The First Amendment Is On Its Way Out
People who laugh at me, pooh-pooh how I act up at the TSA checkpoint, or tell me I just shouldn't fly don't get it. I'm trying to do something about one area of our eroding civil liberties. We are bleeding rights on many fronts.
The latest is H.R. 347 the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011." From RT.com:
Just when you thought the government couldn't ruin the First Amendment any further: The House of Representatives approved a bill on Monday that outlaws protests in instances where some government officials are nearby, whether or not you even know it.The US House of Representatives voted 388-to-3 in favor of H.R. 347 late Monday, a bill which is being dubbed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. In the bill, Congress officially makes it illegal to trespass on the grounds of the White House, which, on the surface, seems not just harmless and necessary, but somewhat shocking that such a rule isn't already on the books. The wording in the bill, however, extends to allow the government to go after much more than tourists that transverse the wrought iron White House fence.
Under the act, the government is also given the power to bring charges against Americans engaged in political protest anywhere in the country.
Under current law, White House trespassers are prosecuted under a local ordinance, a Washington, DC legislation that can bring misdemeanor charges for anyone trying to get close to the president without authorization. Under H.R. 347, a federal law will formally be applied to such instances, but will also allow the government to bring charges to protesters, demonstrators and activists at political events and other outings across America.
The new legislation allows prosecutors to charge anyone who enters a building without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function with a federal offense if Secret Service is on the scene, but the law stretches to include not just the president's palatial Pennsylvania Avenue home. Under the law, any building or grounds where the president is visiting -- even temporarily -- is covered, as is any building or grounds "restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance."
It's not just the president who would be spared from protesters, either.
Covered under the bill is any person protected by the Secret Service. Although such protection isn't extended to just everybody, making it a federal offense to even accidently disrupt an event attended by a person with such status essentially crushes whatever currently remains of the right to assemble and peacefully protest....In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone -- rather it's President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney -- will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of "official functions," engaging in disorderly conduct "within such proximity to" the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate's concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as special event of national significance don't just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.
The Senate passed this bill back on February 6. Those of you who voted for Obama, did you tell yourself he'd never sign something like this? I mean, except for stuff like the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 that he signed a few months back, "essentially suspending habeas corpus from American citizens," as RT.com puts it.
Tweetski
From @villagevoice, more government meddling:
When the feds pulled the plug on online poker, they destroyed livelihoods and a $2.5 billion industry. Why? http://bit.ly/x7wgGZ
Transport Sec Ray LaHood: Name Change Proposal (To Ray LaDumbass)
Distracted drivers make me steam, but Mike Riggs at reason.com is right about what an idiot Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is:
Which is more of a distraction while driving: holding a phone up to your ear, or having a stranger pull up behind/beside you and lay on the horn for no apparent reason?
The latter is what Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood does. He told D.C. radio station WTOP that he likes to tool around D.C. on weekends and lay on the horn when he spots a driver on a cell phone:
LaHood says it's his way of "taking personal responsibility" to reduce driver distractions.
It would be a public service if somebody painted the word MORON really big on all sides of this man's car (backwards on the hood so other drivers can see him coming in the rear-view mirror).
It would be an even greater public service if he were caught with three hookers and a goat so he could quit his job to "spend more time with (his) family" (even if he doesn't even have a family).
Rude, Creepy Mormons
I don't believe in god, but I think it's kind of awful that the Mormons are baptizing dead people who believe in a different version of The Imaginary Friend -- especially those with living relatives who find out about it.
Michael Levenson writes in the Boston Globe that one of their recent baptizees is murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl:
Pearl's parents, Judea and Ruth, said it was "disturbing news" to learn that Mormons had baptized their son, in a rite that they understand was meant to offer him salvation."To them we say: We appreciate your good intentions but rest assured that Danny's soul was redeemed through the life that he lived and the values that he upheld," Judea and Ruth Pearl said in an email. "He lived as a proud Jew, died as a proud Jew and is currently facing his creator as a Jew, blessed, accepted and redeemed. For the record, let it be clear: Danny did not choose to be baptized, nor did his family consent to this un-called-for ritual."
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate whose name and the names of his late father and grandfather had been entered in a database in preparation for the Mormon rite, drew national attention earlier this month when he called on Mitt Romney to speak out against the ritual baptism of Jews. Romney's campaign has directed all questions about posthumous baptisms to church officials.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently apologized after Radkey disclosed that the parents of the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized by church members at temples in Arizona and Utah in January. Radkey has also produced records showing Mormons in the Dominican Republic baptized Anne Frank on Feb. 18.
Pearl's widow, Mariane, who was five months pregnant with their son, Adam, when her husband was killed, said it was upsetting to learn that he was baptized.
"It's a lack of respect for Danny and a lack of respect for his parents," she said.
Handbags Under $100
Here
The TSA Makes Us Less Safe
Smart post by Sommer Gentry on the anti-TSA blog, TSANewsBlog:
That the TSA fails in its stated goal of keeping prohibited items off airplanes is amply demonstrated by its 70% failure rate in testing, and the continuing presence of loaded handguns and box cutters on flights.And how does TSA make us less safe? Let me count the ways:
The TSA creates vulnerabilities by breaching the integrity of our closed and locked luggage. Hundreds of screeners have been arrested for stealing from passengers. Screener theft betrays a serious security vulnerability, because a dishonest person with access to take things out of your bags is a dishonest person who could be bribed to put something into your bags. In fact, this has already happened with the TSA's drug smuggling rings: how does the screener know whether it's meth or explosives in that sealed container?
The TSA concentrates people in enormous lines right outside the checkpoint, creating a target of opportunity for a bomber who wouldn't ever be screened.
...The TSA forces people with poor balance or in wheelchairs to walk without their walkers or canes, to totter through metal detectors and body scanners, so it's just a matter of time until a passenger breaks a hip trying to comply with these bullies.
The TSA trains children to be vulnerable to sexual predators by teaching children the lesson that anyone with a badge gets to reach inside their clothing and rub them on the body parts that their bathing suits cover.
Finally, the TSA's abusive searches of innocent people cause many of us to drive to our destinations instead of flying. Flying is by far the safest long-distance travel mode, and discouraging flying causes road deaths.
More from Christopher Elliott on the TSA's new "charm offensive," and their sickening bit of PR about screening cute baby otters. Loved this bit about what they find:
Jon Allen, a TSA spokesman in Nashville, "proudly" showed off an entire table of dangerous items at the agency's, "show and tell" last week. They included giant knives, a pepper spray dispenser, a 3-liter box of white wine, even fully-loaded handguns. Allen said the items were largely confiscated within the past five weeks.What's a terrorist going to do with a box of booze on a plane, except get really drunk and show the entire plane that he has extraordinarily bad taste in wine? Likewise, we have no evidence that the knives, the pepper spray and even the loaded guns would be used for anything related to terrorism. More likely, they were packed accidentally and would have been caught with a conventional magnetometer or X-ray machine, anyway.
Because Some People Don't Watch Their Children Very Well
...The rest of us should pay $160 to $200 more per car as of 2014 as the nanny state mandates that automakers put backup cameras in every car. Nick Bunkley writes for The New York Times about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's new mandate:
On average, two children die and about 50 are injured every week when someone accidentally backs over them in a vehicle, according to KidsAndCars.org, a nonprofit group that pushed the government to begin tracking such tragedies. And more than two-thirds of the time, a parent or other close relative is behind the wheel....However, in a preliminary version circulated for public comment, regulators predicted that adding the cameras and viewing screens will cost the auto industry as much as $2.7 billion a year, or $160 to $200 a vehicle. At least some of the cost is expected to be passed on to consumers through higher prices.
But regulators say that 95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle. Government statistics indicate that 228 people of all ages -- 44 percent of whom are under age 5 -- die every year in backover accidents involving passenger vehicles. About 17,000 people a year are injured in such accidents.
"In terms of absolute numbers of lives saved, it certainly isn't the highest," Mr. Ditlow said. "But in terms of emotional tragedy, backover deaths are some of the worst imaginable. When you have a parent that kills a child in an incident that's utterly avoidable, they don't ever forget it."
It's terrible that this happens, but I don't have children, don't have a driveway, and parallel park. And I'm an extremely cautious driver -- and parker (I'm one of those who pulls in and out of the space in a whole bunch of tiny increments to avoid touching your car.) And I live in an area where kids have playdates in fenced-in yards and are not allowed to roam the streets -- especially as toddlers. Why should I have to have a backup camera in my car as anything other than optional equipment?
Don't Be Handing Out Free Beverages In Big Governmentville
Todd Starnes writes on FoxNewsradio:
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits."We were given a cease and desist order," said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. "We had no idea we were breaking the law."
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
"It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren't in uniform," he said. "But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced."
"We apologized," Tipton said. "We didn't know the rules."
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church's name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law.
...Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd.
..."The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources," he said.
via ifeminists
How Doctors Die
I linked to this in a previous incarnation, when it was on Zocalo, but I found the ending of the piece moving and worth posting, so here it is again.
Dr. Ken Murray, a retired clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Southern California, writes in the WSJ that doctors die differently -- that many of them respond to a terminal diagnosis by opting for "a graceful death"; that is, a death without extraordinary measures taken. The attributes of this sort of death include:
...Being comfortable and in control, having a sense of closure, making the most of relationships and having family involved in care. Hospitals today provide few of these qualities.Written directives can give patients far more control over how their lives end. But while most of us accept that taxes are inescapable, death is a much harder pill to swallow, which keeps the vast majority of Americans from making proper arrangements.
It doesn't have to be that way. Several years ago, at age 60, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight, or torch) had a seizure. It turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. We learned that with aggressive treatment, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months.
Torch was no doctor, but he knew that he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Ultimately, he decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.
We spent the next eight months having fun together like we hadn't had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time, and we hung out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited.
One day, he didn't wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.
As for me, my doctor has my choices on record. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like so many of my fellow doctors.
And like me. I have a little shrunken signed, witnessed photocopy of a note expressing my demand to not be turned into a human turnip. Do you have one? Or some directive expressing your wishes about your medical care?
Ending The War On Citizens: How It Played Out In Portugal
Stossel blogs about the results of decriminalization of drugs 10 years ago in Portugal:
People predicted the country would spiral into chaos. So did that happen? No.Independent studies found that, after the drug law passed, the number of Portuguese who regularly do drugs stayed about the same. Problematic and youth drug use went down.
We spoke to a chief police inspector in Lisbon who was very dubious about decriminalization. But now he's a convert. He told us, "the level of conflicts on the street are reduced"..."drug related robberies are reduced"...and "now police are not the enemies of the consumers".
Adults in a free society should be able to ingest anything they want to, as long as they don't injure somebody else.
via @DrEades
Michelle Obama -- Feed The Governors; Malnourish The Children
Charlotte Allen sent me this link to a blog item by Keith Koffler on White House Dossier on how the governors who came to dinner at the White House got a far healthier meal than Michelle Obama is trying to stick American's kids with (save for the governors' bread, mac and cheese and dessert if you know how unhealthy these carbs are for humans).
Here's the proposed crap lunch for kids for Wednesday from the White House website:
Chef's salad: (1 cup romaine, .5 oz low-fat mozzarella, 1.5 oz grilled chicken) with whole wheat bread
Soft pretzel (2.5 oz)
Corn, cooked (1/2 cup)
Baby carrots, raw (1/4 cup)
Banana
Skim chocolate milk (8 oz)
Low rat ranch dressing (1.5 oz)
Low fat italian dressing (1.5 oz)
The kids' food is terribly unhealthy. Kids need fat. Skim milk is basically white water. Lowfat dressing replaces fat with sugar. Flour in the bread and pretzel cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat (per Gary Taubes). Fat -- ideally, meatfat -- nourishes brains. A banana is a sugar factory with peel. And the whole kids' meal is just an awful, icky, and tasteless bore.
Here's what the governors got:
Garden salad
Bread and butter
Ribeye steak 12 oz
Creamed spinach
Crab mac and cheese Pear tart with ice cream
White wine
What the blogger doesn't understand is dietary science (which doesn't stop him from writing about it like he knows what he's talking about). What Michelle Obama, who has zero science background, is encouraging kids to eat is absurdly unhealthy.
P.S. Gregg got me a couple of ribeyes and left them in my fridge so I'd have food to eat after my trip. Many of you have seen this before, but for those of you who are new around here, this is a body on ribeyes, creamed spinach, bacon, buttered green beans, heavily dressed salads, and white wine. (I eat a scoop of ice cream once a week, but otherwise no flour, sugar, starchy vegetables like potatoes, fruit or fruit juice.)
You Have The Right To Free Speech - Unless You're A Divorced Dad
From the AP on the HuffPo, a judge seems a little confused about that freedom of speechie thing, ruling that a man, Mark Byron, has to post daily apologies for comments he posted on his Facebook page about his estranged wife.
Byron says the ruling violates his freedom of speech. (His alternative was 60 days in jail.)
From the article:
The ruling is highly unusual and "troubling because it's a court telling someone to say something to -- in some regards -- his chosen group of friends," said (Cincinnati free speech attorney Jill) Meyer. She noted that the comments were not directed to Byron's wife, Elizabeth Byron, who was blocked from accessing the page.According to the ruling, Byron posted comments on his page in November, saying in part, "If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband's life and take your son's father away from him completely -- all you need to do is say you're scared of your husband or domestic partner and they'll take him away."
The Byrons are involved in ongoing divorce and child custody proceedings. Byron has said his wife and the court have prevented him from seeing his 17-month-old son many times. The court maintains he is allowed to see him on a twice-weekly basis.
Domestic Relations Magistrate Paul Meyers last month found Byron in contempt of a protective order because of his Facebook comments. Meyers said that Byron could avoid a 60-day jail sentence and a $500 fine by posting the apology -- written by Meyers -- to his wife and all of his Facebook friends and paying her attorney fees. The same apology must be posted every day no later than 9 a.m.
The June court order prohibited Byron from causing his wife physical or mental abuse, harassment or annoyance. She asked in December that he be found in contempt after learning of the Facebook comments.
Byron's comments expressed frustration, but they were not threats and he didn't make them to his wife, said Cincinnati attorney Jack Greiner, who also specializes in free speech and media issues.
Greiner said he doesn't think the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, "allows a court to find that someone has harassed or caused a person to suffer mental abuse merely by expressing one's opinion about a court proceeding in a non-threatening way."
Ignore the annoying HuffPo spokeshead -- here's some video:
Get The Podcast! Advice Goddess Radio: Post-Oscars Sex Show With Therapist Michele Weiner Davis
Okay, so it's not an actual sex show but a show on how to bring the sex back into your relationship and manage things if one of you wants it more than the other (or if one of you wants it and the other wants it not at all).
It was really interesting and unlike all of those "sexperts" who basically tell you to put on a nurse's uniform and have at it, Michele Weiner Davis gives real, practical, pragmatic solutions for this problem -- ones that take into account how people really are and how life actually works.
Michele Weiner Davis is the author of an extremely helpful book, The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/27/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't miss the podcast of my very interesting show with Dr. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, on how we can actually have too much choice, how that messes us up, and how to manage choice:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Catch all my past shows at:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe at iTunes (search Amy Alkon).
Next week a very exciting guest, one of the rockstars of anthropology, Dr. Robert Trivers, has agreed to be on my show. We'll be talking about his new book on deception and self-deception, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
"The 10 Best Pictures Of Angelina Jolie's Right Leg"
Via @AmyVernon, Matt Stopera for BuzzFeed blogs (with photos) that "Angelina Jolie's right leg is the breakout star of this year's Academy Awards."
Related: Via Forbes, the "Hottest Trends on the Oscars Red Carpet." (This could also be titled "A Lot of Ladies Who are in Movies Wearing Boring White and Ecru Dresses.")
The Oy-scars
Reason's Jesse Walker on Billy Crystal as Oscar host: "The Academy hopes to replicate this success next year, when it exhumes Bob Hope."
Canadian Healthcare and US Healthcare: A Few Differences
Via Reason Foundation co-founder Manny Klausner, an article by Sally Pipes in Forbes, "Congenital American Impatience Points to Obamacare's Failure."
Native Canadian and current American citizen Pipes reports that our health care in America consumed 17.9 percent of the US GDP -- a much greater portion of the economy than in many other developed nations -- but she traces the reason to a cultural difference between the US and the rest of the world.
Cross-cultural scholars point to historical events as instrumental in shaping the values and ideologies of Canada and the United States. Born out of armed revolution against an occupying foreign power, Americans have notoriously resisted government interference in their lives for centuries....What does all that history and culture have to do with health care? Quite a bit, actually. The entrepreneurial, independent American spirit tends to demand the best medicine has to offer -- and right now. If it costs more, so be it.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), America spent an average of $7,960 per person on health care in 2009. The average per capita expenditure for OECD countries was just $3,233. Canada spent $4,363 per person -- a little more than half as much as the United States.
Americans may be spending more -- but they also believe that they're getting a lot out of their health system. In the same survey, 90 percent of American adults reported being in good health. The OECD average was just 69.1 percent.
Americans' desire for the best the world has to offer also translates to superior access to top-flight technologies and treatments. The same doesn't hold true for the likes of Canada.
Consider the availability of medical technology in the two countries. The United States has 34.4 CT scanners per million Americans. In Canada, the number of scanners available is less than half that -- just 13.9 per million residents.
The same trend holds for MRI units. In America, there are 25.9 per million; in Canada, just 8.0 per million. The lack of access to top-notch medical technology is a direct consequence of Canada's government-funded single-payer healthcare system. It's called Medicare, just like the U.S. government-funded health insurance program for seniors -- but it covers all Canadians.
In order to keep costs down -- and thus generate supposedly beneficial low per-capita health spending numbers -- Canadian officials impose price controls on medical care. These controls result in shortages in the supply of care. If the budget runs out before a patient can receive the care she needs -- or if she's not deemed worthy of treatment -- then she'll just have to wait.
According to the Canadian Fraser Institute, wait times rose to new heights in 2011 -- heights not considered clinically reasonable. Canadians waited an average of 19 weeks from a general practitioner's referral to delivery of elective treatment by a specialist. That's more than double the wait time of 18 years ago. Across the provinces, citizens waited for an estimated 941,321 procedures last year.
It's no wonder that less than half of Canadians with chronic diseases feel the care they receive is excellent or very good...
Jewel Robbery
Big deals on jewelry, costume and with real rocks, at Amazon. Clearance-prices, up to 60% off.
I don't wear bracelets (because I'm always on a keyboard) -- or gold-toned jewelry -- but if I did, I'd wear this: Citrine by the Stones "Kill Bill" Gold-Plated Cuff.
This one's pretty fab, too: Accessories & Beyond Brown Flat Leather Strands Cuff.
They even have clearance engagement rings!
Vegas: It's All Fake, Including The Grass
Scene from my hotel sans chain-smoking degenerate gamblers. 
(In Vegas for a newspaper conference.)
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio: Post-Oscars Sex Show With Therapist Michele Weiner Davis
Okay, that's maybe a little misleading, but this'll be a great show and you should all listen.
It's not an actual sex show but a show on how to bring the sex back into your relationship and manage things if one of you wants it more than the other (or if one of you wants it and the other wants it not at all).
Michele Weiner Davis is the author of an extremely helpful book, The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido
We've moved the time up a little for tonight, to 8-9pm Pacific, 11-midnight Eastern. Listen live, call in when the show's live (New York area code: 347-326-9761):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/27/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't miss the podcast of my best show yet, with Dr. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, on how we can actually have too much choice, how that messes us up, and how to manage choice:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
This show has garnered amazing mail. A guy in Illinois, for example, wrote me that he's going to restock his small lumber and hardware store based on the psychology he heard on the show. I was even helped by this show. I'm at a conference this weekend and I ended up ordering smarter at the hotel restaurant. Instead of examining the menu for the best possible thing to eat, I spotted something I like -- Philly cheese steak -- and just ordered that pronto. Having to make choices adds "cognitive load," and I want to conserve my mental energy for my work.
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Untie Employment And Healthcare
@DWatney sent me a post echoing my thoughts on employment being tied to health care. Russ Roberts posts at Cafe Hayek:
It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It's a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care. What the government has done is tax-advantage health care via employers and then tell them what has to be covered. So the real outrage is that because of this, the government mandates the mix of my compensation package, biasing it toward a luxury health-care package that is the result of special interest clamoring.
It Isn't Just The US That's Gone Mad
Via Karen DeCoster, a man in Kitchener, Ontario was arrested after his daughter drew a picture of a gun. Dianne Wood writes for the Record:
KITCHENER -- A Kitchener father is upset that police arrested him at his children's' school Wednesday, hauled him down to the station and strip-searched him, all because his four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun at school."I'm picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I'm locked up," Jessie Sansone, 26, said Thursday.
"I was in shock. This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school."
The school principal, police and child welfare officials, however, all stand by their actions. They said they had to investigate to determine whether there was a gun in Sansone's house that children had access to.
