Just Say Neigh?
Why shouldn't you be allowed to eat horse meat? Justin Juozapavicius writes for the AP that horse meat could soon be offered for sale in the US.
If you're against eating horse meat, is it because they're cuter than cows? Because you just aren't used to the idea? Or is there some other reason?
UPDATE: Via @NorCalCazadora, this NYT piece, "Slaughter of Horses Goes On, Just Not in U.S."
If Bad People's Rights Go, Don't Think Yours Are Safe
Our country is really headed down the wrong road. I'm for bringing in suspected terrorists, and for nailing actual terrorists to the wall, but under the rule of law. We can't just toss our Constitution and remain the country we have been.
Charlie Savage writes in The New York Times about the Senate okaying the government keeping US citizens in military custody indefinitely and without trial:
Defying the Obama administration's threat of a veto, the Senate on Tuesday voted to increase the role of the military in imprisoning suspected members of Al Qaeda and its allies -- including people arrested inside the United States.By a vote of 61 to 37, the Senate turned back an effort to strip a major military bill of a set of disputed provisions affecting the handling of terrorism cases. While the legislation still has several steps to go, the vote makes it likely that Congress will eventually send to President Obama's desk a bill that contains detainee-related provisions his national-security team has said are unacceptable.
The most disputed provision would require the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. The provision would exempt American citizens, but would otherwise extend to arrests on United States soil. The executive branch could issue a waiver and keep such a prisoner in the civilian system.
A related provision would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens.
And if "terrorism" is valid for jailing indefinitely and without trial, who's to say you aren't a "terrorist," and not just somebody who's speaking out in a way that's unpleasant to those in power? Dangerous, dangerous road we're headed down...
via Lisa Simeone
Why Didn't Anybody Come To Her Aid?
Watch both of the videos here -- teens attacking a woman they believe is pregnant, brutally beating her. From CTV Canada:
Two 15-year-old girls are set to appear in Toronto court on Wednesday after being charged in the beating of a young woman on a downtown sidewalk that was videotaped and posted online.Police allege that three girls attacked the woman late Saturday or early Sunday in the Yonge Street and Dundas Street area.
Footage of the attack posted on the Internet shows a young woman being punched and kicked by two people after the three have an argument.
More here, at Canada.com:
While comments made during the video suggested the victim was pregnant, police said Tuesday that was not the case.The video is about three minutes long, with most of it showing verbal sparring between the woman who gets attacked, the three other young women and at least two men.
Someone with the group appears to be holding the video camera.
The woman is called a "crackhead" several times during the exchange, and appears to be the instigator of the conflict at times.
At one point, one of the young females asks, "You're pregnant and you're trying to fight b-------s?"
The physical confrontation comes after the woman hits one of the other females with a jacket she is holding, who then retaliates.
A beating then takes place that has the three young females punching the woman until she falls down, then continuing to punch and kick her while she is helpless on the sidewalk.
Many of the blows are directed at the woman's head, while some also are to her mid-section and back.
This happens despite the fact the attackers appear to be under the impression their victim is pregnant.
More here in the Toronto Sun by Terry Davidson -- including video of the beating:
The 35-year-old Native woman, who is homeless and addicted to alcohol, told the Sun Tuesday evening that the beating took place late Saturday night, but she can't remember exactly when. She blamed a gang of teenage girls for the violent assault."I don't know, maybe I egged it on, but I didn't deserve that," the woman said during an interview in a coffee shop in the Queen St. W. and Jameson Ave. area. "I have no recollection, because I'm an alcoholic."
The three-minute video shows the victim first in a verbal confrontation with three young girls outside a 24-hour Burger King restaurant on Yonge St., south of Dundas St. Within seconds, she is punched to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the face and stomach.
The video was posted on a hip-hop website sometime on Sunday. Toronto Police were subsequently called by someone in the U.S. who had seen the video.
The police have since arrested one teenage girl in connection with the incident.
pissedoff20, a commenter on the Sun's website, has it:
This story is sad and pitiful on so many levels. A woman who has squandered her life for alcohol and brought four (count them four) children into this world who probably have fetal alcohol syndrome which will adversely affect the rest of their lives. How selfish of her and unfair to those children to have to start and live their lives with that handicap. Also, it is probably us, the taxpayers, that support those children as I hope they are in foster care.She is a sad cliche, a stereotypical native addicted to firewater. No hopes,no dreams, no aspirations and has robbed her children of their future. Allegedly sexually assaulted by her boyfriend's brother. Both the boyfriend and the brother must be just lovely people and the pastor is a "trustee" for the boyfriend. Holy smoke, what adult male needs a trustee...what kind of trouble is he involved in?
The woman is so lacking in credibility (she can't even remember being beat up) that the police don't pay attention to her story. Do you really blame them? How do you prosecute a case with a witness who history includes that she can't remember being visciously beat up on the street? How drunk do you have to be to not be able to recall that? I wonder if she remembers half the time that she has children.
Then the subhumans that beat her up. They could have walked away no matter what she did. They are barbaric beyond belief, they have lost their right to be in society. Depsite what this woman did, you walk away from a confrontation with someone who does not have possession of all their faculties. You do not hit, kick, punch, slap someone who is down on the ground. No intelligent, aware human being does that. And the person who filmed it and egged on those savage, crude, nasty little street sluts should be jailed. And all of their parents need to brought to account for their failure to raise children with some moral centre, mature judgment, values, ethics, principles, compassion, empathy, common sense. They are complete and utter failures as parents.
Why is no one looking at the cretin who runs the website that would allow this type of violence to be posted and glorified. What about everyone who walked by and didn't even bother to anonymously call the police? The guy in the Burger King store bears his share of responsibility also.
We will pay for this woman's children, addiction treatment, housing, etc. etc. The taxpayers once again are raped because of someone's irresponsible life choices. Not to mention what her medical bills will be in the future due to her addiction and what harm she has done to her body. Everyone here is an irresponsible loser and sadly beyond redemption. The first casualty of loss of personal responsibility is civilization.
"A President Who's A Bystander In The Oval Office..."
I was just saying something along these lines to Kate Coe -- that this is my feeling about Obama -- that just as he voted "present" in the Senate, he's out of his league and then some in the Oval Office. I suspect the country is run by his staff while he stands around blinking cow-eyed. I don't think he's stupid, but I think he's book smart.
And by the way, I would vote for Chris Christie for president in a hot second. (I also would like to have Gary Taubes and Dr. Eades do a food intervention on the guy so he won't drop dead, and tweeted something to that effect. Unless it's my imagination and memory playing tricks on me, I believe Eades said yes.)
Take it away, Chris Christie!
Diversely Sucky
Michael Walsh writes at the New York Post about the president's crop of unqualified -- but "diverse"! -- judicial appointees:
President Obama has said that one quality he prizes highly in his judicial appointments is empathy. "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom," he told a Planned Parenthood conference way back in 2007. "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."Alas, according to the American Bar Association, empathy isn't good enough. Last week, news leaked that the ABA has secretly informed the White House that it rated 14 out of a potential 185 nominees for federal judgeships "unqualified" -- most of them women and minorities put forth in the name of "diversity."
Fourteen may not seem like many, but The New York Times (which broke the story) reports that it's more than the combined number of judges the ABA "flunked" during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (who stopped submitting his nominations to the ABA).
After some huffing about racism and discrimination against women, the administration chose not to nominate any of the 14.
With Republicans continuing to block many of Obama's choices, it's no time for another losing fight.
But this won't stop Obama & Co.'s mad pursuit of "diversity" (narrowly defined in terms of race and sex) or from elevating politically correct "empathy" over what should be a judge's chief consideration, fidelity to the law.
As of August, the Senate had confirmed 97 of Obama's federal judicial nominees; nearly half of them have been women, a fifth African-American and 11 percent Hispanic.
"The president wants the federal courts to look like America," explained the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler. "He wants people who are coming to court to feel like it's their court as well.
Wow. When I see a man or a black person in a judgeship, should I not feel it's my court as well? Does the judge have to look like me for it to be justice -- or just be just?
Further, "diversity" turns out to be pretty much meaningless. How "diverse" were Obama's Supreme Court appointments of Sonia Sotomayor (the Court's first "wise Latina") and Elena Kagan? True, they added two women to the court, but they also added two more Ivy League lawyers -- Yale (Sotomayor) and Harvard (Kagan).In fact, every sitting justice studied law at either Harvard or Yale. There's nary a one from a state university or even from another Ivy League school. With six Catholics and three Jews, not a single member of the founding WASP establishment sits on the court. How's that for diversity?
For the record, I think it's amazing that we have a non-white president such a short time after we had Jim Crow laws. I just wish this particular guy weren't president.
The "Self-Esteem Act" For Digitally Altered Photos
Via Overlawyered, two Fred Segal $30 kids' t-shirt selling Angelenos, Seth and Eva Matlins, have a proposal to make magazines have warning labels when photos of models have been Photoshopped. (Are they also going to have warning labels when those in the photos got their assets from Dr. Rubinstein instead of Mother Nature?) From CBS/NY:
Seth Matlin is the founder of offourchests.com, the driving force behind the "Self Esteem Act," which seeks to make consumers more aware of the digital enhancement that occurs in advertising.Matlin believes that digitally enhanced advertising creates unrealistic expectations for young women and that advertisers are giving young girls the impression that they will never be good enough. He argues that by focusing on physical beauty, and by photoshopping already beautiful models, entire segments of the population are being excluded.
"Real women come in all shapes sizes and colors and we can't leave them out of any conversation," says Matlin.
"Real" women? You can be real and real fat, and if you are the latter, unless you've won an Oscar or have a TV audience of eleventy majillion, you ain't getting on the cover of Vogue. If you want to change that, you put out a magazine -- you don't get to tell other magazines what they can run and how they can run it.
And regarding the "crisis!" in teen girls' self-esteem...like this hasn't been part of being a teen girl since the beginning of time? It's up to parents to help their girls have healthy thinking, not the governnanny.
Oh, and looking at Seth's bio, do we think he's...repenting?
Prior to joining Live Nation in February 2009, Seth had spent almost 9 years at Creative Artists Agency, where he was the agency's first hire in its Marketing Department. While there, he represented a portfolio of the world's most iconic brands, providing them strategic and creative guidance as they looked to the power of entertainment and across the breadth of Hollywood to build their brands and drive business results amongst rapidly changing marketing, media and consumer landscapes. While with CAA, Seth lead and participated in hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions and over one billion dollars in marketing activation.
Something tells me Seth was most vociferous in his silence about the evils of unfettered marketing while bringing home the big green ones from CAA.
"Ten Things We Evil Capitalists Really Think"
Hey, OWSers, clear out your misconceptions by checking out this terrific list by Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph. A few of the points:
1. Free-marketeers resent the bank bailouts. This might seem obvious: we are, after all, opposed to state subsidies and nationalisations. Yet it often surprises commentators, who mistake our support for open competition and free trade for a belief in plutocracy. There is a world of difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes, the two positions happen to coincide; often they don't.2. What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism. In a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations bought by more efficient competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny (see here).
3. If you want the rich to pay more, create a flatter and simpler tax system. This is partly a question of closing loopholes (mansions put in company names to avoid stamp duty, capital gains tax exemption for non-doms etc). Mainly, though, it is a question of bringing the tax rate down to a level where evasion becomes pointless. As Art Laffer keeps telling anyone who'll listen, it works every time. Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut taxes at all income levels. Result? The top one per cent went from paying 19.5 per cent of all taxes to 40 per cent. In Britain, since the top rate of income tax was lowered to 40 per cent in 1988, the share of income tax collected from the wealthiest percentile has risen from 14 to 27 per cent.
For example, Estee Lauder heir Ronald S. Lauder's tax dodging under the current system here in The New York Times. And check out the rest of Hannan's ten at the link above.
via @WalterOlson
"What If Our Daughters Don't Want To Work?"
Women have always been working women -- until the latter part of the last century when the job of mother and homemaker got a whole lot easier.
Some will argue that it's still hard, but I wonder whether it's truly hard or whether it's just tedious.
And I have to say, I respect stay-at-home parents for raising their kids, but I sure wouldn't want to do it (which is why I have a three-pound dog instead of children).
Dorothy Pomerantz writes at Forbes:
This morning, as my children were eating their pancake breakfast, my 7-year-old daughter turned to me and said, "When I'm a mom I'm not going to get a job. I'm just going to look after my children."I asked her why.
"Because James, who I'm going to marry, wants to get a full time job. If we both have jobs we'll have to hire a babysitter to look after our children," she said.
Forget for a moment that my child already seems to have her wedding planned out. It was her clear desire not to work that struck like a guilt-tipped arrow right to my heart. Both my husband and I work full time. I'm lucky enough to work from home but that doesn't make me a stay-at-home mother. My children are out of the house at school and after-school care most of the day and when they are home I'm often peering at them over the top of my laptop as I try to squeeze in extra work minutes throughout the evenings and weekends.
I don't think there's a working mom out there who doesn't experience some degree of guilt about the choices she has made. A part of me wishes I could be there to pick my kids up after school and take them to soccer and help them with their homework. But a bigger part of me is very happy to be sitting at my desk writing or out at a meeting talking to the interesting adults who populate Hollywood.
But at the same time I recognize the professional limitations inherent in trying to have it all. I'm not the world's best mother but I'm also not the executive editor of a magazine.
The problem is, if you go totally mommy track, you're totally dependent on another person to take care of you. What if that person dies or leaves you? What then?
I do know a former stay-at-home dad, Glenn Sacks, whose wife worked while he stayed home with their daughter in the years when she was three until she was seven. But, the guy had (and has) something to him besides being somebody's daddy.
Here's a piece on Alpha Women, Beta Males from New York Magazine, by Ralph Gardner.
Heavy Metal
One more reason to love LA...all the fantastic visuals all over the place.
Advice Goddess Radio: Get Your Podcast, Beverly Engel On Pleasers
Gregg said it was my best show yet -- last night, with therapist Beverly Engel, the psychotherapist whose terrific book The Nice Girl Syndrome I've been recommending to readers who are pleasers, enablers, and otherwise act against their best interest. (I've been getting gushing notes of thanks back.)
Here's a link to the podcast (which I hope you'll share!):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/28/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Listen online, or to download, click "play in your default player." The show has also been accepted on iTunes, so you can listen there. It's really exciting to see, too, the audience is growing each week.
As a recovered doormat, I only wish I had a book like this when I was growing a spine. Don't miss this show!
Brownback Buttheads Against Free Tweets
Amanda Marcotte has a good one on SlateXX (I didn't know it was her post until I read "ladyparts," and then went back up to look at the byline) on Governor Sam Brownback going after a tweeting teen:
The scene: A teenage girl in a high school group called Youth in Government uses her fancy new tweeting phone to exercise her constitutionally-protected right to call a governor a butthead. (Or, to be more specific, to say that he "sucked" and to create the hashtag #heblowsalot.) Her perceptive abilities proved accurate, when said Gov. Sam Brownback reveals that he uses taxpayer dollars to gather evidence that teenagers are making fun of him on Twitter, and to use that evidence to get them in trouble at school. Because the butthead quotient in this story wasn't high enough already, the school responded to Brownback's sniveling about adolescents with political opinions by attempting to force the teenage girl in question to write a letter of apology to Gov. Brownback. The teenager in question, Emma Sullivan, 18, responded by demonstrating her superior understanding of the basic principles of democracy by refusing, and instead causing the easily perturbed governor even more consternation by asking for a sit-down meeting to ask direct questions of the governor, furthering demonstrating no doubt to him that everything started to go wrong with this country when they let women have the vote.I suppose it's not that big a surprise that someone like Brownback, who has a strong belief that women should not be in control of their own ladyparts, would also find the notion that teenage girls have the legal right to make fun of him deeply threatening.
Love that she refused to eat crow. Free speech prevails!
Rossini The Gastronome
Via Dr. Michael Eades, Richard David Feinman blogs:
Rossini said that he had only cried twice as an adult. The first time was when he heard Paganini play the violin and the second, when a truffled turkey fell in the water at a boating party.
Who You Are Is How You Are
Saturday night, I went out for happy hour drinks with friends (the "drinkertarians," I call this particular group). We were seated in a low booth sort of situation and one of them got a little exuberant in the hand motions department and doused the entire bottom of me and my handbag entirely with my wine.
He said he felt terrible and kept apologizing. I laughed, and hugged him, and told him not to worry about it (I pointed out that I was wearing a taffeta evening gown skirt, so it handles water well!) and we both wiped ourselves and the booth seat off.
Afterward, one of my friends who was there with her husband said he judges who people are by how they react when somebody spills a drink on them. (Apparently, I passed!)
For judging people, of course there's the waitress metric (if somebody treats the waitress like a lowly serf), and the old lady standard (old ladies can read men, and if a man's a good man, like nobody can), but what are other ways to tell who somebody is without them saying a word to you?
The Lie That You Need Fiber
The nanny staters are increasingly trying to control us, down to which morsels of food we put in our mouths, yet big cereal manufacturers like the dispensers of unhealth in the form of Fiber One are allowed to lie like hell on the TV about the supposed health of their products. (I heard yet another one of those spots this morning while listening to the politics and media shows on CNN.)
Luckily, there's Dr. Michael Eades to lay out the truth about fiber, which I try to eat very little of so I won't suffer its ill-effects. Eades blogs:
...Despite numerous studies showing that fiber doesn't really do squat for us healthwise, everyone continues to recommend it.To paraphrase John Huston: Evidence? We ain't got no evidence. We don't need no evidence. We don't have to show you any stinking evidence.
Into this society of bowel movement lovers a researcher comes along and writes a paper showing how fiber causes an increase in regularity. Our intrepid researcher's name is Dr. Paul L. McNeil; he is a cell biologist at the Medical College of Georgia. I'll let him tell how it all works.
When you eat high-fiber foods, they bang up against the cells lining the gastrointestinal tract, rupturing their outer covering. What we are saying is this banging and tearing increases the level of lubricating mucus. It's a good thing.Indeed?
He goes on:
It's a bit of a paradox, but what we are saying is an injury at the cell level can promote health of the GI tract as a whole....So, we have a situation where a product causes damage to the cells lining a tube, causing them to produce a lot of mucus in an attempt to protect themselves. In the process many of these cells die and are replaced by new cells. And this is perceived as a good thing.
Get all the goodies on the damage fiber does to you at the Eades link above.
Cyber Monday: Save $120 On A Kindle DX
Was $379, but save $120 at Amazon...while supplies last. Offer ends November 28. Linkiepoo: Kindle DX, Free 3G, 9.7" E Ink Display, 3G Works Globally
More Cyber Monday deals here
And thank you again to everybody shopping through my links and supporting me, my writing, and this site.
Tonight On Advice Goddess Radio: Therapist Beverly Engel On Pleasers
She's the author of the terrific book The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- and Start Standing Up for Yourself
Beverly Engel, in her terrific book "The Nice Girl Syndrome," cautions that the motive for being "nice" in the face of cruel treatment is often guilt, shame, fear of confrontation, fear of rejection, and an intense fear of being alone.Being so compliant is pretty counterproductive because men are into the thrill of the chase, not the thrill of a woman who's on them like a tick on a dog no matter what they do. To be treated with respect, you need to be the disappearing one; disappear from the dating scene until you develop the self-respect to express your needs like you have a right to have them. You'll be ready to date when you require only one person in your life to feel whole -- and it isn't some guy who does with your dignity what other people do with Quilted Northern.
She'll be on my radio show on Sunday night, 7 p.m. Pacific time, 10 p.m. Eastern, for an hour, and WE NEED YOUR CALLS!
Listen live at this link (or use it to download the podcast afterward -- click "play in your default player" to download to your iPod, etc.):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/28/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
The show has also been accepted on iTunes, so you can subscribe there. Just search "Amy Alkon." Or go every week to:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
Call in Sunday night, 7-8 p.m. Pacific, 10-11 p.m. Eastern for advice on love, dating, sex, relationships or to talk with Scott and me about the subjects we're discussing.
Call-in number once the show is on and live (at 7 p.m.): (347) 326-9761 (New York area code).
Oh, and the show opening is finally finished -- and it's fab. It's by Xenia Shin of the underground L.A. band Laco$te.
