Bully Cop Thinks First Amendment Doesn't Apply To Him
Disgusting abuse of his power. Think about how often such abuses go on that are not captured on tape. These guys were lucky -- they know their rights and they weren't tased or shot by this cop:
Here's the story at The Raw Story, reported by Stephen C. Webster:
In the video, the unnamed officer approaches several men who are filming outside of a Walmart, then draws his Taser after the men say that they do not have to show him their identifications. When one man reaches toward the officer, he reacts angerly and accuses him of resisting, then claims later in the video he'd already been "hurt," although it's not clear by whom.The man who appeared to gesture toward the officer apparently did so out of fear that his friend might be tazed, and did quite make contact when the officer flung his arms up and knocked his hand aside.
"Don't taze me, sir," one man says. "Don't taze me, sir."
The men appear to remain calm during the confrontation, even after the officer appears to slap the camera down. "I'm sorry I scared you, but we're not hostile people," one of them explains. "We know our rights. We know the Constitution, sir. We know the Constitution. Do I sound illiterate?"
Knowledge absolutely is power -- especially when it comes to the frequent occasions these days where people with power (police or government) trample our civil liberties. You can get a copy of the Constitution free as a phone ap. Get it and the next time you're standing in line somewhere, read. It's a beautiful document that makes it possible for us to live in the freest country in the world. But, those freedoms need to be protected and defended by all of us.
via @RadleyBalko
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Friday night and I'm a little sleepy, so you post the links. One link per comment so your comment won't go into my spam folder. Will post blog items on Saturday.
Well, You Can Live In Your Car
From Business Insider, an AP story, Americans now put paying their car loans first -- a shift:
It used to be that Americans would pay their home loans first, then their credit card and car loans. After all, homes have been the most valuable possession for most people for decades, and nobody wanted to jeopardize that.Among Americans who were late on payments last year, 39 percent were delinquent on the mortgage while current on the car loan and credit cards, and 17 percent were late on credit cards while current on the other two.
Only 10 percent were late on the car loan while current on the other two. When TransUnion first did the study in 2006, staying current on the mortgage was the priority, says Ezra Becker, the company's vice president of research and consulting.
Public Shaming Of Children: For Or Against?
Spare the public humiliation...?
The Denver Post says a parent, Joseph Gonzalez, is out of line for his punishment of his 12-year-old (photo at the link):
As recounted in a story Wednesday by The Denver Post's Electra Draper, Gonzalez ordered his 12-year-old son, Jose, to spend part of his spring break standing at 22nd and Larimer in Denver with a sign proclaiming: "I am a thief. I took money from a family member."Apparently the boy filched $100 from a cousin's wallet. But in the 21st century, the resulting punishment -- assuming the criminal justice system is not involved -- is usually a private family affair, not a community spectacle.
And we think that's as it should be.A 12-year-old who lifts money from a wallet should of course apologize to the person who was wronged. Full restitution should be required. Certain privileges and freedoms should be canceled for a given period.
...But standing on a street corner with a sign? At age 12?
Your speculation on how this kid might turn out -- with the shaming? Without?
Your thoughts on the Denver Post claiming to be against public shaming of children -- while publishing a color photo of the shamed child with their piece?
via @ariarmstrong
Bruce Schneier Wipes The Airport Floor With Kip Hawley
Schneier and Hawley debated on airport security at The Economist. First, Schneier:
There are two categories of terrorists. The first, and most common, is the amateurs, like the guy who crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin. They are likely to be sloppy and stupid, and even pre-9/11 airplane security is going to catch them. The second is the well-briefed, well-financed and much rarer plotters. Do you really expect TSA screeners, who are busy confiscating water bottles and making people remove their belts and shoes, to stop the latter sort?Of course not. Because the TSA's policies are based on looking backwards at previously tried tactics, it fails against professionals. Consider this century's history of aircraft terrorism. We screened for guns and bombs, so the terrorists used box cutters. We confiscated box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screened footwear, so they tried to use liquids. We confiscated liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We rolled out full-body scanners, even though they would not have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We banned printer cartridges over 16 ounces--the level of magical thinking here is amazing--and surely in the future they will do something else.
This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it. Overly specific security measures work only if we happen to guess both the target and the plot correctly. If we get either wrong--if the terrorists attack something other than aircraft, or use a tactic we have not thought of yet--we have wasted our money and uselessly annoyed millions of travellers.
Airport security is the last line of defence, and it is not a very good one. If there were only a dozen potential terrorist tactics and a hundred possible targets, then protecting against particular plots might make us safer. But there are hundreds of possible tactics and millions of possible targets. Spending billions to force the terrorists to alter their plans in one particular way does not make us safer. It is far more cost-effective to concentrate our defences in ways that work regardless of tactic and target: intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
That being said, aircraft require a special level of security for several reasons: they are a favoured terrorist target; their failure characteristics mean more deaths than a comparable bomb on a bus or train; they tend to be national symbols; and they often fly to foreign countries where terrorists can operate with more impunity.
But all that can be handled with pre-9/11 security. Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. If we truly want to be safer, we should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and spend the savings on intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
Hawley:
"Never again" has become reality, but as new terror threats emerge, security officials have to adjust defensive measures to stay ahead of looming attacks.
Defensive measures are employees, hired off pizza boxes (who might otherwise been manning the fry vat at Mickey D's), groping countless balls and vaginas at the airport? See Schneier, above.
A steady stream of al-Qaeda threats came in during 2006, 2007 and 2008 using "clean" operatives and involving novel explosives, including powerful liquids that were not detectable by scanners. On an average day during this period, I, as TSA administrator, had threat discussions about half a dozen to a dozen specific, separate, serious plots with intelligence analysts to consider security operations that would counter threats targeting transport. A shoe-bomb incident in 2001, a liquid bomb in 2006 and an underwear bomb in 2009 do not give the public a sense of the deadly daily flow of al-Qaeda and other plotting. Whatever perceived buffoonery takes place at checkpoints does not mitigate the cold reality that there are real attack plots and that TSA people all over the world, in concert with partners in industry and other government agencies, take action to prevent them. Sometimes these actions are undecipherable and awkward, but they have worked.
Bullshit. They'd be crowing all the way into three years from now if they'd caught a single terrorist. What they've captured is a whole lot of veterans' penknives and a bunch of weed.
Oh, and note that they didn't catch the shoe bomber or the panty bomber -- or a single terrorist, and they've had $60 billion of our money to grope our balls and violate our rights trying.
Better intelligence shared across agencies and countries, improved technology like advanced checkpoint scanning, upgraded training and tools like behaviour detection, all play a part in lowering the risk of new and future threats. Getting rid of outdated security measures, however, is difficult. In 2005, I tried to remove scissors and small tools from the prohibited-items list in order to focus TSA officers on hidden explosives; there was an outcry that predicted "blood running in the aisles" if these potential weapons were allowed on planes. We went ahead with the changes, but, in many cases, the old measures just stayed on the books.
Just like government -- ineffective at pretty much everything but perpetuating itself.
The TSA losers' failure rate (at catching weapons).
UPDATE: Schneier posts Doctorow's sum-up at BoingBoing:
All of Hawley's best arguments sum up to "Someone somewhere did something bad, and if he'd tried it on us, we would have caught him." His closing clincher? They heard a bad guy was getting on a plane somewhere. The figured out which plane, stopped it from taking off and "resolved" the situation. Seeing as there were no recent reports of foiled terrorist plots, I'm guessing the "resolution" was "it turned out we made a mistake." But Hawley's takeaway is: "look at how fast our mistake was!"
Funny How?
Do you make me laugh?
Colluding The Little Guy Out Of Business
The wonderful Institute for Justice is taking this immigrant cabbie's case. George Will writes about him in the WaPo, and how he's been screwed over by Big Limo:
Ali Bokhari, now 39, emigrated from Pakistan in 2000 and eventually settled here as a taxi driver. He soon experienced a quintessentially American itch, a nagging sense that "I cannot grow." But he had an idea: "I can build a better business model for something Nashville has been missing." He built it and now knows that no good deed goes unpunished by today's political model -- collusion between entrenched businesses and compliant government.Bokhari bought a black Lincoln sedan and began offering cut-rate rides -- an average of $25 -- to and from the airport, around downtown and in neighborhoods not well served by taxis. After one year he had 12 cars. Now he has 20, and 15 independent contractors with their own cars, and a Web site, and lots of customers. He also has some enemies, including the established taxi and sedan companies and a city government that is, as interventionist governments generally are, devoted to regulations that protect the strong by preserving the status quo.
With the quiet support of the taxi companies, which have not raised rates since Bokhari and some similar entrepreneurs went into business, the limo companies got regulators to require a $45 minimum charge for any ride. Not content with that gross injury, government added crippling insults: It limited the age of cars and number of miles on them -- regardless of the cars' condition -- and forbade dispatches via cellphones, which is how start-up limo companies operate.
...But the Constitution, and especially the 14th Amendment, is supposed to protect the individual's liberty, including economic liberty, from government's depredations. One purpose of that amendment's protection of "the privileges or immunities" of U.S. citizenship was to defend the economic liberties of freed slaves from laws restricting entry into trades and businesses -- laws written to insulate white Southern businessmen from competition. But the amendment protects all the "privileges or immunities" of all Americans.
In 1873, in a 5 to 4 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court, without any warrant from legislative history of the 14th Amendment, construed "privileges or immunities" so narrowly as to make it a nullity. Now, however, Bokhari may help catalyze a reconsideration of the constitutional basis of economic liberty.
Somebody sent me a check for $25 for theFIRE.org (I think they were old and aren't on board with PayPal). I endorsed it over to FIRE and I'll mail it tomorrow. Both FIRE and IJ are excellent causes, should you wish to donate. They defend people who otherwise probably couldn't afford a defense -- in turn defending the civil liberties of all of us.
Kids Left In Minivan For A Few Minutes? Child Endangerment!
Lenore Skenazy blogs at Free Range Kids about the latest in the criminalization of everything -- an Arkansas mother charged with second degree child endangerment for a terrible crime; as she puts it, "leaving a sleeping baby and a three-year-old locked in a warm minivan on a cold day for under five minutes":
On December 16, a Friday, which is my day off, I was driving with my two youngest children. Benjamin is my baby, and Aurora is my three-year-old. We had just met up with May, my six-year-old, for lunch at her elementary school. I remembered suddenly that this was the last day I could buy a gift for May's first grade teacher.We were in a touristy and safe part of town, very close to the math and science school at which I work. Benjamin had a bronchial cough, and Aurora was eating cookies (messy), and didn't want to leave the van.
I considered the cold air outside, the baby's cough, Aurora's messy face and hands. I figured that the time it would take to get the children out of the van and back into the van would be nearly twice the time it would take to just run into the shop myself. They were both locked in their car seats. I parked as close to the shop as I could get, locked the car from the outside, double checked the lock, literally ran into the store, grabbed two items without checking the price, checked out with no wait, since I was the only customer, and ran out of the store.
There I found two police officers standing with Aurora outside of the van, with the van's sliding door open. When they saw me running toward them, one of them shouted to get back, and not to touch my daughter. He said "Sit your butt down!" so I sat on the pavement. Aurora, who had been calmly talking to them, was upset by their treatment of me. Finally, they let her come to me, and I held her. The officers claimed that they stopped because they saw her standing outside. This seemed really unlikely to me, but I figure it must be true, because how else would the door have been unlocked? Inside, the baby still slept. They cited me but did not call child protective services, and did not arrest me.
At the hearing my lawyer appeared and entered a not guilty plea. A trial was set for February 4.
...I'm scared, and confused and angry. I am afraid that a guilty conviction could compromise my chances of becoming an attorney. I am afraid of being permanently labeled a bad mother from a judgment call that happened to be out of line with that police officer's opinion of good parenting, even though my actions didn't actually violate the Arkansas child endangerment statute, which is quite vague.
Love how Karen De Coster put it at Lew Rockwell, about "the American Sissy State." She notes that there have been some horrifying cases of kids baking to death in hot cars:
These (parents), however, are the outliers, not the norm. Yet so few cases of these occurrences attract so much attention because the state and the media (I repeat myself) love stories that denigrate individuals and applaud the state as the great savior, protecting children from harm. The attitude that prevails, thanks to the police state-nanny state-media machine alliance, is that any kid left in any car, no matter what the circumstances, automatically becomes a crime.
Girl Power? How About Kid Power?
Joanna Schroeder blogs at The Good Men Project about how she's bothered by the promotion of "girl power":
A little girl who wants to be a doctor, an astronaut, or a construction worker is praised, encouraged and given tools to get there. And much of that change is due to Girl Power. For that, I love Girl Power and wish that phrase has been around when I was small.But it could very well be that Girl Power comes at an expense to boys. My sons, 7 and 4 years old, were not a part of the oppressive patriarchy. Those two sweet little squishy faces don't have any understanding of race or gender, aside from the obvious facts that everyone's skin color is a little different and that there are boys and there are girls.
...They are a part of a generation of boys who are being marginalized because of their sex. My oldest is one of those squirmy boys, the types that can't seem to be still. He stands next to his desk instead of sitting, he wanders around the classroom, he reads books when he should be listening, he wants to talk about bugs and soccer and Ninjago with his friends when he should be doing his sums.
In other words... He's a 7 year-old boy. The girls are very different at this age, they tend to be more studious, more focused and they keep their bodies still. While there are outliers even in his classroom: two boys who are incredibly quiet and focused and two or three girls who are fidgety and chattery, at this age they are very different.
The piece does have a few shovelfuls of PC self-loathing and the expected unthinking trotting out of old tropes, but some of the ideas in it are very good. Personally, I'm for fair treatment for all and find feminism too often to really be about special treatment for some and a justification for bashing men. And that can start really young these days.
She links to an equally PC and trope-trotting piece in the Guardian by Andrea Cornwall that also has this good bit:
I'm disturbed about the promotion of Girl Power as the development panacea. There's something dangerously retributive about an approach that simply flips an inequity around and approaches power as a zero-sum game.
In Audiotape We Trust
How many times has it happened -- two cops, swearing that their version, not the suspect's version, of the story, is the story?
And how many times has that been a lie?
These particular cops are in a jam now that a cell tape contradicts their account of how the arrest went down.
Douglas Stanglin writes at USA Today:
Felony charges have been dropped against a Florida woman after a cellphone tape of her arrest sharply contradicted two police officers' version of events, The Miami Herald reports.The incident unfolded in October when the two Coral Springs officers came upon an SUV stopped in the left lane of a roadway, apparently with two blown tires.
The newspaper says prosecutors are now investigating whether the officers filed false documents relating to the encounter.
None of this would be questioned, The Herald says, if the 60-year-old driver, Susan Mait, hadn't dropped her phone on the floor of her SUV when cops yanked her from the vehicle. She was on the phone at the time with a Geico service rep who, per company policy, was recording the conversation.
The audiotape depicts a starkly different scene from what officers Nicole Stasnek and Derek Fernandes declared in their official reports and told the court under oath.
More here, by Adam H. Beasley in the Miami Herald:
The recording catches Stasnek cursing out Mait (although the officer later denied it), giving no advance warning that Mait was about to be cuffed for resisting arrest (although the officer testified that she had done so three times), and later hashing out a plan with her fellow officer to make sure their stories jibed (they did).The explosive recording prompted prosecutors to drop all outstanding charges against Mait -- and focus their attention on the officers.
"When I finally got this tape, I was totally, completely disgusted with what the police did to this woman," said Michael Catalano, Mait's defense attorney. "And everyone who has listened to it since has agreed with me."
Tape of the incident here.
via Instapundit
How The TSA Respects Women
Lisa Simeone emailed me:
Sommer Gentry is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy. A couple of years ago, she was sexually assaulted by a TSA agent. Since then, she refuses to be scanned or groped. Surprise surprise, she knows one of the most recent arrestees in the TSA Sex Crimes Hall of Fame.
Sommer Gentry blogs at the anti-TSA TSANewsBlog:
In November, I was barred from my flight at Dulles Airport for a double opt-out. I refused to go through a blue-box backscatter (x-ray) body scanner, and I refused to endure an intimate feel-up from a woman I didn't know. The body scanners at Dulles have no privacy filter. Backscatter machines dose passengers with carcinogenic ionizing radiation to create images of their naked bodies for inspection by a screener working in the hidden viewing booth.What I sensed was happening at that airport - targeting young women for special security attention out of sexual motivation - now seems even more difficult for the TSA to deny. Not one, but two of the men working for TSA at Dulles Airport on that day have now been arrested for sex crimes.
Just three days after my refusal, police arrested a Dulles screener, Harold Rodman, and charged him with aggravated sexual battery, object sexual penetration, forcible sodomy, and abduction with intent to defile. His accuser says that he flashed his TSA badge to initiate the assault before he lured her away from her friend and attacked her.
I can have no proof, of course, that alleged rapist Harold Rodman was in the viewing booth that morning, but neither can I be assured that he was not. He was employed as a screener at that airport on the same day that another male screener directed me into the scanner while sending my husband through a simple metal detector.
But surely the TSA must have its house in order with regard to how it treats women? At the very least, if Harold Rodman or other screeners were indeed targeting women, then someone higher up in the organization, say, a Transportation Security Manager, would be there to correct the situation?
In fact, a Transportation Security Manager did present himself at the checkpoint that day to see to it that I was either electronically strip-searched or sexually fondled to his satisfaction. That man's name was Bryant Livingston. I still have his card on my desk.
Bryant Livingston, TSA Security Manager, was arrested at Dulles Airport and charged with five counts involving prostitution. He was allegedly running a prostitution ring out of a Silver Spring hotel room. Law enforcement officers found four men and three naked women in a room. One man admitted to police he had arrived with the promise of sex for $100.
This is how the TSA respects women.
Gentry is right on with this:
The TSA is well aware that its procedures involve sexually invasive touching and processing sensitive nude images. True, most screeners charged with serious sex crimes are fired and lose government immunity for shoving their hands down strangers' pants. But if the TSA's vaunted behavior detection program were anything more than a fistful of make-believe, it could use this program to get rid of the sexual abusers on TSA's payroll.
Laugh Tracks
Better than needle marks.
TSA Titty Peep Show In Orlando
Jennifer Sisk had some fun at the "security" checkpoint in Orlando (I'm guessing she was wearing a sundress and no bra). Bill Fisher blogs at TSANewsBlog:
The TSA screener instructed her to put one leg forward. Without warning, the agent quickly slid her hands down Sisk's leg, pulling her dress down and exposing her breast.Sisk reflexively cried out. The sound immediately drew a crowd and much unwanted attention. She looked up to see everyone in the area staring at her, including the male TSA workers.
The TSA agent harshly told Sisk to hold on to her dress, while continuing to inspect her breasts and torso. The TSA screener was indifferent to the embarrassment she had caused, screaming at Sisk to "hold your dress tight, hold your dress tight" as if the incident were Sisk's fault.
After being exposed, Sisk was detained for several more minutes while everyone in the area continued to stare, further heightening her embarrassment. As she was leaving the checkpoint, one of the male screeners, who had seen the incident, stared at her and smiled.
The violation of our Fourth Amendment rights (no searches without probable cause) isn't funny. When you're at the airport and you pass a TSA worker, be sure to tell them that what they're doing is reprehensible. It shouldn't be emotionally easy, earning a living violating the rights of Americans who need to fly to get where they're going.
The New Anti-Semitism
Victor Davis Hanson writes at Hoover.org about how anti-Semitism's been made okay as anti-Israelism:
Over 500,000 Jews have been ethnically-cleansed from Arab capitals since 1947, in waves of pogroms that come every few decades. Why are they not considered refugees the way the Palestinians are?The point is not that the world community should not focus on Israel's disputes with its neighbors, but that it singles Israel out for its purported transgressions in a fashion that it does not for nearly identical disagreements elsewhere. Over 75 percent of recent United Nations resolutions target Israel, which has been cited for human rights violations far more than the Sudan, Congo, or Rwanda, where millions have perished in little-noticed genocides. Why is the international community so anti-Israel?
...With the establishment of Israel, anti-Semitism metamorphosized in two unforeseen ways. First, it became a near obsession of the modern Left, which associated the creation of the Jewish state with a sort of Western hegemonic impulse. That Israel was democratic and protected human rights in a way unlike its autocratic neighbors mattered nothing. To the international Left, Israel was a religious, imperialistic, and surrogate West in the Middle East.
After the 1967 war, when a once vulnerable Israel emerged victorious and apparently unstoppable, Jews lost any lingering sympathy from the horrors of World War II and Israel became a full-fledged Western over-dog, closely associated with its new patron, the much envied and hated United States. Not only were the new anti-Semites no longer just buffoonish skinheads, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen, but they were polished and sophisticated intellectuals. Deploring anti-Semitic illiterates in white sheets was rather easy; but countering Hamas cartoons of Jews as apes and pigs in West Bank newspapers was difficult when they were disseminated in the name of free speech at U.C. Berkeley.
There was a second facet of the new anti-Semitism. The establishment of the state of Israel itself also served as a respectable cloak for anti-Semitism. One now spoke not of disliking Jews, but only of despising the Jewish state and seeing Palestinians as if they were victims analogous to minority groups within the West. From Oxford dons to award-wining novelists, it became socially acceptable to decry the creation of Israel in a way it was not to say that the Jews were again causing trouble. Alleging that "Jews" had too much influence was still retrograde, but worrying about the power of the "Jewish lobby" was suddenly politically-correct.
via Instapundit
Why I Haven't Blogged On The Trayvon Martin Shooting
A lot of people seem quick to leap to conclusions; I'm waiting for the evidence about what happened to come out.
The person I can agree with right now is a former Texas NAACP chapter head, Reverend C.L. Bryant, who wants to know where all the outrage is on all the black on black crime.
From the New York Post, Frank Rosario, Erik Kriss, and David Seifman write:
Former NAACP leader Bryant said the rallies organized by Sharpton and Jackson suggest there is an epidemic of "white men killing black young men" while ignoring much more prevalent black-on-black crime."The epidemic is truly black-on-black crime," he said. "The greatest danger to the lives of young black men are young black men."
Bryant said he wants to see protests about those problems.
"Why not be angry about the wholesale murder that goes on in the streets of Newark and Chicago?" he asked. "Why isn't somebody angry about that 6-year-old girl who was killed on her steps last weekend in a cross fire when two gang members in Chicago start shooting at each other? Why is there no outrage about that?"
Bryant, an outspoken conservative, predicted that "people like Sharpton and those on the left" will make Martin's death an issue in the presidential race.
He told the Web site that they will "turn this evolving tragedy of this young man into fodder to say . . . 'If you don't re-elect [President] Obama, then you will have unbridled events or circumstances like this happening in the streets to young men wearing hoodies.'"
He also blasted Obama for his "nebulous statement" last week in which he said, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
"What does that mean?" Bryant asked. "What was the purpose in that?"
Of course, the truth is, there's little fame or profit in race-baiters Jackson and Sharpton speaking out against the epidemic of black-on-black crime or the epidemic of unwed motherhood in the black community -- which is also higher than in any other group in America.
Check out the crime stats I heard Erin Burnett read on CNN: From 2005, DOJ stats, 52% of all homicide victims were black; 92% were killed by other blacks.
If the evidence in Trayvon Martin's shooting does not say self-defense, Zimmerman should be prosecuted. Of course.
Again, I'm waiting for that evidence before I leap to any conclusions.
But, it's easy to leap to the conclusion -- the well-founded conclusion -- that black-on-black crime is a serious problem in this country. Yoohoo, Reverend Jackson? Anybody home?
UPDATE: Another story on which I'm waiting for the evidence is the El Cajon murder of the 32-year-old Iraqi Muslim woman, Shaima Alwadi, in her home. On the surface, it looks like anti-Muslim hate. A note was left. Apparently, part of the message was "go back to your own country, you terrorists."
There's speculation that it was an honor killing -- and something about the 17-year-old daughter's behavior on camera did seem really off to me (along with the fact that she claims she was home sleeping upstairs when her mother was bludgeoned and a glass door was smashed).
(A 32-year-old woman with a 17-year-old daughter? Pregnant at 14? There's a lot of that in Muslim culture -- and far younger, really sick cases -- thanks to how Mohammed married Aisha at 6 and had sex with her at 9, and how Mohammed's actions, including mass-murder and sex with a child, are to be emulated by Muslims.)
Make Me Laugh And The World Laughs With You
Or something like that.
How About A Nice Big Helping Of "Inhibited Sperm"?
There's some birth control for men that's said to be in clinical trials in India. From Male Contraceptive Information Project:
The basics
RISUG (which is an acronym for "Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance"), called Vasalgel™ in the U.S., is similar to vasectomy but with one significant advantage: it is more easily reversible. Researchers achieve this feature by injecting a polymer (a gel) into the vas deferens, rather than cutting the vas (as is done in vasectomy). The polymer then coats the inside walls of the vas deferens and kills sperm as they go by. If a man wishes to restore fertility, whether after months or years, the polymer is flushed out of the vas with another injection. This method could thus be ideal for men who think they are finished having children but would like the chance to change their minds in case of remarriage or the death of a child--and it could possibly even be appropriate for men who want child-spacing or young men who want to complete their schooling before having children.Practical details
RISUG is in advanced clinical trials in India; some of the men have been using it for more than 15 years. Right now, only local men near the study sites in India are eligible for the trials, though there could be a limited market release in 2012/2013 for Indian men. But there's good news for men outside India: RISUG may be on its way to the rest of the world! In early 2010, a small foundation that grew out of the Male Contraception Information Project purchased rights to begin studying RISUG in the U.S. and developing it for the rest of the world. The goal is to have it on the market as an alternative to vasectomy as early as 2015, with clinical trials beginning in 2012. Its new name is Vasalgel™.
And then, sadly, the controversy, from Wikipedia:
The thoroughness of carcinogenicity, teratogenicity, and toxicity testing in clinical trials has been questioned. In October 2002, India's Ministry of Health aborted the clinical trials due to reports of albumin in urine and scrotal swelling in Phase III trial participants.[5] The Indian Council for Medical Research noted that dimethyl sulfoxide used as a solvent for the injection is known to cause kidney damage.[6] Although the ICMR has reviewed and approved the toxicology data three times, some United States researchers say that the studies were not done according to recent international standards.RISUG was resubmitted for a new round of tests at a US lab[citation needed], and was approved as non-mutagenic in July 2005. With this new stamp of approval, the path to continued Phase III trials in India became clear.
In March 2006, the ICMR announced that Phase III trials of RISUG could resume at 4 centers around India. The announcement of this progress led to renewed interest in RISUG. Unfortunately, little progress has been made since March. The research centers do not have enough of the RISUG compound to move forward with the trial. Marksans, the pharmaceutical company which has a manufacturing agreement with the inventor and the government, is now over a year past its initial April 2005 product delivery estimate. It is not clear why the delay continues.
Gun Control: Press One, Press Two
California-approved handgun safe (a spoof):
I See (Insanely) Rude People: Dealing With The Crazy Neighbors
Give a listen to the podcast of my appearance on Patt Morrison's show on KPCC 89.3 fm on Tuesday afternoon.
If you don't have my book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, I hope you'll consider buying a copy. It's only $12.37, brand new, with Amazon's discount at the link above. (New copies or Kindle books [but not "bargain" copies] go against my advance, and help me keep writing...and eating!)
The Last Thing The TSA Wants Is Free Speech: Schneier Booted
Security expert Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater" in reference to the TSA's real mission, was invited to testify on Monday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform -- and then removed from the panel.
Schneier blogs:
On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them. (They tried to pull the same thing last year and it failed -- video at the 10:50 mark.)The committee said it would try to invite me back for another hearing, but with my busy schedule, I don't know if I will be able to make it. And it would be far less effective for me to testify without forcing the TSA to respond to my points.
I'm there in spirit, though. The title of the hearing is "TSA Oversight Part III: Effective Security or Security Theater?"
A Man And His Mail-Order Bride
David Haldane writes in Orange Coast Magazine, opening on his neighbor's reaction:
"Your personal life is so messed up," she informs me.In a way, I appreciate her honesty. And I understand her reaction. I'm a 63-year-old white male married to a beautiful woman from the Philippines more than three decades my junior. We met on an Internet dating site aimed at fostering international marriages. My neighbor is expressing openly what others convey with scornful stares. But then, that's just one of the hazards of living in Orange County with a "mail-order bride."
I haven't always raised the eyebrows of my neighbors. Once upon a time, I too fell well within the cultural norms of America and Orange County. Married to a woman roughly my own age with a similar ethnic background, we had two children--a boy and a girl--whose presence in our household hardly warranted dramatic attention. About the most exotic island we ever visited was Santa Catalina. And, like most couples living the suburban dream, we assumed it all would last forever.