"From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there's guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child," said Alison Scott, executive director of Family and Children's Services.
Waterloo Regional Police Insp. Kevin Thaler said there was a complaint from Forest Hills public school that "a firearm was in a residence and children had access to it. We had every concern, based on this information, that children were in danger."
Their concern wasn't based on the drawing alone, he said.
Neaveh, the child who made the drawing, also made comments about it that raised more flags.
DeCoster has it right about the excuses being made for rights grabs:
Anytime that it can be said that a child is in "danger," no matter how contrived or how hysterical, the state has immediate powers to move in and take control of lives. After Jesse Sansone was arrested, his wife was separated from their other three children, and the kids were taken to Family and Children's Services where they were grilled by social services bureaucrats.
Sansone allowed them to search his home, and guess what -- it was a plastic gun.
...The school principal, Steve Zack, said a staff member called child welfare officials because the law requires them to report anything involving the safety or neglect of a child.The agency chose to involve police, he said.
"Police chose to arrest Jessie here. Nobody wants something like this to happen at any time, especially not at school. But that's out of my hands."
Sansone says he got into some trouble with the law five years ago, and was convicted of assault and attempted burglary. But he's put all that behind him. He never had any firearms-related charges.
As for the strip search, Thaler said it was done "for officer safety, because it's a firearms-related incident.
"At the point in the investigation when it was determined it was not a real firearm, the individual was released unconditionally," he said.
Gun laws in Canada.
For the record, I know a number of people with guns in their homes -- none of whom have ever had occasion to use them on anyone, but who want to protect themselves and their family should somebody break in.
Via @WalterOlson, in the US, a guy with a gun is acquitted but is now homeless.
Just When You Thought Stupid Was Going Out Of Style...
The LA Times publishes an editorial waxing poetic on the beauty of high gas prices:
Whatever the cause of high prices, the good news is that Americans have more opportunities to wean themselves from the gas pump with every passing year.
Yeah, lose your job and you'll save barrels and barrels of gas.
Newsflash: Rich People Sometimes Have More Than One Car!
Charles Blow of the NYT gets his panties in a bunch over Mitt's wife having, well, as Mitt puts it:
"Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually."Two Cadillacs?
That's rich, literally.
That's not what you want to say when you are in Detroit, which, as I pointed out last week, has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America.
Yes it is, you idiot, because Detroit makes Cadillacs, and when Detroit makes Cadillacs, Detroiters can eat, pay rent, and pay the gas bill.
I'm not rich, but I accept that rich people live differently -- get to live differently. Why?
BECAUSE. THEY'RE. RICH.
Please understand that I'm not speaking specifically about Mitt, but the way I see it, maybe a guy who made a success out of a business would be a better choice to run this country than a "community organizer" who often voted "present" in the Senate.
Oh, What A Heeling
Save 25% on select women's flats at Amazon at this link
The Constitution, Still On Hiatus (Just Got Another TSA Groping)
At LAX, flying Delta. Gregg told me to go through the lane at the left, and I did, but I still got marked for a search. I spent much of my morning dreading this, and when they told me I immediately burst into tears.
I was so upset at being put through a full bag search and groping that I forgot to get the name of the agent who groped my breasts and buttocks and very upsettingly, pawed my hair, violating my Fourth Amendment rights, my body and my dignity.
At one point, I asked if she wanted me to bend over like a common criminal. She told me I should just stand up, not really getting what I was getting at.
I wept as she violated me and then, when our little government wage-paying sexual interlude was over, I went to fill my water bottle and use the ladies room. In the ladies room, as I was shutting my stall door, I saw a TSA gropenfrau going past. She was a small Hispanic looking woman, a little heavy, with black hair, about shoulder length, pulled back into a ponytail.
I said to her "It's terrible what you do, just terrible, violating our constitutional rights."
She shouted, "Thank you! Thank you!"
"It's nothing to be proud of. Disgusting."
She then told me she was calling the cops on me and commanded me to follow her.
I ignored this and went and sat down.
I would have gone, and wanted to tell a supervisor about her attempt to intimidate me out of my First Amendment rights with the threat of arrest, but I'm also treading a delicate line here because I'm going to a conference that Gregg, very sweetly, is paying for me to fly to and attend. I can't afford to not get there. On the other hand, I also can't afford to not speak up for our Constitutional rights.
An officer, D. Lalicker, badge #639, #08902, came over to speak to me. Uh, lecture me. He told me she'd spoken to him and gave pretty much the account I gave above.
He wouldn't tell me what she said, and said this is private. I said he's a public officer, and I'm entitled to know. I didn't say this at the time, but when one is being accused, doesn't one get to know the extent of the accusation against them?
Officer Lalicker said to me, "She's on this side of security; she's going to the bathroom. When she's going to the bathroom, let her do her thing."
I responded, "The Constitution is still in force in the bathroom, correct?"
"If you have any complaints feel free to walk over to walk over..." (to the TSA supervisor's stand), he said. "She's on her break."
"The Constitution is also on break?" I said.
I told him that as long as our First Amendment rights don't go the way of our Fourth Amendment rights, I plan on speaking up wherever I please.
And finally, a message for TSA workers: You don't like people telling you what you do is terrible, you get a job that doesn't involve earning a living violating people's constitutional rights.
Here's the piece I published previously on why the TSA's violation of our civil liberties is so pointless and what we need to do about it.
Oh, and I forgot to mention -- I'd printed up copies of the op-ed and I left them at the TSA groping station (two copies) and marched over and handed one to the supervisors and told them they don't deserve the protections of our Constitution.
Anybody who earns a living violating our constitutional rights needs to be told -- over and over and over again -- that they are doing something shameful. Working as a street hooker would be a much more honorable job.
Dipshit Advertising, Inc.
Do you drive fewer miles annually than a 9/11 terrorist?
Via @jackshafer, guess whose face showed up on an ad:
Casey Chan posts on Jalopnik about the inclusion of Mohammed Atta's face in this ad:
How the hell does this happen? Well no one really knows exactly. The best guess is that InsuranceSavings, the website who posted the ad, was using random images from the wide web of the Internet as their advertisement photo. And knowing how dark and screwy that wide web could be, is it really all that surprising that somebody plastered the face of a terrorist on a driver license? Ugh.
Stealing images has its price. As does hiring idiots who are unable to recognize one of the most recognizable terrorist faces in the world.
Life In San Francisco
A quote from a Vivian Ho blog item at SFGate:
Instead of getting his transmission fixed as planned, Knight said he spent Wednesday morning on the phone with his insurance provider."I told them my windshield was smashed and they asked if it was on the side of a street or in a parking lot," he said. "I told them, 'No, a naked woman just got on my hood and stomped on it.' They didn't really know what to make of it."
via @tedfrank
One More Person To Sue (Everybody's Responsible But The Drunk)
On Consumerist, Mary Beth Quirk links to an NPR story by Tovia Smith about a Boston City Councilor who wants the valet kids to be responsible for whether some guy who's car they're dropping off drives drunk:
City Councilor Rob Consalvo says he decided something needed to be done after a 23-year-old on a scooter was mowed down by a drunken driver in Boston. The driver later said he was "blackout drunk" and couldn't believe that a valet guy actually handed him his car keys."I was stunned. I said to myself, 'Yeah, how could he have?' " Consalvo says.
He says it only makes sense that valet workers withhold keys from drivers who appear drunk. "They are literally our last line of defense," Consalvo says. "If not them, who? They are the ones with the cars and the keys. I just think it's a no-brainer."
Now some 19-year-old who just needs to make some dough for college is a one-man sobriety checkpoint? And it's not like any drunks are going to take a sock at him when he won't hand over the keys.
Commenter Christine I on NPR has a good point:
What about the situation where the customer has had enough to be over the legal limit but not enough to be apparent? My ex-husband was very good at hiding his level of intoxication--should the valet be held responsible for someone like that?
DOMA Ruled Unconstitutional
Carol J. Williams writes for the LA Times about the terrific news that a judge on Wednesday declared the disgusting 1996 Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, ordering the federal government to ignore it and provide health benefits to the wife of a lesbian federal court employee:
White ordered the federal Office of Personnel Management to enroll the wife of Karen Golinski, an attorney for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in the health benefits program available to other employees of the federal judiciary. The Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the extension of federal benefits to same-sex spouses, and Golinski's wife, Amy Cunninghis, had been repeatedly denied coverage since the couple married in 2008."The court finds that DOMA, as applied to Ms. Golinski, violates her right to equal protection of the law ... without substantial justification or rational basis," wrote White, who was named to the federal bench a decade ago by President George W. Bush.
Absolutely. We have no constitutional basis (or humane reason) to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry the consenting adult that they love -- or to get the benefits that arise out of this that straight couples are allowed. This is as wrong as denying people of different races the right to marry.
Religion and racism should not be the basis of policy in this country. They have been for far too long and enough is enough is enough. Or as commenter "TruthShines" put it on the LAT site:
The gender of marriage applicants is the most irrelevant characteristic of the couple, in the same way that race is the least important trait of a person.
As I've written before, I'm against marriage as a basis for benefits, but if we give benefits to the straights, the gays should get 'em, too.
Regulated Out Of Banks And Credit
Meredith Whitney writes in the WSJ that millions of Americans have lost access to credit and essential banking services due to regulatory "reforms." She writes that one in four Americans were "unbanked" in 2005, but that number will reach one in three in the near future:
Excluding millions of Americans from traditional banking services is not an efficient means of commerce and will result in long-term negative consequences for our economy. The negatives include higher transaction costs, lower household savings, and the concentration of credit in the hands of the few--conditions more commonly associated with Third World countries.Banks are partly to blame for the post credit-crisis shrinkage in banking services. They have not figured out a way to reprice consumer loans effectively in a post-securitization world. For decades, banks could underprice consumer loans (mortgage, home-equity and other personal loans) because they were subsidized with the high fees from securitizations. That all ended with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.
...But importantly, banks are not to blame for the unintended consequences of ill-planned and ill-timed regulatory reform. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (CARD) essentially restricted a bank's ability to quickly reprice credit-card interest rates. It was passed in 2009 after the peak of the credit crisis, with most of the provisions going into effect in February 2010.
Since mid-2008, over $1.6 trillion in credit lines have been expunged from the system. Under the new law, banks could no longer use other credit bureau information to reprice, as decisions had to be based upon the credit experience of the issuer alone. These restrictions made it far more difficult to effectively price for the evolving risk of a consumer.
Overdraft protection ("Reg E") reform has had a similar impact on retail bank customers. By limiting the fees banks can charge customers, regulators have in effect made the expense of servicing some customers greater than the revenue they generate. In many cases, regulations have made the overall economics of branch banking uneconomic. Consequently, many bank branches have shuttered, nearly 1,500 since 2009.
Pre-paid debit cards have grown exponentially over the past few years. (Pre-paid cards are vehicles that essentially allow a consumer to borrow from themselves.) Many of these come with high fees. They are not the solution, but merely the only viable option in the current regulatory environment. Will they be the next target for well-intentioned regulatory reform?
Ray LaHood Is A Dumbass
Mike Masnick blogs at Techdirt about Transportation Secretary LaHood's campaign to wipe out distracted driving. I know the perfect way -- drop one of those bombs that disappears all life on the planet but leaves the buildings. Naturally, LaHood thinks government meddling in what will and won't work on a car while it's moving is the answer. The guy apparently doesn't have the brainstuff to think that through any further. Masnick writes:
A couple of years ago, we wrote about his desire to figure out ways to disable mobile phones from working while the car is in motion. After there was a lot of controversy around that, LaHood tried to claim he never really said what he said. However, he's continued to repeat those kinds of claims again and again -- and with the new "guidelines" for automakers being published, we see, once again, his plan to push for technology to force other technologies not to work while a car is moving....No one denies that distracted driving can be incredibly dangerous and a serious problem. It's just that many of us question this as a solution. In fact, it seems likely to make the problem worse, not better. First of all, rules that require automakers to disable features while a car is moving completely ignore the fact that not everyone drives alone. Many people have passengers, and it can be quite useful to have a passenger make use of the technology to set the GPS, answer a phone call or whatever else needs to be done. Locking that up for passengers serves no purpose.
Factory Temping America Into "Productivity"
The president touts how productive American workers are, but are they? Jordan Weissman writes in The Atlantic, quoting a Brookings Institute report:
Not only has the use of outsourcing inflated manufacturers productivity statistics, it argues, but so has the practice of hiring "temporary help" services to staff factories. That's right: Just like your office can hire a temp to handle filing, so too can Caterpillar hire a temp to man their assembly lines. But because employees from temp services aren't counted as "manufacturing workers" in official data, factories appear to be using less human labor than they really are.
via @Richard_Florida
TV Can Be Juvenile But It Shouldn't Be Run Like Nursery School
Yes, in nursery school, I'm all for seeing that everybody gets the exact same sized cookie with the exact same number of chocolate chips, or thereabouts, but once you're a salary-earning TV presenterlady at the BBC, real life should play out like real life.
Out of the UK, it's yet another case of imposed "fairness," and surprise, surprise, it's one of my favorite people -- Mr. Bean, commonly known as Rowan Atkinson -- popping up to speak up for free expression. From the Guardian, Dan Sabbagh and John Plunkett write about a case in the UK where a BBC presenterlady successfully sued the BBC for ageism for dumping her. Rowan Atkinson, pleasingly, called this an "attack on creative free expression":
The BBC should have been free to drop Miriam O'Reilly from Countryfile without attracting any accusations of age discrimination, according to comedian Rowan Atkinson, in a controversial intervention into the debate about the lack of older women on television.The 57-year-old Blackadder, Mr Bean and Johnny English star said - in a letter to Radio 4's The Media Show - that O'Reilly's successful age discrimination case against the BBC amounted to an "attack on creative free expression" and that television was the wrong place to deal with anti-discrimination issues.
Atkinson wrote that he did not blame O'Reilly for taking legal action, but added that his argument "would be that the creative industries are completely inappropriate environments for anti-discrimination legislation and that the legal tools she used should never have been available to her".
In January 2011, O'Reilly won a landmark age discrimination case against the BBC after she was one of four women in their 40s or 50s who were dropped from a peaktime revamp of BBC1's Countryfile.
...Atkinson said O'Reily's complaint was no more sensible than "Pierce Brosnan complaining that he was sacked from the role of James Bond for being too old" and that true creative freedom for both Bond films and Countryfile could only mean that producers should have complete artistic latitude.
"If either at the outset of a TV programme, or at any time during its screen life, you want to replace an old person with a young person, or a white person with a black person, or a disabled straight with an able-bodied gay, you should have as much creative freedom to do so as you have to change the colour of John Craven's anorak," Atkinson wrote.
Presenterlady O'Reilly came back with a snivel:
"I think very few people will agree with Mr Atkinson. At one time we didn't think black people should sit next to white people on a bus but fortunately we live in a fair and civilised society."..."It was very unfortunate that I had to take legal action against the BBC for them to fairly represent women and older women."
I think it's very unfortunate she prevailed. It isn't television's job to "represent" anyone; it's an entertainment medium.
If you want to see older women on TV, get all your older women friends together and boycott any station that doesn't show them.
The TSA Kills
Cornell's econ and business profs Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon have a paper in Chicago Journals, "The Impact of Post‐9/11 Airport Security Measures on the Demand for Air Travel." They predict that the TSA gropings have had fatal effects (and not just on our civil liberties); they've very likely increased the number of ground traffic fatalities:
Using fatalities in commercial vehicles to control for time trends, weather patterns, economic conditions, and unobserved highway conditions, we found that a decrease of 1 million enplanements leads to an increase of 15 driving-related fatalities. Ap- plying that relationship to the estimated reduction in originating passenger volume due to baggage screening, we estimate that in the fourth quarter of 2002 approximately 129 individuals died in automobile accidents that resulted from travelers substituting driving for flying in response to the inconvenience asso- ciated with baggage screening.
While we're looking at the stats, per an email from anti-TSA blog, the @TSANewsBlog, the TSA confiscated 1200 guns in 2011. The TSA spent about $8 billion, so cost per gun found is over $6 million. And not one of them belonged to a terrorist.
Atheist Gets Trial By Quasi-Sharia From American Muslim Judge
Via lujlp, American Atheists is reporting that an American citizen was attacked by a Muslim immigrant, and the Muslim-American judge threw out the case and blamed the victim, an Iraq veteran, for being attacked, and said he would have been put to death in a Muslim country:
You don't have the right to not be offended -- well, not so long as you're living under the Constitution instead of Sharia law.
The police officer who testified said that the Muslim man admitted to grabbing Pierce's sign and beard on the night of the incident.
Here, Judge Mark Martin scolds victim who insulted Islam (after a brief bit about freedom of religion in America):
More from American Atheists:
The Pennsylvania State Director of American Atheists, Inc., Mr. Ernest Perce V., was assaulted by a Muslim while participating in a Halloween parade. Along with a Zombie Pope, Ernest was costumed as Zombie Muhammad. The assault was caught on video, the Muslim man admitted to his crime and charges were filed in what should have been an open-and-shut case. That's not what happened, though.The defendant is an immigrant and claims he did not know his actions were illegal, or that it was legal in this country to represent Muhammad in any form. To add insult to injury, he also testified that his 9 year old son was present, and the man said he felt he needed to show his young son that he was willing to fight for his Prophet.
The case went to trial, and as circumstances would dictate, Judge Mark Martin is also a Muslim. What transpired next was surreal. The Judge not only ruled in favor of the defendant, but called Mr. Perce a name and told him that if he were in a Muslim country, he'd be put to death. Judge Martin's comments included,
"Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam. In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead. I think you misinterpreted things. Before you start mocking someone else's religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it it makes you look like a dufus and Mr. (Defendant) is correct. In many Arabic speaking countries something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society in fact it can be punishable by death and it frequently is in their society."Judge Martin then offered a lesson in Islam, stating,
"Islam is not just a religion, it's their culture, their culture. It's their very essence their very being. They pray five times a day towards Mecca to be a good Muslim, before you die you have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca unless you are otherwise told you can not because you are too ill too elderly, whatever but you must make the attempt. Their greetings wa-laikum as-Salâm (is answered by voice) may god be with you. Whenever, it's very common when speaking to each other it's very common for them to say uh this will happen it's it they are so immersed in it."Judge Martin further complicates the issue by not only abrogating the First Amendment, but completely misunderstanding it when he said,
"Then what you have done is you have completely trashed their essence, their being. They find it very very very offensive. I'm a Muslim, I find it offensive. But you have that right, but you're way outside your boundaries or first amendment rights. This is what, and I said I spent about 7 and a half years living in other countries. when we go to other countries it's not uncommon for people to refer to us as ugly Americans this is why we are referred to as ugly Americans, because we are so concerned about our own rights we don't care about other people's rights as long as we get our say but we don't care about the other people's say."...The Judge neglected to address the fact that the ignorance of the law does not justify an assault and that it was the responsibility of the defendant to familiarize himself with our laws. This is to say nothing of the judge counseling the defendant that it is also not acceptable for him to teach his children that it is acceptable to use violence in the defense of religious beliefs. Instead, the judge gives Mr. Perce a lesson in Sharia law and drones on about the Muslim faith, inform everyone in the court room how strongly he embraces Islam, that the first amendment does not allow anyone " to piss off other people and other cultures" and he was also insulted by Mr. Perce's portrayal of Mohammed and the sign he carried.
This is a travesty. Not only did Judge Martin completely ignore video evidence, but a Police Officer who was at the scene also testified on Mr. Perce's behalf, to which the Judge also dismissed by saying the officer didn't give an accurate account or doesn't give it any weight.
...Needless to say, this is totally, completely and unequivocally unacceptable. That a Muslim immigrant can assault a United States citizen in defense of his religious beliefs and walk away a free man, while the victim is chastised and insulted by a Muslim judge who then blamed the victim for the crime committed against him is a horrible abrogation.
This judge should be disbarred. As Buckeyenonbeliever writes on American Atheists:
So, if I were to rip a sign off of a christian, jew, or muslim which read: "Nonbelievers are going to hell", would I merit such protection from this judge? Or would I be sentenced to the fullest extent of the law?
CORRECTION: The judge isn't a Muslim and there seems to be plenty that isn't right with the above story. See the piece by Cathy Young in reason.
Who's Fingering Your Vagina At The TSA Checkpoint?
Highly trained, highly intelligent, select intelligence officers? Check out the TSA requirements:
Qualifications:•Proof of U.S. citizenship
•High school diploma, GED or equivalent; OR
•At least one year of full-time work experience in security work or aviation screener work; or with x-ray technician work.
Forget graduating high school! You don't even need a GED!
Training?
•40 hours of classroom training, and •60 hours of on-the-job training, and •A certification examination
Love this at the monster.com job application link:
Discover the Benefits of Serving America
The work we do is rewarding and on the cutting edge of Federal service. You'll receive competitive compensation and all Federal benefits, including a variety of health insurance options, life and long-term care insurance, paid time off, flexible spending account, retirement plan, flexible work schedules, career development and enrichment training, an employee recognition program and more.
