It Could Be Your Lucky Day
Photo by Philip Miller. (Used with permission, of course.) 
Why Let Safety Get In The Way Of Government Regulation?
Another utterly dumbassed decision by the CPSC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, blogged by safetyandcommonsense, which is the antithesis of this commision's rulings:
In a remarkable reversal, a 3-2 majority of the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted today to reinterpret the phrase "unblockable drain" under the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act (VGB Act) to no longer permit the use of unblockable drain covers to protect against entrapment in public pools using single drain systems. As a result, cash strapped schools, municipalities, community pool organizations and others will be required to install an expensive and less protective back-up system.The Commission's original interpretation was based on the recommendation by its career technical experts that a $40 unblockable drain cover provides better protection against entrapment and drowning than does a $1000 - the least expensive and therefore most popular - back-up device, a safety vacuum release system (SVRS). According to Commission staff, unblockable drain covers prevent an entrapment before it happens, whereas an SVRS kicks in 4 seconds after a drain is blocked. As a result, a child playing in a pool without an unblockable drain cover can be eviscerated, or inextricably trapped by hair or a limb and drown before the SVRS turns off the pump. Even the SVRS manufacturer acknowledges this limitation in its product.
The rea$ons for the reversal at the link.
via Walter Olson
Here's How You Catch A Terrorist
With highly trained FBI agents, not slightly trained unskilled workers at the airport. From the HuffPo:
A 26-year-old Massachusetts man has been arrested in connection with a plot to attack the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol using an aircraft filled with C-4 explosives.The Boston Globe reveals the name of the suspect as Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen who was charged with "attempting to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization, specifically to al Qaeda..."
"The conduct alleged today shows that Mr. Ferdaus had long planned to commit violent acts against our country," U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a press release, which was linked off of Michael van Poppel's Twitter account. "Thanks to the diligence of the FBI and our many other law enforcement partners, that plan was thwarted."
The DOJ press release is here.
UPDATE: "Leaked memorandum" from lawblogger Mark Bennett...supposedly from the TSA's Pistole to the FBI's Mueller. An excerpt:
It would take a lot of heat off me if we could actually catch someone going through security with a bomb. I've already got all the newspapers sold, and if scan-and-grope works once, everyone will have to shut their traps and let me decide what price a little more security is worth.You see what I'm getting at here? If you could fabricate a plot involving another mildly retarded loser trying to blow up a plane on Christmas Eve, and then tipping me off on the QT so that I could make sure the screeners caught him, it'd go a long way toward restoring public confidence in government power without oversight--and I know Leonhart and Melson would like a bit of that too.
I considered finding a screener who secretly wants to blow up a plane--with our shoddy employment screening, that shouldn't have to be too hard--and fabricating a plot with him at the center. Then we could catch our own screener trying to sneak explosives through security. But that wouldn't work--it would just support the unfair allegations of incompetence that the Right and the Left keep throwing at us. Besides, TSA doesn't (yet) have the resources to convince even the most simpleminded aspiring bomber. So I really need your help on this one.
If you don't have anything in the hopper right now, I can send you our list of recent applicants; there's got to be someone in that parade of no-hopers who would, deep in his heart, rather put bombs on airplanes than keep them off. But remember: I need you to tell me who you are using and exactly where and when he will be coming through security--God knows we don't want to leave it up to the bunch of losers I have manning the machines to find even a fake bomb on their own.
If you can't help me out, I understand. No sweat. We're still cool. Give my love to the wife and kids.
John
Legal Overkill
Lawyer and law blogger Scott Greenfield has an op-ed in Newsday on some ridiculous overreach by a prosecutor on some students who cheated on their SAT test:
District Attorney Kathleen Rice intends to prosecute them for a misdemeanor; if found guilty, they could face a year in jail. While cheating is serious, and paying for someone else to take the SAT for you is extraordinarily serious, saddling these six with criminal records is overkill.Clearly, they shouldn't benefit from their misconduct, and a consequence must be found both to punish them for such a flagrant wrong as well as to send a message to any other students -- or parents -- who think they, too, are special enough to cheat the system. And the consequence of never being acceptable to a decent college is a very harsh punishment.
But it's critical that we not confuse students who have otherwise harmed no one with unsalvageable delinquents. Their lack of prior records indicates that these were good, if a bit entitled, young people who have royally screwed up. They need consequences, but not a scarlet letter. They need punishment, but not dismissal to the permanent underclass.
The criminal justice system is a blunt object. Involvement with it can mean an extremely difficult, if not hopeless, future. As they check off the hypothetical box of "unemployable criminal" on job applications in the future, was their misconduct so heinous and harmful to others that it should taint their entire destiny? They did a bad thing. A very bad thing. But not something that precludes a chance to move beyond it. To permanently mar their future is a disproportionate punishment.
These are teenagers who have made extremely poor decisions. But making poor decisions is the hallmark of being a teenager -- and one of the primary reasons we do not repose full faith in their judgment. Sometimes their judgment stinks, and we only pray they do no permanent harm.
So we should be cautious in the message we send to other high school students. Yes, there are severe consequences for cheating and behaving dishonorably. But we, the adults toward whom they have typical teenage ambivalence, realize that they are not disposable, unworthy of salvage and that their lives shouldn't come to a crashing end.
How Dumb Is Your Government?
From The Smoking Gun, a blogger derails a year-long Department of Homeland Security undercover operation targeting prospective "sex tourists," and notes that she should have known it was a government operation:
The computer programmer also noticed that the "Precious Treasure Holiday Company" site appeared to have been designed using a 2003 version of Microsoft's FrontPage. In retrospect, she remarked, the use of such outdated software should have tipped her to the fact that the site was a U.S. government production.
Those here who think government protects us, raise your hand. No, your hand.
No Evidence He Sexually Harassed Her. He's Still Suspended. And Ostracized.
My friend Kate Coe, always a fantastic source for links, emailed me this one, about a Dartmouth freshman (a guy) accused of sexually harassing another freshman (a woman).
It seems completely clear that she made this up, yet he was still suspended -- for a year.
Beyond what was done to him -- just disgusting, the injustice -- he talks about the sort of people Dartmouth graduates and what it means for the rest of us. Gonzalo Lira writes:
The kind of men and women Dartmouth enrolls and graduates are the bright men and women who find places for themselves in the gears of America society. The men and women on the COS hearing in the fall of 1991 were no different.And they showed me how fundamentally corrupt the American leadership class really is.
There was no question that the allegations against me were lies--blatant lies. Demonstrable lies. The chair of the Committee On Standards, the Dean of the College, Lee Pelton, knew for a fact that this woman's allegations were bullshit: Her lie about the obscene e-mails was too blatant to be explained away, as was her constantly shifting story about what she claims had happened.
Forget a perfect world--in an intermittently just world, what the members of the COS should have done was dismiss the charges against me. And if they'd really tried for a truly just world, they should have suspended or even expelled the first year woman who had accused me, for having made up her lies and her baseless allegations.
"Committee On Standards" indeed--punishment for bearing false witness is a standard. And a crucial standard at that: No society can long survive, if it allows witnesses to openly get away with perjury. The COS should have made it clear that this particular standard would be upheld.
But it wasn't. They didn't. Because of the recent Thomas/Hill hearings, the political vibe on campus was such that, to have expelled or suspended or even admonished the first year woman for lying would have elicited cries of "Punishing the victim!", and so forth.
There would have been hell to pay, politically.
So there was no punishing this young woman for having lied so blatantly: It would have been too hard.
It was easier for the COS to suspend me. My "voice" was not so important as the "voices" of the various campus factions who would have howled in outrage--regardless of the facts.
And if my entire college experience was ruined by ostracism and open contempt? If this episode in my transcripts made it unlikely--not so say impossible--that I would ever be accepted at name graduate-school programs? If indeed, it made applying to my first jobs an iffy proposition?
If this episode ruined all my carefully nurtured hopes and ambitions for the life I had wanted to lead?...
There's much more to read at the above link.
Redirected Aggression, Retaliation And The TSA
Very, very interesting post on Psychology Today evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon on the TSA gropings (including mine and Susie Castillo's), and why women are especially upset at being forced to allow strangers to touch their sexual parts:
Amy's experience (and a book I recently read which I'll get to in a minute) got me to considering several things, the first being the incredible upset many women (and parents) have expressed following such invasions. There is a vast psychological literature on the sensitivity of women to any behavior that is (or could be interpreted as) sexually aggressive. Women have always been vulnerable to such assaults and have a number of adaptations designed to help prevent us from falling victim to sexual predators (despite that, sexual assaults and rapes do occur, especially under conditions when women are vulnerable, no adaptations are perfect). One imagines that a stranger (TSA agent) fondling your breasts or sticking their fingers between your labia would be very distressing just as being grabbed by a stranger on the street and receiving the same treatment would be. I'm actually stunned that a female agent would not realize how upsetting it would be to another woman to be handled in such an intimate way by an aggressive stranger. Instead, it appears that retaliation is on the agent's mind, both when she engaged in the original invasion and with her current attempt to make a buck.Which brings me to the book I recently read. It's called Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge
, written by David Barash and Judith Lipton. I found this book particularly interesting partially because so many people have suggested that there is a problem with some TSA agents (this issue has been raised with regard to other jobs in the past as well) taking pleasure in controlling and humiliating others. The title they originally entertained was "Passing the Pain Along" and that is what the book is about. People taking pleasure by wounding others when they've been wounded themselves. In particular, the authors focus on redirected aggression, those times when someone's been hurt (physically or emotionally) and can't take action against the person who hurt them. So they attack someone else (often an innocent bystander). A man comes home from work, humiliated in front of his boss by a co-worker and smacks around his son for a minor infraction (like forgetting to pick up the mail). It's not pretty but it happens more often than we like to think. People who feel the need to redirect their aggression may find certain jobs appealing. And certainly when others make them feel like they have to work harder, they may, if they have the power, simply retaliate directly and dish out humiliation in response.
It is my opinion that this agent who stuck her hand sideways into my vagina four times was doing it to punish me for not going quietly in the face of her "authority." I remember the arrogant and angry look on her face -- in fact, it's burned into my mind.
And I am still disgusted, humiliated and enraged when I think of the way I have been sexually groped three times by TSA agents -- in violation of my Fourth Amendment right against being searched without reasonable suspicion I've committed a crime.
I have a lot of respect for Salmon's work, which I've referenced in a number of columns, blog items, and articles. Her book that just came out: The Secret Power of Middle Children: How Middleborns Can Harness Their Unexpected and RemarkableAbilities
Big Government vs. Gibson
Smart stuff, as always, from Tim Cavanaugh, on the government's raid on the Gibson guitar factory and the LA Times' lame coverage of it.
Tim blogs at reason.com, about how 24 armed and armored cops "quickly seized control of the cavernous [Gibson] guitar factory" during a wood-import-related raid on August 24:
A few minutes of thought should have made it clear why this story blew up: It's about how federal officers conducted two raids against a successful and law-abiding company without filing any charges. They have done this while the country is in a severe recession that has not spared Gibson's base of Nashville, Tennessee. The company, which seeks to maintain a relatively progressive and pro-environment posture (as CEO Henry Juszkiewicz does in his comments to Banarjee), makes a product that is coveted by consumers, highly regarded by its users and recognizable to most people with an interest in popular music. And the purpose of the raid was to investigate whether the laws of another country - India, from which Gibson imports its fingerboards and which has provided Juszkiewicz with a letter attesting to the legality of the purchases - were violated. I'm more of a Fender man myself, but I can pretty easily see why the vast right-wing conspiracy has found an eager audience for commentary on this outrage....Gibson is big in the guitar world but it doesn't exactly qualify as Big Business. It does about $111 million in annual revenues and employs 2,800 people. Like most of us, it is struggling to get by in the Obama economy. And it's been raided by the cops twice for no apparent reason. And the cops refuse to give back the stuff they confiscated.
Ask-Out Fail
A guy who sees me from time to time at my writing cafe asked for my card on Saturday. My card (intentionally) does not have a phone number on it, because I want to dissuade just about everyone but Gregg, my little sister Caroline, and a few very close friends from ever calling me...especially if they're calling to say, "Hey, I'm on the 405, and I needed to kill a little time, and I thought that calling you in the middle of your writing day would be a great way to do it."
The guy emailed me yesterday, compressing everything into a single message...wondering whether I'm single, and if I am, whether I like to do my choice of three events with him (with comprehensive details on each) and he wound up telling me I could meet him at his house at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.
Um, no.
First, you find out whether a woman has a boyfriend. Ask in person, if possible. And then ask for her phone number if she is not 19-29 or a little beyond, in which case you could text her to ask her out, but I still think a call is a nice thing, and a manly thing to do.
When you ask her out, you do it definitively, asking her out to one thing you've chosen, and you don't tell her to drive over to your house.
A woman might want to meet you someplace rather than being picked up (I don't think this guy is an ax killer), but she doesn't want to meet you at your place before she even knows you.
A better approach would be asking a woman out for drinks, not a smorgasboard.
And FYI, as I've written in my column, first dates with someone you don't know should be 1. inexpensive, 2. short, and 3. local. You don't buy an expensive dinner for a stranger, even if you can afford it.
And I, at least, want a man who takes charge a little. I take charge plenty, and then some, in my life, but in my relationship, I want to be the girl. I want him to pick a place, reflecting what he likes and thinks I'd like, and tell me where he'd like to take me. If I have a problem with that (like, if it's a place where they have no alcohol), I'll let him know.
And yes, I thanked the guy and let him know I have a boyfriend.
Ladies, how do you like to be asked out, and guys, what's your M.O.?
Overcriminalization
Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller write in the WSJ of "mens rea," a Latin term meaning a "guilty mind," which refers to what they call a "bedrock principle of criminal law" -- the notion that people must know that they've done something wrong before they can be found guilty.
Well, welcome to the brave new world:
This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time.
...Back in 1790, the first federal criminal law passed by Congress listed fewer than 20 federal crimes. Today there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, plus thousands more embedded in federal regulations, many of which have been added to the penal code since the 1970s.
...In 1998, Dane A. Yirkovsky, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, man with an extensive criminal record, was back in school pursuing a high-school diploma and working as a drywall installer. While doing some remodeling work, Mr. Yirkovsky found a .22 caliber bullet underneath a carpet, according to court documents. He put it in a box in his room, the records show.
A few months later, local police found the bullet during a search of his apartment. State officials didn't charge him with wrongdoing, but federal officials contended that possessing even one bullet violated a federal law prohibiting felons from having firearms.
Mr. Yirkovsky pleaded guilty to having the bullet. He received a congressionally mandated 15-year prison sentence, which a federal appeals court upheld but called "an extreme penalty under the facts as presented to this court." Mr. Yirkovsky is due to be released in May 2013.
via Instapundit
Cab Fair
Tuesday morning, per what the Institute for Justice's Mark Meranta told me, the IJ "launched a huge economic liberty case that provides a textbook case of protectionism and regulatory capture."
Currently, Milwaukee allows only 321 taxicabs on its streets--almost half of which are owned by Milwaukee County Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo. That is about one cab for every 1,850 residents, one of the highest ratios in the country. This cap on taxi permits has sent permit costs skyrocketing, from $85 to $150,000--putting the dream of owning a taxi business out of most people's reach.
Here's a quick video about the case:
Bruce Vielmetti writes for the JSOnline:
The lawsuit, which the institute intends to file in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, asks that a judge block the city from denying new taxicab permits, and award nominal damages of $1, plus the plaintiffs' attorney fees."In addition to the harm plaintiffs suffer, the artificial scarcity of cabs harms Milwaukee citizens and visitors through limiting competition in the taxicab industry and creating inferior customer service - including longer wait times for cabs and a lack of available cabs in modest and minority neighborhoods," the lawsuit asserts.
A spokesman for the mayor's office did not return a phone call Monday seeking comment, nor did Ald. Bob Donovan, whose public safety committee oversees taxicab permits.
The lawsuit contends that each plaintiff has the means to start his own taxicab business - to buy a car and a meter and pay for insurance and dispatch service - except for the $150,000 permit cost.
The suit states the city's current practice violates the plaintiffs' due process and equal protection rights under the Wisconsin Constitution because it denies the plaintiffs the right to earn a living of their choice but does not further a legitimate government interest.
"In the classic story of entrepreneurship, someone starts a taxi business in order to save up enough money to buy a house," said Institute for Justice staff attorney Anthony Sanders, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. "In Milwaukee, you need to save up enough money to buy a house just to start a taxi business."
Before the 1991 change, the city issued permits that were not transferable. But longtime taxicab operators wanted to be able to sell their businesses, and the value of built-up goodwill, so the city decided it would not issue new permits, but make existing ones transferable.
The free market needs to remain free -- and free of government intervention.
More government meddling here and here. The DC taxi racket here.
The Auntie Christ On The Radio Today At 2:30 PM Pacific
I'd like "The Auntie Christ" to be my nickname for this afternoon so you'll remember to listen to me on the radio from 2:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time on KPCC.
I'll be talking with the LA Times' David Lazarus, who's sitting in for Patt (the Hatt) Morrison, on the heckler who called President Obama "The Antichrist" at his fundraiser last night, and as a broader issue, on civility and how we treat our politicians.
Listen live here, online, or on your radio in So Cal at 89.3 fm.
UPDATE -- I messed up! Wrong Joe Wilson!
I got this email from a listener:
Dear Ms Alkon,Please in my most polite way possible, do not make the grave mistake of bringing up Joe Wilson of Valerie Plame fame as the Democrat who yelled out "You lie!" during President Obama's State of the Union Speech. That was South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson (R). I hope you will correct the error as soon as possible.
Thanks you
(Name withheld until I hear from the writer)
My response:
I am so sorry - thank you so much for writing me. It was in my notes from a long time ago, and I saw the Joe Wilson/Plame movie recently and made the (gulp) leap to thinking it was them. I'll post this on my blog. Please let me know if you want your name on your note. I'll wait to hear from you. Many, many thanks for writing. I work really hard to put out the scientific truth in my column -- it's just awful that I maligned the other Joe Wilson on the radio in one "slip of the lip." Best,-Amy
The New Racism: Expecting English Fluency And Correct Pronunciation From Teachers
Walter Olson blogs at Cato about a story by Pat Kossan in the Arizona Republic about how Arizona has come to "an agreement with federal officials to stop monitoring classrooms for mispronounced words and poor grammar from teachers of students still learning the English language," thus avoiding a threatened Federal civil-rights lawsuit.
The issue: "Discrimination" against teachers who are not native English speakers.
Kossan writes:
The investigation began after unnamed parties filed a civil-rights complaint in May 2010 alleging that the state's on-site monitoring reports led to teachers being removed from classrooms based on their accents.In November, federal officials told Arizona that its fluency monitoring may violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against teachers who are Hispanic and others who are not native English speakers.
Under the agreement, the Arizona Department of Education will remove the fluency section from the form used by its monitors who visit classrooms. It also will require schools and districts to file assurances with the state that their teachers are fluent. The state did not admit any wrongdoing.
As a result, federal officials determined there were insufficient facts to establish a civil-rights violation and closed the case.
Walter clears things up for anyone who thinks this started with the Obama administration:
Does this strike you as perhaps a bit crazy? If so, it's craziness with quite a pedigree. It was way back in the first Bush administration that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began filing lawsuits against employers for "discriminating" against employees with difficult-to-understand or heavily accented speech, the theory being that this served as an improper proxy for discrimination based on national origin.
Let's remember that "discrimination" isn't always a bad thing. For example, I try to be discriminating in my choice of questions I put in my column so I can address interesting issues. I avoid answering the myriad questions I get from prison in my column (including one that arrived postage due, this week -- very charming). They're all 1. Innocent, 2. Guilty but verrrry nice, 3. Looking for a good woman.
And 4. Idiots.
Who writes to an advice columnist -- someone who gets letters for a living -- in hopes of getting a pen pal?
Harper's Fairy
This fairy doesn't leave a dollar; it leaves a list.