Then everything fell apart.
To be honest, it was my fault. I'm not proud of this, but one day I awoke to the realization that I had become the embodiment of an American stereotype: the middle-aged husband who imagines something better over the next ridge. Unfortunately, it was not a passing fancy but, increasingly, the dominant preoccupation of my life, ultimately leading me into the bottomless pit of an extramarital affair. Gradually, of course, my marriage unraveled until the ignominious afternoon when my wife, overhearing a hushed telephone conversation between me and my paramour, rightly sent me packing...
The men who write me who tend get in a lot of trouble with mail order brides are those who marry women from Eastern Europe. This isn't to say all of these women are dicey bets, but they do not come from a cushy background like we do in the U.S. -- and even "poor" people here have a cushy background. They can be calculating in ways that men don't want to imagine, and aren't prepared for. If you're looking for that submissive foreign woman, don't be too sure Svetlana's the one. Of course, the same goes for any woman or any man in America.
via LAObserved
Peter, Peter, Placenta-Eater
Via Kate Coe...gotta love the title...
I Regret Eating My Placenta
It's a Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting blog item by a woman named Nancy Redd at nytimes.com:
I was a cheerful and healthy new mother. So why did I gobble placenta ground with what the processor mysteriously referred to as "cleansing herbs"? Somehow, it seemed like a good idea at the time.But in my case, it was a terrible idea. Shortly after my first dose of two pills, I felt jittery and weird. By the next day, after just eight placenta pills, I was in tabloid-worthy meltdown mode, a frightening phase filled with tears and rage. This lasted another couple of awful days before my husband suggested that it wasn't postpartum mommy madness finally making its appearance, but the hormone-and-goodness-knows-what-else-filled placenta pills.
My husband isn't a doctor (though he is the son of doctors and has played one on screen), but he was right. After I went cold turkey on the placenta pills, I immediately felt better --exorcised even, of an entity that had willingly left my body but that I had stupidly, and with no medical supervision, scarfed back up.
Motherhood returned to being marvelous, save sleep deprivation. At my six-week checkup, I told my wonderful obstetrician that she should have never let me take my placenta home (medical consent is necessary at most hospitals, and she had somewhat grudgingly plopped my placenta in a to-go plastic bag as soon as I delivered it). While the Internet is teeming with individual pro-placenta stories, they are as anecdotal, and in my case as absurdly off beam, as alien sightings. Eight months later my son and I are fine, but I'm kicking myself for being so gullible without a single shred of proof.
Perhaps one day there will be clinical studies on human placentophagia, and we'll find out more about the pros and cons of the practice. Possibly we'll eventually be able to obtain a prescription for placenta processing, to make sure we know what's really in those "cleansing herbs."
What do you want to bet she's one of those who screeches about "Big Pharma" while taking advice from some celebrity placenta-eating coach (or "a so-called celebrity placenta processor," as she calls the person)?
Nancy Rommelmann found the best comment on the Times' site:
"Are you being stalked by hyenas? Other animals eat it to eliminate the scent of birth and blood, as a way of protecting their offspring from predators."
In a word...Eeeuw!
Every Erosion Of Privacy Leads To The Next
The TSA gropings make it possible for NFL stadium gropings to be accepted.
Yes, one is the government groping without probable cause and the other is a private business (if you don't like that, just don't go), but could you imagine the outcry if the stadium gropings hadn't been preceded by the TSA's?
Stacy Curtin writes at Yahoo Finance about "OUTRAGE OF THE DAY: Employers Asking For Facebook Passwords."
The first rule about the Internet is you don't talk about, or share, your Internet passwords. But that is exactly what some employers are asking job applicants to do: share their Facebook login and password.As many of us know, Facebook users include a wide-rage of personal information on their profiles, including sex, age, religion and sexual orientation, all of which protected under federal equal opportunity employment laws.
After news of this hiring practice surfaced last week, Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal have now called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate whether this employer conduct violates federal law.
"In an age where more and more of our personal information -- and our private social interactions -- are online, it is vital that all individuals be allowed to determine for themselves what personal information they want to make public and protect personal information from their would-be employers," said Schumer in a statement. "This is especially important during the job-seeking process, when all the power is on one side of the fence."
Facebook has even weighed into this controversy, siding with the privacy of all its members. On Friday, the social media giant threatened potential legal action against employers who use this practice during the hiring process.
"We don't think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don't think it's the right thing to do," Facebook said in a statement. "While we do not have any immediate plans to take legal action against any specific employers, we look forward to engaging with policy makers and other stakeholders, to help better safeguard the privacy of our users."
Of course, Facebook cares about Facebook privacy like I care about who's getting traded to Miami (in whichever sport they happen to do that sort of thing).
Hee Hee, Hoo Hoo, Hah Hah...
Funnies here, please.
The Commercial They Should Have Run
Hilarious old car dealer commercial:
The PC-ification Of America Starts Young
Boston radio host Michael Graham blogs about the new "unmentionables" -- swimming pools, birthdays and Halloween:
These words and ideas have been banned from student tests in New York, along with "dinosaurs," "divorce" and "dancing." They're all such controversial ideas that the New York school system says it's harmful to include them in the text of tests.What's offensive about "swimming pool?" Not everyone has one. Little Johnny might become despondent thinking about the fact that his family can't afford their own pool, while other families can, and his class envy might impact his test taking.
"Dinosaurs?" Might lead to conversations about evolution. "Halloween?" Too religious, or non-religious, or maybe both. Whatever. It's gone.
Birthdays? Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate 'em. Dancing? Some people don't do it. And on and on...
Apologize-apalooza
Bill Maher writes for the NYT about the recent slew of bullshit apologies and the demand that people make them:
THIS week, Robert De Niro made a joke about first ladies, and Newt Gingrich said it was "inexcusable and the president should apologize for him." Of course, if something is "inexcusable," an apology doesn't make any difference, but then again, neither does Newt Gingrich.Mr. De Niro was speaking at a fund-raiser with the first lady, Michelle Obama. Here's the joke: "Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?"
...This week, President Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, described Mitt Romney's constant advertising barrage in Illinois as a "Mittzkrieg," and instantly the Republican Jewish Coalition was outraged and called out Mr. Axelrod's "Holocaust and Nazi imagery" as "disturbing." Because the message of "Mittzkrieg" was clear: Kill all the Jews. Then the coalition demanded not only that Mr. Axelrod apologize immediately but also that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz "publicly rebuke" him. For a pun! For punning against humanity!
The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not "make them go away forever." We need to learn to coexist, and it's actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I've been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I'm at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.
When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don't like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don't declare a holy war on ham.
I don't want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. That's why we have Canada.
Politics As Usual: Why Obama Isn't Backing Gay Marriage
Josh Kraushaar speculated at TheAtlantic.com about why Obama isn't backing gay marriage -- an issue that splits his two core constituencies, college-aged voters and African-Americans:
College-aged voters are only part of the president's coalition. The bigger element consists of African-American voters, who are solidly opposed to gay marriage. California's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008 thanks to overwhelming black support; 70 percent backed it, according to exit polls. Recent gay marriage legislation in Maryland drew opposition from leading Democratic African-American legislators in the state. The same ministers organizing get-out-the-vote efforts in black churches for Obama are also railing against gay marriage.Obama can't afford to even risk losing the deep enthusiasm black voters have towards him. They gave Obama a whopping 95 percent of the vote against John McCain last year and turned out at historic levels. He should get similar levels of support this year, but with the down economy disproportionately affecting the black community, he's not at all assured that they'll turn out at the same level as 2008. Backing gay marriage would virtually guarantee that some would stay home -- perhaps enough to tip the balance in states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio.
The conventional wisdom has been that supporting gay marriage would alienate blue-collar whites, and that's been the main reason he's been hesitant to come out in favor before the general election. But in this case, it's a crucial element of his own base that's preventing the president from taking bolder steps to advance a cause that he seems to believe in, but hasn't publicly embraced. It's as much about politics as principle.
Bring Back The Free Market To Gas Prices
Lawrence Solomon writes in the Financial Post:
There actually is a silver bullet, and it would lower gas costs ... for the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world. The silver bullet is a free market in gasoline, something that was abandoned almost a century ago, when the auto industry convinced governments to finance roads through a gasoline tax, and something that subsequent government interventions have further distorted. A return to a free market would not only dramatically raise the supply of gasoline, as the Republicans claim, but would also reduce the demand, as many Democrats desire. The combination of higher supply and lower demand would whiplash gasoline prices downward.Step one in restoring a free market in gasoline is removing its punishing taxes -- levies of about 40¢ per gallon in the U.S. over and above the sales taxes that normally apply and much more in Canada and Europe. The road-building rationale for these extraordinary taxes will soon be ending in any case, both because governments now realize that they won't be able to raise enough money in future through gas taxes to meet motorists' needs and because modern toll road technology allows for true user fees for roads, based on the specific costs of using specific roads. When consumers pay for their gasoline at the pump, they should be charged the market price for gasoline, no more no less.
Unbundling the cost of gasoline from road use would enable the law of supply and demand to function. Once each new road is financed on the basis of its ability to pay its own way, rather than from a pot of gas taxes that becomes dispensed politically, road building will become rational. Uneconomic roads won't be built, resulting in less sprawl-related demand for gasoline. And because tolled roads tend to be free flowing -- the price of driving increases as necessary to reduce congestion -- less fuel is wasted in stop-and-start traffic. Tolled roads also reduce demand for gasoline by encouraging drivers to use their cars more sparingly -- in tolled parts of London, for example, public transit use is up, walking is up, bicycling is up, taxi use is up, ride sharing is up and unnecessary trips are down as drivers, faced with more accurate pricing, reassess the costs and benefits of driving versus other modes of travel. As experience around the world shows, when consumers face unbundled price signals and better appreciate the cost of each mile travelled, they tend to drive less. Tolls discourage needless driving much better than gas taxes do.
A map of gasoline excise taxes per gallon in the USA.
Laugh Me Up, Scotty!
"Laugh Trek," you could call it.
Joanne Manaster Reviews "The Stem Cell Hope," By Alice Park
I love a woman who talks about the "excitement of stem cells" who has a Barbie doll standing proudly on a pedestal just behind her!
Buy the book here: The Stem Cell Hope: How Stem Cell Medicine Can Change Our Lives
.What A Voice
Shy British 17-year-old sings on Britain's Got Talent. You won't believe the voice that comes out of this kid's mouth.
There's No Such Thing As Bad Cholesterol
As Dr. Michael Eades has pointed out to me and on his blog, what matters is not your LDL cholesterol number but whether your particles measure out to be large and fluffy (good!) or small and dense (bad!). (Gregg's doctor about fell out of his shoes when I asked him to measure Gregg's LDL particle size, among other things.)
Karen DeCoster retweeted this piece at Health Impact News -- "Putting The Myth To Rest: There Is No Such Thing As Bad Cholesterol," and though it's apparently a coconut oil sales site, the article, by Brian Shilavy, seems solid:
The 'noddy-science' of the so-called 'functional food' manufacturers would have us believe that there is such a thing as 'bad' cholesterol and 'good' cholesterol. This is, in fact, totally untrue. The cholesterol itself, whether being transported by LDL or HDL, is exactly the same. Cholesterol is simply a necessary ingredient that is required to be regularly delivered around the body for the efficient healthy development, maintenance and functioning of our cells. The difference is in the 'transporters' (the lipoproteins HDL and LDL) and both types are essential for the human body's delivery logistics to work effectively.Problems can occur, however, when the LDL particles are both small and their carrying capacity outweighs the transportation potential of available HDL. This can lead to more cholesterol being 'delivered' around the body with lower resources for returning excess capacity to the liver.
LDL can vary in its structure and occur in particles of varying size. It is the smaller LDL particle sizes that can easily become 'trapped' in the arteries by proteoglycans, which is, itself, a kind of 'filler' found between the cells in all animal and human bodies. This can then cause the cholesterol the LDL carries to contribute to the formation of fatty deposits called 'plaques' (a process known as atherogenesis). As these deposits build up, they restrict the arteries' width and flexibility. This causes an increase in blood pressure and can also lead to other cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks or strokes.
The LDL itself is consequently sometimes referred to as 'bad cholesterol', but you can now appreciate the fact that this is simply incorrect. In fact LDL, HDL and cholesterol are all essential to our health. However, it seems that it has become common for humans to have a preponderance of 'unhealthily' small LDL particles, which can become a precursor to heart and arterial disease due to the mechanisms described. It is apparently healthier to have a smaller number of larger LDL particles carrying the same quantity of cholesterol than a large number of small LDL particles might transport, but for some reason this is less common. This is an interesting area that demands more research.
When LDL becomes retained by the glycol-proteins in the arteries it is subject to being oxidized by 'free radicals'. This is when the process can become health threatening. It has therefore been suggested that increasing the amount of antioxidants in our diet might effectively 'mop up' free radicals, and consequently reduce this harmful oxidation. Although the idea of consuming foods rich in antioxidants, or even using supplements, is now widely promoted, the scientific evidence for their efficacy still remains to be fully established.
Another point to consider is the occurrence of substances called 'very-low-density-lipids' or VLDL, also known as triglycerides. VLDL is converted to LDL in the bloodstream and therefore contributes towards increased levels of LDL and to subsequent potential cholesterol-related health problems. This is why triglycerides are usually measured when a cholesterol test of your blood is undertaken.
The production of VLDL in the liver - which amounts to a combination of cholesterol and low-density apolipoprotein - is exacerbated by the intake of fructose. Fructose is the type of sugar found in many fruits, it is also a component of sucrose and of the widely used food ingredient high-fructose corn syrup. This implies that anyone whose LDL or triglyceride levels are unduly high should cut back on those sweet sugary snacks, and even on the sweeter, fructose laden fruits; not simply reduce their intake of fatty foods!
He goes on to review some of the facts and fallacies at the link above.
There's an increasing amount of evidence pointing to the idea that heart disease is caused by inflammation.
Tonight, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Roy Baumeister On Willpower
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in psychology and research -- all with really compelling things to say about how to be smarter in being human.
Tonight's guest, social psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister.
One of the most practical and helpful self-help books I've read recently is Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Many of the studies in the book are from Baumeister's own lab, and he promises to be a fascinating guest. I've already improved my life with insights from the book, like by understanding how willpower gets depleted so I can conserve mine for important things (like writing). I can't imagine that anyone who listens to this show will come away without tips for how they can improve their life -- and be a little more relaxed about the stuff they anguish over related to self-control.
Listen live at this link or download after the show (click "Play in your default player"). And do call in with questions when the show is live -- 347-326-9761:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/26/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Don't forget to listen to last week's show with Loyola evolutionary psychology professor Dr. Michael Mills, who explained a lot about the ways we're biologically and psychologically different, and the ways that should guide or mating and dating behavior.
Listen at the link or download (click "Play in your default player"):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/19/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Join me and all my fascinating guests live every week from 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, and listen to all my previous shows and listen live at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
11-Year-Old And Her Family Stand Up For Privacy And Probable Cause
Her Pennsylvania school district's requires that she go through urine testing in order to participate in choir and other activities, and she and her family are having none of that. CBSnews reports:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania said Wednesday it filed the lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of the sixth-grader from Peach Bottom, Pa., and her parents. They say the drug-testing policy violates privacy rights under the state constitution, and want a county judge to prevent the Solanco School District from enforcing it.
The girl was removed from the orchestra and the chorus at her middle school and can't participate in athletic or academic teams without agreeing to random urine testing by school officials. More here from Care2.com, by Anna Klenke:
Although it seems shocking to test middle schoolers for drugs, random drug testing in schools is not a new issue, although it is most common at the high school level. The 1995 Supreme Court Vernonina School District v. Acton verdict ruled in favor of random drug testing for school athletes, and a 1998 case expanded the ruling to include all extracurricular activities, not just sports.What is the justification for testing students for drugs? Nearly all proponents of this practice believe that the threat of random drug testing will be enough to prevent students from taking drugs. But studies have shown that while random drug testing does seem to stop students from taking drugs in the short term, it does almost nothing to ensure long-term abstinence from drugs.
And for those students -- like the middle schooler in Pennsylvania -- who are conscious of their rights, drug testing can easily be seen as an invasion of privacy.
Now, I understand if we're going to have 11-year-olds "operating heavy machinery," that we might want to be careful that they aren't chugging six packs before school, but choir?
There's a continuing erosion of rights in our country. Stand up for yours and your children's -- and in turn, all of ours -- when some government agency or government-affiliated body tries to yank them from you.
via ifeminists
Health Insurance Still Chained To The Workplace
It's a Jewish crack -- "never buy retail." And that includes medical care.
Steve Lopez writes in the LA Times of a man whose kid got a stomachache, how he took the kid to the emergency room and ended up with a $5,000:
When the bill arrived, John Moser felt a sharp pain in his own gut.The cost for just walking in the door of the emergency room? That came to $1,288. The ultrasound nicked him an additional $1,135. A comprehensive metabolic panel (blood analysis) was billed at $1,212.
Moser was also charged $158, accidentally, for the saline solution he had turned down. The total came to $4,852.55, not counting separate bills that would arrive later and total nearly $1,000, including $540 for pathology and $309 for the doctor.
"I was shocked," said Moser.
The first bill, $4,852.55, was confusing, as medical bills often are. It said "your health plan has recently made a payment on your account." It said the balance, $2,571.85, "is now your financial responsibility."
When Moser mentioned the bill to his father, Marvin Moser flipped.
"Yes, the fees in ERs are off the wall all over the country," the professor of medicine told me, but he found Tarzana's to be extraordinary. "The one thing that stands out, beyond belief, is $1,212 for a metabolic panel."
That's a test, Dr. Moser said, in which a technician draws blood for chemical analysis, and it takes just minutes. Moser questioned not only the charge, but the usefulness of the test in his granddaughter's case.
Out of curiosity, I went online to see what a lab might charge for a comprehensive metabolic panel.
Any guesses?
Some labs advertise prices as low as $39.
Glenn Melnick, who teaches hospital economics at USC, was not surprised.
"By and large, these prices are fictitious numbers," said Melnick, who argued that Tarzana and most other hospitals routinely charge astronomical fees, especially for emergency room services.
Of course, and it's all part of a years-long game in which the charge for service, the true cost of the service, and the acceptable payment are in three different orbits. And that doesn't even take into account how the charges are adjusted up or down depending on who's paying them and whether they have worked out a deal. How can patients hope to make sense of such an indefensibly convoluted system?
The important sentence that of course Lopez just tossed of and didn't deal with further:
"He had lost his job in TV production, and later bought his own medical insurance."
The comment I left at the LAT:
Yet another thing the ridiculous Obamacare has not corrected (untouched upon in this tale). We live in a time when nobody stays at one company for a lifetime -- a world of freelancers. Health care should not be tied to one's job. It keeps people who are sick in jobs they want to leave and puts people at square one in health insurance when they do leave a job or if they get fired.I'm in my 40s. I left my first and last corporate job in my early 20s and started paying for an HMO -- and have been ever since. The price only goes up by age, and once I was in, I was in. Health insurance should be a thing an individual purchases for him or herself upon graduating college (or high school if there is no college).
Here, from another commenter, NewsBrowser, is how it would have worked out if they had my HMO, Kaiser:
My eight year old recently went to the ER for the same problem. I have a HMO, Kaiser. Cost was no problem since it was only a seventy five dollar co-pay. My complaint - it took FIVE tries to get the IV started!! When I asked why the IV, the answer was we always start an IV.
Muslim Men! Be Sure You Aren't Beating Your Wife Incorrectly
Terry Davidson reports for the Toronto Sun on a book that instructs Muslim men in the proper way to beat their wives ("by hand or stick." Can also "pull [her] by the ears"):
The 160-page book, published by Idara Impex in New Delhi, India, is written by Hazrat Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, who's described in the book's foreword as a "prolific writer on almost every topic of Islamic learning."
Funniest Of The Web
Put 'er here.
VAWA Provisions: Bye-Bye Due Process For Men
Hans Bader blogs at Open Market, "Troubling Provisions Being Added to the Violence Against Women Act: Due Process Rights Threatened":
Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained in a reauthorization of the act that is likely to pass the Senate over objections from some Republican senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has also objected to the lack of safeguards against fraud in the law and the misuse of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. (Even if the Senate's reauthorization does not pass the House, programs set up by the 1994 law will continue to operate.)William Creeley of FIRE, and Wendy Kaminer, say that the Senate reauthorization would effectively result in a form of double jeopardy for accused students. Moreover, they point out, it would implicitly reinforce Education Department "guidance" demanding that colleges water down due process protections in campus disciplinary proceedings (a demand criticized by lawyers like Robert Smith, Jennifer Braceras, Ilya Shapiro, and Harvey Silverglate; leading law professor and former University of Chicago law dean Richard Epstein; the American Association of University Professors; and many civil libertarians and journalists. I am a former Education Department attorney who practiced education law for years, and I discussed why the Education Department's guidance was legally unjustified under Title IX and federal court rulings here, here, here, here, here, and here).
One provision they do not address, but which Senator Grassley understandably objects to, is a provision in the VAWA reauthorization that would subject non-Indians to Indian tribal courts in domestic violence cases. Historically, Indian tribal courts have only had jurisdiction over members of their own tribe. Moreover, defendants in tribal courts are not constitutionally entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, unlike state or federal courts (see Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez ) -- although tribal courts have, in theory, been subjected to some of the strictures of the Bill of Rights pursuant to the Indian Civil Rights Act. As lawyer John Hinderaker notes, courts have ruled "that tribal governments are not bound by the Constitution's First, Fifth, or Fourteenth Amendments."
Federal judges have lamented the bias shown by some Indian tribal courts against non-Indians, as in cases where Indian tribal courts imposed hundreds of millions of dollars in damages on railroads over personal injury cases resulting from railroad tracks running through reservations that ordinarily would lead to damages only in the low thousands, suggesting a flagrant violation of Supreme Court decisions like BMW v. Gore. (See Judge Andrew Kleinfeld's dissent in Burlington Northern Railroad Co. v. Red Wolf, dealing with a $250 million judgment imposed on a railroad by a tribal court.) Given that courts sometimes issue unfounded domestic violence sanctions on people who don't even live in their jurisdiction -- as was illustrated by a New Mexico judge's restraining order erroneously issued against David Letterman after a local woman falsely accused him of harassing her across the country through his TV show -- giving a tribal court jurisdiction over outsiders raises serious questions of due process and jurisdictional overreaching.
...These flaws in the statute may reflect lawmakers' reluctance to scrutinize its provisions due to its crowd-pleasing name (no one wants to be perceived as soft on criminals who commit "violence against women"). Many counterproductive laws come with appealing names that are designed to shut down debate and prevent careful evaluation of their provisions -- like laws named after dead children. Veteran civil-liberties lawyer and former ACLU board member Harvey Silverglate says that "Any time you have a statute named after a victim, it's not a good law." "In order to get it passed, you have to depend on sympathy for somebody rather than seeking to remedy a real problem in the system."
Some have argued that VAWA promotes inflexible mandatory arrest and prosecution policies that backfire on women by taking away their ability to obtain police assistance in situations where the victim does not want a formal prosecution because it could result in job losses or other economic injuries.
What about violence against men? (As I wrote in a column, "in 2005, 513 women in the U.S. were murdered by 'boyfriends' (men they were dating but not married to) and 164 men were murdered by 'girlfriends.' (And yes, men, too, are victims of domestic violence, much of which goes unreported.)"
What about shelters that allow men who are victims of domestic violence? Nevermind! Gotta see to it that men have their due process rights removed post-haste -- anything that serves that is good. Attorney Lisa Scott writes:
VAWA is not about stopping violence. It is about greedy special interests slopping at the federal trough, perpetuating gender supremacy for women. If proponents were truly concerned about helping victims, they would demand that all intervention and funding be gender neutral and gender inclusive.
The existence of male victims threatens gender feminists because it knocks the underpinnings out of their theory, that the "patriarchy" causes men to abuse women. The DV industry has succeeded in creating the "victimarchy." With VAWA in their corner, women win no matter what: victim or abuser, they can do no wrong.
Free Thrills At Amazon From Another Leonard
Free download this weekend -- a gripping thriller I couldn't put down, Voices of the Dead
My great grandfather, who immigrated to this country from Russia, didn't own a scrap yard like Harry, but he was in the same biz, picking up metal scrap and selling it, and sent my grandfather to college and med school at Wayne State. My grandfather became a family doctor. So, I guess you could say my family really came up out of trash.
The book is free, but the link goes through to credit my Advice Goddess account. If you download it, I get credit for it as a "purchase" even though the purchase is zero. The more downloads there are, the more likely my percentage of of Amazon purchases will go up to 7% or maybe even 7.5%.
But, it's a book I couldn't stop reading (even in the wee hours, when I was exhausted out of my mind and really wanted to go to sleep), and that's really why you should download it -- or buy the hard copy at this link
Here's Peter with Elmore from a lit conference Gregg and I and Peter attended with Elmore in Mantua, Italy. (Doesn't he look like he should be getting into a WWI bomber?)
Why Videotape The Savage Murder Of A Little Jewish Girl?
Caroline Glick writes about the bigger implications of the murder, by jihadist Mohamed Merah, of the three little French-Jewish schoolchildren and the young rabbi:
Why did he take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.
And he was surely correct.
Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations.
Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl's killers took of him before they chopped his head off.
The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.
Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators."
The exhibitionism common to all the men's behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.
More in the New York Post and way more at CIFwatch. And Islam's commands to commit violence here:
Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, but when every twelfth verse of Islam's holiest book either speaks to Allah's hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forced conversion, or subjugation, it's little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community - even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.
Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam's most respected philosophers, understood that "the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force", many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran's near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity - preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance - because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to learn that the evidence of the Quran and the bloody history of Islam are very much in contradiction to this.
Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the "culture", claiming that the father was merely following "the religion" and saying that the couple had to "discipline their daughter or lose respect." (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious "holy pilgrimage" to Mecca by the Saudi king - without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.
Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho...
If it's funny, post it here.
Congress Wants Your TSA Stories, They Say (For Monday's Hearing)
I just dropped everything I was doing and posted mine. From the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform/Republicans, on their Facebook page, seeking "travel experiences" with the TSA for a hearing on Monday, March 26:
ASK TSA LEADERSHIP: Have you had a "travel experience" with TSA? Would you like to know why it happened? Here's your chance. On Monday March 26, Oversight is teaming up with the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee to get you answers from TSA leadership. Post your TSA experiences and what you'd want to ask TSA leadership here, and we'll share/ask as many as we can during the hearing.
I have no illusions about this hearing. Here's what I posted on Facebook after I shared the link to the Committee's page:
I posted my story -- and the link to my wonderful, wonderful defense by my First Amendment Hero/Lawyer Marc Randazza. Please, post your stories of having your rights yanked away at TSA checkpoints for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I have no hope that anything will come of this meeting other than some lipservice from the TSA, but the more outrage that is expressed, the better chance we have of stopping the erosion of our civil liberties that I see on so many fronts these days. Don't just recede into your comfortable American life. Get uppity -- like our forefathers -- when somebody tells you to bend over so they can better violate your Fourth Amendment rights...and any others they can reach at the time.
Thanks, Jerry, for alerting me to this.
If You Marry A Woman Who Lacks The Most Rudimentary Math Skills, Don't Put Her On YouTube For It, Don't Tape While Driving
From Jalopnik:
Matt Hardigree posts at the Jalopnik link above:
The mathematically-challenged passenger is not actually the one who sucks here. Nor is she the idiot in this video.It's her jerk of a husband.
The woman in this video clearly doesn't grasp the simple concept of the number of miles travelled in an hour is what determines the speed, in miles per hour. It's a concept her husband could have explained to her in a few words.
Instead, he filmed her and put her on the Internet and framed it in a way that makes her look terrible. That's neither smart nor kind.
But the stupidest thing happening in this entire video is not the wife struggling to answer an easy question, it's the husband trying to film her while he drives.
A $17,000 Dumpster Ramp For The Handicapped
Patterico posts about the latest in regulatory insanity:
A reader from somewhere in Southern California writes to lament the regulatory roadblocks that are severely delaying the opening of his business:We submitted our building construction plans for the restaurant last year to the county. We had over fifty revisions including a request that the trash dumpster have an enclosure. We stated that the dumpster had a walled enclosure of six feet in height and that the dumpster was rain proof. The County stated that we must have a roof over the trash dumpster. We had the architect draw it up. The plans returned rejected.The County now rejected the dumpster enclosure because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. They required that we build a ramp with a locking gate at the top of the ramp for any wheelchair-bound employee. We argued that the public did not have access to the enclosure and we would not ask any employees in a wheelchair to throw out the trash. The County stated that the lack of a ramp would create a barrier to hiring a handicapped person.