And you get to touch strangers' balls, violating their Fourth Amendment rights and their dignity!
From Justice Robert H. Jackson, the former chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials:
"Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart."
Some Ladies Wear A ZZZ Cup
Photo by Philip Kukulski, Detroit. (Used with permission, of course.)
Government Needs To Stop Biting The Self-Employed
Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest online, Feb. 20, arguing that the government needs to shift its policy to favor the entrepreneur (via the WSJ):
Currently, the American legal and regulatory system is set up to bind as many people to employers as possible. The government wants you to be a wage slave and sets up a regulatory framework that keeps as many of us as possible yoked to bosses and management.The IRS doesn't like the self-employed, fearing they may conceal income. Banks and credit card companies view such people with suspicion, and it is notoriously difficult for start ups and part time enterprises to have access to formal finance. Many services are hard for the self-employed to get on terms like those made available to employees of large corporations: from health insurance to retirement planning, many things are harder and more expensive for the self-employed. The payroll tax system is brutal: the self-employed pay both the employer and employee halves of Social Security and Medicare taxes, almost 20 percent of income and likely to go higher. Many cities will tack on unincorporated business taxes, mass transit taxes, and other interesting feudal exactions and dues.
There are other, subtler ways in which the current system favors old style large employers over small firms. The cost of hiring people can be prohibitively high for small businesses: the paperwork involved in hiring so much as a cleaning person or babysitter can be cumbersome. Hiring full time workers involves negotiating the requirements for worker compensation, unemployment insurance and much else. The cost of these barriers cannot be calculated: jobs foregone, businesses stifled in their cradles, ideas untested, innovations untried.
...The jobs of the future will not all come from start-ups and small business, but a very large proportion of them will. The best industrial policy we can have now is a policy that supports the rise of new information and service based enterprises. Small business and other, innovative forms of creative association (like co-ops and partnerships) will be a key engine of growth growing forward. We must do everything possible to accelerate and promote their growth; it is the best and fastest way out of our current troubles to the broad and sunny uplands that lie ahead.
I worked as an employee at companies for a very short time -- before college, and for three years after college at Ogilvy & Mather. After that, and ever since, like my father, I've been my own boss. More and more people are.
So many policies ignore this; most notably, the stupid gargantuan health care "reform." Oops...they didn't untie health care from the workplace. So, in an age of entrepreneurs, freelancers and others already getting boned by the government, people will continue to keep jobs they shouldn't stay in to keep their health insurance and to lose their jobs and find themselves screwed when they have to buy new health insurance when they're no longer 23 and healthy. That's the age when I'd like to see people do what I did and sign up, as individuals, for an HMO like Kaiser, that only raises their rates based on age once you're in.
Kurt Haskell's Disturbing Account About The Pantybomber
This is an excerpt from practicing attorney Haskell's statement that he never made before the court, because pantybomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pled guilty:
On Christmas Day 2009, my wife and I were returning from an African safari and had a connecting flight through Amsterdam. As we waited for our flight, we sat on the floor next to the boarding gate. What I witnessed while sitting there and subsequent events have changed my life forever. While I sat there, I witnessed Umar dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, being escorted around security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect American English and who aided Umar in boarding without a passport. The airline gate worker initially refused Umar boarding until the man in the tan suit intervened. The event meant nothing to me at the time. Little did I know that Umar would try to kill me a few hours later as our flight approached Detroit. The final 10 minutes of our flight after the attack were the worst minutes of my life. During those 10 minutes I sat paralyzed in fear. Unfortunately, what happened next has had an even greater impact on my life and has saddened me further.When we landed, I was shocked that our plane taxied up to the gate. I was further shocked that we were forced to sit on the plane for 20 minutes with powder from the so called bomb all over the cabin. The officers that boarded the plane did nothing to ensure our safety and did not check for accomplices or other explosive devices. Several passengers trampled through parts of the bomb as they exited the plane. We were then taken into the terminal with our unchecked carry on bags. Again, there was no concern for our safety even though Umar told the officers that there was another bomb on board as he exited the plane. I wondered why nobody was concerned about our safety, accomplices or other bombs and the lack of concern worried me greatly. I immediately told the FBI my story in order to help catch the accomplice I had seen in Amsterdam. It soon became obvious that the FBI wasn't interested in what I had to say, which upset me further. For one month the government refused to admit the existence of the man in the tan suit before changing course and admitting his existence in an ABC News article on January 22, 2010. That was the last time the government talked about this man. The video that would prove the truth of my account has never been released. I continue to be emotional upset that the video has not been released. The Dutch police, meanwhile, in this article (show article), also confirmed that Umar did not show his passport in Amsterdam which also meant that he didn't go through security as both are in the same line in Amsterdam. It upsets me that the government refuses to admit this fact.
I became further saddened from this case, when Patrick Kennedy of the State Department during Congressional hearings, admitted that Umar was a known terrorist, was being followed, and the U.S. allowed him into the U.S. so that it could catch Umar's accomplices. I was once again shocked and saddened when Michael Leiter of the National Counter terrorism Center admitted during these same hearings that intentionally letting terrorists into the U.S. was a frequent practice of the U.S. Government. I cannot fully explain my sadness, disappointment and fear when I realized that my government allowed an attack on me intentionally.
During this time, I questioned if my country intentionally put a known terrorist onto my flight with a live bomb. I had many sleepless nights over this issue...
More from NPR, from a Robert Siegel interview with Haskell:
Mr. KURT HASKELL (Attorney): I saw them just before we boarded at the Amsterdam airport near the final ticket agent.SIEGEL: And the younger man, the Nigerian man, you later recognized at the end of this entire thing in Detroit?
Mr. HASKELL: Right. He was the one that tried to blow up our plane a few hours later.
SIEGEL: And who is the older man or what did he look like?
Mr. HASKELL: Well, nobody knows who he is. He was a wealthy-looking Indian man, maybe around age 50. He had a suit on. And, you know, he's the one that tried to get the terrorist onto the plane without a passport.
SIEGEL: What do you mean without a passport? He was...
Mr. HASKELL: Well, what I saw specifically was the two men go to the ticket agent counter together. Only the Indian man spoke and what the Indian man said was this man needs to board the plane and he doesn't have a passport. And the ticket agent then responded, well, you need a passport to board the plane. And the Indian man said, well, he's from Sudan and we do this all the time. And the ticket agent then responded, well, you'll need to speak to my manager and pointed the two down a hallway to speak to her manager.
SIEGEL: Now, did this older man, did he appear to work for the airport or the airline or security? Did he have any badge on him identifying himself?
Mr. HASKELL: I can't say 100 percent for sure. But to me, he didn't appear that way. He appeared to be maybe trying to bully the ticket agent into letting this man on. And it seemed he was more some kind of authority figure to the terrorist.
Video:
Via Lisa Simeone
Ex-Kos-mmunicated
A Daily Kos'er named Eric Allen Bell started a film on a mosque being built in Tennessee, and toed the Kos party line on Islam for quite some time...that it's Islamophobia to criticize it and all that...and then, he started doing some research and changed his tune, and...oh how he was unwelcomed back in Kos-land.
From FrontPage Magazine, Bell writes about what happened when he wrote, based on his research, that "beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women's rights and basic Democratic Values":
I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case. I felt like I was on the right side of this thing - absolutely certain. But in fact, I was wrong.But something kept nagging at me on a gut level. Something about all of this didn't quite feel right. The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned. I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn't this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. "If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I'm scared for them right now". After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.
Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver's worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed "there is no god" as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.
Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.
And it struck me. Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.
...It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary. I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true. It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam. We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule. I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values - anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, "Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe. We don't want to make a movie that promotes fear. Let's just stick with the existing plan, okay?"
I fought and I fought. I showed them a book called "The Truth About Mohammed" but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his "Jihad Watch" site as part of a hate group. I asked them to watch a documentary called "Islam: What the West Needs to Know" and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was "hate speech" and "propaganda designed to spread fear". It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated. I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context. I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that "you can't trust MEMRI because they have an agenda".
I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site "Loonwatch" and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a "Loon" and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists. I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation - the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations. I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate. But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman's show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong. It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around? When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.
...Where do I stand on Islam? Let's look at its founder - a man who raped a 9 year old girl, a slave owner, a leader who ordered people to be tortured, for adulterers to be stoned, for countless nonbelievers to be beheaded, a killer, a warmonger who spread his "religion of peace" by the sword, a man who suffered from hallucinations of voices telling him to do violent things, a tyrant, a homicidal maniac perhaps the equivalent of 100,000 Osama Bin Ladens. And this sadistic lunatic is considered to be the "ideal man" in Islam. What more needs to be said about Islam than that?
The Great (Cheaper) Outdoors
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Hot Or Not?
Another fine shot by Phil Miller, taken on the 91 freeway (used with permission, of course):
Get The Podcast! Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Barry Schwartz On Choice
Very interesting show from this Sunday -- Dr. Barry Schwartz on "The Paradox of Choice" -- how we actually can have too much choice, paralyzing and/or depressing us, and how to manage choice overload.
Get the podcast at the link (listen on your computer or click "play in your default player" to download it to your iPod, etc.):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
A Tragic Tale -- Of A Lack Of Parental Responsibility
Remember all those stories of men back in the 50s who sacrificed to feed and care for their families? They didn't think they got to sacrifice earning power to have the most fulfilling jobs -- and I don't think you get to if you have kids...if you can't pay for those kids on it.
Of course, a big part of the problem, as I've written before, is that health care is tied to the workplace. As soon as I no longer worked in a company (in my early 20s), I got my own health insurance (Kaiser HMO rather than Blue Cross, because once you're in, you're in, and the price goes up based on age, not on whether you get sick).
Read the tale of the here of the guy's kid in the hospital after he took his chances on having no health insurance (but, yay, he "works full time as a self-employed consultant and writer"):
He wasn't eating and his fever was getting pretty high, up to 103. I drugged him the best I could with kid's OTC meds and on Monday my wife and I attended to his needs however we could.We should have taken him to the Urgent Care right then and there. But we didn't.
My poor decision-making capabilities in this regard was influenced by my lack of experience with any major disease (I have an immune system of steel, fortified by coffee and whisky), and our lack of insurance. My family includes four of the 49.1 million uninsured people in the United States. I've comforted myself that we couldn't afford private insurance, which we can't, but at least we were all relatively healthy and never seemed to have problems.
...When I started my family 6 years ago, I was on a path to a career in research and teaching. We had amazing health insurance through my institution and my wife and children-to-be were generously covered, no-questions-asked by the state of Pennsylvania during, and a year after, the pregnancies. We never saw a bill. After I got "real jobs" upon completing my Masters degree, I entered a grey zone of contract teaching and research employment at universities. With a decent, regular salary we were ineligible for state aid, yet didn't make enough to afford extra costs. Furthermore, the quality of the insurance kept lowering until I wasn't even sure what I was paying for - even as the premium costs were rising.
It reached rock bottom last Spring when we attempted to actually use our insurance that I bought for $1400 every six months while a contract lecturer and beginning PhD student at a North Carolinian university. My boy was starting Kindergarten and needed to be current on his vaccines. Of course, both kids needed to be current, so we took them in one-by-one, got their shots and check-ups, handed over the insurance information, paid our co-pay and went on our way. Never thinking about it, assuming that insurance would do the job we paid them to do.
Exactly 6 months later we received bills, after I no longer had insurance (I had to leave my phd for variety of reasons), and addressed to our kids' names and not mine, the policy holder, for substantial amounts. Apparently, my daughter owed over $400 and my son owed over $1600 to the doctor office, which was the net left over after the insurance contributed about $200 for each visit.
Naturally, I was dumbfounded. I already paid $1400, which I had to ask my department head for an advance to cover their own insurance (there were no monthly payment plans offered by the way), but they only covered about 20% of the medical bills? Ironically, as an uninsured I would have been able to get a discounted rate and probably pay less than the amount I actually owed after the insurance company gave their dues.
I still don't understand it and they are unwilling to work with me. Hence, the bills have gone to a collection agency. I'm refusing to pay for the time being and my kids, at 4 and 6, have their first negative credit rating. Presumably, anyways, since the idiots never fixed the billing information.
This burn, though, has contributed to a deep mistrust in the insurance industry, further feeding my indignations about acquiring individual care - of course we couldn't afford the monthly premiums anyways so the point is moot.
This commenter's right on:
20. Eowyn
Mr. Zelnio's story is sad indeed. But I'll be the lone dissenter among the commenters here.Throughout his tear-jerking account, not once did Zelnio admit that his behaviors and his choices have consequences. It is Zelnio who chose to support a wife and 2 kids on a M.A. graduate student's salary -- which is not meant to support an entire family. It is Zelnio who chose to discontinue his Ph.D. studies and so forfeited even that salary. It is Zelnio who chose to get "renter's or home, wind and hail, flood, car, life" insurance, but not medical insurance, although he knows full well how expensive medical care is. It is Zelnio who chose to gamble that he and his family would not require emergency care or hospitalization.
He gambled and lost. So now he wants other people to pay for his family's medical insurance via a "single payer" system. Though some of the commenters deny it, that is socialism.
This person's dad got it, too -- although the commenter's mocking his dad, who was right:
32. DSchultz
My late father would have explained it to me as follows:"When you chose to have children, you forfeited the right to follow your "dream job". Your satisfaction with your job is not as important as your ability to provide necessary support and protection for your children. Therefore you must abandon your present job and find a responsible middle management position in a major corporation that will provide your family with group health insurance. Your pay and benefits are all that matters, job satisfaction is for hippies."
Bio of the writer:
Kevin Zelnio is a marine biologist by training and is now a freelance science writer, independent scientist and science communications strategist living in beautiful coastal North Carolina. He has studied the ecology and evolution of animals living around underwater volcanoes and described several new species of deep-sea invertebrates.Kevin is the assistant editor for Deep Sea News, where he contributes articles on marine science. Outside of science, Kevin is a songwriter and enjoys spending time with family in the long-leaf Carolina pines!
The Right To Lie
I am truly grateful to people in the military who actually lay themselves on the line on behalf of the rest of us, and I think it's really asshole-ish to lie and say you're a military hero -- but should it really be criminal to be an asshole?
In The New York Times, William Bennett Turner writes:
XAVIER ALVAREZ is a liar. Even the brief filed on his behalf in the United States Supreme Court says as much: "Xavier Alvarez lied." It informs us that he has told tall tales about playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, being married to a Mexican starlet and rescuing the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis. But as the brief reminds us, "none of those lies were crimes."Another of his falsehoods, however, did violate the law. In 2007, while introducing himself at a meeting of a California water board, he said that he was a retired Marine who had been awarded the Medal of Honor (both lies). He was quickly exposed as a phony and pilloried in the community and press as an "idiot" and the "ultimate slime."
But his censure did not end there. The federal government prosecuted him under the Stolen Valor Act, which prohibits falsely claiming to have been awarded a military medal, with an enhanced penalty (up to a year in prison) for claiming to have received the Medal of Honor. Mr. Alvarez was convicted but appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that the act violated the First Amendment.
...It's a question about the scope of the government's power over individuals -- whether the government can criminalize saying untrue things about oneself even if there is no harm to any identifiable person, no intent to cheat anyone or gain unfair advantage, no receipt of anything of value and no interference with the administration of justice or any other compelling government interest.
...The Justice Department argues that the Stolen Valor Act serves an "important" government interest: preserving the integrity and credibility of the military medals program. False claims, it maintains, dilute the reputation and meaning of the medals.
But the government has offered no evidence that lies by crackpots like Mr. Alvarez have in any way damaged the honor or prestige of medal recipients. A few instances of dubious characters lying about medals does not require the government to deploy the heavy artillery of criminal sanction. The United States has had military medals since the Revolutionary War, but the founding fathers didn't seem to think such legal protection was necessary, and neither did Congress until 2006, when it passed the act.
We have too many laws and too many are created to pander to one group or another without a thought as to how this accumulation of laws causes danger to us as a free and free-speaking society.
Being a lying asshole should not be a federal offense.
Suburban Housewife As Male Sex Symbol
I know that adolescent girls often like more girlish guys until they get a little older, but this photo of Justin Bieber is disturbing.
via Arvin
Babysitting While White
I'm a little late to posting this story -- the story of a white grandpa who was detained for talking a walk with his black granddaughter. Hasn't anybody noticed that white people and black people sometimes marry? It's not like a dog walking a giraffe down the street to see a white grandpa and a black granddaughter -- or any number of mixed race combos. Grits For Breakfast posts:
As soon as we crossed the street, just two blocks from my house as the crow flies, the police car that just passed us hit its lights and wheeled around, with five others appearing almost immediately, all with lights flashing. The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child. I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying. One of them called out in a comforting tone that they weren't there to hurt her, but another officer blew up any good will that might have garnered by brusquely snatching her up and scuttling her off to the back seat of one of the police cars. (By this time more cars had joined them; they maxxed out at 9 or 10 police vehicles.)I gave them the phone numbers they needed to confirm who Ty was and that she was supposed to be with me (and not in the back of their police car), but for quite a while nobody seemed too interested in verifying my "story." One officer wanted to lecture me endlessly about how they were just doing their job, as if the innocent person handcuffed on the side of the road cares about such excuses. I asked why he hadn't made any calls yet, and he interrupted his lecture to say "we've only been here two minutes, give us time" (actually it'd been longer than that). "Maybe so," I replied, sitting on the concrete in handcuffs, "but there are nine of y'all milling about doing nothing by my count so between you you've had 18 minutes for somebody to get on the damn phone by now so y'all can figure out you screwed up." Admittedly, this did not go over well. I could tell I was too pissed off to say anything constructive and silently vowed to keep mum from then on.
As all this was happening, the deputy constable who'd questioned us before walked up to the scene and began conversing with some of the officers. She kept looking over at me nervously as I stood 20 feet or so away in handcuffs, averting her gaze whenever our eyes risked meeting. It seemed pretty clear she was the one who called in the cavalry, and it was equally clear she understood she was in the wrong.
A supervisor arrived and began floating around among the milling officers (I have no idea what function most of those cops thought they were fulfilling). Finally, she sidled up to repeat the same lecture I'd heard from the young pup officer who'd handcuffed me: "When we get a call about a possible kidnapping we have to take it very seriously," etc., etc.. By this time, though, I'd lost patience with that schtick. Interrupting her repetitive monologue, I explained that I could care less how they justified what they were doing, and could they please stop explaining themselves, focus on their jobs, and get this over with as soon as possible so Ty and I could go home? She paused as though she wanted to argue, then her shoulders slumped a bit, she half-smiled and replied "Fair enough!," wheeling around and issuing inaudible directions to some of the milling officers, all of whom appeared to continue doing nothing, just as before. Not long after that they released us.
Ty told me later that back in the police car she'd been questioned, not just about me but about her personal life, or as she put it, "all my business": They asked about her school, what she'd been doing that evening, to name all the people in her family, and pressed her to say if I or anyone else had done anything to her. Ty was frustrated, she said later, that they kept repeating the same questions, apparently hoping for different answers. She didn't understand why, after she'd told them who I was, the police didn't just let me go. And when it became clear they wouldn't take her word for it, she began to fear the police would take me away and leave her alone with all those scary cops. (I must admit, for a moment there I felt the same way!) On the upside, said Ty, when they were through questioning her one of the officers let her play with his flashlight, which she considered a high point. Don't you miss life being that simple?
Part of the answer, of course, to Ty's Very Good Question about why I wasn't released when she confirmed my identity is that I was in handcuffs and she was in police custody before anybody asked anyone anything. "Seize first and ask questions later" is better than "shoot first," I suppose, but it's problematic for the same reasons. I found out later police had told my wife and Ty's mom that I'd refused to let them question the child - a patent lie since they'd whisked her away into the back of a police car while I was handcuffed. I wasn't in a position to refuse anything at that point.
How hard would it have been to perform a safety check without running up on me like I'm John Dillinger and scaring the crap out of a five year old? I didn't resist or struggle, but they felt obliged to handcuff me and snatch the kid up for interrogation away from any adult family member. Nine police cars plus the deputy constable all showing up to investigate the heinous crime of "babysitting while white."
I understand that the police are supposed to investigate when accusations are made, but what's with the entire lack of reason and sensitivity? Why is this so often the case these days? I know there are good and reasonable police officers -- a couple of them are my friends. But, I read about more and more abuse of power and other police state tactics and it's worrisome.
I Could Link Prostate Cancer To Dog Walking But That Doesn't Mean Dog Walking Causes Statistics
The more media we have, the more apparent it is that we elect utter morons to represent us. Neal Colgrass writes for Newser that a New Hampshire Republican lawmaker Jeanine Notter proclaimed that women's use of the pill is linked to prostate cancer in men.