Harper's arrived the other day, and there were a few interesting items at the bottom of the "Harper's Index":
Percentage of Americans who say they would vote for a well-qualified homosexual candidate for president: 67For a well-qualified atheist: 49
Percentage of Americans in a July poll who said they approve of God's job performance: 52
Discuss.
There's Taxpayer Green In Going Green
How Coca-Cola's Odwalla company got taxpayers to pick up their energy expenses:
via Daniel J. Mitchell
What "No Nation-Building" Is Costing Us
That was a promise by George Bush -- one he broke -- and it came with a hefty price tag in both lives and other costs. Dan Froomkin writes on the HuffPo of all the equipment and more being jettisoned in Iraq:
WASHINGTON -- With just over three months until the last U.S. troops are currently due to leave Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build.The giveaways include enormous, elaborate military bases and vast amounts of military equipment that will be turned over to the Iraqis, mostly just to save the expense of bringing it home.
"It's all sunk costs," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi soldiers from 2003 to 2004. "It's money that we spent and we're not going to recoup."
There were 505 U.S. military bases and outposts in Iraq at the height of operations, said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq. Only 39 are still in U.S. hands -- but that includes each of the largest bases, meaning the most significant handovers are yet to come.
Those bases didn't come cheap. Construction costs exceeded $2.4 billion, according to an analysis of Pentagon annual reports by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone was responsible for $1.9 billion in base construction contracts between 2004 and 2010, a spokesman told HuffPost.
Rather than strip those bases clean and ship everything home, Defense Department officials tell The Huffington Post that over 2.4 million pieces of equipment worth a total of at least $250 million -- everything from tanks and trucks to office furniture and latrines -- have been given away to the Iraqi government in the past year, with the pace of transfers expected to increase dramatically in the coming months.
Read the whole lengthy story at the link.
I'm for a strong military defense, but as much as I feel for the Kurds and those little girls in Afghanistan who can't go to school (to name two examples), we shouldn't be sending our citizens over there to die for them. Catch Bin Laden, yes, but that took a strike team, not ships and ships and ships of troops.
Junk Food Is "Cheaper"
Finally, in The New York Times, Mark Bittman comes out with what my mother figured out long, long ago with the simplest math -- junk food is far more expensive than healthy food.
Of course, we have people jawing on about how junk food is cheaper, and many people have just decided to believe that without giving it a second thought. Bittman writes:
THE "fact" that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, "when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ..." or "it's more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald's than to cook a healthy meal for them at home."This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn't cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four -- for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas -- costs, at the McDonald's a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of "Happy Meals" can reduce that to about $23 -- and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that's too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it's easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
...The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers' market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home -- in almost every case a far superior alternative.
My friend C. buys her vegetables at the 99 cent store. I get my French green beans at Costco -- $4.99 for a huge bag that lasts me the better part of a week (and I go through French green beans like a cow through sweet clover). I don't eat carbs anymore (save for the few in cheese, salami, and vegetables), but I bet I could go through $4.99 worth of Coke and Doritos in an afternoon.
Related post here.
Prepare For Your Government-oscopy
The government is preparing to crawl up your ass and around all the other parts of your body, thanks to Obamacare. Rep. Tim Huelskamp brings out the old line about it in the Wash Ex, that Congress had to pass Obamacare in order to find out what's in it, but we still keep getting shocked by each new unpleasant discovery:
This time, America is learning about the federal government's plan to collect and aggregate confidential patient records for every one of us.In a proposed rule from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government is demanding insurance companies submit detailed health care information about their patients.
...The federal government does not exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to managing private information about its citizens.
Why should we trust that the federal government would somehow keep all patient records confidential? In one case, a government employee's laptop containing information about 26.5 million veterans and their spouses was stolen from the employee's home.
There's also the HHS contractor who lost a laptop containing medical information about nearly 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries. And, we cannot forget when the USDA's computer system was compromised and information and photos of 26,000 employees, contractors, and retirees potentially accessed.
The second concern is the government compulsion to seize details about private business practices. Certainly many health insurance companies defended and advocated for the president's health care law, but they likely did not know this was part of the bargain.
They are being asked to provide proprietary information to governments for purposes that will undermine their competitiveness. Obama and Sebelius made such a big deal about Americans being able to keep the coverage they have under ObamaCare; with these provisions, such private insurance may cease to exist if insurers are required to divulge their business models.
Certainly businesses have lost confidential data like the federal government has, but the power of the market can punish the private sector. A victim can fire a health insurance company; he cannot fire a bureaucrat.
The Salem Witch Trials: Desert Sands Version
The primitive nutbags in Saudi Arabia just executed a man for "sorcery," reports Amnesty International:
"Abdul Hamid's execution is appalling as is Saudi Arabia's continuing use of this most cruel and extreme penalty," said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's Director for the Middle East and North Africa."That he should have been executed without having committed anything that would appear to constitute a crime is yet another deeply upsetting example of why the Saudi Arabian government should immediately cease executions and take steps to abolish the death penalty."
The crime of "sorcery" is not defined in Saudi Arabian law but it has been used to punish people for the legitimate exercise of their human rights, including their right to freedom of expression.
Abdul Hamid bin Hussain bin Moustafa al-Fakki was arrested in 2005 after he was entrapped by a man working for the Mutawa'een (religious police) who asked him to produce a spell that would lead to the man's father leaving his second wife.
It was alleged that Abdul Hamid said he would do this in exchange for 6,000 Saudi Arabian riyals (approximately US$1,600).
Reportedly beaten after his arrest, Abdul Hamid is believed to have been coerced to confess to carrying out acts of sorcery.
Of course, such behavior has no part in a civilized society. Of course, Saudi Arabia isn't a civilized society, because it is under Sharia law. Recently, per CNN.com, "A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports."
They were bringing her bread! Both men were arrested.
The court also doled out punishment to the two men. Fahd was sentenced to four months in prison and 40 lashes; Hadian was sentenced to six months in prison and 60 lashes. In a phone call with Al Watan, the judge declined to comment and suggested the newspaper review the case with the Ministry of Justice. Sawadi told the newspaper that she will appeal, adding that Fahd is indeed her son through breastfeeding
I believe she's referring to this creepiness:
Muhammad permitted a rather shameful practice. Muhammad permitted women to nurse young adults who were not their children.
More:
Saudi Clerics Call For Adult Breast-FeedingIn a surprising development, two senior Saudi clerics today said that Saudi Arabia's women should give their breast milk to male colleagues and acquaintances in order to safeguard the Islamic law that forbids mixing between the sexes. The clerics, however, failed to reach an agreement among each other on how the milk should be conveyed.
On a brighter note, King Abdullah has just permitted second class citizens under Islam -- women -- to be allowed to vote and run in future municipal elections...which is kind of hilarious, since as Neil McFarquhar reports at The New York Times link above, women in Saudi Arabia are " legally subject to male chaperones for almost any public activity," and they are still not allowed to drive.
The Cure For Doctors Who Think Outside The Box
It seems it's other doctors reporting them. Jay Parkinson had a bright idea about how to incorporate technology and house calls into a medical career:
Upon finishing my second residency at Hopkins in Baltimore in September of 2007, I moved back to Williamsburg to start a new kind of practice:1. Patients would visit my website
2. See my Google calendar
3. Choose a time and input their symptoms
4. My iphone would alert me
5. I would make a house call
6. They'd pay me via paypal
7. We'd follow up by email, IM, videochat, or in personIt was simple, elegant, and affordable for me to start. But most importantly, it just made sense given how we all communicate and do business today.
...I didn't need an office or staff. Everything was run by me, my iPhone, and my MacBook Pro. My overhead was about 10%, compared to a regular doctor who spends about 65-70% of their practice revenue on overhead. I was profitable after just a few days. The 7 million hits on my website in the first month obviously helped get the word out about my new practice (thank you internet!).
Then, about six months later I got an official letter from the New York State Office of Professional Conduct. Obviously, that was unsettling. It essentially said that someone had made a complaint about my practice and my use of the internet. They wanted all of my records about the eight patients I prescribed narcotics for in my practice-- I prescribed one time prescriptions for Tylenol #3 for eight patients treating their acute pain for various conditions. The state wanted a serious offense they could charge me with, hence why they singled out the narcotics. I pulled up my records on my MacBook for all eight patients and made them into a pdf and sent them off to the state proving that I'd seen the patients in person, established a doctor-patient relationship, followed standard medical treatment guidelines, and kept the records to prove it.
... You see, anyone, anywhere, can call the state anonymously and report any doctor they want. The state then takes action by sending a startling letter to that doctor asking for records. You are then asked to produce those records and appear in front of their board with or without your lawyer at your expense (lawyer's fees and lost revenue from time not practicing...thousands of dollars).
The state was looking to see if I was prescribing narcotics to strangers I've never met using the internet to do so.
Obviously, I wasn't. That surely wasn't what my practice was about. My practice was about being an old-fashioned neighborhood doctor using today's technology to provide care to the uninsured in my neighborhood who lived close enough to me to walk or ride my bike. I looked at internet communication as augmenting the real-life relationship I had with my patients. That was my dream, and that was my reality.
He ended up shutting his practice down. I wish he'd given all the reasons why. What he went through after being reported is one reason he said he closed up shop, but to me, this seems to be a smart and innovative way to practice medicine, and one more doctors should consider, especially in the wake of governmentcare in 2014.
via @WalterOlson
Dietary Science With The Actual Science Still In
Tom D. Naughton's terrific video:
Worth watching.
For The Sophisticated Dog With The Humiliation Fetish
@Greenpointless tweets:
This week in the grocery store clearance bin... twitpic.com/6q3nv5
An Argument Against Being A Pushy Broad And Asking Men Out
I am a pushy, bossy broad when necessary in life -- but I also know when to put my pushy, bossy side in check, and that's when it's time to be the girl.
In the comments on Wait Training, commenter Jim first quoted me (italics directly below), and then commented further:
It's not like I'm afraid to say "Hey, wanna have a drink" to a man, but I know better, because it tends to set up a dynamic for a man to not appreciate you as fully in the relationship.Amy, I remembered you writing about how you and Gregg met on another thread and just found it:
I meet people EVERYWHERE because I talk to them. I talked to a tall, cute guy at the Apple computer store eight years ago, and he hit on me with talk of kernel panics, bought me an Orange Crush at the Farmer's Market, talked to me for three hours, then walked me to my car and kissed me. We've been together ever since.So, I guess he technically "pursued" you since he presumably asked you to go to the market and he presumably made the move to kiss you. But you were the one who initiated things by talking to him (and, I would guess, also giving him some nonverbal cues that you had an interest in him.)
So now, here you guys are, eight years on and quite happy together. Since we know that Gregg liked you back then, do you think he would not have agreed to go with you if you had taken things one small step further and asked him to go the Farmer's Market? Or, do you think he would have agreed to go with you (because cool! A woman asked me!) but that one small difference -- you asking him to go to the market in addition to initiating a conversation with him -- would have then "set up a dynamic for him to not appreciate you as fully in your relationship."
My response:
Mating is a dance. Beyond what's effective psychologically, just as it's rude to do a monologue instead having a conversation, you don't hog all the moves. It's graceless.Women should indicate interest if they are interested. It's not nice to make the guy do all the work and guess whether you're going to reject him.
Men feel good about pursuing a woman and succeeding (and "winning her"), even if she has given them signals that she's interested. Why would I want to take that away from Gregg? That seems really stupid. He got a chance to act manly because I didn't take over. I'm a very strong person, but sometimes real strength takes waiting to let somebody else make a move instead of taking over.
UPDATE -- Jim's follow-up comment:
Thanks Amy (although you basically dodged my question.) Gregg may have had a chance to "act manly" by asking you to go the market but I'm 99% certain that if you had asked him to go the market (and even if you had also -- oh the horror! the horror! -- made the move to kiss him), you guys would be just where you are today, that he wouldn't be valuing you any less.
My response:
I can't say for sure how he'd feel, but I wouldn't respect him the way I do. I read people pretty quickly, and Gregg presented very clearly to me as a nerdy introvert -- not the kind of guy who's comfortable talking to people or hitting on women, and he rose to the occasion and asked me out despite that.Because he asked me out, I feel wanted and feel he's manly, and he especially impressed me when he grabbed me and kissed me at my car.
And I wouldn't have asked him (or any man out). If a man doesn't want me enough to lay his ego on the line for 13 seconds, or if he doesn't have the balls to do it, I have no interest in him.
Worry About The Guy Whose Hair Has Been To Yemen
And worry about him long before he's about to board a plane. A TSA "officer" chases down a woman with an Afro to humiliate her, uh, make sure there was no bomb in her hair. Todd Venezia reports for the New York Post:
A copiously coiffed Dallas woman says that she got a humiliating extra airport pat-down by the TSA because they thought she could be hiding a bomb in her large Afro hairstyle, according to a report.Isis Brantley said she had already been screened at Hartsfield-Jackson International Air-port in Atlanta and left the security area Monday, when a TSA guard chased after her and demanded to inspect her locks.
The agent demanded to give Brantley's hair a good groping.
"And so she started patting my hair, and I was in tears at that point," Brantley said. "They've never done that to me, ever -- never, never."
Your hair is such a personal part of your body. It's a part of you that strangers do not touch, but a lover will. A stranger working for the government, searching you with zero suspicion that you're a criminal, has no right to touch your hair. It is an act of abuse if they do.
I am still disgusted that an agent in New Orleans patted mine down -- my hair that was pulled back into a very tight ponytail. Forget the ridiculousness of anyone hiding a meaningful quantity of explosive in their hair -- even in their Afro-styled hair -- was I hiding a bomb in a follicle?
Again, remember, these are not security measures but "security" measures, and they have no stopped a single terrorist, but they have primed many Americans to give up their rights and their privacy with ease. Don't go quietly.
via Lisa Simeone
Where Good Ideas Come From
Terrific video with Steven Johnson:
Just Pretend Kids Say No To Drugs
A judge talked to some Texas high school students in real world ways about drugs, and MADD and the school administration got their panties in a twist (as Mark Bennett put it on his blog, where I found the story). Christine Dobbin writes for KTRK/Houston:
There was a technical problem with a MADD video, so panel member and Harris County criminal court Judge Larry Standley took the floor."I think his first question was...'Who in here smokes marijuana?" said Anderson.
The choir and band member says the judge went on to ask who had done certain other drugs and then he got to drinking,
"He said that drunk driving was bad and that he's done it once before, but didn't get caught," said Anderson.
The 17-year-old, along with many other students, was stunned.
"It offended me when he stated the fact that most of us kids were going to go out and get drunk during spring break, to just not do it while we were driving," said Anderson.
...Judge Standley released a statement, saying in part, "I believed the only way to make my point that drinking, drugs, and driving are a lethal combination was to be as open, honest and brutally frank as I could possibly be. My remarks were designed to inform and to educate and not to offend anyone in attendance."
..."It could not have been anticipated," said Clear Creek ISD Spokesperson Elaina Polsen. "As an elected official, as a community leader, we certainly expected a different message to our students."
Yeah, pretend they don't use drugs or drink and never will because that's so effective.
Too Much Law
What isn't illegal these days? We have far too much government, far too many laws. A couple in Orange County has been fined for doing what so many people do every week -- have groups that meet in private homes. These groups are foreign language conversation groups, book clubs, writing groups, etc.
This particular group was a Bible study group. From CBS LA:
Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called "a regular gathering of more than three people".That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple's legal representation.
The Fromms also reportedly face subsequent fines of $500 per meeting for any further "religious gatherings" in their home, according to PJI.
"We're just gathering and enjoying each other's company and fellowship. And we enjoy studying God's word." Stephanie Fromm told CBS2.
PJI is going to appeal to the California Superior Court. More from the story:
"This is also about a city trying to get a family to pay fees - to pay fees and pay money to them - just to be able to have friends over to read the Bible," attorney Brad Dacus of PJI told CBS2.
This is absurd and disgusting. Who is this law protecting? Why does it exist?
via Melody
Guilty? You Pay. Innocent? You Pay Almost As Much.
Via @radleybalko, the Massachusetts Supreme Court just approved charging innocent people who contest their tickets. From thenewspaper.com:
Motorists issued a traffic ticket in Massachusetts will have to pay money to the state whether or not they committed the alleged crime. According to a state supreme court ruling handed down yesterday, fees are to be imposed even on those found completely innocent. The high court saw no injustice in collecting $70 from Ralph C. Sullivan after he successfully fought a $100 ticket for failure to stay within a marked lane.Bay State drivers given speeding tickets and other moving violations have twenty days either to pay up or make a non-refundable $20 payment to appeal to a clerk-magistrate. After that, further challenge to a district court judge can be had for a non-refundable payment of $50. Sullivan argued that motorists were being forced to pay "fees" not assessed on other types of violations, including drug possession. He argued this was a violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection clause, but the high court justices found this to be reasonable.
"We conclude that there is a rational basis for requiring those cited for a noncriminal motor vehicle infraction alone to pay a filing fee and not requiring a filing fee for those contesting other types of civil violations," Justice Ralph D. Gants wrote for the court. "Where the legislature provides greater process that imposes greater demands on the resources of the District Court, it is rational for the legislature to impose filing fees, waivable where a litigant is indigent, to offset part of the additional cost of these judicial proceedings."
The court insisted that allowing a hearing before a clerk-magistrate instead of an assistant clerk, as well as allowing a de novo hearing before a judge constituted benefits that justified the cost. Last year, the fees for the clerk-magistrate hearings generated $3,678,620 in revenue for the courts. Although Sullivan raised the issue of due process during oral argument, the court would not rule on the merits of that issue.
Does anybody notice the pattern, day after day after day, of how "citizen" is starting to seem somewhat synonymous with words like "mark," "victim," and "cash cow"?
Oh, forgot to add this last night: I'm for "loser pays" in court, but "winner pays"?
Bullied Boy Kills Himself
Here's the tape he made before he died. Tragically, the title references a program Dan Savage started to help prevent terrible situations like this one.
The story from the HuffPo:
Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old boy from Williamsville, NY, took his life Sunday after what his parents claim was years of bullying because of struggles with his sexuality.His parents, Tracy and Tim Rodemeyer, say that Jamey faced bullies for years, though things intensified in middle school, according to NBC 2. Jamey recently became a freshman at Williamsville North High School.
In the wake of their loss, the Rodemeyers hope to carry on a message of anti-bullying and acceptance. "To the kids who are bullying they have to realize that words are very powerful and what you think is just fun and games isn't to some people, and you are destroying a lot of lives," Jamey's father told WIVB.
Every little call of "faggot" was like a little knife in this kid.
Illegal Immigrants And Your Tax Dollars
Michelle Hirsch writes for the Fiscal Times, "No Social Security number? No problem," referring to how the IRS last year paid out billions in refundable tax credits to illegal alien workers, according to a new Treasury audit:
Federal law bars illegal immigrants from collecting tax benefits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, that can be claimed by residents with Social Security numbers. But the Treasury report found that the tax code's lack of clarity is allowing the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), which reduces taxes owed by certain individuals with children, to be heavily claimed by undocumented workers;if their tax bills dip below zero, they can collect government checks.Even wages earned illegally in the U.S. are taxed. Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) are available to people without Social Security numbers who cannot legally work in the U.S. so they can file tax returns. These ITINs have become increasingly linked to fraudulent tax claims, which helped inflate IRS payouts on the Additional Child Tax Credit from $924 million in 2005 to $4.2 billion, the report said.
"The payment of federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States without authorization, which contradicts federal law and policy to remove such incentives," the report said.
...In response to the report, IRS officials said they would follow one of its recommendations to meet with Treasury officials to determine whether people unauthorized to work in the U.S. can collect refundable tax credits. But the IRS rebuffed the audit's second recommendation that it collect additional documentation from people claiming the ACTC, arguing that the agency lacks the legal authority to challenge such tax returns.