The additional ramp with locking gate increased construction costs by $17,000 and it will take my employees longer to throw out the trash on a daily basis.
It sounds like an urban legend. But I have known the reader personally for well over a decade.
(I have known Patterico for about a decade, and have had long serious discussions with him about ethics and related subjects, and find him to be a person of sterling integrity.)
via Overlawyered
Jokey-Wokey
Put 'em here.
Are Straight People Born That Way?
Very interesting piece on TheAtlantic.com from Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern's med school, and a very interesting speaker and defender of good science who put on a panel at one of the evolutionary psych conferences I attended. Dreger writes:
Bailey does see some other evidence for an innate component to sexual orientation, at least in males. He points to cases where genetic males have been surgically and hormonally turned into girls in infancy, either because of childhood accidents that obliterated their penises or because they were born without penises and thus doctors subjected them to sex change. As adults, these folks are typically attracted to females. Says Bailey, "if you can't make a genetic male be attracted to other males by rearing him as a girl from early in life, how likely is any socialization theory of homosexuality or heterosexuality? I think not likely," at least for males.Raymond Hames, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Nebraska, has been working with his students to survey the preponderance of homosexuality in various cultures. His team finds that, in more cultures than Americans might guess, same-sex encounters take the form of adult males obligating boys to sexually pleasure them. Many children don't appear to enjoy this; they do it because it is required as a kind of rite of passage. Importantly for this discussion, these kinds of cultures don't seem to produce many men who are attracted to men. In other words, these early same-sex experiences don't seem to "turn" the boys gay.
While it has been asserted by some that abuse at the hands of men might incline girls to be more likely to ultimately become lesbians, the evidence for this claim is weak. Boston Children's Hospital public health researcher Bryn Austin and her colleagues have documented that lesbian and bisexual women report having suffered higher rates of physical and sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence, a finding borne out by other teams' investigations. But we can't show any kind of clear causal link between the experience of childhood abuse (sexual or physical) and adult sexual orientation.
For abuse to push children toward straight or gay orientations they might otherwise not have had, it would have to be the case that children's sexual orientations can be shifted in direction, intentionally or unintentionally, and the truth is that the evidence for that is thin at best.
In short, we don't really know where human sexual orientations come from yet. What we do know is that the evidence we have that sexual orientation includes an innate component doesn't seem to point to the existence of simple "gay genes" and "straight genes." The best scientific argument we have for the innateness of straightness is that evolution obviously would favor it. (Yup: The strongest empirical rationale religious conservatives could use for the idea that straight people are born that way would come from a branch of science they generally disregard.)
Loved her ending:
Finally, a related question: Given that we don't know if they are really all "born that way," should straight-identified people be allowed to marry?Personally, I think it makes sense to let straight-identified people marry, not because they were necessarily born that way, but because it seems silly, in this day and age, to get in the way of their desire to marry and/or to have sex with whatever consenting adults they wish. Given the challenges of attempting a lifetime partnership with a person who will be, on average, fundamentally sexually different from oneself, it seems the least we can do for straight people is to let them get married if they want.
When Stopping Drug Abuse Becomes Pain Patient Abuse
AEI's Dr. Scott Gottlieb (a former FDA deputy commissioner) has a piece in the WSJ, "The DEA's War On Pharmacies -- And Pain Patients." He contends that medical regulators should be put in charge of monitoring opiate consumption and abuse -- not the DEA.
Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration abruptly revoked the narcotics license held by the distributor Cardinal Health, preventing that firm from shipping prescription pain drugs to thousands of Florida pharmacies and hospitals. It's the latest tactic in the DEA's struggle to stem the illicit use of prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin.The agency is going after professed "chokepoints" in the drug-supply system, including pharmacies and, now, drug distributors.
This approach is burdening a lot of innocent patients, including those with legitimate prescriptions who may be profiled at the pharmacy counter and turned away. Others have in effect lost access to care, because their doctors became too wary to prescribe what their patients need. But the DEA tactics aren't stemming the illegal activity.
...The DEA's strategy is having its intended effect. Drug distributors have grown wary about whom they sell to. Cardinal has suspended sales to hundreds of pharmacies that it deems "suspicious," even those in good standing that retain their DEA license to sell narcotics. It's just too bad if a pharmacy is located close to a hospital or serves a nursing home, where it might see a higher volume of scripts for pain pills. Pharmacies, in turn, are closely scrutinizing which prescriptions they will fill, making things like baggy pants and a tattoo a liability if you need medicine.
...The problem is, the DEA may be the wrong enforcer here. It's very difficult to separate appropriate use from illicit use with law-enforcement tools alone because much of the illegal diversion starts in the same places where legitimate prescriptions are also satisfied--with a doctor who prescribes too casually, refilling obediently when patients "lose" their prescription; or the pharmacy that knowingly fills suspicious refills from the same patients. When authorities respond with law enforcement methods, important medical distinctions get lost.
He suggests Health and Human Services take over.
A good line of demarcation would be at the point of care. Doctors prescribing narcotics, drug distributors and pharmacies could come under the supervision of HHS. The department would also take responsibility for apportioning active ingredients to manufacturers of narcotics, educating doctors on proper prescribing, and investigating pharmacies and providers who appear to have gone rogue.
I see HHS becoming the DEA under a different name.
I suggest personal responsibility take over. I'm serious.
I could get heroin easily. Or all sorts of other drugs. I don't. I could also get drunk off my ass day and night. I don't.
Are you not getting drugged or drunk simply for lack of availability or might there be some other reason?
And are our drug laws and controls stopping people from getting illegal drugs -- or are they stopping people with prescriptions they're entitled to from getting the drugs they need -- or stopping people from getting the prescriptions they need (now that doctors need to be as or more concerned with doing time than patient care)?
Radley Balko on patients' suffering: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. Here's a quote from Part Three:
One Indiana pain patient who wrote to HuffPost tells a typical story. Faced with debilitating pain from spinal stenosis, she was told by local doctors she was displaying the drug seeking signs of an addict, and they refused to treat her. "I have never used an illegal substance, and seldom have a glass of wine- I've never had a beer in my life," she writes. She was finally able to find a pain specialist, but in California. She makes the trip every three months for the high-dose opioid therapy she says makes her life bearable. But the cost of flying to the west coast ever few months is taking a toll on her finances. "I have asked for help finding a pain management doctor closer to Indiana," she writes. "I have searched online. I cannot find any one willing, or qualified to take me. I am a Christian and I do not believe in taking my own life, but I pray for an answer before I have no way to survive. I am not alone. There are so many pain patients whose lives are a living hell -- waiting and praying to die."
Government is beautiful, huh?
Deals For Guys, Dolls, And Baby
For women, up to 40% off springwear; up to 50 percent off dresses, tops, jeans, blazers and jackets and intimatewear (including plus size and petites).
For men, $29.99 and under dress shirts for men; $39.99 and under sweaters; $29.99 and under pants (scroll down for the men's stuff).
And there's kidswear, too!
All at Amazon at this link
Public Vs. Private Barbershop
The difference is instructive. Douglas French at Mises' The Circle Bastiat posts on the difference:
The Senate and the House of Representatives each have a barbershop for member use. In 1994, the House barbershop was privatized by Republicans who had taken over control of the House that year for the first time in decades. The Senate shop has remained a government operation.Before it was turned into a private enterprise, the House shop employed 16 barbers, each of whom received federal pensions and benefits. Now the shop has three employees, one of which is part-time.
"We've gone through a lot of changes, with members going back to their districts on the weekends and fewer customers because of the extra security that the House has put up after 9/11, but we're all self-employed," long-time House barber Joe Quattrone says. "Money's not everything. I love coming to work every day. Would you rather go to a job you hated for $50,000 or one you liked for $40,000?"
The House shop actually turned a profit last year, despite occupying an inferior location in the Rayburn House Office Building, farther from the two adjoining House buildings than is the Senate's barbershop.
Meanwhile, the Senate Hair Care Services, the formal name for the Senate barbershop, with its 11 employees, required a $300,000 taxpayer bailout to keep its barber pole lighted, despite not having to pay the government a dime in rent.
Having the advantage of government subsidy, one might assume senators pay less for their haircuts and shaves than House members. Not hardly. While the Senate barbershop charges $23 for a trim with water but no shampoo and $20 for a shave, the House barbershop charges $17 and $10.
And remember, as one of the commenters noted, "There are only 100 Senators, but 435 Congress-critters."
Man Jailed For Not Putting Up Siding On House
From KSTP.com, he went to jail for siding code violations:
The story, from KTSP:
Mitch and his wife Jean say it all began back in 2007 when they received a letter from the city of Burnsville saying, in part, "you must complete the siding of your home.""We were in the process of finishing," Mitch insists. "This wasn't something that we were trying to avoid doing."
But in 2009 there were two more warning letters, and in 2010 yet another--this time requiring Faber to appear in court. Burnsville leaders provided 5 Eyewitness News with these 2010 photos of the Fabers' home as proof there was a problem.
"I was expecting maybe a $700 fine," Faber said. Instead he was given an ultimatum -- finish the siding or go to jail.
So Mitch returned to his house and he and Jean say they spent about $12,000 putting a stucco façade over the plywood exterior. They thought they were finally in compliance. They were wrong.
Faber was then taken into custody in November 2011 after Burnsville inspectors ruled the work was still not satisfactorily completed. A warrant for his arrest had been issued when, according to the city, Faber failed to turn himself in because the house was still not up to code. Faber is adamant it was. Regardless, what came next, he says, was absolutely uncalled for and humiliating.
"I'm walking around in a green and white jump suit, I had to shower in front of a sheriff, I was shackled, my wrists were handcuffed to my waist -- for siding."
...The Fabers point to what they call far more glaring code violations outside other houses in their neighborhood. They'd like to know why they were targeted and others weren't.
And yes, it's surely unsightly to have a house around you that has no covering on the plywood since 2007, as this one apparently did, but should we be throwing people in the slammer for it?
via Radley Balko
Hey, PETA Activists: Feel Free To Decline Any Medical Treatment Based On Animal Testing
Meredith Waldman writes at Nature.com that PETA activists are grounding primate flights -- threatening the supply of research monkeys to Western labs:
Each year, thousands of macaques and other monkeys are flown into Europe and North America to supply academic and industrial research labs -- more than 18,000 to the United States in 2011 alone. But in a campaign that could affect scientists across the West, the few major air carriers that still transport non-human primates are coming under unprecedented pressure to halt the practice.One key route under threat is from China, which last year shipped more than 70% of the research primates sent to the United States (see 'Up in the air'). On 14 March, animal breeders in China met with officials of China Southern Airlines to implore them to resume flights into Los Angeles International Airport, the largest US port of entry for research primates. Last August, China Southern cancelled a shipment from Guangzhou of 80 crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis) destined for Los Angeles, after a social media, e-mail and telephone campaign by pressure group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), based in Norfolk, Virginia. China Southern has not flown research primates into Los Angeles since then.
"This was part of our larger campaign to disrupt the flow of primates to US labs," says Justin Goodman, associate director of the laboratory investigations department at PETA in Washington DC.
...Breeding the animals in the United States instead would be problematic: infrastructure and labour costs are much higher than they are in Asia, and colonies are much more likely to become the targets of animal activists. And moving the animals by sea is a non-starter because of the deleterious effects of the six-week trans-Pacific journey on the animals' health.
...Tipu Aziz, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Oxford, UK, has used macaques to study Parkinson's disease. He believes that restricting transport of animals will not have the desired effect. "My gut feeling is that more and more scientists will go elsewhere to do primate research," he says. "I have no qualms about going abroad to do my work. There are quite a few countries that have good facilities: there are centres in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China."
Related editorial in Nature:
Scientists and their allies must, of course, continue to be open about the price animals pay in research. They must openly acknowledge, immediately correct and do everything they can to prevent lapses in the care of the animals in their charge. At the same time, scientists must make every effort to use lower animal, and non-animal, models where possible, as regulations already require. And alongside all of that, they must emphasize the tangible and compelling improvements to human life that animal research has made possible.Consider stroke, which affects some 795,000 people in the United States alone each year -- 1 person every 40 seconds -- at a cost in excess of US$40 billion. More than 1,000 experimental treatments aimed at protecting brains cells in acute stroke have been developed in cells and rodents; none has been effective in humans. So a possible advance in a paper published last month is significant (D. J. Cook et al. Nature 483, 213-217; 2012). Using macaques -- animals whose neuroanatomy, genetics and behaviour are far closer to humans than are those of rodents -- the study showed that a drug called a PSD-95 inhibitor reduced the volume of brain tissue killed by the stroke and significantly preserved neurological function. It has now moved into human trials, where early results are promising.
via @DrEades
Skyrocketing Healthcare Costs Under ObamaCare
Hurry, hurry...everybody get on the government dole! Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson writes in the WSJ that Obamacare's costs are soaring:
This would not be the first time a government program exceeded its projected cost. When Medicare was passed in 1965, for example, the federal government estimated it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Medicare actually cost $110 billion in 1990.In the case of ObamaCare, one of the principal sources of the lowball estimate used to justify the law is related to the insurance exchanges. The CBO originally estimated that one million Americans would lose their employer-sponsored care and be forced into the exchanges.
But a McKinsey & Co. study in June 2011 showed that 30%-50% of employers plan to stop offering health insurance to their employees once the health law is implemented in 2014. Last week the CBO breezily dismissed this and other studies on the ground that "it is doubtful that any survey conducted today could provide very accurate predictions of employers' future decisions."
As someone who purchased group health insurance for over 31 years, I fully understand why the McKinsey study is more credible than the CBO.
Why? Because the decision employers face under ObamaCare is straightforward: Do they pay $20,000 per year for family coverage, or do they pay the $2,000 penalty to the government?
It is not as if dropping health coverage will expose their employees to financial risk. They will thereby make employees eligible for huge subsidies in the health-care exchanges--$10,000 if their household income is $64,000 per year. In a competitive environment, ObamaCare provides the incentive for employers to drop coverage.
Nerdfight!
The headline from a story by Kyle Feldscher at AnnArbor.com (my college town):
"Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument"
Do speculate on the subject!
@walterolson
Comedy Central
Your jokes and smokes here.
Homeopathy's Effectiveness: No Evidence To Support It
Science-Based Medicine's Jann Bellamy lays out the deal on homeopathy (it's a highly effective cure for the problem of excess dollars in the wallet), quoting from a suit filed in 2010 by Gina Delarosa against one of the big manufacturers, the French company Boiron:
Ms. Delarosa alleged that she purchased Boiron's Children's Coldcalm, relying on Boiron's representations that it was effective in relieving sneezing, runny note, congestion, and other cold symptoms, but that it didn't work for her family....In the Complaint, Delarosa first hits hard on homeopathy itself, alleging that:
A Swiss government study conducted 110 placebo-controlled trials and found that homeopathy is no more effective than placebo.The American Medical Association and Great Britain's National Health Service stated that there is no scientific evidence to support the use of homeopathic treatments.
"Even homeopathy's own supporters, such as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, admit that '[t]here is [] no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment.'" [Empahsis added.]
(And here I've been thinking all this time that only hard-core SBM types and their fellow travelers noticed NCCAM's pro-CAM stance.)
Ms. Delarosa then hones in on Coldcalm itself, alleging:
The homeopathic ingredients in Children's Coldcam range from various flowers, vegetables, insects, metals, and poison. In order not to poison a user, the dilutions . . . are claimed to be up to 3C and 6C.. . . a 6C dilution gives one part ingredient to 1 trillion parts of the solution. Dilutions to this extent leave the solution with no trace of the original ingredient.
. . . The idea that a substance could be completely physically lacking and still be effective violates fundamental principles of science. . . . and runs contrary to dose-response relationship established by pharmacology."
Thus, Ms. Delarosa alleges Boiron's representations, made on both the package and in other advertising, that Children's Coldcalm relieves numerous cold symptoms are false, misleading, contrary to established medical authority, and constitute unfair and deceptive business practices.
Of course, homeopathy gullibles are sure to pop up in the comments to take a strike at "big pharma" to defend their beloved useless "medicine." Bellamy takes note of Boiron's sales: $520,000,000 in 2011.
Me? I prefer Big Pharma, which produces drugs that often work, over Big Useless!
via @gorskon
No Way To Run A Newspaper
The LA Times' Subscriber Services breaks California laws on recording people without their consent by calling me -- at my home! -- and announcing that they're recording me.
Amy, operator #Y216, called me, and announced, "We are recording this call for quality purposes..."
No. No, no, no.
It's a two-party consent state. You need to ask for my consent, and I didn't give it, don't give it, and won't give it.
If they taped me anyway, they're liable for fines and penalties:
632. (a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment. If the person has previously been convicted of a violation of this section or Section 631, 632.5, 632.6, 632.7, or 636, the person shall be punished by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.(b) The term "person" includes an individual, business association, partnership, corporation, limited liability company, or other legal entity, and an individual acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of any government or subdivision thereof, whether federal, state, or local, but excludes an individual known by all parties to a confidential communication to be overhearing or recording the communication.
(c) The term "confidential communication" includes any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.
Who does business like this? Is everyone they call okay with this? If so, why? Is it more sheeple-like behavior like we're seeing at the airports?
Remembering Cathy Seipp
Cathy Seipp (front) with our friend Emmanuelle Richard in the Chateau Marmont Pool.
Jackie Danicki put together a wonderful Pinterest bulletin board of photos and memories of our friend Cathy, who died way too soon. Lung cancer took her, five years ago, and I miss her a lot. Here's a bit from a note I sent to her daughter, Maia Lazar the other day.
She was my first friend in LA and she was largely responsible for how much LA felt like home to me -- and now is home like no place ever has been. All those people who were messaging (about posting memories of her) I see as basically gifts (to me) from your mom, thanks to how she created this incredible circle of people, and was utterly unsnobby about who got to be in it, providing you weren't dull or an idiot. I mean, Luke Ford! Case in point!
I'm talking about how so many of my friends and people I know and care about are friends I met through Cathy -- Nancy Rommelmann, Kate Coe, Jackie Danicki, Sandra Tsing Loh, Hillary Johnson, Kerry Madden Lunsford, Irene Lacher, and so many more.
And Luke Ford is the crazy Australian turned crazy American Orthodox Jew. Again, for Cathy, you just had to be interesting.
To get to know Cathy, read her work, which was just crackling smart and funny. It's here, at the site her daughter made after her death.
(A common thing friends of hers and I say when there's some news story out that no pundit can quite do justice to: "Wish Cathy were alive to write about that.")
Cathy appears in my next book (the last one was in memory of her, and I wrote a few chapters of it at her house while she was sick). The chapter where she appears in the next book starts out with this great (and very Cathy quote from her):
I just want to let everyone know that having cancer hasn't made me a better person.
Moving Back In With Mommy And Daddy
A girl moves back home after college, goes for the plumb jobs, merely writing letters to try to land them, and then just hangs out all day at home, reorganizing her parents' CDs and taking grandma to the movies. 23-year-old Sara Barbour writes in the LA Times:
It wasn't that I'd given up on starting my own life. Every morning at 7 I dutifully staked out my spot at the kitchen table, sifting through job postings and honing my resume. The optimism with which I began my job search was -- to my now appropriately jaded self -- staggering. My applications ran the gamut from Green For All to Google. I prided myself on cover letters that used neat little turns of phrase like "excellent and intuitive" and "positive and professional." I checked my Gmail constantly, confident in my ability to make an impression.I heard back from no one.
Slowly it began to dawn on me that living at home was, perhaps, going to be a long-term thing. The "quick stopover" fantasy I'd indulged over the holidays was harder to maintain when my sister went back to school. Instead of brightly telling people I'd be home for "maybe a couple more weeks," I mumbled incoherently and changed the subject. I got a gym membership. The neighbors recognized me. I stopped buying shoes with money from "the job I'd have soon."
And then, strangely, I started to like living at home. I kept up the applications, but I also began working part time for a local filmmaker. I started volunteering at KCRW, the public radio station that had become my closest companion. I cooked, I flossed daily, I organized my parents' CDs. And when no one else was home (on average, six to eight hours a day) I cranked up the stereo and listened to a song called "Happiness" on repeat.
A lucky thing she doesn't have to go get a real job at Starbucks or in retail -- or is it?
Thought Crimes
As Marc J. Randazza posts, "I hate 'hate crimes.'"
It was at Randazza's blog, The Legal Satyricon, that I found this link to Rogier's blog item at Nobody's Business. Rogier echoes my views -- on gay rights and hate crimes -- as he writes about hate crimes, vis a vis the Tyler Clementi case:
This blog is a friend of equal rights, and of marriage equality. I have written multiple posts and a newspaper editorial stating my position loudly and clearly.But I don't think I will ever see eye to eye with people, of any sexual orientation, who believe that harsh words and actions directed at gay/lesbian/transgender folk must be punished extra severely. You want equality? I'll stand with you, and fight alongside you. But the moment you begin arguing that your people are more equal than other people -- well, excuse me while I spin on a dime, and become your implacable foe. Even Animal Farm-reading eighth-graders might understand why I feel that way.
...Being greatly upset does not give you the higher moral ground. It does not earn you automatic respect. It's exactly the opposite for me: Play the "I'm really upset" card as if it means anything -- an attempted plea for sympathy usually made by hypocrites and weasels -- and you will earn my enmity and scorn. Claiming that intemperate words can hurt just as much as bullets or blades is, after all, the same lame "argument" that religious crybabies of various stripes love making. Improbably enough, they believe that they somehow have the right not to have their feelings hurt.
...THOUGHT EXPERIMENT NUMBER ONE: Let's say that Clementi never jumped off that bridge, but everything else about the case remains the same. Do you believe that Ravi would have even been prosecuted for what he did, much less convicted by a jury and facing ten years in jail? More to the point: If you'd been on that jury, and Tyler Clementi was alive and appearing in court as the plaintiff, would you have felt have compelled to put Ravi behind bars for up to a decade? I doubt it. Remember, Ravi's awful behavior would still have been the same. But few people would probably choose to convict him in the absence of a corpse.
What does that tell us? It says that his actions only amount to a crime when there are certain outcomes that he had no control over. (It's not like he handed Clementi a gun and advised him to shoot himself. And even if he had, that final deed would still be Clementi's choice, and no one else's.)
...I just cannot be comfortable with a legal system that punishes thought crime. Did Ravi commit a heinous invasion of privacy? Yes, and it deserves our condemnation, even our anger. But a privacy invasion is all I see Ravi being legally guilty of. I say "legally" because, yup, the guy is a first-class douche nozzle. But a criminal? Hardly.
Laugh Riot
Think of this as a very dispersed flash mob. Your immature humor below. (Mine's through this blog.)
Words Of Wisdom
Where you can stick that colonoscopy thingie if you don't walk into the operating room with a hypodermic of fentanyl. From yesterday's mini ha ha:
Rand Corp. study deems "expensive sedation during colonoscopy 'a luxury...'"Blog commenter Jim P: "I'm not Katie Couric and I don't want to be awake when you shove a 27 foot fiber cable up my ass."
A Bunch Of Idiots Are Washing And Rewashing The Roads In Florida
@MPetrie tweeted this to me -- a piece by Bobby Eberle at GOPUSA showing that time-wasting fools come in all denominations, including non-:
Frustrated by the fact that religious leaders blessed a portion of highway in Florida, a group of atheists decided to "unbless" the road. Armed with scrubbers and a large container of "unholy" water, the group sought to wash away the work done by the Polk County organization known as Polk Under Prayer.
Want to do some good? I'm writing day and night. Come wash my house and then do my car. Feel free to bless it or unbless it -- I really don't care as long as you don't leave streaks on the windshield.
Doghouses Are Evil, And Crating Your Dog Has Become A Crime
Alex Ballingall writes for Macleans about the shift from dogs being working animals to surrogate children, and how societal attitudes have changed to where previously accepted practices like crating and using doghouses are now considered pet abuse.
Ballingall opens his piece with the story of Nova Scotia man, Robbie Fowler, who lives out in the country. He has two golden retriever mixed breeds living on chains in the yard. They have a doghouse, but "don't even go in...half the time," says Fowler. "What they are is hunting dogs":
That's why Fowler keeps Buddy and Magnum on chains about 15 feet long. These are attached to "big long-run ropes" that Fowler says allow Buddy and Magnum to move up and down the yard while preventing them from straying out to the road and getting hit by a car. "They run around and get plenty of exercise," says Fowler.One day in February, a cruelty investigator from the SPCA turned up at Fowler's door. Animal rights activists in the area have been filing complaints against Fowler for more than a year, telling authorities that the way he keeps his dogs is causing them to suffer social isolation and confinement. The investigator surveyed Fowler's yard, taking note of the run ropes and the insulated doghouse with a shingle roof that Fowler built for Buddy and Magnum. "He said: 'Your dogs cannot get tangled up, they have a good long run, they have a nice house. I don't know what they're calling for,' " Fowler recalls. The investigator left after concluding Buddy and Magnum were well-fed and cared for.
Over the years, the boundary between animal cruelty and kindness has moved, and some of us didn't even notice. The days when dogs were sentries first and pets second are long gone. Even the junkyard dog has largely disappeared, replaced by video surveillance technology. Now we buy them organic food, seatbelts for the car, orthopaedic beds for the house, and take them to physiotherapists when they get arthritis. And the age-old practice of tying a dog up in the backyard or leaving it in a crate to housebreak it are as morally abhorrent to some as putting a child on a halter or keeping it in a playpen all day.
Bloomberg Food-Polices The Homeless
He's making shelters refuse food donations vis a vis his wrong and unscientifically based ideas on what's healthy.
Via @RadleyBalko, Jeff Stier writes in the New York Post:
So much for serving the homeless.The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term "food police" to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city's homeless.
In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can't assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.For over a decade, Glenn Richter and his wife, Lenore, have led a team of food-delivery volunteers from Ohab Zedek, the Upper West Side Orthodox congregation.
They've brought freshly cooked, nutrient-rich surplus foods from synagogue events to homeless facilities in the neighborhood. (Disclosure: I know the food is so tasty because I've eaten it -- I'm an OZ member.) The practice of donating such surplus food to homeless shelters is common among houses of worship in the city.
DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond says the ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg's emphasis on improving nutrition for all New Yorkers. A new interagency document controls what can be served at facilities -- dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations.
The city also cites food-safety issues with donations, but it's clear that the real driver behind the ban is the Bloomberg dietary diktats.
...Says Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Ohav Zedek, "Jews have been eating chulent and kugel for a long time, and somehow we've managed to live long and healthy lives. All we want to do is to continue sharing these bounties with our neighbors."
French Child-Rearing, By Paul Rudnick
Rudnick writes in the New Yorker:
Americans are far too concerned with a child's self-esteem and accomplishments. The French woman knows that to build a child's inner strength it is best either to completely ignore the child or to belittle him. As I was giving birth to my daughter, I refused to put down my copy of French Vogue. When it was over, I turned to my husband and remarked, "I have just had an unusually large bowel movement that will never be as attractive as me." During my son's thirteenth-birthday party, I ordered him to remove all his clothing, and I told the assembled guests, "You see? That is why we raised him as a girl." My wisdom can be traced to the influence of my own mother. When I was five years old, I asked her, "What is love?" She took my small, flowerlike face in her slender hands and replied, "What do I look like, Yoda?"
The Eventual Recovery? Credit The American People
Janet Daley writes in the Telegraph/UK that it is not government that brings about revival in America but the American people:
Even Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal has finally been demythologised. All those works projects and federal programmes may have done something for national morale, but the hard economic evidence shows that the worst effects of the 1929 crash had begun to abate under Herbert Hoover, and that the Great Depression (which was arguably prolonged by FDR's policies) did not properly end until the US entered the Second World War.The secret of the resilience of America's economic life is that its population consists of people with an inextinguishable determination to get on in life. ...It is worth repeating when circumstances require - of the fact that almost everybody now living in the US either is, or is descended from, somebody who made a conscious decision to go there.
The enormous, terrifying risk that was involved in this act, the personal courage and desperation that it involved, was directly to do with fear of oppression or persecution by the state. You went to America because you wanted to escape from the predations of overly powerful governments or to make your own way out of hopeless poverty. The obvious exceptions to this - the descendants of African slaves - serve to support the case: the cruelty of their fate and the social problems to which it led were exacerbated by being in a country where self-determination was supposed to be the chief object of life.