It's maybe also linked to, oh, more wearing of the color teal, but that doesn't mean that the pill causes teal. A link is merely an association, and you can find associations with lots of things that aren't causal. The cause or causes could be entirely different.
From the story:
The study said men have higher prostate cancer rates in nations where women use the pill more often, but the pill wasn't blamed specifically. "This is just a hypothesis generating idea," said a co-author of the study. "Women should not be throwing away the pill because of this."
via ifeminists
Minding Your Mitochondria: Woman Low-Carbs Her MS Into Submission
Multiple sclerosis-afflicted Dr. Terry Wahls' inspiring TED talk about how she designed a food plan for her brain and mitochondria -- a plan that got her out of incapacitation and her her wheelchair and standing and walking to give her talk:
She describes how woefully inadequate medical school teaching is on diet. Foods high in Omega 3 are here.
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Barry Schwartz On Why Too Much Choice Makes Us Miserable And How We Can Manage Choice Overload
Our days are filled with choices screaming at us to be made. Camus joked about this: "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?"
We think more choices are better -- but research shows that human brain is actually overwhelmed by more than a handful of choices. Having many choices often leaves us unable to choose or upset and dissatisfied with our choices afterward.
Tonight on Advice Goddess Radio, psychology professor Dr. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Listen live at the link (7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET), call in (347-326-9761 when show is live), download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't forget to pick up a podcast of last week's terrific show with Dr. Bella DePaulo on why "single" shouldn't be paired with "miserable" and why, even if you're in a couple, living a little "single-ish" should make you happier:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" With the best brains in science.
And, in case you haven't heard, my most recent book is science-driven look at rudeness with lots of funny stories about how I go after the rude, I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle To Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society. It's only $12.75, brand new, with Amazon's discount at the link above. (New copies go against my advance, and help me keep writing, doing my radio show...and eating!)
Why People Overeat
Could it have something to do with the genetic reconfiguration of wheat? Cardiologist Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, blogs:
It's odd, however, that the increase in calorie intake got its beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, precisely when the genetically newly-reconfigured wheat was introduced, complete with its new gliadin protein, differing from its predecessors by several amino acids. Recall that gliadin has been shown to exert opiate-like effects, able to bind to opiate receptors in the brain, blocked by opiate-blocking drugs like naloxone and naltrexone.We also know that, when people with celiac disease remove all wheat/gluten from the diet, calorie intake goes down 400 calories per day. We know that normal volunteers administered an opiate-blocking drug, such as naloxone or naltrexone, experience a reduction in calories of around . . . 400 calories per day. We also know that people with eating disorders, such as binge eating disorder, reduce calorie intake, yup, 400 calories per day when injected with an opiate-blocking drug. We also know that a drug company files its FDA application in 2011 for naltrexone, a drug already on the market for heroin addiction, for a weight loss indication; in their clinical trials, overweight people taking naltrexone reduced calorie intake by . . . 400 calories per day, losing 22 pounds in the first 6 months.
Anecdotally, we also know that, if all wheat, and thereby gliadin, is removed from the diet, appetite and desire for food is much reduced. Calorie intake goes down, weight drops, visceral fat stores shrink. Read the stories on this blog and its Facebook page and you can see that this is not the exception; it is the rule (with few exceptions).
Parenting Is Now Child Abuse
A bratty 10-year-old got suspended for the fifth time from riding the bus and his mom punished him -- not by giving him a car ride to school, no punishment at all -- but by making him hoof it to school 4.5 miles. I say good for her -- consequences equal incentive to change behavior.
Actually, bad for her because she's now considered a child abuser. Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben writes on Yahoo.com:
As per ABC News, Mom was charged with child endangerment and faces one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.Let's unwrap the child abuse charges. KAIT says walk to school was longish (4.5 miles). A compassionate, public-spirited (or nosy, bored) bank security guard spotted the lad trudging to school and called the police. The tween boy implored the officer, "Please sir, don't take me home or my mother will beat me." So very Dickensian.
It was also coldish, 30 degrees, though in my home state of Michigan, that's a balmy spring breeze. Kids walk daily through cold and snow in our area. Stores also sell inclement weather apparel in kids' sizes, (Nequavion was wearing such a garment). Anyway, the concern wasn't weather as much as stranger danger or injury, said officer Lyle Waterworth. He encourages other helpful citizens to call the police when they see kids walking alone.
Segue. I find no fault with the police officer for checking this out. As a mandatory reporter, he has to; it's the law. He may have suspected that Nequavion's "beating" reference was just a deflector shield to save the boy's naughty hide, (which Nequavion told KAIT it basically was). Police officers can't take that chance, however. I do fault them for filing charges, once mom explained that her son had been kicked off the bus repeatedly and was being punished.
From the ABC story:
"There were a number of things that could have happened to the child," said Lyle Waterworth, a spokesman for the Jonesboro Police Department. "The child could have been injured, abducted."
I walked almost a mile every day to elementary school when I was a kid. In Michigan, where it's cold. If it was raining, I took an umbrella. "Builds character," my father would have said if you asked him. But, nobody asked him, because "Why does your daughter walk to school instead of being driven to the door by a parent or armed guards?" would have seemed like a really stupid question...back when things were sane.
Births Outside Marriage: For Most Women Under 30, That's Where They Happen
"Most" doesn't quite get at the nuances, however. There are strong racial and educational differences.
Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise write for The New York Times that it used to be called illegitimacy but now it's "the new normal" -- that more than half the births to American women under 30 are outside marriage:
LORAIN, Ohio - The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.Among mothers of all ages, a majority -- 59 percent in 2009 -- are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women -- nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 -- is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
...The shift is affecting children's lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.
...Large racial differences remain: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
...Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, "experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes."
Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of relatives. The girl's father has other children and rarely lends a hand.
"I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep," Ms. Mercado said.
Hope Floats You
Psychology professor Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman writes in the Ottawa Citizen about hope, which he calls an "undervalued and under-appreciated" quantity in helping people succeed:
Hope often gets a bad rap. For some, it conjures up images of blissful naiveté. That's a shame. Science suggests that hope, at least as defined by psychologists, matters a lot.To be sure, hope is not a new concept in psychology. In 1991, the eminent psychologist Charles R. Snyder and his colleagues came up with what they called the hope theory: The person who has hope has the will and determination that goals will be achieved, and a set of different strategies at their disposal to reach their goals.
Put simply, hope involves the will - and different ways - to get there. (Where there's a will, there's a way, goes the aphorism.)
Why is hope important? Well, life is difficult. There are many obstacles. Having goals is not enough. One has to keep getting closer to those goals amid all the inevitable twists and turns of life.
Hope allows people to approach problems with a mindset and strategy set suitable to success, thereby increasing the chances they will actually accomplish their goals.
Hope is not just a feel-good emotion, but a dynamic motivational system. Snyder and his colleagues argue that a person's level of hope leads him or her to choose performance, or learning, goals.
"Learning goals" are conducive to growth and improvement. People with learning goals are actively engaged, constantly planning strategies to meet their goals and monitoring their progress to stay on track.
A bulk of research suggests that learning goals are positively related to success across a wide swatch of human life - from academic achievement to sports to arts to science to business.
Those lacking hope, on the other hand, may adopt what psychologists call "mastery goals." They choose easy tasks that don't offer a challenge or opportunity for growth.
When they fail, they quit. People with mastery goals act helpless and feel a lack of control over their environment. They don't believe in their capacity to obtain the kind of future they want.
In other words, they have no hope.
Zero Tolerance Even On Pretend Drugs
Before long, breathing will be a criminal act in schools, because a breathing person could possibly attack another person with a pencil or another weapon. A North Carolina student has been suspended for bringing oregano to school and pretending it was pot. From myFox8:
WAXHAW, N.C. -- A 13-year-old student from Waxhaw was suspended for 45 days for bringing a bag of oregano to school and telling a classmate it was marijuana.The boy's parents are now threatening to sue if he isn't immediately allowed back to school.
...The student's family lost an appeal Thursday to get him back into school and is now being represented by attorney John Whitehead with the Rutherford Institute in Virginia, WSOC reported.
"If it was marijuana? Sure. It should be dealt with seriously. I think it should be dealt with probably by the police. But this is oregano, folks! This is what you put on pizza. It was a joke," he said.
The school said it has a zero-tolerance policy on drugs.
Now if only they could extend their zero-tolerance to moronic policies and the administrators who carry them out.
via @ConservaTibbs/@RadleyBalko
Actually, I'm From The Age Of Reason
A biology researcher who friended me on Facebook later messaged me (annoying -- I'm a writer, and I answer mail for a living and have a backlog; I don't need penpals). (I've erased the guy's last name):
John Are you Year of the Snake? Or Dragon? Or the cusp?Wednesday/Amy Alkon
Please, no facebook messages ever and I think astrology and chinese years are ridiculous.Yesterday/John
OK, well I guess you cut me down to size. I still thank you for your kindness. No more messages, ever.23 hours ago/Amy Alkon
Feel free to write adviceamy at aol.com for love advice, but really, I am up at 6am in a panic to write.
Next, the guy emails me:
So you don't think it's rude to ridicule my beliefs? There is a zodiac on the ceiling of the temple of Dendera. The Egyptians had a civilization that endured for 4000 years. They predated all the current religions. I think that Islam & Judaism are full of silly superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but I would never say that to someone who believes that hokum. Do you think Einstein was ridiculous for saying "God does not play dice with the universe." I believe there is order & that one can examine what is written & gain some understanding from that. Sure, the "horoscope" is silly & useless, but if you look at someone's complete chart you can learn a lot about them. Love advice? How do I meet a woman who was born in the Year of the Ox?!
I sent him The Bad Astronomer's link about how ridiculous it is to believe in astrology, plus a note:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.htmlThere were also cannibals in history, but I don't see that as any reason to roast my neighbor and serve him with potatoes.
If you send me messages with comments about astrology in them, don't expect me to remain silent.
I have values, therefore I make value judgments. (A quote from the late Cathy Seipp.)
And wait: You're a professor and you believe in astrology? This is not good
I don't think he's actually a professor -- probably just a researcher -- but it's depressing when anybody in the sciences believes in this hoohah.
But for anyone else who asks:
My sign, from now on: "No parking, active garage."
My year: Year of the nematode.
Are we done now?
TSA: Another Airline Subsidy
Smart post by Bill Fisher over at the anti-TSA TSANewsBlog:
Before 2001, the airlines were responsible for providing airport security; the costs were included in the base fare structure. After TSA's formation, taxpayers assumed the responsibility for the bulk of the cost of federally mandated and staffed airport checkpoints.The TSA now costs Americans $8 billion a year and has cost approximately $60 billion since its inception. The FY 2012 Consolidated Spending Act (Public Law 112-074), signed into law in December, appropriated $7.85 billion to TSA, an increase of $153 million from 2011, and included funding to expand the deployment of body scanners to smaller airports.
What has gone largely unreported is that all of this taxpayer expense has effectively amounted to a subsidy of the airline industry and is borne by many who seldom if ever fly. While an airline ticket now includes a $2.50 security fee (and that fee is about to go higher), up from $2 in earlier years, this is miniscule in comparison to the true cost associated with one passenger screening.
Based on the 2011 TSA budget of $8.1 billion and enplanements of 712 million passengers, the total cost per screening is $11.38, with the taxpayer contributing $8.88 of that for every airline passenger boarding an aircraft in the US. When the cost is distributed across the 144 million taxpayers in the US, the TSA adds an additional $43.86 to each household tax return.
If viewed in terms of the 7.15 million flights in the US in 2011, the security subsidy costs taxpayers an average of $1,133 per flight.
The major airlines are the primary beneficiaries of this government largesse. The 10 largest carriers received $4.8 billion in free airport security in 2011 while posting a collective profit of only $1.7 billion.
I'd love to see Bill Fisher try to guesstimate Chertoff's profits from the pornoscanners.
Baggage Gets Cheaper
Up to 70% off bags and luggage
The War On Fun
Gavin Peters emailed me an article from the Boston Globe about an absolutely ludicrous bit of code enforcement he and his family experienced when he put up a little backyard ice-rink (photo at the link). Billy Baker writes:
CAMBRIDGE - Gavin Peters came home last week to find a note on his door. It was from a Cambridge city inspector, and it asked Peters to call him "regarding your pool.''On Friday, his "children's wading pool,'' as the inspector referred to it, received six citations for violating the city's building, zoning, and sanitary codes, and Peters was given seven days to remove it.
The problem, said Peters, is that he does not have a pool in his yard. He has an ice rink. Or at least he was supposed to.
This weirdest of winters is far from frozen, and the Peters citation is just the latest sign of a season that isn't.
Getting fined for a pool in February was certainly not the dream Peters signed up for that day when he saw a photo on the Internet of a father and his family on a backyard rink with the snow falling. It was not the plan when he pulled out a credit card and spent $1,700 on a kit of snap-together plastic boards and supports from a company in Wisconsin. And it seemed impossible when he did his detailed weather research - he is an engineer at Google - and figured he would get between 40 and 60 skating days.
"I had this great vision that I'd be out there at night with my boy,'' he said.
And that vision came true, when he was finally able to skate with his 5-year-old son, Nick.
"It was great,'' he said. And it lasted for exactly an hour and fifty minutes on Jan. 20.
Word of a rink being cited as a pool quickly spread and became the talk of the backyard hockey world, a rapidly growing subculture that has suffered all winter from good, er, bad weather.
"It's not just backyard people who are outraged; it's anyone with common sense,'' said Joe Proulx, a blogger who dissected the citation on his website, backyard-hockey.com. "Do we now start going after sandboxes? It's a little bit ridiculous.''
There's a contention on the second page of the article that the pool could spread West Nile Virus. Well, maybe if it's left with standing water in it during the summer. But, in winter, in Massachusetts? Might spread fun! Can't have that.
Advice Goddess Radio, Get The Podcast: Dr. Bella DePaulo On Why "Single" Shouldn't Be Paired With "Miserable"
It was a very interesting show with Dr. Bella DePaulo on why myths about being single are all wrong and how being "single-ish" can help couples be happier. Download the podcast (click "play in your default player") or listen at the link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Bella's illuminating book: Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After
Don't miss my show this coming Sunday. My guest is Dr. Barry Schwartz, author of a terrific book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Even Creeps Deserve Civil Liberties
I love them at campus civil liberties-defending theFIRE.org -- protecting the rights of the socially awkward. In this case, a student wrote that he found his Advanced Critical Writing prof hot. An excerpt from a FIRE letter:
Around November 1, 2011, Corlett submitted his writing journal to Pamela Mitzelfeld, his Advanced Critical Writing professor. A course document describes the journal as a "Daybook," stating that "a Daybook should be an ongoing volume that essentially functions as a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations." The Daybook should contain "[f]reewriting/brainstorming for essay assignments," "[o]bservation logs: People, places, etc.," and "[c]reative entries of your own."One entry in Corlett's journal, titled "Hot for Teacher," describes his experience of being worried about being distracted in class due to his physical attraction to several of his professors, despite his having been married for 30 years. The essay discusses his (perhaps fictionalized) impressions of his first class with Mitzelfeld: "Kee-rist, I'll never learn a thing. Tall, blond, stacked, skirt, heels, fingernails, smart, articulate, smile. I'm toast but I stay. I'll fuck [up my] Tuesday-Thursday class thing if I drop. I'll search for something unattractive about her. No luck yet."
It continues, "I'm not a maniac for every female although I try to find something attractive about everyone." In a second entry dated September 23 and titled "Hot for Teacher Continued," the Daybook states that the "eternal male question" is whether to prefer a woman like Ginger from the television series Gilligan's Island (comparing her to Mitzelfeld) or one like Mary Ann from the same series (comparing her to a different professor).
FIRE's Adam Kissel wrote this blog item, "Creeping Someone Out Does Not Equal Threats or Intimidation or Harassment":
Last week, FIRE drew attention to a free speech case at Oakland University near Detroit, which wildly overreacted after a student wrote in his writing journal for class that he was attracted to his professors. Student Joseph Corlett appears to have been charged with no crime outside of campus, but Oakland found him guilty of "unlawful individual activities," even though the journal assignment specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic. Corlett was suspended for three semesters, barred from campus, and required to undergo "sensitivity" counseling. That's right: Far from seeing Corlett as the next Virginia Tech shooter, Oakland explicitly labeled insensitivity as Corlett's problem....Here, I focus on the huge difference between being perceived as creepy and insensitive, on the one hand, and making threats, intimidating, or harassing someone on the other hand. As I said to Inside Higher Ed for an article published this morning, "It is not against the law to be--or to be perceived as--a creep." And as I wrote back in 2007, insensitivity is not a crime.
For one thing, to lose First Amendment protection as "intimidation," the speech in question must be "a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death." That's the Supreme Court's definition of intimidation in Virginia v. Black (2003). As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote a couple of years later, feeling "intimidated" does not equal intimidation.
Indeed, a person's subjective feeling is not the same thing as intimidation under the law. The Supreme Court has made clear that a threat or intimidation requires the speaker to intend to voice "a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals." I have seen nothing that comes at all close to this standard in Corlett's case, and I urge you to read the materials and make your own decision.
...Second, the standard definition of actionable student-on-student harassment ever since the Supreme Court's ruling in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999) has been conduct that is "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim's access to an educational opportunity or benefit." By definition, this includes only extreme and usually repetitive behavior, directed at the victim, so serious that it would prevent a reasonable person from receiving his or her education. In FIRE's letter to Oakland University President Gary D. Russi on December 16, 2011, we explained how Corlett's journal is far from such a standard.
It's also important to note that that the Davis case sets a standard for peer-on-peer sexual harassment where there is no power differential between the parties. But Corlett and his professor aren't peers--his professor is the one in the position of power. That makes any harassment rationale for punishing Corlett even more difficult to sustain.
MSNBC video with Corlett:
Paying For Big Government
Parking in Santa Monica? They're ticketing cars with a vengeance heretofore unseen.
They're even chalking car tires at meters with two hour limits. You can be paid up on your meter, but if you've overstayed your two-hour welcome, you're going to be funding all those programs they couldn't pay for but voted in anyway.
Do police officers have a right to touch your car, to put chalk on it? Mark E. Vogler writes for the Eagle-Tribune:
Former councilors: When police chalk tires, it's vandalismHAVERHILL Two former city councilors have accused the Police Department of vandalizing car tires by using chalk to check for violators of downtown parking regulations.
"What we have is a form of graffiti," Haverhill attorney David Swartz told councilors last night when he addressed the council on behalf of former Councilor Louis Fossarelli, who opposes the use of chalk.
"You can take a picture with a digital camera," said Fossarelli, who held two cans of tire care products which he said cost about $7 apiece.
"I really don't want you touching the car for any reason," said Fossarelli, who likened the use of the chalk on the cars of innocent people to a breach of civil liberties.
Swartz continued:
"The fact this tire graffiti has been utilized by official members of the law enforcement community to aid them in enforcing parking restrictions is no excuse. No one should be allowed, without permission, to mark the property of others in any way they wish simply because it makes their job easier to perform," he wrote."The principle of private property rights is a cornerstone of the liberty the people of this nation and this community have fought for and is a foundation stone of our freedom," he wrote. Swartz labeled the practice of using chalk "inappropriate and bordering on illegal."
A White Cannibal Won; Why Can't A Black Maid?
I'm uncomfortable with the subject matter of "The Help." My thinking is, and as I wrote to a black friend of mine who wrote a piece on roles for blacks in Hollywood, do we really need to see a time when black women could only work as maids?
Well, here's an Oscar-time perspective from one of the actresses. Melena Ryzik writes for the LA Times' Carpetbagger blog:
In a recent interview with Tavis Smiley, Ms. Davis and her co-star Octavia Spencer responded to Mr. Smiley's qualms about their Oscar-nominated turns playing domestic workers. He referred to Hattie McDaniel's Oscar victory, the first for an African-American actress, for playing a maid in "Gone With the Wind" and wondered why filmmakers or audiences can't get past that image. (In the opinion pages this weekend, Brent Staples noted that advertising got there long before the dramatic arts.)"I want you to win," Mr. Smiley said, "but I'm ambivalent about what you're winning for."
Ms. Davis was direct. "That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist," she said.
"The black artist cannot live in a revisionist place," she added. "The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy. People are messy. Caucasian actors know that."
Ms. Spencer pointed out that Anthony Hopkins won for playing a cannibal and Charlize Theron for portraying a serial killer -- that white actors were never taken to task for their choices in playing troubling roles. "I don't have a problem with nominating these two earnest, hard-working women," Ms. Spencer said of "The Help" characters. "We've never seen this story told from their perspective."
via Tim Cavanaugh
Are You There, Gad, It's Me, Casual Sex?
Comprehensive and very good blog item on women's interest in casual sex -- a rebuttal from Dr. Gad Saad to a fellow Psych Today blogger irked that he wrote about several studies showing that women are less interested in having sex with random strangers.
(Hellooo...obvious!)