What A Difference A Leg Of Lamb And A Gravyboat Of Melted Butter Make
Vegan vs. omnivore (photos of Brit "health" guru and vegetarianism promoter Gillian McKeith and Nigella Lawson, who eats meat, butter and deserts).
via @tsappora (via @DrEades)
What's Next, Banning Pillows?
If what I see on crappy cop shows is correct, a pillow makes a pretty good silencer.
Apparently, so does the Chore Boy household scrubber, and the govern-nannies are going all banny on its ass (when "stockpile"[d]). Bob Unruh writes at WND:
A letter has surfaced from the federal government warning against consumers stockpiling Chore Boy household scrubbers because they can be considered a component of a gun silencer and, therefore, regulated by federal gun laws.The letter is from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the ATF. It was obtained by David Codrea, who publishes online as the Gun Rights Examiner.
And it comes from a federal agency that earlier determined a 14-inch-long piece of shoestring must be regulated under federal gun laws and restrictions because it is a "machinegun."
Incentivizing The Drug War
Radley Balko writes on the HuffPo about a woman whose beating outside a bar was ignored by cops -- who care much more about the drug crimes that bring in the dollars:
Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn't bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants."The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats," said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.
"When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside," Downing said.
...In an explosive Village Voice series last year, current and former NYPD officers told the publication that supervising officers encouraged them to either downgrade or not even bother to file reports for assault, robbery and even sexual assault. The theory is that the department faces political pressure to produce statistics showing that violent crime continues to drop. Since then, other New Yorkers have told the Voice that they have been rebuffed by NYPD when trying to report a crime.
The most perverse policy may be asset forfeiture. Under civil asset forfeiture, police can seize property from people merely suspected of drug crimes. So long as police can show even the slightest link of drug activity to a car, some cash, or even a home, they can seize it. In the majority of cases, most or all of the seized cash goes back to the police department.
"Touched By Blubber"
LS sent me a link to a story I've seen around, about the airline passenger who says he was forced to stand for seven hours (from Anchorage to Philly) after a morbidly obese man sat next to him and he was squeezed out of his seat.
MSNBC Travel editor Joe Myxter quotes Chris Elliott's interview with Arthur Berkowitz, the passenger who stood:
"His size required both armrests to be raised up and allowed for his body to cover half of my seat," Berkowitz said. "It did not allow me to use my seatbelt during takeoff and landing as well as required me to stand in the aisle and galley area for most of the seven-hour-plus flight."...Liz Landau, a spokesperson for US Airways, confirmed that Berkowitz was inconvenienced by a passenger of size and told msnbc.com "it was his choice to stand."
"His seatmate had the same right to his seat as Mr. Berkowitz did to his. So here's where the diplomacy and cooperation of all passengers comes into play," the airline said in a statement.Berkowitz was unhappy with the $200 voucher the airline offered him for his experience, at which point he contacted Elliott.
"We have attempted to address this customer's service concerns," the airline statement said, "but offering increasing amounts of compensation based on a threat of a safety violation isn't really fair -- especially when the passenger himself said he didn't follow crew members' instructions and fasten his seatbelt.
"The way to ensure you have space available next to you -- whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight -- is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance."
A commenter, beanathome, on MSNBC writes:
There is no reason whatsoever to believe this man's story that he could not possibly sit in his own seat. I am a "person of size," and I've dealt with these people who react the moment that they see me. I fit in the seat just fine--thank you. It is extremely likely that this man could have sat down and buckled his belt if he wanted to, but did not want anyone else "touching" him. That the airline is holding it's ground tells one that this man chose to stand up because he didn't like sitting next to an obese person who could not sit in his seat without "touching" others (and, no, I don't "touch" others--I can sit with the arm rest down--though my blubbery arms might "invade your space").If this man is that particular, then he should just have refused to raise the arm rest. If the other man can't fit with the arm rests down, then the other man can't fit and he should be taken off the plane. If the staff insisted that the arm rest be raised, then there would have been reason to protest.
Seriously, it gets old, old, old to listen to people complaining about being "touched" by someone else's blubber. If the person is really so fat that s/he cannot sit down, then the situation is one thing, and it's up to you to say something to the staff because it is, in fact, against regulations if people cannot sit down and fasten their seat belts. But if the person is--OMG--"spilling over into your seat" just like someone might on a bus . . . seriously. It's the cheap seats. If you don't like touching other people, then pay for first class. When you are in steerage, you don't get to be quite so fastidious.
And, no, the person "of size" doesn't have to pay for a second seat because you don't like being touched by blubber. I believe you should have a right to keep the arm rest down, and if one is forced to raise it by the staff, I think you have a case. But, if the "person of size" can make it between the arm rests, then you don't have a case. I don't actually believe this person when he says the man couldn't fit in the seat with the arm rests down--we only have his word for it, and given the behavior of the airline, I don't believe him one.little.bit.
Agree? Disagree?
My thinking: Take up the space beyond the armrests bordering your seat? Buy the space beyond the armrests.
Cyber Monday At Amazon Starts Today
Those of you who read and comment here have been just wonderful about shopping through my Amazon links, here on my blog and at Amy's Mall. Thank you -- it helps support me and my site.
Here's the latest: Cyber Monday At Amazon
Any of my links you click through to get to Amazon will mean I get a little kickback (at no charge to you), or you can go through the little "powered by Amazon" logo at the top left of Amy's Mall. Thanks again -- means a lot that you're helping me out in this way!
Black Pirate On Black Friday
I love LA. Photo by Gregg Sutter.
Gregg to Pirate: Is there a story?
Pirate: There's always a story.
Gregg: Would it be okay if my girlfriend put this up on advicegoddess.com?
Pirate thinks for a moment: Sure.
Gregg to me: Normally, it's just Jesus walking down the street in this neck of the woods. (Fairfax area).
And he's not kidding -- we've seen him, and a guy dressed up like Elvis waiting for a bus.
6-Year-Old Plays Doctor, Charged With First Degree Sexual Assault
From Channel 3000, this Wisconsin boy "played doctor" with two 5-year-old friends and had the law come down on him. The prosecutor is Grant County Attorney Lisa Riniker:
Attorneys for the parents of the 6-year-old, who is being referred to as "D," said that Riniker has gone too far by bringing a felony sex charge against a first-grader for touching a 5-year-old girl inappropriately while playing doctor last fall."That behavior by a prosecutor is outrageous," said Christopher Cooper, an attorney for the boy's parents.
Cooper and attorney David Sigale filed the federal suit last week, alleging that Riniker wants D to sign a consent decree admitting some level of guilt.
"We're certainly hoping to vindicate D in the eyes of the law," Sigale said.
"He (the boy) says he didn't do it, and the little girl says he didn't do it. The little girl says he touched the back of one of her buttocks," Cooper said.
Throw him in jail with all the rest of the kiddie rapists, and throw away the key!
"(The experts say) a 6-year-old child is unable to intellectually and emotionally associate sexual gratification with the act that D has been accused of committing," Cooper said.In justification for the charge, Riniker is quoted in the lawsuit saying "the Legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute ... the legislature did no such thing."
The lawsuit also alleges the charges were brought because the 5-year-old is the daughter of a high-ranking official in Grant County.
This is the cost of too many laws, too broadly applied. And laws, if they exist, can be as broadly applied as the language in them allows.
via @WalterOlson
What Your Kid Needs At 17
An example showing why America's going to be owned by China in a few decades via the Waterford Patch. Paul Petrone writes:
It took two long days, but for Kathy Calle and her niece, Karisa Pasay, it was worth it."It is all for this kid," said Calle, pointing to a picture of her son on her smart phone. "He's 17, and he needs this TV."
Calle and Pasay, both of Moosup, camped out at the entrance of Best Buy in Waterford starting on Wednesday morning in preparation of the Black Friday sales today. The number one item they both wanted was a $199.99 Sharp 42" television, a product listed normally for $549.99 on Best Buy's website.
Not that the two were alone. Thousands and thousands of people stood in line at several of Waterford's largest chain stores, including Target, Walmart and Toys "R" Us, for a chance at deals. Most of the stores had "doorbusters," such as the 42" television, where there was a limited amount of the product that people at the front of the line would get. Also, the stores had general sales as well on nearly every product.
"It's a family tradition," said Jeremiah Csubak, who went to Best Buy with some of his cousins. "We don't get to see each other that often so we just hang out in line."
It was also the first year many of the stores opened at midnight. Before, the stores would open early in the morning, around 4 or 5 a.m.
"It is easier at midnight," Csubak said. "Now we don't have to stay up all night."
Seeking Holiday Love Temp
Craigslist ad, San Francisco:
WANTED: Holiday Girlfriend - 28 (mission district)Let me be clear. I want a girlfriend. But, I don't really want a girlfriend.
I just want one for the holidays.
Let's recognize something. The holidays suck, especially for us single people. All of your coupled friends are going to be doing couple things: snuggling by the fire, going to dinner at each others' parents houses, blahblahbarf.
Let's recognize another thing. Deep down inside, you don't want to be alone for the holidays. You want someone to do all of those cute snuggly things with, someone to get fat and keep warm next to (let's also recognize that it's getting fucking cold here), and someone to accompany you to your friends' coupley holiday parties so they don't keep thinking you're a loser destined for permanent solo status.
But, you've spent all year working on your career / training for charity bike rides / getting drunk and haven't had the time or inclination to track down and capture a boyfriend. And even if you did, you're not really sure you'd want to keep him after the holidays are over, anyway.
The solution:
Be my girlfriend for the holidays. And only for the holidays.How it works:
You reply with a picture and a brief bio (250 words max. To give you an idea, this posting is 499). If it seems like a good fit we'll set up a casual mini-date (coffee, beer, or whatever). If that's a success and we're both feeling it, we'll date until 11:59PM, January 2nd, 2012. After that we can still be friends (unless we hate each other, then we can downshift to the occasional drunken booty call).The benefits:
• You have someone to keep you company on these witch-tit-cold San Francisco nights. Did I mention I'm an excellent cuddler? (I have references.)
• I like to cook. Especially for others. Nothing too fancy, but always tasty and satisfying. As long as you're an omnivore, you win.
• Having done it professionally for some years to pay for school, I know my way around a bar. Same goes for wine cellars and beer coolers. Homemade winter warmers? Done.
• Hate holiday music? Me too. Seeing as every other establishment or event you step into will be playing it, I'll spare you the excess.
• Love taking photos? Sweet. Let's wear gaudy holiday attire and make ridiculous Xmas postcards to send your friends and family. Just for the lulz.
• Worried about finding someone to kiss on New Year's Eve who doesn't look (or sound) like Sloth's cousin? Boom! Got you covered.About Me:
28 years old, small business owner, active (cyclist, surfer, snowboarder), outgoing, easy on the eyes.
Not About You (aka Dealbreakers or, Don't Bother if You Exhibit the Following):
Heavy drug use, laziness, prudishness, still in love with old boy or girlfriend from years past (or if you secretly are, at least have the damn decency to not blab on about it).Interested? Then send your pic and bio and get this ball rolling.
Property Rights, Schmoperty Rights
Bob Unruh writes at WND of a couple looking to build a home who bought a $23K plot of land in a residential subdivision and got started -- only to have the EPA come down on them, tell them to stop and threaten them with $40 million in fines:
The case developed when the Sacketts bought a .63-acre parcel of land for $23,000 in a subdivision in their hometown of Priest Lake, Idaho. The land is 500 feet from a lake, had a city water and sewer tap assigned, had no running or standing water and was in the middle of other developed properties.The couple obtained all of the needed permits for their project and started work. Suddenly, the Environmental Protection Agency showed up on the building site, demanded that the work stop and issued a "compliance order" that the couple remove the fill they had brought in, restore the land to its native condition, plant trees every 10 feet, fence it off and let it sit for three years.
...Then they would, for costs estimated at roughly a quarter of a million dollars, be allowed to "request" permission from the government to build on their own land.
Or else, warned the agency, there is the possibility of fines of $37,500 per day - with the total now surpassing $40 million.
Chantell reported she was told by the EPA that if "you're buying a piece of property you should know if it's in wetlands."
"I started to do research. I said, 'So how do I find this piece of property in the wetlands [registry]'? And she said, 'Here's the coordinates.' When I actually pulled up the coordinates, it's not there."
No matter, said the government. Do what we want.
...The brief explains that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that "no person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." But the Clean Water Act gives the EPA authority to issue compliance orders, then fine defendants who are "in violation."
"Any citizen engaged in a range of activities may run afoul of the act," the brief explains. "The Clean Water Act's reach is extremely broad, requiring a permit for the discharge of 'pollutants' from a 'point source' into the 'waters of the United States,' which phrase has been interpreted by regulation to include 'wetlands.'"
The regulations, the brief contends, had been defined so broadly by the EPA that they have pertained to "land that appears to be totally dry."
"If the EPA has completed an analysis and made a determination that the property contains jurisdictional 'wetlands,' the citizen has no right to judicial review of that analysis. If the citizen hires professionals to conduct a 'wetlands' determination, EPA is not obligated to accept it. Despite any evidence, professional opinions, or agency advice the citizen obtains, EPA may still impose sanctions by a compliance order if it has 'any information' that" it wants to use to call it wetlands, the brief explains.
I Have Magical Powers!
I am able to have food that has lower salt content in it simply by entering a grocery store and say, going to the bacon aisle and choosing Oscar Mayer lower sodium bacon. Or...I can even pop on over to the fruit and vegetable aisle and buy a cucumber, for no added salt content! Amazing feat, huh!
Well, it must be, because the government is on the verge of forcing manufacturers to cut salt content in food. Walter Olson writes at Cato:
With little publicity, the federal Food and Drug Administration has begun laying groundwork for one of the more audacious regulatory initiatives of the Obama administration: mandatory reductions in the salt content of processed foods in the supermarket aisle and at restaurants.In a September 15 "Request for Comments, Data, and Information" (PDF) published in the Federal Register, the FDA solicits from the public "comments, data, and evidence relevant to the dietary intake of sodium as well as current and emerging approaches designed to promote sodium reduction." Among the specific ideas it has in mind: setting federally prescribed "targets" for "stepwise" reductions in the amount of salt allowable in various foods, the phased nature of the reductions indicated because consumers' "taste preference for sodium is acquired and can be modified."
As Walter notes:
It's one thing to limit adulteration or contamination of foods, or the use of mysterious chemical additives; it is another to order the reformulation of recipes to reduce intake of a substance that 1) occurs naturally in virtually all foods; 2) is beneficial to health in many circumstances; and 3) has been sought out and purposely added to the human diet through recorded history....Reports have begun to come out that the salt panic has been exaggerated and may even pose some health dangers of its own. "New review questions benefit of cutting down on salt," reported Reuters about a new review of more than 160 scientific studies published in the American Journal of Hypertension. "It's time to end the war on salt," per a July Scientific American article by Melinda Wenner Moyer.
My recent blog items here and here on the "science" on salt leading people to want to cut it, and the actual science.
Found Poetry
A girl who works at a cafe I go to went a little crazy with the label gun.
Where Does Government Get Off Telling Business What To Charge?
I love when I fly with Gregg, first because I'm with Gregg, but also for all the perks. He flies back and forth to Detroit for his work -- kind of a lot -- so Delta treats him like a valued customer in a lot of ways. One of these ways is not charging him for luggage. If I'm flying on United, they'll stick it to me for $25 a bag (under 50 lbs.) -- even though if you weighed my bag and me, we'd collectively weigh a hell of a lot less than some passengers before you even get to their luggage.
I'd love, luvvvv to not pay that $25 -- or to have flights charged like they charge for candy at some grocery stores: by the pound. But, I wouldn't love that if the luggage charge were removed because some meddling lawmaker started telling a business what they can charge -- which is exactly what Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is trying to do with the two bills she's introduced to curbed checked luggage fees. Via Consumerist's Chris Morran:
Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has come up with what she's called the Airline Passenger Basic Airline Standards to Improve Customer Satisfaction (BASICS) Act, which would require airlines to allow passengers one checked and one carry-on bag for free. The second piece of legislation that Landrieu intends to introduce is the Fair Airline Industry Revenue (FAIR) Act, which would impose additional fees on airlines that don't comply.Explains the Senator, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security:
When an airline advertises a flight, that is how much it should cost, plain and simple. Passengers should not be charged additional fees for checked or carry-on baggage, drinkable water or other reasonable requests....Many airlines consider checking a bag not to be a right, but a privilege - and one with a hefty fee attached. The Airline Passenger BASICS Act will guarantee passengers one checked bag without the financial burden of paying a fee, or the headache of trying to fit everything into a carry-on.
You see it in the Constitution where it says you have a right to fly without paying for the luggage you take with you?
I am both a clotheshorse and ADHD-bad at packing, and my idea of traveling light is taking a single large suitcase, filled to just under 50 lbs. (Gregg sometimes asks if I'll be checking luggage, just to be cute. I ALWAYS check luggage -- except for the time I flew to Sacramento for the afternoon to do a reading of I See Rude People.)
Bills like these are win-win situations for lawmakers, meddling in places where they have no business. The voters, for the most part, are just glad to save a few bucks, and don't realize the cost -- the ultimate cost -- of the government strong-arming business at every turn...one of which is that business goes out of business or that costs are passed on to all consumers to pay for the price of making a freebie for some.
The Red Card Solution For Foreign Workers
Summary here:
Smart cardsIn order to allow these workers to enter the U.S. and keep track of them, a new non-citizen work permit is issued. The smart card would contain personal information encoded on the card itself in a microchip, much like a credit card, and be "swiped" in order to cross the border, providing workers the ability to come and go at will, instead of feeling stuck permanently in the U.S..
Controlling the border
The Red Card Solution will help secure the border by providing an easy method that allows legal workers to go through a background check and enter the country legally. This will free up the resources and manpower needed to control the border, and eliminate the vast majority of illegal border crossings.
The private sector solution
The Red Card Solution allows private employment agencies, licensed by the U.S. government, to open offices in foreign countries and issue non-citizen worker permits following a required detailed background check. This program is paid for by applicant fees and businesses that want legal workers -- not by taxpayers.
Tracking workers
Employers and law enforcement would be able to check the legal status of temporary workers by simply "swiping" their cards to verify they are allowed to work at a certain location. It will remain illegal to hire a worker not in the country legally.
Effective Law Enforcement
The most powerful motivating force is human self-interest. It is what drives free markets. The Red Card Solution uses that principal to create a system that will reduce illegal immigration, control the borders, and strengthen our economy. Once a legal non-citizen worker card becomes available, it will be the first resort of businesses wanting to operate legally and employees who want to come out of the shadows.
Full details here.
For or against?
via Mickey Kaus
Keep Amy In The Black (Friday) Deals
Thanks to all who have been supporting me, my writing, and the work I put into this site by shopping through my Amazon links. If you go to Amy's Mall, if you click on the "powered by Amazon" logo at the top left, I'll get kickbacky credit for all your purchases. Same if you go through any link to Amazon I've posted on my site...like this one for Black Friday Deals
And please consider picking up a copy of my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society. If you buy it new through the link above, it's only $12.75, and it goes against my advance, which will help me sell the next one (my agent is taking it out in January, so book sales now are super-helpful!).
Occupy Der Fuhrer
The Hitler vid repurposed:
via @laobserved
Danielle Crittenden Dispenses With An Urban Legend
Absolutely hilarious piece by Crittenden on the HuffPo,"Bartender, a Dirty Martini With a Tampon!" about the silly alarm bells that have been sounded that kids are putting vodka-soaked tampons up their butts:
Carefully, I poured one ounce of vodka into each glass. Here were the results:I. Regular tampon in plastic applicator
Notes: At first glance, this looked like a cocktail you might be served at your gynecologist's Christmas party. No need for a garnish. My concerns about the plastic applicator, however, proved well-founded. It drank up a little, maybe half an ounce, before it could hold no more. Not even a 13-year-old would get tipsy from that. I moved on to the next beaker.
II. Super tampon in cardboard applicator
Notes: At first I was concerned the applicator might unfurl or dissolve, but this did not happen. The tampon slurped up the vodka a little faster than the one in the plastic applicator, but then seemed to pause at exactly the same point -- at half an ounce or so, before giving up. It looked slightly more engorged at the tip, like it was about to be sick. I tried stirring it around to see if it would seep up a more that way, but it didn't. Clearly, this tampon was not going to be able to hold its vodka either.