"Any suggestion that the IRS shouldn't be paying out these credits under current law to ITIN holders is simply incorrect," IRS spokesperson Michelle Eldridge told The Fiscal Times in a statement. "The IRS administers the law impartially and applies it as written. If the law were changed, the IRS would change its programs accordingly."
Better Late Than Never, But It Won't Bring Her Home Back
Via Damon Root at reason, in May, 2010, a Connecticut Supreme Court justice apologized to Suzette Kelo, whose home was ripped away from her under evil "eminent domain," thanks to the ruling against her in Kelo v. New London. Jeff Benedict writes in the Hartford Courant:
I had delivered the keynote address on the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London. Susette Kelo was in the audience and I used the occasion to tell her personal story, as documented in my book "Little Pink House."Afterward, Susette and I were talking in a small circle of people when we were approached by Justice Richard N. Palmer. Tall and imposing, he is one of the four justices who voted with the 4-3 majority against Susette and her neighbors. Facing me, he said: "Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently."
I was speechless. So was Susette. One more vote in her favor by the Connecticut Supreme Court would have changed history. The case probably would not have advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Susette and her neighbors might still be in their homes.
Then Justice Palmer turned to Susette, took her hand and offered a heartfelt apology. Tears trickled down her red cheeks. It was the first time in the 12-year saga that anyone had uttered the words "I'm sorry."
It was all she could do to whisper the words: "Thank you."
Then Justice Palmer let go of her hand and walked off.
Commenter recordat, on the Courant's site, summed up well (stumbling a little in trying to get to "acknowledged"):
An apology is also owed to all American citizens whose rights have been dramatically diminished as a result of his now acknolwed misstep.
Again, this is the crux of the situation I'm now involved in, in the wake of the TSA agent demanding $500K from me -- for refusing to go quietly as our Fourth Amendment rights are violated daily at airports across America, or as a single agent engages in malfeasance (I believe, to punish me for speaking up) and then tries to extract money from me for how I dared to continue to exercise my free speech rights in the wake of what was done to me.
This is one little (and extremely unpleasant, violating, and upsetting) incident that happened to me. But, the big picture is one of our rights being eroded and of people shrugging their shoulders as it's happening. I couldn't even finish discussing it with a woman who writes at the cafe I do. She didn't think it was a big deal that an agent was groping her hair. I asked her if there was evidence that she was an al Qaeda operative. She reiterated that being searched was really no big deal, blah blah blah.
But, it is. Every right that is yanked away from us makes it that much easier to yank others' rights and more of our own.
The decision in Kelo makes it that much easier for some municipality or some big business to take your home or business from you, and with nothing you can do about it but start packing the moving boxes.
Stupid President Tricks
President Obama's "soak the rich" scheme sounds good to his base, but it's anything but good for the country, writes Daniel J. Mitchell on Cato:
Whether the President is talking about higher income tax rates, higher payroll tax rates, an expanded alternative minimum tax, a renewed death tax, a higher capital gains tax, more double taxation of dividends, or some other way of extracting money, the goal is to have these people foot the bill for a never-ending expansion of the welfare state.This sounds like a pretty good scam, at least if you're a vote-buying politician, but there is one little detail that sometimes gets forgotten. Raising the tax burden is not the same as raising revenue.
That may not matter if you're trying to win an election by stoking resentment with the politics of hate and envy. But it is a problem if you actually want to collect more money to finance a growing welfare state.
Unfortunately (at least from the perspective of the class-warfare crowd), the rich are not some sort of helpless pinata that can be pilfered at will.
...This means that they -- unlike me and (presumably) you -- have tremendous ability to control the timing, level, and composition of their income.
Indeed, here are two completely legal and very easy things that rich people already do to minimize their taxes - but will do much more frequently if they are targeted for more punitive tax treatment.
1. They will shift their investments to stocks that are perceived to appreciate in value. This means they can reduce their exposure to the double tax on dividends and postpone indefinitely taxes on capital gains. They get wealthier and the IRS collects less revenue.
2. They will shift their investments to municipal bonds, which are exempt from federal tax. They probably won't risk their money on debt from basket-case states such as California and Illinois (the Greece and Portugal of America), but there are many well-run states that issue bonds. The rich will get steady income and, while the return won't be very high, they don't have to give one penny of their interest payments to the IRS.
Mitchell urges us to "check out this data, straight from the IRS website, showing how those evil rich people paid much more to the IRS after Reagan cut their tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent in the 1980s."
UPDATE: David Brooks discovers that Obama is just another politician. This seems to be happening again and again -- to writers at The New York Times. Brooks writes:
When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.It recycles ideas that couldn't get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn't try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.
He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)
This wasn't a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I'm a sap for thinking it was possible.
More Oopsycare
Nobody read it; nobody really gave all the permutations too much thought; they just rush-rush passed Obamacare. It's now that the costs of it are becoming more clear. From the Wash Ex, Conn Carroll blogs:
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman, and doctor, Howard Dean backed a McKinsey & Co. survey today that found that almost a third of private-sector employers will drop their employee health insurance coverage when Obamacare's government-managed insurance exchanges come online....The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) premised their Obamacare score on the assumption that only 7 percent of employers would drop their employee health plans. If the percentage is closer to the 30 percent, as the McKinsey survey results predict, Obamacare's price tag would rise by almost $1 trillion.
Of course, health care should have been untied from employment -- just not in a way that would cost us even more money that we already don't have.
"It's Your Rectum, Not Mine"
I love Sue Johanson. She uttered the above words in this clip from her now-ended show on Canadian and American television,, "Sunday Night Sex Show" that I came upon because I'm hoping to mention her in a column and needed the spelling of her name.
NOTE: Not Safe For Work Unless You Work For Me, of course. (But, worth sneaking off and watching at some point -- both for its educational and entertainment value.)
Feeding Government Bureaucrats
They don't call 'em "fat cats" for nothing. What kind of muffin can you get that costs $16? Because they're eating them at the Justice Department.
Linette Lopez writes for Business Insider:
The DoJ spent $16 per muffin at a meeting of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and $32 per person on a meal of Cracker Jacks and candy bars at a conference of the Office on Violence Against Women! They also spent $7.42 per beef wellington appetizer and $5 per Swedish meatball at other meetings.
via @NewYorkObserver
"Millionaires" Like You And Me
The AP reports that it isn't just people who actually have millions of dollars who will pay more under the President's plan to combat the deficit. The government will raise $130 billion in revenues through new or increased fees:
Airline passengers would see their federal security fees double from $5 to $10 for a nonstop round-trip flight and triple to $15 by 2017, raising $25 billion over the coming decade. Federal workers would face an additional 1.2 percentage point deduction from their paychecks to contribute $21 billion more for their pensions over the same period. Military retirees would pay a $200 fee upon turning 65 to have the government pay their out-of-pocket Medicare expenses. They'd also pay more for non-generic prescription drugs.And it'll cost corporate jet owners a new $100 fee for each flight.
The fees aren't taxes. They're charged to people who use government services or receive benefits such as taxpayer-subsidized health care, and they typically defray the government's cost of providing a service. The fee on corporate jets and other private passenger planes, for example, would raise about $1 billion a year to help finance the cost of air traffic control. Recreational flyers won't have to pay.
Many of Obama's proposals are retreads from earlier budget proposals, including those submitted by his predecessors. Most have been rejected year after year. Some ideas, like requiring wealthier veterans to pay more for their health care, stir up opposition from powerful interest groups. Others, like the bigger security fee for flyers, seem too close to a ticket tax increase.
Administration budget documents describe the fees as savings.
How cute of them.
P.S. All for government workers paying more of their pensions and wealthier people getting less from the rest of us for their health care. My grandma wasn't rich, but she wasn't poor, either, and what money she had should have gone to her health care rather than having people like me (and people in their 20s) subsidizing it.
New New Atheism
Gary Gutting blogs in The New York Times of Kitcher over Dawkins -- that is, the atheism of Columbia philosophy prof Philip Kitcher over that of Richard Dawkins:
Instead of focusing on the scientific inadequacy of theistic arguments, Kitcher critically examines the spiritual experiences underlying religious belief, particularly noting that they depend on specific and contingent social and cultural conditions. Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning. This "cultural relativism" argument is an old one, but Kitcher shows that it is still a serious challenge. (He is also refreshingly aware that he needs to show why a similar argument does not apply to his own position, since atheistic beliefs are themselves often a result of the community in which one lives.)Even more important, Kitcher takes seriously the question of whether atheism can replace the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion. Pushed to the intellectual limit, many will prefer a religion of hope if faith is not possible. For them, Tennyson's "'the stars,' she whispers, 'blindly run'" is a prospect too bleak to sustain our existence. Kitcher agrees that mere liberation from theism is not enough. Atheists, he maintains, need to undertake the positive project of showing how their worldview can take over what he calls the ethical "functions" of theism.
James Wood writes of Kitcher's atheism in The New Yorker:
Many people, for instance, believe that morality is a deliverance of God, and that without God there is no morality--that in a secular world "everything is permitted." You can hear this on Fox News; it is behind the drive to have the Ten Commandments displayed in courtrooms. But philosophers like Kitcher remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn't what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there's no way for us to assess that judgment. In other words, if you believe that God ordains morality--constitutes it through his will--you still have to decide where God gets morality from. If you are inclined to reply, "Well, God is goodness; He invents it," you threaten to turn morality into God's plaything, and you deprive yourself of any capacity to judge that morality.The Bible contains several examples of God and Jesus appearing to sanction what seems arbitrary or cruel conduct: the command that Abraham kill his son, the tormenting of Job (a game instigated by Satan, who seems quite chummy with the Lord), Jesus' casual slaughter of the Gadarene pigs. The Old Testament seems to have an apprehension of Plato's dilemma, when it has Abraham plead with a vengeful Yahweh to spare the innocent inhabitants of Sodom. Abraham bargains with God: would He spare the city for the sake of fifty innocents? How about forty-five, or forty, or thirty? He gets Yahweh down to ten, and almost seems to shame Him, or perhaps teach Him, and hold Him to an ethics independent of His own impulses: "Far be it from You!" he chides Yahweh. "Will not the judge of all the earth do justice?"
Your Tax Dollars At Work
"My EBT" by @MREBT -- about all the wonderful healthy foodstuffs that can be bought with a food stamps Electric Benefit Transfer swipe card:
Income limits for Uncle Sam (and all us taxpaying Sammies) to buy your Doritos for you is 185% of the Federal poverty level -- about $20K.
Shopping Carts
My friend Thom Fritz has a rare disease known as Friedreich's Ataxia, which affects his coordination in maneuvering and his ability to see objects from afar, and which has him confined to a motorized wheelchair.
Thom moves his hands and arms with great difficulty, but somehow manages to be one of the sunniest people I see in my week.
Today, at Starbucks, as I opened the door so he could roll on home, I saw that somebody had placed the shopping cart they were finished with directly in front of the ramp he needs to go down in his motorized wheelchair (followed by his big sweet service dog, "California").
Luckily, because I noticed that it would be in his path, I moved it out of the way, and snarled that somebody had left it there. Well, shopping carts, a ho-hum part of life to most of us, are one of Thom's fiercest daily enemies.
Thom told me to look up a piece he wrote about shopping carts on his blog, Life Is Good:
Many times I do not see obstacles until they are right in front of me. I go several times per week to the local Starbucks, and on other trips I go to Albertson's or Costco, which are located in the same shopping center. When I go to Albertson's I need to cross the parking lot of Costco where I see the issue manyfold.Often, I go zipping along minding my own business, lost in my thoughts, and I come across a shopping cart left lackadaisically in the middle of a walkway or sidewalk. I am bound to run into it, or be forced to make a last-minute maneuver to keep from running into it. These unexpected maneuvers lead to collisions of a catastrophic moment, leaving me with a broken and bloody foot or sending me careening off the sidewalk or walkway into the flower bed or even off the curb. Sometimes these encounters are not so catastrophic to me, but can be for other people. Like if I have to push a cart out of the way and it rolls off the curb into a parked car, damaging the paint, or into the stream of traffic, causing a traffic accident. Or the times when I just push the cart out of the way and it rolls into the window of a store, cracking it, or off the curb, falling over to block the road. When something happens because of my actions, this troubles me because there is little I can do about the situation. It's not like I can get up and catch the runaway cart or pick it up after it has fallen in the street. It might look to others like I am the instigator of the problem when, actually, I am not.
...Yet, the shopping cart has two purposes The first has a very logistical basis, the convenience, practicality and ease-of-use in transporting our groceries. The second is more of an observation and questions our relationship we have with others, or the lack thereof. It must be looked at a little more.
Sometimes even blocks from the shopping center I encounter a shopping cart left haphazardly in the middle of a walkway. And the closer I get to the shopping center the more I encounter. Until, sometimes, I cannot use the sidewalks or walkways at all. Many times, because I already have an idea that the walkways are blocked, I do not even try them but opt instead to drive my chair in the street or parking lot. Something that really irritates me is when people leave the cart right across the wheelchair ramp , dug against the wall at an angle so it won't roll down any further, forcing me to go down to the use the next ramp to enter the shopping center. I could go on and on for a long time about the many encounters I have had, but that would take much space and much of your time. I will say here that the issue is not only isolated to this shopping center but is a widespread phenomenon to many shopping centers I have gone to.
This brings me to the second part of this issue. What is going on in people's heads that they are so inconsiderate and leave the carts, whereever, when they are done? I not understand. Why is it that it is so hard to push the cart, after you have used it, back to the store or, at least, to a designated area for shopping carts? Granted, it is somewhat out of the way and inconvenient to push the cart all the way back to the front of the store.
I know whomever left the cart in his path surely didn't mean to do it. They just weren't mindful, like I wasn't when I used the big dressing room at Ross last year -- and came out and saw a woman in a wheelchair waiting to get in.
I was just horrified. This woman surely has a hard time doing things we all take for granted, and I made her life just that much harder by making her wait while I was twirling around in some discount dress.
I still feel sick about that, and wish I could give her back that 10 or 15 minutes she sat there while I didn't give a moment's thought to why one dressing room is bigger and has a wider door than all the others.
I can't change that now, but because of that, and because of knowing Thom, who's a truly great guy and sticks in my mind, I don't forget people who need ramps and bigger dressing rooms anymore, and I hope this moving blog item by Thom helps other people not forget them, too.
On a happier note, here's cool Thom's book about traveling across Australia in his motorized wheelchair, with the terrific title "RollWalkabout Australia."
Disorderly Sitting
Shequita Walker, a 40-year-old disabled Atlanta woman (with scleroderma, a disease that causes her severe joint pain) likes to sit outside her apartment in a metal folding chair waiting for the ice cream truck, and apparently has been doing so for years.
A police officer approached her and said she and her friends had to move. Walker asked why, and her lawyer said she got up and got ready to go, and told the officer that she was going to go call his supervisor.
She alleges that the police officer twisted her arm -- which seems to be happening in a still photo on the video at this link, and it seems he then slammed her to the ground. From the WSBTV link just above:
Walker filed a complaint with the Citizens Review Board. The board ruled that the officer made a false arrest and recommended a three-day suspension.
This is just one of a number of such stories I feel like I'm reading more often than I ever have. Do you feel there's become an increasing climate of police overreach or is this just an isolated incident?
via Gawker
The World In Black And White
David Lawrence writes at American Thinker:
I teach boxing at Gleason's Gym. A strange profession for a Ph.D. in literature and the former CEO of insurance brokerage companies. I like it. It roots my ankles to the canvas. It gives me balance.Strangely enough while the poor black kids around the gym are capitalists in search of Lamborghinis and bling, the middle class white kids claim that they are socialists. They have the time to concern themselves about income redistribution because they don't have to have summer jobs. They enjoy big allowances from their dads while they denounce the system that affords them luxuries.
The poor, whom the white kids are slumming with, hate socialism. They want to live in a competitive system. They don't want to be on the dole any longer. They resent the welfare that the middle class people throw at them to belittle them and aggrandize themselves. The street kids want to be the self-hating middle class without the self-hate.
Prescient Thinking On Fear Of Terrorism
My friend, forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Smith, who specializes in the psychology of violence, sent me a link to a very smart piece she published on September 27, 2001. An excerpt:
People at airports seem to favor stringent enforcement of these policies. For example, after the World Trade Center tragedy, one passenger at United Airlines stated that she was glad the authorities were keeping lines long to check for coffee cups with sharp edges. (No, really.) "This makes me feel really safe,"she said. "I feel like they are doing something." Doing something is nice, but perhaps it would be better to do something effective. "Feelings" may not care about effectiveness, but terrorists do. We see a similar dynamic with zero tolerance weapons policies in schools. Sure, it makes sense to expel a kid who brings a real loaded gun to school, but most of the time, innocent kids are expelled for drawing a picture of a weapon (something boys have been doing since time immemorial) or for pointing a finger and going "bam, bam!" Has this averted one act of school violence? It's doubtful.What these rules actually do is punish the average citizen who is not doing anything wrong. But that's actually part of the dynamic. There are far more law-abiding citizens: by punishing them the authorities reassure other law-abiding citizens that they are acting. If they only acted against people who were actually violent, most ordinary citizens (i.e., voters) wouldn't notice. Unfortunately, these policies also leave the rest of us with a false sense of security. At least, that is, until the next mass murder takes place and we are left shaking our heads, wondering why our symbolic solutions have done nothing to solve the problem. Of course, this is what these kinds of symbolic solutions are all about--the appearance of doing something. Whether or not that something works to reduce random acts of violence is not even the question.
This is not surprising. From primitive times to the present, people have engaged in magical thinking in times of terror. Magical thinking is the practice of associating a
particular action with a desired result even though there is no logical connection between the two. It's like ancient priests sacrificing babies to prevent an earthquake, or a modern student carrying a rabbit's foot in the hopes of passing a test. Studying would be better, but it's also work.
We First
Hey, UAW...shouldn't taxpayers be first in line to get paid back in the wake of the GM bailout, The Daily Caller's Mickey Kaus wonders:
How about paying back the $15 billion first? I'm sure there are sophisticated arguments for why the UAW members shouldn't pay back the taxpayers who bailed their employer out of bankruptcy before they negotiate a deal that gives them each a $5,000 bonus. I just can't think of them right now. ... Just from a PR standpoint, repaying the debt would seem like a good idea. ...Sure, as a going concern, GM has to pay to keep its employees from bolting to a competitor. But what are the odds that most of GM's UAW workers (i.e, the ones not in the $14-an-hour Tier Two) could find jobs anywhere near as good as the ones they now hold? Almost all their leverage comes from the Wagner Act's power to strike and not be fired. Without Wagner, they'd be free to quit, which they would not do. (Go ahead. Make GM's day.)
It's one thing to give workers power to negotiate above-market wages through collective bargaining-hey, let them squeeze the bosses for all the bosses can bear. It's another thing when they squeeze more than the bosses can bear, the bosses go broke, and ordinary citizens, many poorer than UAW members, have to make up the difference.
Chicago Government's Fingers In Government Workers' Health
In Rahm Emmanuel's Chicago, city workers are forced to join a "wellness program" -- or else. According to NBC Chicago, the "or else" includes paying $50 a month if you don't join the program:
The program includes an initial screening that focuses on preventative care for asthma, heart disease and diabetes. City employees would then receive wellness training to achieve long-term health goals, including weight loss.Smokers wouldn't be penalized, but they would be encouraged to quit. Advisers overseeing the program will monitor progress on a bimonthly basis, and those who reach their goals could see their health care premiums reduced.
...But Emanuel says the program is a necessary step to getting healthcare costs under control.
"You can't ask the taxpayers to pay for a healthcare problem that you can manage and do a good job," Emanuel said. "You can do that with cholesterol, you can do that through diabetes, you can do that through smoking, through heart, blood pressure. Every one of those is manageable."
Of course, per Gary Taubes' exhaustive research of the research out there, the cholesterol/heart disease connection has never been proved, and per Michael Eades, "Elevated cholesterol is actually protective against stroke," but hey, Rahm Emanuel's not going to let a little thing like science get in the way of some program he's forcing on people.