Loved this from Lebanon-born Saad: "This reminds me of a classic Arabic saying: If my grandmother had testicles, we would have called her my grandfather."
And then there's this from his previous post:
If Ms. Phillips could provide us with a culture where women are more desirous of unrestrained sexuality than men, she should advise us ASAP. Fame awaits you Ms. Phillips. I know, I know. No such culture exists because the patriarchy is omnipotent. It predates the Big Bang.
Here's Gad Saad's terrific appearance on my radio show:
And here's a column I wrote referencing Dr. John Marshall Townsend's surveys suggesting that many women feel regret and longing after casual sex:
Although the reasoning department of your brain keeps telling you that you should be friends with benefits, there you are jonesing for girlfriend benefits (flattery, little prezzies, and all). Anthropologist John Marshall Townsend explains that women evolved an emotional alarm system to read whether a man would be a good provider and to compel them to seek cues of commitment. Some women feel especially emotionally connected to their partner following orgasm, probably due to the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin, although the most conclusive research is on rats and prairie voles, and your ability to send email suggests you are neither. Regardless, Townsend's surveys on casual sex showed that even when women fully intended to use and lose some himbo, many would wake up the next morning and find themselves longing for more from a guy they knew they wanted nothing more from.
Gad Saad's book: The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
John Marshall Townsend's book: What Women Want--What Men Want: Why the Sexes Still See Love and Commitment So Differently
Brew You
Deals on single-serve coffee brewers
Y The Long Face?
Another fine Phil Miller photo, taken at his local AM/PM. (Used with permission, of course.)
When Funbags Become Airbags
From Fox5Vegas, DeAnn Smith posts "Woman with enormous breast implants says they saved her life":
Her enormous boobs have become Sheyla Hershey's calling card.But she said her breast implants saved her life when her car crashed after she left a Super Bowl party.
TSA Fail: FBI Guy Explains Why TSA Is Useless
Great blog item at GManCaseFile. An excerpt:
The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse "Chili's" are using and cleaning butcher knives.While bomb-sniffing dogs are run past luggage, the beach at the departure end of LAX is largely unpatrolled, and anybody with a shoulder launched missile (you know the ones they regularly shoot down U.S. helicopters with in Afghanistan) could take out any plane of their choice. I am reticent to discuss anything further that would give anybody ideas. However, these two have had wide dissemination in the media but are by NO means the biggest threats.
I sometimes ruminate while standing in line waiting to take off my shoes, remove my belt, laptop, iPad, etc., etc., about the improvised weapons I saw in prisons and how hard they were to find. It's fascinating what weapons prisoners can make out of plastic forks, newspapers and toothbrushes. Ask any prison guard if an inmate can make a weapon out of an everyday item, and how long it would take them. Approximately 99% of what the average traveler carries on a plane would be considered contraband in a maximum security prison, due to the fact that it can easily be converted into a weapon. Toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks, pens, pencils, anything with wire (iPod headset), any metal object which can be sharpened, etc., etc. is a potential weapon. Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed. (Handcuffing is the required procedure for U.S. Marshalls transporting prisoners in government aircraft.)
TSA's de facto policy to this point has been to react to the latest thing tried by a terrorist, which is invariably something that Al Qaeda identified as a technique not addressed by current screening. While this narrows Al Qaeda's options, their list of attack ideas remains long and they are imaginative. Therefore, if TSA continues to react to each and every new thing tried, three things are certain:
1. Nothing Al Qaeda tries will be caught the first time because it was designed around gaps in TSA security.
2. It is impossible to eliminate all gaps in airline security.
3. Airline security screening based on eliminating every vulnerability will therefore fail because it is impossible. But it will by necessity become increasingly onerous and invasive on the travelers.
His idea of effective screening is random screening:
Approximately 80% fewer screeners needed, complete unpredictability of the likelihood of a search, and extremely effective searches of those, say 10%, selected. It would not reduce by 1% Al Qaeda's belief that they could get through screening with a weapon. A 1-in-10 chance of a full search is too much of a risk for Al Qaeda. They do not plan their attacks on the "Well, it's got a decent chance" method. They require a sure thing. Putting explosives in a shoe and depending on a 10% chance of failure are odds they will not accept. So rather than ineffective (yet incredibly intrusive) screening of 100% of the passengers, there should be highly effective screening of an unpredictable 10% with a reduced screening requirement for the other 90%, say a magnetometer and bag X-ray, allowing people to wear their shoes, belts and pacemakers through screening.
And check out what congressional investigators said:
"Today, TSA's screening policies are based in theatrics. They are typical, bureaucratic responses to failed security policies meant to assuage the concerns of the traveling public." Translation? TSA doesn't know what it's doing, but is trying to put on a good show to keep the traveling public from catching on. The report, entitled, ""A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform" sharply criticized the agency, accusing it of incompetent management. Former DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner dropped this bomb, "The ability of TSA screeners to stop prohibited items from being carried through the sterile areas of the airports fared no better than the performance of screeners prior to September 11, 2001."Frankly, the professional experience I have had with TSA has frightened me. Once, when approaching screening for a flight on official FBI business, I showed my badge as I had done for decades in order to bypass screening. (You can be envious, but remember, I was one less person in line.) I was asked for my form which showed that I was armed. I was unarmed on this flight because my ultimate destination was a foreign country. I was told, "Then you have to be screened." This logic startled me, so I asked, "If I tell you I have a high-powered weapon, you will let me bypass screening, but if I tell you I'm unarmed, then I have to be screened?" The answer? "Yes. Exactly." Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said. I looked at him incredulously and asked, "The semi-automatic pistol is okay, but you don't trust me with a knife?" His response was equal parts predictable and frightening, "But knives are not allowed on the planes."
Polio And Private Funding
Melinda writes:
Thought you would find this anecdote amusing...The polio vaccine was primarily developed by a private organization, the National Foundation for Infant Paralysis.
Who gave the foundation their seed money from his own pocket?
Sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Even the New Deal man himself chose the private sector when it came to solving the very problem he faced.
Interesting, when one considers Obama Care and government ineptitude in general.
The State Does A Hostile Takeover Of Your Kid's Stomach
Incredible and incredibly disturbing story out of the Carolinas, with a government worker inspecting the lunches kids bring from home and forcing kids to eat items the government deems missing. Sara Burrows writes at carolinajournal.com:
RAEFORD - A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.
The girl's mother - who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation - said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a "healthy lunch" would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.
"I don't feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home," the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County.
The girl's grandmother, who sometimes helps pack her lunch, told Carolina Journal that she is a petite, picky 4-year-old who eats white whole wheat bread and is not big on vegetables.
The craziest thing is, the government mandates one serving of grain. For any of you who are new around here, per Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat," it is carbohydrates -- sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes, apple juice -- that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. In other words, eating grain isn't healthy and despite what people believe about "healthy whole grains." (No such thing.)
There's also some indication, Dr. Michael Eades has told me, that Alzheimer's is "diabetes of the brain." But, eat up those breaded chicken nuggets, kiddies! Government knows best!
via @DrEades
Skype Accident
I accidentally typed a skype text meant for my boyfriend into the window to the woman who edits me. She found it hilarious and played along:
Amy Alkon: Honey, need to fly in Friday night.stephanie: ok baby
At least I only called him "Honey," and not something more personal and more embarrassing!
No, The Answer For Too Much Government Is Not More Government
The TSA needs to be disbanded, not have a touchy-feely wing added to it (metaphorically touchy-feely, as opposed to the airport workers who earn a living fingering your vagina).
But, count on Big Government-Loving Chuck -- Chuck Schumer -- to decide that the answer is hiring "passenger advocates" in every terminal. Yes, because government is so brilliant at running things. Look at any single aspect of the TSA and there will be major flaws. For example, the scanners. In medical facilities, scanners are checked daily. TSA? Their scanners -- peering into everybody's private uglies 24/7 -- are checked MAYBE once a year. Maybe.
Via Consumerist, a CBS/Miami story:
"Flying became a degrading experience that should be avoided at all cost," said Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY).Schumer, along with state Senator Michael Gianaris made the announcement Sunday flanked by the sons of the elderly women.
"We are calling on the TSA to give a voice to those who feel they may have been inappropriately treated or subject to overly onerous screening," said Senator Schumer.
His proposal would post a trained passenger advocate to field complaints and address them immediately at all airports. Zimmerman was pleased to hear about the proposal and hopes that it is adopted.
"Women should not be abused. They should be protected," she said.
Um, we have a little thingie called the Fourth Amendment to do that. The problem is, it's ignored and our rights are violated in airports -- and pointlessly, since the TSA mainly scores some pot, a few knives, and sometimes steals passenger possessions and loot.
"I'm Rubber, You're Glue": The Terrorist Version
Headline in the Daily Mail:
Iranian bomber blows off his legs in Bangkok as grenade he hurled at police bounces off tree and explodes at his feet
Graphic video footage from an American living nearby.
via Martin
Oopsy!
Middle-aged woman, Charlotte Cory, is interviewed in the Daily Mail about impulsively ditching her 62-year-old husband, and how he spent months weeping into his pillow:
Five days after I walked out on him, Malcolm moved his new girlfriend into our house. He had met an 18-year-old Eastern European girl in an internet cafe a day or two after I left, and she was now his girlfriend.
Taxpatrons Of The Arts
I love cultchuh, and I pay for the cultchuh I go to see -- which is how it should be. If you're a NASCAR girl, why should you be forced to pay for the ballet?
Well, because Obama says you should, and never mind that the payment will have to go on the national credit card, which is already so over its limit, we're all eventually going to be working as houseservants for the Chinese. Mike Boehm writes in the LAT:
President Obama's proposed 2013 budget, released Monday, calls for a 5% increase in spending for three cultural grantmaking agencies and three Washington, D.C., arts institutions.Obama aims to boost outlays from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion, encompassing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Gallery of Art.
The arts and humanities endowments each would get a 5.5% boost, to $154.255 million -- nearly restoring cuts announced in December. But if Congress approves the president's proposal for the fiscal year that begins in October 2012, the NEA and NEH will still be well short of the $167.5 million each was set to receive before two separate rounds of cuts instigated by Congressional Republicans during 2011.
There's Reality And There's Greek Reality
Love this from Steyn in Macleans. There was a riot in Greece in which three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to an Athens bank:
They were not an "anti-government" mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they're paid more and they retire earlier, and that's how they want to keep it. So they're objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paycheques per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the "workers" might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paycheques per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims--a man and two women--were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.
Who will pay for it? Hey, not my problem, say the rioters. Maybe those dead bank clerks' clients, assuming we didn't burn them to death, too. The problem facing the Western world isn't very difficult to figure out: we've spent tomorrow today, and we can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we've already burned through. When you're spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Obama model), you've no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is starker. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the Western world isn't "printing money" but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. As I pointed out in my bestselling hate crime America Alone four years ago, Greece has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet--1.3 children per couple, which places it in the "lowest-low" demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids. Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their "working" lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death. Who's going to be around to pay for that?
Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.
We're next.
Do We REALLY Need Potato Chip Grants?
If potato chips can't survive in the marketplace without government assistance...well, you think you'd look around and see flat abs and "paleo" snacks everywhere. But, the last time I was in a grocery store, I saw asses the size of Kansas, and that was just on the little kids.
Yet, our government is taking our taxpayer dollars and handing them over to a poor beleaguered potato chip company. I mean, how can a potato chip company expect to sell delicious, crispy potato chips to the tofu and bean sprout-scarfing American public without taxpayer assistance?
Jennifer Gustavson writes for the Suffolk Times:
North Fork Potato Chips won a federal grant last week and is now planning to expand its marketing reach, company officials said Thursday.Carol Sidor, who owns the 170-acre Sidor Farm in Mattituck with her husband, Martin, said she's "very pleased and excited" about winning a $49,990 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and hopes the additional funding will help her family business increase its sales.
"Getting the big contracts is a hard job," Ms. Sidor said. "I'm sure this will be a big help. We wouldn't be able to do it otherwise."
There are a lot of things I can't do without government assistance, and I have a handy-dandy solution for that: I either raise money to do them -- or I don't do them.
Ms. Sidor said the federal funding will go toward updating North Fork Potato Chips' website and brochures. The company has also started working with Northport-based marketing firm Slightly Mad Communications to help boost sales.
I need to boost my sales and make some brochures to sell my syndicated column. Is this an endeavor that we should all now consider taxpayer-fundable? Because if it's good to go for the potato chip lady it should be good to go for the syndicated advice lady.
(How did we get to a point where this sounds normal enough to people that it actually goes through?)
via Jacob Sullum
Truly Loco Parentis
Hans Bader is on the case again at examiner.com about the various states (Maryland, this time) trying to force divorced parents to pay for their adult children's college -- when married parents have no such obligation:
The U.S. Supreme Court has never decided whether it is constitutional......I and legal commentator Walter Olson earlier noted that such laws have unforeseen bad consequences, such as (1) forcing parents to support children who are disrespectful and abusive toward them, and whom they have no parental control over, or -- in some states -- (2) forcing parents to make payments to their ex-spouse who was once the custodial parent, rather than directly to their child or the child's college, thus actually reducing the child's ability to attend college, by reducing the non-custodial parent's ability to directly pay for the child's college tuition.
...I oppose such college child-support mandates partly based on my experience as a lawyer. (I should note, by the way, that I am not divorced, and have no child support obligations). As an intake lawyer for a non-profit law firm for several years, I saw cases of aging divorced parents forced to pay the college bills of disrespectful, ungrateful offspring with whom they had an acrimonious relationship, even though they could ill-afford to do so - like a father dying of an incurable liver disease forced to pay his estranged daughter's graduate school expenses, under a state law permitting child support to be awarded for adult children. (We did not handle family-law cases in state court and I thus had no choice but to reject these people's urgent pleas for legal assistance).
Divorced parents, like married parents, should have the right not to pay for their adult children's living expenses or college costs -- for example, if the child engages in conduct or a field of study that is wasteful or objectionable to the parent.
It is likely that courts will apply this bill (if it becomes law and is not overturned by the courts) to impose support obligations even when doing so is very burdensome and unfair to aging parents. Courts often award support reflexively even when doing so is unjust.
UPDATE -- Hans Bader just emailed me:
There is a legislative hearing coming up on February 23 in the Maryland House Judiciary Committee, which may approve the college child-support bill at that time.
Spain's Stolen Babies: More Evil From The Church
From the BBC, a story by Katya Adler with the subhead "Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s":
Lawyers believe that up to 300,000 babies were taken.The practice of removing children from parents deemed "undesirable" and placing them with "approved" families, began in the 1930s under the dictator General Francisco Franco.
At that time, the motivation may have been ideological. But years later, it seemed to change - babies began to be taken from parents considered morally - or economically - deficient. It became a money-spinner, too.
The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain's social services including hospitals, schools and children's homes.
Nuns and priests compiled waiting lists of would-be adoptive parents, while doctors were said to have lied to mothers about the fate of their children.
The name of one doctor, Dr Eduardo Vela, has come up in a number of victim investigations.
In 1981, Civil Registry sources indicate that 70% of births at Dr Vela's San Ramon clinic in Madrid were registered as "mother unknown".
This was legal under Spanish law, and was meant to protect the anonymity of unmarried mothers. It is alleged that this was also widely used to cover up baby theft and trafficking.
Dr Vela stands accused of telling women their babies had died when they had not and handing over those newborn children to other couples for cash.
Snakes And Snails, And Check Out The Tail!
Gregg and I got the cutest shoes for my neighbor's new baby boy. Only $16.99 in the six months to a year size at Amazon: Robeez Soft Soles 3D Puppy Crib Shoe
For big savings on the hard stuff, shop Amazon's Consumer Electronics Deals Page
Rehearsal For Cinco de Mayo
Photo and title by Phil Miller (used with permission, of course).
Everybody's Sucking Off The Government Teat (Hmm, Who's Paying For All Of This?)
He does not need any help from the federal government -- but if they're handing it out, thanks, he'll be taking it. Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff write in The New York Times:
LINDSTROM, Minn. -- Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region's long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year.
Dozens of benefits programs provided an average of $6,583 for each man, woman and child in the county in 2009, a 69 percent increase from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. In Chisago, and across the nation, the government now provides almost $1 in benefits for every $4 in other income.
...The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.
What happens when there are no more rich left to bleed -- and does anyone think there are enough rich left to bleed when everybody's on the dole?
All The President's Birth Control Bullshit
Sure, there are a lot of children "left behind" these days, but those of us who are over 20 can still mostly add and subtract, Mr. President. The WSJ has an editorial about President Obama's tricky-dicky birth control math:
Under the new rule, which the White House stresses is "an accommodation" and not a compromise, nonprofit religious organizations won't have to directly cover birth control and can opt out. But the insurers they hire to cover their employees can't opt out. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you're a rational person.Say Notre Dame decides that its health plan won't cover birth control on moral grounds. A faculty member wants such coverage, so Notre Dame's insurer will then be required to offer the benefit as an add-on rider anyway, at no out-of-pocket cost to her, or to any other worker or in higher premiums for the larger group.
But wait. Supposedly the original rule was necessary to ensure "access" to contraceptives, which can cost up to $600 a year as Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray wrote in these pages this week. The true number is far less, but where does that $600 or whatever come from, if not from Notre Dame and not the professor?
Insurance companies won't be making donations. Drug makers will still charge for the pill. Doctors will still bill for reproductive treatment. The reality, as with all mandated benefits, is that these costs will be borne eventually via higher premiums. The balloon may be squeezed differently over time, and insurers may amortize the cost differently over time, but eventually prices will find an equilibrium. Notre Dame will still pay for birth control, even if it is nominally carried by a third-party corporation.
This cut-out may appease a few of the Administration's critics, especially on the Catholic left--but only if they want to be deceived again, having lobbied for the Affordable Care Act that created the problem in the first place. The faithful for whom birth control is a matter of religious conviction haven't been accommodated at all. They'll merely have to keep two sets of accounting books.
Loved how Taranto put it:
Unless insurance companies have access to magical abortifacient trees, somebody has to pay for this stuff.
I think that's an as-of-yet unwritten book by Shel Silverstein: "The Giving The Pill Tree."
Has Somebody Embalmed The First Amendment?
At WSJ.com, James Taranto blogs about an embalmer, Troy Schoeller, who was less-than-circumscribed in talking to a Boston Phoenix reporter, spilling that he hates embalming fat people and describing the body of a baby as a "bearskin rug."
After reading his comments, the Massachusetts licensing board for funeral directors and embalmers yanked his license, and Schoeller is arguing in court that the yanking violates his constitutional right to free speech.
Assistant Attorney General Sookyoung Shin seems confused about the text of the First Amendment, telling the Massachusettes Supreme Judicial Court:
"If his comments are OK, then any funeral director or embalmer in the state would have license to go out and describe the types of bodies that he finds nasty or that he finds amusing."
We call that free speech -- and really, really, really deadly for business.
When Facebook Becomes Unabashed Userbook
Unbelievable how presumptuous people are -- a total stranger sent me a Facebook message asking me to help her market her self-published book.
By the way, I have no idea who the second "Deleted" is, and "the law of attraction" is utter crap believed in by the lettuce-headed -- but a convenient and lame effort by this woman to excuse her rudeness in contacting me, a total stranger, and asking for something for nothing. And regarding work I have not read and will never read. Email follows:
Hi Amy:I sent you an email awhile ago as I found you when I was doing book marketing, for my fun eBook nice article on it below in Beverly Hills Patch.
I see we have mutual friends Deleted and Deleted. I'm reaching out for some help, perhaps through your circles, you may be able to help me with this new book venture? I am so grateful for an assistance. I listened to a little bit of the Blog Radio tonight ... funny, I just found out about Bella also on my research today and then she was on your show -- well, we know how all of that law of attraction works! Here is article and please be in touch.
It's hard enough for me to get to non-science books I want to read by friends and colleagues of mine, like Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals
Small Latte, Extra Whiskers
Angus' finest design:
Angus, who used to work at my favorite coffeehouse, only made these special little coffeeartworks for a few special customers.
This coffee was made for Lawyer Tom, my friend who told me about the legal precedent I needed (the International Shoe case) to bring my (winning) case against the time-thieving telemarketer -- a case I wrote about in my book I See Rude People.
Why a cat? Well, here's Tom from the back.
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Bella DePaulo On Why "Single" Shouldn't Be Paired With "Miserable"
Contrary to popular belief, the adjective that goes with "single" isn't necessarily "miserable," and not being in a relationship doesn't mean you'll "die alone" and have your face eaten off by your 26 cats. Belief in notions like these pushes people to get into relationships they shouldn't, just to have someone, and helps keep people together with partners who aren't making them happy.
So...just in time for what I've termed our "national day of insincerity," when people who behave hatefully to each other year-round try to make up for it by buying flowers, chocolates and jewelry, I have Dr. Bella DePaulo coming on my show -- Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern -- to set you straight on how good things can be for people who don't have that "significant other"...if only they throw off all that societal prejudice against being single:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Listen live at the link, call in (347-326-9761 when show is live), download the podcast afterward.