III. Super-plus tampon, no applicator
Notes: Poured it a double, on the assumption it could hold more than the others. Dropped it in the martini beaker like a bleached tea bag. It immediately tossed back one ounce... an ounce and a half maybe... swelling quickly with pride. Then it stopped. Wait, a super plus couldn't handle a double?? I swished it around, trying to mop up some more, but it was finished.
Conclusion on methodology: My experiment showed me that the soppy, unfurled tampon was the only way to go.
The Test
First I had to wring the damn thing out a little. I didn't want to lose too much of the vodka so I kind of shook it above the glass and gently squeezed it. I would estimate that about a half-ounce was lost. Then I looked at it a little despairingly. Well, friend, how were we going to do this?
I repaired to the bathroom and -- without too much information here -- managed to wad the thing up and push it in where it was supposed to go. (Did it help that I've had three kids? Possibly.) Girls, don't do this in your best party dresses: I think I lost another half-ounce in the process as it splattered on to my clothes and the floor. No need to say "Bottoms up!"
Reaction:
Oh sweet mother of Jeez----
Owwwwww.....
Absolut... firewater!!!!!!! Holy sheeeeeeeee...
It felt like someone had thrown a lit match in there. I began hopping around and breathing in the rapid, short puffs I'd learned in birth classes, so long ago, before I realized I didn't need to breathe like that if I took the epidural...
"Ten Is The New Two"
That's Hans Bader at OpenMarket quoting a WSJ piece by Lenore Skenazy of Free Range Kids in his piece about how Amtrak has banned 12-year-old unaccompanied child riders:
In Japan, 6-year-old children are not only allowed to ride the train by themselves, but are eligible for a special fare. Not so in America, where Amtrak has now raised the age that children can ride the train by themselves from age 8 to age 13, effectively barring many working-class children from seeing their father (or non-custodial parent) after a divorce or parental break-up (or seeing their grandma). In America, unlike Japan, children are expected to be chained to their parents to prevent the one-in-a-million chance that something bad will happen to them if they are allowed a little freedom. Could the greater Japanese belief in children's individual responsibility have something to do with how much better Japanese kids do on tests?Amtrak admits that it had no experiences with anything bad happening to unaccompanied 8- to 13-year-olds who rode it, it just banned them out of an "abundance of concern" -- that is, a baseless fear about safety. But taking away children's mobility and independence is not "safe," but deadly. Kids are getting obese as they are kept inside playing video games by busy parents, rather than being allowed to roam the neighborhood unaccompanied, which society used to permit. When I was in second grade, I and my twin brother would play outside for hours unsupervised, walking miles from our home in the woods and on our street, and getting lots of good exercise. Today, this would be considered child neglect by our parents, even though my father was depicted in a front-page obituary in the local paper as a model citizen. The home-habitat of the average child -- the area in which they are allowed to travel on their own -- has shrunken to one-ninth of its former size as parents are expected to be helicopter parents (and even rewarded for it with sole custody when fighting over custody of a child in the aftermath of a divorce).
Skenazy writes:
...Even when Amtrak does allow minors to travel on their own, look at the rules it imposes: 13 to 15 year olds must wear a special wrist band identifying them as youngsters. They cannot travel after 9:05 p.m. They cannot get off at an unmanned station. An adult must be at both ends to sign them in and drop them off.Why not just put them in a crate with a chew toy and be done with it?
There is one more requirement for teens traveling on Amtrak alone. They also must be "interviewed by station personnel to determine if the child is capable of traveling alone." So here's an idea: Do away with the age restrictions and go with a basic interview for all the minors who want to travel solo. If they can tell you where they're going, how they'll know when to get off, and what they plan to do for supper, let them ride the rails.
There's a difference between minors and babies. But if we never let the babies grow up and have some adventures on their own, they could end up as befuddled as Amtrak officials.
Bend Over Again, Taxpayers!
Via Fox, the Labor Dept. will allow ex-Solyndra workers to come back for more taxpayer dollars:
Hundreds of workers who were laid off by the bankrupt solar firm that received $528 million in taxpayer support are eligible for additional federal aid, the Labor Department has ruled.The potential benefits for laid-off Solyndra workers would fall under a program known as "trade adjustment assistance." The taxpayer-backed benefits are supposed to help workers who lost their jobs presumably because production was shifted overseas.
In a Nov. 18 decision, the Labor Department ruled that former Solyndra employees meet the criteria. Echoing an argument that has been made for months by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and other Obama administration officials, the department determined that Solyndra's workers were hurt by foreign competition.
...But the Obama administration has argued that, while they are disappointed with the outcome of Solyndra, the company fell victim to global market forces -- officials say a glut of solar panels out of China, coupled with slackening demand in Europe, drove down the price of panels and helped put Solyndra out of business.
I See Book Sales
My dream literary agent is signing me (I should get the revised contract this week), and she'll take my book out to publishers in January. It's important that I sell as many copies of I See Rude People before then. Also, it's funny and people seem to like it.
So, if you haven't bought a copy, or need a fun and inexpensive Christmas present for people in your life, please consider I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society!
That's Not Really The Spider's Ferrari, Either
Loved this headline at Sci Am, "Male Spiders Scam Females with Gift-Wrapped Garbage."
Cynthia Graber reports on a Maria J. Albo study in BMC Evolutionary Biology, "Worthless donations: male deception and female counter play in a nuptial gift-giving spider":
Male nursery web spiders often woo potential lady-friends with gifts wrapped in silk. Mating may ensue, during which a female unspools the present, expecting to find a tasty treat. But the males can be unscrupulous. Some offerings contain inedible plant seeds or empty insect exoskeletons.How do males get away with such egregious behavior?
Researchers provided males with potential gifts--either a fly or an inedible item, such as a bit of cotton. Other males had to give it a shot with no gift at all.
The empty-handed males were mostly unsuccessful at mating. Whereas those with a gift could get the girl. But if the gift was worthless, the females quickly realized the deceit and pushed the copulating males off. Which gave the males less time to transfer sperm.
I wrote about insects' "nuptial gifts" here, in "Give Fleece A Chance":
We aren't the only species that goes on dinner dates. Anthropologist Helen Fisher calls gifts of food one of the "universal features of wooing" -- and guess who's almost always responsible for the check? Fisher writes in Anatomy of Love that the boy black-tipped hang fly plies his crush with aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies. (Hard to say which wine goes best.) "The male common tern often brings a little fish to his beloved. The male roadrunner presents a little lizard." And then, of course, there's the ultimate courtship gift, the male praying mantis letting the female praying mantis eat his head during sex....Actually, a glass or two of something-or-other, not dinner, is all you should be buying on the first date. You don't shell out big for a near-stranger. The point is getting to know a girl, not getting to know whether she prefers Kobe beef to lobster. And yes, the person who does the asking out -- usually the man, poor dear -- should do the paying. On at least the first and probably the second date. Beyond then, if a woman's wallet seems welded shut, have a little talk and suss out whether she worries you'll think ill of her for paying (some men do), or whether she's just a leech with lipgloss.
Pay Your Own Damn Student Loan
I'm opposed to bailouts, large and small. GM should have gone bankrupt, and students should pay their own damn student loans. Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg write at reason about three reasons student loans shouldn't be forgiven. For example:
1. These loans are voluntary. All borrowers are excrutiatingly well-informed of how much they're borrowing and how much they're going to have to pay back.About half of all college students take out loans and when they do, every lender clearly spells out exactly how much you're on the hook for and what your monthly payments are going to be after you leave school.
Critics say that 18-year-olds don't understand what they're getting into and shouldn't be held accountable for their decisions. But that's an argument against letting kids attend college, not against letting them borrow against future earnings to get a degree that will increase lifetime earnings by somewhere between about $280,000 and $1 million.
...College is an important decision - and it's made even more expensive by heavily subsidized loans. But letting people off the hook for loans they made with full knowledge of the costs will not only dissuade anyone from lending to students with no collateral other than their future work output. It will make it that much harder to argue against the next call for bailouts from the next group of special interests.
The High Price Of A "Free" Education
Gotta love the tortured logic of Bob Samuels over at the HuffPo, in his justification for universally free college education -- that it'll be cheaper for everyone. Over at reason, Seth McKelvey corrects his tortured logic:
Unfortunately, the magic formula of getting more for nothing doesn't work any better in higher education than it does anywhere else in reality.
Samuels writes:
Not only is higher education seen as a key to economic advancement, but if all 18-24 year olds were in college, we would reduce the unemployment rate by 2 million people, and fewer people would be in need of governmental assistance.
McKelvey logic-checks his ass:
Translation: Giving more people more expansive governmental assistance will reduce the number of people on governmental assistance. This will save money. Somehow.
TSA Agent Charged With Sexual Assault - In Uniform
Via Lisa Simeone, a TSA agent, in uniform, and flashing his badge (according to the victim) was charged with sexual assault. Thousands of TSA agents sexually assault innocent Americans every week, of course; the difference is, this guy didn't do it at a checkpoint in an airport.
The story from NBCWashington:
The victim said she and a friend were on the block when they were approached by an unknown man, who forced sexual contact on her. After interviewing the victim, police canvassed the immediate area in search of the perpetrator.Authorities said a short distance away, they found 52-year-old Harold Glenn Rodman, who fit the victim's description. Rodman, an employee with the TSA, was exiting his house while police were canvassing, and he was taken into custody.
Rodman has been charged with aggravated sexual battery, object sexual penetration, forcible sodomy and abduction with intent to defile.
Police said Rodman was wearing his TSA uniform during the assault.
What's Trickling Down Are Lies
Hans Bader fact-checks Obama's ass on Herbert Hoover's supposed tax breaks for the wealthy. In fact, writes Bader at OpenMarket.org:
Herbert Hoover increased marginal tax rates on the wealthy to 63 percent, and more than doubled government spending as a percentage of the economy. But in his political speeches, President Obama continues to falsely claim that Hoover gave "tax cuts" to the rich and slashed the government to promote "trickle-down economics." In his November 14 remarks at a campaign event in Ko Olina, Hawaii, Obama said:So this competition for new jobs and businesses and middle-class security, that's the race I know we can win. But you don't win it by saying every American is on their own. We're not going to win it if we just hand out more tax cuts to people who don't need them, let companies play by their own rules without any restriction, and we just hope somehow that the success of the wealthiest few translates in the prosperity for everybody else.We have tried that, by the way. We tried it for 10 years. It's part of what got into the mess that we're in. It doesn't work. It didn't work for Herbert Hoover, when it was called trickle-down economics during the Depression. It didn't work between 2000 and 2008, and it won't work today.
Four Perspectives, UC Davis Pepper-Spraying
Listen Online, Download The Podcast: Scott Barry Kaufman On Advice Goddess Radio
NEW! The latest episode of Advice Goddess Radio! Fascinating Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman on creativity, imagination, innovation, and maximizing your potential.
Listen online at the link or download by clicking "play in your default player":
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/21/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Gingrich Calls For An Alternative To Social Security
Via TalkingPointsMemo, Gingrich is set to announce an alternative to Social Security. The AP's Philip Elliott reports that Newt Gingrich wants to give younger workers the option of choosing private retirement accounts as an alternative:
Gingrich's plan would also let the markets determine how much money workers who choose private accounts would get each month.His aides did not immediately provide a price tag for the proposal.
"Growth and innovation means securing and strengthening Social Security by empowering Americans with the option to invest in personal savings accounts," Gingrich said in remarks prepared for delivery. "This gives Americans ownership over their retirement and the opportunity to unleash the power of the market to enjoy prosperous retirements beyond their most optimistic expectations, while also wiping out all future liabilities in the Social Security system."
Gingrich said his plan would reduce the inequality between workers who paid into Social Security as their sole retirement account and higher income workers who benefit from private funds.
The unretirement many are going to face, from a LewRockwell.com piece by Gary North:
They counted on Social Security, but they never looked at the numbers. The article says that 37% said they have no fear because "it will work itself out." They have been saying this since age 18. They think the federal government will be there to make their golden years comfortable...."29% of people in their 60s have saved less than $25,000 for retirement." This is the real world - not the world of those with $100,000 in investable capital.
Raise Your Hand If You Think This Will Stop At The Afghan Border
We've grown accustomed to search sans probable cause of every passenger at every airport. How long until the government reaches a little more and a little more? People who pooh-pooh how the TSA is violating our rights in the name of "safety" need to look forward a little.
Via Lisa Simeone, a New York Times story by Rod Nordland, "Afghanistan Has Big Plans for Biometric Data," about how Afghanistan fingerprints and photographs all travelers who pass through Kabul International Airport, arriving and departing. But that's not all:
Nor do Afghan authorities plan to stop there: their avowed goal is to fingerprint, photograph, and scan the irises of every living Afghan.It is a goal heartily endorsed by the American military, which has already gathered biometric data on two million Afghans who have been encountered by soldiers on the battlefield, or who have just applied for a job with the coalition military or its civilian contractors.
The Kabul airport program is also financed by the United States, with money and training provided by the American Embassy. Americans, like all other travelers, are subject to it.
. . . Gathering the data does not stop at Afghanistan's borders, however, since the military shares all of the biometrics it collects with the United States Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security through interconnected databases.
Occupy A Swanky Hotel
Occupying Wall Street Is so much comfier when you're doing it from a $700-a-night hotel. Candice M. Giove writes in the New York Post:
A key Occupy Wall Street leader and another protester who leads a double life as a businessman ditched fetid tents and church basements for rooms at a luxurious hotel that promises guests can "unleash [their] inner Gordon Gekko," The Post has learned.The $700-per-night W Hotel Downtown last week hosted both Peter Dutro, one of a select few OWS members on the powerful finance committee, and Brad Spitzer, a California-based analyst who not only secretly took part in protests during a week-long business trip but offered shelter to protesters in his swanky platinum-card room.
What was it Orwell wrote?
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Lt. Pike Pepper-Sprays The Art World
At Richard Metzger's Dangerous Minds.
What The Supremes Will Be Looking At On Obamacare
Simon Lazarus and Dahlia Lithwick write on Slate about the Supreme Court's "unexpected and astounding reasons for wanting to hear a challenge to Obamacare":
The health care law, signed by President Obama in March 2010, extended insurance coverage to more than 30 million Americans, in part by requiring citizens to purchase health insurance by 2014 or face a tax penalty. That "individual mandate" provision was the one that launched a thousand Tea Parties, and it's the issue to which most constitutional scrutiny has been devoted: Can the government, under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, regulate "inactivity" (i.e., the decision not to purchase health insurance), and by what principle can we limit such unspeakable powers (i.e., how far can it go in forcing citizens to eat broccoli)?The court will hear arguments on that issue for two hours. It will also entertain 90 minutes of argument on the mandate's "severability"--that is, whether the entire law collapses if the individual mandate provision is deemed unconstitutional. (The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, even as it struck down the mandate, believed that the law itself would stand.)
So that's three-and-a-half hours of debate. What are they going to argue about for the remaining two hours? That's where it gets interesting.
The court asked the parties to brief and argue for an hour whether the lawsuit brought by the states challenging the insurance mandate is barred by the 19th century Anti-Injunction Act. That's a law that precludes claimants from asking for a refund on a tax until the tax has been collected and paid. If the court were to determine that this law applies in this case, then the courts wouldn't have jurisdiction to even consider the challenges until 2015, when the tax-penalty provision goes into effect.
The Ugliest Thing I Own
If I have an Achilles heel, it's my entire foot. If my feet aren't warm, I can't think, I don't want to write. I'm basically at a standstill.
When I go out, I wear boots and cashmere socks.
At home, I wear these ugly things that are like little down sleeping bags for your feet. A fabulous invention. I bought mine for $16 on eBay, used, but they're a pretty good deal on Amazon -- $27 for the sale colors ("sky" and "radish") and a little more for black or white (whatever the hell names they call them). Here's a link: Sierra Designs Down Bootie
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I am the laughingstock of my little world in these. Gregg laughs at me when I wear them and Lilly, my neighbor's little girl (who has about the same fashion sense I do), sometimes sees me in them when I go back to get the laundry, and she thinks they are just the funniest things she's ever seen...pretty much falls on the ground laughing at me in them. Sigh.
(Keep Amy In The) Black Friday Deals Week At Amazon Starts Now
Go through Amy Alkon's magic portal
Oh, and thanks, Jim P (or maybe it was BlogDog), for reminding me to start posting these links. (The DWP also thanks you.)
Tonight On Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
On topics he focuses on, creativity, innovation and imagination and becoming the best you can be. He's written on these subjects for the Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, among others. He's very smart, fascinating, and fun, and it'll be a very interesting and fun show.
About Scott, whose work I've covered in my column ("Extreme Meekover"):
I'm a cognitive psychologist who specializes in the development of intelligence, creativity, and personality in education, business, and society. I apply a variety of perspectives to come to a richer understanding and appreciation of all kinds of minds and ways of achieving greatness.I'm co-founder of The Creativity Post, a non-profit web platform that features quality content on creativity, innovation and imagination and Chief Pedagogical Advisor of The Future Project, an educational reform movement that aims to inspire young Americans through dynamic partnerships. I'm also Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.
He'll be on my radio show on Sunday night, 7 p.m. Pacific time, 10 p.m. Eastern, for an hour, and WE NEED YOUR CALLS!
Listen live at this link (or use it to download the podcast afterward -- click "play in your default player" to download to your iPod, etc.):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/21/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
The show has also been accepted on iTunes, so you can subscribe there. Just search "Amy Alkon." Or go every week to:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
Call in Sunday night, 7-8 p.m. Pacific, 10-11 p.m. Eastern for advice on love, dating, sex, relationships or to talk with Scott and me about the subjects we're discussing.
Call-in number once the show is on and live (at 7 p.m.): (347) 326-9761 (New York area code).
Oh, and the show opening is finally finished -- and it's fab. It's by Xenia Shin of the underground L.A. band Laco$te.
In Case You Haven't Seen It: The Barbarism By Cops At UC Davis
A cop pepper-sprays peacefully seated, still Occupy Wall Street protesters. Casually enacted brutality. Simply, utterly vile:
Pepper spray on non-violent protesters was deemed excessive use of force by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Lt. Pike meme here, per Xeni Jardin.
Making Homes Temporarily Affordable To People Who Can't Afford Them
Aaron Gee writes on American Thinker:
Imagine that you are in the business of lending money. At one time, the business model was simple; money was lent to people who had a high probability of repaying it. The rules were then changed by federal government in the interest of "fairness," with laws passed such as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and federal agencies like Housing & Urban Development (HUD) activated. To stay in business, you must follow the government's dictates.Then the government changes the rules again by changing the percentage of loans that go to certain types of borrowers in the interest of "fairness." Just asking you to increase loans to people with poor credit ratings isn't enough. Community activist groups like ACORN threaten to sue you under the CRA if you don't make enough loans, or if you don't loan to the "right" people, or if you make it too hard to get a loan.
Fast-forward ten years.
Now the DOJ is suing you for making too many loans, to the "wrong" people, and you are being accused of making loans too easy to get. What used to be called "making the American dream a reality" is now called "predatory lending practices." Yesterday's good corporate citizen is today's corporate boogeyman. This is the schizophrenic environment home mortgage providers have to try to navigate while attempting to pay their employees, shareholders, and taxes, and all that while trying to stay in business.
The massive housing bubble is a legislative creation that would not have been as big or economically damaging if it hadn't been for government intrusion. If it hadn't been for the government trying to make homes affordable, millions more Americans would have jobs today. Government's attempt to socially engineer the housing market coupled with a luddite energy policy has cost our nation its prosperity.
...The next time you hear about "evil banks," do mention the politicians who made homes affordable by making a nation poor.
Starting Or Restarting A Low-Carb Diet?
Two terrific blog posts from Mike Eades to help you out. (I've blogged these before, but they're worth posting again for anyone who hasn't seen them or who could use a second look.) Part One here. Part Two here.
He and his wife, Dr. Mary Dan Eades, a smart-as-hell southern belle with an edge, have agreed to come on my weekly radio show. We'll probably do it after the holidays. I'll give lots of warning because their thoughts on eating an evidence-based (and much more tasty) diet are not to be missed.
If you haven't heard my show, you can download or listen to all the episodes here:
The show has also been accepted on iTunes, so search my name -- Amy Alkon -- there to subscribe. More on Sunday morning about the exciting guest for next week's show -- airing Sunday night, 7-8 pm PT, 10-11 pm, ET.