Of course, it's government advice, in large part, that's led to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes with the advice, not based in scientific evidence, to eat the terribly unhealthy high carbohydrate/low-fat diet.
Meanwhile, you pay no extra if you're a smoker or fat as hell or otherwise unhealthy. Reducing your health care costs seems to be all about whether you play good boy or girl and reach the "health care goals" set by the government.
Sure I'm Annoying, But I Bet You're Thinner And Healthier
A regular commenter sent this note -- a note that's actually like a good many I get -- thanking me for turning her on to sources of good dietary science like Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades and Gary Taubes:
Dear Amy,I wanted to thank you for your part in my recent healthfulness. I have been obese--no, I have been horribly, morbidly FAT--my entire life. My BMI at its highest was about 72 (currently 55). I have gone on diet after with no success. The bit of progress I made was when I dropped white flour and sugar from my diet, but I had given up, certain that I was destined to be fat forever.
I learned about this low-carb thing, Gary Taubes, and The Eades Doctors through your advice columns and blog. Two months ago, teetering on the brink of Type II Diabetes and with no options left and a doctor that told me my problem was that I have no self-control, I put what I'd learned into practice and my blood glucose normalized (on the low-side, even!) and the benefits have been astonishing.
I've lost 20+ pounds of fat while gaining muscle mass. The arthritis in my knees and back have gone from crippling agony to occasional, minor discomfort. I went from being unable to walk in the grocery store to trotting around with a 40-lbs. bag of pet food on my shoulder without so much as a twinge. The rashes and chronic acne I've had since puberty have all-but vanished. I started taking body measurements to track my progress, and found that I lost 4 inches on my waist in a week! Just so I'm very, very clear: today is the 14th of September. I started this one the 7th of August, and I have lost 25 lbs and more that 10 inches off my middle! Nothing, not even bariatric surgery, has that kind of success rate!
I have a long way to go before I am anywhere near normal-sized, but the information I have learned from sources you helped me find have given me what no doctor in the 30 years I've been alive could: hope.
Thanks again,
"The Original Kit"
Another amazing weight loss story that started here, chronicled on Free The Animal.
We just spent a day and a half up in Santa Barbara with the Eades, where Gregg trained the three of us on an amazing Mac-based writing program called Scrivener, and I have to say, every moment I spend with the Eades is a moment I'm more impressed by them, both as people and as purveyors of good science.
Also, Mary Dan makes a mean plate of bacon for breakfast -- a skill not to be minimized -- and they're both from the south (Arkansas -- though Mike was born and raised in Missouri) and have that Southern warmth and charm thing going.
It's Positron Emission Tomography; They Don't X-Ray Your Cat
Loved this sign at Kaiser Permanente, which should have had the nuclear med acronym "PET" scan instead of "Pet" Scan, but in its incorrectness, gave me a momentary fond thought of my little crumb of a dog. 
What The TSA Has Prepped Americans For
Intrusive body searches like those performed by the TSA would never have been possible just a few years ago.
Soon, however, per this USA Today story, "NFL wants pat-downs from ankles up at all stadiums," they'll be possible everywhere, as "We The Sheeple" Americans now need only hear "Bend over!" to assume the position and ask "Far enough, Sir?"
Here Comes The Scum
It was a sunny day for solar energy company Solyndra when the Obama admin restructured a half-billion collar loan in such a way that private investors -- including a fundraiser for the President! -- moved ahead of taxpayers in case of default.
Matthew Daly writes for the AP:
Administration officials defended the loan restructuring, saying that without an infusion of cash earlier this year, solar panel maker Solyndra Inc. would likely have faced immediate bankruptcy, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.Even with the federal help, Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees.
The Fremont, Calif.-based company was the first renewable-energy company to receive a loan guarantee under a stimulus-law program to encourage green energy and was frequently touted by the Obama administration as a model. Obama visited the company's Silicon Valley headquarters last year, and Vice President Joe Biden spoke by satellite at its groundbreaking.
Since then, the implosion of the company and revelations that the administration hurried Office of Management and Budget officials to finish their review of the loan in time for the September 2009 groundbreaking has become an embarrassment for Obama as he sells his new job-creation program around the country.
An Associated Press review of regulatory filings shows that Solyndra was hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars for years before the Obama administration signed off on the original $535 million loan guarantee in September 2009. The company eventually got $528 million.
Given the company's shaky financial condition, Republican lawmakers say the decision to restructure the loan raises questions about whether the administration protected political supporters at taxpayers' expense.
Boohoo. They'll Have To Pay A Whole $9 A Week For Health Insurance!
Why are Los Angeles grocery store workers striking? P.J. Huffstutter writes in the Los Angeles Times:
The labor negotiations, which have grown increasingly tense, have most recently focused on healthcare funding and how to pay for benefits, according to officials from both UFCW and the employers. Both sides have been meeting regularly since a recent strike-authorization vote by union members won strong support.The labor contract that was approved in 2007 expired March 6. It had been extended day to day.
The contract covered an estimated 62,000 checkers, baggers, meat cutters and other grocery workers across the region, including those employed by Ralphs, which is owned by Kroger Co. of Cincinnati; Vons and Pavilions, owned by Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif.; and Albertsons, which is owned by SuperValu Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn.
...Thursday's news harks back to 2003, the last time Southern California grocery workers and their employers faced a standoff over labor issues. The 141-day strike and lockout that began that fall left many union members with staggering debts. It reportedly cost the employers an estimated $2 billion and gave competitors an opportunity to step into the gap.
Now, as in 2003, one key sticking point is healthcare. What's at issue is a painfully common refrain in corporate America: medical costs are rising.
Under the latest offer from the employers, grocery workers would pay $9 a week for individual coverage and $23 a week for a family, company and union officials said.
The grocers say these premiums are necessary to help offset rising healthcare costs and augment the amount Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons are agreeing to pay into a trust fund that purchases healthcare for workers. But union officials say that what the employers have proposed to pay during negotiations on the complex deal is far short of what is necessary and would ultimately gut the trust fund. Instead, union officials say, the employers need to pay more in order for the fund to be viable long term.
$9 a week for health insurance, huh? I think one of my ancestors paid that in the late 1800s.
Dog Day Après-Midi
Lunch, Paris. Photo by Emily Tarr.
"Inclusiveness And Civility"
To me, a big part of what college is about is the free exchange of and debating of ideas. Harvard's gone all soft on that vis a vis a pledge incoming students are asked to sign. Virginia Postrel writes on Bloomberg:
"At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that 'each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.' That message serves as a kind of moral compass for the education Harvard College imparts. In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses, students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility."As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on par with intellectual attainment."
The original plan was to post the pledge in each dorm entryway, along with the names and signatures of the students living there. Although signing was supposed to be voluntary, any dissent would have been obvious.
The posting constituted "an act of public shaming," Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College, wrote in a blog post condemning the pledge. Some students signed because they felt they had to -- a completely predictable, yet somehow unforeseen, result that Tom Dingman, the dean of freshmen, says is "against the spirit of the pledge." The signatures will no longer be posted.
Yet what the Harvard Crimson dubs the "freshman kindness pledge" remains in place. The vast majority of freshmen, and the college itself, have formally declared that "the exercise of kindness" is "on par with intellectual attainment." Both parts of that equation are odd, and they are odd in ways that suggest something has gone awry at Harvard.
How this is playing out:
"I note in the current generation of undergraduates a tendency to hold back on disagreement or criticism of other students in class," says Jeffry Frieden, a political scientist. "They're much more respectful of each other -- much more than when I was an undergraduate. If someone states an opinion, even if absurd, they take it in stride."No Arguing Allowed
A humanities professor says, "You can't get them to argue easily. They're wary of that. They know the game that you're playing with them, whereas 20 years ago they loved to play the game." Instead of lively byplay driven by engagement with ideas, this professor says, the students have an unwritten code of: "If you give me space to impress the teacher, I'll give you space to impress the teacher."
The Vagina Dialogues: LA Weekly Piece On TSA Employee Demanding $500K From Me
Terrific Martin Berg piece in the LA Weekly, "TSA Employee vs. Advice Goddess: Outspoken L.A. columnist Amy Alkon slams intrusive body search":
Just because she offers advice on manners in the modern world, don't expect blogger/columnist Amy Alkon to stand by quietly if she thinks a government employee is violating her rights at the airport."I'm just a normal girl from the Midwest who doesn't believe that she gets to have these rights and then doesn't have to stand up for them when they're violated," Alkon says.
... In his Sept. 6 letter to Magee's lawyer, Alkon's lawyer, Marc Randazza, wrote: "Your client aggressively pushed her fingers into my client's vulva. I am certain that she did not expect to find a bomb there. She did this to humiliate my client, to punish her for exercising her rights, and to send a message to others who might do the same. It was absolutely a sexual assault, perpetrated in order to exercise power over the victim."
...A TSA spokesman says his agency has conceded that the pat-downs can be "intrusive and uncomfortable" but denies that they're intended to be retaliatory. The spokesman, Nico Melendez, also denies that there had been a lot of complaints over the pat-downs, relatively speaking. "We have received less than 1,000 complaints since October of last year," Melendez says, "and we screen 2 million people a day."
As to Alkon's allegations against Magee, Melendez says: "We had personnel at the security checkpoint when the pat-down occurred. It was witnessed and it was handled appropriately.
Sure it was -- if "appropriately" involves a bunch of "officers" at and around the supervisor desk, sitting there cow-eyed and doing absolutely nothing. No one apologized. No one asked me what happened. Not a supervisor. No one. They apparently couldn't have cared less about my scream, "You raped me!" -- after this woman stuck the side of her latex-gloved hand into my vagina four times.
In other words, a passenger loudly and vociferously alleges an abuse of power -- in fact, serious misconduct -- by a government employee touching the most private parts of innocent American citizens' bodies, and no one wants to take a statement, ask her why she's said this...no interest at all?
Nico, do tell: Is that really what the TSA considers an "appropriate response"? So...the attitude is "We're the government and we answer to no one?"
Not surprisingly, despite my loud allegation of misconduct on the part of this officer, a month and a half later, when I went back again through the same screening area, the same agent was still there, glaring at me -- at me...her victim.
I'm also the one who got a letter of demand for $500K -- because, it seems, I make such a poor victim...because, in the wake of how I was violated at the airport, I had the audacity to exercise my First Amendment right and blog about what was done to me.
In a word: Kaaa-CHING!
More from Berg's LA Weekly piece:
"We have received less than 1,000 complaints since October of last year," Melendez says, "and we screen 2 million people a day."
I think that's because people know the complaints are futile. After all, the complaints keep rolling in and nothing seems to change.
Miss America, Susie Castillo, reported that what happened to me happened to her. Does THAT TSA agent still have her job? The one who violated me still does.
And the TSA is still in full operation despite their track record -- despite the fact that they only find pot and the occasional knife here and there, and these seem to be just garden variety marijuana busts, not Al Qaeda plots.
Here's some nice stinking cowpie from the TSA agent's lawyer, who's listed as "Herself-VIP audience (uncredited)" at the Michael Jackson Memorial, and who has quite the celebrity-adjacent resume on her website:
"This incident has been completely fabricated," says Vicki Roberts, Magee's lawyer. "The evidence will show that she planned it in advance, and unfortunately my client was the victim of her scheme."
Feel free to lay out that "evidence" at any time, Vickiepoo.
Then again, I understand how busy you must be, putting out press releases like the one I linked to above, letting the universe know that you are sometimes seen with D-list celebrities!
Of course Roberts' allegation about me is not true -- but I guess she had to say something so she'd look less like a fool and/or a media whore for taking this case.
By the way, what I have said is that I consider TSA searches in general to be a violation of our Fourth Amendment right against search without probable cause, and think that people should try to file sexual assault charges against any TSA agent who gropes their breasts or sex parts without reasonable suspicion they've committed a crime. (And this would include almost all travelers going through almost all airports in America every day.)
Whether this is allowable under the law, I can't really say. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) co-founder, lawyer Harvey Silverglate told me he thinks this will not fly; other lawyers have had different opinions.
I believe searches, if any, should be left to the airlines. The airlines can advertise what tight security they have -- or how little they have at all -- and passengers can choose to fly on whichever type of airline fits their needs best.
The fact here remains, what this woman did to me -- sticking her hand sideways into my vagina four times -- was a vile and disgusting abuse of power, and it is my opinion that it was done to me as a punitive measure: to punish me for not going quietly like most of the other sheeple this agent encounters every day.
Remember, if some stranger with coercive power over you groped you in any other situation the way TSA officers do myriad travelers daily, they'd be arrested pronto -- unless they were police officers and there was reasonable suspicion you'd done something criminal.
The real crime is what's being done to the Constitution.
Please, everybody, stop going quietly as your Fourth Amendment rights are taken from you. When people sometimes wonder whether I'm right to cry (as in, whether it's "bad manners"), I respond that our Constitutional rights are being eradicated at airports across America every day. My question is: Why isn't everyone sobbing?
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Here's bounty hunter Bob Burton, who's having coffee a few tables away from me, with Gregg, while I'm working on my column: 
My vacation only lasted for a part yesterday, really, because I have so much on my plate right now, but I had some great cred with evolutionary psychologist/NYU psych prof Scott Barry Kaufman when I told him I couldn't go meet him to write at a cafe because I was going to Santa Barbara on Wednesday to meet Gregg's crazy bounty hunter friend.
We had dinner with Bob last night, who seems to be friends with everyone in Santa Barbara and Montecito (including this amazingly glamorous older woman named Susan who had drinks with us and told us about her adventures in Africa), and we heard loads of amazing stories from Bob.
I also told him I'd love to freelance for him (as an "operative"), as I have a very good track record -- especially for somebody who's only a hobbyist Nancy Drew -- in tracking people down.(I gave Bob my book, I See Rude People, with my stories of tracking down my car thief and other criminals and miscreants).
Here's a bit on Bob by Diana Huynh on Freakonomics Radio:
Contrary to popular belief, bounty hunters aren't necessarily vigilante justice seekers who sport tattoos and long hair. Thinking about "Dog the Bounty Hunter"? This is what Bob Burton, who has been tracking down bail jumpers since the 1980s, has to say about the reality show:BURTON: It's grossly exaggerated. First of all, no one in the industry acts, or rather looks like that. We're dealing with cops, judges, district attorneys. We can't look the way he looks. Forget the long hair, you stand out, and it's pure television nonsense the way he looks.
Unlike what one might see on TV and the movies, bounty hunting hardly ever involves airborne high-speed chases or a hilarious reconciliation with an ex-spouse. These men and women approach their work like pros. And there are stats to prove it. Bounty hunters catch about 97 percent of all fugitives they pursue, making them significantly more successful than police.
Bob's book here. More on what Bob does here.
"Give Me Doubleplusgood or Give Me Death!"
Smart piece by Wendy McElroy on The Future of Freedom Foundation site on the push to get us to use politically correct language, and why it's dangerous:
George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, got a few things wrong -- for example, the date. But he was dead-on in depicting the cause-and-effect relationship between language and politics, between language and our ability to think clearly; the process of using words as social control was called Newspeak. What cannot be expressed cannot be effectively understood or opposed. Neutralizing language defuses the most powerful weapon against oppression: the ability to think....Some of attacks are blatant. For example, "gender" has replaced the word "sex" and this replacement has been key to embedding the idea of sexual orientation as a social construct and not a biological fact. Words have been demonized as de facto acts of violence, so that using a slang term for a race is viewed as a hate-filled attack that might result in retaliatory violence or even arrest. Other attacks on words are subtler. Terms have come mean their opposite, so that "equality" now requires the disadvantaging of men in law and with policies such as affirmative action in order to favor women.
...But there are many other ways to degrade the language for political purposes.
One is the introduction of "doublethink.' Doublethink occurs when someone simultaneously accepts two contradictory beliefs as true. It is achieved through using one word in a contradictory manner. An example is "affirmative action." Because it is wrong to judge people on the basis of skin color or gender, universities and employers should give preference to people based on skin color and gender. Or consider the concept of "diversity"; because differences in human beings are to be embraced we must eliminate those differences that may offend some. "Affirmative action" and "diversity" have become part of the PCspeak and modern doublethink that parallel Newspeak.
If people embrace the incompatible ideas of doublethink, their ability to make distinctions and to critically analyze issues is crippled. This hobbling is also promoted by surrounding the doublethink idea with euphemistic language that makes it more palatable and casts a priori aspersion upon anyone who objects. Thus, affirmative action is not "class preference embedded into law" but "justice to oppressed minorities"; thus, making slang terms for minorities into hate speech is not "censorship" but "respect for dignity." Who can righteously object to justice and dignity?
Cute, Fun Old People Go Viral
Two seniors try to learn to use their webcam (I loved the monkey face the guy makes and his comment urging his wife to show off her boobies):
Apocalypse No
Comedy Central roasts Charlie Sheen:
If You're Going to Be Poor, Be Poor In America
Last night, in talking about my TSA incident on the radio, I mentioned that we're too comfortable here in America about giving up our civil liberties and perhaps that relates to how physically comfortable we are as a society.
Times are a bit tough for me now financially (as I've been putting it recently, "it's not exactly the golden age of newspapers"), but I have my own car (circa 2004), a little house I rent, a refrigerator with food in it, and two Macintosh computers (that probably each have more computing power than the bank of computers NASA used to put men on the moon).
(Gregg did get me my iMac and my laptop is his 2009 MacBook Pro, a screamingly fast and fabulous piece of technology, but if he hadn't, I'd still be using my little circa 2004 iBook, which still works seven years later.)
Fellow redhead and mirthful Scot Andrew Malcom blogs at LA Times' "The Ticket" that about what it's like to be poor -- and "poor" -- in America.
Per a Heritage Foundation study, he reports that 4 percent of the poor are temporarily homeless, but otherwise, the picture of being poor in America looks pretty good to people who are poor elsewhere:
In fact, 42% own their own home.The vast majority are in good repair, with more living space per person than the average non-poor person in Britain, France or Sweden.
Ninety-six percent of poor parents say their children were never hungry during the year due to an inability to afford food.
Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning and 92% have a microwave.
One-third of poor households have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV, 70% have a VCR and two-thirds have satellite/cable TV, the same proportion as own at least one DVD player.
Half of the povery households have a personal computer and one-in-seven have two or more.
And half of those with children have a video game system like Xbox.
Almost 75% have a car or truck and nearly a third have two.
Other than that, being poor in America is just like you thought.
My TV is 12 years old and works fine, thanks. (Being from the Midwest, I was raised not to throw things away until they actually break.)
Not *That* Kind Of Profiling
I am for "profiling" in the search for terrorists (details on that below) -- but not the absolutely idiotic sort witnessed on a plane at Detroit Metro Airport on 9/11.
A woman and her two seatmates were yanked off the plane by the authorities. The woman, Shoshana Hebshi describes the trio on her blog:
The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
Niraj Warikoo writes in the Freep:
A woman who is half-Jewish and half-Arab says that she and two Indian Americans were detained Sunday by armed officers on an airplane at Detroit Metro Airport and then jailed and strip-searched -- an incident that civil rights leaders say was one of many cases of law enforcement targeting minorities on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.But federal officials say they were told that some passengers on board were acting suspiciously and responded accordingly.
After landing in Detroit, the Ohio woman, Shoshana Hebshi, wrote on a blog that has received national attention that she and the men were handcuffed, jailed, strip-searched and interrogated because of their ethnicities.
"They ... needed to make sure all my orifices were free and clear," Hebshi wrote.
From the Huffington Post, from an AP story by David N. Goodman and James Anderson:
Frontier Flight 623, with 116 passengers on board, landed without incident in Detroit at 3:30 p.m. EDT after the crew reported that two people were spending "an extraordinarily long time" in a bathroom, Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuck said.
Re-fucking-diculous.
Again, I'm all for profiling. Not for profiling anybody who looks tan.