DePaulo is the author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After
But, what will become of you if you don't lock in a man like an interest rate? Who will change the rubber sheet on your bed and put tennis balls on the bottom of your walker? This is an understandable concern, but maybe you could just put a few bucks aside for that, as it seems kind of insulting to get together with somebody now as a means of saving big on elder-care. Beyond the need for good nursing, maybe you fear being all alone in your twilight years (or, worse yet, dying alone and being turned into a Purina substitute by your 26 cats). The truth is, according to studies referenced in Bella DePaulo's terrific book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, women who've never been married have some of the strongest friendships and sense of community in their lives, and are the least likely to feel lonely when they're old bags.
And I wrote about one of her studies here:
Like a lot of unpartnered types who go suddenly psycho, your friend probably seemed perfectly happy until that night she marched into some crowded bar and shouted, "I'm nothing without you!" (Who "you" is remains to be seen.) Now, maybe she never really was happy, or maybe she just hit that age where "single" becomes an adult form of cooties. In a recently published study, Bella M. DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris blame this bias on "The Cult of the Couple," and puzzle at "the strange implication that people without a stable sexual relationship are wandering adrift with open wounds and shivering in their sleep."DePaulo and Morris aren't anti-couple; they were just surprised when their data showed most people suspect single equals loser -- even single people. When they asked 950 undergrads to describe the characteristics of married and single people in general, married people were assumed to be "mature, stable, honest, happy, kind, and loving." Singles got nailed with "immature, insecure, self-centered, unhappy, lonely, and ugly." Of course, the truth is, sometimes two is the loneliest number. Is there really anything lonelier than feeling completely alone when you're in relationship with somebody else?
It doesn't help that award-winning social scientists keep making bold pronouncements about the transformative power of marriage, like E. Mavis Hetherington's claim, "Happily married couples are healthier, happier, wealthier, and sexier than are singles." Don't be too quick to assume they also have bigger breasts, flatter abs, and are less likely to be abducted by aliens. The above quote from Hetherington's recently published book was just one of many examples cited by DePaulo and Morris of couple-glorifying sloppy methodology and data analysis. DePaulo told me via e-mail, "I think that cultural notions about singles and marrieds are so pervasive, and so unquestioned, that even respected scholars do less than their best work on the topic." DePaulo and Morris point out the rather obvious flaw in Hetherington's claim: She compared only happily married people to all single people. Wow, imagine that: Happily marrieds are more satisfied with their lives than, say, suicidal singles.
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" With the best brains in science.
And, in case you haven't heard, my latest book is I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle To Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society. It's only $12.75, brand new, with Amazon's discount at the link above. (New copies go against my advance, and help me keep writing, doing my radio show...and eating!)
Should Have Known Better Than To Speak My Mind On Politics
I have this very talented fiction writer friend I truly adore who shares my views on manners and rudeness and even stands up to the rude herself. This is quite the relief because I'm typically the only person ever to speak up when rudesters trample all over the rest of us.
Well, speaking up about my political views was a mistake on Saturday, because I'm libertarian and she's very much anything but. She's also on the left. I'm neither left nor right, but it's my impression and my experience that when people on the right disagree with you, they typically don't take it as personally as some do on the left. People on the right who disagree with me just seem to think I'm a bit stupid (like for my view that we had no business being in Iraq), but they don't think I'm a terrible person for not sharing their views.
My mother experienced the latter recently with a friend, who told her to please never bring up Barack Obama again in her presence (my mother is not an Obama fan, and indicated why in some conversation she and her friend had -- probably by my mother expressing fiscally conservative views). My mother told me that she felt their friendship would never be the same. I told my mom my opinion, that when people on the left don't agree with you, they tend to feel offended that you would even have such views, and even view you as a bad person for having them.
I should have remembered this when my friend made a remark about Santorum (I despise the guy, by the way) and sex and then hopped onto coverage of birth control by health insurance. This was basically my cue -- I saw the can of worms and I got out my can opener -- instead of doing what I should have done, not engaging and hopping on to another subject.
She was shocked at my views on freedom of religion: That if you are, say, a Catholic hospital, and you are not getting public funds, you should not have to provide any medication or service that runs contrary to your religion. (I would add now that I would think this religious dispensation should be suspended if necessary to save a life.)
Now, I'm an atheist, and I think religion is silly, and I'm a supporter of Planned Parenthood and find abortions creepy, but feel a woman has a right to have one (but please have it as early as possible). But, I still feel that people who have religious beliefs should not be forced by the government to do things that violate them.
In case this didn't horrify my friend enough about me, we somehow moved on to other such neutral topics like government meddling in health insurance (and my view that one of the biggest problems is that it's tied to the workplace).
And then, for the crowning glory of what should be termed "How to put a rift in a perfectly wonderful friendship," we somehow moved on to the subject of "What if this cafe decided to say black people couldn't come there?"
I said, "I think that's ugly and horrible but I also think they should be free to do that. I wouldn't patronize this cafe if they had that policy, and I'd probably open up a cafe next door that welcomed everybody -- everybody not shouting into a cell phone."
Shocked, she said that this would take us back to the days of Jim Crow Laws.
And I told her the problem there was government -- government legislation that prohibited blacks and whites from mixing, and that I thought the free market solved these problems. Again, you don't want to serve blacks? You're not going to be serving me, either.
And, I told her, I'd be for freedom to choose who comes into your business even if I'm the excluded one. I told her that I'd experienced some pretty awful anti-Semitism as a child -- egging of our house and more -- but that even if the discrimination fell upon me, I would still maintain the same view.
We walked out to our cars together, and she said something about how necessary government is to run every area of our lives, and I said my view is that government makes a mess of it and that I wanted as little intervention as possible: basically just road maintenance, defense, and the classic stuff you usually hear libertarians talk about when they explain small government.
From the look on her face, I realized about midway through that I'd dug myself into the same friendship hole I'd talked to my mother about, and realized I'd made a mistake. It isn't that I think I should keep quiet about my views; I just think I need to realize that some people just can't help but be anything but deeply offended by them, and talk with those people about shoes, good books, and the weather.
Barbie On Board
Golfcartmobile used as transportation around Santa Monica.
The Beer-Devil Made Them Drink It
The Oglala Sioux tribe wants $500 million from beer makers, four beer stores, plus beer distributors its suing, for selling alcohol to residents South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where alcohol is banned. Kevin Abourezk writes in the Lincoln Journal Star:
(The suit) alleges the defendants violated the tribe's alcohol ban as well as Nebraska law by providing alcohol to the reservation's residents, knowing those residents would transport the alcohol into the reservation and resell much of that beer to other reservation residents.The lawsuit also alleges the owners of the four beer stores sold alcohol to intoxicated people and accepted sex, pornographic photos and food assistance vouchers in exchange for beer.
"Alcohol is a devastating drug to the Lakota people," the lawsuit states. "The vast majority of beer consumed in the town of Pine Ridge and the (reservation) is sold in Whiteclay establishments."
Ted Frank makes the right point (and has posted the complaint online):
How it is these companies' responsibility to prevent the legal sale of beer is beyond me; are they supposed to engage in racial profiling at the checkout counter? Refuse to sell to vendors near dry areas?
Don Surber adds:
In the old days, I would have called it a frivolous lawsuit except we just saw bankers agree to pay $25 billion to millions (of) people who were behind in their mortgage payments. Suddenly in our world, moochers, freeloaders and welchers on loans are heroes. Why not alcoholics?
via Overlawyered
Parking Attendants Who Can Keep The Lights On In Their Homes And Their Country Homes
An editorial in the LA Times about the sick rates of pay at the DWP, thanks to the union's coziness with the pols:
Few kids grow up dreaming of becoming a parking lot attendant, but the job can be quite lucrative -- at least if you land one at the L.A. Department of Water and Power. According to a report in Bloomberg News, garage monitors at the DWP made, on average, $74,408 a year; nationally, the average salary for this position is $21,250.That's just one of many eye-popping figures unveiled by Bloomberg, which found that DWP workers make on average 40% more than other city of Los Angeles employees, even when they're doing nearly identical jobs. For example, carpenters at the DWP averaged $102,732 in 2010, compared with $65,201 at the general services department. DWP auto painters pulled down an average of $109,192, compared with $59,901 at the Fire Department. Overall, utility employees had an average salary of $96,805, while other city employees averaged $68,822.
The reason for these inflated salaries isn't mysterious. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is among the biggest campaign contributors in Los Angeles, which means that at contract time, the DWP union finds itself in the enviable position of negotiating with city politicians who may owe their own jobs to the union.
I'll be working in a donut shop at 90 to pay the parking attendant's pension.
Dad Shoots Teen's Laptop For Facebook Post
It's so harrrrd growing up in America!
For or against the approach?
Stop Hollywood
Photo by Phil Miller. (Used with permission, of course.)
You Can't Fly Because You're A Girl
There was no female TSA worker there at the tiny Rock Springs, Wyoming airport to grope the vagina of a female passenger, Jennifer Winning, so she was made to miss her flight. Jaclyn Allen reports for thedenverchannel:
A Transportation Security Administration agent informed her that the only female screener had been let off to avoid paying her overtime."I offered to sign a waiver to let a male screener check me, but they wouldn't do it," Winning said. "I asked, 'If I was a man I could get on [the plane], but because I'm a woman I can't?' And he said, 'Yes, that's correct.'"
A TSA spokeswoman issued a statement to 7NEWS saying there had been several final boarding announcements, and that the reason Winning wasn't allowed through security was actually because she was too late and "the airline was no longer accepting passengers for the flight."
..."It wasn't about timing," Winning said. "It wasn't because I was late. It was because I am a woman, and they didn't have a female TSA agent."
The Stupidity Of Employer-Provided Group Insurance
Finance prof John H. Cochrane writes in the WSJ:
If your employer pays you $100 less in salary and buys $100 of group insurance for you, you don't pay taxes on that amount. Hence, the more insurance costs and covers, the less in taxes you seem to pay. (Even that savings is an illusion: The government still needs money and raises overall tax rates to make up the difference.)To add insult to injury, this tax deduction does not apply to portable, guaranteed-renewable individual insurance. You don't get the tax break if your employer gives you the $100 and you buy a policy--a policy that will stay with you if you get sick, leave employment or get divorced. The pre-existing conditions crisis is largely a creature of tax law. You don't lose your car insurance when you change jobs.
If you're like me, you know people chained to jobs because they need to stay with the employer's health insurance due to some condition they came down with while in their job. Health insurance needs to be untied from employment -- especially since there are fewer and fewer people who stay for more than a few years in a job.
"Hilariously Unconstitutional": Arizona's Bill For G-Rated Education
That's not something I thought I'd ever hear Greg Lukianoff say, as he's a guy who takes the Constitution pretty seriously...as do I. Greg heads up FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending civil liberties on campus. He blogged at the HuffPo about a bill that goes wildly beyond the pale:
In what has to be the most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I've seen in quite some time, senators in the Arizona state legislature have introduced a bill that would require all educational institutions in the state -- including state universities -- to suspend or fire professors who say or do things that aren't allowed on network TV. Yes, you read that right: at the same time the Supreme Court is poised to decide if FCC-imposed limits on "indecent" content in broadcast media are an anachronism from a bygone era, Arizona state legislators want to limit what college professors say and do to only what is fit for a Disney movie (excluding, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. After all, those films are PG-13!).But don't take my word for it, here is the full text of the bill (SB 1467) as it currently stands:
15-108. Public classrooms; compliance with federal standards for media broadcasts concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity; violations; definitionA. If a person who provides classroom instruction in a public school engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio:
1. For the first occurrence, the school shall suspend the person, at a minimum, for one week of employment, and the person shall not receive any compensation for the duration of the suspension. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the first occurrence from suspending the person for a longer duration or terminating the employment of that person.
2. For the second occurrence, the school shall suspend the person, at a minimum, for two weeks of employment, and the person shall not receive any compensation for the duration of the suspension. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the second occurrence from suspending the person for a longer duration or terminating the employment of that person.
3. For the third occurrence, the school shall terminate the employment of the person. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the first or second occurrence from terminating the employment of that person.
B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.
You catch all that? The bill doesn't even require that the profanity be uttered in the classroom, it just generally says that if a professor or, for that matter, a K-12 teacher, engages in FCC-regulated conduct or speech at all, he or she can lose their job. Of course, even if this were limited strictly to classroom speech it would still be laughed out of court as unconstitutional on its face.
Irony abounds in this law, especially when you consider that it would require law professors to be suspended for discussing two of the most important Supreme Court cases regarding the First Amendment and free speech on campus. The first is the ever-famous case of Cohen v. California (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that a citizen could not be punished for wearing a jacket emblazoned with the slogan "Fuck the Draft." Indeed, the Court rightly noted in its decision that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."
...Legislators and, in many cases, campus bureaucrats need to know that real life and real education often includes "strong language and adult content."
We Call These "Don't Fuck Me" Pumps
These gleaming leather uglies are confused as to whether they're women's shoes, men's shoes, mary janes or golf cleats. Helpfully confusing matters even more, they've got a twisted bridle attached at the heel. If ever pairs of footwear deserved to die in a fire, they're these. (NYT)
"Making Value Judgments": Please Do.
Regarding my blog item on the home birthing advocate dying a home death, somebody wrote me about how inappropriate they find it to weigh in on the subject:
"It is not my place to pass any judgement upon what the mother to be feels appropriate for her own personal life."
I'll quote Cathy Seipp on that. When someone would say to her, "Why, that's a value judgment!" she'd say, "I have values, so I make judgments."
I second that.
This silly thinking that one is rude to have an opinion is part of what feeds into the general pussyfootery that leads people to stand blinking like sheep at airports as their Fourth Amendment rights are ignored by the government lackey fingering their vagina in the name of "security."
Don't Be A Tool, Just Save On Them
Save 60 Off Amazon's Tools - Value Center Best Sellers
Advice Goddess Radio - Get The Podcast: Dr. Robin Stern On Manipulation-Proofing Yourself
Very interesting show this week with psychologist Dr. Robin Stern, Ph.D. on "gaslighting" and manipulation-proofing yourself against partners who prey on your weaknesses and break you down to get their way. Get the podcast here (listen online or click "play in your default player" to download):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Stern is the author of a book, The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life
What your boyfriend's doing to you is "gaslighting," which, unfortunately, only sounds like lighting farts on fire. It's actually insidious emotional abuse that gets its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, about an heiress whose husband makes small changes around their home (like making their gas-powered lights flicker), then denies anything's different, making her believe her sanity's gone off its hinges.In a relationship, writes Dr. Robin Stern in The Gaslight Effect, you're being gaslighted when somebody relentlessly pressures you to believe the unbelievable and do what you know you shouldn't. Stern explains that the gaslighter "needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world," while the gaslightee allows him to bully away her sense of reality and self because she fears losing his love and approval. Of course, in your case, it could have something to do with not wanting to think you've wasted five years with "a selfish, manipulative ass." (Fart-play suddenly sounding inviting?)
Here's the movie trailer:
Adult Daycare In The Heart Of Manhattan!
Michael Musto tweets:
@mikeymusto Studio 54 is reopening without sex or drugs!
California: Everything Is Now Officially Illegal
I checked. I promise this is not a story from The Onion about how people can now be fined up to $1K for throwing a frisbee or a football on the beach in LA. No, sadly, it's a story from CBS/LA:
The Board of Supervisors this week agreed to raise fines to up to $1,000 for anyone who throws a football or a Frisbee on any beach in Los Angeles County.In passing the 37-page ordinance on Tuesday, officials sought to outline responsibilities for law enforcement and other public agencies while also providing clarification on beach-goer activities that could potentially disrupt or even injure the public.
...Officials warned that any activities that could potentially harm "any person or property on or near the beach" should not be allowed during the peak summer season.
Your kids could also end up costing you big bucks: the ordinance also prohibits digging any hole deeper than 18 inches into the sand except where permission is granted for film and TV production services only.
Will there be park rangers coming around with rulers?
Apparently, according to an LA Times story, they're just banning frisbees and footballs during the summer...the time people actually want to be on the beach throwing a football or a frisbee around!
I lived in an apartment three houses from the boardwalk in Venice (a strip of pavement you cross to get to the sand). People would play all sorts of games on the beach and just look out for each other. How insane is it that they make laws about this stuff?
Ah, wait -- the answer, from the LAT piece:
"The county is looking to find more revenue," he said.
Because the nitbrains we vote in to represent us spend our money like it's our money (as opposed to theirs).
San Francisco Government Wants You On Welfare
It sure doesn't seem to want you to open a business and, you know, employ people and pay taxes. At least, that's what one has to conclude from the hell Julie Pries went through opening her ice cream parlor.
I repeat: Her ice cream parlor.
Not her toxic chemicals lab. Not her nuclear warhead assembly plant. '
The lady wants to sell you "house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco)," according to a New York Times story by Scott James:
The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.But getting it opened wasn't easy.
"Many times it almost didn't happen," said Juliet Pries, the owner, with a cheerful laugh.
Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city's morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.
"It's just a huge risk," she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. "At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss."
Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn't have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.
The ice cream shop's travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.
The matter has also alarmed some business leaders, who point out that few small ventures could survive such long delays.
Ya think?
Chemerinsky On Prop 8 Ruling: No Good Reason To Deny Gays And Lesbians Equal Rights
UC Irvine School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains in the LAT:
Tuesday's federal court ruling declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional can be easily explained: There is no legitimate government interest in prohibiting same-sex marriages. It is for this reason that the Supreme Court is likely to affirm the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and hold that the denial of marriage equality to gays and lesbians violates the U.S. Constitution.In one sense, the 9th Circuit ruled narrowly, holding only that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional because it rescinded an existing right in the state. In another sense, though, the reasoning of the court stands for a broader proposition: The ban on marriage equality for gays and lesbians serves no legitimate government interest. Under this reasoning -- though it was not the holding of the case -- any law denying marriage equality would be unconstitutional.
Laws that discriminate against individuals must, at the very least, serve a legitimate government purpose. The 9th Circuit found no such compelling purpose in a California ballot initiative that rescinded the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Instead, the court concluded, the reasoning behind the law could be explained only as impermissible animus.
One contention frequently made is that marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman. But this is not an argument; it is just a definition. Certainly marriage can be defined this way, but it also can be defined to include same-sex couples exchanging the same vows, going through the same rituals and receiving the same benefits.
...One central criticism of the 9th Circuit's decision is that it was wrong for the court to substitute its decision for that of the voters. However, it is a crucial judicial role to interpret the Constitution and to remedy unjust discrimination and violations of rights. It was not impermissible judicial activism when the Supreme Court invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and it is equally appropriate for courts to declare unconstitutional laws rescinding the right to same-sex marriage.
Love his ending:
No doubt many are offended by the idea of same-sex marriage. But, of course, those who don't like the idea of same-sex marriage don't have to marry someone of the same sex.
Home Birth Advocate Dies Home Death
Via @bengoldacre, a Louise Eccles and Richard Shears story on IOL/New Zealand:
London - A passionate advocate of home births has died after her own home labour.Australian campaigner Caroline Lovell, 36, went into cardiac arrest while giving birth to her second daughter, Zahra, at her home.
She was taken to hospital but died the next day. Her daughter survived.
The tragedy, in Melbourne on January 23, will re-ignite debate about the safety of home births.
NHS statistics show that between 2000 and 2008, home births in the UK soared by 54 percent.
Lovell had made arrangements for a private midwife to assist with the delivery, but unknown complications during the birth caused her heart to stop. By the time paramedics arrived at her home, she was critically ill.
New data suggests home births have risen by 29 per cent in the U.S. triggered by the 'Hollywood influence', better safety measures and lower costs.
Some serious shit can go on while giving birth (see the bottom of the article for a little list). It's 2012, and we aren't living in the jungle in mud huts. Have your baby in a hospital.
Anonymous, in the comments on the IOL piece, sounds like he or she might be a doctor, and regardless, the comment seems right on:
...you want to let a midwife do a hysterectomy on your kitchen table- fine, but you have no right to chose risking an innocent baby. I also doubt a midwife can handle an emergency, sometimes in emergencies you need skills that a midwife does not possess, no matter how well trained she can't clamp a uterine artery, do a caesarian, give a neonate surfactant, give mum a blood transfusion. When I have been called to torrential post partum haemorrhages it is always an absolute life-threatening problem, and a midwife has little in her toolkit apart from giving drugs and applying direct pressure- and even then not at the same time!
The Earmark Next Door
David S. Fallis, Scott Higham and Kimberly Kindy write in the WaPo that earmarks are sometimes used to fund projects near properties owned by lawmakers:
A U.S. senator from Alabama directed more than $100 million in federal earmarks to renovate downtown Tuscaloosa near his own commercial office building. A congressman from Georgia secured $6.3 million in taxpayer funds to replenish the beach about 900 feet from his island vacation cottage. A representative from Michigan earmarked $486,000 to add a bike lane to a bridge within walking distance of her home.Thirty-three members of Congress have directed more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers' own property, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Under the ethics rules Congress has written for itself, this is both legal and undisclosed.