"You're All Going To Hell For Eternity"
Sam Harris on not being indoctrinated into Christianity:
via @ariarmstrong
You Didn't Miss My Show With Nando, Did You?
I'm talking about last week's Advice Goddess Radio, with Dr. Nando Pelusi, an Albert Ellis-trained psychologist who combines cognitive therapy and evolutionary psychology to help his patients.
If you missed us live, download the podcast (click "play in your default player) or just listen on your computer at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/14/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Catch my show -- and call in for advice or to comment -- every Sunday night, 7-8 pm PT, 10-11 pm, ET at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
Call-in number during show: (347) 326-9761
Unbelievable Shot From Paterno Linebacker Video
Sandusky assumes the position with a young player -- who TMZ says is one of his victims:
Details here at TMZ.
There's An Uptown Asshole Section At Occupy Wall Street
An Occupy Wall Street movement divided -- into upper and lowerclass, uptown elitists and downtown poors -- via The Daily Show:
..."It's a personal possession. I'm more against private property, not personal property."
Um...the difference?
Sonny Bono's Widow Wants To Protect Your Facebook Experience
The economy is circling the toilet -- the national one and the California one -- but Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif) is really concerned with your Facebook experience. Helen A.S. Popkin writes on MSNBC about the Facebook porn attack and Bono Mack's response:
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. ... wants her people to meet with Facebook's people "to make certain -- to the extent possible -- that it doesn't happen again," Ken Johnson, a spokesman for Bono Mack, said in an email response to The Hill....Appearing to take a stand on porn and violence is always a win for politicians however, so the only surprise about Rep. Bono Mack's interest is that she wasn't instantly joined by other politicians in this particular beef against the social network.
...According to The Hill, "The Facebook officials will meet with Bono Mack's aides for the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, which she chairs."
My concern: Who voted for this woman, and can they prove they have an IQ above freezing?
Uncircumcised Men Seem To Have More Fun
And so, it seems, do their partners. Niels Ebdrup writes on ScienceNordic of a new study surveying 5,000 sexually active men and women:
"Circumcised men are three times as likely to experience a frequent inability to reach an orgasm," says one of the researchers, associate professor Morten Frisch of SSI, a Danish research, production and service enterprise...."It appears that women with circumcised men are twice as likely to be sexually frustrated. They experience a three-fold risk of frequent difficulties in achieving orgasm, and an eight-fold risk of feeling pain during intercourse - also known as dyspareunia."
Circumcised men prefer it rough
There appears to be a very simple reason why circumcised men and their partners are having problems with their sex lives.The circumcised man develops a thin layer of hard skin on his penis head, which decreases the sensitivity. This means that in order to reach an orgasm, he needs to work harder at it, and that can lead to a painful experience for the woman.
"We conducted a survey, but the data does not explain why these problems occur. There are, however, some good suggestions in the scientific literature," he explains.
When the penis enters the vagina, the foreskin is pulled back. And on its way out again, the foreskin goes back to cover the penis head. This way the foreskin stimulates both the man and the woman.
The gliding in-and-out movement of the foreskin, combined with the in-and-out movement inside the vagina, constitutes what is known as 'the gliding movement'.
"When a circumcised man moves in and out of a woman without 'the gliding movement' caused by the foreskin, it can have a painful effect on the woman's mucous membrane. This could explain the pain and the tendency towards dryness that some women with circumcised men experience."
Fire In Your Future?
If you buy a $199 Kindle Fire through my Amazon link, it's like sending me about $13. Here's a link: Kindle Fire, Full Color 7" Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi
Thanks to all of you who support this site (and me!) by buying through my blog links to Amazon and through Amy's Mall.
I don't list some product you want, if you just use one of my product links or the "powered by Amazon.com" logo on the top left on Amy's Mall to click through to Amazon, I'll get a small kickback from what you buy. Also, if you go through one of my links to shop (even if you don't buy that exact product), same deal. I get credited for everything you buy.
Thanks again!
Why Aren't They Occupying Obama?
I've been seeing the term "venture socialism" around (a term apparently coined by Senator Jim DeMint), and I Googled it and found this piece by Timothy P. Carney in the Wash Ex about "this racket of private profit and public risk," the Export-Import Bank of the United States:
In its latest act of venture socialism, the Obama administration has offered a novel taxpayer backstop to General Electric, the multinational industrial conglomerate that is famously close to this administration, and that spends more on federal lobbying than any other company. The government accessory in this instance is the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency that finances U.S. exports at taxpayer risk....But manufacturers aren't the only beneficiaries of this little-known federal agency -- banks profit from it, too. For instance, when Ex-Im recently approved $1 billion in financing to subsidize Pemex, Mexico's government-owned oil company, 3M and other U.S. exporters of oil-field equipment benefited, but so did some big banks. Bank of America and JP Morgan financed these sales, and so if Pemex defaults, it's these megabanks the U.S. taxpayer will be bailing out.
Now Obama has created a new Ex-Im subsidy for banks. The name is a mouthful: "The Supply-Chain Finance Guarantee Program."
Here's how to understand what's going on: Imagine I'm a shoe exporter. I ship shoes to stores in Europe, and then I wait a few weeks to get paid by the stores. But what if more orders come in, and I need to restock the shoes right away, before I get paid for my last shipment? I could just borrow from a bank. But another option is that I can just sell my invoices, in effect, to the bank. If the shoe stores owe me $1,000, I might sell Citibank, for $950, the right to be paid by those shoe stores. That's called supply-chain finance, and it's a quintessential capitalist arrangement.
But in the midst of this commerce among banks, exporters, and importers, Barack Obama has inserted the unwitting U.S. taxpayer. As part of his Export Initiative aimed at doubling U.S. exports in five years, Obama created the Supply-Chain Finance Guarantee Program to guarantees 90 percent of the banks' exposure. In our hypothetical example, if the European shoe stores welched, the U.S. taxpayers would cover 90 percent of Citibank's loss.
Citi and JP Morgan were the first two banks admitted to this new subsidy program, and earlier this month, Ex-Im welcomed GE Finance. So GE, which already rakes in tens of billions of Ex-Im subsidies as an exporter (in September, for instance, Ex-Im approved a $425 million subsidy to help GE sell locomotive equipment to Kazakhstan), will now also pocket Ex-Im subsidies as a financier, too.
Smart Points On Occupy Wall Street
Reason's Veronique de Rugy quotes George Mason econ prof Tyler Cowen and others at NRO from a Diane Rehm show appearance. Here's Cowen:
Well, the main question is inequality. But I think there are two fundamental contradictions in the Occupy Wall Street as a movement. The first is it points out correctly, politics is corrupt. But it then ought to conclude the solution is to limit the size of government. In fact, most of them want to increase the size of government, and that's a contradiction. It's not going to work. The second point is this distinction between 1 percent and the 99 percent.Within the top 1 percent, there are people who are in wealth by producing it, like Steve Jobs, and then people who take it by predation or fraud. And that's the important distinction. It's about values. It's about how you got your wealth and not how much you have.
REHM: But you really say there's been so much talk about riches. You're talking about values. Do you think that that ends up being a divisive message?
COWEN: I think it is. It gets people suspicious of wealth. I think that most wealth is earned. Most rich people are great. They are our benefactors of humanity and America. And the idea that you lump together with some number of financiers who have done bad things and call them the top 1 percent and pit them against everyone else, I think that's exactly the wrong the message. The real message should be a lot of people get their wealth through politics. We should limit this. The way to do this is to limit the overall influence of politics over the American economy.
Grass Growing Up Between The Art
Ran into Gary Palmer, a guy I used to see when I sometimes wrote at Santa Monica's Novel Cafe, and I checked out his website. He's done pretty amazing street art.
Women Aren't Disappeared Enough In Saudi Arabia
From Jihadwatch, "Women Must Cover Provocative Eyes" if they "provoke fitna [sedition, chaos]." Video from Al Arabiyya News (with bizarre Simpson's shot at end):
From the US State Department on women going to Saudi Arabia:
Women visitors and residents must be met by their sponsor upon arrival. Women who are traveling alone and are not met by sponsors have experienced delays before being allowed to enter the country or to continue on other flights.Women considering relocating to Saudi Arabia should be keenly aware that women and children residing in Saudi Arabia as members of a Saudi household (including adult U.S.-citizen women married to Saudi men, adult U.S.-citizen women who are the unmarried daughters of Saudi fathers, children born to Saudi fathers, and U.S.-citizen boys under the age of 21 who are the sons of Saudi fathers) require the permission of the Saudi male head of their household to leave the country. Married women require their husband's permission to depart the country, while unmarried women and children require the permission of their father or male guardian. The U.S. Embassy can intercede with the Saudi government to request exit permission for an adult U.S. woman (wife or daughter of a Saudi citizen), but there is no guarantee of success, or even of timely response. Mothers are not able to obtain permission for the departure of minor children without the father's permission.
A Saudi man who wishes to marry a foreign woman is required by law to seek the permission of Saudi authorities. Since February 20, 2008, a regulation exists requiring the Saudi man to sign a document giving irrevocable permission to his foreign wife and the children born of their union to travel in and out of the country without restrictions. However, it seems thisdocument is rarely demanded by authorities and in anyevent it is not retroactive. Even with such documentation, the foreign spouse and their children may still have difficulty leaving Saudi Arabia freely. Also, if a couple consisting of a foreigner and a Saudi living in Saudi Arabia divorce, the foreign parent cannot under any circumstances leave the country with the children born of their union even if he or she is granted custody rights.
Gregor Samsa's Girlfriend
Photo by Gregg Sutter. (Who is Gregor Samsa?)
Art at One-Eyed Gypsy, cool downtown bar (and former speakeasy) where reason and LA Press Club co-hosted a party for Kurt Loder's book, The Good, the Bad and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews
The "Epidemic" Of Bullying
Is there really such a thing? The Obama admin calls bullying an "epidemic" and a "pandemic." At DC Scotus Examiner, Hans Bader, Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes, per Justice Dept. studies, that bullying has actually gone down.
Bader notes that the Associated Press noted a "sharp drop" in the percentage of kids being bullied beaten up by their peers, and a New York Times story called the panic over bullying by girls "a hoax." Bader writes:
If bullying has gone down, how can it be a pandemic? By broadening the definition of bullying to include speech and vague power relationships.The anti-bullying website nobully.com defines even "eye rolling" as bullying, so if you roll your eyes at a bully, you yourself can be accused of "bullying." Its ridiculously-broad definition has been adopted by schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, which define "eye rolling" and "staring" as "bullying." As a small middle-schooler, I rolled my eyes at bullies. A recent survey defined bullying to include "the use of one's . . . popularity to . . . embarrass another person on purpose."
A student can even be deemed guilty of "bullying" for not inviting a hostile classmate to her birthday party, since social "exclusion" is considered bullying (even though forcing children to invite unwanted guests to their birthday party can violate their right to free association). As a bullying victim noted in response to an article about such broad anti-bullying policies, "as someone who was frequently bullied as a youth, this policy would have required me to invite my own bullies to my birthday party. That sounds exceedingly miserable."
Forty-five states "have laws requiring public schools to adopt anti-bullying policies," but there's no federal law against bullying, in general. That hasn't stopped the Obama administration from trying to federalize anti-bullying policy. Its StopBullying.gov website defines "teasing" as a form of "bullying," and "rude" or "hurtful" "text messages" as "cyberbullying." Since "creating web sites" that "make fun of others" also is deemed "cyberbullying," conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors like UCLA's Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)
School bullying can only violate existing federal law if it involves racial or sexual harassment. Moreover, harassment by students violates federal law only if it's condoned by school officials, and is severe and pervasive. In its 1999 decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that schools can be sued "only where they are deliberately indifferent to sexual harassment, of which they have actual knowledge, that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victims of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school." As it emphasized, "Damages are not available for simple acts of teasing and name-calling," nor are they available for even "severe one-on-one peer harassment" if it occurs just a "single" time.
Canada: Report Calls For Decriminalization Of Assisted Dying
From Scholarlynews@wiley.com:
Should We Prepare For The End? New Report Calls for Decriminalisation of Assisted Dying In CanadaA report commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada, and published today in the journal Bioethics, claims that assisted suicide should be legally permitted for competent individuals who make a free and informed decision.
...End-of-life decision-making is an issue wrapped in controversy and contradictions for Canadians. The report found that most people want to die at home, but few do; most believe planning for dying is important and should be started while people are healthy, but almost no one does it. And while most Canadians support the decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, both remain illegal under the Criminal Code of Canada.
...Autonomy, or the capacity for self-determination, was ... found to be a paramount value to Canadians in the RSC report. Respect for autonomy requires respect for competent individuals' free and informed decisions with respect to how and when they die.
..."We discussed in considerable detail the arguments against assisted suicide. The evidence does not support claims that decriminalising voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide poses a threat to vulnerable people," concluded Schuklenk. "The evidence does not support claims that decriminalisation will lead us down a slippery slope from assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia to non-voluntary or involuntary euthanasia. The evidence does not support claims that decriminalisation will have a corrosive effect on access to or the development of palliative care.
If you can find a doctor to help you die, should you come to the point where you can no longer go on (if I'm suffering physically or if I get Alzheimer's, I'd want this), that should be your right. And that doctor shouldn't be prosecuted for doing your bidding.
Why Is There A Federal Housing Administration?
Some of their flubs noted here, at Cato. From the WSJ:
...Late Monday a bipartisan Congressional committee announced an agreement to increase FHA's maximum mortgage limits to $729,750 from $625,500 through Dec. 31, 2013. The bill is linked to a continuing resolution to fund Congress past Saturday, increasing the likelihood that this backroom deal will become law. The House is scheduled to vote on the bill today without debating these changes, in what ought to be an embarrassment to Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.The National Association of Realtors is lauding this idea as great for housing "stability," by which it means that the taxpayer subsidies for its industry will keep coming, even for fancy homes. The median sales price of existing single-family homes nationwide in the third quarter was $169,500, according to the Realtors's own data. Politicians from higher-cost regions argue that higher loan limits are needed, but even Los Angeles has seen median prices fall to $324,800 from $402,100 in 2008--well below $729,750.
This FHA payoff to the housing lobby comes as the agency has had to publicly reveal the extent of its financial travails. In its annual report to Congress Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and an independent auditor reported the FHA has a 0.24% capital reserve, well below its statutory 2% minimum for the third year running. Take $1.1 trillion of outstanding loan guarantees divided by $2.6 billion in capital reserves and you get a 422-to-1 leverage ratio, up from 33-to-1 in 2009. By this standard, Lehman Brothers was risk-averse.
So how much would a bailout cost, even before the proposed loan-limit increase? University of Pennsylvania real-estate finance professor Joseph Gyourko noted in a paper last week that FHA "systematically" underestimates future default risk, not least because it lends to borrowers with very little equity in their homes and uses rosy economic assumptions. Mr. Gyourko estimates that FHA is "materially underreserved by at least $50 billion, with the true figure likely higher."
These numbers are no surprise, given FHA's inherently risky business model. It provides 100%, explicitly taxpayer-backed mortgage loans to first-time, moderate- to low-income borrowers. Down payments can be as low as 3.5%, at a time when most private lenders are prudently insisting on 20% after the housing bust. In fiscal 2011, 85% of FHA loans had a down payment of less than 5%.
We have way too much government intervention in markets. Can't afford to buy a home? I can't either -- not in Los Angeles. So I rent. How about you do the same instead of sucking off the taxpayer teat?
Dough Unto Others
If I were any more "gay-friendly," I'd have a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend, yet I don't think any business should be forced to serve anyone if it's against the businessperson's principles.
A Christian baker told two lesbians getting married in Iowa that her religious beliefs wouldn't allow her to bake their wedding cake. That should be her right -- to not bake them a cake because they're lesbians or to not bake one for me because I don't believe in god. (And again, I say that about the cake for the two ladies getting married as somebody who's pro-gay marriage and a staunch supporter of gay rights.)
In yet another example of state overreach, it turns out that it's illegal for her to deny to sell to these ladies according to the Iowa Civil Rights Act. (Never mind protecting the rights and freedoms of the religious.)
From Care2.com, the cake lady, Victoria Childress, explained:
"I didn't do the cake because of my convictions for their lifestyle. It is my right as a business owner. It is my right, and it's not to discriminate against them. It's not so much to do with them, it's to do with me and my walk with God and what I will answer (to) him for."
But, then, there's this:
A quick scan of the Iowa Civil Rights Act, expanded in 2007 to extend protections on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, says that a refusal of services based on sexual orientation is actually forbidden unless the service provider is a "bona fide religious institution":...Childress is a person of faith who, based on her video interview with KCCI.com, appears to truly believe she wasn't discriminating against the couple. In fact she contends the issue is not about the couple at all but rather her being able to express her religious convictions about their "lifestyle," and however objectionable we may find that set of beliefs it does appear she never intended to hurt Trina Vodraska and Janelle Sievers. However, unless she would contend she is a bona fide religious institution, it would seem Childress is incorrect that it is her automatic right as a business owner to refuse to serve the couple.
Trina Vodraska and Janelle Sievers have said they found the experience degrading but it is unclear at this time whether they will file a legal suit.
However, what might have appeared to be a rather trivial matter about a wedding cake -- and one with an easy remedy: just go to another bakery and spread the word that Childress isn't providing services to same-sex couples, letting all who find that offensive protest by also not using Childress' services -- has now turned into a civil rights versus religious exemptions battle, reminding us that the question of how far religious privilege should extend is an issue that, we are increasingly finding, can no longer be sugarcoated or skirted.
Mackey Comes Backey
Whole Foods co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey writes in the WSJ that the decline of economic freedom in the USA is what's causing the decline of our economy and the ensuing unemployment. He offers solutions:
Most importantly, we need to radically cut the size and cost of government. One hundred years ago the total cost of government at all levels in the U.S.--local, state and federal--was only 8% of our GDP. In 2010, it was 40%. Government is gobbling up trillions of dollars from our economy to feed itself through high taxes and unprecedented deficit spending--money that could instead be used by individuals to improve their lives and by entrepreneurs to create jobs. Government debt is growing at such a rapid rate that the Congressional Budget Office projects that in the next 70 years public money spent on interest annually will grow to almost 41.4% of GDP ($27.2 trillion) from 1.4% of GDP ($204 billion) in 2010. Today interest on our debt represents about a third of the cost of Social Security; in only 20 years it is estimated that it will exceed the cost of that program.Only if we focus on cutting costs in the four most expensive government programs--Defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which together with interest account for about two-thirds of the overall budget--can we make a significant positive impact.
Our defense budget now accounts for 43% of all military spending in the entire world--more than the next 14 largest defense budgets combined. It is time for us to scale back our military commitments and reduce our spending to something more in line with our percentage of the world GDP, or 23%. Doing this would save more than $300 billion every year.
No nation building!
More from Mackey:
Government regulations definitely need to be reformed. According to the Small Business Administration, total regulatory costs amount to about $1.75 trillion annually, nearly twice as much as all individual income taxes collected last year. While some regulations create important safeguards for public health and the environment, far too many simply protect existing business interests and discourage entrepreneurship. Specifically, many government regulations in education, health care and energy prevent entrepreneurship and innovation from revolutionizing and re-energizing these very important parts of our economy.A simple reform that would make a monumental difference would be to require all federal regulations to have a sunset provision. All regulations should automatically expire after 10 years unless a mandatory cost-benefit analysis has been completed that proves the regulations have created significantly more societal benefit than harm. Currently thousands of new regulations are added each year and virtually none ever disappear.
According to a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Americans now believe that America is in "decline." While we are certainly going through difficult times our decline is not inevitable--it can and must be reversed.
Privacy Really Is Officially Over
Every day, the world looks a little more Orwellian. Per Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, the Oxford city council (Oxford in the UK) has ruled that every taxicab has to have closed circuit TV to record the passengers' conversations. The recordings...
...are to be held for 28 days in case the police wanted to conduct an investigation in which the footage might prove useful. The idea that peoples' words should be recorded when they are in public places "just in case," is really troubling, as it's hard to see why, if it's justifiable to record taxi passengers in case they're criminals, you wouldn't also record restaurant patrons, park-goers, bus-riders -- why you wouldn't, in short, record every word uttered in public just in case someone committed a crime.And, of course, this is a natural progression from the existing CCTV doctrine that says you should record every person's movements (though not their words), for the same reason.