Americans see economic freedom as key to this, because they believe that personal prosperity is the guarantor of individual liberty. Their working and "blue collar" lower middle classes are not at all - and this is what I really hope that George (Osborne) understands - like the British equivalents. And, for that matter, their upper middle classes aren't much like the British ones either.
From my own entirely subjective, uncorroborated observation as someone who grew up in the US but has lived most of her adult life in Britain, I would say that the American working class was quite like the German one (hard-working, thrifty, self-reliant) and that its intellectual elite was more like the French (abstract, idealistic and passionate) than the empirical, pragmatic English.
When the US economy springs to life again, it will be because the people would not let it die. There will be countless citizens working two jobs, day and night, to get themselves and their families through the worst, and to put their kids through college. Agitation for welfare support and government help will come, not from proletarians like "Joe the Plumber" who became a national legend in 2008 because he wanted the government to get off his back and let him grow his business, but from cosmopolitan intellectuals who want to import European-style paternalism and class guilt which go back a long way before modern capitalism.
Mini Ha Ha
Put today's here.
People Used To Work Their Way Through College
It isn't capitalism that causes crushing student debt:
Nick Sorrentino explains at Against Crony Capitalism:
Huge sums of federal (fiat) money have poured into the system and as such, just like during the housing bubble, have sent prices (tuition) skyward.Somebody is making money off of your indentured servitude.
Get The Podcast! Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Michael Mills, Why Women Shouldn't Ask Men On Dates And Other Sex-Based Differences
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in psychology and research -- all with really compelling things to say about how to be smarter in being human.
Last night was a fascinating show with Loyola evolutionary psychology professor Dr. Michael Mills, who explained a lot about the ways we're biologically and psychologically different, and the ways that should guide or mating and dating behavior.
Listen at the link or download (click "Play in your default player"):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/19/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Get the fantastic podcast from last week: Dr. Frederick Woolverton's brilliantly unconventional insights on overcoming addiction. Fascinating and moving, even if you aren't hooked on anything.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/12/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Here's the terrific book he co-authored with Susan Shapiro: Unhooked: How to Quit Anything
TSA: Screen Thyself
If only they were as careful vetting their own hires off pizza boxes as they were at pawing toddlers as suspected Al Qaeda terrorists!
Philip Messing and Josh Margolin write in the NY Post:
A TSA screener at Newark Airport was recently busted in a major heroin den near her workplace -- still wearing her spiffy, government-issued uniform, authorities said.Samirah Saunders, 22, and two other women were collared in the March 6 raid at 86 Wainwright St. in Newark, just around the corner from an elementary school and a spot where cops found a load of ready-for-street-sale heroin, according to sources and court records.
...She's accused of helping to distribute the 1,400 packets of heroin, stamped "Green Lantern" and "P Dope" in green ink, confiscated from the apartment, according to court records.
The fact that the pad was near a school resulted in Saunders' being hit with an additional felony charge of possessing or distributing heroin within 1,000 feet of a school.
In her mug shot, a somber Saunders was still wearing her blue TSA uniform blouse, adorned with black epaulets.
Check out her mugshot and come hither Twitter photo at Travel Underground.
Via Lisa Simeone
Be My Gas Genie
Blogcomments-source me, baby!
I need your gas-buying advice. Gas prices are going up, but will they be coming down?
I have a 2004 Honda Insight hybrid with 20,000 miles on it (In other words, I don't drive much!) When I am driving, I only go about three to five miles each way and I only do that maybe four times a week. So, I drive mayyyybe 40 miles a week.
I get between 45-65 mpg hwy, and more like 38-45 in the city traffic I'm typically stuck in. Right now, I have half a tank -- and I live in Southern California, and can buy my gas at Costco.
So...your advice?
Buy gas? Wait?
If I should wait, how long -- and based on what?
Your assistance is much-appreciated.
How Govt. Meddling In Housing Markets Damages Neighborhoods
Vincent Carroll writes for the Denver Post of former state senator Steve Ward's attempt to buy a property in foreclosure, only to be thwarted by a government scheme to "stabilize" neighborhoods:
"The plan was to submit an offer as soon as the property hit the market," Ward told me. "I was working directly with the listing agent. When I called this morning, I was informed that the bank will make it available to a non-profit organizations first. By 'non-profit,' read some quasi-government entity like a housing authority."Now Ward was on a roll.
"If you want to stabilize prices in a neighborhood," he declared, "let things sell for what the market will allow. And sell to people who have a profit motive to see prices rise, helping all those who have been holding on ... waiting for their values to recover so they can sell, move up, or move on to another job in another place."
I've known Ward since way back when he was mayor of Glendale in the early 1990s, and he's as blunt and sardonic as a retired Marine colonel -- which, come to think of it, he is, too. But he also shares an appreciation of the absurd. And what he finds absurd today is government's continued intervention in housing markets that most of all just need it to back off so they can find their bottom and revive.
..."I bought a condo in 1986 for $51,000," Ward told me -- in other words, just before that decade's crash. "A year later a friend bought an identical place for $25,000. Ten years later I sold mine for $110,000."
Given time, markets work -- if, as Ward says, we "let the pony run."
via @ariarmstrong
Government Is NOT Good, Will NOT Protect You
Or the truth, justice, or much of anything good. Bureaucracy's foremost job is perpetuating itself. Don't forget that.
Via @radleybalko, the DOJ wanted to pay just $5K a year to a man who was wrongly jailed. Scott Gunnerson writes at USAToday that they ended up paying him $140K, which still seems very low to me for three years of having your freedom robbed from you via fraudulent evidence:
Lyons, whose case was documented in a 2010 USA TODAY investigation of misconduct by federal prosecutors, was arrested in 2000 on drug and counterfeit merchandise charges. He was found guilty the following year, based mostly on the testimony of convicted felons.A federal judge threw out the charges in 2004, blasting prosecutors for a "protracted course of misconduct" that "caused extraordinary prejudice to Lyons, exhibited disregard of the Government's duties, and demonstrated contempt for this court."
In 2010, U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell took the unusual step of declaring that Lyons was actually innocent, partly because "the most damning testimony against Lyons had come from people who had been allowed, if not encouraged, to lie under oath."
Your Lowbrow Humor In This Space
Post away! (Do your best to rival my lowbrow humor.)
Baby Bargain Mondays
Of course, the first thing I thought of is that Amazon is now selling babies at a cut rate, but they just have special sales on baby and kid things on Mondays. Here's the link
Other top bargains
TSA Nabs Suspected Al Qaeda Terrorist At O'Hare: Toddler In A Wheelchair
Does the removal, by our government, of our civil liberties in the name of "security" get any more disgusting?
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Michael Mills On Why Women Shouldn't Ask Men Out On Dates And Other Sex-Based Differences
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in psychology and research -- all with really compelling things to say about how to be smarter in being human.
Tonight, Sunday March 18, 7-8pm Pacific/10-11pm Eastern, my guest is Loyola evolutionary psychology professor Dr. Michael Mills. He'll be talking about how we're biologically and psychologically different and the ways that should be a guide for our mating and dating behavior. His Psychology Today blog is The How And Why of Sex Differences.
Listen live at this link or download after the show (click "Play in your default player"). And do call in with your love, sex, dating and relationships questions when the show is live -- 347-326-9761:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/19/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Get the fantastic podcast from last week: Dr. Frederick Woolverton's brilliantly unconventional insights on overcoming addiction. Fascinating and moving, even if you aren't hooked on anything.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/12/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Please Make Lewd And Immature Jokes And Wisecracks Here
And I mean "lewd and immature" in the nicest of ways.
Per Crid's "(Petition: Amy should do one joke/photo post per day so people will have a place to unload stuff like this without interrupting her topic flow. Sign below:)"
No need to sign. Just post below.
McCain (With A Side Of Goldwater) On What Dumbasses The Republicans Are Being
At TPM, Sahil Kapur writes:
Republicans need to "get off" the issue of contraception and "fix" the perception that the party has spurned women, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) declared Sunday.The party's 2008 standard-bearer, now a Mitt Romney surrogate, was asked by David Gregory on NBC's Meet The Press whether he thinks that "there is something of a war on women among Republicans."
"I think we have to fix that," McCain said. "I think that there is a perception out there, because of the way that this whole contraception issue played out. We need to get off of that issue, in my view. I think we ought to respect the right of women to make choices in their lives, and make that clear, and get back on to what the American people really care about: jobs and the economy."
Goldwater on religion and Republicans, from a webpage on "Barry Goldwater vs. the Religious Right":
Goldwater was ... deeply worried about the Religious Right's long-term impact on his beloved GOP. "If they succeed in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet," he told U.S. News & World Report in 1994, "they could do us in." In an interview with The Post that same year, Goldwater observed, "When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."
Occupy The Varicose Veiny
reason writer Veronique de Rugy, on NRO, has a better suggestion for the Occupy Wall Street protesters: Occupy the AARP:
My theory is that while they are right that some groups have more political power than others and right to think in terms of class warfare, they are mistaken to construe the lines only in stark economic terms (the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent.) There's another war -- much more important in my view -- that pits one class against another and is fully the result of specific government policies: the systematic transfer of wealth from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy....As you can see, in 1970, spending on Social Security and Medicare was one-fifth percent of the budget (blue portion). This portion has since grown to nearly 37 percent of the budget in 2010. By 2030, half of the entire budget will be consumed by payments for senior citizens.
...According to the Pew Research Center, "In 2009, the typical household headed by an adult 65 or older had $170,494 in net worth, compared with just $3,662 for the typical household headed by an adult younger than 35," and "the current gap is by far the largest since the Census Bureau began collecting these data in 1984. Back then, the age-based wealth gap was 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1."
This data is evidence that economist Scott Sumner is right (again) about the fact that income often is a misleading measure, which results in the adoption of inefficient policy measures. In this case, the focus on income data leads one to conclude that the elderly are in need of assistance. A focus on consumption data shows that some are but most aren't.
How Rosy Is Home-Schooling?
Kristin Rawls writes on AlterNet of the gross educational neglect of some home-schooled children -- especially those of religious Christians with vast families who are pushed to home-school no matter what...even if they aren't qualified:
I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian homeschooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian homeschoolers, some of whom we would now consider "Quiverfull" families: homeschooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to "trust God" with matters related to procreation.Though I fell out of touch with my homeschooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don't merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about homeschoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.
Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies - which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries - took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn't able to devote enough time and energy to homeschooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, "allowed us to get away with some really shoddy homeschooling for a lot of years."
"I'll admit it," she confesses. "Because I was so overwhelmed with my life... It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn't take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old."
At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, "If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them."
The implication, she says, was that, "if they're not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It's not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn't able to keep up anyway." This kind of rhetoric, Garrison notes, provided a "high-minded justification for educational neglect. I would not have gotten away with that if I'd had to get my kids tested every year."
Over time, Garrison lost faith in her fundamentalist ideology and became aware that her children's education was being neglected. Eventually all but one of her six younger children ended up entering and excelling in the public school system.
...Of course there are parents who are qualified to teach their children at home, and who do an excellent job of it. And there are children who excel in homeschooling environments. These families may well constitute a majority of homeschoolers. But this does not mean that all children do so well, and just as public schools are obligated to educate children who fall behind, so are parents who opt out of the system.
The Die Of The Potato
Hilarious, from @Greenpointless, on Twitter:
"How can people eat Irish food willingly? I strongly suspect the potato blights were in fact mass potato suicides."
What Role Did Religion's Promotion Of Hatred Of Gays Play In Tyler Clementi's Suicide?
Brent Childress writes in the WaPo about why Tyler Clementi might have been more prone to suicide due to the religious views on gayness that he was raised with:
Grace Church of Ridgewood, New Jersey, is the church that Tyler Clementi attended with his family. It was not an affirming and welcoming place for a young person processing a same-sex sexual orientation, according to some pastors in that community. The church is a member of the Willow Creek Association, a group of churches headed by Bill Hybels, who as recently as last year said that God designed sexual intimacy to be between a man and a woman in marriage and anything outside of that is sexual impurity in God's eyes. The gay youth hears in those words that they are dirty, unclean and something for which they should be ashamed.Molly Wei, the co-defendant in the case who has been granted immunity, is described as a "sister in Christ" to Tyler and other Christians by Rev. Clarke Olson-Smith, a pastor at All Saints Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa, who previously served as pastor at St. Stephen Lutheran Church in South Plainfield, New Jersey. It is not hard to understand why Molly felt may have felt justified in shaming Tyler by sharing the video with others - particularly if she like many others has been taught that same-sex intimacy is worthy of such shame in the eyes of God.
In an October 2010 article posted on a church blog at St. Stephen Church, Olson-Smith wrote "In the congregation Tyler grew up in and his parents still belong to, there was no question. To be gay was to be cut off from God."
...After five years of speaking with LGBT youth and their parents across this country, I believe that it was this perspective that likely caused Tyler's mother to react in a way that her son perceived to be "totally rejecting" him - as he penned in a text message - when he came out to her before going off to college. There can be no doubt that Mrs. Clementi loved her son unconditionally. But Tyler didn't hear the unconditional part and I suspect that is because he knew what his mother had been taught by the church.
Immunity can no longer be given to misguided church teaching's bias and intimidation toward gay and lesbian youth and families. If we do, there will be more stories about a precious life being senselessly ended and more devastation brought upon their parents and families.
By the way, I have read a lot about this case because I put it in the Internet chapter of my next book, which I wrote this Fall, and I think this is true (from the second WaPo link):
Ravi's lawyers had argued at the trial that the college freshman was not motivated by any hostility toward gays and that his actions were just those of an immature "kid."
Also, via Marc J. Randazza, Elie Mystal writes at Above The Law:
Let's break down what the jurors did with Count 4, 2nd Degree Bias Intimidation. Once they find Ravi guilty of invasion of privacy, they can find him guilty of bias intimidation. But look at what the jurors did:• Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: ACQUITTED• Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate M.B. because of sexual orientation: ACQUITTED
• Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
• Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause M.B. to be intimidated, because of sexual orientation: ACQUITTED
• Invasion of Privacy, under circumstances that caused Tyler Clementi to be intimidated, and considering the manner in which the offense was committed, Clementi reasonably believed that he was selected to be the target of the offense because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
So, the jury believed that Ravi did not invade Clementi's privacy for the purpose of intimidating Clementi over his sexual orientation. But they thought that Ravi should have known that Clementi would feel intimidated, and that Clementi believed he was intimidated, and so Ravi is guilty and going to jail.
Is that how we want our hate crime laws to work? Any time we feel we're being singled out because of our race, religion, or sexual orientation, we're victims of a hate crime, even if we're not being singled out because of our race, religion, or orientation? We've moved beyond punishing what is in a person's heart, and moved straight to punishing an assailant for what's in his victim's heart.
I'm with Mystal on the ludicrousness and wrongness of this.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. I'm a little wiped out. Posted a couple of blog items below, but I'll post more on Saturday once I've had a little sleep.
TSA: Grope And Pillage
Great graphic on the vast moneysuck in the name of "security" (used with permission):
Created by: OnlineCriminalJusticeDegree.com
Enemies Of The Constitution
Those would be Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, along with Robin Morgan -- the three of whom are cofounders of the "Women's Media Center," and advocate outright censorship. (Sorry, Stalinistas, even offensive speech must remain free.) As Ari Armstrong writes on The Objective Standard:
They claim that Limbaugh sometimes resorts to "degrading language" and "hate speech" (as if nobody on the left ever did that), and therefore his radio program should be forcibly shut down by the government.What of Limbaugh's right to freedom of speech? That doesn't matter, the authors argue, because the radio "spectrum is a scarce government resource," properly licensed by the FCC for use "in the public interest." Limbaugh is "constitutionally entitled to his opinions," they write, "but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people's airways."
Attorney Eugene Volokh points out that the Supreme Court does recognize First Amendment protections on the radio; "the government may not suppress speech based on its viewpoint, even if the speech is seen as using 'government resource[s],'" he writes.
But the fundamental issue goes deeper than Supreme Court rulings. This case illustrates the danger of the federal government abnegating its moral and constitutional responsibility to recognize and protect property rights in radio frequencies. Instead of upholding property rights in this sphere, the government controls the radio waves, and the bureaucrats of the FCC serve as censors, granting and revoking permissions as they choose. As a consequence, radio broadcasts--properly a matter of free association between station owners, hosts, advertisers, and listeners--become targets of political pressure.
My First Amendment lawyer Marc J. Randazza's post from the other day on Limbaugh and free speech.
A Patient's Right To Be Killed: Some Call It Murder; I Call It Mercy
I guess today's become Euthanasia Debate Friday here at Advice Goddess Blog. Allison Pearson writes in the Telegraph/UK of a man whose stroke left him with "locked-in syndrome," and who now wants to persuade England's High Court to let someone kill him. For him (and I concur), this is mercy not murder:
What kind of person puts cancer at the top of their wish list? Maybe a parent who has watched their child suffering and has begged God to give the disease to them. Other than that you would have to be seriously warped, mad even, to choose a brutal, life-threatening illness. Yet Tony Nicklinson says he wants to get cancer. Cancer is Tony's best hope, unless he can persuade the High Court to let someone kill him and call it mercy not murder.Mr Nicklinson, a 53-year-old father of two from Wiltshire has "locked-in syndrome". Paralysed from the neck down after suffering a stroke in Athens six years ago, the former civil engineer is as helpless as a baby, though unlike a baby he is fully aware of every agonising limitation and indignity. "I cannot scratch if I itch, I cannot pick my nose if it is blocked and I can only eat if I'm fed... I have no privacy or dignity left."
He communicates by blinking at a Perspex board with letters and the words are interpreted by his wife, a former nurse. Anyone who heard Jane Nicklinson, her own life in a state of paralysis, saying that the only way to end her husband's suffering was to kill him will have been moved by the couple's predicament.
But what do we do about vexed cases like Tony Nicklinson? Do we say that good laws cannot be made for tragic exceptions, however heartbreaking? Or do we agree with wise Kent in King Lear: "Let him pass! He hates him that would upon the rack of this rough world stretch him out longer?"
"Am I grateful that the Athens doctors saved my life?" Tony Nicklinson asks. "No, I am not. If I had my time again I would not have called the ambulance but let nature take its course."
...He wants a landmark case. "I'm not vulnerable. I don't need help or protection from death or from those who would help me," says Tony Nicklinson. This summer, at a five-day hearing, he will argue for a drastic change in the law on murder, for death on demand. If he wins, any doctor who kills a profoundly disabled person can say: "But he wanted me to end his life, your Honour."
Peter Singer On "The Ashley Treatment"
Singer writes in the Guardian about the parents of a "profoundly intellectually disabled girl born in 1997, known only as Ashley," who used a treatment that involved giving her hormones so she'd remain below normal height and weight, and giving her surgery to remove her uterus and prevent her breasts from developing:
Ashley's mental age was that of a three-month-old. She was unable to walk, talk, hold a toy or change her position in bed. Her parents were not sure she recognised them. There was no prospect of her mental condition ever improving.The treatment was approved by the ethics committee at Seattle children's hospital, where it was carried out. It begun when Ashley was six, and was made public when she was nine. The aim of the surgery was to keep Ashley small and light, so that her parents could continue to move her around frequently and take her with them when going out with their two other children. The uterus removal was intended to spare her the discomfort of menstrual cramps; the surgery to prevent the development of breasts aimed to make her more comfortable when she was lying down or had a strap across her chest in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, when it became public, many objected to it. Some said it was "unnatural", others that it violated Ashley's dignity, that it was not in her best interests, and that it could lead down a slippery slope of parents "modifying" their children for their own convenience.
Today, Ashley is 14. Her mental condition has not changed, but her size and weight have remained that of a nine-year-old. Her father remains convinced that he and his wife made the right decision for Ashley, and that the treatment made her more likely to be comfortable, healthy and happy. He describes her as "completely loved" and her life "as good as we can possibly make it". There seem to be no grounds for holding the opinion that the treatment was not in Ashley's best interests.
As for the claim that it was unnatural, well, in one sense all medical treatment is unnatural; it enables us to live longer, and in better health, than we naturally would. Perhaps the most "natural" thing for Ashley's parents to do with their severely disabled daughter would have been to abandon her to the wolves and vultures, as parents have done with such children for most of human existence. Fortunately, we have evolved beyond such "natural" practices, which are abhorrent to civilised people. The issue of treating Ashley with dignity was never, in my view, a genuine one. Infants are adorable, but not dignified, and the same is true of older and larger human beings who remain at the mental level of an infant. You don't acquire dignity just by being born a member of the species Homo sapiens.
Now, Singer writes, other profoundly disabled children have been given this treatment, and he says their mothers are convinced they are living happier lives because of it.
A disability activist argues against the treatment, but Singer says there's no reason to believe activists know what is better for these children than their parents, who are better able to take care of them with the Ashley treatment.
Do You Call The Cops On Yourself If You're A Pedo?
Via Fathers & Families, the BBC reports that a man called the cops after he tried to download music but instead got kiddie porn, and was prevented from being alone with his daughter for four months:
A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.Nigel Robinson from Hull said he called police after trying to download music but instead finding pornographic images on his laptop last November.
As a result social services said he "should not have unsupervised access with his own or other children".
He said he was "totally innocent". No arrests or charges have been made.
Mr Robinson, 43, recalled how on discovering the images he discussed the situation with his wife and immediately called police to report the incident.
...The police took the laptop away for investigation and said it could be a year before it is returned, Mr Robinson said.
...Mr Robinson said: "It makes you feel as though you shouldn't have reported it in the first place."
He added it would have been "a lot easier" to just throw the machine in the bin.
Mr Robinson said the restrictions on seeing his daughter had come to a head after his wife had returned to work.
When his wife works late, as regularly happens, Mr Robinson's daughter goes to his mother-in-law's home.
Good advice at Fathers and Families:
Now, needless to say, Robinson has never been accused of abusing his child or any other. He's not been accused of any wrongdoing in this case and indeed, there's no evidence that he's committed any kind of offense. But a mistaken effort to download music is still enough to brand him with the scarlet letter 'A' for 'Abuser.'...Robinson should do what the vast majority of Americans and Canadians do; when it comes to family life, leave the government out of it. Robinson and his wife tried to be good citizens. I'm sure they thought that if they just came clean about what happened and demonstrated that they had nothing to hide, the authorities would see them for who they are - law-abiding citizens and fit parents.
Now they know better. The ridiculous exercise of police power at the expense of a father's relationship with his daughter was entirely predictable and to be avoided at all costs. Whatever the outcome of the case and whenever it happens, great damage to Robinson and his family have been done. As well, great damage has been done to whatever notion he might once have harbored about his rights as a father and himself as a member of a beneficent polity.
...Yes, there will always be parents who are so bad, so destructive of their children's well-being that state agencies must step in, take the children and place them in foster care or some other living arrangement outside their parents' reach. But child welfare agencies have taken that notion and made it a license to substitute their own decisions about how best to parent for those of parents. Government has a way of increasing its power over the governed. Grants of power tend to expand into realms unthought of by the original grantors.
That's nowhere more apparent than in the case of child welfare agencies that began with the very real need to protect abused children. By now they've morphed into all-purpose overseers of parental behavior.
Oh, and on a copyright note, if you pay for music you download you're less likely to get little unwanted files coming along with the tunes.
Everything Is Now Illegal
Stossel writes at reason that complex societies call for simple laws:
"If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law."He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules "incomprehensible." They are. They are also "uncountable." Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.
So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.
That's not good. It paralyzes life.
...When so much is illegal, common sense dies. Out of fear of breaking rules, people stop innovating, trying, helping.
Think I exaggerate? Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn't enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because "safety" rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited "emergency workers" from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with "stage 2 training" arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and "rescuers" stood next to the pond and watched.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, sometimes called the first libertarian thinker, said, "The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished....The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be."
And the more of them there will be in government.
If Only They Fined Members Of Congress For Stupidity
Daniel J. Mitchell blogs about the latest "eat the rich!" cry from Congress -- Congressman Rick Crawford of Arkansas, who is proposing an additional tax of 2.5 percent on incomes over $1 million. Mitchell nails it with this:
But I do know that America's fiscal problem is a government that is far too big. You don't solve the problem with more taxes, just as you don't cure alcoholics by giving them more to drink.
"Nerdiest Video About Bullshit Police Abuse You'll Ever See"
Via @RadleyBalko and @ScottGreenfield on the stop of two Star Trek fans for suspected drug transportation in Collinsville, Illinois. It's long but totally worth watching. Amazing abuses of civil liberties by the officers:
The officer is Michael Reichert -- all of whose traffic stops should be checked out immediately for similar abuses against those who aren't so savvy about their rights or able to score the footage from the police department and make a YouTube video.
Car Company Bailouts Aren't Enough
Now we're supposed to bail out whole cities. Simone Landon writes on the HuffPo:
The federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler is often called the "Detroit bailout." But while the Big Three automakers have become profitable again, the city of Detroit continues to face a dire financial crisis and looming state takeover. So Rep. Hansen Clarke, a Democrat who represents the city in Congress, is pushing for a second bailout -- this time for the city.Clarke said he plans to seek emergency federal aid in Congress and from the Obama administration and may introduce legislation as early as next week. His plan is modeled after the federal bailout of New York City in 1975. "It's the same situation that's just as grave," Clarke told HuffPost. "We need to provide relief for the city of Detroit in order to create jobs in this country and rescue this symbol of our manufacturing power."
New York City got $2.3 billion in federal loans after President Gerald Ford signed the New York City Seasonal Financing Act in 1975.
Clarke said he hasn't determined how much money he'll request. He said he's looking into "a combination of grants or loans."
Detroit faces a cash shortfall that could leave it unable to pay bills and meet payroll in April. The city's budget deficit is near $200 million for this fiscal year, and its long-term obligations are $13.2 billion -- or $18,500 per resident.
In a city where a good many residences look like this one.
Marc Randazza: "It's Un-American To Silence Limbaugh"
I love the hell out of Marc J. Randazza. He was my First Amendment knight in shining armor when I got a letter of demand from the lawyer for TSA worker Thedala Magee, demanding that I pay her $500,000 for "libel" and "defamation." (Or as Marc and I and anybody who has read the Constitution calls it, "Asserting one's First Amendment rights.")
He is a fierce defender of civil liberties and especially free speech rights, and understands that nobody has a right to not be offended. The First Amendment is the asshole protection amendment. We don't need to protect the rights of people who say things everyone agrees with, but those with views that offend others. And those views are extremely important to protect -- and the foundation of a free society. Most gloriously -- and I use that word intentionally -- here's Randazza defending Rush Limbaugh's free speech CNN:
I despise Rush Limbaugh. I despise almost everything I have ever heard him say. I wish that he were no longer on the air. That is why I write today to defend him against those who call for him to be silenced.Far too frequently, Americans find offense in another's art, music or other expression, and then they call for censorship. This is intolerable.
The First Amendment stands for principles like that espoused by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. Barnette: "Of there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Or that wisdom given to us by New York Times v. Sullivan, "Debate on public issues ... [should be] ... uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."
The First Amendment requires neither tact nor politeness. It requires that we permit all views to set up stalls in the marketplace of ideas, and we let that marketplace decide which ideas prevail.
Rush Limbaugh has a right to his views. Just as important, his fans have a right to hear him. Those of us who disagree with him have a right to fight him, but we must do so on our own. Using the government to support our view is constitutionally intolerable. Trying to bully him off the air is wrong.
Some call for the Federal Communications Commission to pull Clear Channel's broadcast licenses if they keep Limbaugh on the air, because they believe that Rush Limbaugh does not "serve the public interest." This is inaccurate and not permissible under the Constitution.
It is a terrifying prospect that the government might review the political and social positions of a broadcaster when deciding who gets access to the airwaves. Should the government censor books that it finds to be unpopular or offensive?
...I despise Limbaugh not because he uttered one or two nasty words, but because his views are truly evil. I debate those who agree with him. I place my ideas into the marketplace, and I believe that ideas like mine will win out.
I realize that my work is difficult, and I may not even live to see Limbaugh's ideas repudiated. But my commitment to free expression requires me to engage his ideas, to parry them and to let my beliefs stand on their own -- without using the government or other improper means to tip the scales.
Free speech means tolerating views that you despise. Otherwise, one day, it will be your views that someone doesn't like.
If you don't stand up for Limbaugh's liberty today, someone may come for yours tomorrow. Discredit him, but don't silence him.