If you don't understand that politics is the career of sleazy self-interest, tarted up as "public service," you're either 10 or seriously naive. As with cockroaches, turn the lights on on almost any politician and it's going to be ugly. (And, pssst, this includes those who profess to be on the side of all that is good and right in the universe like Nancy Pelosi.)
via @mpetrie98
Issuing Citizen Tickets For Entitled Rudewads
Tuesday night, I was walking across the crosswalk when this biddy in a Prius nearly mowed me down. I jumped backward out of the way and the Prius sped on.
A block later, it stopped briefly and a female passenger got out. (The Prius driver later claimed to me that her passenger was blind, but, in retrospect, I doubt that she was bat-blind vis a vis the speed and lack of help with which she trotted into a neighborhood business.)
I scurried around the corner through the rain after Prius Broad to a parking lot -- where she pulled into one of two handicapped spaces. A young guy who has a wheelchair and drives a Jag sometimes parks in one and a guy with a wheelchair van often parks in another. But, one of them will not have a place to park tonight.
Now, I have no proof that Prius Broad doesn't have some invisible and terrible injury that got her the little handicapped placard she hung on her rear-view. But, I'd bet my lunch money that she's one of the bullshit handicapped that Steve Lopez wrote about in a recent column in the LA Times -- a column I tucked under her windshield with my note (with the headline words "abusers of disabled placards" circled in red Sharpie).
After I photographed her plate and gave her a scolding for nearly mowing me down, I went home and wrote a note to tuck under her windshield wiper. As I wrote, I had an idea -- which most of the time won't pay off, but some of the time just might: The Citizen Ticket.
When people commit small crimes that aren't actual crimes but the things that make the lives of others around them worse through their selfishness, make them pay -- or at least make them feel something other than smug.
Call them out for what they've done, put a price on their rudeness (monetary or perhaps something they need to do for someone else or the neighborhood), then tell them to pay to make up for their bad behavior. 
The text of the ticket:
Your friend might be blind, but you dropped her off and used the placard to snare yourself a parking space that a man who comes to this neighborhood needs - a man who's paralyzed from the waist down.Yay, you didn't have to search for parking in the rain. But, you have two healthy legs to trot around on. I guess since he can't park elsewhere, he can't come here tonight. Because of you, Ms. Selfish.
There's something called "green licensing" that may be at work here. Smug eco buyers think that driving a Prius or buying "green" soap means they are entitled to act like selfish pigs.
You drive like one and you park like one.
Worse yet, when I told you you nearly hit me you told me you were dropping off a blind person. No, you later dropped off a blind person. You tried to lie your way out of it because you apparently think nothing of having accountability.
You're a bad person. Try to change.
Consider this your citizen-issued ticket for behaving with utter entitlement.
You need to donate $100 to theFIRE.org for nearly hitting me, and another $100 for parking in a handicapped space when your only handicap, again, is bad character.
Let's see if you'll atone or if you'll just think you got away with something. I'm betting on the latter, unfortunately.
As long as I was hitting her up for cash, I thought I'd ask her to fund my favorite charity, campus civil liberties defenders, theFIRE.org. If you've got a few extra hundreds you don't know what to do with, you might do the same, even if you haven't nearly run anyone over or parked in a handicapped spot.
More Sanding off The Edges Of Childhood
Got this email from a commenter here:
Hi Amy,I don't know if you've come across this already, but it makes me really sad. A famous collection of creepy stories for young adults, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
, has been reprinted for its 30th anniversary in a "sanitized" version, without the beautiful, surreal artwork that was an integral part of it.
I first read these when I was 11 or so. I remember the illustrations more vividly than the stories themselves. Yes, the book thoroughly scared me, and my imagination ran wild as I lay in bed at night after reading it. And how insulting and patronizing for adults to think that kids should no longer be allowed that experience. But I guess that's right in line with the stupid thinking behind removing playground swings -- bubble-wrap their bodies, numb their imaginations.
There's a petition, but I doubt it will do any good.
--Commenter YTS
Arts Journalism
Heh heh.
I just love when people post stuff like this. I have a Bokov, a gift from the artist -- a crazy painting of the Statue of Liberty -- that he gave me when my friends and I were giving free advice on the street corner in Soho. Bokov's this adorable guy who used to make art and stick it on phone poles and other places around New York -- and probably still does, though his art is now sold in galleries.
Uncle Rover's Cabin
The tofu-sucking crazies at PETA are confusing animals with people again. Julie Watson writes for the AP that a federal judge heard arguments Monday on whether animals should have the same constitutional protections against slavery as people:
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller called the hearing in San Diego after Sea World asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that names five orcas as plaintiffs in the case.PETA claims the captured killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at its parks in San Diego and Orlando, Fla.
"This case is on the next frontier of civil rights," said PETA's attorney Jeffrey Kerr, representing the five orcas.
Sea World's attorney Theodore Shaw called the lawsuit a waste of the court's time and resources. He said it defies common sense and goes against 125 years of case law applied to the Constitution's 13th amendment that prohibits slavery between humans.
"With all due respect, the court does not have the authority to even consider this question," Shaw said, adding later: "Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the 'We the people' ... when the Constitution was adopted."
It's Easier To Go After The Cold Sufferers Than The Meth Makers
The Atlantic's Megan McArdle goes after the asshattery in behind notions that it's okay that you'll suffer from cold symptoms -- as long as somebody's prevented from getting Sudafed to make meth. One suggestion is that states do as South Carolina has and make Sudafed prescription only:
Let's return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That's going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor's visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it's about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that's why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you've got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn't include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor's visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.Of course, those wouldn't be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn't be able to take the time for a doctor's visit. So they'd just be more miserable while their colds last. What's the cost of that--in suffering, in lost productivity?
Perhaps it would be simpler to just raise the price of a box of Sudafed to $100. Surely that would make meth labs unprofitable--and save us the annoyance of a doctor's visit.
They can still buy cold medicine, protest the advocates for a prescription-only policy. But as far as I can tell, there's really no evidence that the current substitute, phenylephrine, does a damn thing to ease congestion; apparently, a lot of it gets chewed up in your liver pretty quickly, and because the FDA only allows a low dose to start with, the resulting pills don't seem to be any better than placebo. For people who are prone to sinus or ear infections, that's no joke; one of the main ways you prevent them is by taking a decongestant as soon as you feel the first ticklings of a cold--not four days later, when your GP can finally see you.
Obviously, the suffering of someone caught in a meth lab is much, much higher--but how many of these people are there? Should we deny millions of people a useful treatment in order to prevent a handful of fatalities? Before you answer that, ask yourself whether you'd be willing to stop driving on the grounds that statistically, you're reducing the chances that someone will die. Or to endorse a policy that involved punching 15,000 people in the head, hard, in order to prevent one death.
Perhaps it's unfair of me, but it seems to me that there's a lot of tunnel vision in these proposals. People who present prescription programs as simple and obvious seem fixated on the horror of the stories they are confronted with . . . to the exclusion of the very large costs that they're proposing to impose on the rest of us. All they're interested in is "how do we put an end to meth labs?", a question to which one can reasonably argue the answer is "better control of pseudoephedrine"**.
But no policy question is ever as simple as "How can we stop X", unless "X" is an imminent Nazi invasion. We also have to ask "at what cost?" and "by what right?"
The "prevention" here is via TSA-style logic: Search every granny and 6-year-old little girl who comes through the airport and you might one day find a terrorist. The intelligent airport security proposition: Keep your latex-gloved paws out of granny's diaper and hire highly trained, actually intelligent intelligence officers to use targeted intelligence on people who show probable cause to be considered suspects.
Same goes for meth. Follow the meth back to the hole...don't make everybody with a stuffy nose take a day out to go to the doctor -- or go to work sick and leak nose germs all over the damn place. Ick.
Semen On A Spoon: How To Fire A Teacher
It's proven near-impossible to get rid of crappy teachers -- with a few recent exceptions (like the sicko recently arrested in in Torrance). Ian Lovett writes for The New York Times:
LOS ANGELES -- The entire faculty at Miramonte Elementary School, where two teachers were arrested last week on accusations of child sexual abuse, will be replaced by new teachers this week, the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent announced Monday night.Speaking to hundreds of parents at a meeting called to address the crisis at Miramonte, Superintendent John Deasy announced the school would be closed Tuesday and Wednesday, and when students returned on Thursday, an entirely new corps of teachers and staff members would have been hired to greet them. All current teachers, administrators and staff members will be moved to a school still under construction for the rest of the school year, where they will be interviewed by school officials and, if necessary, the police.
In addition, a psychiatric social worker will be assigned to every class once the school reopens. Every student in the school district who attended Miramonte will also be interviewed.
Mr. Deasy said he felt a personal responsibility to do two things: help children who were victims, and restore parents' trust in the school district.
Sorry, but you aren't going to do that by firing only the sexual sickos in your employ.
Talking Sleaze Reform While Exploiting The System
Voters need to understand that this is politics as usual. Those smiling faces you vote for are mostly sleazebags sucking on the public teat for personal gain while proclaiming to be there in public service for you.
Bill Hammond writes at the New York Daily News of Cuomo's brand of sleazo -- "taking advantage of loopholes and end runs that he has repeatedly argued for shutting down":
As reported Monday by the Daily News' Kenneth Lovett, Cuomo took freebie flights worth $145,000 in the past six months, jetting to fund-raising events in Puerto Rico, California, Buffalo, Syracuse, New York City and the Hudson Valley.In at least one case, the governor's campaign directly requested the use of a plane owned by billionaire John Catsimatidis.
Catsimatidis -- a big-time donor to politicians of both parties -- owns the Gristedes grocery store chain and a fuel refinery, companies that spent $76,000 lobbying in Albany last year.
They lobbied about collection of cigarette taxes by Cuomo's Department of Taxation and Finance, and about sulfur emission standards set by Cuomo's Department of Environmental Conservation.
So when Cuomo's fund-raising committee phoned him, Catsimatidis had every reason to take the call.
The campaign specifically requested the use of his plane, Catsimatidis told The News. "What do you say? You say yes."
Cuomo ended up using Catsimatidis' jet for two trips to Syracuse worth $20,228.
It's hard to square that transaction with Cuomo's promises of campaign finance reform.
There Are A Lot Of Ways To Say I Love You
For example, "SHOP NOW"!
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Robin Stern, Ph.D., Giving The Boot To The Manipulators In Your Life
Ever had somebody keep telling you down is up and 2+2 is 5 until you break down and agree with them?
At first, you're all, "Naw, that's not how it is," but they keep at you and keep at you until you start to say "Maybe they're right..." against all your better judgment.
If you've had this experience -- and I think we've all had this experience -- you've experienced gaslighting, an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation. If you keep putting up with it, you can lose who you are and start living a life where you're walking on eggshells all the time, trying to avoid setting off the person who's been manipulating you.
Tonight on Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, therapist Dr. Robin Stern, Ph.D., on gaslighting -- what it is and how to stop it:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Listen live, call in (347-326-9761 when show is live), download the podcast afterward.
Stern is the author of a book, The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life
What your boyfriend's doing to you is "gaslighting," which, unfortunately, only sounds like lighting farts on fire. It's actually insidious emotional abuse that gets its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, about an heiress whose husband makes small changes around their home (like making their gas-powered lights flicker), then denies anything's different, making her believe her sanity's gone off its hinges.In a relationship, writes Dr. Robin Stern in The Gaslight Effect, you're being gaslighted when somebody relentlessly pressures you to believe the unbelievable and do what you know you shouldn't. Stern explains that the gaslighter "needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world," while the gaslightee allows him to bully away her sense of reality and self because she fears losing his love and approval. Of course, in your case, it could have something to do with not wanting to think you've wasted five years with "a selfish, manipulative ass." (Fart-play suddenly sounding inviting?)
Welfare Chic: Not Just For Poor People Anymore
You on the dole? If not, well, how wildly unchic of you. Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in the WashEx about our moocher culture, laid out in Charles Sykes' new book, A Nation of Moochers: America's Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing
"Fifty thousand for what you didn't plant, for what didn't grow. That's modern farming -- reap what you don't sow."That's a line from a song about farm subsidies, "Farming The Government," by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.
But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out...
The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can't run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that's essentially what we're doing.
In today's America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who'll keep them coming. The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can't muster enough votes to put this to a stop.
Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul's vote.
But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, "In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.
...And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we've reached that point now:
* People who pay their mortgages - often at considerable personal sacrifice - see others who didn't bother get special assistance.
* People who took jobs they didn't particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn't getting extended unemployment benefits.
* People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.
And an important point of Sykes' book is that moocher-culture isn't limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn't between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.
That it isn't a rich/poor divide is best illustrated by checking out which people get farm subsidies -- which Manhattan-dwelling swells, that is. There's even a Rockefeller on the list! Lookie, lookie at this link.
The Crime Against Islam Of Developing Successful Software -- Punishable By Death
The barbarian state of Iran has sentenced to death a 35-year-old web designer on the grounds that he is guilty of desecrating and insulting Islam with software he created. From the Globe and Mail, an editorial calling for Canada to keep up pressure on Iran to free the man, Canadian resident Saeed Malekpour, who was in Iran to visit his terminally-ill father:
His crime was to develop software to upload photographs - a web program that was then used by pornographic websites.Mr. Malekpour has said that he had no knowledge his software was used for this purpose. Even if he did, his actions in no way justify the death penalty.
The Canadian government is right to call on Iran to release Mr. Malekpour - as well as the many other people imprisoned without due process. ... Thousands of people are believed to be on death row in Iran, including Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, sentenced to death by stoning, or hanging, for committing adultery.
Although Canada's influence in Iran is limited, lobbying for Mr. Malekpour's release could be effective in the long run. Last year, Iran released two American hikers who were accused of espionage, in part to appear magnanimous in advance of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at the United Nations General Assembly. Iran is not immune from the pressure of international condemnation.
An Earmark By Any Other Name
Our elected scumbags can talk "no more earmarks" and still shovel up the taxpayer cash to take home to their districts. Ron Nixon writes in The New York Times:
"We thought we'd gotten rid of earmarks," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group in Washington that is part of the coalition. "But it looks like Congress has just moved on to other methods that are less transparent than the old way, like creating these slush funds."The latest example, the groups say, is the recently passed budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. Budget documents show that Congress included 26 different funds -- totaling $507 million -- for the corps to spend on various construction, maintenance and other projects that were not included in President Obama's budget or the final spending bill.
The funds were financed by reducing money for projects included in the president's budget request and adding $375 million to the corps budget, documents show.
Congress also gave the corps criteria to use in selecting projects and instructed it to report within 45 days about how it intends to spend the money from the funds, according to the budget documents. On Monday, the corps will release the list of projects it plans to finance.
I wish somebody would give me money on those terms, but it generally only works that way if there's taxpayer money to toss around to some government or government-approved entity.
More:
Critics say the special funds in the corps budget are the latest example of members of Congress trying to circumvent the earmark ban to funnel money to their districts, in the form of corps engineering projects. In the absence of earmarks, lawmakers have tried pressing agencies for money or in some cases threatened to tie up Congress if projects are not financed.For example, in 2010, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, threatened to block Obama administration appointments unless money was provided for a harbor dredging project in his home state.
Graham really is an oily character.
More Flash (Drives And Such) For Less Cash
Today's Deals in Electronics
Thanks so much to everyone who supports my writing and the time I put into this site and my radio show through my Amazon links and Amy's Mall. I appreciate every purchase, large or small. Means a lot, in fact.
How The West Wasn't Won
Just loved this. Via the man I voted for for Los Angeles mayor, Walter Moore:
(Can't argue with craggily handsome men engaging in a little Sunday pussy-chasing, now can you?)
Tonight's Advice Goddess Radio Moved To Monday Night (I Hear There's Something Called "The Super Bowl"...)
I laughed when a friend asked me if I could get him tickets to the Super Bowl. I guess, because I live somewhere near Hollywood, he assumes I'm plugged in. Of course, on a Hollywood plugged-in scale, I think I fall somewhere just below the new substitute night janitor at William Morris.
Also, I told him that I had no idea when the Super Bowl was, or who was playing. I've heard mention of it recently (still no idea who's playing), but it occurred to me that I might have a smaller-than-usual group of listeners tonight for Advice Goddess Radio...
So...you can hear my show with the terrific Dr. Robin Stern, on gaslighting, at a special time -- Monday night, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern.
Stern is the author of a book that's helped many, many of my readers stop being victimized by partners, bosses, and others in their lives through repeated emotional abuse that makes them doubt themselves and what they know to be real, true, and right. I write about it here:
What your boyfriend's doing to you is "gaslighting," which, unfortunately, only sounds like lighting farts on fire. It's actually insidious emotional abuse that gets its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, about an heiress whose husband makes small changes around their home (like making their gas-powered lights flicker), then denies anything's different, making her believe her sanity's gone off its hinges.In a relationship, writes Dr. Robin Stern in The Gaslight Effect, you're being gaslighted when somebody relentlessly pressures you to believe the unbelievable and do what you know you shouldn't. Stern explains that the gaslighter "needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world," while the gaslightee allows him to bully away her sense of reality and self because she fears losing his love and approval. Of course, in your case, it could have something to do with not wanting to think you've wasted five years with "a selfish, manipulative ass." (Fart-play suddenly sounding inviting?)
Dr. Robin Stern show link here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
What Is This, The Wild Fucking West?
Now we're basically deputizing trinket dealers to root out terrorists?
Check out the latest TSA idiocy -- that the TSA has wasted even more taxpayer dollars training vendors at the Super Bowl to spot terror threats. Story from Fox/NYPost:
From parking-lot attendants to hot-dog sellers, the government has put some 8,000 employees and volunteers at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis through their First Observer training program.Patti Hammerle, an event volunteer who will be signing up people for chances to win free prizes, said, "They told us to look for suspicious people and things that didn't look right. It's been fabulous. Knowing everybody was watching out made me feel safer."
Lorraine Wright, a worker at the NFL Experience venue, said she took the government's anti-terror training online.
"They had us looking for suspicious activity," she said. "You know, people who looked out of place or just wandering around asking a lot of questions."
Like, "Excuse me, do you know the best place to put a fertilizer bomb?"
I spent part of Friday night talking to a friend who's highly trained in behavioral science (as in, he's taught it and worked with a major primatologist as a young man) and who runs a division of a major police force. This guy I'd trust to figure out who's a terrorist.
The 15 or so cops I've had dealings with in my precinct -- many of whom I've encountered due to a neighborhood issue I'm spearheading -- well, we can't even count on them to know the local laws. (And this includes the captain.) Oh, and best of all, the officer who couldn't have found my stolen pink Rambler if it drove up his ass and honked was rewarded with a promotion to sergeant and is sometimes even the Watch Commander (the officer in charge at the precinct).
And...seriously?...seriously?...we're asking the lady selling foam fingers at the big game find al-Zawahiri?
via @mpetrie98
A Mom And Dad Named "Sue"
Lenore Skenazy at FreeRangeKids blogs about a kid who came home with a four-page playdate liability waver for her parents to sign. The kid's mom writes:
Wow! I guess that dangers lurk over there - in the form of a trampoline - and if she is going to set foot on their property she needs a release first. I can't help but feel paranoid - should I then be worried about having their kids over at our house, because the first thing in their mind is legal action? Has anyone heard of such a thing? Is this the new normal for making friends? - Stunned Mom
The American Child-Centric World And The French Way Of Doing It
Pamela Druckerman writes in the WSJ of the differences between American and French parenting (echoing a good deal of what I wrote about parenting, French and American, in I See Rude People):
The French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are--by design--toddling around by themselves....The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)
She talks to a woman, Delphine, with a young child, Pauline:
When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, "Just wait two minutes, my little one. I'm in the middle of talking." It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane.
PLANNED Parenthood: The Big Clue Is In The Name
William Saletan writes on Slate:
If you want to put Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business, what should you do with your money?The answer is: Give it to Planned Parenthood.
Look at the latest annual report from Planned Parenthood Federation of America, issued two months ago. The table on page 5 shows that over the course of a year, PPFA provided 3,685,437 contraceptive services and 329,445 abortions. That's a ratio of 11 to 1.
Internationally, the ratio is even higher. Look at the latest annual report from the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The table on page 13 shows that over the course of a year, IPPF provided 33,854,786 contraceptive services and 1,411,494 abortions. That's a ratio of 24 to 1. Did I mention condoms? IPPF distributed 152,397,194 condoms. That's 108 condoms per abortion.
What happens when you provide condoms and contraceptive services? Women who don't want to get pregnant don't get pregnant. Which means fewer women are in the market for abortions. The abortion business dries up.