Let's see if the citizens squeak up in protest -- if the citizens rise up in social media...like they did to loot the stores. What's your guess?
Deep-Dish Crony Capitalism
Chicago has perfected it. William McGurn writes in the WSJ about how it works:
Raise taxes on everyone--and then cut side deals with those big enough to lobby for special relief.The legislature is considering this limited tax relief because three corporate mainstays of greater Chicago have threatened to leave without it. One is the CME Group, operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's largest futures exchange by volume. Another is the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the world's largest options exchange. The last is Sears, one of America's oldest and most famous retailing giants.
Earlier this month, CME chairman Terrence Duffy told Illinois lawmakers that his company is entertaining "very, very lucrative offers" from other states. Meanwhile, his counterpart at the CBOE, Bill Brodsky, says his exchange needs relief from a tax code that is "virtually punitive." Sears has chimed in too, with its general counsel reporting that it has a $400 million offer from a nearby state to relocate there.
To be fair, these companies have a case when they complain that Illinois is making them less competitive. Take CME. Because its world-wide sales are taxed in Illinois, CME accounts for almost 6% of all state corporate taxes. On top of this, Mr. Duffy says that the "temporary" corporate tax increase passed in January is now costing his company an extra $50 million a year.
CME and the other beneficiaries of this special tax bill would have a far better case, however, if instead of pushing for special treatment for themselves, they used their clout to argue for a more market-friendly environment overall. After all, if the state's tax treatment is making it hard for Sears and CME, the family restaurant or mom-and-pop shop down the corner is probably feeling the pinch too.
Banning Circus Elephants As The Economy Burns
You'll be pleased (and unsurprised) to hear that while the economy is continuing its steep nosedive into the toilet, Congress has been busy considering a bill to outlaw exotic or wild animals from performances if they have been traveling within 15 days prior.
At Raw Story, from Agence France-Presse:
US circuses are circling the wagons against a proposed law in Congress that would ban using elephants under the big top, a tradition that animal rights activists say causes terrible suffering.The bill, introduced this month in the House of Representatives by Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, aims directly at traveling circuses by seeking to outlaw exotic or wild animals from performances if they have been traveling within the previous 15 days.
That would mean an end to the days of elephants balancing on stools, tigers and lions jumping through fiery hoops, monkeys on wheels, or other popular staples of the ring.
"It is clear that traveling circuses cannot provide the proper living conditions for these exotic animals," Moran said in a statement.
A pity Virginia's voters haven't sought to ban Moran from Congress.
via iFeminists
Australia Has Learned From Us, And Not In A Good Way
Paul Karl Lukacs emailed me this link about how the Australians are stripsearching returning nationals at airports.
Paul added:
The security paranoia is an Anglo-Saxon sickness. The US, Canada, UK and Australia are the countries that treat travelling citizens as criminals. I've had no problems in France, Thailand, Taiwan or China.In the past month, I've made eight border crossings, half of them into or out of mainland China, a paranoid authoritarian state which is currently very nervous because of the Arab Spring combined with next year's planned transfer of power to a new generation of leaders. Yet all interactions with Chinese border officials were businesslike and respectful.
Gillespie On Occupy
Nick Gillespie writes at reason about how the Occupiers are missing the point:
...If the government bailout of politically connected financial institutions was awful (and it was), a bailout of, say, holders of student loans isn't the way to correct the problem.
Black Monday Through Thursday Deals
Check out Amazon's Pre-Black Friday Deals
Thanks to all who support this site by buying through my Amazon links on my blog and at Amy's Mall.
Rich People Who Fly Frequently Won't Get Felt Up By The TSA!
My boyfriend Gregg, who unfortunately isn't one of the "1%", but who flies to Detroit every few weeks for his work, often gets upgraded to Business Class.
The last two times he's flown out of Detroit (he came home today), he's been able to leave his shoes on, his belt on, his laptop in the bag, and just put his phone in his laptop bag (instead of having it in his pocket).
He said they told him something like, "If you don't set off the metal detector, you just speed off to your plane." No nudie-scan. No ball-grab.
And no, this is not a good thing. I believe this measure is designed to stop the most influential voices from complaining about the TSA. (Nothing like a little sense of "I'm special" -- relative privilege -- to make a person forget the Fourth Amendment violation.)
Here's the back and front view of the little bookmarkie thing the TSA guy handed Gregg last time he traveled, describing the Very Special People Who Don't Get Their HooHoos Grabbed TSA pre-screening program that they're testing in Detroit and Atlanta:
Smallpox Became No-Bid Big-Money Pox -- On The Taxpayer
David Willman writes in the LA Times that the Obama admin has been aggressive about pushing "a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work." The company is New York-based Siga Technologies. The company's largest shareholder, Ronald O. Perlman, is a longtime Democratic donor:
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.
Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.
Once feared for its grotesque pustules and 30% death rate, smallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific institute and the U.S. government. There is no credible evidence that any other country or a terrorist group possesses smallpox.
If there were an attack, the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire U.S. population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure.
Siga's drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints -- and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans.
Barefoot And Criminal
Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids blogged about the latest in neighborhood paranoia:
Imagine my surprise as I looked out the second story window only to see my 10 year old son walking into our driveway with a police officer's car creeping along with him! You see my son was "outside," "alone," "without shoes" and this was apparently alarming to law enforcement.Actually, he was outside, without shoes, waiting for his friend to arrive, and in his great anticipation, had decided to walk a few houses up the street. (How terribly childlike of him!) The officer asked him, "WHY ARE YOU OUT ALONE WITHOUT YOUR SHOES?" And my son (quite nervous and experiencing an anxiety-induced brain freeze) said, "Uhmm, I don't know." The officer took note of his name and address and drove away after he was safely inside. I am left to wonder if there's a file at the police station with my child's name on it with a note about the boy who was "outside," "alone," "without shoes."
Per behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuk (who I heard speak at an evolutionary psych conference at Penn a few years back), talked about how going barefoot as a child seems to stimulate the immune system. (More on that in her book Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are
Free Call-In Therapy Sunday Night: Nando Pelusi On Advice Goddess Radio
There are very few therapists I respect. When I had a problem (related to my writing) about seven years ago, I ended up flying to New York to see the therapist my friend Susan Shapiro wrote about in Five Men Who Broke My Heart
The guy thought I was nuts -- uh, that is for wanting to fly to New York for a double session with him when there are countless therapists in Los Angeles. The difference: What Sue wrote about him made it clear that he was really good and worth the trip.
Dr. Nando Pelusi is another therapist I have a lot of respect for. He's an Albert Ellis-trained cognitive therapist who brings evolutionary psychology into his therapy. He was also very close to Ellis, and led the $5/Friday night therapy-before-a-group sessions at the Albert Ellis Institute when Ellis wasn't there, which is where we met. (I used to go when I was in New York.)
I've heard his viewpoint over the years, read his terrific Neanderthink column that was in Psych Today for a while, and we've sat next to each other and hung out at numerous ev psych conferences, and I respect him a lot.
He'll be on my radio show on Sunday night, 7 p.m. Pacific time, 10 p.m. Eastern, for an hour, and WE NEED YOUR CALLS!
Listen live at this link (or use it to download the podcast afterward -- click "play in your default player" to download to your iPod, etc.):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/14/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
The show has also been accepted on iTunes, so you can subscribe there. Just search "Amy Alkon." Or go every week to:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
Call in Sunday night, 7-8 p.m. Pacific, 10-11 p.m. Eastern for advice on love, dating, sex, relationships or to talk with Nando and me about the subjects we're discussing (everything from procrastination to money problems, and the effect on relationships and various relationship-related issues).
Call-in number once the show is on and live (at 7 p.m.): (347) 326-9761 (New York area code).
Oh, and the show opening is finally finished -- and it's fab. It's by Xenia Shin of the underground L.A. band Laco$te.
Marshall McLuhan Wasn't There To Back Me Up, But It Was Like That
Saturday, I was at the no cell phones cafe. A guy standing next to me was talking on his cell phone. Um...nuh-uh.
Me, smiling, politely, to guy: "Excuse me, but there's a no cell phones policy here...."
Guy, remaining on phone: "I don't care."
Me, to Joe, the buff, 6'1" counter guy, passing by at just the right time: "Joe, he says he doesn't care about the cell phones policy."
Joe cared to show him the door.
On the way out, the guy took a detour past my table to snarl: "You're rude. It would have been different if you hadn't asked me so rudely."
(See above, "Smiling, politely...'Excuse me, there's a no cell phones policy here." The only way I could have been sweeter is if I'd sprinkled fairy dust on him while I was saying it.)
Of course, I knew what he was really saying: "You bitch. How dare you pnk me?"
Everyone Should NOT Go To College
Via Joanne Jacobs, Michael Graham writes in the Boston Herald that Obama is wrong about his notion that everybody should go to college (and funded by somebody else's money):
"We should be doing everything we can to put a college education within reach for every American," President Barack Obama told a group of college students in Denver last week. "College isn't just one of the best investments you can make in your future. It's one of the best investments America can make in our future."Before we beat this nonsensical notion to death with the latest data, take a second and think about the young people you know. The kid behind the fast-food counter, the geek camped out at Best Buy waiting for the Call of Duty game, the girl popping her gum at the hair salon.
Would it really be the "best investment in America" to spend $100,000 of our money sending each one of them to college?
Because that's what we're talking about: your money. Every year Massachusetts taxpayers pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the University of Massachusetts system, subsidizing college costs for all. Add the $36 billion in federal Pell Grants and that giant sucking sound is the money going from your wallet to some kid's six-year bong party known as "the college experience."
And what's the big payoff? Some entitled punk waving a "Debt Is Slavery!" sign outside a shabby tent on Dewey Square. This is America's "best investment?"
The "Everybody gets a cupcake" crowd insists that college degrees are essential in the new, high-tech workplace. And if our students were getting high-tech degrees, they might have a point.
Privacy Is Over
There are signs of it everywhere, and of the increasing Orwellian overtones to our society. A woman who is a regular commenter here writes:
This evening, heading home from my mother's house, I was pulled over. The cop asked me if I knew why, I said no. He said, "well that light you just went through has a camera and it couldn't scan your license plate", and that it was a violation to not be able to scan your plate to 50 feet. Anyway, it was disturbing. Thank goodness he seemed rather bored and I didn't get a ticket or anything. He probably only pulled me over because some computer beeped at him. He was just sitting on the side near the light. I had no idea that those intersections were scanning our plates.What do you think of this? I really don't like all this monitoring our every move, kind of sick. Bad enough cameras everywhere, but scanning in all the plates that pass through?
Should We Stigmatize Drug Addicts?
Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick writes on Spiked-Online about when drug and alcohol use becomes drug and alcohol abuse:
My medical colleague Theodore Dalrymple, one of the most perceptive of medical writers on this subject, takes what you might you say is an extreme view, which is to say that if society is going to stigmatise any activities, these ought to be stigmatised, indeed the addict ought to be stigmatised, because this behaviour is self-centred, self-destructive, self-indulgent and, indeed, socially destructive. I wouldn't advocate the stigmatising of individuals and the social discrimination of individuals, but it seems to me that it's an entirely sensible position for society as a whole to take a view of these activities as something that should be regarded with an element of social disapproval or disapprobation. We need to strive for a cultural climate in which these activities are not encouraged, rather than what seems to me to exist at the moment: today, these activities are indulged and in some sense rewarded.Celebrity culture celebrates this, but it also happens on a smaller scale. It is interesting that a large population now exists that can claim disability benefits on the basis of being addicted to alcohol or drugs. There are 100,000 people in this country in receipt of long-term benefits with a diagnosis of either alcohol or drug dependency. And that's doubled in the past 10 years.
That's a very interesting social trend that has been created in our society. This activity is in a sense supported and indulged by the rest of society. One of the striking things - and there's been some discussion in the medical world about this recently - is of the problem of aging addicts. I've got a couple of patients myself who have graduated into old people's homes, along with their zimmer frames and bottles of methadone. And what that communicates is the extent to which the admission into the category of addiction is a life sentence. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy which lasts a lifetime - people are condemned to a life in that respect.
So I think we need to move away from that sort of support for the culture of drugs, from indulging it in those ways, and we should not celebrate this way of dealing with the experience of modern society as being in some way interesting or creative. As the slogan goes, 'A drunk is a drunk, every heroin addict is a philosopher'. Pete Doherty is a cult hero of our era and that seems to me a morbid aspect of contemporary society that we have these sorts of folk heroes, people who celebrate this condition or the idea of creativity being enhanced by these substances - which is one of the great illusions that is well discussed by Theodore Dalrymple, going back to the romantic poets and de Quincy and Coleridge and that whole tradition. I haven't got the space here to go into that now, but what a myth and a delusion that is.
I'm not saying that any of these activities should be banned or clamped down on. Instead, I'm talking about the sort of cultural climate we ought to seek to foster around them, and that seems to me to be consistent with this wider notion of bringing the morality of issues into focus.
...And we should make a start, I would say, by repealing the laws, closing the clinics, stopping the benefits. The take-home message from that is 'take responsibility for your own actions'.
Good Advice From The Simple Dollar
Save money by only buying things you'll wear out. Trent writes:
On the shelf in my office sits a well-worn copy of the board game Settlers of Catan. By well-worn, I mean well-worn. Fraying edges. Ink starting to wear off of the cards. A few home-brewed replacement pieces. A bit of moisture damage causing some warped pieces.The game has moved with me at least four times. It's went to the homes of countless friends. It's been taken on countless camping trips, including quite a few where we pulled all of the pieces out of the box and put them into bags for easier travel.
In 1998, I paid somewhere around $30 for this game. I would estimate that Sarah and I have each had several hundred hours worth of fun from this game and it's not completely worn out yet. It still has some miles left to go before it needs replacing.
I've gotten much more value out of this well-worn game than from most of the nearly-new items in our home.
When I think about the items I've used until they've literally worn out, my mind is flooded with memories.
I actually wore out an iPod Touch until the battery only held charge for about fifteen minutes and the screen was so scratched up that it was unusable.
He talks later about having three or four good knives in his kitchen instead of a block of knives. This is a practice I see in French people I know. They seem more likely to buy one quality thing instead of many little crappy things.
I live this way. I only buy clothes if they're absolutely fabulous on me, and then I wear them all the time. I have a favorite skirt -- an evening dress skirt -- that Gregg got me for his high school reunion a few years ago. I wear it probably three times a week. Love it.
And then there's the black leather backpack I carry my computer in. I bought it in 1992 at The Original Leather Store in the West Village in New York, after getting paid for a freelance job. I paid what was a lot of money back then -- $125 -- for a bag that was guaranteed to last. And last, it has. It's almost 20 years old now.
Spending $125 on a beautiful and sturdy backpack in 1992 meant that I didn't spend $60 here and $70 there every two years or so for new bags that would wear out. That's a lot of money I saved, my backpack is still in great shape after carrying a bunch of my laptops over the years.
via Lifehacker
Do You Need To Be "J" To Go On JDate?
Or can you be "Willing To Convert," etc.?
Interestingly, there are quite a few non-Jews on JDate (at least in the LA area). I have a question for my column about this -- about whether it's okay for non-Jews to go on JDate -- and started looking up profiles there. Within 20 miles of Beverly Hills, the non-Jews on JDate tally: about 80 men seeking women, 180 women seeking men, 4 lesbians and 15 gay men. Wonder whether they get many takers. Anybody want to opine?
Of course, even if you do get takers, the problem is those who eventually decide (or get convinced by their parents) to get serious and marry and breed with a Jew.
P.S. If you aren't gay, I wouldn't suggest going on GayDate.
And feel free to discuss your general experiences, positive, negative, or otherwise with online dating in the comments below.
Occupy Wall Street's Collateral Damage
I'm against corporate welfare, and I'm for smaller government, but I'm not a joiner -- and I'm neither a Tea Party member nor a member of the vague-missioned Occupy Wall Street.
I do have to say, I am all for people protesting against politics they don't agree with.
What I don't understand is why Occupy Wall Street stays in the locations overnight, fouling parks and other areas, and engages in persistent drumming...just to name a couple examples. New Yorkers who live on Liberty Street near Wall Street (my old neighbors) have been living in hell since Occupy Wall Street started. Pushcart vendors and small businesses are in trouble.
Mike Riggs writes at reason about more thuggery and abuse from the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Last night, San Diego residents held a fundraiser for two street vendors whose carts were burglarized and vandalized, with blood and piss, by Occupy protesters. The protesters were angry that the vendors would not "donate" their wares to the movement. CBS Los Angeles reports that the vendors, one who sold hot dogs, and one who sold coffee, also received death threats for refusing to give away their goods.At the Port of Oakland earlier this month, workers and observers could only enter--and more horrifying, leave--the port after the mob "voted" their permission. When one trucker tried to break through the blockade, his vehicle was attacked. The protester who did the attacking had this to say: "These people tried to kill us. I can't believe they are being that aggressive over a paycheck, over your own people fighting for you." (Savor the irony.) While people waited into the early morning hours for permission to see their families and do their jobs, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who gave the OK for Oakland Police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of Occupy Protesters, sat safely in a government building.
Even if we are to assume that the bulk of these crimes have been committed by members of Black Blocs--groups of anarchic nihilists who cover their faces in order to wreak meaningless havoc, yet are not really on board with the wider aims (whatever they may be) of the Occupy movement--and other minorities of the movement, there's still no good explanation for why Occupy protesters on the whole are causing more harm to their local economies than they are to their government.
Show me an Occupy demand that can be met by destroying the livelihoods of people who are on the cusp of poverty (due to government regulations on food vendors), smashing the windows of a Men's Warehouse and a coffee shop, trashing the bathroom of a Manhattan restaurant, pushing an old lady down a flight of D.C. stairs after imprisoning her and her fellow conservative conference attendees using a human chain, or "clobber[ing] a store manager with a credit-card reader." You can't. That's because the government holds the strings here, not the people who Occupy is hurting.
Good News For People Who Salt Their Food Like They're Salting The Road
Me, for one. I long ago read Gary Taubes' award-winning piece in Science on the lack of evidence that salt is detrimental, and ever since, have been salting my food so vigorously that people sometimes look on me with worry.
I like that wonderful French sea salt in the cute cardboard container with the whale on it. Baleine, I think. Have had a thing of it for about 10 years, and I'm just running low now.
On Reuters, Kate Kelland reports on a review led by Copehagen University Hospital's Niels Graudal of 167 studies on salt:
The review ... found that while cutting down on salt reduced blood pressure in people who have normal or high blood pressure, it also caused increases in some hormones and other compounds that can adversely affect people's heart health....Lowering salt intake is known to reduce blood pressure, but research has yet to show whether that translates into better overall heart health in the wider population.
Despite that, many countries have government-sanctioned guidelines calling on people to cut their salt or sodium intake for the sake of their longer-term health.
A few examples from studies:
A separate Cochrane Library review conducted by British researchers and published in July found no evidence that small reductions in salt intake lowered the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely.And another study by Belgian scientists published in May found that people who ate lots of salt were no more likely to get high blood pressure, and were statistically less likely to die of heart disease, than those with low salt intake.
Graudal said his results showed that when salt intake is reduced, there are increases in some hormones and in fats known as lipids "which could be harmful if persistent over time."
He added that because none of the studies in the review were able to measure long-term health effects, his team was not able to say "if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes."
Graudal said the growing number of studies questioning the net benefit of salt reduction meant public health officials should look again at their guidelines.
Despite barely exercising, and probably because I eat a diet of meat, meat, bacon, and buttered green beans (and probably also due to genetics), I have blood pressure that wows the nurse at Kaiser every time she reads it. I'm going to continue salting my food with abandon. You?
Because I Don't Think Being Gay Should Get You Caned And Jailed
That's one of the answers to "Why I'm intolerant of Islam." If you aren't intolerant of Islam, is it because you're bigoted and homophobic, or because you just haven't given the reality of Islam much thought?
Via Reuters, Malaysian states (about 60 percent Muslim) are bowing to Sharia law to punish gays:
In Malaysia, homosexuality is punishable by law by caning and up to 20 years in prison, but the amendments planned by the Pahang and Malacca religious authorities would give the state governments additional powers.If the proposed changes come into force, jail terms could run consecutively if a gay Muslim person is punished under both laws.