Real, meaningful profiling doesn't start with hiring every unskilled worker who decided that the airport job beats the one standing over the fry vat. It takes bringing in highly trained officers who use highly targeted intelligence and actual probable cause: evidence that shows people to have been in touch with Al Qaeda or to have shown that they're likely to mass murder for a cause.
What's truly asinine is what we are doing, which is searching every one of eleventy bajillion passengers traveling on airplanes throughout the U.S. This is like picking up every piece of hay in a hay field and licking it to see what it's made of-- instead of picking up directions and metal detector in order to have some reasonable possibility of finding the needle.
The current method -- think "carpet-searching," as in, the cousin to carpet-boming -- is a waste of the time of every traveler, a vast waste of taxpayer dollars, and it's eating the airline industry. And once you give civil liberties up like so many travelers do daily at airports across America...well, it's not like they're going to apologize and hand them back to you.
Osama Bin Village People
Oklahoma's idiot state legislator Sally Kern calls homosexuality a bigger threat to America than terrorism. Steven Levingston blogs at the WaPo:
State Rep. Sally Kern wrote her book, "The Stoning of Sally Kern: The Liberal Attack on Christian Conservatism and Why We Must Take a Stand," in response to an uproar she unleashed in 2008 when she was recorded leveling a similar attack against gays.In that recording, Kern expressed her fear that school children were being indoctrinated to accept a gay lifestyle, that "studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than a few decades," and that gays were more of a threat to the country than terrorists.
...Kern, the wife of a Baptist minister, was speaking about her book in late August with Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth about Homosexuality, when she again brought up the gay-terrorist comparison.
"You know," she told LaBarbera, "if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack here in America or HIV/AIDS? In the last 20 years, 15 to 20 years, we've had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the same time frame, there have been hundreds of thousands who have died because of having AIDS. So which one's the biggest threat?"
I heard about this from a mailing list I'm on, Human Rights Campaign, which also did the tiresome thing of playing the polarization game in their email about Kern:
...she's written a book criticizing the efforts of people like you and me to confront right-wing hate like hers.
I emailed them back:
Um, I have friends, including gay friends who are conservatives, and I'm fiscally conservative and socially libertarian, and find the fact that gays do not have equal rights in this country (marriage, etc.) vile and disgusting, and think gays and lesbians should pay fewer taxes until they are allowed marital rights in all 50 states.
Oh, and for the record, I'm a Neither -- neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and I'm voting for Austin Beutner for mayor of Los Angeles, and I have not a clue as to whether he's a Democrat or a Republican, but what I do know, after hearing him speak at a private gathering on Friday night, is that he's the best hope of bringing jobs to LA, keeping the ones we have, and fixing the potholes in the roads on our way to them.
"We're Going To Rush The Hijackers..."
Compelling minute-by-minute narrative of September 11's Flight 93, in tweets done today. Scroll to the bottom, start there, and read through to the top.
Lexington Green, at Chicago Boyz, where I found the link to the tweets, wrote this two years ago:
The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.The lesson I derived:
Bottom-up, inductive, spontaneous self-organization is the essence of America.
After a decade I can say we have wasted a decade failing to learn from that lesson.
We had better do better over the next decade.
Picture of Todd Beamer at the link -- the guy who said, "Are you guys ready? Let's roll."
1. Sue, Or 2. Eat In Your Car
These are the choices that come to mind if the seat at your favorite fast food restaurant is not big enough to accommodate your 290-pound gut.
This being the Litigious States of America, in 2011, I'm sure you know what Martin Kressman chose, and...DING! DING! DING!...Yes! Sued White Castle under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Kathianne Boniello writes in The New York Post:
"They're stationary booths," he told The Post. "I'm not humongous, [but] I'm a big guy. I could not wedge myself in."Mortified and in pain from smacking his knee into one of the table's metal supports, Kessman limped out of the restaurant, and later penned a complaint to corporate headquarters.
"As I looked around the restaurant, I saw that there were no tables and chairs that could accommodate a person that merely wanted to sit down and eat his meal," Kessman wrote.
...White Castle also pledged to expand its seats, Kessman claimed.
"They sent me specs and everything, about how the booths were going to be enlarged and made comfortable for people with a little more weight," Kessman said. "So two and a half years went by, and nothing was done."
The Rockland County man says the chain's uncomfortable booths violate the civil rights of fat people.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is "applicable, not only to me, but to pregnant women and to handicapped people," he said.
"I just want to sit down like a normal person," said Kessman, who is suing for bigger chairs and unspecified damages.
Kessman could have approached a store manager and asked for a regular chair, said White Castle spokeswoman Jamie Richardson, who had no timetable for the expected renovation of the Nanuet store.
Yes, he could have, but then what would he sue over?
How Feminism Is Like A Corporation
I've learned a lot from Dr. Barbara Oakley, who spoke here in LA at Center For Inquiry, about how fundamentalism isn't just something practiced by the religious, but extends to many spheres. Matthew Reisz interviews her for Times Higher Education:
Oakley suggests that we hear rather too much about the self-serving nature of corporations, given that "many other organisations behave in precisely the same way."Feminism can be thought of as like a corporation. It's interested in its constituents. Well-meaning feminists are often trained only to see a certain way, only to support their constituents. That is partly what underlies the spurious research on battered-woman syndrome. Anyone who questions whether battered women are only simple victims is put in the pillory and crucified.
"There are young, inexperienced women who fall in love with a man and are put in a battering situation, but there is nothing wrong with them more than simple bad luck. That's absolutely possible and my heart goes out to them. But there's also a sizeable group - perhaps 40 to 50 per cent of battered women - who are themselves as much involved in the battering as the man. That simply isn't discussed; it's considered to be 'blaming the victim'. But in fact it's being more perceptive about the difference between real victims and those who portray themselves as victims.
"We need to take off the ideological blinders if we are to forge the intelligent interventions that can make a dramatic difference in these women's lives. We need more scientifically based research in this area to help tease out what is actually going on."
Oakley's recent books, both of which I highly recommend, are Cold-Blooded Kindness and Evil Genes.
Oh, and if you happen to live in Detroit and attend Oakland University, take Oakley's class for undergrads in how things work. Nobody has ever made telling people how their refrigerator functions more fascinating. P.S. Per Barb, dust off the coils in back and your fridge will use less energy.
The State Of Terrorism
Spencer Ackerman writes on Wired:
Here's the thing. It's very difficult to kill mass quantities of people with car bombs. So much has to go right: the explosive mixture, finding a target that's packed with enough people, and avoiding detection and arrest at any stage of the plot. If a terrorist is lucky, he will kill dozens of people. It will be horrible. It will also be orders of magnitude less damaging than what al-Qaida pulled off 10 years ago.There is only one kind of terrorism that actually is a major threat: nuclear terrorism. And there, the U.S. has shamefully underreacted. It's a travesty that there's unsecured nuclear material in this day and age, and the Obama administration's efforts to secure it, however incomplete, deserve credit. But notice that's a problem about unsecured nuke material, not al-Qaida. Lock up the loose nukes -- and yes, that's difficult -- and there's no nuclear terrorism. What's more, the difficulty of al-Qaida acquiring that material, even with its ties to the spy service of nuclear Pakistan, is reflected in the fact that al-Qaida's most ambitious plots now involve ... car bombs.
There are any number of ways to crunch the data. But the bottom line is that you are vastly more likely to die in a car accident than from a car bomb.
The Food Police Are Upon Us!
Some people think it's cruel to eat cow. I think it's cruel to children for parents to get divorced unless they are in constant and vicious conflict.
Well, we don't ban cow-eating or divorce by parents, and we shouldn't be banning foie gras. But we have...we fruits and nuts in the State of California...thanks to our pretend conservatarian former governor.
Elina Shatkin blogs at LAWeekly.com of an impending foie gras ban:
SB 1520, which bans force-feeding of ducks or geese to make foie gras and forbids selling foie gras produced that way, takes effect in July 2012. It was signed into law in 2004 by then-governor Arnold Schwarzeneger."When the ban comes in, we're going to serve it every day," chef Laurent Quenioux tells Bloomberg. "They can send me the foie gras police."
Some chefs, like Thomas Keller, are resigned to the ban, while others vow to band together and fight the ban via the courts legal challenges. A similar foie gras ban was passed in Chicago then lifted in 2008 at the urging of Mayor Richard Daley.
Think foie gras is the product of terrible cruelty? I don't. (See my previous blog items on this: Here. Here. Here. Here.) But, if you do think the gavage process is horrible, feel free to not eat eat it -- but not to tell me I can't.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
I've been working like mad on this op-ed, pretty much day and night, and must get to my column now, so feel free to post links of interest. (Please post only one per comment, lest you activate my spam filter.) More soon!
P.S. And thanks to everybody for all your messages of support vis a vis the TSA incident and suit, and thanks, especially, to Gregg, who brings me groceries when I decide to eat frozen hot dogs for a few days instead of stopping writing to go to the supermarket.
Legends Of The TSA
No, we're not talking about the good sort of legendary behavior but the other kind, the kind we too often see from people who've gotten their first taste of power over others.
I've been hearing a lot of really upsetting stories about violations and degradation of passengers by TSA gropers in the wake of my being sued for $500,000 by the TSA agent who's pissed that I seem to be under the impression that I still have First Amendment rights.
I'll start off with a story I heard this past week: A friend's elderly, dementia-suffering, wheelchair-bound dying mother was being put on a plane at LAX. He was too upset about it to go into much detail, but basically, TSA searchers were horribly compassionless and really slow in the whole process of removing and searching the woman's diaper as her son stood by steaming with rage.
Do we really have any reason to believe that a elderly woman in a wheelchair who only occasionally remembers who her son is, and is generally mostly incoherent, is going to detonate an explosive device on a plane?
Please post your stories here, and encourage people to share theirs, and share this link.
How To Keep Your Six-Legged Girlfriend From Running Around On You
I was reading some interesting mate-guarding tactics in Dr. David Buss' "The Evolution of Desire" the other day (p. 124 of the revised paperback edition):
The male velid water strider, for example, grasps his mate and sometimes rides on her back for hours or days, even when not engaged in copulation. ... Perhaps the most unusual form of physical interfrerence with the designs of rival males is the insertion of copulatory plugs.
Insect chastity belts!
Buss continues:
In one species of fly, the Johannseniella nitida, males leave their genitalia broken off from their own bodies after the copulation to seal the reproductive opening of the female.
Being a mammal has its merits.
Why I'm The Rudest Person In The Universe (And A Publicity Whore, Too)
Yet another commenter has popped up (see earlier here) -- this one, in response to my brief appearance yesterday on Canadian radio personality Roy Green's syndicated show.
A man named Ed Dannenberg was compelled to come to my site to tell me what an absolutely awful, rude, publicity whore of a person I am. Dannenberg left this comment on my travel rudeness blog item (on my "You See Rude People" blog where I'm collecting stories for the manners book I'm working on now):
Yesterday, across the radio airwaves, Canadians where introduced to a person who has instantly become one of the worlds most brusque, graceless, "cry-wolf" travellers the post-9/11 world has ever seen......her name? It's called out loud and clear in the the header of this blog.Of course no more than a handful of regulars to the blog would ever have known the name Alkon had it not been for her self-serving tirade that pushed the boundaries of pushing-back in the name of personal rights. Few, like myself, would be visiting this "flog" had it not been for the self-serving, cry-wolf, cry-me-a-river antics of said "author".
Checking the "up-to-the-minute" thesaurus, in this post 9-11 world, we now find "Alkon" synonymous with boorish, brusque, crude, curt, discourteous, graceless, gross, gruff, ignorant impertinent, impudent, inconsiderate, insolent, insulting, loutish, low, obscene, offhand, peremptory, raw, savage, scurrilous, surly, uncivil, uncivilized, uncouth, uncultured, uneducated, ungracious, unmannerly, unpolished, unrefined and vulgar - of course - and rarely - this thersauric addition is purely self-cast.
If thousands - nay millions - of travellers have passed un-molested, much less RAPED (which she apparently screamed as she was exiting the security area), through airport security stiles the world over without going so far. How is that MS. Alkon thinks she can yell - and later espouse - that she had been RAPED at the hands of a female security person in plain view of hundreds of other travellers.
Perhaps Ms. Alkon is confused as to what constitutes rape, likely due to a distinct lack of intimate experiences to whcih she can qualify the action.
Regardless, Alkon is now the poster-child (I dare say woman, as adults do not act like this)for over-reaction the world over. If it can make someone like myself, someone having many better things to do thatn write on her "advice blog", visit her page, then I guess Ms Alkon got what she wanted. It's just too bad - even with the $500,000 suit being brought against her - that she won't get what she deserves.
E. Danneberg.
My response:
Ed, in America, we have the Fourth Amendment, prohibiting searches without probable cause -- reasonable suspicion we've committed a crime. I was going to Binghamton, New York for an anthropology conference. There was no indication I'd be having coffee with al Qaeda while I was there.There are times when the most civil thing to do is to be uncivil -- to not go quietly and politely as our rights are yanked away from us, and that is what I did, and that is what I urge others to do as well.
I benefit greatly from our Constitution; I don't feel I have a right to go quietly as it is ripped up at the airport door.
In Nazi Germany, people were mostly quite polite as their civil liberties were taken away. That worked out really well for them, didn't it?
For the record, I plan to be a huge publicity whore in terms of getting the message out to Americans that they need to speak out about civil liberties violations.
Save for my blog, where the regulars inspire me to post blog items when I'm falling over exhausted at midnight, I normally sneer at the idea of writing for free (ask me if I "journal" and I will fall over laughing). But, in terms of getting the word out on this issue, I I learned from my attorney, First Amendment bulldog Marc Randazza, who took my case at no charge to me other than expenses (so far, I think, a 44 cent stamp). He told me that "some cases are too important to need to get paid for."
That said, Randazza and two of his associates have put in over $10,000 in hours, and they are taking donations if others would like to share the financial cost. This actually wasn't even Randazza's idea, but he started getting people emailing him wanting to contribute to my legal defense, so I posted an address to send his firm checks here -- scroll down -- and I asked him to set up a Paypal account but I think he's been too busy legal beagle-ing to get to it yet.
Anyway, I got to Starbucks before 8am today to continue working on an op-ed that I plan to give to the biggest venue I can get to carry it, even if they don't pay a bent cent. And, if I can (per my agreement with whomever ends up running it), I will have my syndicate give it out free to every paper they send to, and I will give it to every alt weekly and blogger in the universe to run for free as well.
The upshot of my message: Don't go quietly as our rights are violated. This country was founded by a bunch of loud, obnoxious jerks -- and I mean that in the most reverent way -- who told the King of England to stick his rulership up where the royal sun don't shine, and rotate. (Or something along those lines. Thomas Paine, among others, was quite the heated wordsmith.)
Why I'm Uncomfortable With The 9/11 Festivities
Oh, sorry -- they aren't "festivities," but there's something about the way the day is being promoted in the media that led me to type that when I dashed off a title to this blog post.
And then, there's the tacky way Mayor Bloomberg and others have planned the day -- not bothering to make room for firefighters and other first responders to attend. Without those incredible, heroic New York City firefighters and other first responders -- many of whom sacrificed their own lives -- many more people would have died. From International Business Times:
The chain status exploded on Facebook on Wednesday: "Due to 'lack of room,' NYC police officers, Port Authority police officers and FDNY firefighters are not 'invited' to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 at ground zero. Funny -- they weren't invited on that day in 2001, either -- they just showed up and became our heroes. Please repost if you think they belong MORE than the politicians who are invited."...However, the number of politicians attending is much smaller than the number of first responders. Bloomberg, President Obama, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will be there, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who were in office when the attacks occurred, and a handful of other officials. If the space constraints are in fact set in stone, even uninviting the politicians would not allow first responders to attend.
The injustice, then, isn't so much that politicians were chosen over first responders -- it is that city officials did not make enough room for everyone who deserves to be at ground zero for the anniversary.
I am truly impressed by those who acted heroically on that day, and was both terribly sad and enraged about the mass murder of all of these innocent people -- people guilty of no more than arriving to work on time.
Like many who live or have lived in New York (my last apartment was a mile from the World Trade Center), I know somebody who survived the attack simply because he was late to work. He's the husband of a good friend of mine, and she had a meeting that morning, so he had to take the kids to school. If he hadn't, he'd likely be dead.
Here's a sad thing -- a list, from 9/14, informing people of who survived and whether they were injured. Here's a far sadder thing, from Steve Lopez' column in the LA Times:
From my hotel, I called the relative of a friend. Mike Sweeney answered the phone at his home in suburban Boston and told me his story.Early on the morning of Sept. 11, he got a call from his wife, Amy. She was feeling low about being at work and missing out on a chance to see their daughter, a kindergartner, off to school. Sweeney, a cop, talked her through it. There'd be plenty of chances to take Anna, who was almost 6, and Jack, 4, to school. Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant, took off from Logan International Airport shortly after that conversation on American Airlines Flight 11, headed for Los Angeles.
On his way to work later that morning, Sweeney got a call from an American employee in Dallas, asking if he'd heard the news about a plane going into a tower.
He later learned that his wife had called flight management services in Dallas to report the hijacking and the seat numbers of the hijackers. "I see water and buildings," she said as Flight 11 went into rapid descent, according to an FBI document. "Oh my God! Oh my God!"
"The first thing I had to do was pick up the kids," said Mike Sweeney. "I said, 'Guys, today's a real tough day. Mommy was in a plane crash and died.' Anna goes, 'What?'"
Mike Sweeney said Anna wanted to know if other people were hurt. Yes, he told her. They died, too.
The kids had lots of questions: Why would someone fly a plane into a building? Where was their mother now? If she was in heaven, why didn't she just come home?
The thing that's been giving me pause these past few days is that what's going on Sunday is, in a way, a commemoration of a terrorist act. I can't help but think that many in Muslim countries will be celebrating, and that our event -- while a commemoration of deserving heros and a terrible loss of innocent people's lives -- plays into that.
For me, even the memorials there -- twin reflecting pools -- are also memorializing an act of terrorism, and I can't help but think that people bent on doing America and Americans similar harm will turn it into an important stop when they're in New York. Here's the dad of a firefighter, quoted in the WSJ by Michael Howard Saul:
"The 10th anniversary means I haven't seen my son for 10 years--I haven't been able to give him a hug and he hasn't been able to say, 'Hi Dad,'" said Lee Ielpi, whose son Jonathan, a firefighter, was killed.Mr. Ielpi said he considers the anniversary of the attacks an "important day of remembrance" for the city and the nation. But on a personal level, he said he focuses on his son's birthday, July 15, because "I would rather not remember the day my son was murdered."
Can any of you give me another perspective on my feelings about this 9/11 commemoration, or do you agree in some way?
The Big 9/11 Anniversary Question: Are We Safer?
Raymond Ibrahim of the Center for Security Policy writes that al Qaeda was just one of the many manifestations of the threat upon us -- including "stealth jihad" to overthrow Western civilization from within:
Even the Obama administration is inadvertently beginning to acknowledge the existential nature of the conflict (though of course without articulating it as such): it recently declared that lone wolf terrorists--jihadists who have no connection to al-Qaeda other than that they share the same Islamist-inspired worldview, people like the Fort Hood jihadist, the Christmas Day Bomber, the Shoe Bomber, ad infinitum--are a greater threat than al-Qaeda. That is, jihad metastasized.To better appreciate the "big picture," consider how at the turn of the 20th century, the Islamic world was rushing to emulate the victorious and confident West--best exemplified by the Ottoman empire itself, the preserver and enforcer of Islam, rejecting its Muslim past and trying to modernize. Today, 100 years later, the Muslim world has largely rejected secularism and is reclaiming its Islamic--including jihadist--heritage, lashing out in a manifold of ways.
Likewise, consider how many Islamist leaders, organizations, and terrorists have come and gone in the 20th century alone--many killed like bin Laden--only for Islam to grow more hostile towards the non-Muslim West than at any time in the modern era.
It is in this context that the overall significance of eliminating this or that terrorist or organization must be understood.