That's what was happening from 1995 to 2003, according to an analysis published two weeks ago in the Lancet. The article, Induced abortion: incidence and trends worldwide form 1995 to 2008, finds that the global number of abortions fell from 45.6 million in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003. But by 2008, the number had risen to 43.8 million. On a per capita basis, from 1995 to 2003, the number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age fell from 35 to 29. From 2003 to 2008, the rate hardly moved, from 29 to 28.
Why did the decline stop? Look at the trend data published last year by the United Nations in World Contraceptive Use 2010. From 1995 to 2000, contraceptive prevalence increased worldwide at an annual rate of nearly half a percentage point. From 2000 to 2005, the rate of increase dropped in half. From 2005 to 2009, it stopped altogether. The abortion rate stopped falling when the contraception rate stopped rising.
Nancy Rommelmann: "Dazed and Confused" (And In NYT Magazine)
Very happy to see that my dear and very talented friend Nancy Rommelmann has a piece piece in New York Times Magazine. An excerpt:
It's 1976. I am 15 and have been "asked to leave" the progressive private school in Brooklyn Heights I've attended since age 4. This is not a surprise. I have been playing hooky all year, hanging out with boys from other neighborhoods, smoking pot every day. My parents wheedle me into another private school. Walking to this new school on the third morning, I stop in a pocket park off Court Street, knowing that if I miss the mandatory morning meeting, I'll be kicked out. I miss it.The city is a fantastic playground in 1976, '77. My best friend and I crash gay discos. We wear our hair up because it is said that Son of Sam targets girls with long brown hair. We wear short shorts and halters and smoke Newports and eat Hostess cherry pies when we get the munchies. There is no need for school, no need to go home. I want to stay out forever.
Until I don't. Until the light trouble we've been getting into becomes heavier. My friend and I are arrested for shoplifting. The drugs get stronger. My mother's jewelry goes missing. The boys we hang out with start to carry chains. One night, while sitting on a stoop in the Heights, someone's little brother runs up and says, "Dave and them are on the Promenade, beating up gays!" I tell the kid he must have it wrong, they're probably just rumbling. Ten minutes later, I hear Dave and the kids walking toward us. There is a light if unmistakably victorious ring to their voices. I ask if they've been fighting. They shuffle their feet and stare to the side. Have they been beating up gay men? I ask. They stop fidgeting and look at me. No, they say, they haven't. The denial seems to get them back on track. They rev up and start moving, loose and righteous, if not about what they've been doing, then about coming together against some chick acting all Mother Conscience.
I get myself into Satellite Academy, an alternative school with classrooms over a discount drugstore near Wall Street. It's for kids who have no options, kids with criminal records, kids with babies. We are assigned Harold Robbins's "Lonely Lady" for English class. We are given a history test of stuff I learned in fifth grade.
Every day at lunch, 20 of us squeeze into the entryway of a service elevator off Chambers Street to get high. It's 1977, and the media are crowing about how dangerous angel dust is. I watch Dawn the dust-head go quiet as she slides down the wall, but most of the kids never shut up. The loudest is Chico, a wiry Puerto Rican kid who wears a bandoleer, and whose overblown tales of gangbanging no one believes.
The history teacher asks me to stay after class. Great, I think; I even failed here. But I haven't. I scored 100. The teacher asks if I've considered whether I'm at the wrong school...
This essay was adapted from Nancy's recently published ebook, which I've bought, and which you can, too, for only 99 cents at Amazon: The Queens of Montague Street
Amazingly, I Didn't Need To Have Nancy Pelosi Come To My House And Tear A Doughnut Out Of My Hand
My friend, fellow alt weekly columnist and The Atlantic blogger Ari LeVaux emailed me about my post on Dr. Robert Lustig's petulant little tantrum calling for the government to start controlling sugar consumption.
Now, I'm right there with Lustig on how awful sugar is -- and I've posted his video and sent the link to it around to many. But, I'm very much not there with him on his thinking that government should tax or ban sugar. Ari writes:
Hi Amy,I saw your blog post about Lustig's sugar proposal. While I agree with your sentiment, I'm curious where you draw the line. Do you think there should be an age limit for legal sale of alcohol and tobacco? If so, what would you think of some kind of age limit for sugar?
The reason I'm asking is because while I agree that informed people should make their own decisions on what to eat, children don't have that choice, and they can be trapped into longtime habits and medical conditions based on what they're fed.
My fix would start with ending the US government's continued subsidies to sugar farmers.
Ari
My response:
Children's parents should be responsible for parenting them -- we should not be "parented" by the state because some choose to have children. We were not allowed to eat sugar growing up. Since I did not work a side-job as a bookie and did not have either a driver's license or a car, I had a hard time going up to the supermarket and loading up on Little Debbie's.My fix would start with ending all government subsidies. If you can't stay in business, you should do something else!
Also, government meddling in what people eat has largely caused the obesity crisis (per Gary Taubes...for example, how an aide to George McGovern with zero science experience created the Food Pyramid). Of course, the current "Food Plate" is not based in dietary science, either, but "science."
Slow To Slow-Burn, Dumb Me
Excerpt from my email to a friend who's low-carbing (with faaabulous results) and who's met Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, who have helped numerous commenters here drop pounds by the truckload (and while eating bacon) with The Protein Power Lifeplan
You should get the Eades' book they wrote with fitness trainer Fred Hahn, The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution. It's amazing. Basically, you can cause your metabolism to pick up by doing minimal exercise of the kind they recommend: a half-hour or less a week where you work your muscles to the max. Gregg just got one for both of us at my request. I always love these efficiencies (do less, get more out of it), but this also seems to maximize cardio health, bone health, fitness. They back it all up, too, of course.
I talked with the Eades about this briefly on my radio show with them, which is making people slimmer and healthier by the listen!
Get The Podcast: Dr. Gad Saad On Advice Goddess Radio (Next: Dr. Robin Stern)
Evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad, Professor of Marketing at Concordia University and author of The Consuming Instinct
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/01/31/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
This coming MONDAY, February 6, at 7-8pm Pacific (instead of Sunday, because I hear there's this Superbowl thingie on Sunday), another very special guest, Dr. Robin Stern, author of a book that's helped many, many of my readers stop being victimized by partners, bosses, and others in their lives. I write about it here:
What your boyfriend's doing to you is "gaslighting," which, unfortunately, only sounds like lighting farts on fire. It's actually insidious emotional abuse that gets its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, about an heiress whose husband makes small changes around their home (like making their gas-powered lights flicker), then denies anything's different, making her believe her sanity's gone off its hinges. In a relationship, writes Dr. Robin Stern in The Gaslight Effect, you're being gaslighted when somebody relentlessly pressures you to believe the unbelievable and do what you know you shouldn't. Stern explains that the gaslighter "needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world," while the gaslightee allows him to bully away her sense of reality and self because she fears losing his love and approval. Of course, in your case, it could have something to do with not wanting to think you've wasted five years with "a selfish, manipulative ass." (Fart-play suddenly sounding inviting?)
Dr. Robin Stern show link here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/07/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Dumb And Dumber: California's Voters Ride The Train
I was one of the losing group -- the people who voted against the train from San Diego to San Francisco that we couldn't afford at the projected cost of $33 billion...which I knew would go up. The price tag always goes up.
And this is a totally unnecessary train (and I say that as a train lover). It's $59 from LA to SF on Southwest if you book in advance. (And the train couldn't really run high speed -- so it was really a "high speed" train.) Steve Lopez writes (opinionlessly) in the LA Times:
The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst's Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority's own peer review group said the project represents "an immense financial risk" to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority's top executive resigned.To top it off, a poll last fall said nearly two-thirds of registered voters would run this train off the rails if they had a chance to vote again.
I wish voters would be smart before the money is spent but it seems, no matter how often stuff like this happens, you can always count on them to be gullible.
Tim Cavanaugh in reason on Lopez here:
Lopez has the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown's rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project.
At the link within, Cavanaugh writes about the moronism from the LATimes' pro-train opinionoids:
In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled "Keeping faith with California's bullet train," the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston's notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves.
A Different Frame: Children's Rights In A Divorce
Smart thinking out of the UK, where they're looking to give children equal access to parents after a divorce. Christopher Hope writes in the Telegraph/UK about legislation in the works:
Campaigners have long complained that without a legal right to see their children, fathers can be excluded, particularly when a split has been acrimonious. By creating the new right for children, ministers hope that judges ruling on custody disputes will ensure more equal access for both parents.
The Piper Seeks Payment
A former intern is suing Hearst, hoping to start a class-action suit. Steven Greenhouse writes at The New York Times:
A former unpaid intern for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, of violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time.In her lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the intern, Xuedan Wang, and her law firm are asking to make the case a class action on behalf of what they say are hundreds of unpaid interns at Heart Magazines, which also publishes Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping.
Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience.
..."Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work," said Adam Klein, one of the lawyers for Ms. Wang. "The practice of classifying employees as 'interns' to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws."
...The lawsuit pointed to guidelines from the United States Labor Department, which state that unpaid internships are only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not displace regular employees and the employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern's work. The guidelines also state another criterion for internships to be unpaid: "the internship experience is for the benefit of the intern."
Ms. Wang's lawyers said that by treating her and others as interns rather than regular employees, they were denied not only wages, but also Social Security contributions and the right to receive unemployment insurance and workers' compensation.
Who's Policing The Pretend Police?
The AP reports that yet another TSA worker (they aren't "officers" -- just unskilled workers in police-like costumes) was nabbed for stealing money from a passenger -- $5K from the passenger's jacket:
Alexandra Schmid took the cash from a Bangladeshi passenger's jacket as it went along an X-ray conveyor belt Wednesday night in Terminal 4, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's police force.Surveillance video showed Schmid taking the money from a jacket pocket, wrapping the cash in a plastic glove and taking it to a bathroom, Della Fave said.
The money hasn't been recovered, he said. Police are investigating whether Schmid gave it to another person in the bathroom.
The 31-year-old Schmid was arrested on a charge of grand larceny and suspended pending an investigation. Her attorney's name wasn't immediately known.
Schmid, who lived in Brooklyn, had worked for the TSA for 4½ years, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.
"We do hold our officers to very high standards, and we have a zero tolerance policy for theft in the workplace," Farbstein said.
Farbstein continued, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." And everyone just nodded their heads like bobblehead dolls.
via @mpetrie98
Yawn, Now It's A War On Sugar In Food
Erin Allday writes at the SF Chronicle that Robert Lustig (whose video on the harm done by eating sugar I have blogged before) now wants to bully people into not eating it:
Like alcohol and tobacco, sugar is a toxic, addictive substance that should be highly regulated with taxes, laws on where and to whom it can be advertised, and even age-restricted sales, says a team of UCSF scientists.In a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, they argue that increased global consumption of sugar is primarily responsible for a whole range of chronic diseases that are reaching epidemic levels around the world.
Sugar is so heavily entrenched in the food culture in the United States and other countries that getting people to kick the habit will require much more than simple education and awareness campaigns, the UCSF scientists said.
It's going to require public policy that gently guides people toward healthier choices and uses brute force to remove sugar from so many of the processed foods we eat every day, said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF.
"The only method for dealing with this is a public health intervention," Lustig said in an interview. "Everyone talks about personal responsibility, and that won't work here, as it won't for any addictive substance. These are things that have to be done at a governmental level, and government has to get off its ass."
How was it that I was able to cut out sugar without anyone taxing it through the roof or banning it? Hmmm...either I have magical powers...or...I read the science on sugar and carbohydrates like flour, starchy vegetables, and juice and decided I'd rather be healthy than eat them, and applied the requisite self-discipline.
I eat a scoop of chocolate gelato about once a week, but otherwise have zero sugar or flour, and subsist...yes, weep for me...on bacon, steak, heavily buttered green beans, omelets, cheese, dry italian sausage, and salad with a lot of dressing on it.
What I eat, contrary to what the AMA and the government have contended is healthy for years, is an extremely healthy diet...one that keeps me slim, keeps my skin young, and leads me to need far less sleep and exercise that I ever could have imagined. Listen to my radio show with Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades for more on this.
via Overlawyered
Cheap(er) Kicks
Shoe sale at Amazon (on pricey ones): 20% Off $70 Orders
Blacking Out Valentine's Day
Anybody boycotting Valentine's Day? I've noticed a backlash against celebrating it in recent years, and especially against the commercialization of the holiday. Some researchers even did a study about that, and surprise, surprise, found that people are sick of the commercialism and feeling obligated to buy dumb crap.
How will you be celebrating...or...for you, has Valentine's Day jumped the big chocolate truffle shark?
The Boys And Girls In The Plastic Bubble (Welcome To Childhood, 2012)
Most annoyingly, the dumb LA Times couldn't be bothered to send a photographer on the Gale Holland story about an apparently decades-old treehouse a state inspector made a preschool take down, declaring it and the climbing structure to it too high. An excerpt from the piece:
This lame-brain act of over-regulation is part of a dumbing down of playgrounds that has been going on for decades. Twenty years ago, when my son turned 3, they took a soaring swing away from the neighborhood recreation center. I drove from suburb to suburb, seeking out equipment with more kick than the mounds of safety-first molded plastic he'd outgrown in our L.A. neighborhood.A couple of years later, my daughter's preschool was ordered to rip out its monkey bars. I took them home and put them outside my kitchen window. They became her gym, secret clubhouse and pretend castle. I watched her and her friends fill with pride as they progressed from swinging hand-over-hand across the bars to hanging by their knees and then finally walking across the top.
Risky? Perhaps, but I saw a greater risk in having children bored to tears or flat-lining on video games or TV. And the research bears me out.
Even if the new playgrounds are safer -- and that is disputed -- children need to master progressive physical challenges to develop the confidence and judgment necessary for everyday life, playground experts say. Otherwise they grow up anxious and fearful. Playground thrills also make children smarter.
"If you create sanitized play areas, children are bored and their brains go to sleep," said lawyer Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense
, who has written about ridiculous playground regulations.
Kids generally resist flinging themselves over the side of a two-story tower. They take calculated risks. I recall the first time I ventured onto the park merry-go-round, clinging to the center while the big kids spun us around. As I got older, I slowly moved to the edge, finally dropping my head back over the side to watch the sky spin crazily above my head.
It was a rush. But now merry-go-rounds, seesaws and tall slides are disappearing. Wright-Chrystal told Stocking that instead of replacing the climbing structure she could introduce other activities, like balls or hopscotch.
Hopscotch! Whoopee!!
We're soon going to be a nation of weenies. For this coddled generation growing up, will they change Marines slogan to "The Few, the Frightened..."?
What are your predictions for the kids of the padded playground...the kids who aren't allowed to bring a paring knife to cut an apple to school? Zero challenge, zero tolerance, zero need to think for this generation (just say no! Well, that is, except to your Tiger Mom).
Via Overlawyered
Former Slave's Letter To His Former Master
Great stuff: "To My Old Master" (the best part is his demand for $11K of back wages).
A Day In The Life Of Dumb Valentine's Day Press Releases, #2
Just when I thought it couldn't get any lower, PR bottomfeeding really plumbs the bottom at Valentine's Day.
Just in, this emailed press release: "For Valentine's Day - Catch Him or Her In The Act!" (promoing surveillance services...awww, how sweet!)
Avoid this sort of issue entirely with this terrific book about living while awake by Nathaniel Branden, The Art of Living Consciously: The Power of Awareness to Transform Everyday Life
Sorry, Wrong Number!
Oops, except nobody dialed wrong -- they broke through the front door of the wrong apartment...after a two-year investigation. Via @RadleyBalko, Jim Armstrong reports at WBZ that the FBI chainsawed and kicked in the front door of the apartment where Judy Sanchez lives with her 3-year-old daughter:
Sanchez says they left her on the floor for 35 minutes, with her daughter screaming for her mommy in the other room."I was told not to move, so I didn't move," she tells WBZ, out of fear that she'd be shot.
Eventually the feds figured out they were in the wrong spot and they arrested the suspect they were after in the next door apartment.
Sanchez can't believe that a two-year long federal investigation ended at the wrong door.
"The looks on their faces when they knew they got the wrong door was priceless," she recalls. "They looked at each other dumbfounded."
Sanchez says another agent came by later that day to offer an apology, but it was one that Sanchez felt wasn't quite genuine.
"For me it felt routine apology, it felt like just a regular, 'I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Here's the phone number for your landlord to get reimbursed for the door, have a good day.'
And that's how I felt, like it was a smack in the face."
She's just lucky that she wasn't standing there with a phone in her hand they could mistake for a gun.
The drug war is too often a war on innocent citizens -- as fought by the Three Stooges in cop uniforms.
Tech Yourself Some Savings!
Visit Amazon's Consumer Electronics Deals Page
A Day In The Life Of Dumb Valentine's Day Press Releases
I'm besieged with them at this time of year. Got some eco-guide lady's "Sweetest Valentine's Day Proposal Ideas for Men Planning to Propose on the Most Romantic Day of the Year":
•No one likes to say they got engaged next to the laundry machine. Pick a location or restaurant that she loves or take her to your favorite green spot. Whether a mountaintop or an organic restaurant, your soon-to-be fiancée will appreciate a carefully selected location.
"No one likes to say they got engaged next to the laundry machine"? Sounds romantic to me. More than fancyschmancy trite-orama.
Best is that she suggests people bathe before proposing:
•Look the part. Shower with your organic bath products, wear an outfit you know she loves, and put on a non-toxic deodorant or cologne (check the Environmental Working Groups Skindeep database to see how yours ranks today).
Oh, hurl. And two with the bad advice of making the proposal a crowd scene:
•Does she love an audience? Purchase tickets to a concert or theatrical presentation and propose in front of a crowd.•Make it a party. Surround her with the people she loves the most for an engagement with an audience. Keep some chilled organic sparkling wine on hand to pass around after you pop the question.
You'll need some grain alcohol if she says no before a studio audience. Not everyone loves the public proposal, as I wrote in "Aisle Be Embarrassing You":
There are public people and then there are private people, like my boyfriend, who'd react to a surprise birthday party with the enthusiasm he'd have for a surprise prostate exam.
Boyfriend On My Outdoorsiness
"To you, nature is a weed that grows in a parking lot." (I get itchy being more than 100 feet from concrete at any time.)
Obama: No More Bank Bailouts! (Well, Except For All Of These)
Hans Bader blogs at Open Market:
In his State of the Union address, President Obama, a consistent supporter of bailouts and crony capitalism, hypocritically railed against them, proclaiming, "no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs." Just a couple days later, though, his administration is rolling out a massive multibillion dollar bailout that will enrich speculators. Bloomberg News reports that the Obama Administration is vastly expanding aid for certain "delinquent homeowners," paying banks up to 63 cents for every dollar in principal they write off for such homeowners, a tripling of what banks can currently get under the HAMP bailout program. Speculators will benefit, too: they don't even have to live in a house to get its mortgage principal reduced: "Investors who rent out their properties would be eligible to refinance under the new rules." In the coming weeks, the Obama administration is expected to roll out an ill-conceived mass mortgage refinancing program that could shrink your 401(k) and increase the cost of mortgage financing for future borrowers.
No Doritos On The Public's Dime
Richard Fausset writes in the LA Times:
Reporting from Atlanta-- Ronda Storms is a Republican state senator from Florida. She is also a mom who buys the groceries for her family of four.A few months ago, Storms, 46, started noticing that some fellow shoppers were using federal food stamp money to purchase a lot of unhealthful junk. And it galled her -- at a time when Florida was cutting Medicaid reimbursement rates, public school funding and jobs -- that people were indulging in sugary, fatty, highly-processed treats on the public dime.
"If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."
That sense of unfairness, plus a concern about the health of needy children, is the motivation behind a bill Storms sponsored that would prohibit people from purchasing "nonstaple, unhealthy foods" with funds provided by the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
... In the last year, legislation seeking to restrict SNAP purchases was introduced in Illinois, Oregon, California, Vermont and Texas, though none was successful, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
That is in part because theU.S. Department of Agriculturehas been unwilling to issue further restrictions on food stamp purchases, beyond traditionally ineligible items such as alcohol, tobacco and "hot foods."
Last year, the USDA rejected New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's "demonstration project" that would have prohibited soda purchases with food stamps. In 2004, it rejected a Minnesota plan to prohibit the purchase of soft drinks and candy.
In Florida, Storms' bill is being resisted by anti-hunger advocates, as well as Democrats like Sen. Audrey Gibson of Jacksonville, one of two lawmakers who voted against it Wednesday.
"It's like we're attacking poor people because they're poor, and because they're asking for some assistance," Gibson said.
No, we're telling them to buy their own damn potato chips.
When you're paying for your own food, you have choices. When we're paying for it, buy some green beans and ground hamburger.
Anyone Can Be President (They All Suck)
Yeah, Romney won Florida, but NBC's Mark Murray writes that " 38% say they're not satisfied with the GOP field and want someone else to run."