Malacca's chief minister, Mohd Ali Rustam, said the state would review its Islamic law provisions to allow Muslim gay men and lesbians to be tried in court and punished by a prison sentence or a fine to "deter" homosexuality.
"So many people like to promote human rights, even up to the point they want to allow lesbian activities and homosexuality," Ali told Reuters.
"In Islam, we cannot do all this. It is against Islamic law," he said, adding that gay Muslim people would also be required to attend counselling.
Ali, who is also the Malacca Islamic religious department chairman, said the proposed penalties would also apply to those who "supported" homosexuality.
Oops, that's me.
"Liberal" Used To Mean You Were An Advocate Of Liberty
Mario Vargas Llosa against collectivism and in support of individual freedoms in the WSJ:
There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They have described the path out of darkness and toward a brighter future of freedom and universal appreciation for the values of human dignity.
Here, he echoes Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
Many cling to hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.
I Think He Slept Through The Amber Waves Of Grain
View from Gregg's airplane window.
Not A Legal Obligation, But A Moral One
Penn State Coach Paterno had a human obligation to report Sandusky to the police -- immediately. How do you hear that little boys are being molested and not do anything about it -- and not want to have done something about it yesterday, last week, last year, years ago?
From Corey Dade at NPR:
Both Penn State and the Catholic Church are hallowed institutions that are parochial in practice and culture, carefully protected images built on moral values, and are led mostly by men. And both tried to handle suspected pedophiles internally, ultimately failing in the process.A grand jury report says school officials were first told of allegations involving Sandusky in the 1990s. Police investigated an accusation in 1998, and Sandusky admitted wrongdoing, but he wasn't prosecuted. Sandusky retired in 1999 under pressure from the university, according to reports.
Sandusky continued to have access to campus facilities, where he often brought children through his work with the nonprofit Second Mile, which he founded to help disadvantage youths.
In 2002, the grand jury report states, an assistant coach told Paterno that he'd witnessed Sandusky having sex with a 10-year-old boy in the team's locker room shower. Paterno told his boss, athletic director Tim Curley, who later described the alleged incident as "horsing around," according to the report. Curley didn't contact police.
Paterno has been roundly criticized for not also referring the allegations directly to police, though authorities have determined that he didn't have a legal obligation to do so.
But Curley did. That's why he, along with Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, have been charged in the case. They both have stepped down from their positions.
"This is a case about a sexual predator accused of using his position within the community and the university to prey on young boys over a decade," Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly said at a news conference Monday. "Those officials and administrators to whom it was reported did not report [incidents] to police ... Their inaction likely allowed a child predator to continue to victimize children for many, many years."
Lawyers for both Curley and Schultz have said their clients are innocent of the allegations.
As with any prominent organization, experts say, the high stakes of Penn State football seems to have discouraged disclosure. University of Massachusetts psychologist David Lisak, who specializes in treating victims of sexual abuse, said the shock of such revelations can be powerful enough to stifle a potential whistle-blower.
"Sometimes it's very difficult for individuals in power to accept that a person they may know personally, or as part of the faculty or church, could be committing these very serious crimes," Lisak said. "That's why we have these mandatory reporting laws -- because we know sometimes people will make bad decisions, and we don't want them having to make a judgment call.
"But, unfortunately, institutions get into damage control mode, and they lose their moral center."
California Senate Fat Cats Go On A Tiny Tax Dollar Diet
Per a Patrick McGreevy LA Times story, I learn that we California taxpayers have been funding state senators' coffee breaks, snacks, and meal expenses. In the future, the senaturds will cover these expenses. Poor dears. McGreevy writes:
"It has been a long tradition in the Senate that our coffee room provides snacks for members on session days and meals in situations where the Senate remains in session over normal dining hours,'' Steinberg wrote in a memo to his colleagues. "However, not all traditions can or should be maintained indefinitely," he wrote. "Our institutional practices should reflect our best judgment as times and circumstances change.''The Times reported Sunday that in addition to the public money the Senate has spent on food this year, taxpayers picked up the tab last year for more than $23,000 worth of meals during a 115-day budget standoff. An additional $2,900 a month paid for granola, yogurt, fresh fruit and sweet snacks during the impasse, according to a review of Senate receipts.
This year's expenditures were 10% more than last year's, even as lawmakers approved a 6% cut in the budget for services to Californians.
Lew Uhler, head of the California-based National Tax Limitation Committee, had criticized the meals spending as double dipping, because senators also get $143 per day, tax free, for expenses such as meals and lodging while they are in Sacramento.
Vodka-Laced Tampons? This Has To Be An Urban Legend
Via @ScottGreenfield and Legal Satyricon, teens are supposedly using vodka-soaked tampons to get drunk...and get this from KPHO.com:
"Using a beer bong rectally is the same concept as a vodka soaked tampon," Thomas said.Rather than the traditional beer bong you'd find at a college party, kids are sticking the tube elsewhere to get wasted.
They're calling it "butt chugging."
"A lot of people believe it would cover it up, your breath won't smell like alcohol so you can hide it from the parents, hide it from police," Thomas said.
I don't even see the engineering behind that. How do you get your butt to take a big gulp?
KPHO Commenter Sarah also brings some common sense to the buttparty:
Seriously? Think about what happens to a tampon when it gets wet. It expands. A lot. Now try to imagine inserting that large, soggy piece of cotton into your ****. Also, think about how much that would burn. No way this actually happens.
Do Christmas Trees Really Have An Image Problem?
Are there people out there spewing virulent hatred of Christmas trees? I'm an atheist and I love them. They're pretty. And I wish people would leave Christmas tree lights up all year. They're pretty, too.
I thought this was a story from The Onion, but no, it seems the federal government finds it necessary -- actually, make that nece$$ary -- to promote the image of Christmas trees. From The Foundary, Davis S. Addington writes:
President Obama's Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees--the Christmas Tree Tax--to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a "program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry's position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry" (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of "information" is to include efforts to "enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States" (7 CFR 1214.10).
To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.
What the hell is the Federal government doing in involving itself in the promotion of Christmas trees. And seriously, is there a family out there who wasn't going to have a Christmas tree before that will have one now because the government is sticking this "not a tax," as Shipman calls it, on the trees?
Oh, and don't blame the loser Democrats -- without blaming the loser Republicans, and some dumbasses in the Christmas tree-growing industry for bringing in the government to help them deal with competition from the fake tree industry. From Mediaite:
Jeremy Holden of Media Matters, however, explains that this fee was in the works as far back as 2008, before Obama was elected. And it was generated by growers. "Far from a tax initiated by the Obama administration," Holden says, "the proposal to create an assessment on tree growers to fund a research and promotion program through the USDA was begun by the industry during the Bush administration."
From the Federal Register:
The Christmas tree industry has tried three different times to conduct promotional programs based on voluntary contributions. Each time, after about three years, the revenue declined to a point where the programs were ineffective. The decline in revenue is attributable to the voluntary nature of these programs. Therefore, the proponents have determined that they need a mechanism that would be sustainable over time. They believe that a national Christmas tree research and promotion program would accomplish this goal.
I love the notion that government incompetence is the answer to business incompetence. (If you don't think the government does things rather incompetently, well, we're so sorry about your long coma.)
Told She Has To Lift Her Skirt Up For TSA To Board A Plane
Disgusting abuse of power by little people -- little security guards who are not "officers" but are called that -- who have been handed power for probably the first time in their lives.
Tabitha Hale blogs at RedState:
I had on black tights under my dress, which I'm certain is not uncommon. She asked me to lift my dress so she could check the waistband of my tights.I felt my stomach drop. I said "I'm not lifting my dress for you. No way." She was obviously irritated with me now and said that she would take me to the private screening area if I would like.
I said "No, absolutely not. If you can't do this in front of everyone, you should not be doing this to me."
She then called a manager over. The manager approached me and explained what they were going to do and that if I failed to comply, they would escort me from the airport. I told her I saw no reason that they should have to lift my dress to clear me to get on a plane. I would have, however, allowed them to escort me out of the airport before they got me to lift my skirt and stick their hands down my tights. I was bracing myself to spend another night in Texas.
She sensed the rebellion in me, and it was almost like they were punishing me for not just lifting my dress and making their lives easier. She checked every inch of my neckline, sticking her fingers between my breasts because she needed to "clear" the (very slight) ruffle.
They cleared the waistband of my tights through my dress, then made me put one leg forward at a time so they could get better "definition of my thigh." She then proceded to pat down every inch of me, all the way up to my crotch. And yes, she used that word. Twice.
It reminded me of the time in Columbus, Ohio last November that one of the agents told me to think of the pat down as a "free massage from TSA." I reminded her at the time that you needed to post a license for that.
The pat down in Houston yesterday was so vigorous I had to readjust my clothes when she was finished. Even my bra straps had been pulled down my shoulders in the process. I felt completely violated, immediately called a friend to recap, and took to Twitter to draw as much attention to the incident as I could.
Here's the thing. If anyone else had done this to me, I would have decked them and likely filed charges. The fact that the person has on a TSA uniform is supposed to make it okay? It isn't. Why should any person be subjected to this to get on an airplane? We're supposed to subject ourselves to inappropriate touch for teh sake of "safety"?
The Only Thing Marriage Changes Is That You're Married
The thoughts in this piece by Joelle Caputa, on things that lead women in their 20s to divorce, echo letters I get from the married but divorcing or the divorced. Especially this one:
They hoped marriage would change things.
I am guilty of this mindset. I thought once we were settled into newlywed bliss, my ex-husband would be happier with his own life and able to hold a steady job and show me more affection. However, the honeymoon ended during my engagement. I brushed our problems aside, directing my efforts to tracking down black ostrich feathers for my bouquet and the perfect all-pink flower girl dress.Casey, a 35 year-old travel correspondent and founder of GirlsGetawayGuide.net, described her ex-husband to me as "immature and insecure." She married him at age 24 and recalls "I thought getting married would fix those problems."
Hitchens On Cain And Sexual Harassment
It might be argued that all "advances" begin as unwanted. Christopher Hitchens writes at Slate:
A Washington attorney named Joel Bennett issued a statement about a female complainant in the case of Herman Cain. She makes a claim of sexual harassment, which in Bennett's formulation consists of "a series of inappropriate behaviors and unwanted advances." In a related commentary, Charles M. Blow of the New York Times and others have brought us polling data, to the effect that a majority of committed Republican voters do not give a damn whether Cain is guilty as charged. And Cain himself has continued to soak up the cheers and applause, even as reports surface of another female complainant. Indeed, the figures seem to show Cain sharing the lead with Mitt Romney, which in some if not many ways is absurd.Blow's conclusion, that the right wing doesn't care about Cain's victims, would appear to have a corollary, which is that the left wing doesn't give much of a damn, either. Or at least that no numbers can be found to suggest the contrary. For liberals, Cain is no more than a ghoulish puppet of the Tea Party, a pathetic insurance against charges of racism, a lobbyist and a front-man devoid of ideas. The notion that there might be some wounded woman employee in his past is, to most American radicals, one of pure irrelevance. Why does this somehow not delight me?
Why does it also not delight me that the extent of the allegations against him, at least on some showings, is "unwanted advances"? It might be argued, by the cynical or the naive, that all "advances" begin that way. True, a period of a matter of months is specified, but don't I seem to recall, in President Obama's jaunty account of his courtship, that it took him a certain amount of time to "wear down" his intended target? I dare say that many of us could say the same, while reminiscing among friends, and still hope to avoid getting too many sidelong looks. But in the present circumstances there seems to be a danger of a straight-out politicization of the sexual harassment issue, with many people deciding it in advance on the simple basis of campaign calculations, or--to put it more crudely--of whose ox is being gored. This appears to represent a general coarsening by silence, and yet another crude element in a depressing campaign.
Miracle Cure For Hemorrhoids
Via @RadleyBalko, this story: "A 50-year-old Croat, who had to get medical help after inserting an anti-aircraft shell in his anus..."
Eggs Aren't People
Andrew Rosenthal blogs at the NYT on Utah governor John Huntsman coming out on the side of sense -- saying a proposed amendment to the Mississippi constitution, which would declare a fertilized egg to be a person under the law, "goes too far":
Too far? That's putting it mildly.Let's start with this simple medical fact: Only about half of fertilized eggs ever become implanted. It's hard to imagine personhooders claiming that a woman whose body fails to implant a fertilized egg is a criminal. But their nutty amendment does seem to rule out abortion under all circumstances, including rape or incest, or in the case of an ectopic pregnancy that could kill the pregnant woman, along of course, with the implanted egg.
The amendment could also result in a ban of birth control pills and intrauterine devices, since they disrupt implantation. According to the Guttmacher Institute, at a national level that sort of restriction would affect around 11 million women who use the pill, and another 2 million who use IUD's.
This is 2011 and people in this country want to argue about birth control. What a colossal waste of time--almost on par with "reaffirming" our national motto.
For the record, while I'm for women being allowed to choose to have abortions, I find abortion creepy and troubling -- but creepiest and troublingest when it's done well into a woman's pregnancy.
But, let's be honest: Want to have a fertilized egg sucked out of you? That's having a fertilized egg sucked out, and not at all equivalent to aborting a lady sitting next to you on the bus.
And for the neuroscientific approach to this question, from a previous blog item, here's Michael Gazzaniga in The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas
For Gazzaniga, neuroscience tells us that "life begins with a sentient being," around week twenty-three, or around the same time that the fetus can survive outside the womb with medical support. In Gazzaniga's view, it is at this point, and not until then, that the fetus becomes "one of us," with all "the moral and legal rights of a human being." And thus Gazzaniga holds that we should allow unrestricted experimentation on human embryos up to week twenty-three.To explain his argument, Gazzaniga uses an analogy: the embryo is like housing materials found at a Home Depot. Says Gazzaniga: "When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not '30 Houses Burn Down.' It is 'Home Depot Burned Down.'" Similarly, to destroy a fetus is not to destroy a human life, but merely the "materials" of life.
It's "Switzerland" Not "Saudiland"
The audacity of Muslims continues in demanding that Western society change to accommodate them.
Muslims in Switzerland are now demanding that the Swiss change their flag...because...it's a little too Christian for them! Soeren Kern blogs at Hudson New York:
Ivica Petrusic, the vice president of Second@s Plus, a lobbying group that represents mostly Muslim second-generation foreigners in Switzerland (who colloquially are known as secondos) says the group will launch a nationwide campaign in October to ask Swiss citizens to consider adopting a flag that is less offensive to Muslim immigrants.
As Marisol posted at Jihadwatch:
Switzerland isn't forcing people to go live there if the flag offends them.
Occupy Wall Street Versus Occupy McDonald's
@AriArmstrong visits both (the second of which is populated by his wife and friend):
And here's a voice from Occupy St. John:
Yes, dude -- if you want to get a job at a corporation, you will have to look the part. Oh, the DEMANDS!
Workplace Sexual Harassment Isn't Merely A Compliment Or A Request For A Date
Curt Levey, in the WSJ, does a good job clearing up some widely held myths vis a vis the allegations that Hermain Cain made sexually suggestive remarks and unwanted sexual advances while he headed the Nat'l Restaurant Association in the 90s:
Sexual harassment claims in the workplace are governed by the federal antidiscrimination statute Title VII and similar state laws. Title VII protects only employees, holds the employer, not the harasser, liable, and recognizes two types of harassment claims: "quid pro quo" and "hostile environment."The former occurs when job benefits, such as employment, promotion, and salary are made contingent on the provision of sexual favors--or withdrawn because a sexual advance is rejected. While suggestively asking your employee up to your hotel room is a bad idea, without more it's not sexual harassment.
The definition of hostile-environment harassment is more complicated and more open to interpretation. For a hostile-environment claim to succeed, the conduct--sexual advances or hostile behavior--must be unwelcome, based on gender, and severe or pervasive enough to create an abusive work environment as judged by an objective, reasonable person. Each of these several elements must be satisfied. And even then, the plaintiff will prevail only if the employer failed to respond appropriately.
Conduct must be unwelcome in the sense that it wasn't invited, and was regarded as offensive. If the plaintiff engaged in the same sort of inappropriate behavior as the alleged harasser--"sexual hijinx" in one case--courts will usually conclude that the conduct is not unwelcome.
To be considered "severe or pervasive" the Supreme Court has instructed courts to look at the totality of circumstances, including "the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee's work performance." The court distinguishes between "the ordinary tribulations of the workplace, such as the sporadic use of abusive language, gender-related jokes, and occasional teasing" and flirting, and a workplace "permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult."
"R" Is For Hypocrite
For anybody gloating that the Republicans are sooo much better than those dirty Dems, let's not kid ourselves: There are loads and loads of dirties on both sides.
Tad DeHaven blogs at Cato on GOP hypocrisy on energy subsidies:
When the Solyndra scandal broke in September, I wrote that "Republicans should be careful when casting stones given their past and present support for energy subsidies." The left has been ripping congressional Republicans for making political hay of the Solyndra affair after having lobbied the Department of Energy to bestow their constituents with similar taxpayer handouts.ThinkProgress released a report that documents letters sent by 62 Republican members of Congress to Energy officials groveling for subsidies. Are these Republicans hypocrites? I'd say that it depends. I think the members who justified their request on the basis of "job creation" while criticizing the Obama administration for justifying its stimulus packages on the same grounds belong in the "yes" column. Also belonging in the "yes" column are those subsidy-seeking members who have chastised the administration for engaging in "crony capitalism" and "picking winners and losers." On the other hand, I don't think the sole act of criticizing the Solyndra deal while begging Energy for money necessarily makes one a hypocrite.
Are Public School Teachers Underpaid?
Via reason's @NickGillespie, a post by Lindsey M. Burke at JayPGreene:
My colleague at Heritage, Jason Richwine, along with co-author Andrew Biggs of AEI, has just published a groundbreaking new paper on teacher compensation. The authors find that public school teachers "make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year."...While it's true that public school teachers earn less, on average, than similarly credentialed non-teachers, Richwine and Biggs note that traditional skill measures, such as years spent in school or level of degree, do not lend themselves to an accurate salary comparison of teachers to non-teachers. The "wage gap" disappears when teachers and non-teachers are compared using objective measures of cognitive ability, as opposed to years of university education.
Beyond paper qualifications, comparisons of public school teachers to their private school counterparts provides more evidence that public school teachers are compensated above market value. The authors find that "With all observable skills held constant, public-school teachers nationally earn 9.8 percent more in salaries than private school teachers."
But it's the benefits that are the biggest factor. Biggs notes in NRO:
"The BLS benefits data, which most pay studies rely on, has three shortcomings: It omits the value of retiree health coverage, which is uncommon for private workers but is worth about an extra 10 percent of pay for teachers; it understates the value of teachers' defined-benefit pensions, which pay benefits several times higher than the typical private 401(k) plan; and it ignores teachers' time off outside the normal school year, meaning that long summer vacations aren't counted as a benefit. When we fix these problems, teacher benefits are worth about double the average private-sector level.
"Finally, public-school teachers have much greater job security, with unemployment rates about half those of private-school teachers or other comparable private occupations. Job security protects against loss of income during unemployment and, even more importantly, protects a position in which benefits are much more generous than private-sector levels."
The teacher who brings me in to talk to the inner city kids specifically told me she isn't underpaid. She gets a good salary, she said, and gets the summer months off.
Everything You Do Doesn't Require Therapy
It's yet another bullshit article that gloms onto a rather rare psychological disorder to frighten (and get web traffic from) the masses. On the side of my email, I saw a blurb linking to a Stylelist.com piece, the blurb reading "Why You Shouldn't Twirl Your Hair." Dana Oliver writes:
Once I stopped straightening my naturally curly hair, I developed a routine that includes wrapping strands into two strand twists before bed to achieve the "perfect" coil in the morning. While it can take up to an hour for each process, I find myself getting lost in the rhythm of pulling at my curls. However, I'm starting to rethink my hairstyling strategy can have serious consequences.Any action like twirling, brushing and twisting can cross the line from normal to compulsive, leading to trichotillomania, according to Elizabeth Cunnane Philips, trichologist at hair health-focused brand Philip Kingsley.