In short, we need to get beyond obsessing over names and faces--al-Qaeda and bin Laden, for example--and begin focusing on the ideas and motivations that create them--that is, if "we" encompasses more than this generation.
It's sometimes the little things -- like facial hair -- that say a lot. Ibrahim writes here about why Muslim men's beards matter:
Prior to Ramadan, Islamic leaders in Egypt called for a million men to grow their beards and show Egypt's adherence to Muhammad's commands. Popular and enthusiastic preachers such as Muhammad Hassan went as far as to pray for the day when 80 million Egyptians grew their beards (a figure that presumably includes women and children, as 80 million is the size of Egypt's entire population).Amr Adib, a popular talk show host on Cairo Today, mocked this call for a "million man beard" with his trademark sarcasm: "This is a great endeavor! After all, a man with a beard can never be a thug, can never rape a woman in the street, can never set a church on fire, can never fight and quarrel, can never steal, and can never be dishonest!"
He and his Egyptian viewers know quite well that it is precisely those Muslims who most closely follow the minutia of Muhammad--the Salafists--that are most prone to violence and deceit, which were also advocated by the prophet. Towards the end of the program, Adib spoke seriously, ominously, saying this issue is not about growing a beard, but rather, "once you grow your beard, you give proof of your commitment and fealty to everything in Islam."
While Egyptians instinctively understand how fealty to the Muslim beard evinces fealty, or at least acceptance, to all those other things Muhammad commanded, even in fuzzy Western op-eds, the connection sometimes peeks out.
...Yet if such Muslims meticulously follow the minor, "outer" things of Islam simply because their prophet made a few utterances concerning them in the hadith, logically speaking, does that not indicate that they also follow, or at the very least accept as legitimate, the major, "inner" themes Muhammad constantly emphasized in the hadith--such as enmity for and deceit of the infidel, and, when capable, perpetual jihad?
A bit on stealth jihad here:
In a 1998, CAIR founder Omar Ahmad told the San Ramon Valley Herald, "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth." Others point to a 1991 memo by the radical Muslim Brotherhood challenging American Islamic groups.The memorandum, presented as evidence during a terrorism trial last year, reads that these Muslim groups "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands" until Islam reigns supreme."
For radical Muslims, that means pushing an aggressive, pro-Islam agenda that's been increasingly successful in recent years: Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis refuse to carry passengers who have alcohol in their possession. Public schools schedule prayer breaks to accommodate Muslim students. Pork is banned in the workplace - the list goes on.
Islam expert Robert Spencer says Americans have caved in to such demands far too often. His new book, The Stealth Jihad, describes the non-violent war being waged by radical Muslims against American society.
More: Ten years later, radical Islam is still a taboo topic. For those who'd like a very good quick primer on Islam:
It's Against The Traffic Laws To Make The Police Look Like Jerks
Via Kate Coe, the Pasadena police crapped out on a traffic snarl, then ticketed the private citizen who stepped in to do their job, clearing up the mess in 10 minutes. From CBS Los Angeles:
When a major traffic light in the area went out Thursday morning, Alan Ehrlich took matters into his own hands, directing traffic at Fair Oaks and Huntington avenues."I grabbed a bright orange shirt that I have and a couple of orange safety flags. I took it upon myself to help get motorists through that intersection faster," said Ehrlich.
Before Ehrlich stepped in, traffic was backed up for more than a mile and it took more than 30 minutes to get through the busy intersection.
...After 15 minutes, South Pasadena police say they finally received a call about their newest traffic officer.
Police responded to the scene and told Ehrlich to stop and issued him a ticket, but never stepped into direct traffic themselves.
Work is so much work!
The Millennials: The Entitlement Generation
Tech-trepreneur Jason Calcanis writes:
Many millennials not only don't want jobs, they simply don't deserve them. They can't take even a tiny amount of criticism and they need constant adulation for amazing efforts like, ummmm, showing up for work.A frequent refrain I hear from these folks is, "I've been working here for almost six months and you haven't recognized the work I've put in!" Of course my reaction to this is "Oh, I'm sorry, please tell me what you've accomplished."
That is usually a short conversation which includes that the person came in and worked for the hours in which they were paid to work. In other words, they want the participation trophy. They want credit for coming to work for the hours they've been paid. That's not how it works in my mind, but I decided to relent.
I had a trophy made for participation. It reads "for excellence in showing up."
We have a tradition at the office of putting it on people's desks when they are on vacation so that they when they come back it's waiting for them as a reward for "excellence in showing up."
The fact is, thanks to massive technological and organizational advances the "just show up" job is a seriously endangered species. Companies are getting so efficient that they've learned that they can make better and more profitable products and services with smaller teams.This chart from Safework Inc. (via BusinessInsider), shows that in the past decade the profit per employee has increased by -- wait for it -- 50%. What this chart tells us is that companies would rather hoard cash and increase their bottom lines by not hiring folks.
Work-ethic erosion has sent a strong signal to the corner offices in corporate America: A large percentage of Americans are simply not worth the trouble.
In fact, what I've learned -- and I know many of my contemporaries have too -- is that many folks simply don't want a job. If a large percentage of folks don't want to work hard and would rather be hiking around Machu Picchu, well, perhaps we shouldn't worry about 10 or 20% unemployment.
Maybe the future of America is that half our citizens don't have jobs by choice?
via Robert W.
How To Respond In A Police Stop
Eric Peters of EricPetersAutos.com has an instructive piece on this at LewRockwell.com on why, as I've blogged before, you should not answer a police officer's questions...even if you've done nothing wrong. An excerpt:
Say nothing... nothing!To cops, ever.
Anything you say can and will be held against you. Remember that?
You ought to.
Even if you haven't been formally arrested (merely "detained," as in the case of a traffic stop) it does you no good and very possibly much harm to give any information to the cop beyond the simple minimums of name and perhaps address, as required by law. Nothing more, because anything more will simply give the cop information - information he can and will use against you, both at curbside and later on, in court.
This is his job. Do not forget it.
He is not there to "help" you. He is not a good Samaritan. You are not having a chat with a friend. You have been detained because the cop believes you have violated some statute or other - and he is investigating you. He is trained to elicit confessions of guilt, which can and will be used against you. Depend upon it.
He explains how to deal with a police officer in a traffic stop and then summarizes:
There are, in fact, only three things you should ever say to a cop. The first is:"Am I being detained?"
And next:
"Am I free to go."
Repeat.
And finally:
"I do not consent to any searches."
Never mind that you know there are no drugs, illegal weapons or any other contraband item in your car. Such contraband has been known to magically appear underneath seats. If you grant entry, you've given opportunity. By refusing, you force them to abide by at least some procedure - and you have formally refused consent, which could be a lifesaver later on, if they ignore you and go ahead and ransack your vehicle (or person) regardless.It is important to be polite, calm and collected.
But it is far more important to not be servile - and to assert your rights, whatever's left of them, anyhow.
A friend who is a cop has further advised me to put three signs outside your house: "No trespassing, no soliciting, beware of dog." This is a little extra "Don't come in" for police.
Here's a terrific video I've posted before:
UPDATE: See criticism of this post by SHG, a lawyer I respect, below. An excerpt from his comment below (left September 11, 2011 6:45 AM):
While I don't quite take issue with any of the advice given, I also feel some concern about it being a bit overly simplistic and lacking in nuance. It's not that the advice is wrong, but rather incomplete and inadequate to address many common situations...
You Have A Right To Record The Police
Law prof Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) writes at the Wash Ex about the recent spate of arrests by police of citizens recording or videotaping them:
Tiawanda Moore had made a sexual harassment complaint against a Chicago patrolman. When she was visited by police Internal Affairs officers who tried to persuade her to drop the charge, she recorded the audio using her Blackberry. Though the audio reflected rather poorly on the Internal Affairs officers, the response of the Chicago state's attorney was to act not against the offending officers, but against Ms. Moore, charging her with "wiretapping."After the tape was played, the jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of not guilty. "When we heard that, everyone (on the jury) just shook their head," said one juror interviewed afterward. "If what those two investigators were doing wasn't criminal, we felt it bordered on criminal, and she had the right to record it."
Illinois law makes it illegal to record conversations with public officials without their permission. If the officials are law enforcement officers, the penalty can be as much as 15 years in prison. It's hard to see what purpose such a law could serve, except to protect corrupt officials from exposure.
Glenn explains that technology may be winning, but...
...The real problem is that America has a class of government workers who believe that they are above citizen scrutiny, and who are prepared to abuse their powers to avoid that scrutiny. The only solution for this is to punish offenders severely enough that others learn their lesson.Some have proposed a federal civil rights law specifically recognizing the right of citizens to record police, and including severe punishments for police and prosecutors who violate that right. Frankly, it seems like a pretty good idea. Until then, however, we need to educate both police and citizens that photography is not a crime, even when those who wield government power, ostensibly on behalf of the citizenry, would rather not be photographed.
Treating Ordinary People Doing Ordinary Things Like Criminals
The prospect of terrorism is being used to criminalize ordinary people doing ordinary things in pubilc places. There's a Salon article about this, about Mall of America. G.W. Schulz, Daniel Zwerdling, and Andrew Becker write:
On Nov. 9, 2008, the Bloomington resident (Francis Van Asten) videotaped a short road trip from his home to the Mall of America. Van Asten, now 66, planned to send it to his fiancée's family in Vietnam so they could see life in the United States.As he headed down an escalator, camera in hand, mall guards caught sight of him.
"Right away, I noticed he had a video camera and was recording the rotunda area," a security guard wrote in a suspicious activity report.
Van Asten, a one-time missile system repairman for the Army, was questioned for approximately two hours, records show. He was asked about traveling to Vietnam and how he came to know people there. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was alerted. He was given a pat-down search, and the FBI demanded that his memory card be confiscated "for further analysis."
Authorities were concerned about his footage of an airplane landing at Minnesota's nearby international airport. They also worried Van Asten was conducting surveillance of mall property.
Exhausted and rattled, Van Asten had trouble finding his car after the ordeal was over.
"I sat down in my car and I cried, and I was shaking like a leaf," Van Asten said in an interview at his home. "That kind of sensation doesn't leave you real quickly when you've had an experience like that."
Bobbie Allen, a musician who lives in downtown Minneapolis, was stopped for writing in a notebook. As he waited for a lunch date on June 25, 2007, Allen jotted down some words, which caught the attention of security guard.
One guard wrote in Allen's suspicious activity report: "Before the male would write in his notebook, it appeared as though he would look at his watch. Periodically, the male would briefly look up from his notebook, look around, and then continue writing."
Guards asked for his name and for whom he was waiting. Allen, who is black, felt singled out for his race, according to the report. The guard responded that he was "randomly selected" for an interview.
The guards called Bloomington police, after deciding Allen was uncooperative and his note-taking "suspicious." Allen was cleared, but a suspicious activity report was compiled, complete with surveillance photo, age, height, address and more. Much of that information ended up in a Bloomington police report.
This isn't acting on meaningful intelligence. It's anything but. It's an excuse for security guards to act like bullies. And if we do change America, formerly the land of civil liberties, to a country just like so many countries that don't have our Constitution, the old "the terrorist have won" really does apply.
Lisa Simeone, who tipped me about this, sent this email to Mall of America:
In the "Plan Your Visit" section, you forgot to include information about the Stasi-like questioning shoppers will have to endure from your authoritarian security guards.The cat is out of the bag: since the exposure in the press of your paranoid techniques because you believe, apparently, that "The Terrorists Are Everywhere!" neither I nor anybody I know will ever set foot in your mall. You think you have the right to bully, harass, and abuse citizens? Fine. Then lose money. You can feel proud that, some day, you will have put several of your vendors out of business. And taken a dump on the Constitution in the process.
I have disseminated the Salon article and NPR account to all my friends and colleagues. I work in radio and print, and it's my pleasure to spread the word about your appalling actions. If You See Something, Say Something? I've seen it, and I'm saying plenty.
"Professor Blastoff" Podcast: Amy Alkon With Tig Notaro And Friends On "I See Rude People"
They just posted this popular, smart and fun iTunes podcast I appeared on, Professor Blastoff, hosted by comedians Tig Notaro (who I loved as "Officer Tig" on Sarah Silverman), Kyle Dunnigan and David Huntsberger.
I'm talking about my book I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society. I lay out the science behind why we're rude and how we can stop rudeness -- our own, when it happens to us, and in general.
From yesterday, a couple of my tweets:
@amyalkon More rudesters at "no cellphones" cafe - two women w/cell on speaker! Incredible to go into place & make it worse for your having been here.@amyalkon Guy at cafe w/no cellphones rule: "What are we, at a library?" (Answer, unspoken: No. Most libraries don't stop the cellularly ill-mannered)
There's Got Not To Be A Law
Virginia Postrel put it so well:
Jerry Brown has many flaws, but he does understand one thing that most Californians seem to miss: "Not every human problem deserves a law."
Wyatt Buchanan and Marisa Lagos wrote on SFGate that Brown vetoed ski helmet and phone bill fine laws:
...Bills that would require that kids wear helmets when on ski slopes and increase fines for people who talk on cell phones or text while driving....In his veto message accompanying the helmet bill, SB105 introduced by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, Brown appeared to side with GOP critics who had characterized the measure as "nanny government."
Brown, a Democrat, wrote, "While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state. Not every human problem deserves a law."
...A bill aimed at getting drivers off their cell phones also fell under Brown's veto pen. The measure would have increased the base fines for texting or talking on a cell phone while driving by $50 on the first offense and $100 on subsequent offenses. The measure would have brought the total penalty to $328 for the first offense and $528 for subsequent offenses. It also would have applied to bicyclists, but with lower penalties.
Brown said that was too much. In explaining his veto of SB28, he wrote, "I certainly support discouraging cell phone use while driving a car, but not ratcheting up the penalties as prescribed by this bill. For people of ordinary means, current fines and penalty assessments should be sufficient deterrent."
It Wasn't "Wednesday Is Negligent Parents Day"
My friend and former New York Daily News colleague Lenore Skenazy, with the terrific Free Range Kids blog (and movement she started to fight rampant helicopter parenting), linked to this Michael Alves blog post about the old "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day" commercial:
It shows a school-age boy, Anthony, running home through the streets of the North End of Boston to get his dinner. He is alone. The streets are crowded, but he gets home safely. According to the article below, this spot ran for 13 years. I bet no one felt it was strange that a boy would be out by himself back then. -- Michael Alves
Here's another one of Alves' posts, on "The Red Balloon":
So this is the ultimate free range kid film. 34 minutes of walking around the dangerous streets of Paris in the 1950s. Notice how the other kids walk home from school themselves. Notice how his mother shoos him out of the house to play by himself. When he is bullied, he outsmarts the bullies with no help from adults.I loved this movie as a child. It is a beautiful expression of childhood and freedom.
Betcha Can't Wheat To Have Diabetes!
The Grain Foods Foundation pretends grain is healthy.
This flies not at all with Tom D. Naughton at Fat Head, blogging on the grain producers' damage control press release and blog item on cardiologist Dr. William Davis' new book "Wheat Belly", which shows grain for what it is -- a scourge of human health:
GRAIN: The Guidelines call for the average healthy American to consume six one-ounce servings of grain foods daily, half of which should come from whole grains and the other half from enriched grains.TOM: So the government agency whose mission is to sell grains is telling us to eat grains. Well, that's all the proof I need.
GRAIN: Wheat is the basis for a number of healthful whole and enriched grain foods including breads, cereal, pasta and wheat berries that provide valuable nutrients to the American diet and have been shown to help with weight maintenance.
TOM: Can't argue with that one. Wheat will definitely help you maintain your weight ... at, say, 40 pounds above where you'd like to be.
Some of Davis' excellent, evidence-based posts linked here and here and here.
Tragically Clueless Blog Commenter Of The Day, (Week, Month...)
A commenter who goes by "James" just left his thoughts on my original entry about my "gate-rape" by a TSA "officer.
The title of that blog item was "Don't Give The TSA An Easy Time Of Violating Your Rights," and my first line was "It shouldn't be emotionally easy, earning a living by violating people's rights."
James apparently thinks otherwise, posting this:
Its strange to see a prson who wrote a book about being rude (title line- that loud jerk in the drugstore que!) would then go and act in this manner- you are comming across as a self important, arrogant 'princess' in this blog post.nice bit of shrouded racism there- 'and neither name sounds like a typical American first name or last name, so I can't remember if I wrote it down in the right order.'
what is a typical name in a country full of immigrants anyway?
Airport security is way over the top and especially in the USA, but then in a village run by the idiots what can you expect.....I dont see why you made such a fuss though, maybe you have nothing better to do? What exactly is wrong with someone touching you/going through a scanner anyway? You are lucky that you live in a period of history and in a corner of the world where you are not living in a hovel, a slave, subject to rape/murder at someones whim....the more you give to people the more they have to complain about. If the world was comming to an end and they were filling the space shuttle with useful people ask yourself a question- would you be invited on it?
Dont get me wrong I dont hate you, I dont even know you- this story came into my email account through 'web pro news' and I was researching today street harrasment, I thought it was something to do with that. But when I see a paradox like this- an apparently intellegent and successful woman acting like an idiot and then telling the world about it, I hope that there is something I can do to prevent my daugthers from growing up to be the same way. As you are an advice specialist, maybe you can advise me on how to prevent them from being like this?
Here's my response:
JAMES: Its strange to see a prson who wrote a book about being rude (title line- that loud jerk in the drugstore que!) would then go and act in this manner- you are comming across as a self important, arrogant 'princess' in this blog post.AMY ALKON: To respond in terms of the manners/civility angle, it is absolutely NOT impolite to be uncivil when the occasion calls for it. In fact, it is the height of good conduct as a citizen to not go quietly and "politely" when our Constitutional rights are being yanked away from us.
JAMES: nice bit of shrouded racism there- 'and neither name sounds like a typical American first name or last name, so I can't remember if I wrote it down in the right order.'
AMY ALKON: Again, as somebody else pointed out, if the TSA person's name was Maria Rodriguez, do you think I'd have trouble figuring out whether it was Rodriguez Maria or Maria Rodriguez?
What is wrong with going through the scanner is that Janet Napolitano seems to have lied when she said these scanners were tested to be safe. I think it was Johns Hopkins that was one of the institutions she said tested the scanners and pronounced them safe -- and they hopped right up and said, "Um, no, we didn't pronounce them safe."
Electronic privacy rights organization EPIC.org just posted something about how the scanners are not safe for use on humans!
And regarding "apparently intellegent and successful woman acting like an idiot" -- I would venture that the idiotic behavior would be letting our government take away our constitutional rights and not making so much as a peep about it.
JAMES: I hope that there is something I can do to prevent my daugthers from growing up to be the same way.
AMY ALKON: My mother, who is not one to wildly toss around compliments, told me she was proud of me the other day for what I've done.
I would only hope other people raise their daughters to understand how lucky we are to have a country backed by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and to teach them to not act like "We the sheeple..." in the face of it being ripped up at the airport door or anywhere else.
Where's Dorothy?
Photo by Philip Miller.
Welcome To The Land Of The Not-So-Free
Unfortunately, we've also become the land of the way-too-comfortable.
I told a reporter who interviewed me about the TSA agent suing me for "defamation" that this country was started by "assholes" -- and I say that as somebody who has enormous respect for our founding fathers, and who even found George Washington rather hot. (My boyfriend almost got jealous watching me with a statue of him at the National Constitution Center in Philly -- here, "Hunka Hunka Burning Forefather.")
What I mean by referring to the founding fathers as "assholes" is that these were men who spoke up, who told the King of England to "blow it out his keister" (or however they said that keister stuff back then). Here, for example, is Thomas Paine with a 1776 "we're free/screw you" to the King:
But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain...let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
In case you hadn't noticed, we're way short on assholes in this country these days (save for the sort shouting on their cell phones in public places).