On a related note, here's an excerpt from an email an editor sent me from a woman trying to get me fired by a newspaper group that runs me:
I'm writing to ask you to please, please, PLEASE stop printing the "Advice Goddess" column in the Sunday paper. This column is occasionally funny but usually offensive and anti-feminist...Please, for the sake of my blood pressure (which rises every Sunday morning as I come across this nonsense while trying to eat a peaceful breakfast with my family), stop printing it.
An excerpt from my reply -- complete with free-speech-lovin' ending:
I think it's essential that we tell young women the truth, which is one of the goals of my column -- cutting through political correctness. This sometimes disturbs people who favor the party line...I put an enormous amount of research, thought, time, and energy into turning out a column that I feel is not only funny but based in good science and integrity, and it's disturbing when a reader wants to see the column axed simply because they don't share my beliefs.
In addition to writing my column, I support free speech in this country through my support of organizations like theFIRE.org, which defends free speech on college campuses -- all free speech, even that which they personally disagree with.
To me, having all views expressed is makes for the healthiest society, and I hope, M., you will consider that when you read my column in the future.
Randazza on the radio on Limbaugh/free speech.
Oh, and on the bright side, "occasionally funny" from someone who hates you and is trying to get you fired probably means "HILARIOUS!"
Ban Drug Bans
Jacob Sullum writes at reason about the risk premium associated with prohibition, which delivers big profits to murderous thugs all over the world. Check out the markup on meth, quoting a Stratfor primer:
Depending on the price of chemicals used--determined by the quantity of chemicals purchased and the legitimacy of the supplier--the cost of manufacturing 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of meth comes to anywhere between $150 and $4,000....According to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Illicit Drug Prices Mid-Year 2009 report, the wholesale market price for meth is $19,720 per kilogram while its street value is $87,717 per kilogram. Needless to say, this is a huge markup.
Sullum comments:
Indeed. Based on Stratfor's range of estimates, meth sells for between 20 and 600 times as much as it costs to make, and almost all of that value is added after the drug has been broken down into relatively small quantities--one reason interdiction has little impact on retail price. Stratfor also notes that "since the product can be made anywhere and can be fabricated into a variety of forms, it is very easily transported." Nor is Stratfor sanguine about the prospect of shutting down the market by controlling precursor chemicals such as pseudoephedrine and methylamine.
Meth makers have found their way around that -- they always do.
As Sullum writes:
There's the prohibitionist conundrum in a nutshell: Banning a product people want creates the very incentives that ensure the ban will be ineffective.
How Stupid Is Your Publicist?
Dumbass publicist flogging book CALLED me at home at 7:30 am California time to pitch a book. Calls are unacceptable these days. I told her she woke me up. She actually didn't -- I didn't sleep well last night. Email is the acceptable form of contact unless you are my boyfriend or a good friend of mine, in which case you know better than to call me during the day, because I am either writing or napping so I can write some more.
A Cool (Actually Warm) Thing Somebody Bought Through My Amazon Links
It's a portable solar shower.
It's Summer Shower 5
(Thanks to the person who bought this! And everybody who buys stuff through my links -- including the person who recently had or having a baby and seems to be buying all or a lot of their baby stuff through me.)
Could The Obama Admin Make Life Any Harder For Business?
Apparently, yes. Today is the deadline for hoteliers to have pool lifts to provide disabled people "equal access" to pools and whirlpools. (They can also have a plan to acquire one.) If they don't, civil penalties can go as high as $55,000, USA Today reports.
Walter Olson blogs at Cato:
Because the elevator lifts are space-consuming, unsightly, potential hazards to curious children, and unlikely to be used very often, many pool operators assumed it would be enough to purchase a portable lift that could be wheeled over to poolside on user request and stored when not in use. No such luck: the Obama administration has announced that the lifts must not only be of permanent construction, but must apply to each separate "water feature", so that a pool with adjoining spa would need two of them. "Each lift costs between $3,000 and $10,000 and installation can add $5,000 to $10,000 to the total." Many budget hostelries are expected to simply shutter their pools until further notice rather than take the risk that entrepreneurial fast-buck artists will begin filing complaints against them for cash settlements, as in California's notorious ADA filing mills....The problem is more that this administration (and not just this one) has outsourced its thinking on the law to advocates in the legal academia-disabled rights-"public interest law" community, which tends to embrace interpretations and applications of the law geared to advance ambitious versions of social change.
I was going to say, "Have a nice swim!" but "Have a nice day of social change." Nothin' for nobody, brought to you by the Obama Administration's Social Engineering Department (which is probably pretty much the whole damn administration).
P.S. Love some of the comments on the USA Today piece. Here's one from Stuart J. Gray:
I used to work in specialty construction of shielded rooms. We had to install an electrical filter box and we put it on top of the metal room. The inspector came by and told me that it could not be on the "roof." It had to be less than 30 inches from the floor. I asked "WHY??" and he said what if an electrician needs to work in the box and he is in a wheelchair? WHAT???!?!? How many electricians are there in the entire WORLD that are in a wheel chair?? I bet - NONE!So I told him he had better lower all of those light fixtures (in the ceiling) in case the person coming to change the bulbs is in a wheelchair. He didn't think that was funny.
Robert Benning:
Is the path to the bottom of the Grand Canyon handi accessable? No...well close it down
Bryan Schnell:
@Robert, Everest isn't handi-cap accessible? Shut it down! As well as all further space exploration.
Paul Russell Wagner:
Don't forget the Statue of Liberty. No elevator or chairlift. Shut her down.
Half-Naked Milkmaid Somewhere In Santa Monica
Can you think of some other explanation?
In case you can't tell, this was lying across the curb into the street.
The "Happiest Place On Earth" May Truly Become Orlando
For me, that place is the place we have our civil liberties. Where your 2-year-old is "profiled" to be a 2-year-old, whose danger of creating an explosion is greatest if she's had too much applesauce, and who is not treated equally with some guy who spent his summer vacation in Al Qaeda training camp.
Absolutely great news out of Orlando, via Alex Jones' InfoWars. Paul Joseph Watson writes of an airport president who grew a pair and is applying to tell the TSA to fuck the hell off. (Disturbingly, you need to "apply" to have people's civil liberties respected.):
One of America's busiest airports, Orlando Sanford International, has announced it will opt out of using TSA workers to screen passengers, a move which threatens the highly unpopular federal agency's role in other airports across the nation."The president of the airport said Tuesday that he would apply again to use private operators to screen passengers, using federal standards and oversight," reports the Miami Herald.
With Sanford International having originally been prevented by the TSA from opting out back in November 2010 when the federal agency froze the ability for airports to use their own private screeners, a law passed by the Senate last month forces the TSA to reconsider applications.
Larry Dale hinted that the move was motivated by the innumerable horror stories passengers have told of their encounters with the TSA, noting that the change was designed to provide a more "customer friendly" operation.
The agency has been slow to reissue the guidelines on the the rule change, prompting Republican Representatives John Mica of Florida, Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah to press TSA head John Pistole to implement the mandate.
Appearing at Orlando Sanford International yesterday, Mica said he had written to 200 airports advising them of the opportunity to op out of using TSA screeners.
Write to the head of your local airport to pressure him or her to follow suit. And your city council and your (useless in our case in LA) mayor.
via @Iowahawk
Big Tax Prep And Big Government Go Hand In Hand
From the wonderful Institute for Justice -- "Litigating for Liberty," Congress never gave the IRS the authority to license tax preparers, and the IRS can't give itself that power. But, hey, why should they let that stop them?
Last year the IRS imposed a sweeping new licensing scheme that forces tax preparers to get IRS permission before they can work. This is an unlawful power grab that exceeds the authority granted to the IRS by Congress.The burden of compliance will fall most heavily on independent tax return preparers and small businesses. Unsurprisingly, big firms such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt support the licensing scheme. As The Wall Street Journal explained: "Cheering the new regulations are big tax preparers like H&R Block, who are only too happy to see the feds swoop in to put their mom-and-pop seasonal competitors out of business."
These regulations are typical government protectionism. They benefit powerful industry insiders and at the expense of entrepreneurs and consumers, who will likely have fewer options and face higher prices. But tax preparers have a right to earn an honest living without getting permission from the IRS. And taxpayers--not the IRS--should be the ones who decide who prepares their taxes.
That is why on March 13, 2012, three independent tax preparers joined the Institute for Justice in filing suit against the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. This lawsuit challenges the IRS's statutory authority to impose this licensing scheme, and seeks to overturn regulations that would affect an estimated 350,000 tax return preparers, forcing many of them to stop working in the occupation of their choice.
From the WSJ piece:
Under the plan, which would begin with the 2011 tax season, anyone who takes money to help people with their taxes will have to register with the IRS, and eventually pass competency tests and sign up for continuing education. So having made tax filing so complicated that most Americans need help with their forms, Washington now wants to raise the price of such counsel by regulating advisers in a way that may reduce their supply.Defending the decision, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman declared that regulating tax preparers was reasonable because "In most states you need a license to cut someone's hair." Yes, the cosmetology guild does like to raise the barriers to entry for competitors.
Here's the video from the IJ:
My tax guy is terrific. He's an independent with a small family firm, working out of a storefront in Burbank. He has integrity and does a great job on my taxes -- and is both friendly and soothing throughout the process. My architect neighbors were so enthusiastic about him that I couldn't help but switch to him. He's seriously far from my house, and I hate driving all that way from the west side of LA, but he's worth it. And that should be license enough.
Tweets From A "Religion Of Peace"er
A Muslim woman tossed out a bunch of violent tweets to me and then disappeared from Twitter when I retweeted them to expose them to sunlight. Here they are:
@extremeind we really love to kill people who belive in another god and happy that i belive in one god@extremeind i really wish to kill people who dont belive in any god
@extremeind we are so happy with jihad so happy that we are planing to start it in america europe and all over world
You know, I'm an atheist, not a Christian, but I can get right behind all that Jesus stuff of "feed the poor" and "turn the other cheek," and in Judaism, one of the highest forms of righteousness is helping somebody learn to help himself. Nice stuff.
And then, there was this quote Rob Brezny posted on Facebook from the Dalai Lama:
"If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change."
I don't know if they actually practice that, but I sure like the sentiment.
Here are "Ten Obvious Reasons Why Islam is NOT a Religion of Peace" from thereligionofpeace.com:
#1 18,000 deadly terror attacks committed explicitly in the name of Islam in just the last ten years. (Other religions combined for perhaps a dozen or so). #2 Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, had people killed for insulting him or for criticizing his religion. This included women. Muslims are told to emulate the example of Muhammad....#7 Islam is the only religion that has to retain its membership by threatening to kill anyone who leaves. This is according to the example set by Muhammad.
#8 Islam teaches that non-Muslims are less than fully human. Muhammad said that Muslims can be put to death for murder, but that a Muslim could never be put to death for killing a non-Muslim.
#9 The Qur'an never once speaks of Allah's love for non-Muslims, but it speaks of Allah's cruelty toward and hatred of non-Muslims more than 500 times.
#10 "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!" (The last words from the cockpit of Flight 93)
What If George Bush Had Done That?
Barack Obama is probably the most Teflon president we've ever had. Good piece at Politico by Josh Gerstein on how Democrats give Obama a pass on things they would have howled at George Bush for.
Examples include Obama's fundraising and swing state travel -- "using his office to his political benefit in states that could decide his reelection" -- something Bush got slammed for. And there's losed-door CEO courting, a leak crackdown that could send reporters to jail, and a golfing habit that gets little or no scrutiny. There's also "a green light to kill U.S. citizens abroad":
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder visited Chicago to lay out his rationale that the U.S. government has the legal right to kill U.S.-citizen terror suspects overseas -- and that there's no role for the courts in reviewing such use of lethal force.The speech at Northwestern University Law School drew a smattering of news accounts and a handful of reporters, but no protesters, no candlelight vigil and no audience members clad in orange jumpsuits and chains. Some liberal groups issued press releases taking issue with Holder's analysis, but the reaction to what could be termed warrantless killing was a far cry from the sky-is-falling, apocalyptic rhetoric unleashed at Bush and his appointees a few years back over efforts merely to listen in on the communications of suspected terrorists through the warrantless wiretapping program.
After Obama submitted to a rare news conference the next day, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart noted that not a single question was asked about the provocative Holder speech. "How come no one at the press conference brought that up? Didn't even say a f--ing word about it?" Stewart asked on his program Wednesday. "You didn't say anything about a historically massive, executive branch power grab."
Greenwald sounded equally amazed. "Here you have Obama asserting the power not to detain Americans or eavesdrop on them, but to target them for execution by the CIA without a shred or whit of due process," he said. "I would think that most people would prefer to be eavesdropped upon, or detained, than killed with a drone."
...Corallo (Mark Corallo, director of public affairs at the Justice Department from 2002-05) said he supports the drone policy outlined this week, but if his former boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, gave a similar speech, he would have been excoriated.
"You would have gotten a firestorm of criticism from the left," Corallo said. "We would have been pilloried as 'a bunch of jackbooted thugs ignoring the Constitution. We ought to impeach this president.' The cacophony would have been deafening. The New York Times editorial page would have pilloried Ashcroft and Bush, and reporters would have found every leftist constitutional law scholar to come out and scream and yell that we're just trampling on constitutional rights." (The Times did weigh in with an editorial Sunday, six days after Holder's speech.)
Corallo noted that the Bush administration's detention of Al Qaeda suspect and American citizen Jose Padilla without charge in a Navy brig in South Carolina became a cause célèbre for many on the left, while reaction to the drone strike that killed New Mexico-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last year has been relatively muted.
"We got pilloried [over Padilla], and they're dropping missiles on some guy's eyeball from 30,000 feet and it's just business as usual," said Corallo. "In fact, they're actually crowing about it."
Top Deals In Electronics
Big-screen TV closeout at Amazon
Laptops, external hard drives, Bluetooth headsets and BlackBerry accessories are also on sale at the link above.
Thank you, everybody, who spends through my Amazon links. Appreciate all your purchases, big (somebody bought a Kindle yesterday!) and small (love seeing what people are buying -- like a stud-finder...studs in the wall, not the kind who go to bars and take ladies home).
Working day and night on my next book -- two-thirds done (should finish the rest by July) -- and your purchases are helping keep me afloat in the downturn in newspapers.
From The "Everything Is Racist" Files
Brentwood AOL Patch editor Dennis Wilen was fired for running Lalo Alcaraz' cartoon satire of Cinco de Mayo attitudes in this Arianna nabe. Click up the cartoon at the link. Also, note the name Lalo Alcaraz. He's a Latino cartoonist! What...is he a...self-hating Latino?
The story is here, at Alcaraz' site (Alcatraz has since hired Wilen):
For Cinco de Mayo, I commissioned three stories: The real history of Cinco de Mayo as related by a professor at Mount St. Mary's (Brentwood's only college), the best places to celebrate with nachos and beer in Brentwood and a cartoon from my friend Lalo Alcaraz about how the Battle of Puebla is understood in Brentwood.I was thrilled to score a cartoon from a cartoonist of Lalo's stature at Patch's standard rate of $50.
This was the same week that AOL and HuffPo honchos announced a Latino outreach initiative, probably to coincide with Cinco de Mayo. I thought they'd be pleased.
The cartoon went live just after midnight on May 5; I Tweeted about it, per AOL policy, and posted a link on Brentwood Patch's Facebook page. The headline Lalo and I wrote? "It's Cinco de Mayo - do you know where your gardener is?" I thought the cartoon -- marked as opinion -- perfectly expressed Brentwood's reality and it still makes me laugh.
Early the next day I got a call from my regional editor directing me to remove the cartoon and delete my Tweets and Facebook posts. Someone in AOL's New York headquarters decided Lalo's image of two Latinos "reenacting the Battle of Puebla" (a housekeeper with a broom and a gardener with a leaf blower) constituted "blatantly racist stereotypes" (it could have been "patently racist".) They were objectionable, said my boss.
"Wait!" I said. "Lalo IS a Latino. He is the country's first nationally-syndicated Latino cartoonist (La Cucaracha.) He has written books and won awards! Are you calling Lalo a racist?"
"New York finds it objectionable, " was the reply.
The next morning my boss, and her uber-boss, the West Coast editor, called me up to tell me I was fired for violating my employment agreement with AOL by posting "racist" material.
Who Raped The Cheese?
I just got some French spam trying to sell me some product. What's that? "Rape your cheese"?
"Râpe pour tous vos fromages, le chocolat et même le pain sec!"
Whoops, my French is a little rusty. Now I remember: "râper," to grate.
Oh, boring...it's ad for a cheese grater that also grates chocolate and dried bread. Much prefer to imagine the ham holding down the goat cheese in a sort of foodie remake of one of those bodice-ripper novels.
The Case For Legalized Prostitution
From a 1993 article at FreedomFoundation by Paul Armentano:
According to a study done by the Rand Corporation, for instance, the city of Los Angeles' policy of "shooing away streetwalkers has done nothing except push them across the city's boundaries."Of course, the most important argument for the legalization of prostitution services is that such prohibitions violate one's most basic and inherent rights. Prostitution is the voluntary sale (or rental) of a labor service. Individuals own their own bodies and their own labor services and have the absolute right to decide how those labor services should be used. As long as the prostitution transaction is voluntary, there is no justification for governmental interference. Indeed, such interference constitutes an infringement of the privacy and personal liberty of the individuals involved.
The government does have a legitimate role to play in the prostitution market. As with all markets, it should ensure that all exchanges are truly voluntary. In short, it should protect individual rights to property, especially the right not to be coerced.
Currently, since prostitution is illegal outside of Nevada, most prostitutes are in a "no-man's-land" as far as physical protection is concerned. They are often beaten and brutalized, with no real legal recourse. In a free market for prostitution services, suppliers of labor services that are physically harmed would have the same rights to police protection and to legal recourse as the rest of us.
The moral and economic case for the legalization of prostitution is overwhelming. Government prohibition and regulation blatantly violate the rights of the individual and are economically expensive. Therefore, America's views and strategies on the topic of prostitution must undergo an immediate and radical change. The time has come to abandon the nation's archaic attempts to legislate personal morality. The time has come to face up to the facts and to implement the only policy that can truly make a positive difference. The time has come for the legalization of prostitution.
Via Karen DeCoster's post, Prostitution is Libertarian. A bit from a comment at her site:
I like Michael Cloud's story about an audience member asking him about prostitution. He replied "I see prostitution as a matter of two issues. Sex, and free trade. Which one are you against?"
The Difference Between Naughty And Nice
I trained my tiny Yorkie Lucy that barking is not allowed (she will bark if there's danger, but otherwise, she gets in trouble). I'm close to neighbors here, and my feeling is that your life shouldn't be disturbed because I choose to have a pet.
If she's stuck outside and wants to be brought in (she's old and can't climb the steps well), she'll sometimes do this little swallowed noise -- a sort of bark-ish kind of thing -- and I'll run out and carry her in.
As with the way to discipline kids, I'm always quick and always consistent in punishing her if she's naughty. Gregg, however, who is otherwise Detroit-ornery, except to me, is quick and consistent in being the total pushover of this tiny dog. He pretty much finds it unbearable when he's over and Lucy has to go to "doggie jail" -- ie, be placed in the bathtub as punishment for five minutes (a place she is miserable).
Well, Gregg was at my place when I was still out writing on Saturday at my fave cafe, and was I ever shocked by the video he showed me Monday night on his phone: My little dog, who doesn't bark at all when I am home -- who wouldn't dare bark -- was barking up a storm to make him pick her up. And he did. And couldn't get his work done (on my computer) very well because he was holding her in one hand.
It's kind of amazing how a generally very, very well-behaved little dog, who immediately sits, lies down, and comes trotting over on my command, will turn into a tiny brat depending on whose leniency she's experiencing. (She once even pooped in Gregg's suitcase, proving, I guess, that you only shit on those who enable you.)
How To Fix Big Government
Nick Sorrentino blogs at Against Crony Capitalism:
It's not solely the fault of the Democrats. It's not solely the fault of the GOP. It is the fault of both houses. It is Washington's fault. It is the political establishment's fault. This is because borrowing massive amounts from China and now directly from the Federal Reserve allows our "leaders" to continue on providing services (which make many voters happy) without raising taxes. By the time the bill is due they are long gone with a stretch of highway in their home district named after them.It is the next generation who must pay. How we are to do this will be the most important question of my political life. It will define the next decades and may potentially transform this country for the worse if we are too paralyzed by political tribalism to address it.
The fact is that for this country to flourish in the 21st century we must recognize now as the high water mark for the expansion of government. There is no time to play around. We must cut deeply and we must begin now.
What am I talking about? Obamacare repealed. Department of Education, gone. Department of Homeland Security cut by 70%. Defense cut by 50% (which would put it back at 2000 levels oh no!). EPA cut 50%. Department of Energy cut by 90%. And so on.
Don't forget moving the Social Security eligibility age to 74. That is vital.
We have been led to believe that the world would end if we started cutting like this. It won't. For most of America there will be little impact. For Washington, DC however there will be a great impact. People will lose their jobs and will have to find a place in the private sector where things are a little tougher. People will have to move, just as people in any company town must when the main industry cuts back.
For the country overall, it will be a boon. As red tape is lessoned and the army of regulators is reduced America will again find that the business of America is business. We are not Europe. We are a free people who have built a society on risk taking. With a smaller government this deep American nature can again emerge, and make no mistake the world will take notice.
Another Reason To Be Against The Death Penalty
The wrongful conviction rate in Virginia alone is just appalling. Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate that of 214 DNA samples of incarcerated people obtained between 1973 and 1988 that could still yield accurate results, a whopping 70-plus people (perhaps even 79 of those people) were excluded as perpetrators of a crime:
Whatever the percentage of error on the part of Virginia's criminal justice system, one thing is certain: Only a handful of the falsely convicted have received the exonerations they deserve. Since DNA retesting began in Virginia, two people have been formally exonerated and another, who is dead, was cleared of a rape he didn't commit. When Barbour's paperwork is processed, he will be only the fourth person to be exonerated, despite the fact that the state is aware of scores of others who may be innocent. Even now Barbour remains skeptical. "They can do anything now to trick it up like they did 34 years ago," he says. "I'm not going to be excited 'til it all comes out. I'm innocent. I'm here. But I don't trust the justice system. Period."After all, Virginia authorities never did successfully contact Barbour to acknowledge his innocence. It was Jonathan Sheldon, a private-practice attorney in Fairfax, Va. who took it upon himself to contact Barbour and many of the other 70-some men who have been convicted of crimes, excluded by DNA testing, and never advised of that fact. As of today, the state has given him only 32 names and Sheldon says he has already located most of them. Some are dead. Some are dying. Some suffer from mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to even understand why he is calling. As the Richmond-Times Dispatch's Frank Green, who first reported on Barbour's exclusion by DNA testing, wrote last month: "The Virginia Department of Forensic Science has issued reports that exclude at least 76 felons as the source of biological evidence in their cases." Yet as of last month, 29 of those felons had not been notified that the new DNA reports existed.
Barbour, whose story leads the piece, lost five years of his life in jail and is stricken with cancer:
Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer familiar with his case says, "People think, 'Oh, he only got five years.' But in that five years he lost his six-month-old marriage, and scarred his relationship with his daughter. That five years broke him."The Commonwealth of Virginia learned that Bennett Barbour was innocent nearly two years ago, when DNA testing cleared him of the crime. Virginia authorities, however, never informed Barbour of his innocence. (State officials claim to have mailed a letter with the test results to Barbour's last four known addresses, but none of those letters ever reached him.) Barbour learned of the DNA tests that proved his innocence only last month, on Feb. 5, when he received a phone call from Sheldon. "I was with my nephew playing cards, and Mr. Sheldon called my mother's house looking for me," says Barbour. "He said the authorities stopped looking for me because they couldn't find me. But Sheldon found me in two days using the Internet."
Actually, that's not true. It only took Sheldon a few hours.
Play Games Cheaper
Up to 70% off 
Loved this Amazon reviewer's idea of turning them into a parenting tool:
I got these thinking they might help my 3 year old in the dark at night. I was going to put them all up at once, when I realized she could earn them. For every night she goes to bed without giving us the run around, she earns one star. For every nap she takes, she earns two. It works a good chunk of the time.
The Police State Goes To School: "Bad Touch" By The State
Via Drudge, a 12-year-old was made to hand over her Facebook password and was punished for posts she made from home. Rosa Prince writes in the Telegraph/UK:
In the Minnesota case, the 12-year-old girl, known only as RS, is said to have been punished by teachers at Minnewaska Area Middle School for things she wrote on Facebook while at home, and using her own computer.The ACLU is arguing that her First and Fourth Amendment rights, which protect freedom of speech and freedom from illegal searches respectively, were violated.
She is said to have been punished with detention after using Facebook to criticise a school hall monitor, and again after a fellow student told teachers that she had discussed sex online.
Our rights are increasingly being eroded -- on many fronts, and nobody is taking notice. It's very worrisome, because once they start going, they don't come back. Parents not only need to warn their kids about "bad touch" from some pedophile, but "bad touch" by the school and the state, and prepare them for how to behave when it happens.
Whackjob Below
On the It's Called "Family Planning" Not Family Shaming entry.
I suspect it's the chickie herself posing as "Fellatricks."
Commenter Fellatricks has never posted here, except on that entry, and has Portland IP. That's same location as the chickie who got pregnant after after dating a guy for two and a half months and spewed all over her blog in hopes of shaming him into being a father -- and not just the checkbook version of one mandated by the state.
The best is how Fellatricks alternately accuses of me of being rich and famous and poor, untrafficked (my site), and unknown, depending on what she has to say in a particular comment.
Why Does The Pill Have To Be Prescription?
Virginia Postrel asks the right question at Bloomberg News:
Requiring a prescription "acts more as a barrier to access rather than providing medically necessary supervision," argues Daniel Grossman of Ibis Reproductive Health, a research and advocacy group based in Massachusetts, in an article published in September in Expert Review of Obstetrics & Gynecology.Birth-control pills can have side effects, of course, but so can such over-the-counter drugs as antihistamines, ibuprofen or... Aleve. That's why even the most common over-the-counter drugs, including aspirin, carry warning labels. Most women aren't at risk from oral contraceptives, however, just as most patients aren't at risk from aspirin or Benadryl, and studies suggest that a patient checklist can catch most potential problems.
To further increase safety, over-the-counter sales could start with a progestin-only formulation, sometimes called the "minipill," rather than the more-common combinations of progestin and estrogen...Progestin-only pills, or POPs, have fewer contraindications. Unlike combination pills, they're OK for women with hypertension, for instance, or smokers over the age of 35. The main dangers are fairly rare conditions such as breast cancer or current liver disease. "Not only are POP contraindications rare, but women appear to be able to accurately identify them using a simple checklist without the aid of a clinician," declares an article forthcoming in the journal Contraception.
...Aside from safety, the biggest argument for keeping birth- control pills prescription-only is, to put it bluntly, extortion. The current arrangement forces women to go to the doctor at least once a year, usually submitting to a pelvic exam, if they want this extremely reliable form of contraception. That demand may suit doctors' paternalist instincts and financial interests, but it doesn't serve patients' needs. As the 1993 article's authors noted, the exam requirement "assumes that it would be worse for a woman's health to miss out on routine care than it would be to miss out on taking oral contraceptives."
Going to the doctor is costly in time, money and sometimes in dignity. Not surprisingly, the prescription requirement deters use of oral contraceptives. In a 2004 phone survey, 68 percent of American women said they would start the pill or another form of hormonal birth control, such as the patch, if they could buy it in a pharmacy with screening by a pharmacist instead of getting a doctor's prescription. Two-thirds of blacks and slightly more than half of whites and Latinas surveyed said they chose their current, less-effective method of birth control because it didn't require a prescription.
Quick! Somebody Ban Stairs!
Of course, we'll name the new law against stairs after one of the injured children. From a tweet by @NBCNews:
Research shows a child younger than 5 is treated for a stair-related injury every six minutes in U.S. http://on.msnbc.com/wuLzQB
Gamble Big: If You Win, You Keep The Money; If You Lose, The Rest Of Us Bail You Out
Author Francesca Lia Block blogs that she may end up losing her home. I feel sorry for her or anyone in that position, but I'm a little amazed at how cavalier she appeared to be in getting an interest-only loan:
The cost of housing was continuing to rise and I was trying to get in while I still could, afraid I would never be able to afford a home for my family. I got an interest-only loan which does not pay off principle until later, after having been reassured by my broker and realtor as well as accountant that I could refinance in a year or two and start paying off principle. Then the market crashed, the value of the home has continued to decline (to $150,000 less than the original cost) and the bank (now Bank of America who bought out Countrywide went it went under) refuses to refinance on an over encumbered or "underwater" property so refinancing is no longer an option. This is exactly the type of situation President Obama is trying to address with his new legislation since so many homeowners are in this position.After having a very low income year in 2010 due to my retinal surgery and my mother's death from cancer, I realized I would not be able to afford the loan, especially when it balloons in a few more years, so I tried to modify. After almost a year I learned that I could not qualify for a modification because the loan was in my mom's name, even though I had made all the payments on time since the beginning and am now the sole owner. I am unable to assume the loan because I don't qualify, in spite of having a good year in 2011--you need a year's worth of mortgage set aside to even assume the loan at the high interest, interest only rate.
I have been told by experts in the field that only by stopping paying may I be able to get the bank's attention so they will let me assume the loan at a modified rate. I do not want to do this for many reasons, including the risk of foreclosure. If someone else came along to buy this house, they could get it at a very good price and get a loan at a very low rate. I tried to explain this to the bank, suggesting they could avoid the costs of foreclosure and I could avoid the heartache of leaving my home if they just worked with me but they have definitively refused.
These banks have been bailed out by the American public and yet are not working with us. The interest-only loan from Countrywide was egregious in the first place (although my broker, realtor and accountant reassured me it was standard for the times and quite safe, especially with the expected ability to refinance in a couple of years) and Bank of America knew this type of loan was unfair when they bought out Countrywide. B of A's behavior toward a customer who has never been behind on a single payment has been inexcusable.
Bank of America, not surprisingly, has given her a major run-around. The rest of the details of the story are at the link above.
Here's the comment I left:
Amy Alkon Mar 11, 2012 11:05 AM
I'm very sorry for what you're going through, and I'm no friend of B of A, but I couldn't afford a home either, so I didn't buy one.
There were a bunch of comments there, but she's since shut the comments down -- probably because there were a few like mine. One I remember said something along the lines of, "Look, you take a gamble, and you'd get the full payoff from that -- why is it anybody else's job to take the medicine when your gamble turns out to be a losing one?"
I agree.
Also, it's hard to understand why such a successful author -- with children -- has no money saved up.
Inspiring
The people I know who value freedom the most are those who've been without it at some point in their lives, like friends from Russia or Cuba. From the WSJ:
From Forever Flowing, by Russian novelist Vasily Grossman (1970):
I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it's a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom--not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.
Why Are There So Many Home-Grown Muslim Terrorists In America?
Very interesting 14-minute video with Bridget Gabriel on how Saudis and others are using oil wealth to try to convert American kids to do violence for Islam:
Dresses For Lesses
40% off
For the boys who don't wear dresses, shop Amazon - up to 50% off in the Home Improvement Value Store
Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Frederick Woolverton On Overcoming Addiction
Nationally syndicated advice columist Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
I'm very excited about this week's guest, Dr. Frederick Woolverton, co-author (with Susan Shapiro) of Unhooked: How to Quit Anything
When I was having problems with my writing, I wanted to see a therapist, but I know that many have little wisdom -- and also, that the methodology of many therapists is simply to let you talk and not tell you what you need to do. Seems kind of a ripoff, huh?
Susan Shapiro, a friend of mine since the late 80s in New York, sent me her compelling book Lighting Up
I realized that he was the therapist I also needed to see. He thought I was a bit, well, nuts, to fly from Los Angeles (where there are therapists practically handing out cards on every street corner) to see him in New York (for a double session on a Sunday night).
I told him that I could see therapist after therapist in Los Angeles and not find one who was good, but I knew he was wise from what I read in the book, so off I went. (And he solved my problem in the first 15 minutes -- though I kept seeing him over Skype for six months, for reinforcement, and frankly, because it was a better economy and I found him and our sessions interesting.)
He's also really terrific on overcoming addiction -- the subject of tonight's show. Additionally, I found "Unhooked" a very moving book -- and not in a tearjerky way.
Tonight's show will be a very interesting and helpful one, even if you aren't addicted to anything -- so do tune in to the live show from 7-8 p.m. Pacific, 10-11 p.m. Eastern, and feel free to call in with problems, comments, questions. Here's the link (where you can also listen after the show and/or download the podcast [click "play in your default player"]):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/12/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't miss last week's show with one of the rock stars of anthropology, Dr. Robert Trivers. We'll be talking about his very interesting new book, "The Folly of Fools," on deception and self-deception. Listen at the link or download the podcast afterward (click "play in your default player"):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/05/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Trivers lays out we evolved to be liars, and how, in order to lie better to others, we often lie to ourselves first. (Even infants practice deception.) He debunks the myths people believe about how they can detect lies, and discuss how "cognitive load" (limitations of memory and mind) plays a big part in our detection of deception in others and how minimizing it in ourselves helps lesson our chances in getting caught in a lie.
Join me for Advice Goddess Radio every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward. Catch shows you missed at http://my.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
DEA: The Drug Enforcement (And Pain Patient Suffering) Administration
Radley Balko writes at the HuffPo about how little the government cares about people in chronic, terrible pain -- as long as they can stop other people from getting high:
The government agency that controls the supply of opioid pain medication in the U.S., the DEA, is specifically charged with eradicating drug abuse. There's no countervailing charge in the DEA's mission to ensure that legitimate pain patients have access to the drugs that can give them relief. The incentive is to err on the side of control and restricted access.It's the type of error that "Mike," a New York City artist who wrote to HuffPost, has been on the wrong end of too often. "I've suffered from severe refractory migraines my entire life, and am forced to take pain killers. It is insane the degree of time, money and effort I have to go through to get medicated for what is clearly a legitimate, refractory (unresponsive to typical treatments) disease." Mike writes that he's tried other treatments, but only opiod painkillers work. The problem, he says, is that "doctors are afraid to prescribe them, or they think I am an addict," even though he's been at the same dose for years. "It's insane and extremely depressing," he writes. "I live constantly in fear of either getting a totally debilitating headache or of running out of meds. I have had the headaches my entire life, and finally found a drug regimen that allows me to function -- to keep my job and get up and do everyday things -- yet I am treated like a criminal."
Russell Portenoy, who chairs the Department of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, is a leading supporter of opioid treatment. He said there's a concerning lack of balance in the dire warnings about painkillers. "There are just as many deaths associated with the use of anti-depressants, or from liver failure associated with the use of acetaminophen, but you don't see the same sort of language about risks associated with those drugs. Opioids are just a medical therapy," he says. "They need to be carefully managed, but there's this age-old fear of them that seems to make them more urgent than other public health concerns."
Christopher says while there are references to patients concerns, but they're drowned out by warnings. "You might see a line, really a throwaway line, in some of the press releases about how these recommended new policies won't preclude or limit access to patients, but the reality is, they do exactly that."
Doctors are terrified of criminal or administrative investigations, which can end their medical careers, even if they're eventually cleared, Christopher says. "They feel besieged. And it's not necessarily even a fear of criminal charges. It's about getting investigated, about having the DEA come and say, 'We'd like to look through your files.' You then have to pay for a defense, and take time away from your practice to defend yourself." This, Christopher and other patient advocates say, is why it's so difficult for pain patients to find conscientious doctors to treat them.
Another example from earlier in the piece:
One Indiana pain patient who wrote to HuffPost tells a typical story. Faced with debilitating pain from spinal stenosis, she was told by local doctors she was displaying the drug seeking signs of an addict, and they refused to treat her. "I have never used an illegal substance, and seldom have a glass of wine- I've never had a beer in my life," she writes. She was finally able to find a pain specialist, but in California. She makes the trip every three months for the high-dose opioid therapy she says makes her life bearable. But the cost of flying to the west coast ever few months is taking a toll on her finances. "I have asked for help finding a pain management doctor closer to Indiana," she writes. "I have searched online. I cannot find any one willing, or qualified to take me. I am a Christian and I do not believe in taking my own life, but I pray for an answer before I have no way to survive. I am not alone. There are so many pain patients whose lives are a living hell -- waiting and praying to die."
From a commenter, wsr1500, at the HuffPo:
Letting the DEA set quotas for drug production is a travesty. There are supply problems not only with pain medications but also some of the drugs used for attention deficit disorders. As a pharmacist for many years, I have dealt with the DEA. On one occasion they audited the hospital where I practiced.They arrived and announced they would start the audit the next day. They tried to be intimidating, were very rude, apparently had already decided we were criminals, threatening to close the pharmacy if the records were not produced, even though no one had raised any objection. We decided to perform our own audit, and worked late into the night. The next day they proceeded with their audit and found that drugs were "missing" Having done our own audit we knew that this was not the case.
When confronted with this evidence they backed down and accepted the fact that our records were correct. They have enormous power over practitioners as they can suspend the DEA license without the level of proof required for a criminal conviction. They have no interest in the welfare of the patients. Trying to limit the supply of legal drugs is of course easier than actually stopping the diversion into illegal channels. The problem is the diversion will continue meaning that legitimate users are the ones who suffer.
Roy For McArdle: "Health INSURANCE Is Not The Same As Health CARE"
Avik S. A. Roy, blogging at TheAtlantic.com's space that was Megan McArdle's, writes:
Chapin White of the Center for Studying Health System Change has published an important new paper in Health Services Research, a journal of health economics, which suggests that a critical part of the Affordable Care Act--its expansion of Medicaid coverage to 16 million more Americans--may actually reduce those individuals' access to health care.White's report comes on the heels of numerous studies that show that patients on Medicaid, our national government-run health-care program for the poor, do far worse on health outcomes than do those on private insurance, and in some cases, worse than those with no insurance at all. (For an extremely deep dive into these studies, see my three-part series on the topic.)
1) Medicaid underpays doctors for their expenses
Why does this occur? The main reason is that Medicaid underpays doctors and hospitals to care for Medicaid beneficiaries. Medicaid's reimbursement rates are around half of those paid by private insurers. In many cases, Medicaid pays doctors less than it costs to care for Medicaid patients, meaning that doctors face the choice of caring for the poor, and going broke, or shutting their doors to Medicaid patients. One survey found that internists were 8.5 times as likely to accept no Medicaid patients at all, relative to those with private insurance. Another found that two-thirds of kids on Medicaid were denied a doctor's appointment for a serious condition, relatively to only 11 percent for the privately-insured.
Believe it or not, physicians even do better caring for the uninsured than they do caring for Medicaid patients. Two MIT economists, Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez, have found that three-quarters of physicians receive lower fees for serving Medicaid patients than they do for the uninsured, because many people without health insurance are still able to pay out-of-pocket for routine health expenses. (Gruber was the intellectual father of Obamacare, and remains an outspoken advocate of the law.)
And #2 and #3:
2) Overall, Medicaid expansions do not lead to more doctor visits3) Obamacare's Medicaid expansion could worsen physician access
Stupidity, Thy Name Is The State
And the voters who support crap like this. Future of Capitalism blogs what you see when you return a rental car to San Francisco Airport's rental car garage:
Return a rental car to the San Francisco Airport's giant joint rental-car garage and you might be confronted, as I was last night, with this sign: "Proposition 65 Warning: Vehicle exhaust fumes are present and contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."This struck me as at least slightly absurd for at least two reasons.
First, the sign is posted not at the entry door to the garage, but well inside, once it's too late to avoid exposure to the carcinogenic and birth-defect inducing chemicals. Even if it were posted at the entry door, it's not clear how the state expects people who view it to react. What is a driver supposed to do, abandon his rental car at roadside and then sprint to the terminal while holding his breath to avoid inhaling the exhaust fumes from the other vehicles?
via @WalterOlson
FBI Director Confused On Due Process
Here's the video:
TSA: Years Of Watching Roadrunner Cartoons (Standing In For Actual Intelligence And Intelligence Training)
Photo tool confiscated by TSA geniuses, according to Reddit poster gynoceros:
@Debwilker tweet:
#TSA thinks photo equipment looks like a bomb. Yeah if ur education is cartoons
PetaPixel posts about a popular photographers' tool, pictured above -- the Giottos Rocket -- used to blow dust off cameras and glass.
Not surprisingly, the bright lights at the TSA confiscated one from Reddit user gynoceros, he says, at Newark Airport.
Over at Reddit, poster TomDLux has a helpful hint for fooling a bunny or those with TSA-level intelligence:
Always have a half-full water bottle in your camera bag. It gives them something to take away from you, and then they forget to keep looking. And if they miss it, you can enjoy some nice refreshing water.
Reddit poster invalid_font_size has another:
I used to do that to get lighters through when they were banned. I'd put two in the bin to get x-rayed, the one doofus on the monitor would yell "lighter" and the second doofus would stop looking through the bin after finding the first one.
This is security? Or a jobs program for unskilled workers and a get-rich program for Michael Chertoff and everyone else sucking off the teat of the "security" industry?
The NYPD Tapes
Fantastic piece on the Voice's investigation about cops jiggering crime stats by refusing to make crime reports, or calling serious crimes minor ones, then going after the whistleblower who made their doings public. Graham Rayman writes in the Village Voice:
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting--which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors--his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
...Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft's specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.
These weren't minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.
...•In a 2009 incident, an elderly man said he was a burglary victim. When he showed up at the precinct to file a report, a sergeant told him to go to another precinct to file. Again, this is a violation of the NYPD's own policy. It was only after a newspaper article appeared months later that a report was taken.
•A 60-year-old retired traffic agent made repeated visits to the precinct to get a complaint number for her stolen vehicle from May through June 2009. The investigation showed the report was never entered into the NYPD computer system, preventing it from being counted in the crime statistics. Investigators concluded nothing would have been done if the woman hadn't been a former traffic agent and pressed the issue.
Jet Blue Refuses To Be Jet Brat
From the Tucson Citizen/USA Today, a family was booted off a plane from the Turks and Caicos back to their Rhode Island home after their 2-year-old threw a tantrum before takeoff:
The problem: The toddler's tantrum came just before takeoff when the girl refused to sit down and put her seat belt on. Federal aviation regulations, of course, require all passengers to be seated and buckled in before a plane can legally take off.Colette Vieau, the mother of the girl, tells NBC 10 that they were eventually able to get Natalie into her seat, but it was not soon enough to keep the family of four from being removed from the Boston-bound flight. The family also was traveling with 3-year-old daughter Cecilia.
"We were holding them down with all of our might, seat belt on. And I said, 'We have them seated. Can we go now?' She said the pilots made a decision to turn the plane around," mother Vieau told NBC 10.
Perhaps my parents kept us in line because were some special kind of Jewish Hitlers, but it was just not an option for us to throw tantrums at any age -- especially not to the point where we needed to be held down. And they say "holding them." Why the hell were these parents doing putting other passengers in a position where they had to suffer these children who have to be held down through their tantrums?
As I wrote in my op-ed a few years ago in the LA Times:
I hear claims that some children are prone to tantrums no matter how exquisitely they are parented. If this describes your child, there's a solution, and it isn't plopping him in a crowded metal tube with hundreds of people who can't escape his screams except by throwing themselves to their deaths at 30,000 feet.Granted, there sometimes are extenuating circumstances, reasons parents and their little hell-raiser simply must take a plane. Well, actually, there are two: dire family emergency (Granny's actually dying, not just dying to see the little tyke) and the need for a lifesaving operation for the wee screamer. In all other cases, if there's any chance a child is still in the feral stage, pop Granny on a flight or gas up the old minivan. It really does come down to this: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin.
I hope you'll consider buying a copy of my book, 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 or Kindle books [but not "bargain" copies] go against my advance, and help me keep writing...and eating, and help fund my answering questions that will never make my column.)
A Wee Flaw In The "Discrimination!" Logic
Jason L. Riley writes in the WSJ about intimations from the Obama camp that black kids' discipline rates (which are higher than whites') are due to discrimination:
The Obama administration is waving around a new study showing that black school kids are "suspended, expelled, and arrested in school" at higher rates than white kids. According to the report, which looked at 72,000 schools, black students comprise just 18% of those enrolled yet account for 46% of those suspended more than once and 39% of all expulsions.Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the administration is "not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases," but that's certainly what he's implying when he bleats on about the "fundamental unfairness" of the situation. "The undeniable truth," said Mr. Duncan in a press call this week, "is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise." Of course, if racial animus toward blacks explains higher black discipline rates, what explains the fact that white kids are disciplined at higher rates than Asian kids? Is the school system anti-white, too?
The reaction to studies like this reveals disturbing sensibilities on the left when it comes to education in general and black education in particular. The data were compiled by the Education Department's civil rights office, which probably thinks that it's doing black people a favor by highlighting these racial disparities and pressuring schools to reduce black suspension rates. No thought, it seems, was given to whether this course of action helps or harms those black kids who are in school to learn and not act up.
The Obama administration's sympathies are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety? Going easy on the students who behave badly--especially in inner-city schools where the problem is pronounced--is an odd way of advancing black education and closing the learning gap. Black kids already tend to be stuck in dropout factories with the most inexperienced teachers. Must they be consigned to the most violent schools as well?
Karzai: It Isn't Afghanistan But Islam Itself That Allows Men To Beat Their Wives
From the AP:
President Hamid Karzai's Tuesday remarks backing the Ulema Council's document, which allows husbands to beat wives under certain circumstances and encourages segregation of the sexes, is seen as part of his outreach to insurgents like the Taliban.Both the U.S. and Karzai hope that the Taliban can be brought into negotiations to end the country's decade-long war. But activists say they're worried that gains made by women since 2001 may be lost in the process.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan prior to the 2001 U.S. invasion, girls were banned from going to school and women had to wear burqas that covered them from head to toe. Women were not allowed to leave their homes without a male relative as an escort.
The "code of conduct" issued Friday by the Ulema Council as part of a longer statement on national political issues is cast as a set of guidelines that religious women should obey voluntarily, but activists are concerned it will herald a reversal of the trend in Afghanistan since 2001 to pass laws aimed at expanding women's rights.
Among the rules: Women should not travel without a male guardian and women should not mingle with strange men in places like schools, markets or offices. Beating one's wife is prohibited only if there is no "Shariah-compliant reason," it said, referring to the principles of Islamic law.
Asked about the code of conduct at a press conference in the capital, Karzai said it was in line with Islamic law and was written in consultation with Afghan women's groups. He did not name the groups that were consulted.
Karzai: "Ladies, you've got the rights of dogs and if you smartmouth about it, we're gonna clock you one. Per Sharia law. That okay with you? Well, okay then."
Is Your Industry "Cool" Enough To Kill Birds And Get Away With It?
@mattwridley tweeted:
Double standard -- US govt prosecutes oil industry for killing birds, but not wind industry.
Robert Bryce writes the piece Ridley linked to, "Windmills vs. Birds," originally in the WSJ:
For years, the wind energy industry has had a license to kill golden eagles and lots of other migratory birds. It's not an official license, mind you.But as the bird carcasses pile up--two more dead golden eagles were recently found at the Pine Tree wind project in Southern California's Kern County, bringing the number of eagle carcasses at that site to eight--the wind industry's unofficial license to kill wildlife is finally getting some serious scrutiny.
Some 77 organizations--led by the American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Endangered Species Coalition and numerous chapters of the Audubon Society--are petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to toughen the rules for the siting, permitting and operation of large-scale wind projects.
It's about time. Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America's oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act.
But the Obama administration--like the Bush administration before it--has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines. A violation of either law can result in a fine of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for two years.
Matt Ridley writes in the Spectator on the "wind-farm scam":
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world's energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine -- despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide....Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me -- the taxpayers -- double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, 'policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum' or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now.
When Idiocy And Political Correctness Stand In For Security
Dr. Gad Saad blogs about profiling at Psychology Today:
As we approached the security area at the Montreal airport, we were informed that our two-year-old daughter had been randomly chosen for a more rigorous security screening. Hence, in the bizarre and suicidal world driven by "progressive" political correctness, all individuals are just as likely to be security threats and hence a random mechanism is the "fairest" way to single out travelers.Is someone who possesses my profile as likely to be a security threat as a two-year old little girl?
Listen to my radio show with Dr. Gad Saad here.
Communism And Capitalism: Remarkable Before And After Photos
Photo gallery from Der Speigel and photog Stefan Koppelkamm of scenes from East Germany. Story here.
via Walter Olson
The LA Times Just Now Figured Out That The Occupy Movement Is Incoherent
The Occupy movement needs to get its act together, notices the LA Times. Subhead on their editorial:
The Occupy movement appears to have lost its way. To be a factor in the November vote, it needs to get organized.
An excerpt from the editorial, which says pretty little, actually:
An example of the problem cropped up in late February, when attorney Michael Pollok, founder of the 99% Declaration Working Group and a self-appointed movement leader, announced a national Occupy Wall Street conference in Philadelphia the week of July 4 that would pick delegates from 50 states and draft a petition to present to the president and Congress. That idea was speedily pooh-poohed by Han Shan of the Occupy Wall Street public relations working group, who said the movement wasn't endorsing the conference.Other Occupy leaders say they're planning big protests during the Group of Eight economic conference in May. And there are of course splinter groups all over the country holding regular demonstrations at banks and city halls. But 2012 is an election year that presents a sharp contrast between candidates who aim to help level the playing field dominated by the 1% and those who don't. If the Occupy movement is to have much influence over that contest, it will probably have to do something its leaders have so far resisted: get organized.
I can tell you what the Tea Partiers stand for: Smaller government. Lower taxes. That's four words.
Can anyone put into words what the Occupy Movement stands for? Concisely. In a statement others would generally agree with?
Popehat On TSA Reaction To Corbett Nudie Scanner Video
Ken White and his taint blog at Popehat:
This post is not about whether Corbett is right about the scanners. My point is about the TSA's reaction. Today, Corbett reported that in the course of being interviewed by reporters about his claims, he learned that a TSA spokesperson "strongly cautioned" a reporter not to cover the story. He didn't identify the reporter. In the comments to his post, someone claiming to be a reporter from Smarter Travel asserted that they, too, were "strongly cautioned not to cover the story." The post asserted the TSA spokesperson in question was one Sari Koshetz.
He emailed her:
Dear Ms. Koshetz:I write for a modestly-trafficked blog that frequently discusses TSA issues.
I write to request a comment on a report regarding your conduct. Specifically, two reporters have now asserted that you "strongly cautioned" them against reporting on the allegations of litigant and blogger Jonathan Corbett regarding TSA scanners.
Specifically:
1. Did you (or other TSA spokespersons) in fact "caution" journalists against reporting on the story?
2. Was your caution meant to convey that journalists who report on the issue could face some sort of governmental action?
3. What was the legal or factual basis of your caution?
4. Is there any other comment you would like to make?
Thank you,
etc.
He got a prompt but brief response:
Any guidance provided is to caution reporters not to generalize that our technology doesn't work or print something without all the facts, based on an inconclusive YouTube video.
Ken admitted to being shocked by the response:
You know, if I were the spokesperson for a controversial and unpopular government agency frequently accused of infringing upon the civil rights of Americans, I think that I would go out of my way, when asked, to emphasize that I hadn't meant any threats against journalists and that I didn't intend anything I said to be threatening.Unless, of course, I meant to be threatening.
As I've said recently, ambiguity in threats is the hallmark of bullshit thuggery. Until I see a clarification from the TSA, that's how I interpret this incident: as a deliberate attempt by the TSA to chill journalists from writing about whether its intrusive full-body scanners are worthless.
So. Allow me to offer my response to the TSA and its spokespersons: snort my taint, thugs.
It's the hallmark of a police state -- the thugs are employed by the government. Don't say I didn't tell you so. Start taking notice, speaking up and standing up -- before it's too late.
The Third Date Rule: Your Thoughts?
This is the "rule" that the third date is the sex date.
When do your panties/tighty whities hit the floorboards? Or when would they have back when you were still dating?
If you're a woman, do you go by the third date rule? If so, why? If not, why not? When do you have sex with a guy -- and what's the reasoning behind your timetable?
And guys, what's your thinking about The Third Date Rule? When do you expect sex, and when are you outta there if you aren't getting it?
TSA: We Already Ignore The Fourth Amendment; Why Respect The Rest?
Not satisfied with ripping up the Fourth Amendment at the airport door (our right not to be searched without probable cause -- reasonable suspicion we've committed a crime), the TSA continues to mess with our free speech and freedom of the press.
Jonathan Corbett, who posted the terrific video showing how easy it is to defeat the TSA's nudie scanners, just posted a blog item about the TSA contacting a reporter and advising him not to cover the story:
I've been on the phone all day for the last 2 days with reporters and journalists of all kinds, including the big bad MSM, and one South Florida reporter told me that he had been "strongly cautioned" by the TSA not to cover this story. Absolutely unbelievable:Update: The name of the TSA spokeswoman who attempted to intimidate this journalist is Sari Koshetz.
Here's the email:
Corbett continues:
The TSA is clearly no fan of the 4th Amendment, nor of 5th Amendment due process rights, and now this blatant attempt to manipulate the free press with "strong caution" hits at Amendment the First. Why strong caution? Are there repercussions for journalists that fail to heed this "advice?" Because, you know, if I were a member of the free press and the federal government asked me to censor myself, I'd happily comply . . . . . . . . . riiight.
It's Called "Family Planning" Not Family Shaming
Irresponsible woman gets pregnant after dating a guy for two and a half months and spews all over her blog in hopes of shaming him into being a father -- and not just the checkbook version of one mandated by the state.
Overview of Alana Joy's story here.
Her blog item here:
I explained that since I had been consulting I did not have insurance through work, and (like an idiot) hadn't gotten any on my own. I told you that the doctors had told me at about 8-10 weeks I'd need to see an OBGYN. Get bloodwork, ultrasound, etc. I let you know that I'd need you to cover that while I figured out how to secure healthcare, and I asked you to come with me to the appointment. You agreed.Two days later, the night before I was meant to leave, you came back from work and had done a complete 180. You informed me that you were "not going to let this baby dictate the rest of your life", that "if I choose not to have an abortion then you are choosing to have this baby, and you should do that knowing that I will not be involved in raising it, I won't be a father to it". You did, however, say that you would uphold any "financial obligations" you know you have.
I cried. I yelled. I begged. How is choosing NOT to have an abortion choosing TO have a child? Neither of us "chose" for this to happen. Just because abortion is available as an option, doesn't mean it's a simple "choice" or something every woman would want to do. Being unwilling to have an abortion doesn't mean that I suddenly am choosing to do this, and choosing to do this on my own. Of course I cried, yelled... should I have thanked you? Of course, your reaction of "See? Look at how we communicate! We can't raise a child together!" only served to infuriate me more. I mean, we had never had a single moment of stress or strain in communication, but when someone is saying the most obscene things, does a total 180 in a life altering situation... NOT breaking down would be crazy. Especially after you say that if I were to discuss this situation publicly, on my Twitter or blog, that you would sue me for "extortion". No, that shouldn't infuriate me at all! Extorting you for what? Prenatal care?? Helping to pay for a crib? Please.
Three letters: I.U.D.
Also, I have not worked for a company since my 20s, but I've done the big girl thing and paid for health insurance independently every month. This is what grownups do.
So many people are in their 40s and have yet to reach adulthood.
And regarding getting knocked up and hoping that the guy will come through the way you want him to, I wrote in the column I linked above:
While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: "Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?" A child shouldn't have to survive on peanut butter sandwiches sans peanut butter because he was conceived by two selfish, irresponsible jerks. Still, there's a lot more to being a father than forking over sperm and child support, yet the law, as written, encourages unscrupulous women to lure sex-dumbed men into checkbook daddyhood.This isn't 1522. If a woman really doesn't want a kid, she can take advantage of modern advances in birth control like Depo-Provera or the IUD, combine them with backup methods (as recommended by her doctor), add an ovulation detection kit, plus insist that doofuses like you latex up. Since it's the woman who gets a belly full of baby, maybe a woman who has casual sex and is unprepared, emotionally, financially, and logistically, to raise a child on her own, should be prepared to avail herself of the unpleasant alternatives. It's one thing if two partners in a relationship agree to make moppets, but should a guy really get hit up for daddy fees when he's, say, one of two drunk strangers who has sex after meeting in a bar? Yes, he is biologically responsible. But, is it really "in the child's best interest" to be the product of a broken home before there's even a home to break up?
via Kate Coe
UPDATE, 9:31 am, Pacific Time: Googled other "Fellatricks" comments (see below) and found this video of "Alana Joy" linked on another site:
The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About PETA
Nicole Cliffe came up with the list on thehairpin.com. A few of the entries:
1. This advertising campaign is offensive to women.2. Clearly you have not read "The Sexual Politics of Meat." Here are four paragraphs from it.
3. Women are not animals and dairy farming is not rape.
8. Bacon is the Holocaust. Isaac Bashevis Singer quotation.
45. Michael Vick killed dogs but everyone else in the NFL kills their wives and no one cares.
46. This thread has been closed for review by a moderator.
via @melissamcewen
Anybody Can Sue Over Anything, And That Means Anything
We save a lot of money and disappointment by watching really good TV series like The Wire on DVD (we're on Season 3 now) instead of going to the movies. I think the last movie we saw in a theater was the excellent movie The Guard, on the recommendation of our flawless recommender of movies, Writers Bloc's Andrea Grossman.
If we're going to spend the bucks and have to drive and park, we have to have it on solid recommendation that the movie is really good -- or it has to be something with "Die Hard" in the title, starring Bruce Willis. (Embarrassing, but I just love these, and love Willis in those movies. I watch the movie -- Gregg watches me and laughs.)
Well, besides the expense of the movie, they charge for popcorn like it's laced with gold, and soda's up there in the same price realm. And now a Michigan man thinks that's cause for a lawsuit -- as opposed to staying home with a stack of DVDs. Rene Lynch writes that Joshua Thompson is filing a suit against the theaters for price gouging:
Thompson, an avid moviegoer from Livonia, Mich., used to bypass the high prices charged for theater popcorn, soda and candy by bringing in his own treats, said his attorney, Kerry Morgan. But Thompson arrived at his local theater outside Detroit recently to find a new sign telling customers they were no longer allowed to bring in their own goodies."He called me and said, 'Can they do that?' " Morgan told The Times. The attorney said his first reaction was, "Sure, they can do that, it's private property." But then he began doing a little legal research and came across the Michigan Consumer Protection Act, a statute designed to prevent price gouging.
And a lawsuit was born.
...Morgan said consumers were willing to pay a fair premium for movie theater goodies. But they don't enjoy being charged three or four times the price of a box of Goobers.
Eat beforehand. Or -- oh, the horror! -- spend 90 whole minutes without shoveling candy into your face.
Pot Robertson
As @Iowahawk tweeted:
Pat Robertson goes where Barack Obama won't.
Jesse McKinley writes in The New York Times that Pat Robertson is an advocate of legalizing marijuana:
"I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol," Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. "I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded."Mr. Robertson's remarks echoed statements he made last week on "The 700 Club," the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs.
...Mr. Robertson, 81, said that there had been no single event or moment that caused him to embrace legalization. Instead, his conviction that the nation "has gone overboard on this concept of being tough on crime" built up over time, he added.
"It's completely out of control," Mr. Robertson said. "Prisons are being overcrowded with juvenile offenders having to do with drugs. And the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get 10 years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all."
Such talk was welcomed by some other religious leaders, especially those in African-American communities who have long argued that blacks are unfairly targeted in drug cases.
Iva E. Carruthers, the general secretary for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, the Chicago group that represents hundreds of black clergy members and lay leaders, said Mr. Robertson's remarks suggested that he recognized that "if you're a Hollywood exec with money, you're treated differently than if you're a poor kid getting off public transportation and get arrested."
Bunny Hungry
It's Amazon's Easter Shop
The absolute best, though, are the bunny suits
I Smell Rude People: Jeanie Daniels' Nail Polish On A Plane
Noxious fumes? Suck 'em up, other passengers. Selfish Jeanie Daniels wants to paint her nails:
The bathroom, where she went after being told to stop painting her nails amidst the other passengers, is also no place to take your noxious fumes: Tiny enclosed space! Leave the fumes for the next person! No problem for Jeanie.
She complains about being treated "so poorly"? Ever smelled nail polish fumes in an enclosed space like a plane? Where hundreds of other people are trapped for hours and cannot walk away or otherwise escape (except by throwing themselves to their death at 30,000 feet)?
This woman represents the height of ME! ME! ME! Generation behavior. Per the footage above, she still has not a clue as to what she did wrong.
If you haven't read my book, I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle To Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society, I hope you'll consider buying a copy. It's only $12.58, brand new, with Amazon's discount at the link above. (New copies or Kindle books [but not "bargain" copies] go against my advance, and help me keep writing...and eating, and help fund my answering questions that will never make my column.)
What TSA "Security" Is Costing Us In Dollars
Bob Fisher blogs at TSANewsBlog about the cost of the easily fooled scanners:
While the TSA usually cites scanner costs ranging from $140,000 to $180,000 apiece, this is only the scanner cost and does not include associated airport modifications and installation expenses.In the case of Akron-Canton airport, the total cost for four scanners was $2,342,567.17, which included $945,439.40 to relocate the food court. The checkpoint alone cost $1,397,127.77 for four machines, or an average cost of $349,281.94 each.
Since most airports usually require some building modifications, such as floor reinforcement, the typical scanner installation is likely closer to $500,000 than $400,000.
The 29 secondary airports received a total of 45 scanners at an estimated cost of $15.7 million and will screen a total of 50,337 passengers a year.
Of these, 18 airports handle fewer than 1,000 passengers daily but were equipped with 21 scanners at an estimated installed cost of $7.3 million to screen 9,538 passengers per day.
...If the TSA truly wants to expedite and improve airport screening, it would use the scanners only as a secondary screening device , as originally approved by Congress in 2008, or as an option to metal detectors for those with metallic medical implants. If the scanners were used to screen only when passengers alarmed the metal detector, or as a personal choice by the passenger, things would work better and faster and would more equitably account for the variation in passengers' circumstances.
...TSA has also avoided any discussion of the backscatter machines because of the lingering health and privacy problems. The agency appears to be attempting to mislead the public into believing that the backscatter scanners have the same privacy improvements as the MMW scanners. It continues to dodge Congressional demands for independent testing despite evidence that these scanners could result in an additional 100 cancer deaths each year.
The scanners have now become a politically charged and divisive issue rather than a tool used to detect contraband. There is also an implication of government corruption and deceit associated with the deployment of these systems, which should be investigated by an independent special prosecutor: has this government agency compromised passenger safety and imposed unnecessary procedures to protect private manufacturers' profits?
The original program stipulated that passengers would first use the walk-through metal detectors. If an alarm was raised, they would be sent to the scanners for further screening. If an anomaly was present in both scans, then the passenger would be patted down or wanded, but only on the part of the body that showed the anomaly, not on the entire body.
Unfortunately, the scanners aren't foolproof, and they fail to detect hidden items 44% of the time. Most of those items would have been detected if the metal detector had been used as the primary screening device. Almost all of the items found by the TSA in 2011 were found via the x-ray belt and walk-through metal detectors, not the scanners.
Of course, the greatest cost is the erosion of our civil liberties -- which most Americans accept like blinking sheep.
Corbett: TSA Nudie Scanners Are Worthless
On Tuesday afternoon, Jonathan Corbett himself (and about 20 other people, subsequently) emailed me his awesome video showing how easy it is to fool our "security" drones at the airport:
Hey Amy! Wanted to share this one with you... After a month or so of research, I found a way to essentially make the body scanners useless: anyone can beat them. ...and less scanners = less pat-downs! --Jon
I wrote him back:
Brilliant - just great. Will blog this and get it out there. (No, I'm not supposed to be watching this now -- deadline -- but couldn't resist.)Thank you -- you're a friend to the Constitution, and there are far too few of these these days. -Amy
PS I'm hoping it gets some of the sheep out of their stupor.
And it just might. He wrote me later:
I'm now up to 10 hits PER SECOND :) Y Combinator just picked me up as #1. This is crazy!
He's gotten so many hits the YouTube counter reset to zero. Let's keep it up. Send this video to everyone you know. Especially those who are our elected officials who have done nothing to stop the TSA's violation of our Fourth Amendment rights -- daily, for dollars -- at airports across America.
Here's a link to his video:
Here is his write-up on his site (the transcript of what he says on the video is at the link as well):
This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA's insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.Please share this video with your family, friends, and most importantly, elected officials in federal government. Make sure they understand that your vote is contingent on them fixing the abuse that 200,000 passengers face from the TSA on a daily basis.
My legal battle against the TSA's nude body scanner and pat-down molestation program continues in court, soon with a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you'd like to donate to this effort, send PayPal to: jon [at] fourtentech.com
Jonathan Corbett
Capitalism Vs. Crony Capitalism
Via Sam Bowman at Adam Smith Institute, Tom Palmer's piece at City A.M. on why he loves free-market capitalism:
It's a legal, social, economic, and cultural system of decentralised innovation - what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" - that relies on the voluntary cooperation and exchange among legal equals. Capitalist culture celebrates the entrepreneur, the scientist, the risk-taker, the innovator, the creator. Although derided as materialistic by some, capitalism is at its core a spiritual and cultural enterprise...Capitalism rests on a rejection of the ethics of loot and grab, the means by which most wealth enjoyed by the wealthy is acquired in other economic and political systems. For much of human history, those who were rich were rich because they took from others, and especially because they used their power to gain monopolies and to confiscate the produce of others through taxes. It's only under conditions of capitalism that people commonly become wealthy without being criminals.
...It's important to distinguish free-market capitalism from crony capitalism, a system that has mired many nations in corruption and backwardness and is, sadly, on the rise. In many countries, if someone is rich, there is a very good chance that he (rarely she) holds political power or is a close relative, friend or supporter - in a word, a crony - of those who do hold power, and that his wealth came not from being a producer of valued goods and services but from enjoying the privileges that the state can confer on some at the expense of others.
Sadly, crony capitalism can with increasing accuracy be applied to the economy of the United States, a country in which failed firms are routinely bailed out with money taken from taxpayers, in which the national capital is a gigantic hive of lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, consultants and hacks, and in which appointed officials of the Treasury department and the central bank reward some firms and harm others.
Such corrupt cronyism shouldn't be confused with free-market capitalism, which is based on the rule of law, on equality of rights for all, on the freedom to choose, on the freedom to innovate, on the guiding discipline of both private profits and private losses. Under American cronyism, the many are bought off with subsidised home loans, the economy generates a huge bubble, the financial system crashes and the powerful get bailouts, only to be followed by more bailouts, easier money and another cycle.
The cronyist system of private profits and socialised losses hasn't worked out too well. Give me free-market capitalism any day.
Adam Smith Institute blog I found via the very cool Karen DeCoster's blogroll. She's a one-woman biker gang, a libertarian, and, well, I'll let her tell you:
I am a Certified Public Accountant and freelance writer who is devoted to the causes of liberty, individualism, and the free market. I embrace the right to keep and bear arms; recognize the superiority of the Articles of Confederation; subscribe to a motley assortment of minor conspiracy theories; and believe that government is evil, immoral, corrupt, and unnecessary in a free society. I am also an ardent lover and student of Austrian economics, the pro-market, anti-statist school of economics. Additionally, I proudly wear the title "Queen of Political Incorrectness", given to me by my friend Tom DiLorenzo.
There's more at the link. Basically, she's cool as hell and I can't wait to have drinks with her, which I hope to do next time I'm in Detroit.
Victorian Star Trek
via @DrEades and kottke.org, the cast of Star Trek, daguerreotyped-up. The artist, Rabbittooth, can be found here. More of his Star Trek manips here.
Notes On Writing: The Printed Page Is Meant To Be Printed Out
Inspired by this piece -- "Not My Type" -- on the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virginia Postrel posted on Facebook:
I haven't tried switching typography, but it's an interesting idea. I do read aloud when I can (rarely for columns, often for my book-in-progress) and edit with a pencil on paper.
A quote from that Chronicle piece by Rachel Toor:
For some perverse reason, my version of Microsoft Word defaults to an unattractive sans-serif typeface for a new document. It also adds a space between paragraphs--something that drives me nuts. While I've been able to change those quirks on my home computer, my tiny laptop will not let me reset the default.
She usually resets it (I have a page formatted page set up that I open) but one day, she didn't:
And something funny happened. Without the familiar presentation, my writing looked strange to me. I saw my sentences from a distance, as if someone else had created them. It excited me enough to keep writing. When I went back to revise, the distance provided by the novelty of the presentation allowed me to read and edit with a freshness that I hadn't felt for a while.I suppose I should have realized that this would happen. Often when I read my own published work it feels unfamiliar. Sometimes I think, "Wow, this is pretty good." Sometimes I cringe and notice flaws and failures that had been invisible to me in the draft on my own computer.
Distance from our own prose serves an important purpose. Usually we get it in a temporal way, allowing manuscripts to lie fallow in desk drawers (in the old days) or now in unopened documents, for however long it takes to come to the work with a fresh focus. When we spend too long revising and messing around with the language, we tend to memorize our own sentences, which can give them a ring of inevitability. That can make them hard to edit, or to jettison.
When we're in the process of creating, we often add ideas, anecdotes, or data that don't really belong. In early drafts, that can be a good thing. The first draft is the get-it-down draft. It's where you get to throw in anything that might turn out to be useful or important. But until you've let a piece of writing sit long enough, it can be difficult to discern the essential from the self-indulgent because everything, when newly minted, looks shiny and good. Just getting words on the page seems like an accomplishment.
When I see the work printed out, the experience of reading is different. Lines that on the screen seemed perfectly fine can no longer hide their clunkiness. I notice flabby descriptions and ugly adverbs I had overlooked. I see when paragraphs are too long and the work looks uninviting, or when they are so uniform that the writing appears dull and boring even at a quick glance. Similar sentence constructions become more apparent to me on the printed page and seem easier to change. When the work is in one continuous scroll, I'm less likely to be able to see the whole piece. It helps to lay pages next to each other and see how they fit together. That is, after all, how the reader will experience them, at least when they appear in printed publications.
I wrote on Virginia's Facebook post:
Microsoft is uniquely unintuitively designed. But, related to the piece, I MUST print my stuff out to read it. To edit my weekly syndicated column, after it's first done, I tape it on my bathroom wall and edit it while I'm in the shower. Something about being out of a "proper" writing environment gives me insight that I don't have while seated at my desk.
When I've finished a book, or some important chapters, I go to a bar I love near my house at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, sit down with a glass of wine, and proofread. I just finished the telephone chapter of my book. Basically. I have some fiddling to do, but in a few days, it'll be bar-time, and then I can see anything I've missed.
On a related note (per something Toor says in her piece), here's why you shouldn't be worried about "wasting" paper.
Advice Goddess Radio: Get The Podcast -- Anthropology Rock Star Dr. Robert Trivers On Deception And Self-Deception
It was a very interesting show with Dr. Robert Trivers on deception and self-deception -- why we're all such lying mofos and how to lie less to yourself and maybe catch other people in their whoppers.
Listen at the link or download (click "play in your default player"):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/05/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Buy his book here: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
This coming Sunday, March 11, 7-8pm Pacific/10-11pm Eastern, therapist Dr. Fred Woolverton, co-author with Susan Shapiro of the smart, very helpful and even moving book on addiction, Unhooked: How to Quit Anything
Sell Pot, Not Hot Dogs, Near The Elementary School
Patrick McGreevy writes in the LA Times that a state lawmaker wants to keep food trucks farther away from schools than pot dispensaries:
"It's a shame the state would ... deny people the opportunity to do what they are passionate about," said (Mireya) Ingham, an administrator at a local charity. "So many of the food trucks are doing such good things with fresh foods and ingredients.''The problem, according to Assemblyman William Monning (D-Carmel), is that although trucks specializing in healthy gourmet fare are getting media attention and even their own TV shows, they still make up a small fraction of the vendors.
The other trucks are contributing to an epidemic of childhood obesity on California school campuses by supplying youngsters with greasy burgers, sodas and high-calorie ice cream, Monning said. He wants to ban all food trucks and pushcarts from within 1,500 feet of elementary, middle and high schools from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on school days. Pot stores must be 600 feet from schools.
In Los Angeles, boundaries would triple the current limit of 500 feet. In many other cities, Monning's measure would create a new no-go zone. Food truck operators say the restrictions would put large swaths of their market -- as much as 80% of streets in some places -- out of reach.
From a letter to the editor by a woman named Diane Nunn, showing what shortsighted idiots we elect:
If food trucks are pushed away, will someone else propose to close down the doughnut shop directly across the street from the high school in our neighborhood? How about the fast food taco place on the other corner? And what would be the fate of the liquor store a few steps away, which sells junk food and soda? How exactly will this bill help decrease childhood obesity?
Porn Watchers, Premarital Sex Participators Ineligible For SC GOP
Jillian Rayfield writes for TPM:
Before you can join the Laurens County Republican Party in South Carolina and get on the primary ballot, they ask that you pledge that you've never ever had pre-marital sex -- and that you will never ever look at porn again.Last Tuesday, the LCGOP unanimously adopted a resolution that would ask all candidates who want to get on the primary ballot to sign a pledge with 28 principles, because the party "does not want to associate with candidates who do not act and speak in a manner that is consistent with the SC Republican Party Platform."
Republicans really water down their ability to get votes by trying to legislate morality (and "morality"). Somebody recently wrote me about the "immorality" of premarital sex. I'm 47 and I've never been married, and I try to do kind things for people and "leave the campground better than I found it," and my sex life is "immoral"? Why?
via @SteveMirsky
The Garbage Police
The police state goes all the way down to the kitty rectum. Via Reason's Charles Oliver, a DC woman was fined thousands of dollars for not recycling her kitty litter. Matt Ackland writes for FoxDC:
Dupont Circle resident Patricia White says she has been fined eight times for throwing homemade cat litter in her trash. The fines total $2,000. White says she shreds old newspaper and junk mail to use as cat litter. She believes she is helping the environment by reusing the paper and avoiding cat litter you will find in stores.After being fined several times, White says she called the Department of Public Works inspector who issued the tickets. According to White, the inspector admitted to digging through trash looking for violations. White even appealed the violations in D.C. court. Judge Audrey Jenkins agreed with the inspector after White explained the situation. FOX 5 tried to reach Judge Jenkins, but her office has declined to comment.
The trash-policing Department of Public Works made this statement:
"The overall goal of recycling is to reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills; therefore, DPW's commercial recycling education and enforcement work is citywide. We do not enforce residential recycling, which is collected from single family homes and apartment buildings with no more than three living units."DPW recycling investigators are looking for evidence of co-mingling of trash with recyclables. We are finding contamination of the recyclables that is clearly coming from someone who lives or works in the building or in the trained perspective of our investigators, the problem is 'systemic' where poor receptacle placement, labeling and/or education have contributed to obvious contamination.
Wastrel Way is on the job in the FoxDC comments:
Her crime is trying to recycle newspaper by herself. What a fool. Everyone knows that recycling must be done FOR YOU by the government. So, don't use your newspaper for your cats, buy commercial cat littler in twenty-pound bags (yes there is profit there, BUT EVERYONE GETS A SHARE) and throw that in the trash, not your twice-used newspaper. Then you will set a positive example as a responsible consumer in a brave new world. Meee-YOWWW! Fzzzzttssss-WraaaaaaRRR!! RRRRRRRRR....
And why recycle? Well, don't do it to save a tree. From thefreemanonline, Lawrence W. Reed writes:
Recently, a speaker on this subject told my local Rotary Club that we should all recycle more of the paper we use so America could save its trees. The implication was that we're using too much paper, that trees are endangered, and that our civic duty requires that we do more with less.As it turns out, most of the trees that are planted in America are planted with the intent of eventually harvesting them to make things like paper. This means that if we all used less paper, there would be fewer trees planted. Maybe some people ought to use less paper anyway (bureaucrats, for instance), but no one should assume that the people who are in the business of growing and harvesting trees are going to continue to do so even if we don't buy their products.
"We're running out of trees" is a fiction older than most of the trees alive today. The truth is that though the total area of forestland in the continental United States is about the same as it was 75 years ago--600 million acres--there are far more trees because of greater tree density per acre. Market-driven technological changes, such as the development of wood preservatives, have led to more efficient use of forest resources. Market incentives have given private land owners good reason to replant nearly three million acres of trees every year. So when it comes to paper, recycle to your heart's content, but not because you think we'll run out of trees if you don't.
A recycling mania has been sweeping the country for nearly a decade. More than 6,000 curbside programs are operated by local governments, serving at least 70 million Americans. In a recent year, more than 140 recycling laws were passed in 38 states--mandating the activity or requiring taxpayers to pay for it, or both.
...Because of flat rate charges for municipal garbage pick-up and disposal, government policies in most areas subsidize those who throw away large quantities of refuse at the expense of those who throw away very little.
That would be me. I pay an exorbitant amount every month for trash pickup, while throwing out a tiny amount of trash.
More from Reed:
Many people believe that simply segregating plastic containers, glass bottles, newspapers, and metal cans and then placing them in colorful boxes at curbside means that recycling has somehow taken place. Without ever questioning either the cost or the outcome of the process that starts at the curb, they assume that whatever happens must be both economically and environmentally sound.Recycling, however, doesn't really happen unless all that plastic, glass, paper, and metal is turned into new, useful products that are actually in demand in the marketplace. Some of what we put at curbside actually ends up in a landfill or piled to the ceiling in warehouses with no place to go. Recycling programs may make a lot of civic-minded citizens feel good, but the whole rationale is undermined to the extent they are nothing more than expensive, politically motivated, and circuitous methods of old-fashioned garbage disposal.
Quite often, more energy and resources are spent than saved in the process of recycling. Municipal governments, because of the inherent shortcomings of public sector accounting and budget information, routinely underestimate the full costs of their recycling programs.
Eat Tofu But Kill Puppies
PETA -- "People Eradicating Thousands of Animals," the NY Post calls 'em -- and rightly so, picking up on a story I saw a while back. The Center for Consumer Freedom is a restaurant and food company lobbying group (click on the link below), but the info on what PETA is doing seems to be confirmed in the memo linked below. From the Post op-ed:
The nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom last week reported that PETA slaughtered fully 95 percent of the stray dogs and cats it "rescued" in 2011.And that's par for the cat-killing course: Overall, PETA has killed more than 90 percent of the animals it's taken in since 2005.
Bottom line: The organization that claims its members would "rather go naked than wear fur" prefers to kill dogs and cats rather than find homes for them.
Yes, making the effort to find homes for stray pets takes time -- of which PETA apparently has precious little.
In 2010, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services discovered that fully 84 percent of the strays taken in by PETA were killed within 24 hours.
No wonder: The report concluded that PETA's headquarters "does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody."
So, off they go to the gas chamber.
No surprise, though, that the organization is much more adept at fund-raising than it is at finding homes for kittens and puppies.
PETA's annual budget is $37 million, "most," it claims, coming from tax-deductible contributions from 2 million members.
Doc with the death toll here.
Racial Discrimination OK Against The Right Colored People?
How about a no-blacks-allowed fireman test-taking session? How would that fly?
C.J. Sullivan and Dan Mangan write in the New York Post:
A tutorial workshop for the upcoming FDNY entrance exam turned raucous last night when the organization that represents black firefighters -- which was hosting the Queens event -- turned away whites who wanted to attend."This is absurd," fumed Rob, a 21-year-old who was one of about 60 whites refused entry by the Vulcan Society at MS 72 in Jamaica and whose angry reaction drew 30 NYPD cops and school safety officers.
"My dad [a firefighter] was killed on 9/11. I always wanted to be FDNY," said Rob, who did not give his last name, as about 110 black men received a test prep inside.
But a Vulcan volunteer said he was told to admit people only if they had received a confirmation e-mail from the society, and that the decision had nothing to do with race.
I actually think businesses and organizations should have a right to exclude whomever they want -- but I know there'd be a huge outcry if the excluded here were black instead of white. Either we're against racism or we're not. Which is it?
Uncle Hand Out
That's not just Uncle Handout (for other people and GM), but Uncle (Got His) Hand Out for his tax take of people's cancelled debt. Via @radleybalko, Sandra Block writes in USA Today:
Billions of dollars in credit card debt that was charged off during the Great Recession-- some of it decades old -- is coming back to haunt borrowers in the form of unexpected tax bills.Debt that is canceled or forgiven is considered taxable income, something many borrowers don't realize until they receive a 1099-C tax form from their lender. The IRS projects that creditors will send taxpayers 6.4 million 1099-Cs in 2012, up from 3.9 million in 2010.
The increase likely reflects the rise in credit card defaults during the economic downturn, says Gerri Detweiler, personal finance expert for Credit.com. Moody's Investor Service estimates that the nation's six largest credit card companies wrote off more than $75 billion in uncollectible balances in 2009 and 2010.
Taxpayers who receive a 1099-C, which is also submitted to the IRS, are liable for the tax bill unless they can prove that the debt was discharged in bankruptcy or that they were insolvent when the debt was canceled, says Jennifer MacMillan, an enrolled agent in Santa Barbara, Calif.
The Softer (And More Well-Lubed) Side Of Sears
Via Gawker, now on sale at Sears, I Heart Butt Plugs tee shirts. In 11 happy colors! 
Bradley J. Fikes corrects:
It's not actually from Sears, it's a third party vendor called 99 Volts using Sears' Web site.
Here's another one of their offerings.
I Don't Want A Redheaded Judge; I Want A Fair And Qualified Judge
Wrongheaded idea in the LA Times, in an editorial touting race preferences in judge appointments, headlined "Make the courts look like us":
A society based on the rule of law requires that people respect their courts; but that respect is subject to question when, from county to county and courtroom to courtroom, the judges are primarily of one race or ethnicity and the litigants and defendants are of another.The divide in California courtrooms is not quite that stark, but it is unmistakable. In a state in which about 40% of residents are non-Latino white, the Judicial Council reports that 72.3% of trial judges and appellate justices are white. Fewer than a third of judges and justices are women.
So it is encouraging that Gov. Jerry Brown is, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger before him, appointing jurists that are more reflective of California's composition. Brown, in fact, deserves credit for having placed a new emphasis on diversity in bench appointments during his two terms as governor in the 1970s. But that was three decades ago. Why is there still such a lag?
Governors can only work with the applicant pools they are given. If not enough qualified African American, Latino, Asian and other non-white lawyers are applying to become judges, the best a governor can do is encourage more to try. But even that requires a diverse population of attorneys, which in turn requires a population of law students, college and university students and ultimately high school graduates that reflects the state's people.
Racism in hiring people of the "right" colors is still racism.
As for affirmative action in law school admissions, it often ends up in blacks flunking out. Walter Williams writes on Creators:
Professor Gail Heriot, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights commissioner and member of the University of San Diego law faculty, addresses academic mismatch in her article "Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," in The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2008). Citing UCLA law professor Richard Sander's research, Professor Heriot says that at elite law schools 52 percent of black students had first-year grades that put them in the bottom 10 percent of their class as opposed to 7 percent white students. Black students had a higher failing and dropout rate, 19 percent compared to 8 percent for white students. Only 45 percent of blacks passed the bar exam on their first try compared with 78 percent of whites. Even after multiple attempts, only 57 percent of blacks succeeded in passing the bar....It is truly a vicious, mean agenda, where black students, who would be successes at a second- or third-tier law school, have been recruited and admitted to the highly competitive environment of first-tier schools in the name of diversity and turned into failures.
Think of it this way. Suppose you asked, "Williams, would you teach me how to box?" I say yes and the first matchup I arrange for you is against Lennox Lewis. You might have the potential to ultimately be an excellent boxer, but you're going to get your brains beaten out before you learn how to bob and weave. It's the same with any student -- black or white. He is less likely to succeed if he is placed in an academic environment where his credentials don't begin to match those of his peers. He is likely to do much better in a slower paced, less competitive environment where he might receive more personal help.
I have frequently made this argument only to be asked: If top-tier colleges don't have racially different admissions policies, how are they going to have enough black students? My response is that's their problem. Black people can't afford to have our youngsters turned into failures so that in the name of diversity race hustlers and white liberals can feel better.
Susan Goldsmith, a terrific writer I sort of grew up with in Michigan (she's a little older), writes in the East Bay Express, "Rich, Black, Flunking: Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it":
The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense....The professor and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.
Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white." Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.
"The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that's where their role stops," Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. "They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn't supervise their children that much. They didn't make sure their children did their homework. That's not how other ethnic groups think."
A Visit To The Paris Animal Cemetery
I've been there -- it's just outside Paris in a sort of unsavory neighborhood. Our friend Pierre, this wonderful man who is a retired master woodworker, took us out there. My Paris-dwelling friend Richard Nahem blogged some wonderful pictures he took.
Well, It's True That He Wasn't Employed
Unemployment payments, which self-employed people like me aren't eligible for, often keep people from looking for work until their benefits checks stop coming. And then, there are those who can't look for work while they're getting unemployment because the guards won't let them leave the prison.
From the LA Times, a murderer got $30,000 in unemployment while in jail. Jack Dolan writes:
A convicted killer who got caught because he'd tattooed a graphic mural of the murder scene on his chest raked in more than $30,000 in unemployment benefits while he sat in the Los Angeles County jail system, a sheriff's spokesman said.Anthony Garcia, 26, had family and friends cashing his $1,600-per-month checks while he served time, said Capt. Mike Parker, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. His accomplices would then deposit a portion of the money into Garcia's jail account. They also shared the cash with Garcia's fellow incarcerated gang members.
Police arrested Garcia's father, 47-year-old Juan Garcia, and girlfriends 45-year-old Sandra Jaimez and 25-year-old Cynthia Limas on unemployment fraud and related charges Thursday, Parker said.
"It's pretty appalling when you think about somebody sitting in jail collecting unemployment," Parker said.
How To Get Luckier
Being a tense type may actually make you less lucky. Sounds a bit whack at first, but the article by psychologist Richard Wiseman makes the notion seem pretty plausible. He writes in the Telegraph/UK about, for example, chance opportunities. He says lucky people consistently encounter them where the unlucky do not. He did an experiment to try to figure out whether they differed in the ability to spot such opportunities:
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.
The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.
And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
He summed up at the bottom:
In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.
Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.
Proposed: New Slogans For Obama's Campaign
Andrew Malcolm blogs one at IBD:
"Are you better off than you were 4 trillion dollars ago?"
He continues:
It will be hard to top the ex-state senator's 2008 motto: "Hope and Change." That was a beauty, combining the nation's widespread desire for change from the bipartisan acrimony of the Bush years with a naive, unfounded hope in what this unvetted new guy sounded like he was saying he would do. Sincerely.
But, he comes up with a few more:
So, what else could Obama use? "It Could Have Been Worse" "To Infinity on Russian Rockets" "Not as Bad as It Seems" "Food Stamps for Everyone" "Live Free for Now""Banks Suck, Except at Fundraisers" "This Time, Guantanamo. Really"
"It's Free If I Say So" "Building a Better Tomorrow for Bundlers" "No lo Conoce"
"Bush Started It" "Spend All You Want, We'll Print More" "It's Worse in Greece"
"Shovel-Ready, the President Says"
Your suggestions?
Tonight, Advice Goddess Radio: Dr. Robert Trivers, Liars, Lying, Deception And Self-Deception
Nationally syndicated advice columist Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Tonight's guest is one of the rock stars of anthropology, Dr. Robert Trivers. We'll be talking about his very interesting new book, "The Folly of Fools," on deception and self-deception, which I've quoted from in my syndicated column. He's very funny and interesting -- just heard him speak at Cal Tech a few months ago.
Catch the show at this link at 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, listen at the link afterward or download the podcast afterward (click "play in your default player"):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/03/05/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Trivers will lay out we evolved to be liars, and how, in order to lie better to others, we often lie to ourselves first. (Even infants practice deception.) We'll discuss the myths people believe about how they can detect lies, and discuss how "cognitive load" (limitations of memory and mind) plays a big part in our detection of deception in others and how minimizing it in ourselves helps lesson our chances in getting caught in a lie.
By the way, Trivers' breakthrough research and thinking on reciprocal altruism informed my thinking on why people are rude and how to change things that I wrote about in my book, "I See Rude People."
Don't miss last week's show: Therapist Michele Weiner Davis did a terrific show on the sex-starved marriage, which is also the title of her very helpful book, The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/02/27/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
This was 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.
Join us every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward. Catch shows you missed at http://my.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
How Much Should Your Religion Determine Others' Health Care?
What if you're from one of those religions that doesn't believe in medical intervention in illness (i.e., let The Imaginary Friend do what he will)? On account of this, do you get to bow out of paying for the health care of people who do believe in medical intervention?
About the current controversy, Julie Pace writes for the AP:
The latest furor involved putting in place a requirement in the president's health care law mandating that religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities include free birth control coverage in their employee health plans.Many Republicans and religious organizations accused Obama of waging a war on religion. As protests mounted, Obama said religious employers could opt out, but insurers must pay for the birth control coverage.
While I'm forced to have maternity care as part of my Kaiser HMO payment, having an IUD is covered, as are other forms of birth control, and I like it that way. I go to the gynecologist to have this need addressed, and I pay for health care and this is a part of it. I just suck it up about the maternity thing, same as I suck it up and vote for pandering losers at the polls, because those are usually the only people running.
The problem is government-provided health care. It can't be everything to everybody -- except for those items we pluck out with a shrimp fork. And the real problem that led to government health care (aside from people wanting something for nothing) is how health care continued to be tied to the workplace as employees increasingly were not. (It's now rare for somebody to stay at one company for an entire career.)
How Salary Spiking Drains Publicly Paid Pension Funds
Catherine Saillant, Maloy Moore and Doug Smith write in the LA Times of legally allowed thievery from taxpayers:
Approaching retirement, Ventura County Chief Executive Marty Robinson was earning $228,000 a year.To boost her pension, which would be based on her final salary, Robinson cashed out nearly $34,000 in unused vacation pay, an $11,000 bonus for having earned a graduate degree and more than $24,000 in extra pension benefits the county owed her.
By the time she walked out the door last year, her pension was calculated at $272,000 a year -- for life.
Robinson, 62, is among a group of public employees who have increased their retirement paychecks by adding such things as vacation time, educational incentives, car allowances and bonuses to their final salaries.
Such "salary spiking" was banned in 1993 by CalPERS, the state's largest public employee retirement system, to help control spiraling costs. But 20 of California's 58 counties -- including Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and San Diego -- do not participate in CalPERS and their employees may legally continue to spike their salaries.
The scope of the practice is unclear because counties have resisted releasing complete pension data, citing the difficulty and cost of assembling the information.
But an analysis by The Times of partial data from Ventura and Kern counties -- two small windows into the problem -- shows that spiking is affecting pension systems already staggered by massive obligations.
In Ventura County, where the pension system is underfunded by $761 million, 84% of the retirees receiving more than $100,000 a year are receiving more than they did on the job. In Kern County, 77% of retirees with pensions greater than $100,000 a year are getting more now than they did before.
Ventura County officials have defended the practice, arguing that some pension boosts were meant to make up for pay freezes during lean years. It would be unfair to take them away now, Robinson said during a board hearing last year.
And the vast majority of county employees, officials pointed out, retire with modest pensions: an average non-management worker with 30 years of service gets $32,580 a year.
Why?
It is totally untenable for us to be paying this.
A Breastfeeding Woman, A Breast Pump, And The Latest Powermad, Dumbass TSA Moron
From ksdk.com, TSA worker demands that a woman prove her breast pump is real at Lihue Airport:
Lihue, HI (KITV) -- A Hawaiian mom says she was humiliated when asked to prove her breast pump was real at an airport.The woman says she was flagged for additional screening at the Lihue Airport Wednesday because of her electric breast feeding pump.
She claims agents told her she couldn't take the pump on the plane because the bottles in her carry-on were empty.
"I asked him if there was a private place I could pump and he said no, you can go in the women's bathroom. I had to stand in front of the mirrors and the sinks and pump my breast in front of every tourist that walked into that bathroom. I was embarrassed and humiliated and then angry that I was treated this way.
When the bottles were full, she was allowed back on the plane.
The TSA is apologizing, saying the agent made a mistake.
Of course, the TSA itself is the mistake.
Sommer Gentry's response in the comments below the entry was right on:
Oh for pete's sake, can the TSA never get enough of humiliating, demeaning, and bullying passengers? How about if we travelers start standing up for ourselves and telling these thugs in the blue shirts to shove it? Contact your Congressional representatives and let them know you're not going to take any more abuse from these lowlife screeners. If the TSA tells you to do something offensive, stand up for yourself and say NO! No flight is worth being sexually abused, strip searched, exposed, humiliated, and harmed.What kind of person takes money to rub the sex organs of minors against their will? What kind of person takes money to create and transmit naked images of children? What kind of person takes money to shove their hands down the pants of strangers? Anyone willing to take money to force unwelcome sexual contact on innocent people deserves jail time. That goes double for the class A pervert responsible for these ritualized sexual assaults - John Pistole, TSA Genital Manipulator in Chief.
Loved the @Popehat tweet about this:
Can't someone explain to the contemptible freaks at the #TSA that there's plenty of free fetish porn on the internet?
via @TedFrank
Taliban Too Tired To Beat Their Wives
It was a hard day's beheading...
Happily, they're not too busy to brutally slaughter other men's wives!
Time Is On Your Side
At least the price of it is. Shop Amazon Watches - Incredible Deals
Thank you to all who support my writing and this site by buying through my Amazon links. It's been helping keep me afloat through tough times. I'm finishing a book chapter now and should have my next book finished by June.
My agent, who just had her baby and needed a few months off, will take it to publishers at the end of March or early April. She was worth waiting for, so I've just kept writing. (You typically sell a book in the proposal stage, with a couple of chapters, but this book is two-thirds done.)
Retro Bra
I dreamed my breasts came to such a sharp point that I could put out a guy's eyes.
Thanks, Jay J. Hector
Reconsider Jury Duty
Walter Olson blogs at Cato about why people detest jury duty ("Hint: It's Compulsory"), linking to his (much) earlier reason piece:
When they move from room to room, they go as a group, escorted by men in uniform," writes Stephen Adler of his subjects. "They are supposed to follow directions, ask no questions, make no demands." In cases where their captivity is prolonged, some suffer serious financial losses, while others are unable to nurse an ailing spouse or fly to a loved one's deathbed. "It was the closest I've ever been to being in jail," one woman said.Such can be the experience of those called to serve on that reputedly all-powerful body, the jury. For many of us, no doubt, the potential excitement of acting a part in a real courtroom drama outweighs any indignation at the compulsory aspect of the adventure. Still, jury duty helps point up one of our legal system's less endearing features: its penchant for casually inflicting the kind of harms for which it would demand the most stringent punishment were they to be inflicted by anyone else.
Take the case of lost wages. Often, these days, a disgruntled applicant will drag an employer to court claiming to have been wrongfully turned down for a job. If it approves of his case, our legal system is eager to guarantee him the most liberal measure of compensation. Naturally, he'll sue for full back salary since the date at which he should have joined the payroll--without, of course, having to go back and perform any of the actual work in question. Depending on the law involved, he may also demand the cash value of fringe benefits, overtime and lost promotions, training, damages for emotional disturbance, and on and on. Whole days and weeks may be spent at trial squabbling over these entitlements.
But what about the jurors conscripted to hear his case? What can they expect as compensation for their lost chance to earn a living? Some purely arbitrary, token sum, such as a flat $15 a day, no matter what their actual pay would have been on the outside. Otherwise, lawyers will tell you, people will seize on exaggerated notions of the value of their time, and courts are too busy to argue about that kind of thing.
Or consider the issue of privacy. In a well-known California decision, a court ruled that a discount store unlawfully invaded the privacy of applicants for security guard jobs by asking them to fill out an off-the-shelf psychological questionnaire, even though 1) mental stability might seem to be a valuable trait in guards, who are apt to use physical force for which their employer is legally liable; 2) the store was not going to base its hiring decision on any one answer, nor release the results; and 3) no one had to apply for the guard jobs who didn't want to.
Contrast that with the treatment of Dianna Brandborg, the 48-year-old office manager from near Dallas who got drafted as a prospective juror last year. Like many jurors, she was handed a questionnaire curtly demanding information about her religion, political views, income, membership in controversial organizations, reading and TV viewing preferences, what make of car she owned, and so forth. Brandborg has lived with her husband for 20 years in the town of Shady Shores, and describes herself as "probably as law-abiding a person as there ever was. I've never even gotten a traffic ticket." But she found the questions intrusive and declined to answer some of them, asking the judge for a chance to argue that these matters were irrelevant to her ability to serve as an impartial juror. Instead, he summarily found her in contempt of court and sentenced her to three days in jail and a $200 fine, a ruling upheld on appeal. "We can't let jurors decide what questions they will ask and won't ask," a local law professor explained.
Should we have professional jurors, paid real wages? If that's not the solution, what is? Who should pay the cost of juries? (If I had to take months off from writing, I would lose my column and have to live on my savings in the meantime.)
How To Make All The Rich People Leave France
Socialism is theft and if you're opposed to theft, you're opposed to socialism, even if you earn no where near 1 million euros or dollars a year. From the WSJ, France's Socialist Party candidate for President hopes to impose a 75% tax rate on incomes over 1 million euros ($1.3 million):
Mr. Hollande calls his 75% rate a matter of "patriotism," and in one sense he's right--it would take a very patriotic Frenchman to stay put and pay the levy. French footballers are said to be especially distressed by Mr. Hollande's proposal, which could be good news--for the English Premier League.When he emerged at St. Pancras station in London, Mr. Hollande was asked whether he had a message for London's financial district. His reply: "I am not dangerous, but we need more regulation everywhere."
...To be specific, Mr. Hollande has consistently hit out against the "obscenely rich" and declared himself the "enemy" of the "world of finance." In December he announced he would renegotiate the pending treaty on fiscal discipline to give France more flexibility in funding its welfare state.
He "Slapped Him Upside The Melon"
Would-be thief gets a taste of small-town justice:
via Jim P.
Welles Done
Loved this quote:
"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."- Orson Welles
Jim Moran Is A Congressman Who Hasn't Heard Of The First Amendment
Moran, a Democratic Congressman from Virginia, thinks an ad in a DC Metro station goes too far in criticizing Obamacare because it ends up telling the president to "go to hell," per an AFP story:
The advertisement is for "Sick and Sicker: When the Government Becomes Your Doctor," a documentary that interviews Canadian doctors and patients in the hope of showing how dangerous "Obamacare" is for the American people."Barack Obama wants politicians and bureaucrats to control America?s entire medical system. Go to hell Barack," the ad says.
Moran wrote a letter to Metro general manager Richard Sarles calling for the removal of the advertisement.
"The ad is deeply disrespectful of the President of the United States and does not belong in the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) network," he wrote.
Maybe Moran should be representing people in Saudi Arabia. His thinking fits in much better there.
The Washington Transit Authority helpfully instructed congressman in remedial American government:
"WMATA advertising has been ruled by the courts as a public forum protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, and we may not decline ads based on their political content," the Metro authority said in a written statement.
Thanks, TG
Government Meddling In Family Farms
Hunter Lewis writes at Against Crony Capitalism:
The Labor Department decided that children growing up on a family farm could only work there if wholly owned or operated by their parents ( no LLC's and family partnerships and the like). The Department has decided to reconsider this (see recent article in Washington Times weekly, 2/6/12, P 18), but clearly intends to narrow the "parental exemption." So even children doing farm chores is to be regulated by Washington. Based on how most of this is going, it wouldn't be surprising if you will be able to get an exemption by hiring a federally approved "consultant" to help you define the chores.
True confessions: I would have liked if somebody had passed a law when I was a kid that we weren't allowed to vacuum, dust, unload the dishwasher (what a rough life!), weed the garden or mow the lawn.
Andrea Billups writes in the Wash Times piece linked above about the Labor Department rules:
The change sparked outrage last fall, particularly across the Midwest, where such summer jobs as corn-detasseling, where teens hand-strip the tops off of stalks to help cross-pollinate future crops, has long been seen as a way for teens to make some spending money and to forge a strong work ethic....Mr. Schlegel said the backlash against the initial proposal was significant from farm families across the nation, many of whom were protecting a way of life.
"There was a great deal of anxiety and concern when these changes were first announced," he said. "The way they were narrowing their interpretation of the law to the point that ... there was a real question of whether any children could grow up working on the family farm. In a lot of ways, it was going to be a real challenge for people to handle the values they wanted to instill in their children."
The Labor Department said in a statement that revisions to the child labor laws will be published for public comment by early summer. It had said that it was updating its regulations based on studies that had shown youth were more likely to be killed doing agriculture jobs than work in all other industries combined.
Two Illinois girls, Hannah Kendall and Jade Garza, both 14, were detasseling corn last summer when they were electrocuted after they stepped into a puddle apparently charged from a nearby irrigation system, sparking safety concerns. A federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into their deaths concluded last week without issuing citations to R&J Enterprises of Illinois Inc., which was a subcontractor for Monsanto.
The new rules would ban power-driven equipment use by children younger than 16 as well as keep those younger than 18 from work in stockyards, grain bins and feed lots.
More than 30 lawmakers from farm states had called on the department to rescind the rules, warning they would have a negative impact on rural employers and interfere with parents' ability to train the next generation of farmers.
Because there's an accident that happens (which probably could have happened to an adult working there) doesn't mean "there ought to be a law."
Can We Also See Video Of Your Colonoscopy?
Because you can share anything and everything on the Internet doesn't mean you should. A blogger named Charlie Capen whose a wife had a baby posts at the HuffPo, "Why Won't My Wife Have Sex With Me?" An excerpt:
I worked for hours and days on my body to get fit, mostly for myself and my career, but I'd be lying if I said those were the only reasons. I really wanted to do it so my wife would find me attractive enough to want to have constant, ridiculous, while-Finn-was-asleep-in-the-other-room monkey sex with me.But I didn't get that.
I mean we had sex, and it happened more often, I guess. But the change was even more evident. Maybe my awesome foreplay needed help... Walking around bottomless in our room used to do it, but it barely raised an eyebrow now. My patented phrase "Jump On It" didn't seem to fire things up anymore, either. Doing naked jumping jacks? No dice. Maybe it was the fact that sex meant something else now, it meant a means to a painful end. Childbirth.
So, now I don't know what to do. I love my wife. I just want her to rock my socks off a little more, ya know? I want her to know how cared for and passionately I feel about her. Can someone email her about this post and tell her I'm ready for her? Anytime. Any place. Thanks.
Think his wife knew he was posting this? Think they'll end up getting divorced?
Maybe somebody should send him the link to my radio show with therapist Michele Weiner Davis, on which we discussed issues like his and what to do about them.
He could also use Davis' very helpful and realistic book, The Sex-Starved Marriage
"Are We Entering An Epigenetic Spiral Of Obesity?"
As in, can a kid catch it from his mother? And the answer is, possibly. Ross Pomeroy blogs at RealClearScience:
A 2009 study from the University of Pennsylvania linked a mother rodent's diet-induced obesity to offspring adiposity, risk of cardiovascular disease and impaired glucose metabolism. This research was reaffirmed in 2010 when a study published in Nature showed that obesity can alter gene expression in lab rats, and these changes can then be passed on to progeny. Descendants of rat parents fed an obesity-triggering diet were born with impaired insulin production.
Cellphone Jammers
I've probably had 300 people gleefully email me to inform me about cellphone jammers, devices that transmit a radio frequency that blocks cell phone signals. Yes, I've heard of them -- and I'm opposed to them. These are devices that transmit a radio frequency that blocks cell phone signals...and, perhaps, some other signals nobody wants to have blocked, like GPS and 911.
In this video, a Philly man uses one of these things to jam the cellphone calls of the oversharers on the bus. From NBC Philly:
As I wrote in I See Rude People, I'm all for punishing the cellboors, and but some people do need to be reachable, and aren't rude, and it isn't fair to blot out their signal just because other people are cell-bellowing buttwads.
Great Government Health Code Ratings Make For Crappy Restaurant Food
Via @WalterOlson, Josh Barro writes at Forbes that "A" restaurant letter grades from the government health police make your food worse, and says he happily dines at the ones that get a "B":
A few weeks ago, I went with a friend to my favorite bar in Midtown (The Bar Downstairs at the Andaz Fifth Avenue). We ordered some cheese to go with our cocktails, and it arrived very cold, like it had just come out of the refrigerator. I was displeased. That is not how you are supposed to serve cheese. But today, I am relieved to learn that I don't need to blame the bar--the cold cheese was the government's fault.The New York Times looks today at what factors go into the scorecards that produce the letter grades that, for about a year, New York City restaurants have been forced to display in their front windows. Some of the rules--you're not supposed to have rat droppings in the kitchen--are uncontroversial. But others are criticized by chefs and restaurateurs as needlessly costly or even interfering with the quality of food.
One has to do with holding and serving temperatures for foods. Certain foods, like terrines and cheese, should be served at room temperature for the best flavor. But this is either prohibited or, in the case of cheese, subject to onerous requirements:
In November, Sardi's sequestered its communal cheese crocks after an inspector questioned its decades-old custom of setting them out on its bars. A consultant told the owners that the city would require employees to check the pots every two hours with a thermometer to make sure they didn't exceed 70 degrees, while meticulously signing a Cheddar-temperature log, then throwing out the cheese no more than six hours after it had last been refrigerated.Cheese isn't the only problem area. Pork is supposed to be cooked to 165 degrees (twenty degrees higher than the USDA guideline!) unless the customer specifically requests otherwise. I'll save you the trouble of investigating: a 165 degree pork chop is terrible. It will be dried out and unpleasant. At home, I cook mine to 140.
I like my meat cooked to "still faintly mooing," yet restaurants afraid of litigious customers and probably the health department sometimes tell me they cannot serve it to me that way. Others just cook the hell out of it and serve me something somebody should be playing with in the NFL.
If you've ever seen a health inspector at a friend's restaurant or cafe -- I have -- it can be a very upsetting thing to behold.
At my favorite cafe, the pinhead from the health department made them move CLOSED, STEEL pour containers of milk to another location. Why? Because they were on the way to the bathroom. "On the way" like the counter with all the food is -- like the whole place is.
And while the shelf where the milk sat was on the other side of a corner you had to turn to go down to the 10-12 foot hallway to the bathroom, do they contend customers heading to the john are flinging pee and poo on their way?
Ridiculous.
I don't want to get sick from eating at a restaurant. But, a restaurant that sickens its customers isn't going to be in business long.
What this "move the milk" mandate was really about: a power-mad pinhead exercising his authority and justifying his job.
"The Idiot Cousin Theory of Government"
Government begets government begets government...
Daniel Greenfield blogs at Sultan Knish:
The first and foremost purpose of government is to create government jobs. Going back to the early days of American history a time honored tradition of newly elected politicians was to obtain positions for their friends, their nephews and assorted cousins. In those more innocent times appointing someone an inspector of something was a cordial way of repaying a favor. But the problem with inspectors is that they inspect things.There are only so many idiot cousins you can hire to stamp papers and frown at things until you have to create an entire new department and then a division and then an agency to give them something to do. And that leads to budget drains and an expansion of government authority that interferes with the lives of people who work for a living.
A few centuries later we live in a country where every place that has more than three people living within three miles of each other is overseen by a multitude of agencies with overlapping levels of authority beginning from the locals to the staties and all the way up to Washington D.C. where the swamps were paved over to construct massive buildings full of agencies all descended from the day someone's idiot cousin got a sinecure, a government horse and an inkwell in a city that no one used to take seriously.
Many of us would gladly trade off those buildings and those bureaucrats in return for a few dozen idiot cousins drinking in Washington taverns on the public's dime in a country with no income tax and no one pounding on your door every five minutes because you don't feed your kids arugula, don't recycle your trash and don't care about the latest trendy cause already being written into the state religion.
Unfortunately like rabbits, idiot cousins lead to more idiot cousins. Corruption doesn't stop at a set line, it pushes as far as it can, and when a man with some big ideas gets hold of it, then bar the door because it's DOE/EPA/HUD/DOL time.
Gas Prices Aren't Rising; The Dollar Is Falling
Nick Sorrentino blogs at AgainstCrony Capitalism, explaining the piece linked below:
It is not that gas prices are rising. It is that the dollar is falling. Priced in gold, gas is historically underpriced and so may have much further to go.
Louis Woodhill writes on Forbes
Unfortunately, the talking heads that are trying to explain the reasons for high oil prices are missing one tiny detail. Oil prices aren't high right now. In fact, they are unusually low....Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke uses a "core CPI index" that excludes food and energy to guide monetary policy. From Big Ben's point of view, rising gasoline prices are not a problem. For the rest of us, they are becoming a big problem.
Over the centuries, gold has been "the golden constant". Eventually, all prices equilibrate with gold. This is why gold represents the best available standard in terms of which to define the value of a monetary unit. Forty-one years ago, when the value of the dollar was defined in terms of gold at $35/oz, WTI was selling for $3.56/bbl.
Right now, the threat posed by rising gasoline prices is not just to family budgets. An even greater danger is that the government will use escalating oil prices as an excuse to do something stupid.
After President Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods monetary arrangement in stages starting in September 1971, both gold prices and oil prices started to rise. The government responded by imposing wage-price controls. This made a bad situation much worse.
This time around, the stupid policies being considered to "deal with" rising gasoline prices include additional cuts in payroll taxes and higher taxes on energy producers.
During the 1970s, the toxic combination of a weak dollar, high tax rates, and onerous regulations introduced a new word into America's economic vocabulary: stagflation. Reaganomics banished this word to the history books. Now, President Obama and Fed Chairman Bernanke are teaming up to give stagflation another try. It is not likely that Americans will like it any more this time around than they did 40 years ago.
We Can't Cure Islam
Smart blog item by Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish on the futility -- and damage to us and our society -- of our attempts to save Muslims from themselves:
After September 11 the reasonable thing to do would have been to take steps to save ourselves from Islamic terror, instead we went on a crusade to save Muslims from themselves. The latest stop on that crusade is Syria, where the foreign policy experts responsible for decades of horrifying misjudgements tell us that we are duty bound to save the Syrian people from their dictator.Rarely do we ask why it is that Muslims so often need saving from their dictators. Or why a party that campaigned on improving America's reputation by promising not to bomb Muslims anymore, is now improving America's reputation by bombing so many Muslims and so often that it makes George W. Bush look like a tie dyed hippie.
The Obama Administration has had a role in regime change in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all in one year. Along with the other "Friends of Syria" it would like to bomb its way to regime change in Syria. The point of all this regime change is to replace totalitarian Muslim regimes with democratically elected totalitarian Muslim regimes on the theory that will make everyone happier.
...Muslims look to Islam as a central unifying principle of universal allegiance, but it's nothing of the sort. It's actually an excuse for constant internecine violence.
...It has been amply demonstrated to us that we cannot save Muslims from themselves, we cannot drag them a thousand years ahead in time just because they use cell phones and have prime ministers. Externally imposing progress does not work. Especially across cultures which have to make their own adaptations and their own journey upwards.
The misbegotten crusade to save Muslims from themselves, to act as missionaries of democracy has cost us more lives than September 11 and to no purpose. There was something noble about the belief that we could march our troops in, liberate a people from their tyrant and their spirits would open up and a new world would be born. That belief however was rooted in a secularized religious ideal that was layered over with American exceptionalism. But the whole point of exceptionalism is that it is not universal. America is not the inevitable outcome, it is a series of accommodations and experiments that derive from a particular set of histories. It cannot be generalized or universally applied.
We cannot save Muslims from themselves, we can however save ourselves from their turmoil, their religiously influenced violence and their cultural instability. The more we try to reach out to them, the more we are at risk of importing their violence and instability.
The job of governments is not to sell our way of life to others, it is to protect that way of life from others. It is about time that we stopped being the world's benefactor, psychiatrist and policeman, and began looking after our own interests first. That doesn't mean isolationism, it doesn't rule our friendships with other countries, but those friendships should be in our interest.
More by Greenfield on the nature of Islam here -- in his blog item "Islam Uber Alles":
The organizing force of Islam can be seen in urban gangs which react in much the same way to being 'disrespected'. When your religion is little more than an entitlement to be a thug, to elevate your way of life over that of everyone else, violent outrage over even the most minute sign of disrespect is to be expected. And when your beliefs are little more than an excuse to hate, rioting over a slight is the sacrament of your faith.Islam did not expand through the persuasiveness of its illiterate child abusing founder, at least not beyond the initial persuasion that allowed him to gather bandit troops to raid, murder and enslave the multicultural peoples of the desert until there was nothing left but Muslims and their slaves. It expanded by force and it has gone on expanding by force. Faced with advanced civilizations, it has reacted with the violent petulant fury that is its spiritual heritage.
The first law is the only true law of Islam. That is the law being practiced by the Afghan rioters and murderers outraged over the burnings of already defaced Korans, as their counterparts have gone on similar rampages over cartoons of Mohammed, the Satanic Verses, Facebook postings and anything else which triggered their rage. This violence has the same goal of all Islamic terror, to maintain the privileged status of Muslims and enforce the submission of non-Muslims.
There is nothing that serves the first law so well as opponents who compromise or offer gestures of appeasement.
...We have become a nation of psychiatrists rushing from international ward to ward trying to calm the lunatics before they go on a killing spree and then again after they have already gone on a killing spree. As a civilization we live in constant fear of a religion that our leaders constantly assure us is wholly peaceful. But if that were truly so, why do we have so much security in airports, why do we grovel so much before Muslim clerics and why do we have so many troops in Muslim countries?