The extreme self-inflicted hair loss condition can start as innocently as hair twirling, perhaps while watching TV or studying, which then can develop into the pulling of individual hairs. It's much more likely to affect women than men -- with an approximate ratio of four to one. And trichotillomania is often present or reported soon after the onset of puberty, with the urge to twirl having deep psychological undertones.
"The sensation of pain creates a sensation that is one of exhilaration," says Philips. "Often times the patient reports a period of elevated stress that then spurred the condition. I have never observed a case where stress was not one of the presenting factors."
Details on trichotillomania here. And note (from the link above) that "trichologist" sounds very important, but, "Trichologists themselves are not normally licensed healthcare workers, although members of the medical profession can undertake courses and/or careers within trichology."
And yes, actions (from hair pulling to drinking) can cross the line and become harmful, but you'll notice that most of us are exposed to alcohol a whole lot of the time and only a few of us are drunks.
Likewise, acting like hair twisting is going to be a problem for the average woman is just crap promoted as reality.
Why don't I twist my hair? No, not because I'm unnecessarily panic-stricken about becoming driven to do it, but because it's boring as fuck and I need to get a seat at my writing cafe in the mornings, and if I take the time to twist my hair, I'l get a seat there the morning after tomorrow.
Occupy Wall Street Has Nothing On The Muslims Taking Over Europe's Streets
A reported 60,000 Muslims block traffic in Moscow to pray.
Better (and shorter) video here:
"Maxime Lepant," the alias (because his life has, of course been threatened) of the guy who takes the video of Muslims blocking the streets in Paris, speaks at the blog, Wakeup2010:
His camera shows that Muslims "are blocking the streets with barriers. They are praying on the ground. And the inhabitants of this district cannot leave their homes, nor go into their homes during those prayers.""The Muslims taking over those streets do not have any authorization. They do not go to the police headquarters, so it's completely illegal," he says.
The Muslims in the street have been granted unofficial rights that no Christian group is likely to get under France's Laicite', or secularism law.
"It says people have the right to share any belief they want, any religion," Lepante explained. "But they have to practice at home or in the mosque, synagogues, churches and so on."
Some say Muslims must pray in the street because they need a larger mosque. But Lepante has observed cars coming from other parts of Paris, and he believes it is a weekly display of growing Muslim power.
"They are coming there to show that they can take over some French streets to show that they can conquer a part of the French territory," he said.
...From the 1980s until recently, criticizing or opposing Islam was considered a social taboo, and so the government and media effectively helped Islam spread throughout France.
"We were expecting Islam to adapt to France and it is France adapting to Islam," Robin said.
Video with English subtitles. And the message posted with the video: "It needs to be stressed, the Muslims do not have legal authorization to take over the streets for prayer, or to act as police and direct traffic."
I Drink My Coffee "Break A Tooth"-Black
It's a problem finding a grinder that'll grind it really fine, that doesn't break your wrist or heat up the beans and muck up the taste. Burr grinders are the best, and the best of the burr grinders (and the best for the money) is the Capresso Infinity. (You just twist a little dial and it does the job -- no holding a vibrating thing in your hand...well, not unless you like to have some fun multitasking while the coffee is grinding...and it happens rather quickly, anyway!)
Being in massive frugal mode, I got a used floor sample on eBay, but they're at a good price on Amazon, and grind all the way to "Turkish." And it's quiet (for a thing grinding a bunch of beans -- certainly quieter than any other home coffee grinder I've ever heard -- and easy to use.
Here's a link to one on Amazon -- only $89.99 instead of the regular price of $120: Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder, Brushed Silver Finish
And best of all, if you buy it, or use the link to buy anything else on Amazon, it helps support me and this website. At the very least, it supports my coffee purchases.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I make my coffee the way that makes it the least bitter and most flavorful, and while looking a bit Mr. Science -- by using a glass beaker Chemex
And while we're at it, isn't this teakettle
Get The Podcast!
Advice Goddess Radio: Great show tonight with Dr. Barb Oakley on "pathological altruism," helping that hurts. Get the podcast: http://bit.ly/skMVlW
"Play in your default player" downloads it as a podcast. "Download" makes it play on your computer. Yeah, a little bassackwards.
Advice Goddess Radio Tonight: Special Guest, Dr. Barbara Oakley
My fifth show is tonight -- 7 p.m. Pacific time, 10 p.m. Eastern, for an hour, and WE NEED YOUR CALLS!
Tonight, very special guest Dr. Barbara Oakley, author (most recently) of the fascinating book, Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts
I'll be talking with Dr. Oakley about enablers and other purveyers of "helping that hurts," aka "Pathological Altruism," which is also the title of a fascinating edited Oxford Press book that she is the lead author on. More about Dr. Oakley here.
We'll be taking your calls -- a not-to-be-missed opportunity to both hear and talk with Dr. Oakley and, of course, your hostess, Amy Alkon.
Call in to comment on something in the news (related to love, dating, sex, relationships, or rudeness), call in for advice, or call in to talk about something in my column.
If you're willing to call, please let me know (comments or email me at adviceamy at AOL dot com) so I know I'll have some people to talk with.
Listen live here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2011/11/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Download a podcast afterward here:
http://blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
About the show:
Nationally syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon takes your questions on love, dating, sex, relationships, and manners.It's most fun and most interesting (and I get in "the zone") when you call and I can play off of you. So don't be shy -- call-in number once the show is on and live (at 7 p.m.): (347) 326-9761 (New York area code).
Call in for advice on the topic we're discussing, to bat around your thoughts on love, dating, sex, relationships, and manners, or to ask for advice on any topic on the above!
You can go to that regular link to download the podcast after the show (you may have to wait 10 minutes or so for it to post). "Play in your default player" downloads it as a podcast. "Download" makes it play on your computer. Yeah, a little bassackwards.
Treating Kids Like China Dolls
Lenore Skenazy blogs at Free Range Kids that there was an accident in an elementary school, where a kid fell off his stool in the cafeteria and hit his head, so now children must be immobilized during lunch:
...A whole new array of rules in the cafeteria have been established, including that kids who need a fork, spoon, straw, etc. are now not permitted to get up and get one, but instead they are to raise their hand and ask the lunchroom monitors to get it for them. Kids are also no longer permitted to use the restroom during lunchtime.I am sorry that a child bumped his head, but I do not see the sense in preventing kids from taking care of their own needs helps this. There is not always an institutional solution to every little problem. The kid fell not because someone got up and got a straw. The kid fell because he is a little kid who sat a little goofy on his stool and lost his balance.
This is a perfect example of over-correcting for an unfortunate accident and in the meantime, creating worse problems for kids. I think 4th graders should not expect an adult to take care of all their needs.
Bruce Schneier on the difference between feeling secure and being secure:
Rudewad Of The Day
Gotta love the 20-something musician asshat sitting by me at Starbucks with the pristine new MacBook Pro (15-inch!) bellowing into his iPhone 4 about how he's got to get off welfare.
Sending Infectious Diseases In The Mail
Whether the chicken pox virus would even survive through the mail is a question, but how dare these mothers expose their children to chicken pox -- and possibly the painful (and related) disease, shingles, later in life...along with postal workers and others?
Rita Rubin writes for Moms.TODAY:
You've probably heard of "chickenpox parties," where parents get unvaccinated kids together (in the home of an infected child) in the hopes they'll catch the disease. They think making their kids suffer through the disease will help them develop stronger immunity than immunization would provide.But now the buzz is all about people shipping objects that have been contaminated with the chickenpox virus to people who live too far away to attend a pox party.
A Nashville TV station Thursday reported on a local woman who charged $50 a pop to ship suckers smothered in saliva by her sick kids.
Spurred by that story, Nashville federal prosecutor Jerry Martin on Friday warned parents not to try it. "It's illegal and unsafe," Martin told the Associated Press.
A Phoenix TV station last week reported that a Facebook page called "Find a Pox Party in Your Area" was helping to arrange shipments of contaminated objects--jammies, blankets, suckers.
But shortly after the Phoenix story ran, the "pox party" FB page posted a warning:
"The mailing of infectious items, such as lollipops, rags, etc., is a federal offense. This page is not private and can been seen by members and non-members alike. You may post on the page that you have the pox and are willing to share but please keep your specifics in private messages between members. We are all intelligent adults but these guidelines will help protect your privacy. If you'd like to go back and delete your posts about mailing, feel free to do so."
The Palestinian Lie And Useful Idiots For Palestine
Pat Condell on how the Muslims want the Jews dead, don't want a state of their own but want the Jewish state obliterated:
Note that Muslims have more rights in Israel than they do in any Arab country.
"It's not about Israelis; it's about Jews."
"Death to Jews. That's what you support when you support the Palestinians."
"What you're actually doing is supporting an Islamic war against Jews."
Spending The Day With Denise Hamilton
Thanks largely to this awful economy, I haven't really had a day off since Gregg took me to Paris last November, and I woke up today all life-exhausted and went back to bed. Gregg, who is wise about things, told me to stay home (instead of going out to my writing cafe), and I listened, and I've been having a fabulous day, sleeping and reading.
I'm about 100 pages into a fantastic crime novel, Damage Control
Great book -- compelling story, laced with interesting mentions of perfume (Denise is now the LA Times' Magazine's perfume columnist and is into forgotten French fragrances), and wonderful, evocative writing. Plus, it's set in California -- largely LA -- and Denise really captures the place with bits of language here and there getting you from place to place in the crime story.
Great to see a friend so successful. And I highly recommend the book, which you can get in hardcover, paperback, audiobook or eBook at the Amazon link above.
Cover Your Ass Crack While Dining
San Francisco bans naked dining, and demands that you put a doily down before sitting on a public bench. Via FOX:
The city's Board of Supervisors has adopted new rules that ban naked people from eating in restaurants, and forces nudists to place a cover on public chairs and benches before they sit down, the San Francisco Examiner reported.Supervisor Scott Wiener, who introduced the legislation, said, "We did hear from folks in the neighborhood that these are actually tangible issues that are happening in the Castro and so the legislation is important for that reason."
"I'm not a health expert, but I believe sitting nude in a public place is not sanitary," he said in September when the ordinance was introduced. "Would you want to sit on a seat where someone had been sitting naked? I think most people would say no."
Lobbyists Are Too Powerful Because Government Is Too Powerful
From the Libertarian party's Mark Hinkle:
"President Obama is currently caught in a bit of a scandal over his pledge not to take campaign money from lobbyists."According to the New York Times, 'Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.'
"It's unfortunate that the president has added one more to his pile of broken promises. But it's not at all surprising.
"Our government has far too much power and money at its disposal. The inevitable consequence is that businesses, organizations, and individuals will work very hard to guide that power and money in their own favor.
"In fact, it often seems like politicians intentionally create incentives for people to try to bribe them.
"Businesses especially will fight for more corporate welfare, and also for regulations that stifle potential competitors. What choice do they have? If they don't fight for those special government favors, then someone else will, which will put them at an increasing disadvantage, and might drive them out of business.
..."I have to remind myself, lobbying isn't essentially a bad thing. It's an expression of our right to 'petition the government for a redress of grievances.' It provides information to politicians. But when politicians get in the habit of handing out favors, you can bet everyone is going to run up to the trough.
"The only way to reduce the power of lobbyists is to reduce the power of government. That choice rests with the voters. If voters keep electing Democrats and Republicans, then the power of government and lobbyists will continue to grow. If voters start electing Libertarians, things will change."
Jesse Ventura's TSA Suit Tossed
I'm heartened that he brought suit, but disheartened by the results. Via InfoWars:
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura said he would now refer to the country of his birth as the "Fascist States of America" after a judge dismissed his case challenging airport pat downs, adding that his only recourse now would be to run for President."Ventura made his comments outside the federal courthouse in St. Paul, where in January he sued to challenge the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) airport security procedures," reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "The suit was thrown out because Congress set up the law so that all such challenges must be brought directly in Circuit Courts of Appeals, wrote U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson."
"They said they don't have jurisdiction," Ventura told reporters. "Well my question is if the federal courts don't have jurisdiction over a constitutional question then who the hell does?"
A further detail that Ventura revealed on the Alex Jones Show which has not been picked up by mainstream media reports is the fact that Ventura's lawyer was told he could not even look at the ruling due to "national security" concerns.
By the way, I met and had a lot of fun verbally sparring with Ventura when producers of his TV show flew me to Minneapolis to test to be his co-host on his planned TV show.
Hugging Dangerously
Via regular commenter DrMaturin, the latest in idiocy in "zero tolerance" policies -- students suspended for breaking a middle school's zero tolerance no-hugging policy. From Fox Orlando:
Nick Martinez said he gave a quick hug to his best friend, a female student, between classes.The public display of affection was spotted by the principal of Palm Bay's Southwest Middle School, 74 miles southeast of Orlando. While the principal said he believed the hug was innocent, he brought the two students to the school's dean, who penalized them with in-school suspensions.
According to the Southwest Middle School's student handbook, students can receive a one-day out-of-school suspension for kissing, while students caught hugging or hand-holding are penalized with a dean's detention or suspension.
School administrators said a committee of parents approved the "no hugging" policy years ago, and there aren't plans to change it any time soon.
The school's strict policy stipulates that there is no difference between an unwanted hug, or sexual harassment, and a hug between friends.
Christine Davis, spokesman for Brevard County School said the school's "focus is on learning; therefore, we cannot discriminate or make an opinion on what is an appropriate hug, what's not an appropriate hug," said Davis. "What you may think is appropriate, another person may view as inappropriate."
The focus is on learning? Well learn them students to think instead of forcing them to follow dumb policies apparently designed to help administrators avoid the need for discernment.
Remember judgment?
And what kind of parent comes up with a zero tolerance/no-hugging policy?
We not only have too many laws affecting all of us, we're spreading the disease to kids in the dumbest of ways.
The video:
In Printed Platitudes On Paper We Trust
Michael Shermer writes in the LA Times about the 396-9 House vote this week to reaffirm as the national motto "In God We Trust" and to encourage its placement on money and public buildings:
What is troubling -- and should trouble any enlightened citizen of a modern nation such as ours -- is the implication that in this age of science and technology, computers and cyberspace, and liberal democracies securing rights and freedoms for oppressed peoples all over the globe, that anyone could still hold to the belief that religion has a monopoly on morality and that the foundation of trust is based on engraving four words on brick and paper.If you think that God is watching over the U.S., please ask yourself why he glanced away during 9/11 or why he chose to abandon the good folks of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and why he continues to allow earthquakes and cancers to strike down even blameless children. The problem of evil -- why bad things happen to good people if an all-powerful and all-good God is in control of things -- has haunted the faithful since it was first articulated millenniums ago, with nigh a solution on the horizon.
It's time to drop the God talk and face reality with a steely-eyed visage of the modern understanding of the origin of freedom on which the United States was founded and continues to be secured. God has nothing to do with it. If you want freedom and security, you need the following:
The rule of law; property rights; a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system; economic stability; a reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country; freedom of the press; freedom of association; education for the masses; protection of civil liberties; a clean and safe environment; a robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states; a potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by people within the state; a viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws; and an effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.
And excuse me, but it's not like there's any dearth of stuff for the bozos in the house to set about fixing, like the fact the worth of the money that statement's going to be printed on is rapidly becoming comparable to that of the Zimbabwean dollar.
Think The Government Will Protect You From Dangerous Drugs?
Haw, haw, haw! (Can you please not come anywhere near me if you're taking a statin?)
via @TomDNaughton
If Free Speech Doesn't Work For You...
How about you live where where speech is unfree, like in Muslim countries in the Middle East, instead of emigrating to West to foist your values -- and your firebombs -- on free and civilized people there?
Of course, a rather modern and civilized alternative would be taking a chair at the table of Enlightenment values and learning to defend your religion with something other than brute violence.
Henry Samuel writes for the Independent that the satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, had its offices bombed after it printed this cover, with Mohammed saying "A hundred lashes if you don't die of laughter": 
From Samuel's story:
A back page cartoon shows a bearded prophet with a red nose and the caption: "Yes, Islam is compatible with humour."It is also mockingly renamed "Charia Hébdo" - a pun on Islamic Sharia law.
The fiercely anti-clerical magazine said the move was intended to "celebrate" the victory of Islamist party Ennhada in Tunisia's election, and the inclusion of Sharia in the Libyan constitution.
Charlie Hedbo's editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb said: "We no longer have a newspaper. All our equipment has been destroyed."
No-one was hurt in the blaze, believed to have started by two Molotov cocktails thrown at the paper's headquarters in Paris's 20th arrondissement overnight. Computers needed to design the paper and digital archives were destroyed.
...The magazine's website was also hacked overnight, with the welcome page replaced by a picture of Mecca full of pilgrims and the words: "No god but Allah".
It has filed a legal complaint against persons unknown, and has taken up temporary quarters at the Libération newspaper's offices.
"We will do everything possible to put a paper next week. There is no question of giving in to Islamists (if behind the fire)," said Charb, who added that the attackers could not even have read the offending magazine.
"Nobody knows what's in it except those who bought it this morning, that's what's most abhorrent and stupid," he said.
More at Hudson New York, by Soeren Kern:
In recent years, Muslim immigrants and their multicultural supporters in Europe have used a combination of lawsuits, verbal and physical harassment and even murder to silence debate about the rise of Islam there....But Charb rejected accusations that he was trying to provoke. "It was a joke where the topic was to imagine a world where Sharia would be applied," Charb said. "But since everyone tells us not to worry about Libya or Tunisia, we wanted to explain what would be a soft version of Sharia, a Sharia applied in a soft manner. We feel we are just doing our job as usual. The only difference is that this week, Mohammed is on the cover and that is quite rare," Charb said.
French Prime Minister François Fillon said "Freedom of expression is an inalienable value of our democracy. No cause can justify a violent action."
French Muslim leaders, while distancing themselves from the attack, said it was justified.
Barbarians. Here, from Kern's piece, is one of those French Muslim leaders:
Dalil Boubakeur, who heads the Great Mosque of Paris, said he resented the "anxious European climate of Islamophobia" and the stigmatizing of Muslims through caricatures.
Again, we have free speech in the west. And you don't have a right to not be offended or have your religion of violence and death mocked for being just that.
That sort of thing doesn't work for you? Drag your backward, barbarian ass back to the Middle East where they'll execute people for having an Islamically unapproved opinion. (In fact, just being Christian will very likely get you dead.)
Fathers And Families Is Also For Mothers And Families
I've long respected men's rights activist Glenn Sacks for his balanced approach to the issues, and he doesn't disappoint here. Fathers and Families has long been working on protecting the custody rights of parents in the military, and yes, that's parents, not just fathers.
Sacks writes at fathersandfamilies.com:
While the family court system in general is biased against fathers, Fathers and Families has repeatedly warned that there are fathers who have learned how to work the system against mothers, and use it to their unjust advantage. When this occurs, Fathers and Families is on the side of the mother whose loving bonds with her children are being endangered.In Re the Marriage of Brandt, currently before the Colorado Supreme Court, is such a case. Fathers and Families has been assisting Captain Christine Brandt of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps to regain custody of her 12-year-old son. As Brandt's attorney Stanley G. Lipkin, Esq. explained to the Court, this case is "about an active duty military person who has been deprived of the custody of her child solely by reason of her deployments."
Details on the case at the link above.
For the record, one of my issues about feminism is that it often seems to be for special treatment under the guise of equal treatment. If you're truly for equal and fair treatment, you're for it for anyone who's a victim of injustice, no matter what sort of parts they're packing in their pants.
DHS: The Government Is Not Only Making Commercials On Our Dime...
...They're deputizing us to fink on our neighbors. Raise a hand -- who here thinks this won't be abused? The next time I tell some boor who flicks his butt on the ground, "The world is not your ashtray," well, the SWAT team may be breaking down my door to search for my Al Qaeda connection.
Via Lisa Simeone (who was fired from her NPR arts job for having an opinion on politics instead of pretending to be apolitical -- as if her politics affect her opera coverage), hotel guests are "recruited" with Department of Homeland Security TV spots to "join the fight against terrorism."
Re-fucking-diculous. Much like it is for us to wait for terrorists to get to the airport so we can hope to have unskilled workers root them out by groping their genitals -- as opposed to using targeted intelligence, by highly trained officers, to find them.
From USA Today, by Barbara De Lollis:
Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, "Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities."
The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact "local authorities."
...The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry's largest association -- the American Hotel & Lodging Association -- which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry's largest TV-content provider.
By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.
"Captive audience"? In a word, fuck you. Oh, sorry -- that's two words.
Loved this:
DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard, however, cites successful citizen interventions, such as the May 2010 incident in which two street vendors helped thwart a car bombing attempt in New York City's Times Square by noticing a smoking vehicle and reporting it to police.
Like you need a commercial to help you figure out that you should do something when a vehicle seems to be on fire in Times Square.
And here's the dopey commercial:
Like a guy at the airport getting something out of his trunk is suspicious! (Of course, they didn't make him look like he was born in Pakistan or anything -- and no, not that all Muslims are, since some people misguidedly convert to the religion of intolerance and death.)
And, okay, the pantybomber and others sent by Al Qaeda haven't exactly been geniuses, but anyone with an IQ above freezing isn't going to take his bomb out of his trunk like it's a golf bag right in front of the airport or train station.
Kinda Sucks To Subsidize Freeloaders, Huh?
Commenter Renee called this out from Occupy Wall Street, from an MSNBC story by Miranda Leitsinger:
"People forget this is the middle of the street," Burke said. "All walks of life are in here, so it's not like a bunch of crazy people are in this park. But there is an element in this park that is eating free food, living in tents and being subsidized by the movement. It's one of the weak parts of the movement, but it's changing. ... It's just a thing everyone's working out as we go along."
Renee wrote on "Occupy Sense":
HA! So you don't like to subsidize others and the way they live? But you want the big bad business men and government to subsidize your decision to go to some high dollar school and study American Folk Dancing or some crap? The irony was too funny not to share!!
How Dumb Is Our Federal Government?
Professor Mark J. Perry blogs about the government push for high-cost, "high-speed" rail -- when there's already a transportation solution in an area:
Megabus provides low-cost, non-stop express bus service twice daily between Iowa City and Chicago for fares as low as $10 each way for service on some days, and $18 and $23 on other days. The single and double decker luxury buses offer free wireless Internet, convenient power outlets for laptops and cell phones, and panoramic windows (see photo above), and the one-way trip takes less than four hours. To provide this affordable, convenient, dependable and low-cost daily bus service between Iowa City and Chicago, Megabus receives no taxpayer funding, federal or state subsidies, loan guarantees, support payments, etc.So what's the federal government's response to the "non-problem" of affordable public transportation between Iowa City and Chicago? At New Geography, Wendell Cox writes:
"The federal government is again offering money it does not have to entice a state (Iowa) to spend money that it does not have on something it does not need. The state of Iowa is being asked to provide funds to match federal funding for a so-called "high speed rail" line from Chicago to Iowa City. The new rail line would simply duplicate service that is already available (Megabus).Perhaps most surprisingly, the luxury buses make the trip faster than the so-called high speed rail line, at 3:50 hours. The trains would take more than an hour longer (5:00 hours). No one would be able to get to Chicago quicker than now. Only in America does anyone call a train that averages 45 miles per hour "high speed rail."
Gives New Meaning To The Term "Mindfuck"
Also, I think there are a number of women who'd like this woman's husband's phone number.
Michael Winter writes in USA Today:
An item that LiveScience reported Tuesday about a 54-year-old woman who suffered temporary amnesia after having orgasmic sex with her husband is piquing interest today.About an hour post-coitus, the unidentified woman went to the Georgetown University Hospital emergency room to report she could not remember the past 24 hours. Doctors diagnosed her with a rare form of sudden memory loss known as transient global amnesia, or TGA. They reported their findings in The Journal of Emergency Medicine.
"Transient global amnesia is caused by a scrambling of the memory circuits in the brain, often brought on by physical or emotional triggers," Dr. Carol Lippa, a professor of neurology at Drexel University Medical School in Philadelphia, told ABC News.
Mexico: Red, White, And Bloody
Fred Reed writes on Lew Rockwell about what's happened to Mexico:
When I came to Mexico some eight years ago, it was a peaceful, moderately successful upper-Third-World country - middle-class, barely, literate, though often barely, and as democratic as the United States, which is to say barely. Things were improving, though often they had a long way to go. The young were visibly healthier than preceding generations. The birth rate was in sharp decline. Women entered the professions in substantial and growing numbers.And it was safe. Expats sat over coffee at the plaza laughing at people back in the States, insular, fearful, ignorant of the world outside their borders. (For recent college graduates, Mexico is a country south of the United States. "South" is down on maps.) Mexico, they believed, was most astonishing perilous. Don't drink the water, avoid ice. Salads were thought especially lethal. The Federales would kill you for sport, like squirrels. On any given day, you would probably be shot several times by bandidos. It was nonsense.
Then Vicente Fox left office, and Felipe Calderon came in. He declared war on the narcotraficantes. Why he did this, I don't know, since Mexico didn't have a drug problem. My guess is that Washington pushed him into it, but I don't know.
Unfortunately Mexico, which neither produces nor uses a lot of drugs, lies between Colombia, which produces vast amounts of drugs, and Americans, who want vast amounts of drugs. Washington does not want Americans to have vast amounts of drugs. Neither did it want to lose votes by imprisoning white users of drugs, such as college students, high-school students, professors, Congressmen, lawyers, and blue-collar guys driving bulldozers. The answer was to make Mexico fight Washington's wars.
But Mexico couldn't fight the narcos, because the United States was actually on the side of the traficantes. Does this sound counterintuitive? What happened was that the narcos gave the Americans the huge quantities of drugs they wanted, and in return Americans gave the narcos huge amounts of money and military-grade weaponry: chiefly AKs, but also grenades and the occasional RPG. The Mexican police, lightly armed, barely paid, and utterly corrupt, could do nothing against these odds. The narcos had a further argument: Do what we say, and we will give you money. Otherwise, we will kill your family.
You figure it out.
Hello Titty
A happy day for lovers of naked nipples and naked free speech -- a federal court has sided with CBS and Janet Jackson's boob on exposure of the latter at the Superbowl. From an AP story by Maryclaire Dale:
A three-judge panel from 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that the FCC improperly assessed a $550,000 fine against the network for the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that lasted just over half a second.During the Super Bowl performance in Houston, Justin Timberlake ripped off Jackson's bustier, briefly exposing her breast and a silver sunburst "shield" covering her nipple. In arguments last year, the FCC argued that CBS should have been aware the performers might add shock value to the act.
"CBS had a duty to investigate," FCC lawyer Jack Lewis argued.
Right: "Miss Jackson, might you let Jason Timberlake rip off part of your outfit for shock value?"
The big question is: Why did the government pursue such a weak, stupid, and wasteful course of action?
And a complaint: We didn't even get to see nipple.
Here Comes The Judge: Taking A Belt To His Teenage Daughter
Extremely disturbing video:
This text (apparently by his daughter) was posted on YouTube along with the video:
2004: Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time. She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father's backwards views. The judge's wife was emotionally abused herself and was severely manipulated into assisting the beating and should not be blamed for any content in this video. The judge's wife has since left the marriage due to the abuse, which continues to this day, and has sincerely apologized and repented for her part and for allowing such a thing, long before this video was even revealed to exist. Judge William Adams is not fit to be anywhere near the law system if he can't even exercise fit judgement as a parent himself. Do not allow this man to ever be re-elected again. His "judgement" is a giant farce. Signed, Hillary Adams, his daughter.
The Aransas County Court posted this message:
ARANSAS COUNTY, TEXAS - Judge Burt Mills has today announced that Aransas County is aware of the video posted on YouTube regarding County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams, and the matter is now under review by the Police Department. Please refrain from communication with County offices or the Sheriff's Department on this matter until the review has been completed. Calls, emails, and faxes only create disruptions for other ongoing county business. The public's cooperation would be most appreciated.
A video of Hillary playing the piano is here, to give you a sense of what she's like when she isn't being viciously beaten.
via reason
Occupy Sense
Good blog item by Ben Popken at Consumerist about a YouTube video that's gone viral promoting the notion that you can really mess with banks by sending back angry messages in those prepaid envelopes that come with credit card offers...that this will cause the banks to revolutionize the way they operate. Silly! Naive!
Popken blogs, "This is a terrible idea and a waste of time":
As much as I may appreciate the video's sentiment, the mail gets processed by outside contractors , it doesn't go into the bank mailroom. There's not going to be a meeting. Anything that doesn't fit the marketing response lead generation criterion is going to get thrown in the trash. They're a direct marketing facility, they don't care about dialogue.Making it heavier won't raise mail costs for bank as they pay flat bulk rates. However, putting weird heavy and crumbly crap in letters may mess up the mail sorting machines at the post office, which is why most postmasters try to intercept that stuff. If a prepaid postage envelope is used for other than its intended purpose - the classic example popularized in Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" is taping it to a brick - the post office can treat it as "waste" and toss it. They're highly motivated to keep items like this out of the mail.
Finally, the notion that if enough of these envelopes come in the bank will have to meet about it, "and an hour spent making them react to us is an hour less they spend foreclosing and lobbying," ...is just plain wrong. Even if this meeting did happen, it won't draw any resources away from the parts of the bank handling the foreclosure and lobbying efforts.
Here's the video:
PS Yes, nimrod, the bank pays less for mail -- as does anyone who gets a bulk rate stamp...which even I used to have. It's about volume, not discrimination.
TSA Scanners: The Government Couldn't Give Two Dried Turds About Your Safety
What always surprises me is encountering anyone over, say, 14, who thinks the government is there to protect them, but there are so many people like that -- despite myriad examples like this one.
Michael Grabell writes at Propublica that the government glossed over cancer concerns as it rolled out airport scanners:
A ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation of how this decision was made shows that in post-9/11 America, security issues can trump even long-established medical conventions. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the FDA, which regulates drugs and medical devices, but by the TSA, an agency whose primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks.Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as "safe," glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation -- the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners -- increase the risk of cancer.
"Even though it's a very small risk, when you expose that number of people, there's a potential for some of them to get cancer," said Kathleen Kaufman, the former radiation management director in Los Angeles County, who brought the prison X-rays to the FDA panel's attention.
...Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors' offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices.
Still, the FDA has limited authority to oversee some non-medical products and can set mandatory safety regulations. But the agency let the scanners fall under voluntary standards set by a nonprofit group heavily influenced by industry.
As for the TSA, it skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts.
Love the fox in the henhouse aspect, noted in the piece, of how inspections of the TSA scanners are done by Rapiscan, the manufacturer.
And then there's this:
Some TSA screeners are concerned about their own radiation exposure from the backscatters, but the TSA has not allowed them to wear badges that could measure it, said Milly Rodriguez, health and safety specialist for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA officers.
Guess who's going to be paying out for the cancer lawsuits of the TSA workers? You and Me Q. Taxpayer, that's who.
Nobody "Forced" You To "Play By The Rules"
Terrific piece by Matt Welch about some of the whining by the Occupy types about how the world is not exactly their oyster.
Welch links to this Alex Parene Salon piece with their whining put out into a "New Declaration of Independence," and writes in reason:
Cradle-to-grave employment (at least outside the public sector) has been dead since at least the end of the Cold War. Undergraduate degrees in English and Film and Sociology and Philosophy (and a thousand other subjects) have had debatable workplace utility for as long as I've been alive. There have even been previous housing bubbles and busts in Alex Pareene's lifetime.I don't recall anything like the promises so cruelly unkept in Salon's list. I do remember my father warning me that an engineering degree would be much more useful in the workplace than English, to which I uttered a phrase available to 18-year-olds everywhere: Thanks, Dad; not your call. Ditto for the legions of well-meaning adults urging me to finish my undergraduate degree, to sign up for the Selective Service, and even (when I finally attained a decent living in the second half of my 30s) to pay a mortgage instead of paying rent. One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.
Which is why phrases like "wage slaves," "inescapable debt," and "force" "force" "force" leave me feeling like a brother from another planet. Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. You could try to make it in Minneapolis before living the dream in Williamsburg. You could stare into the face of a no-money-down, adjustable rate 30-year mortgage at the tail end of a housing-price run-up and conclude "Maybe that one's not for me." You could even choose to turn down a bad if high-paying job when you're living below the poverty line. If we indeed live in a "candid world," let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who "forced" you to "play by the rules" is more than a little pathetic.
And since when have right-thinking liberals from the creative class bragged about "playing by the rules" anyway? Is it really my imagination that the point used to be something closer to the opposite? I am old enough to remember when the whole aspiration-or at least the defiant self-acknowledgment of status-was to declare yourself a marginalized "one percenter."
Beautifully Frugal
Sorry, this is just a post for the ladies -- or any men who care about their eye bags.
Eye cream is one of those things where women just get reamed. It's a tiny jar of lotion that manufacturers charge exorbitant amounts of money for.
Well, thanks to a note about tests by Consumer Reports, I think, I bought one of their top-rated eye creams (the cheapest) -- Olay Total Effects Eye Transforming Cream -- which is available at Amazon for just under $15.63, if you add in the shipping. (This beats the drug store, where I saw it for $23.) And the stuff is pretty great -- very creamy -- but frankly, even just under $16 seems a lot to me for such a tiny jar!
Then again, according to the piece (in Consumer Reports or wherever), it seems to compare favorably to creams that cost a bunch more.
Of course, the best way to protect your eyes is with a really good sunblock -- which I've been wearing for years, and which is now available in the United States, and at prices that begin to approach reasonable: Anthelios 50+ (pour la visage -- for the face) with Mexoryl.
Previously, Big Nanny, aka our government, had protected us from protecting our skin with Anthelios, prohibiting its sale here (though Anthelios had been on sale throughout Europe for a long time, and had not cause anyone, say, a cardiac arrest or anything).
The Land Of Backward
Via Gawker, welcome to the Muslim country of Iran, where a celebratory butt squeeze got two soccer players fined 40K smackers and "banned indefinitely from all football activities for committing immoral acts."
Of course, it's far less odious than the time Iran hung three men for having gay sex.
Meanwhile, in Muslim Saudi Arabia, the barbarians are busy beheading a guy on top of a parking garage for "sorcery."
Anybody want to call me "intolerant"? Because yeah, I sure the hell am, of stuff like this. You?
Why Didn't Christ Return On October 21?
Lauri Apple at Gawker posts:
Harold Camping--aka "the guy with all the Raptures"--says he's "embarrassed" that his last two failed doomsday predictions on May 21 and October 21 did not pan out. In fact, he even admits that, "incidentally," he was wrong.
They quote Camping's justification. An excerpt:
It seems embarrassing for Family Radio. But God was in charge of everything. We came to that conclusion after quite careful study of the Bible. He allowed everything to happen the way it did without correction. He could have stopped everything if He had wanted to.
What would your speculation be for why Jesus didn't pop by for a second coming?
Sounds Like BS. BS I've Heard A Lot Of.
This blog post about a sexual harassment reprimand posted on PJMedia by Charlie Martin is a story I've heard in slightly different forms (and scarier, worse forms) from a number of friends who are academics:
Back in the early 90′s, I was teaching at Durham Technical Community College while I was in grad school.One day, one of my students, who normally wore sweats and jeans -- as I did -- came in wearing hose and heels, a cute denim skirt, and a white-and-aqua sweater with silver threads in it.
I said "Nice outfit! That's a pretty sweater."
The next day, I was seeing the Dean in Charge of Spanking Lecturers. Seems I'd said "something offensive". She couldn't tell me who had complained so I could apologize, what I'd said, as that might identify who had complained, but that I'd better apologize tout suite and I'd better watch myself.
A fascinating book on sexual harassment -- with some novel views -- is Dr. Kingsley Browne's Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality (The Rutgers Series in Human Evolution)
As I wrote previously (unrelated to the mild compliment dispensed to the woman by Miller), in the book, Browne talks about how men haze each other, in the workplace and out:
Hazing is about going for somebody's Achilles heel. Browne has this interesting notion that some perceived sexual harassment actually isn't unequal but equal treatment -- guys playing the nines with women the same way they do with men. They just use sexual themes to tease them with because that's a sensitive spot with women.
Via Instapundit
Poulet, Please
I've eaten chicken here and I've eaten chicken in France, and chicken in France is far better. Here's a WSJ letter to the editor about a Matt Ridley story on the rise of fast-growing, cheap chicken in the USA:
As I read the essay about the efficiency of producing chickens, I recalled what Julia Child wrote some years ago in her delightful book "My Life in France": "The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear."In my humble opinion, she was completely correct.
Martin Rosenthal, Phoenix
The worst chicken I've eaten in the US is from Whole Foods. Perhaps serving the fat-anoia of their customers, their chickens seem to have been on some sort of low-fat diet and taste like Ikea furniture.
The best chicken I've eaten is from Costco -- $4.99 for a big, juicy, fatty bird. Once, when Gregg couldn't find parking in my neighborhood after we'd gone to Costco together, I told him to wait -- to keep driving around the block -- and I'd make it worth his while.
No, pervos, I didn't do anything children shouldn't be exposed to in the car; I put a leg and breast in a Ziploc bag and brought it out to him. He called me later and understood why, saying, "That's the best chicken I've ever had." Or something like that.
The End Of American Meritocracy?
Lengthy, interesting piece on City Journal by Luigi Zingales, "Who Killed Horatio Alger?" An excerpt:
Two powerful forces are threatening to drive America from a meritocratic equilibrium to a nonmeritocratic one. Recall that to survive in a democratic country, a meritocracy must enjoy a welcoming culture and offer large, widespread benefits to citizens. In the United States, both of these factors are being challenged: the first by a spreading belief that markets are a bad method of rewarding the meritorious; the second by a reduction of the benefits that most people derive from those markets.The housing bubble and the 2008 financial crisis played a major role in the moral delegitimization of markets. When new developments in Florida and Arizona, built under the pressure of astronomically high real-estate prices, sit empty, people start questioning the efficiency of market prices. When the difference between a comfortable retirement and an indigent one is determined not by hard work or by a frugal lifestyle but by lucky timing in buying or selling your house, people start questioning the fairness of the market system. The fact that the real-estate bubble was the second large bubble to pop in less than a decade further undermined trust in markets as a good indicator of where to invest resources.
But nothing upsets people like the perception that the rules don't apply equally to everybody. When my children were small, they sometimes tried to play Monopoly. These attempts inevitably degenerated into arguments. My daughter, who is two years younger than my son, would claim that my son was cheating. My son, with the official instructions in hand, would protest his innocence. And he was right: he never invented any rule. Nevertheless, my daughter was right, too: my son was engaging in selective recollection of the rules, counting on my daughter's ignorance and bringing up only the rules that were in his favor. Despite her youth, my daughter understood that something wasn't fair, so she employed the only response she had available: giving up.
Her frustration was similar to what many people felt after the 2008 bailouts of the financial system. The system was certainly at risk, and some government intervention was just as certainly necessary. Yet it was false to say, as Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury secretary Henry Paulson did repeatedly, that the choice was between the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as it was proposed and the financial abyss: there were feasible--and, in fact, superior--alternatives. It didn't escape most Americans that TARP was the largest welfare program for corporations and their investors ever created in human history. That some of the crumbs went to autoworkers' unions didn't improve things; in fact, it made them worse, showing that the redistribution was not an accident but a premeditated pillage of defenseless taxpayers by powerful lobbies. TARP wasn't just the triumph of Wall Street over Main Street; it was the triumph of K Street over the rest of America.
The way the bailout was conducted damaged Americans' faith in their financial system, in their government, and in the market economy. A BBB/Gallup poll conducted in April 2008, a few months before TARP was passed, indicated that 42 percent of Americans trusted financial institutions and that 53 percent trusted U.S. companies. In a similar survey performed in December 2008 by the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, which I direct, these figures dropped to 34 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Moreover, 80 percent of respondents felt less confident about investing in financial markets because of the bailout. Their altered feelings weren't the consequence of any ideological bias against government involvement; on the contrary, a majority of respondents believed that the government should regulate financial markets. They objected, rather, to the specifics of what the government was doing. One reason they objected was their perception that lobbying interests had influenced the intervention: 50 percent of respondents, for instance, thought that Paulson had acted in the interest of Goldman Sachs, not the United States.
But a stronger reason, presumably, was that the bailout made the system suddenly look fundamentally unfair. Why should outsourced workers, whose only fault was to have entered the wrong sector, bear the burden of market discipline, while rich bankers were offered a government safety net?