We'd better grow some of the freedom-defending sort fast, because here's Laurence M. Vance posting at Lew Rockwell about freedoms in need of defending as of late. (Forget whether you agree with his take on the military earlier in his piece, and see if this list -- in no particular order -- makes sense to you, too.) The first, of course, is one of my particular recent favorites:
•The freedom to fly without being sexually violated.
•The freedom to purchase a gun without a waiting period.
•The freedom to grow, sell, and smoke marijuana.
•The freedom to sell goods and services for whatever amount a buyer is willing to pay.
•The freedom to make more than six withdrawals from one's savings account each month.
•The freedom to drink alcohol as a legal, voting adult under twenty-one years of age.
•The freedom to purchase Sudafed over the counter.
•The freedom to gamble without government approval.
•The freedom to deposit more than $10,000 in a bank account without government scrutiny.
•The freedom to not be stopped at a checkpoint and have one's car searched without a warrant.
•The freedom to sell any good or offer any service on Craigslist.
•The freedom to fill in a "wetland" on one's own property.
•The freedom to cut someone's hair for money without a license.
•The freedom to home-brew over 100 gallons of beer per year.
•The freedom to advertise tobacco products on television.
•The freedom to smoke Cuban cigars.
•The freedom to not wear a seatbelt.
•The freedom to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
•The freedom to keep the fruits of one's labor.
•The freedom of an employer and an employee to negotiate for any wage.
•The freedom to discriminate against anyone for any reason.
•The freedom to videotape the police in public.
•The freedom of businesses to hire and fire whomever they choose.
•The freedom to not be brutalized by the police.
•The freedom to not be arrested for victimless crimes.
•The freedom to sell raw milk.
•The freedom to not have one's child subject to unnecessary vaccinations.
•The freedom to not have one's child unjustly taken by Child Protective Services.
•The freedom to not be subject to the Patriot Act.
•The freedom for kids to set up neighborhood lemonade stands.
•The freedom to not have every facet of business and society regulated.
•The freedom to stay in one's home during a hurricane.
•The freedom to not have our e-mail and phone conversations monitored.
•The freedom to travel to and trade with any country.
•The freedom to be left alone.
Now, there's one here I don't agree with -- the vaccination example, for one. I'm of the science school of vaccines (rather than the Jenny McCarthy school), and there are terrible diseases that were eradicated that are showing up in places because of all the nitwits who believe a celebrity and a fraud of a doctor. If you ever want your kids to be out in public, you need to be part of protecting "herd immunity."
Otherwise, I've blogged about a whole lot of these, like the raw milk issue, kids being fined for setting up lemonade stands, certainly the TSA!...and more. I also think it's fine if you want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet or stay in your home during a hurricane -- if you aren't going to look to the rest of us to pick up the cost if and when it goes badly.
Any you disagree with? Anything that you think should be added?
And finally, Vance concludes his piece with three thoughts:
One, I want the military to defend our freedoms. But fighting foreign wars only reduces our freedoms. After all, it is still true that war is the health of the state. Two, if the military is going to defend our freedoms, then we need freedoms to defend. Our freedoms must be restored before the military can defend them. And three, the greatest threat to our freedoms is the U.S. government, not the governments of China, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran.
The founding fathers set us up to be a free country, and if we're going to remain that way, a lot of people need to wake up, stand up, and start saying "screw you" to big government and all these little yank-aways of our rights and freedoms.
TSA Searches: "Obedience Training For The American Public"
That's how Zahir Ebrahim, of Project Humanbeingsfirst.com, rightly termed the TSA searches -- in his comment on the blog item that led to TSA agent Thedala Magee's demands of me.
Magee is looking for me to pay her $500K, apologize to her, and take down my blog item about her -- because I had the nerve to exercise my First Amendment rights and complain after she jammed her hand sideways into my vagina four times. (Unfortunately for Ms. Magee, I've always made a pretty crappy victim.)
What the TSA searches themselves say about where we're going as a country is the larger issue here, and one I'll be home writing about all day today (I'm doing on op-ed as step two of this. It's not only an explanation of what went on, but a call to action.)
I grew up reading books about Russia and thinking how great it was that no authority figure in America ever demanded our "papers" without reasonable suspicion that we've committed a crime. This is no more the case, and that is tragic and terrible.
I have the Cato Institute copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights on my phone and read them often. I see that the Fourth Amendment guards us against unreasonable and warrantless search, but that is exactly what millions of Americans are being put through daily, sans probable cause.
Our country was started by people who were fiercely opposed to blind obedience to authority. Oh, how disappointingly -- and dangerously -- far we've fallen.
In recent years, there's been an overreach of government into many areas of our lives -- telling us what kind of lightbulbs we're allowed to use, and the lady in Oak Park, Michigan who faced 93 days in jail for growing vegetables where her front lawn was "supposed" to be.
Encroachments like the light bulb mandate may seem minor compared to the vile TSA searches in the name of "security," but they are part and parcel of the whole.
Every time we relax and allow Big Government to rule us a little more, every time we let one more Constitutional right be taken from us without so much as a peep, it makes it that much easier to take the next one and the next one, until we wake up one day and wonder how we ended up living in a police state.
And finally, thank you to everyone expressing support for me here, by email, and on other websites.
It's been a tough few months (it's scary to possibly be on the hook for the rest of my life to support this woman when I was the one victimized here).
But, I was lucky in that I have an absolutely wonderful guy behind me -- First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza, who took my case pro bono, and who just asked that I pay any costs (which he said he'd try to keep really low, and which, at this point are maybe just postage. As in, a 44-cent stamp!).
I don't like to not pay people for their work. When I told him I was sorry that, well, this wasn't exactly the golden age of newspapers (or book-authoring), he told me, "Some cases are too important to need to get paid for." I wanted to hug him through the phone.
Marc and two of his associates (Jason A. Fischer and J. Malcolm Devoy) have put in a substantial amount of work on this, and he, himself, personally challenges the "officers," verbally and otherwise when he goes through these checkpoints.
My absolute favorite thing he does when he gets a patdown is stick out his middle finger on each hand. It's his way of showing these people -- people earning a living violating our rights -- the respect they deserve.
I hope some of you will follow his lead, and mine, and those of others who've spoken out. If there's any message here, it's this: Don't go quietly as they yank away your rights.
UPDATE: Even though Marc and his associates are being gracious with their time, there is a bill, and somebody (who understands that legal fees are hundreds of dollars an hour, and that they've spent many hours) just asked if he could donate, which is wonderful.
If you wish to contribute to my legal defense fund, please mail checks to:
Randazza Legal Group
PO Box 5516
Gloucester, MA 01930
Note on memo line, Alkon LDF
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's been an exhausting day. Thank you to everyone expressing support about the TSA woman coming after me for $500K for "defamation." I posted two columns here, but I think I have to go to bed now. I hope to post some new blog items in the morning.
If you're someone who can speak out about the TSA's constant daily violation of our Fourth Amendment rights, please do. Or, support somebody who can speak out -- even by just telling them they're doing the right thing in not standing there like a bunny and letting their rights be seized.
For anybody new who's popped by here, "Advice Goddess Free Swim" means you're free to post what you want -- comments, links -- just please only post one link per comment so your comment won't throw itself off a cliff into my spam folder. If you want to post two comments, no problem -- just wait about 20 seconds and post in a separate comment form.
Will post more blog items as soon as I can.
Breaking News: The TSA Agent Who Visited My Vagina
Mike Masnick just broke the story on me on Techdirt:
"TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search Rape."
There's a link to my original blog item within his link, along with TSA agent Thedala Magee's lawyer's letter and the reply from my knight in shining legal armor, Marc Randazza.
Please share the link -- and please don't go quietly as your Fourth Amendment rights are violated at TSA groping stations in airports across America. More to come on this. (I'm on deadline today, but I'll probably have a full post up with background on this tomorrow, and in the near future, a piece on what we all need to do to stop the erosion of our rights...by the TSA and in so many arenas in this country.)
"The Great Society!" (New & Improved, With Added Taliban!)
Smart comment by Heather Mac Donald in one of her posts over at Secular Right:
The belief that by building roads and hospitals in Afghanistan, America has the power to change that society in significant and positive ways, and to foster long-term good will towards the U.S., strikes me as no less fanciful than any Great Society faith in the ability of government social service programs to eradicate dysfunctional underclass behavior. Restoring electricity and rebuilding bridges in New Jersey and Vermont, by contrast, is eminently doable and a service that American citizens can legitimately expect their government to provide-even if the costs of doing so should be offset during this time of spiralling deficits.
Beauty For Regular People
You don't have to be a supermodel to have beauty. Smart article by Catherine Hakim about Christine Lagarde, who's taken over the IMF:
As it happens, Ms. Lagarde is also very attractive and stylish. Vanity Fair just named her to its best-dressed list, along with the likes of Kate Middleton and Lady Gaga. A synchronized swimmer in her youth, she works hard to stay fit and has paid tribute to her mother for teaching her to present herself with classic French eclat.Ms. Lagarde possesses an abundance of what I call "erotic capital," and she has used it knowingly and to great advantage.
Women in the U.S., Britain and other outposts of the Anglo-Saxon world tend, by contrast, to resist the idea that their physical appearance should matter to their professional advancement. In our age of feminism and meritocracy, women who emphasize their looks are thought to be superficial; it somehow seems like cheating.
But do we have this all wrong?
Beauty is not limited to supermodels and A-list celebrities. It can be achieved by wearing flattering styles, getting in shape, improving posture and putting some effort into choosing clothing and hairstyles.
And erotic capital is not just about physical attractiveness. It also encompasses personality, charm, liveliness, social energy and the ability to make people feel at ease and want to know you. It is not about flaunting your sexuality at the office by showing more cleavage and wearing tight pants.
Time For A Dour Shower!
San Francisco's "Commission on the Status of Women" just put out a resolution demanding that NBC cancel its new TV show "The Playboy Club" and replace it with a show that "depicts women's substantive achievements."
I'm sure this has made every bigwig at Fox drop their Playboy show script -- for about five seconds, as they laughed their asses off.
Heather Knight writes for SFGate:
Set in 1960s Chicago, the show follows the mobsters and bunnies who, um, intermingled at Hugh Hefner's famed Playboy Club. Its website says it's set to premiere Sept. 19, but perhaps NBC honchos are too busy firing the actresses and burning their bunny suits to announce they've scrapped the show because seven commissioners in San Francisco voted they should.Or maybe not.
Kay Gulbengay, president of the commission, came up with the idea for the resolution and since its passage has been in discussions with the three female supervisors to advance it at the board level, too.
"I got a bee in my bonnet about it," she said. "I'm not a prude, but Playboy is sexual exploitation of women, and we don't need to go back there again. For me, it's been there, done that."
Anger about a fictional TV show that hasn't even aired yet is nothing compared to some other machinations at the commission level in the past few months.
(By the way, there are roughly 100 commissions, working groups, task forces and the like in San Francisco, and they're mostly advisory bodies made up of volunteers. Some, like the Police Commission and Planning Commission, are powerful, but most are not.)
The most infamous only-in-San Francisco example was the scrapped call at the Animal Control and Welfare Commission to ban pet sales in the city - including goldfish, guppies and hamsters.
That worked about as well. The geniuses on that commission apparently weren't able to rub two brain cells together in order to figure out that all the SF pet sales ban would do was cause SF pet stores to go out of business. (Like people wouldn't get in their cars and drive to a city without the dumb ban!)
Holistic ER: "The Bold And Natural Approach To Medical Emergencies"
Can't remember whether I've posted this -- or maybe it was another show like it. Very funny...and perfectly shows the absurdity of "alternative" medicine (as in, alternative to evidence-based):
Thanks, SD!
Breaking News! Gleem Does Not Work On Your Ovaries
Via NumberSix, The New York Times rounded up a bunch of stupid women who think looking young means their ovaries will still be rarin' to go as they get up there in age. Tatiana Boncompagni writes for the Styles section:
FORTY may be the new 30, but try telling that to your ovaries.With long brown hair and come-hither curves, Melissa Foss looks -- and feels -- fabulous at 41. "I've spent hours of my life and a lot of money making sure I was healthy, and that my hair was shiny, my teeth were white and my complexion clear," said Ms. Foss, a magazine editor in New York City.
So when it came to conceiving a child with her husband, a marketing executive, Ms. Foss wasn't at all worried. After all, she noted, those same traits of youth and beauty "are all the hallmarks of fertility."
Fifteen unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization later, Ms. Foss now realizes that appearances can be deceiving. "I'd based a lot of my self-worth on looking young and fertile, and to have that not be the case was really depressing and shocking," she said. The couple are now trying to have a baby with the help of a surrogate and a donor egg.
Advances in beauty products and dermatology, not to mention manic devotion to yoga, Pilates and other exercise obsessions, are making it possible for large numbers of women to look admirably younger than their years. But doctors fear that they are creating a widening disconnect between what women see in the mirror and what's happening to their reproductive organs.
Are women really that stupid -- or just the ones interviewed for this article?
Number Six adds, "As much fun as it is to blame the media, Jessica Grose (on Slate) has a better point":
"[P]retending that this is something common, or trendy, takes away from the messy reality that most women who wait to have children aren't doing it because they believe they are endlessly fertile. They're waiting because they haven't found the right partner, or they don't have enough money, or they don't feel ready, or a million other reasons that have nothing to do with female ignorance."
Better Endangered Family Than Endangered Species!
An Idaho man named Jeremy Hill appears to have shot a grizzly bear to protect his family, and now the law is after him. Anthony Gomes writes for KHQ:
Federal agents filed a criminal misdemeanor charge of killing the grizzly, which is listed as a threatened species. It is a charge Hill and hundreds of supporters in town vehemently deny by arguing Hill shot the bear just feet from his home to protect his family.Hill's kids were playing outside when three bears wandered into the yard on Mother's Day. Hill killed one of the bears with a rifle and the two other bears ran away. Family friends say the bears were watching livestock in a pen about 150 feet from the family home.
"If your kids are threatened, you're going to do everything you can to protect them," said Mike Hill, Jeremy's father. "It just seems that this is just a waste of taxpayer money for this even to be pursued."
The Assistant US Attorney trying the case declined to comment but said similar charges have been filed as recently as last year.
Trial is set for October 4, but many in the community just south of the Canadian border hope the matter will be dismissed before that.
"In our opinion, Jeremy not only has the right, but he has the obligation to protect his children, and protect his family," said Ronald Smith, chairman of the Boundary County Board of Commissioners.
Of course, had he instead stood by and let his children be mauled and/or eaten by the bear, he'd surely be up on child neglect, child endangerment, and other charges. (And in that case, rightfully so.)
Tree hugger "Darren," commenting on the KHQ site, has him some sense:
I'm a tree hugger and this is clearly a perversion of justice. He did the right thing in killing the bear. I love wild animals, but the bottom line is, they can be very DEADLY to humans, especially BEARS!As much of an animal lover as I am, with my kids in the yard I might have shot all three bears, not just one. The Mother might have retaliated as one of the stories below illustrates a child killed in Tennessee.
Bears should not be entitled to protection when they enter property zones where children reside, and perhaps adults. Apparently these Feds haven't learned that animals can be dangerous.
I think the FED agents ought to have to expose their children to wild bears, and then we can watch what kind of reaction the agents will have, especially after they read this story.
Hitchens On 9/11
Christopher Hitchens writes on Slate about how 9/11 changed his thinking:
So, for me at any rate, the experience of engaging in the 9/11 politico-cultural wars was a vertiginous one in at least two ways. To begin with, I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known "no fly" names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!).My solidarity with soldiers, cops, and other "responders" didn't make me a full convert to the police mentality. I was a named plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the National Security Agency, for its practice of warrantless wiretapping. I found a way of having myself "waterboarded" by former professionals, in order to satisfy my readers that the process does indeed constitute torture. I have visited Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, those two grotesque hellholes of American panic-reaction, and written very critically from both. And I was and remain unreconciled to the stupid, wasteful, oppressive collective punishment of Americans who try to use our civil aviation, or who want to be able to get into their own offices without showing ID to a guard who has no database against which to check it. But I had also seen Abu Ghraib shortly after it was first broken open in 2003, and could have no truck with the moral defectives who talked glibly as if that mini-Auschwitz and mass grave was no worse. When Amnesty International described Guantanamo as "the Gulag of our time," I felt a collapse of seriousness that I have felt many times since.
One reason for opposing excesses and stupidities on "our" side (actually, why do I defensively lob in those quotation marks? Please consider them as optional) was my conviction that the defeat of Bin-Ladenism was ultimately certain. Al-Qaida demands the impossible--worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia--and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means. (This combination, by the way, would make a reasonable definition of "terrorism.") It follows that the resort to panicky or degrading tactics in order to combat terrorism is, as well as immoral, self-defeating.
Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and--because it has no means of generating self-criticism--would begin to implode. The trove recovered from Bin Laden's rather dismal Abbottabad hideaway appears to confirm that this fate has indeed, with much labor on the part of unsung heroes, begun to engulf al-Qaida. I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of "our" civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of "faith."
Crop Rot
I'm not down with the socialist view that property ownership (whether of bits of hand-held property or of land) is a negative -- in fact, I think it's quite the contrary.
But this is a very interesting and compelling take on agriculture by Jared Diamond from the May 1987 issue of DISCOVER -- "Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." An excerpt:
How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
via Christopher
Maureen Dowd Just Locked The Door And Turned Out The Lights
I'm a Neither (as in, neither a Democrat nor a Republican), but I didn't think much of Obama (a cool cat-looking guy best known for voting "present" in the Senate) from the start.
Well, the Great And Powerful Oz-bama has finally frustrated even Maureen Dowd, who writes in The New York Times:
MSNBC's Matt Miller offered "a public service" to journalists talking about Obama -- a list of synonyms for cave: "Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate."And it wasn't exactly Morning in America when Obama sent out a mass e-mail to supporters Wednesday under the heading "Frustrated."
It unfortunately echoed a November 2010 parody in The Onion with the headline, "Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail."
"Throughout," The Onion teased, "the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China's undervalued currency, Boston's Logan Airport, and tort reform."
You know you're in trouble when Harry Reid says you should be more aggressive.
If the languid Obama had not done his usual irritating fourth-quarter play, if he had presented a jobs plan a year ago and fought for it, he wouldn't have needed to elevate the setting. How will he up the ante next time? A speech from the space station?
Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.
Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.
The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.
The Wheels Of The Paranoid Police State Keep On Turning
Charlotte Allen sent me a link about police in Elizabethton Tennessee threatening to arrest a woman for...yes...letting her 10-year-old fifth grader ride her bike to school -- a seven- to nine-minute trip by bike.
The mother, Teresa Tryon, is instead supposed to put her daughter on the bus. Tom E. writes on BikeWalkTennessee:
Teresa Tryon said, "On August 25th my 10 year daughter arrived home via police officer, requested to speak to me on the front porch of my home. The officer informed me that in his 'judgement' it was unsafe for my daughter to ride her bike to school."Ms Tryon called the mayor's office and the chief of police office in order to determine what laws she was breaking by allowing her daughter to ride her bike to school. Her daughter's route to school was reasonably safe.
Major Verran of the police department returned Ms Tryon's call. She said he told me, "He had spoke with the District Attorney's office who advised that until the officer can speak with Child Protective Services that if I allow my daughter to ride/walk to school I will be breaking the law and treated accordingly.
She asked, "What law she would be breaking to which the answer was 'child neglect'".
I rode my bike almost every day to Bond Elementary School -- about a 10- or 12-minute trip from my parents' house. I thought my parents were horribly overprotective, but it turns out they should have been brought up on charges for not wrapping me up in swaddling clothes (even at 10) and carrying me lovingly into school and to every one of my classes.
"The Gray Cardigan Of Care"
Via Kate Coe, loved this Marina Hyde piece in The Guardian about celebrity "angels of death" -- celebrity do-gooders who end up mucking things up for those they're supposed to be doing good for.
