passenger on every U.S. domestic flight," wrote Special Agent Kevin R. Hogg in an FBI affidavit. Virgin had no record of Noibi paying for his ticket.
Despite this, he was able to move past two checkpoints -- at the security screening area and at the gate -- with his expired ticket and university ID.
Investigators later determined the boarding pass belonged to a man identified in the affidavit only as "M.D."
The man told authorities he printed his boarding pass at home, folded it up and put it in his back pocket. But when he arrived at JFK after taking the subway, he couldn't find it. He said he did not know Noibi and printed a replacement boarding pass.
When the flight attendant approached Noibi two hours into the twin-jet Airbus A320 flight, Noibi produced a boarding pass for the day before. The attendant alerted Capt. Joseph Groff, who directed her to seek additional identification, according to the affidavit. Noibi initially hesitated but then produced a student ID from the University of Michigan. Noibi attended as an undergraduate student between 2006 and 2008, the college confirmed.
Groff noted that the names did not match, and the crew alerted authorities on the ground.
The crew kept the subject -- who was asleep for much of the flight-- under surveillance, but at no time felt there was any threat to the security of the flight, Condon said.
The five-hour, 23-minute flight landed in Los Angeles at 12:53 a.m. Saturday. Waiting officers let Noibi go after questioning him, and it's unclear how he spent his time in Southern California. But he returned to LAX on Tuesday, passed through security screening and waited for hours at the airport.
Love this bit:
"Waiting officers let Noibi go after questioning him..."
You sneak onto a plane and they give you a wave and an "Enjoy Los Angeles"? But, if you've got a legit ticket to fly to New York to attend a science conference for your work, you'll have to be sexually violated?
Obama Admin Goes After The Potheads
The DOJ sent out a memo telling the Drug Enforcement Administration and the bigwigs in the U.S. Attorney's office to treat medical marijuana dispensaries as top priority for prosecutors and drug investigators...regardless of state laws permitting the growth and sale of marijuana. Mike Rigg writes at reason, quoting from the DOJ memo:
State laws or local ordinances are not a defense to civil or criminal enforcement of federal law with respect to such conduct, including enforcement of the CSA."The memo, authored by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, "clarifies" a memo released in 2009 that declared medical marijuana sales in states that have legalized it to be a low priority for law enforcement and prosecutors. The so-called "Ogden memo" first appeared to drug law reformers as evidence that Pres. Obama was dialing back the war on drugs. The DEA and U.S. Attorneys office continued to go after state-legal grow operations and marijuana shops after the memo was first circulated, leading reformers to conclude that Obama was lying when he said on the campaign trail that he had no interest in going after medical marijuana.
...The Ogden memo did not make medical marijuana legal, but it clearly advised federal law enforcement agencies to go after pot shops that showed signs of being tied to organized crime. From the Ogden memo, released in 2009:
Typically, when any of the following characteristics is present, the conduct will not be in clear and unambiguous compliance with applicable state law and may indicate illegal drug trafficking activity of potential federal interest:•unlawful possession or unlawful use of firearms;•violence;
•sales to minors;
•financial and marketing activities inconsistent with the terms, conditions, or purposes of state law, including evidence of money laundering activity and/or financial gains or excessive amounts of cash inconsistent with purported compliance with state or local law;
•amounts of marijuana inconsistent with purported compliance with state or local law;
•illegal possession or sale of other controlled substances; or
When I asked the White House in 2010 if continuing to raid medical marijuana dispensaries--which it had been doing less often than under Bush, but more often than never--a senior staffer told me, "Yes - that enforcement is focused on those incidences where both federal and state law are being violated - and is therefore focused largely on drug traffickers. It has not spent its limited resources on ind. patients with cancer and other serious disease."
Suck it up, cancer patients!
College Indoctrination (Uh, Orientation) For Resident Advisors
Rachel Cheeseman, a student and former RA at DePauw, and a summer intern at the wonderful campus free speech-defending organization FIRE, writes about her experience at RA orientation:
During the week-long series of RA training events, my fellow RAs and I were lectured repeatedly about white privilege, racism, sexism, and every other "ism." My peers who questioned the information were silenced immediately or heckled for their refusal to accept the dogmatic views of our superiors.We were told that "human" was not a suitable identity, but that instead we were first "black," "white," or "Asian"; "male" or "female"; and, perhaps most alarming of all, "heterosexual" or "queer." We were forced to act like bigots and spout off stereotypes while being told that that was what we were really thinking deep down. I was appalled, and I hadn't even been forced to drag my residents through the same thing ... yet....I was enraged. Not only did this brainwashing program go against DePauw's own promise of freedom of conscience, it promoted an environment where there is a "right" and a "wrong" way of thinking. But more than just telling us what to think, DePauw told us what we should believe deep down. Instead of inspiring students by fostering free and open debate, DePauw was--and still is--indoctrinating its students.
via @AdamKissel