The "gray cardigan of care" was worn by Vanessa Redgrave (pictured), who was trying to help some squatters keep land that didn't belong to them. Great bit about Sharon Stone:
I am given to understand that part of the Dalai Lama's shtick is not losing his rag, but in the interests of catharsis, I hope the exiled Tibetan leader permitted himself a Christian Bale-level meltdown when Sharon explained on the red carpet that the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which had killed nearly 70,000 people and left millions homeless, was due to the Chinese government "not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine". The Basic Instinct legend - and noted seismologist - inquired rhetorically, "Is that karma, when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"...Then there was the time Sharon effectively hijacked a plenary session at the World Economic Forum at Davos - at which she was bafflingly a guest - in which proper experts were discussing the possibility of insecticide-treated mosquito nets being used to combat malaria in Tanzania. All of a sudden, Sharon stood up in the audience, arm raised in a manner Time magazine compared to "an evangelical preacher", and demanded people join her in pledging money to the cause. "Just stand up! Stand up, and people will take your name!" she cried presumptuously, and some long, awkward time later, $1m had been raised. Or had it? Suspicions that donations had been made just to shut her up were confirmed when less than $250,000 of them ever materialised, forcing the UN to divert funds from other projects to make up the shortfall.
While TSA Employees Are Busy Searching Granny's Diaper...
AP reporter Eileen Sullivan reports on a warning issued by the FBI and Homeland Security that Allah's best friends may be taking to small planes:
The alert, issued ahead of the summer's last busy travel weekend, said terrorists have considered renting private planes and loading them with explosives."Al-Qaida and its affiliates have maintained an interest in obtaining aviation training, particularly on small aircraft, and in recruiting Western individuals for training in Europe or the United States, although we do not have current, credible information or intelligence of an imminent attack being planned," according to the bulletin obtained by The Associated Press.
More on the death toll from practitioners of "the religion of peace" here.
The 2011 Ramadan Razzie Awards here:
Highest Body Count:The award for highest body count in a single incident goes to Al-Queda this year for a market bombing in Kut Iraq that took out 42 shoppers, including 12 children.
Most innovative:
Perhaps the most innovative attack reaching levels of barbarity rarely seen in other parts of the planet was a tricycle bomb in Peshawar Pakistan that ended the lives of 11 people shopping for food for the official feast that marks the end of Ramadan.
Interfaith outreach award:
In keeping with a tradition of increased attacks on Jewish civilians, this year's Ramadan saw the murder of 8 Israelis in sniper attacks in the town of Eilat. Contenders this year for the interfaith outreach include a church bombing with no fatalities in Kirkuk, Iraq as well as a missile attack on a Jewish seminary that injured 14 and 10 respectively. This is in contrast to the Nigerian raid that left 6 Christians hacked to bits, including women and children. Not to be forgotten, there were also a number of attacks on Shia Moslems from the country that never disappoints to disappoint, Pakistan. Yemen, the dark horse in interfaith outreach now that they have ethnically cleansed all of the Jews from the country, managed to show that when there are no Jews around, 14 Shia will obviously classify as the next best target.
An Introvert's Guide To Social Networking
Gregg is very charming to librarians and people he knows and likes, but quotes Ving Rhames from the set of "Out Of Sight" ("I don't want to talk to anybody I don't already know").
This morning on the phone, he announced that he's starting a nihilistic social network called "Quitter." Posts are zero characters and you're asked not to join.
Burning Man Lite
Via the WSJ, some wealthy attendees at Burning Man rethink Burning Man's concept of "radical self-reliance":
Obama Notices Which Way The Wind Is Blowing
A politician's integrity is usually only as strong as his poll numbers. (See bit I italicized below.)
Deborah Solomon and Tennille Tracy write in the WSJ that the President has asked the EPA to withdraw their proposed ozone rule:
President Barack Obama, citing the struggling economy, asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday to withdraw an air-quality rule that Republicans and business groups said would cost millions of jobs.The surprise move--coming on the same day as a dismal unemployment report--reflected the energy industry's importance as a rare bright spot in adding U.S. jobs. The tighter standards for smog-forming ozone could have forced states and cities to limit some oil-and-gas projects.
In making the move, the White House clearly judged that it had more to lose from industry and Republican criticism than it had to gain from environmental groups who support the rule.
The EPA's January 2010 proposal, to tighten air-quality standards to a level below that adopted under President George W. Bush and even further below what most states now adhere to, has been cited for months by industry groups and lawmakers as "regulatory overreach" that they say is undercutting the economic recovery. Republican presidential candidates have routinely criticized the EPA in stump speeches.
Mr. Obama said in a statement that he remains committed to public health and clean air, but he added, "I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover."
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said the move suggests the White House "is becoming more sensitive to the uncertainty created by their heavy regulatory hand....They are beginning to understand that the regulatory burden does more to chill job creation than just about anything else out there."
Advice Goddess Free Swim
Been writing like a madwoman, and now I think I need to keel over and go to bed.
So...you pick the topics. If you post a link, post just one link or your comment will go to spam. If you want to post a second one, just post a second comment (but wait about 20 seconds for your first to go through).
Don't Bother Understanding Your Subject Matter Before Publishing A Piece In NYT About It
Commenter DrCos called my attention to this idiotic NYT op-ed by Eliyahu Stern, "Don't Fear Islamic Law in America," equating vile Sharia law with Jewish and Christian religious laws.
Stern is an assistant professor of religious studies and history at Yale who needs to study harder before running off at the keyboard. Dumbest line in the piece:
Given time, American Muslims, like all other religious minorities before them, will adjust their legal and theological traditions, if necessary, to accord with American values.
The Quran is different from The Bible in that it is not to be taken as allegory or a historical document. It is to be taken literally and unquestioningly as the word of god. There are peaceful passages in it early on, but they are abrogated by later ones that are violent and horrible and command Muslims to convert or slaughter "the infidel."
Sound like enlightenment values to you? Here's a piece from American Thinker on the "Top ten reasons why Sharia is bad for all societies." They're little things like:
•"Islam orders apostates to be killed."•"Islam orders death for Muslim and possible death for non--Muslim critics of Muhammad and the Quran and even sharia itself."
•"Islam orders unmarried fornicators to be whipped and adulterers to be stoned to death."
•"Islam allows husbands to hit their wives even if the husbands merely fear highhandedness in their wives."
•"Islam commands that homosexuals must be executed."
All of these things actually happen in Muslim majority countries where Sharia law is in place (go to the link at American Thinker for examples). James Arlandson, author of the piece, sums up:
The nightmare must end. Sharia oppresses the citizens of Islamic countries. Islam must reform, but the legal hierarchy in Islamic nations will not do this because the judges and legal scholars understand the cost: many passages in the Quran and the hadith must be rejected, and this they cannot do. After all, the Quran came down directly from Allah through Gabriel, so says traditional theology. So how can Islam reform? But reform it must. It can start by rewriting classical fiqh (interpretations of law). Again, though, that would mean leaving behind the Quran and Muhammad's example. How can the legal hierarchy in Islamic nations do this?In contrast, the West has undergone the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason (c. 1600--1800+), so western law has been injected with a heavy dose of reason. Also, the New Testament tempers excessive punishments. At least when Christianity reformed (c. 1400--1600), the reformers went back to the New Testament, which preaches peace and love. So religion and reason in the West permit justice to be found more readily--the Medieval Church is not foundational to Christianity; only Jesus and the New Testament are.
Can Islamic countries benefit from an Enlightenment that may deny the Quran and the hadith? This seems impossible. Islamic law threatens Muslims with death if they criticize Muhammad and the Quran, not to mention denying them.
Since Islamic law cannot be reformed without doing serious damage to original and authentic Islam--the one taught by Muhammad--then a second plan must be played out. Sharia must never spread around the world. At least that much is clear and achievable. The hard evidence in this article demonstrates beyond doubt that sharia does not benefit any society, for it contains too many harsh rules and punishments.
...Sharia ultimately degrades society and diminishes freedom.
Idiot With A Working Internet Connection At 3 AM
This is a dangerous hour, the hour of self-diagnosis over the Internet.
For over a month, I'd had this pain in my hip, and it wasn't like I'd fallen skiing or anything.
There was really no reason for it to be there except...except...well, it said on the Internet that persistent unexplained bone pain could be bone cancer, and bone cancer isn't usually where it starts; it's where it spreads.
I knew it -- I was sure i was dying of bone cancer.
I got to Kaiser on Wednesday morning, and when I told the doctor what I suspected -- that I might have bone cancer -- I think she had to stifle a laugh, or at least a smile, as she told me...no, I don't have bone cancer.
(Bone cancer apparently has a few other symptoms, like massive weight loss, blah blah blah.)
It turns out I probably have tendonitis, which I don't think anyone has ever died of. Also, I'm kind of an ass, but I don't think that will show up on the X-ray they took.
Who Decides How Long?
David Lazarus writes in the LA Times of Bob Iritano, who just died of cancer at 51 on Thursday:
Iritano was just a guy who worked his job as an insurance broker every day. He was a husband. He was the father of four kids.Iritano also had terminal cancer. He knew he was going to die. The only question was when.
His insurer, Health Net, decided last year not to cover a life-extending procedure that had worked just a few months earlier. This left Iritano fighting for time -- time to share with his wife, Karen; time to teach his son to throw a football; time to attend a father-daughter school dance with his little girl.
Iritano faced a situation that many others with terminal illnesses or chronic diseases face: What price do you put on a life? How much money and medical resources are too much when it comes to prolonging a doomed existence? Who decides when your time is up?
...In the harsh light of pure statistics, it's clear that we have to do more to bring down healthcare costs and expenditures. One way to do that would be through the efficiencies of extending Medicare to all Americans and more strictly regulating how much can be charged for medical procedures and insurance.
Another would be to limit how much of our healthcare resources should be devoted to, for lack of a more artful term, lost causes.
More to the point, do we really want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars extending the life of a person with a terminal illness?
For me, Bob Iritano provides a resounding "yes" to that question. And the reason is a simple one: What if it were me? What if it were you?
Rand Paul On The Government Telling You What Light Bulbs, Etc., You Can Use
"In America we believe in trying to convince our neighbors, but not in trying to convince them through the force of law," Paul said.
Actually, that's the old America, the one in which we also had Fourth Amendment rights; the one in which you only got felt up at the airport if you got drunk with some cute salesman at an airport bar.
The times, they are a changin' and not for the better.
The Arab Spring Is Leading To The Burka-Clad Summer
David E. Miller writes in the Jerusalem Post that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has declared war on the bikini:
Sunbathing in Alexandria may soon be a thing of the past, at least if some Egyptian Islamist politicians have their way.Egypt's tourism industry has suffered a severe blow since the outburst of anti-regime demonstrations in January. But that did not stop the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, from demanding stricter regulations over what tourists can do and wear while visiting the country. The party is urging officials to ban skimpy swimwear and the consumption of alcohol on Egyptian streets.
..."Beach tourism must take the values and norms of our society into account," Muhammad Saad Al-Katatny, secretary-general of Freedom and Justice, told Egyptian tourism officials on Monday.
What's that Prince song? "We're gonna party like it's 600 AD!"
Oh, and they apparently want the Sphinx in a burka, too:
But bathing suits are not the only worry of Egypt's Islamists. Abd Al-Munim A-Shahhat, a spokesman for the Salafi group Dawa, has said that Egypt's world-renowned pharaonic archeology - its pyramids, Sphinx and other monuments covered with un-Islamic imagery - should also be hidden from the public eye.
Problem Solved! (At 30,000 Feet)
I'm on a tight deadline to revise my chapter on airplane/airport rudeness, and I need your problems right away...but not just your problems, your solved problems. Or other people's solved problems.
I'm looking for examples of conflict on an airplane or in an airport that have been resolved -- in some clever, amusing, interesting, or touching way. These will go in the conflict resolution section of the chapter.
An example would be having some seat hog taking over the arm rest and how you solved it -- ideally, without having the two of you come to blows.
Your stories or things that have happened to friends' and acquaintances or those that have appeared in news stories are what I'm seeking. I want to avoid picking up any "urban legends" (like the story of the male customer snarling, "Do you know who I am?!" and the gate attendant announcing over the P.A., "Attention! Attention! We've got a man here at Gate 17 who does not know who he is. If anyone knows who this man is..." etc.
Your help would be most appreciated. Please spread the word. Getting these examples in the next few days would be super.
For CA Parents, Dinner And A Movie May Get Way More Complicated
Idiot and legislator Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) just authored a bill requiring parents to provide workers' compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time...for babysitters!
The bill, Assembly Bill #889, "will require these protections for all "domestic employees," including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers," says the Office of Sen. Doug LaMalfa, writing in The Union:
The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature - and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor's desk.Under AB 889, household "employers" (aka "parents") who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.
Failure to abide by any of these provisions may result in a legal cause of action against the employer including cumulative penalties, attorneys' fees, legal costs and expenses associated with hiring expert witnesses, an unprecedented measure of legal recourse provided no other class of workers - from agricultural laborers to garment manufacturers. (On the bright side, language requiring an hour of paid vacation time for every 30 hours worked was amended out of the bill in the Senate.)
Unfortunately, the unreasonable costs and risks contained in this bill will discourage folks from hiring housekeepers, nannies and babysitters and increase the use of institutionalized care rather than allowing children, the sick or elderly to be cared for in their homes. I can't help but wonder if that is the goal of AB 889 - a terrible bill that needs to be stopped.
Check out all the fiscal suffering that ensues from this bill: Teenaged girls don't earn money in a safe and easy form of employment. Restaurants and movie theaters see even fewer parents going out than they already do in this economy. And all the other employees who'd benefit, like restaurant valets, also lose.
I mean, really: "...Provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks."
I babysat. It's not exactly taxing work.
What is taxing, of course, is the nanny state, and its continual efforts to put all forms of business and money earning to death.
The New Rules Of College Sex: Male? Probably A Predator
The Federal government and a Pennsylvania lawyer (Brett Sokolow, founder of NCHERM, the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management) are rewriting the rules on campus hookups--using Title IX to tag young men as dangerous predators, writes Sandy Hingston in Philly Magazine:
Jack and Diane are at a party at their college. It's September of their freshman year. They're still excited about being away from home, on their own for the first time. They don't know each other, but they've noticed one another, at orientation and in the dining hall.Because they're underage, they can't drink at this party, but before she arrived, Diane "pre-gamed," as the girls in her dorm call it--downing mixed drinks, doing gummy-worm and Jell-O shots. Jack had a few beers.
The liquor's gone to Diane's head. On the dance floor, she makes eye contact with Jack. He maneuvers his way toward her. She grabs him by the crotch, then whirls around and pushes against him, letting him grind away. Jack can't believe it--she's so pretty. She smells so good.
"I can't hear myself think in here, it's so loud!" he shouts into her ear.
She smiles at him. "What?"
"Too loud!" He takes her hand and leads her outside, into the autumn night. She looks at him expectantly. He puts his arms around her, pulling her close, and begins to kiss her. She drapes against him. He touches her breast, and when she doesn't protest, does it again. He moves his hands to her rear, cupping her buttocks. She kisses him back, frantically eager. He reaches underneath her dress.
Jack doesn't know it, but he's just created what the Department of Education calls a "hostile environment" for women on his campus--a violation of Title IX for which his college could lose all federal funding. Should Diane press sexual assault charges against him with the school, he'll be tried in a judicial hearing that fails to guarantee him the most basic American legal rights--the right to counsel, the right to confront his accuser, the right not to be convicted unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He could well be expelled, and have a record that will hound him should he try to get into another school.
And here he thought it was his lucky night.
Next up, we've got the Vice President pushing bullshit rape stats -- a "one in five" figure in this case. (See debunking links here.)
More:
But wait, you say. Didn't Diane consent when she let Jack touch her breast? No, because consent has to be active, not passive. And Jack has to get Diane's consent every time he wants to move up another base--a policy first instituted at Ohio's Antioch College in the early 1990s. Here's how an Antioch women's center advocate explained it to freshmen: "If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask." Reaction to Antioch's policy--including a Saturday Night Live skit--was wildly derisive; eventually, the college closed down. The policy, however, as detailed by NCHERM, lives on all over the country.Besides, the NCHERM model says that even though Jack had no way of telling whether or how much Diane had been drinking, it was his responsibility to determine if she was "incapacitated"--a term of murky meaning. If she was, any fondling they did, no matter how great her zeal, was sexual assault. She doesn't even have to lodge a complaint; the college has to investigate if, say, Diane's resident adviser- sees her and Jack outside the party and suspects she's drunk. And OCR says a single incident of sexual assault can be enough to create that hostile atmosphere.
My friends at the campus free speech-defending organization FIRE of course come through for due process on campus:
But Samantha Harris, of the Philly-based nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, which advocates for individual rights at colleges, says the new standard violates accused students' due process rights. "Campus judicial procedures already have questionable -validity," she says. "The preponderance standard, which essentially means 50.1 percent proof, will just compound those problems." She says the Supreme Court's precedents demonstrate that evidentiary standards should be higher, not lower, when so much is at stake, as FIRE argued in a lengthy letter to Russlynn Ali. "We're not sending these students to prison," Harris says, "but the terminology is the same. They're found guilty of serious criminal offenses." Perpetrators are subject to expulsion, which affects their employment and social prospects. Harris blames the guidelines, not the schools: "Their hands are tied. The loss of federal money would be catastrophic."Why don't colleges just turn sexual assault cases over to police to prosecute? Because there's rarely enough evidence to convict in a real court of law. Harris points to a case at the University of North Dakota in which a judicial board found a student guilty of rape under the preponderance standard and expelled him. The victim had also reported the rape to police--who charged her with filing a false report. "The potential for abuse and injustice is tremendous," Harris says. "We have to protect victims' rights, but how many innocent students is it right to convict to do so?" Due process, she says, doesn't just safeguard the accused; it preserves the integrity of the judicial system. "If I were sending a son off to college now," she adds, "I'd be very concerned."
Sokolow's response? "FIRE is sticking up for penises everywhere."
Somebody has to.
This, from Sokolow, is particularly disgusting:
"'The number of expelled students is going to go way up,' Sokolow predicts--a prospect he's looking forward to."
Viper.
Details on FIRE's protests of the new regulations here.
The Terror-Supporting Muslim Down The Block In Ohio
Patrick Poole writes on PJM:
Last week my PJM colleague Barry Rubin noted that Egyptian shiekh Dr. Salah Sultan had issued a fatwa earlier this month at a Muslim Brotherhood rally in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo authorizing that "every Muslim who meets a Zionist is entitled to kill him." He also noted that I have written extensively on Sultan. Why so much attention paid to this individual, you may ask?Because he used to be my neighbor.
That's right. Prior to Sultan being denied U.S. citizenship and later being denied reentry into the United States because of his advocacy of violence against the U.S., he lived in my own hometown of Hilliard, Ohio, not a mile from my own house. In fact, he still owns his home and some of his family still reside here. His oldest son, Mohamed, is the president of the Ohio State Muslim Student Association.
When I wrote my first article about Salah Sultan in April 2006, noting his close association to Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi and his many public statements promoting anti-Jewish blood libels, I was attacked by my own hometown newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, as a racist, bigot and Islamophobe in an article written by religion reporter Felix Hoover.
Several prominent Islamic organizations and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio launched a smear campaign attacking me, including the Islamic school in Hilliard that had employed Sultan as their religious director, enlisting the Dispatch to defend the school and portraying Sultan as a peaceful moderate, not the racist, terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric that I claimed he was.
Wishful thinking. Far too much of that going around by people who want to believe that Islam is just another religion rather than what it is: a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion, and the closest you can get to living in the dark ages without getting into a working time machine:
Poole continues:
But with his recent fatwa authorizing the killing of Jews, and his public call last Friday on Al-Jazeera for the assassination of the Israeli ambassador to Egypt, I think we can safely lay to rest any claims that Salah Sultan is a peaceful moderate; and consider myself vindicated that, yes, my former neighbor really is a racist, terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric.
Get informed about Islam in a nutshell here:
