Paul Ryan Is A Pretend Fiscal Conservative
Kenneth Schortgen, Jr., writes at Examiner.com, "Ron Paul washes his hands of Keynesian, fiscally irresponsible Republican party":
Congressman Paul's assessment of the Republican party being no different than the Democrats when it comes to government spending and Keynesian economic doctrine is easily exemplified in Mitt Romney's vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan. As Chairman of the House budget committee, Ryan backed the raising of the debt ceiling in August of last year, and voted for TARP and the Obama stimulus packages which has increased the national debt by more than $2 trillion. His recent speech on cutting spending is actually just a proposal to cut future increases in spending, and not remove much from the over $1.4 trillion annual deficit.As the Federal Reserve finishes up its annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming today, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has the support of both Republicans and Democrats, no matter the campaign rhetoric. Through their willingness to bail out the banks during the credit crisis of 2008 under then President Bush, to the voting in of the failed Dodd-Frank act which actually lessens restrictions on the financial industry, the proof lies in the desire of both parties to continue to spend money it does not have, and create an ever growing debt than is unsustainable.
Because Golf Has Always Been A Stereotypically Black Sport
From the WashEx, an editorial about Dems using accusations of racism to demonize Republicans:
For example, who knew that the word "Chicago" is a racist epithet? It is, according to MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "They keep saying Chicago," he said of the convention speakers. "That's another thing that sends that message -- this guy's helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the 'burbs." His guest replied: "There's a lot of black people in Chicago." And there you were, thinking Chicago was merely Obama's hometown....Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., commented this week on Obama's enthusiasm for golf: "He hasn't been working to earn re-election. He's been working to earn a spot on the PGA tour." That may sound like a wry jab at a political opponent, but MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell saw right through it: "Well, we know exactly what he's trying to do there," he told host Martin Bashir on Wednesday. "He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the -- lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. ... these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches." (Don't try to understand the logic -- it's way over your head.)
via @RadleyBalko
Nothing Sacred From The Grubby Hands Of Meddling Government
Jonathan Turley blogs that a Methodist church in Fairfax County, Virginia has been told it may have to remove its electronic sign after violating county rules that prohibit signs from being changed more than twice a day (unless they are giving weather reports). Seems to be a blatant violation of free speech.
Turley writes:
It may be a sign of our times that there is nothing sacred. Today a burning talking bush would result in a fire code citation and lawsuit for failing to have a sign interpreter for the hearing impaired.Before addressing the free exercise issue, I am not sure what surprises me more: that the county has a law regulating how many messages can appear on electronic signs or that it has someone who actually monitors the messages on electronic signs. Given the host of underfunded school and county programs, I think we have isolated a position that can be freed up for more productive use.
In this case, the Vienna United Methodist church posted three messages on one day. One offered people refuge from the heat. The church then posted a reference to its web sites. Then came the final and fatal message . . . wait for it . . . the church listed the time of a group prayer meeting. That final message shocked a Fairfax zoning inspector who dashed off a warning to the church "It is noted that the screens changed more than twice in a twenty-four (24) hour period. This changeable copy LED sign is considered a prohibited sign." So now the county wants a permanent limit of just two messages a day on the sign or for the sign to be taken down.
Notably, the messages on that day followed a severe storm that knocked out the electricity of the whole whole, leaving many in distress. Here are the three specific messages:
"Welcome, come on in and beat the heat""Visit us at goodshepherdva.com."
"Practicing the Presence, Thurs., July 5, 1 pm."
Now the church is suing as a matter of both free speech and free exercise.
Unintentionally funny church signs here.
Is government so challenged for real work to do that they need to make work, or is it just that real work is a lot less fun then going all tiny, power-mad bureaucrat on a church?
"Society Long Ago Decoupled Marriage From Church Doctrines"
Letter to the editor at Gazette.net from Overlawyered's Walter Olson, who's also with Maryland for All Families:
Edward Baber of Frederick (The Gazette Forum, "Giving God benefit of the doubt," Aug. 16) says no one will budge him from his religious views on marriage. That's fine. But nothing entitles him to insist that those views be imposed on his fellow citizens.To begin with, the churches themselves disagree: the Congregationalists, Unitarians, Reform Judaism, and large sectors within the Evangelical Lutherans, Episcopalians, Quakers, Presbyterians and other communities bless same-sex unions, even as many others do not.
The fact is that the state has not looked to the churches for its definition of marriage for a very long time. For centuries, leading religious authorities insisted that a divorced person could not validly remarry while an ex-spouse was still living, a position for which they could cite authority in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
But on that and countless other elements of marriage -- from age, health, and racial prerequisites, to the consequences that marriage carries for property and inheritance -- civil society long ago decoupled marriage law from church doctrines. And aren't most of us glad it did?
America is a big country with freedom for everyone. Those of us who welcome legal recognition of committed gay relationships are no threat to the right of others to live freely with different beliefs.
Clint Eastwood on gay marriage (quoted by Dan Amira in NYMag):
"These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don't give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We're making a big deal out of things we shouldn't be making a deal out of ... They go on and on with all this bullshit about 'sanctity' -- don't give me that sanctity crap! Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want." -- Clint Eastwood. [GQ]
Well-said.
I Hear Rude People: Don't Keep The Neighbors Awake And They Won't Write You Notes
From Jessica Pauline Ogilvie at LAist, Rebel Wilson, the Australian actress who played Kristen Wiig's roommate in "Bridesmaids," moved to West Hollywood, a place where residences are not exactly miles apart and surrounded by thickets of woods, drowning out all sound.
This means that those who live there need to be somewhat considerate, and not let the soundtrack of their lives spill over into everybody else's lives.
Just looking at any street in WeHo, one would have to be blind, deaf and comatose not to figure this out. (Apparently, Wilson has had a miraculous recovery.)
On Conan, Wilson read a note from a neighbor, "I'm glad you are enjoying your new pool and hot tub, but I am trying to sleep..."
I find a note informing the inconsiderate asshats that they need to keep the volume down is a far better option than lying in bed fighting back tears of rage while trying to sleep as somebody's crooning "Annie" songs at the top of their lungs. You?
Seniors Suffer. Democrat In White House. Media Snore.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes at USAToday.com:
Thank goodness we have a Democrat in the White House. Otherwise, America's seniors would be facing a serious crisis.The ingredients of the crisis are already here. Interest rates on bonds, CDs and money market accounts -- staples of the retirement crowd's portfolio -- are at historic lows. (I'm always shocked to see what banks are touting. Really? 0.35% -- that is, 35/100 of a percent -- on a money market? 0.90% on a CD? Yep.) Stocks are nothing to write home about, still well below their highs of five years ago. As for those real estate investments? Forget about it.
The squeeze is real. Some years ago, when earning say 5% on your money was realistic, a $360,000 portfolio of CDs would produce $18,000 a year in interest -- that's $1500 a month. Couple that with an unexceptional Social Security payment of about the same amount, and that's $36,000 a year, $3,000 a month. Nothing fancy, but enough to get by.
Now change that 5% to 0.9% and you're earning $3,240 per year, or about $270 a month. Add that to $1,500 a month in Social Security and you've got $1,770 a month to live on; just $21,240 a year. That's a brutal 41% cut in income. And it is why many senior citizens around the country are being forced to draw down savings to make ends meet.
The Federal Reserve's low interest rates are a boon to overextended banks and to the borrowers who owe them money. (As well as the world's greatest debtor, the U.S. Treasury). But these benefits come at the expense of savers -- both those who hope to see their savings grow enough that they can retire someday, and those who have already retired expecting to live on interest at rates far higher than those that prevail today. The low rates are, basically, a tax on savers for the benefit of borrowers and those who made bad loans.
What's missing, Reynolds says, is the kind of election-year coverage you'd have on suffering seniors if a Republican were in office.
The GOP Is Committed To Freedom And Liberty! (Except In All The Cases They Aren't)
Consenting adults? Too bad! You don't get to make your own choices. The Republicans will decide for you!
I'm reminded of the H.L. Mencken quote: "Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
The Republicans are going after porn.
They don't want you Internet gambling.
From the 2012 Republican Platform:
Making the Internet Family-FriendlyMillions of Americans suffer from problem or pathological gambling that can destroy families. We support the prohibition of gambling over the Internet and call for reversal of the Justice Department's decision distorting the formerly accepted meaning of the Wire Act that could open the door to Internet betting. (P 32)
Brian McGraw blogs at Cato:
This is especially cute given the number of words the platform dedicates to "Internet freedom" which in this case does not include the right to play a card game with your friends over the Internet.
And Andy Sullivan writes at the Reuters link above (on "porn"):
Anti-pornography activist Patrick Trueman said the language in the Republican platform would bolster a broader push against the type of sexually explicit material that is sold by convenience stores, by hotels via pay-per-view television programming, and satellite and cable TV providers.The widespread availability of Internet pornography has made it harder for a generation of young men to find intimacy with their wives, he said.
This is the government's business why?
Lori Heine gets the big picture of what idiots the Republicans are in pandering to social conservatives, writing at Liberty Unbound:
Like their counterparts on the statist Left, social conservatives use words not to clarify thought but to stir emotion.In America, the contemporary political Right essentially consists of two factions. Ordinarily one is called social conservative and the other libertarian, though a more accurate way of distinguishing them would be to describe the former as big-government conservative and the latter as small-government conservative.
The only thing that brings the two together -- into the marriage of convenience that unites the Right today -- is a shared opposition to the statist Left. The Obama administration has kept them together as perhaps nothing else could. It may be all that prevents them from getting their long-overdue divorce. Once Romney is elected, if that indeed happens, all the counseling in the world won't be enough to save this marriage.
She continues:
I, very frankly, am getting tired of being told that I must vote for whichever unprincipled empty suit the Republican Party has chosen to carry its baton.
I, very frankly, concur.
And she asks the right question -- why they call themselves "social conservatives" -- which she's right about: It's a too-polite term for what they really are. Heine writes on:
I would prefer they drop the self-congratulatory veneer and simply call themselves what they are: advocates of big government....It is dishonest for the Republican Party to go on pretending that big-government conservatives and small-government conservatives belong in the same political party. Their aims are so fundamentally at odds that they cancel each other out.
Be Charmed By Your Soup
The soup comes on little people feet, to borrow from Carl Sandburg.
Via @thefoxisblack, soup bowls with feet.
Here's the whole footsie dinnerware collection by LA artist and do-gooder for homeless and foster kids, Dylan Kendall.
Don't Be Too Smug About How Much Better We Are Than Communist Dictatorships
Ilya Shapiro, with Cato legal associate Kathleen Hunker, blogs at Cato -- "I Heard It Through the Grapevine That the Government Was Violating Property Rights" -- about what raisin farmers are made to go through:
Property owners shouldn't be made to suffer a needless, Rube Goldberg-style litigation process to vindicate their constitutional rights. Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeks to impose on independent raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne when they protested the enforcement of a USDA "marketing order" that demanded that the Hornes turn over 47 percent of their crop without compensation.The marketing order--a much-criticized New Deal relic--forces raisin "handlers" to reserve a certain percentage of their crop "for the account" of the government-backed Raisin Administrative Committee, enabling the government to control the supply and price of raisins on the market. The RAC then either sells the raisins or simply gives them away to noncompetitive markets--such as federal agencies, charities, and foreign governments--with the proceeds going toward the RAC's administration costs.
Believing that they, as raisin "producers," were exempt, the Hornes failed to set aside the requisite tribute during the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 growing seasons. The USDA disagreed with the Hornes' interpretation of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 and brought an enforcement action, seeking $438,843.53 (the approximate market value of the raisins that the Hornes allegedly owe), $202,600 in civil penalties, and $8,783.39 in unpaid assessments.
After losing in that administrative review, the Hornes brought their case to federal court, arguing that the marketing order and associated fines violated the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. Having litigated the matter in both district and appellate court, the government--for the first time--alleged that the Hornes' takings claim would not be ripe for judicial review until after the Hornes terminated the present dispute, paid the money owed, and then filed a separate suit in the Court of Federal Claims.
The San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit proved receptive to the government's about-face. Relying on Williamson County v. Hamilton Bank (1985)--the Supreme Court case that first imposed ripeness conditions on takings claims--the court ruled in a revised opinion that the Tucker Act (which relates to federal waivers of sovereign immunity) divested federal courts of jurisdiction over all takings claims until the property owner unsuccessfully sought compensation in the Court of Federal Claims. In conflict with five other circuit courts and a Supreme Court plurality, the Ninth Circuit also concluded that the Tucker Act offered no exception for those claims challenging a taking of money, nor for those claims raised as a defense to a government-initiated action.
Cato has filed an amicus brief supporting the Hornes.
The "Takings Clause" of the U.S. Constitution states: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Do You Hang Onto Photos Of Your Exes?
If so, why? And where do you keep them?
If not, why not?
And any romantic partner ever get a little freaked about this?
The Politics Of Government-Crazed Junkies
(AKA Senators, Congressmen, Presidents, and then some). Excerpt from Chris Christie's speech at the Republican Convention:
You see, I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved. Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country's principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.But our leaders of today have decided it's more important to be popular, to say and do what's easy, and say yes rather than to say no, when no is what is required.
In recent years -- in recent years we as a country have too often chosen the same path. It's easy for our leaders to say, "Not us, not now," in taking on the really tough issues. And unfortunately we have stood silently by and let them get away with it. But tonight, I say enough.
Where was he wrong? Later in his speech, in the notion that Republicans and Democrats are different. They're a little different, but more in word than in anything else.
As I've written before, the Democrats are the party of ginormous government and the Republicans are the part of slightly less ginormous government, plus a lot of panting to tell a lot of people what to do.
A "Police Presence" On Buses Doesn't Make Me Feel Safe
It makes me afraid for our civil liberties. From "Reich Here, Reich now," posted by William Grigg on Lew Rockwell:
In a commercial republic -- or a reasonably free society of any description -- warfare of any kind should hardly be considered "routine." This is particularly true of military deployments in a modern urban environment and training that seems suspiciously well-suited to scenarios involving economic collapse and massive social unrest. Those blessed with a capacity for healthy cynicism would suspect that the purpose of such military exercises is to train the public, rather than Special Forces operators -- to acclimate the citizenry to the spectacle of helicopter gunships plying the skies above them.There is no ambiguity about the purpose of the TSA-supervised BUSSAFE initiative: It is geared entirely to the purpose of molding public opinion.
When heavily armed, black-clad figures began stalking bus and train stations in New Jersey on August 23, Transit Police Chief Christopher Trucillo explained that they hadn't been deployed in response any specific threat. The VIPR teams -- local police units supervised by agents from the Transportation Security Administration -- were intended "to increase uniform police visibility. ... Just to step on a bus and have somebody visually look in the bus, and have the folks on the bus see a police presence, and to give a sense of security to folks who use the bus daily."
A Calorie Is Not A Calorie
That was just one point of Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. Biologist and science writer Rob Dunn explains it -- and in some interesting detail -- referencing recent research, in a very interesting guest blog item on SciAm, "The Hidden Truths About Calories":
Just this month, a new study by Janet Novotny and colleagues at the USDA found that when the "average" person eats almonds she receives just 128 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories "on the label."It is not totally clear why nuts such as almonds or pistachios yield fewer calories than they "should." Tough cell walls? Maybe. But there are other options too, if not for the nuts themselves then for other foods.
For one, our bodies seem to expend different quantities of energy to deal with different kinds of food (the energy expended produces heat and so is referred to by scientists as "diet-induced thermogensis"); some foods require us to do more work than others. Proteins can require ten to twenty times as much heat-energy to digest as fats, but the loss of calories as heat energy is not accounted for at all on packaging.
For another, foods differ in how and where they are digested in our guts. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is really not even put to good use. They are absorbed in our small intestines; game mostly over. More complex foods, on the other hand, such as cassava or almonds, have to travel to the colon where they meet up with the largest concentrations of our little friends, the microbes.
...But what about meat? Cooked meat was easier to digest. The mice lost 2 grams of body mass on raw meat but just 1 gram on cooked meat. In retrospect this does not seem surprising. Heat denatures proteins and makes them easier to digest. Heat also kills bacteria and might decrease the immune cost of eating meat by reducing the work the immune system has to do which allows the body to make, well, more body for a given number of calories.
In general, it seems that the more processed foods are the more they actually give us the number of calories we see on the box, bag or other sort of label. This applies not just to cooking and pounding but also to industrial processing.
Via @DrEades, who has a very interesting blog item up himself, "Can your food make you fit?"
Fighting LA City Council's Mobile Billboard Ban
Phil Miller, who took this photo, wrote, "This is on a flatbead truck parked on Laurel Canyon Blvd near Moorpark. Have no idea who put it there, but it might be the Lonestar Security guy." (Story here, about the City Council banning mobile billboards, at KCET.)
More on billboard battles in LA at LA Weekly. LA Weekly on City Councilman Paul Krekorian. More.
(If you're going to speak freely, it always helps to speak funny.)
Idiots Teaching Children
Has anybody ever murdered anyone by pointing their fingers at them to make the sign for a gun? A deaf Grand Island, Nebraska preschooler has been asked to change the sign for his name because it violates a school's weapons policy!
From 1011now.com, via @FreeRangeKids:
Hunter Spanjer says his name with a certain special hand gesture, but at just three and a half years old, he may have to change it."He's deaf, and his name sign, they say, is a violation of their weapons policy," explained Hunter's father, Brian Spanjer.
Grand Island's "Weapons in Schools" Board Policy 8470 forbids "any instrument...that looks like a weapon," But a three year-old's hands?
"Anybody that I have talked to thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. This is not threatening in any way," said Hunter's grandmother Janet Logue.
"It's a symbol. It's an actual sign, a registered sign, through S.E.E.," Brian Spanjer said.
S.E.E. stands for Signing Exact English, Hunter's sign language. Hunter's name gesture is modified with crossed-fingers to show it is uniquely his own.
"We are working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child," said Jack Sheard, Grand Island Public Schools spokesperson.
That's just about all GIPS officials will say for now.
Anybody know the sign for a whole lot of heads up a whole lot of asses?
There wasn't this nuttery when I was growing up about guns. Boys played with guns. They made their fingers into guns. The world didn't end. The world didn't even notice:
Why Can't She Have It All?! Ann Curry Stamps Her Feet That She Can't Have Her Grey Hair And Her Big Media Job, Too
A little late on this one -- kinda forgot about it -- Ann Curry's notion that media should bend to her will (based on the notion -- maybe true, maybe not -- that she was ditched because she let her hair go gray and scraggly on top, and because she wanted to wear gardening shoes [clogs] on the air).
Media's notion (specifically NBC's): Nuh-uh, lady. Lotta people want your job. Enjoy your grey hair at home!
From Radar:
In a revealing interview with Ladies Home Journal conducted just before she was replaced by Savannah Guthrie as TODAY co-anchor, Ann Curry vents about how she irked decision-makers at NBC because she wasn't their style -- literally.Curry said Peacock Network officials didn't like that she had grey hair, thought her wardrobe was frumpy and wanted her to wear "ridiculously high heels" during her time as an anchor with the TODAY show.
Curry said when she wore clogs and flats into the studio, it didn't "go over very well with my bosses," and in one instance, she was compared to breakfast cereal mascot Toucan Sam when wearing a colorful dress on the air.
TV is a business -- very big business -- and those on it in positions like Ann Curry's get paid BUTTLOADS OF MONEY. In exchange, they can either bend to the will of their bosses and wash that grey out of their hair -- or go home and grow tomatoes.
Sorry, but you don't get to keep the big job and the grey (if that's even the reason she was ditched, instead of, perhaps, some face-saving move).
Pro-Business vs. Pro-Market
Econ prof Dr. Mark J. Perry quotes Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, interviewed in The Economist:
Why do you say that America's political system is degenerating into crony capitalism?There is not a well-understood distinction between being pro-business and being pro-market. Businessmen like free markets until they get into a market; once they are in it they want to block entry to others. Pro-marketeers want free markets at all times. The more conservative pro-marketeers are fearful of criticizing business, because they assume they will be seen as criticizing the free market. But we need to stand up and criticize business when business is not helping the cause of free markets.
In what way?
Take lobbying. Lobbying may once have been reactive but now it's proactive--businessmen use it to shape policy and ask for tax advantages. This is corruptive of democracy.
Snip, Snip: We've Had This Discussion Before
But, so many people cling to the weird belief that hacking off a part of an infant's body is a good thing (and now there's this ridiculous recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics). I figured I'd post this sensible letter to the editor from Marc. E. Angelucci in the LAT:
Re "Circumcision's decline could be costly," Aug. 21How does it make sense to remove a healthy erotogenic organ from a baby boy to avoid the possibility of contracting sexually transmitted diseases in the future? By that reasoning, why not remove one testicle from every boy to avoid future costs of testicular cancer?
No wonder the medical establishments throughout Europe and most of the medically advanced world reject this nonsense.
Marc E. Angelucci, Los Angeles
Here's Brian David Earp on bad science in the Africa studies and why the "circumcision solution" to the AIDS epidemic in Africa will increase transmission of HIV:
The "randomized controlled clinical trials" upon which these recommendations are based (I use scare quotes deliberately) represent bad science at its most dangerous: we are talking about poorly conducted experiments with dubious results presented in an outrageously misleading fashion. These data are then harnessed to support public health recommendations on a massive scale whose implementation would almost certainly have the opposite of the claimed effect, with fatal consequences. As Gregory Boyle and George Hill explain in their exhaustive analysis of the RCCTs:While the "gold standard" for medical trials is the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, the African trials suffered [a number of serious problems] including problematic randomisation and selection bias, inadequate blinding, lack of placebo-control (male circumcision could not be concealed), inadequate equipoise, experimenter bias, attrition (673 drop-outs in female-to-male trials), not investigating male circumcision as a vector for HIV transmission, not investigating non-sexual HIV transmission, as well as lead-time bias, supportive bias (circumcised men received additional counselling sessions), participant expectation bias, and time-out discrepancy (restraint from sexual activity only by circumcised men).
Earp explains this in detail at the Oxford link.
School Violence Caused By Racial Quotas In Disciplining Kids
Hans Bader, at Open Market, writes about the Obama administration's "recent pressure on school districts to adopt veiled racial quotas in school discipline discourages schools from imposing meaningful discipline on black students for misconduct that would lead to serious discipline if committed by a white student." He writes:
Since being taught to behave properly and follow rules is a necessary predicate for classroom learning as a child, and keeping a job as an adult, it is an educational "benefit" that cannot be denied minority students based on race, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. ... It also violates white students' constitutional right not to be punished more than blacks for the same offense, as a Seventh Circuit ruling banning school discipline quotas illustrates, see People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997).
Bader's detailed piece on this is at the link above.
He also links to Joanne Jacobs' blog, writing, "At a widely-read education blog, a teacher describes the violence and disorder that occurred when her school adopted racial quotas in school discipline":
I was the homeroom teacher in an incident in a school that tried to implement just this criteria for discipline. One kid (scrawny 7th grader) had the {bleep} beaten out of him by a 6-foot, fully-muscled 7th grader - two different races. The little kid was suspended before his copious blood had been cleaned up off the floor. The big kid never did have ANY punishment - that particular ethnic group had been disciplined too many times.Need I mention that it was a tough month, as word quickly spread that violence against the "under-disciplined" ethnic group was treated as a freebie?
"Cheesecake Factory Medicine"
From the WSJ, cookie-cutter medicine in the name of savings:
Another ObamaCare godfather, the surgeon and influential New Yorker magazine writer Atul Gawande, has further instructions for the medical masses, this time from--believe it or not--the Cheesecake Factory, the chain restaurant.Dr. Gawande's point is that medicine would function better if care were delivered by huge health systems that can achieve economies of scale, like commercial kitchens. Care ought to be standardized like preparing a side of beef, with a "single default way" to perform each treatment supposedly based on evidence, with little room for personalization.
No doubt health care could learn a lot about efficiency from a lot of industries, but to understand the core problem with assembly-line medicine, recall that ObamaCare actively promotes medical corporatism. The reason isn't to encourage business efficiency but for political control. Liberals believe in health-care consolidation because fewer giant corporations are easier for Mr. Orszag's central committee to control, and more amenable to its orders.
How is this going to work? I got an endoscopy, and ended up losing my memory and some cognitive function for three weeks from the anesthesia. It was terrifying, with the first few days being the worst and the scariest.
I'm apparently very sensitive to "conscious sedation." This may have been something that could have been anticipated. I emphasized to the doctor that I am a lightweight on many levels: I get carsick from my own driving, and can barely drink without getting loaded. (I don't drink anything stronger than wine -- a Cosmo or a gin and tonic could probably put me in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. I once accidentally chugged some of a friend's vodka drink, thinking it was my water, and had to stick around for an hour to be able to drive home.)
Back to the hospital...when I was there for that endoscopy, about every other person also waiting for an endoscopy was a gigantically fat black woman. I'm a skinny, very white, under-hardy Northern European. Did I get Cheesecake Factory anesthesia? I have no evidence as to what happened, but that's what I suspect -- that the doctor went "Yeah, uh-huh, lady" to my cautions that I'm a lightweight, and did the "You're having what she's having."
Silence Is Golden: No Free Speech For Teens?
Smart piece by Garrett Epps in The Atlantic on Kaitlin Nootbaar, the valedictorian who got her diploma withheld from her by tiny little power-mad high school principal David Smith:
Remember, we are dealing with a student who has done everything our system asks of her -- excelled in school, won college admission and a scholarship. In exchange, she is offered a brief moment to say what she thinks. But there's a catch: The censor must approve every thought and every word. She is free to say anything the principal wants her to say.Every free citizen should know how to outwit a censor, and applaud others who do the same.
If Kaitlin was sneaking "what the hell?" past the censor, it did little injury to the Class of 2012 at PHS -- a school whose official mascot is the Red Devil. There's no call for revolution, violence, free love, or atheism. Any of those might cause a ruckus and bring genuine offense. (Just to be clear, I think a school valedictorian has a right to talk about those things, too, and I wish more did -- but Kaitlin didn't.) If the audience at Prague's graduation is like the ones at graduations I attend, most of them probably didn't even notice the word fly by. And if some people didn't like it, they had every right to criticize Kaitlin. They don't have the right to shut her up.
From the outside, this seems like the age-old battle between a grown-up bully and stubborn kid.
I have huge respect for many people who teach and administer high school. When they do it well, they make everyone's lives better.
But anyone who's ever been in high school knows that some people are drawn to education because they enjoy petty power over people who can't fight back.
Note the disproportion in Kaitlin's punishment: because of a one-word transgression, she loses something she worked four years to get. Note the lack of process here: the decision was apparently made by one man. Note the desire to humiliate: the principal wants a letter apologizing.
The larger question is this: In a society that operates on the free exchange of ideas, why do we tolerate an educational system that teaches children to keep safe by keeping silent?
50% Off Back-To-School Supplies
At Amazon
Amazon has finally fixed the "Powered by Amazon" button in Amy's Mall (although I haven't had a moment to fix the text that says it's still broken). So, to buy something that's not linked here, just go through this link
And thank you -- really, truly appreciate all the purchases that you all send my way.
Advice Goddess Radio: 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET -- Dr. Carol Tavris
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
My guest this week is social psychologist Dr. Carol Tavris, talking about how we deceive ourselves in the face of mistakes or errors in judgment we've made. We do this in order to prop up our self-worth -- but end up making an even greater mess of our lives, relationships, and social relationships.
Understanding cognitive dissonance and the self-justification we use to mop up after it is the best way to avoid behaving in ways that are dumb, painful and even morally wrong. And that's what we'll be discussing on this show.
Her book, co-authored with Dr. Elliot Aronson, is one of my favorites: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
Listen live at 7pm Pacific and 7pm Eastern at this link or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/27/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't miss last week's show with therapist Dr. B. Janet Hibbs on love and fairness -- how being fair to each other is the key to happy relationships (and saving relationships in trouble).
Her very wise, very helpful book: Try to See it My Way: Being Fair in Love and Marriage
Listen online or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon/
Listen to all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
Where Are The Diversity Police On The College Basketball Court?
Econ and finance prof Dr. Mark J. Perry asks just the right question in respect to affirmative action on campus -- race being taken into account in college admissions, allowing minority students with worse grades and tests scores in ahead of non-minorities who did better.
He first quotes an ESPN piece:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- "The National Association of Basketball Coaches has told the U.S. Supreme Court it believes university officials should be able to continue taking race into consideration when deciding who gets to enroll in their schools."
And then that question:
Q: Will the college basketball coaches agree to take race and diversity goals into consideration when deciding who gets to play on their teams?
I totally suck at any sport where there's a large ball that flies at you: basketball, kickball, volleyball, and certainly football. My response to the ball coming at me? Ducking -- that is, if I don't have time to drop and roll and curl up in a fetal position.
Shouldn't I have been considered for a college basketball scholarship?
End The Small Business Handout Administration
Smart piece by Veronique de Rugy and Tad DeHaven at DownsizingGovernment.org. Their conclusion sums up their thoughts:
The SBA retains political support because it is a tool for policymakers to signal their support of small businesses. At the same time, SBA supporters have cultivated a myth that being against the agency is equivalent to being against small businesses. In reality, the great majority of American small businesses have thrived without government subsidies. The SBA's lending programs benefit a relatively tiny number of businesses at the expense of taxpayers and the vast majority of businesses that do not receive government support.Even though there are no substantial economic benefits of the SBA, the agency has remained politically entrenched. It gains particularly powerful support from the banking industry. However, with today's huge federal deficits, policymakers should begin eliminating unneeded business subsidies in the budget, including SBA spending.
The United States became the most prosperous country in the world by leaving business development to the private sector. America's amazing entrepreneurial history did not come about as a result of small business subsidies from Washington. The SBA is an unneeded agency that should be terminated to reduce the deficit and end business favoritism. Federal policymakers should instead focus on reducing tax and regulatory barriers to small business growth and providing a level playing field to all businesses of all size.
More at Cato, from a blog post by DeHaven, quoting an email from a reader -- a credit analyst with a commercial bank:
I commend you for your excellent piece on "terminating the SBA." As a credit analyst for a commercial bank based in DC, I'm in a special position to see the tragedy of it.In addition to everything you cited, it's also worth noting that the SBA will not sign on to loans if the guarantor is too strong (on the theory that such a guarantor already has access to credit). This policy necessarily means that the SBA only guarantees high-risk loans. Next, the SBA mandates low interest-rate ceilings (in the name of aiding its Borrowers), meaning that the loans are low-reward from an SBA income standpoint. You put that together and what you have is the SBA is putting the taxpayer's money into a portfolio that is high-risk, low-reward by design, and further burdens us with a massive overhead of nationwide offices and 2,000+ employees. (One also might wonder about the opportunity cost we pay when 2,000 people who could presumably be producing bona fide goods and services are instead taking from our limited resources and redirecting them into operations with an unusually high failure rate).
I'm convinced that nearly all of the good loans made with the SBA's guarantee would have been made anyway, and we would have been spared most of the bad ones and a whole lot of headache.
It's Not The Politics; It's The Politics
Underwater mortgages (negative home equity) are nothing new, blogs Mark A. Calabria at Cato:
With the near constant calls for mortgage restructuring and the proposals to reduce mortgages via eminent domain, you would think that no homeowner in America has ever before had negative equity (i.e., a situation where a homeowner owes more on his mortgage than what his house is worth). If you did think that, you'd be wrong....In 2002, before the housing bubble started, about 7 percent of owners with a mortgage living in Buffalo, N.Y. were underwater.
I've written elsewhere that I don't see a convincing or compelling economic justification for write-downs. The more honest proponents of forced write-downs and re-financing argue it is ultimately about "fairness," not economics. I appreciate the honesty of such a position. If, in general, you hold a position because you feel it is "just" or "fair," you only undermine your case by trying to use shoddy economics to justify it.
But those who believe that write-downs would be "fair" need to explain why they didn't argue for write-downs when it was just the residents of Buffalo or rural Mississippi who were underwater. Suddenly, when residents of swings states like Florida, Nevada, and Arizona are underwater, it becomes an issue of fairness.
Foot Joy
Up to 40% off men's, women's, and kids' shoes and boots at Amazon
Amazon has finally fixed the "Powered by Amazon" button in Amy's Mall (although I haven't had a moment to fix the text that says it's still broken). So, to buy something that's not linked here, just go through this link
And thank you -- really, truly appreciate every purchase that you all send my way.
The Answer To The Question "Well, Who Gives You Advice?"
My 8-year-old neighbor, Lilly, thats who: 
She was trying to help me with this. (Deadlines -- book, radio, column -- have since gotten in the way, but I love her note and keep it on my refrigerator.)
Breastfeeding On A Plane: Have Special Needs? Pay For Them
Having a child is a choice. Commerce should not have to stop in its tracks and give you a price break because you've chosen to reproduce. Christopher Elliot has a column on breastfeeding on planes. (I have not a problem in the world with it, and don't think mothers should have to give their baby his or her dinner in the toilet -- ick...would you want to eat in there?)
Breastfeeding is not sexy. In fact, I think it's kind of beautiful. My neighbor is breastfeeding now and I occasionally get a flash of boobage when I'm staring at the baby when she's holding him. Not only is it not sexy; what I'm seeing is barely noticeable as a bit of boobage.
An excerpt from Elliott's piece on breastfeeding:
When Martin Madrid got his seat assignments on a Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis to Orlando, he spotted a problem: Even though the airline knew that he and his wife were flying with a 4-year-old and an infant -- you have to tell the airline your birth date when you book tickets -- the couple had been assigned seats a few rows apart.Splitting up his family wouldn't normally be a problem, said Madrid, an account manager for a health products company in Minneapolis, except that his wife, who was still nursing the baby, needed a little help. Couldn't Delta just seat them together? "This is so irritating," he said.
Madrid could, of course, pay extra for premium seats -- but isn't Delta required to make a special allowance for nursing moms?No. Airlines have traditionally had a tumultuous relationship with nursing mothers. Emily Gillette, a passenger kicked off a Delta commuter flight in 2006 for refusing to cover herself with a blanket as she breast-fed her daughter, is a poster child for that conflict.
Gillette quietly settled a lawsuit against the carrier this year.
...Many of the passengers who contact me are so embarrassed by their run-ins with crew members that they don't want their names published. One recently e-mailed me on behalf of his wife, who was traveling on American Airlines for business. She had left her 4-month-old son at home with her husband, but during the flight she visited the restroom to use a breast pump.
After a few minutes, a flight attendant made an announcement, "asking customers in the restroom to return to their seats, as other passengers also needed to use the restroom," her husband said. "I was appalled at the lack of professionalism and common sense of the in-flight crew."
I asked American Airlines about the incident, and a representative told me that the airline regrets what happened. "Our in-flight procedures advise our crew to ensure that breast-feeding mothers have the privacy they need and that other customers are not subjected to an uncomfortable situation," a spokeswoman said. "Our in-flight personnel are trained to handle such situations with professionalism and discretion."
Did they know she was breast-pumping? They're flight attendants, not psychics.
Welcome To The Social Justice Department
The government is going out of its way to hire people with disabilities in the Justice Department. Now, I have no problem if they do hire people with disabilities -- providing their disability doesn't make them incapable of performing their job, and providing they aren't hired over people, "able" or disabled, who are better qualified. But, that doesn't sound like what they're doing. Christian Adams writes at PJ Tatler:
This DOJ policy does not merely involve prohibitions against discrimination, but rather the documents reveal deliberate recruitment efforts to hire as attorneys and staff for the Department of Justice people suffering from psychiatric disorders and intellectual disabilities. Moreover, applicants can "self-identify" their disability by means of the "Standard Form 256, Self Identification Disability."Those with "targeted disabilities" may be hired through a "non-competitive" appointment. That means they don't have to endure the regular civil service competition among applicants, but can be plucked from the stack of resumes and hired immediately instead.
According to the documents, those with these "targeted disabilities" may be hired "before the position is advertised" and even "before the position's closing date." Moreover, lawyers with psychiatric disabilities and "severe intellectual" disabilities receive a waiver from the requirement that a new DOJ employee have practiced law for one year before being hired.
You do not fight discrimination with discrimination. A person shouldn't be nixed for a job because they have two legs if they're the best candidate for the job.
via Manny Klausner
Kenya Make College Cheaper?
Jim Treacher writes at The Daily Caller that Obama himself previously claimed to have been born in Kenya. Perhaps he used this to bring down the cost of college (get aid for foreign students) or sell more books:
This was the author bio Obama provided to his literary agent in 1991, and it was uncovered months ago by our friends at Breitbart.com. Obama used this bio for over 15 years, and it was revised a number of times. But he only changed it to indicate his true place of birth, Hawaii, once he decided to run for president.
via @instapundit
TSA "Chat Downs": Just Say No To Big Brother At The Airport
Steve Gunn writes in the Muskegon Chronicle about his refusal to tell a TSA worker where he was flying and what he was doing:
She mentioned that I was headed from Detroit to Grand Rapids."That's a pretty short flight," she said.
"Talk to my travel agent," I grumbled.
At that point she asked me what my business would be in Grand Rapids.
"I'm headed home," I replied.
Then she wanted to know where home was. That's when the mental alarms went off and I realized I was being interrogated by Big Brother in drag.
I asked her why the federal government needed to know where I was going and what I would be doing. She explained that the questions were part of a new security "pilot program."
I then told her I am an American citizen, traveling within my own country, and I wasn't breaking any laws. That's all the federal government needed to know, and I wasn't going to share any more.
Not because I had anything to hide. It was because we live in a free country where innocent people are supposedly protected from unwarranted government intrusion and harassment.
At that point the agent yelled out, "We have another refusal." One of my bags was seized and I was momentarily detained and given a hand-swab, which I believe was to test for residue from bomb-making materials.
I passed the bomb test and was told I could move on, but I hung around a moment and told everyone within listening range what I thought about this terrifying experience.
So, this is what we've come to. The federal government now has a need to know where citizens are going and what they are doing before they are allowed to peacefully pass. I'm starting to wonder what separates us from Russia or Cuba.
Of course, I went home, got on the computer and learned more about this "pilot program." I discovered that it's been going on for a few years now at selected airports around the nation.
Of course, it's caught no terrorists, but it has picked up a few people with drug warrants. (Is that really the goal of the $60 plus billion we've put into the TSA?)
Gunn asks the right questions:
What's next? Check lanes on city streets, where jackbooted thugs from Washington, D.C., will stop everyone every morning to ask them where they're going and what they're up to? And if our answers are not what the government wants to hear, perhaps we'll be sent home and put under surveillance, to make sure we're not involved in anything that Big Brother doesn't approve of.Our freedom is severely compromised when government is allowed to do this sort of thing. We are supposed to be presumed innocent and able to come and go as we please, as long as we don't break any laws or give authorities reason to believe we may have.
I believe a number of actions by the TSA -- like leaving your belongings on the belt where anyone can steal them if you opt out of the nudie scanners and go for the groping -- are meant to intimidate passengers. What was done to Gunn seems like another such tactic.
An academic who follows me on Twitter chided me for my supposed silliness in speaking out about the TSA, but every violation of our rights matters. Every time we let our rights be eroded, it's that much easier to yank them from us the next time and the next time, and to yank more and more rights from us.
Because of a lot of crazy deadlines and obligations (book, etc.), I'm working now as if chased by coyotes, and I'd meant to do a protest at a TSA checkpoint at LAX by the end of August, and I've had to postpone it. But, I do mean to do it. If you can protest in any way -- whether at a checkpoint or by other means -- please do so.
Don't go quietly at the TSA checkpoint or any time you see rights being violated, whether yours or another person's. The quiet road is the path to the police state -- or more of a police state than has already come into existence in this country, these days.
Big Government Ruins Everything: Bye-Bye Chattanooga Pedicabs!
From a Chattanooga Times-Free Press editorial:
How many regulations are necessary to dictate how a licensed, responsible adult should operate an oversized tricycle? If those regulations come from the nanny-state tyrants responsible for drafting the City of Chattanooga's pedicab ordinance, the answer is 11 pages' worth.When longtime Chattanooga-area resident Christian "Thor" Thoreson and his partner Christina Holmes decided to launch Buzz Chattanooga Pedicabs in February 2011, the business seemed tailor-made for the downtown area.
Thoreson's pedicabs, which are pedal-driven tricycles with a two-person passenger compartment attached behind the driver, fill an important need for downtown. By offering a cheap and convenient way for people to get around between hotels, tourist attractions, bars and restaurants, Buzz Chattanooga is a boon for tourist and a convenient addition for locals.
The pedicabs prevent drunk driving, free up precious parking spaces and also cut down on auto emissions. The service is inexpensive -- it costs passengers only the amount they wish to tip their driver -- and it provides well-paying jobs for Buzz Chattanooga drivers. Thoreson estimates his drivers make more than $20 an hour. Revenues from selling ads on the pedicab and a small cut of driver tips fund the business.
The pedicabs seem like a win for everyone. They provide a needed service for tourists, help get people in local businesses, get drunk drivers off the road, are environmentally friendly and provide Chattanoogans with well-paying jobs.
...After dealing with the frustrating regulations placed on his business, the unwillingness of city leaders to allow him to serve customers on both sides of the river (pedicabs are banned from using the bridges that span the Tennessee River in downtown Chattanooga, including a pedestrian bridge) and difficulties in selling ads on the pedicabs, Thoreson decided yesterday to throw in the towel and close Buzz Chattanooga.
When asked what he'd tell another entrepreneur considering starting a business in Chattanooga, Thoreson replied, "Stay the hell away."
Universal Health Care Not So Healthy Or So Universal
Welcome to Canada, with the NHS foreshadowing what's to come with Obamacare.
Jonathan Sher writes for the London Free Press in Ontario, Canada that Ontario is the one Canadian province that won't pay for medication to lengthen the lives and lessen the pain of dying men suffering from prostate care:
There are two tiers of men with advanced prostate cancer in Ontario: Those who get access to a remarkable drug through private insurance, and those who get a death sentence.The grim news is often delivered at the London Regional Cancer Program to men whose shoulders sag and jaws drop when told Ontario's Health Ministry has for 15 months refused to pay for a medication covered by every other Canadian province.
"There's shock, fury and dismay," said oncologist Kylea Potvin. "Everyone thinks we have this wonderful universal health care system, but this is absolutely not the case. We've increasingly become a two-tier health care system where if you have money, you have access."
The drug Zytiga is a last resort for men whose prostate cancer has spread and who wouldn't benefit from aggressive chemotherapy or even chemical castration.
A pill with few side effects, Zytiga targets an enzyme needed to make a hormone that feeds the cancer and studies have shown it to slow its progression, leaving men living months or even years longer and without as much pain.
It was quickly approved in the United States and by Health Canada.
But Ontario rejected the application, a decision that's left heroic patients such as Percy Bedard of Zurich calling on Ontarians to ask their government why it has abandoned so many men to suffer and die before they should.
"(Health Minister Deb) Matthews: What's my life worth to you?" the 67-year-old Bedard told The Free Press.
The Free Press relayed his question Wednesday to Matthews, who expressed sympathy for Bedard, admitted it was the drug's costs that had been the holdup and said she hoped negotiations now under way would further reduce the price enough for the ministry to cover the costs.
The pill costs $5,000 a month.
Details:
Zytiga (Abiraterone Acetate)Pills taken daily with few side effects.
Health Canada OK'd July 2011. Every province but Ontario funds it.
Extends life an average four months and reduces pain.
--- --- ---WHAT THE PROVINCE SAYS
Letter from Ontario Health Ministry to patient denying coverage:
"Although there is a well-conducted randomized controlled trial demonstrating a statistically and clinically significant increase in overall survival without substantial side effects in this group of patients . . . the cost effectiveness of this agent is not favourable. As a result, the (Committee to Evaluate Drugs) recommended that Zytiga not be funded."
What was that about no death panels?
via @Instapundit
How Obamacare Will Make College More Expensive
John Merline writes at Investors.com:
ObamaCare relies heavily on Medicaid -- the federal/state program that provides health insurance for the poor -- to expand coverage.But Medicaid is already swallowing up state budgets, forcing states to cut back on everything else, especially support for two- and four-year public colleges.
"The two biggest items of every state budget are Medicaid and education," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told IBD recently. "As the Medicaid mandate rises, the educational funding declines. That is passed on to universities and they raise tuition in order to make up for it."
via @Instapundit
Sporting Cheaper: 45% Off Sports & Outdoors Overstocks
At Amazon
Best of all, when you buy through my links, you help support me and my site, which I truly appreciate.
Amazon has finally fixed the "Powered by Amazon" button in Amy's Mall (although I haven't had a moment to fix the text that says it's still broken). So, to buy something that's not linked here, just go through this link
And thank you -- really, truly appreciate every purchase that you all send my way. Also, I love seeing the interesting things people buy -- tents, melamine bowls, among the most recent. (I don't know WHO buys what, in case you were worried, those of you buying vibrators and such!)
Amy On Dr. Drew (On How To Keep Your Relationship Alive)
I taped the show yesterday and it aired last night. Here's a little clip HLN posted:
This is Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky's research that I'm talking about: "Variety is the Spice of Happiness: The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) Model." Her coauthors are Dr. Kennon M. Sheldon and Dr. Julia Boehm.
On my radio show, she discussed how she and her husband will get grandma to stay with the kids for a couple days and go off to a downtown hotel. Just shaking things up in small ways makes a difference.
A quote from their paper:
Varying how one does a "positive" activity may be crucial in determining whether that activity continues to have enhancing effects on peoples' well-being. Again, a key assumption of the HAP model is that an ongoing stream of fresh positive events and positive emotions are necessary to maintain a person in the upper end of his or her "set range." Hedonic adaptation is a powerful counterweight to this possibility, and in order to overcome it, one must continue to vary the positive experiences one has.
Her book, which I recommend, is The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want
Boston Market Goes Bloomberg On Salt
Nitwits at Boston Market are trying to help people cut their salt consumption -- based on the widely held myth that people should cut their salt consumption. The headline from the LA Times story by Tiffany Hsu, who credulously believes "current dietary guidelines" rather than doing any actual reporting:
Boston Market removes salt from tables to help customers cut back
They're leaving a little note in the salt shaker slot:
Diners at Boston Market will have to taste their food before pouring on the salt after the restaurant chain decided to take shakers off tables and put them out of reach at the condiment station....Americans adults shouldn't consume more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day, according to current dietary guidelines. A single McDonald's Big Mac has 1,000 milligrams. An original recipe KFC chicken breast has 1,080 milligrams.
At Boston Market's 476 locations, salt shakers will be removed from tables immediately, the company said. The chain also plans to cut the amount of sodium in its menu items by at least 15% by the end of 2014.
And for signature items such as mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese and rotisserie chicken -- of which Boston Market sells 48 million servings a year -- a 20% cut in sodium will be implemented over the next six months.
Likely making the food taste like crap.
If they want their customers to be healthy, they'd cut out the mashed potatoes and sell heavily buttered green vegetables, as it is sugar, flour and starchy vegetables like potatoes that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat and makes America The Land of the Lardass.
Melinda Wenner Moyer writes at SciAm that the zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science:
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine--an excellent measure of prior consumption--the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous....the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79.
Gary Taubes writes in The New York Times:
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a "safe upper limit" is likely to do more harm than good.
Frankly, I don't want to eat in any restaurant that treats me like a naughty child or turns inconveniencing me in the name of bad science into a business practice. I suggest you likewise avoid Boston Market and other restaurants with similarly numbskullish, nannying practices.
LL Cool J Goes Badass On A Burglar
Andrew Blankenstein posts at the LAT:
The burglar who broke into the Studio City home of actor-rapper LL Cool J suffered a broken nose and jaw in what police sources described as a "knock-down, drag-out" fight.Los Angeles police were called to the star's home in the 12000 block of Blairwood Drive around 1 a.m. Wednesday, officials said. LL Cool J was holding the suspect when officers arrived, officials said.
Rrrrm-Rrrrm-Remember The Free Market?
Holman Jenkins writes at the WSJ that Government Motors (aka General Motors) is going to have some problems, and maybe require a future infusion of taxpayer welfare, thanks to the Obama admin's pie-in-the-skie fuel economy targets:
A perfectly good mechanism already exists to help Americans decide which cars to buy and how highly to value fuel efficiency. It's called the price of gasoline. Not well-remembered nowadays, the U.S. began regulating fuel efficiency only when it denied itself this useful mechanism during a disastrous experiment with gasoline price controls in the 1970s. The corporate average fuel economy rules (aka CAFE), though now fully institutionalized, stopped making sense as soon we stopped trying to fix the price of gasoline below market levels.In one of those kerfuffles that render the Web a net plus, financial blogger Louis Woodhill caused consternation by predicting at Forbes.com last week that GM is headed for another bailout.
Bob Lutz, the former GM vice chairman, posted an irate rejoinder. Others piled on. Mr. Woodhill dwelled on the shortcomings of the 2013 Chevy Malibu, a car that goes up against the Accord, Camry, VW Passat and a near-infinity of others in the crowded market for family sedans. But the real reason to worry about GM is that it's making a Malibu at all. No logic under the sun, or under Harvard Business School, tells a company to play to its weakness, to prefer low-margin opportunities to high-margin-opportunities, to plan and execute large investments designed to lose money.
Detroit's labor costs, brand aura and design knack long ago should have told GM to focus on vehicles with low labor content relative to price and profit margin, such as pickups and SUVs. It's only because of CAFE that GM invests billions in small-car technology without payback, including the electric Chevy Volt. It's only because of CAFE that GM saddled itself with the money pit known as Opel, to keep up with small-car technology and markets in Europe.
Even the Obama auto task force, as it was wrapping up the GM bailout, acknowledged the obvious in a leak to the New York Times: "At some point . . . the drive for profitability is likely to collide with Mr. Obama's fuel-efficiency and low-emission goals."
I bought a Honda Insight hybrid in 2004. I don't drive much, but I spent $93 on gas last year. All last year. My car, at its gas mileage worst, gets around 40 mpg. If I'm driving on the highway and not stuck in traffic, it gets about 60.
Once gas prices started going up, one thing changed for me: I started getting notes on my windshield begging me to sell my car.
Watch Me Tonight On Dr. Drew On HLN At 6pm Pacific (9pm Eastern)
Whirlwind. They emailed me at 11:15 am and asked me if I could be in Hollywood for a taping on sex and relationships at 1:30 pm! Yes!
Luckily, I dress as if I'm going to be asked to be on television at any moment (not because I think this will actually happen), and I was wearing a little black dress and glam earrings while I was sitting and writing at my fave cafe.
Didn't have time to be nervous -- they emailed me topics at 11:30 and I took notes for half and hour and emailed them to myself and looked them over in the car!
PS If anybody can tape this, it would be super. Not sure I can get home to set my DVR.
Diploma Held For Ransom For Valedictorian's Use Of "Hell"
Allison cross writes in Canada's National Post about yet another power-grabbing administrator (who seems to have taken a time machine back to 1950):
A high-achieving student from a small Oklahoma town has been denied her high school diploma, allegedly because she used the word "hell" in her valedictorian speech.Kaitlin Nootbaar, 18, delivered the speech three months ago after graduating from high school in the community of Prague, according to KFOR-TV.
Nootbaar's father David said she borrowed a line in her speech from one delivered in Eclipse, a movie from the Twilight Saga series.
"Her quote was, 'When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the hell do I know? I've changed my mind so many times,'" David said.
Nootbaar, who maintained a 4.0 GPA, had planned on saying "heck" in the speech but instead said "hell," her father told KFOR-TV.
They didn't know Nootbaar's choice of word was a problem until she went to her former school to retrieve her diploma, only to find out the principal planned to withhold it until the teenager issued an apology. At the time of the speech, the audience reacted warmly.
The article says she has no plans to apologize. She earned her diploma and it seems the school has no right to withhold it.
They should, perhaps, considering withholding the job of the apparently power-mad administrator who came up with this boneheaded, immature little revenge plot.
Per the article, the school is refusing to comment, and it is possible that the one-sided story has more to it than this.
It's always kind of amazing when somebody gets their panties in a bunch over the use of a word. When a word -- whether "hell" or "fuck" is used correctly (and not in the presence of, say, 4-year-olds or frail elderly aunts who don't curse like hell themselves), shouldn't that be the standard?
(And I say this as someone whose next book, to be published by St. Martin's in Spring 2014, is titled "Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck.")
Sorry, Obamacare Fans: More Government Not The Cure For Too Much Government
Of course, Obamacare will not cause health care costs to go down. A. Barton Hinkle writes at reason:
As critics warned, the Affordable Care Act will not "bend the cost curve downward" as promised. To the contrary, a June report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid predicts that national health spending through 2021 will continue to grow at a considerably faster clip than Gross Domestic Product.That growth will not be even. Private health insurance spending will rise about 8 percent. Medicaid spending will grow about 20 percent. In a few years, government will account for 50 cents of every health care dollar spent in America.
...This, naturally, has alarmed many progressives. But don't worry--as always, they have a plan. ...'The only sustainable solution is to control overall growth in health costs.'"
Translation: Set a nationwide cap on all health spending, including private spending. This is the brilliant fix being offered by "responsible...leading thinkers" such as the Center for American Progress' John Podesta and former Obama health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel. (Just imagine what the irresponsible, second-rate thinkers would come up with.)
Pause for a second to review how we got here. Although numerous factors have contributed to the explosion of health-care costs--an aging population and expensive technology, for example--a chief driver is government itself. WWII-era wage controls, followed by the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance, combined to create the third-party-payer conundrum vexing us today. Medicare and Medicaid made the cost problem worse. It's the same dynamic driving up college tuitions: Massive government subsidies encourage massive price hikes, which then ostensibly justify yet more government intervention to bring prices down.
Worthless Junk Purchased By The TSA
Great post by Bruce Weber at TSANewsBlog on some of the wasteful crap we're paying for in the name of "security." A few of the items:
The Puffer: Officially known as Explosive Trace Portals (ETPs), these machines are supposed to be stationed at the security checkpoint for passengers to enter before proceeding through the metal detector. Several puffs of air are released in an effort to shake loose trace explosive particles on the passenger. Total Cost: $29.6 million for a family pack of 207 machines (about $153,000 each), less than half of which were ever deployed. The rest didn't work, were pulled from service, and are now sitting in a warehouse. Cheaper, Low-Tech Alternative: Trained vapor-wake detection dogs, estimated by the military to cost $8,500 each (plus food). As a bonus, dogs do not have to sneeze on you to "shake loose" any particles.AIT: Advanced Imaging Technology comes in two delicious crime-fightin' flavors, millimeter wave and backscatter. Also known as nude-o-scopes and by a number of other colorful names, the AIT is the machine that tells Officer Mallcop that you aren't wearing any knickers. Total Cost: About $250,000 (machine plus installation costs) times 800 machines (with another 1,000 on order) for a total of about $450 million, not including pin striping, floor mats, or undercoating. Fun Fact: The government said this spring that they don't work.
eFence: (Or is it the iFence? I can never be sure.) I'm speaking, of course, of the high-tech intrusion prevention system at JFK airport. Installed by Raytheon and confounded last week by a drunken jetskier, the fence includes motion detectors and video cameras. Total Cost: Well, here's a happy surprise! The oft-quoted price of $100 million actually bought FOUR fences, one at each of the Port Authority's airports. That means that it only cost $25 million to encircle JFK!
Bargain shopper Bonus Question: If JFK covers 4,930 acres, how much does the eFence cost, per foot?
Answer (check me on this, friends): An acre is 43,560 square feet. Assuming the airport is a perfect square, it would take 58,617 feet of fence to enclose it. If the fence was $25 million, that's $426.50 per foot . . . or about 50 times more expensive (and 0% more effective) than plain old chain-link fencing. Helpful Suggestion: Buy a bunch of those $8,500 bomb-sniffing dogs. By my calculations, for $25 million the Port Authority could station a dog every 20 feet around the entire airport perimeter. Even TSA couldn't miss a guy in a yellow life-jacket pursued by a pack of 2,941 security hounds.
Automatic ID Checker: Outside every dive bar in America there's a guy sitting on a stool, checking for fake IDs. TSA's newest gizmo is a software/hardware solution that would replace him, cuz he probably costs way more than the $115,000 price of each device, and, dude, he's not digital. Inconvenient Fact: TSA killed off the Puffers because the maintenance costs were around 40% of the purchase price (see above). Unfortunately, Congress noticed that over their lifetime it will cost $150 million to service the $115 million worth of CAT/BPSS machines TSA wants to buy, or 130% of the purchase price. Other Inconvenient Fact: All of the 911 hijackers had current, valid, US-government-issued IDs, making the discovery of fake documents kinda pointless.
The government report on the TSA failures is here.
And as somebody asks on the TSA's new ID checker blog item, "How exactly does checking ID's enhance security? After all, doesn't everyone still have to pass through screening?"
Another question from a commenter there:
TSA is only authorized by Congress to conduct an Administrative Search for Weapons, Incendiaries, and Explosives.What part of searching for WEI does this ID and Boarding Pass inspection fall under?
Best of all, the name of the ID checker gizmos reads like CAT PISS -- CAT/BPSS.
And one other commenter sums what's happening up well: Airports have been turned into "Constitutional Twilight Zones."
It's not the money -- it's the gobs and gobs of money. A bit from the end of Weber's post:
Government Security News reported yesterday that Morpho Detection, Inc., and L-3 Communications have each been awarded contracts worth over half a billion dollars "to supply 'medium speed' explosive detection systems that can screen checked baggage." What GSN didn't mention is that Morpho's CEO, Brad Buswell, is the former head of TSA's Science and Technology Directorate.Naturally.
Raped At Knifepoint And Knocked Up: Awww, How Sweet!
Lou Colagiovanni writes at Examiner.com about another hoof in mouth from another Missouri Republican -- this time, a "high-ranking state Republican," Sharon Barnes (with a bunch of Republican party titles/associations at the link). Barnes, most charmingly, told the New York Times that god sometimes chooses to "bless" a rape victim with a pregnancy.
You Don't Have A Right To Not Be Offended
Yes, some people have a problem with a religion (really a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion) that commands the death of gays and apostates, the death or conversion of "the infidel" (that would be the rest of us), and that treats women as if they have all the rights of pets.
People who have such problems with Islam sometimes seek to non-violently express their feelings. (We have a thingie called "The First Amendment" to protect such expression.)
In New York City, however, and most states, that's a "hate crime" -- which not only conflicts with free speech but free thought...assuming we can even know what a person's thoughts are (and, of course, assuming that they're "hateful" of a protected group).
Of course, Muslims building a mosque -- a place for people to read, recite, and pray for the destruction of non-Muslims -- isn't a "hate crime." There are too many of us, and we're too pasty to be considered protected.
But throwing bacon on the ground in a New York City park, that is considered "a hate crime," per police commish Raymond Kelly.
Do I have a problem with people who toss bacon around a city park? Yes -- but the "crime" is called "littering," and it's bad because it brings rats, and there are already far too many of those in New York City.
People who use bacon as speech -- well, it's a waste of a fantastic food, but I otherwise celebrate that, and all other forms of speech.
Acupuncture? Cupping?! Why Doesn't The U.S. Military Just Hire Witch Doctors?
Harriet Hall writes at Slate that the military has not only used bomb detecting wands that worked no better than "a forked stick or a coin toss," but that quack medicine like the use of dowsing rods, cupping, and battlefield acupuncture are endangering troops:
Acupuncture has been tested repeatedly and found wanting. Studies have shown that it doesn't matter where you stick the needles, and it doesn't matter whether you pierce the skin. Stimulating intact skin with toothpicks or electricity works just as well. The crucial factor seems to be whether patients believe they are getting acupuncture.The claimed benefits of acupuncture range from treating infertility to aiding smoking cessation, but the evidence argues against its usefulness for anything but easing pain and possibly nausea. A recent comprehensive review of the literature by Edzard Ernst found little evidence that acupuncture is even truly effective for pain. He also found 95 published cases of serious adverse effects, including death. There is a double standard here: The quality of evidence offered to support acupuncture would not pass muster for a proposed prescription drug.
Some acupuncturists have accepted that the evidence is lacking and are now saying: "Maybe it's just a placebo, but let's use it anyway. Placebos are good." But placebos amount to lying to the patient. Surely our troops deserve better.
...One could argue that acupuncturists have nothing "evidence-based" to offer in the first place, but what is really alarming are the duties listed for the position. They include things acupuncturists are clearly not trained to do, like prescribing orthotics and braces and counseling patients on nutrition. Worse, the duties include providing cupping, moxibustion, and visualization techniques, none of which are effective and two of which directly injure patients. Cupping is the application of glass bulbs filled with heated air to the skin. It creates a vacuum as the air cools, sucking up wads of skin into the bulbs and leaving ugly bruises. Moxibustion involves burning mugwort on or near the skin and can cause burns and permanent scars (and does so deliberately in some forms of moxibustion).
...In this modern era, we should be looking at the best science, not reverting to anecdotal evidence and pre-scientific belief systems. ... The adoption of acupuncture by military medicine is a step backward.
Men Return Their Eagle Scout Badges To Protest Boy Scouts' Anti Gay Policies
Good for these men for standing up against discrimination against gays (the Boy Scouts' policy of refusing membership to homosexual men and boys.
James Hamblin posts at The Atlantic:
And to all the heterosexual kids in Scouting who are absorbing the message that discrimination is okay -- for them to see the Eagles they idolize tell them clearly that it's not.
The moving letters are posted here.
And just imagine being 12, maybe not fitting in very well in school and other places, and being told you can't be a part of an organization because you feel like you like boys rather than girls. (Some of my friends who are gay said they knew at a pretty young age.)
Dumb Enough To Work For The TSA; Too Dumb To Understand Satire
Wearing the above shirt, designed by BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow, caused a "brown" man to be abused (even more than the rest of us usually are) by TSA thugs and then yanked off a plane. Arjit blogs at Storify:
My wife and I arrived at Buffalo-Niagara International Airport to fly home to Phoenix after attending my wife's grandfather's funeral, flying via a layover in Atlanta on Delta #1176.While at the gate, a Delta supervisor informed me my shirt had made numerous passengers and employees "very uncomfortable."
I was then questioned by TSA about the significance and meaning of the shirt ("It's mocking the security theater charade and over-reactions to terrorism by the general public -- both of which we're seeing right now, ironically.") and was told I would be able to board the plane, but only after acquiescing to an additional security check of my and my wife's belongings and changing my shirt ("It's not you, it's the shirt," as noted in a tweet below). We would then be the very last two people to board the plane. I agreed to these stipulations.
Soon afterwards, the Delta manager pulled me aside again, this time accompanied by not only three TSA agents, but also multiple Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority transit police. I was questioned some more, our bags were searched, and the TSA agents were satisfied we had nothing suspicious and posed no threat. At this point, however, the Delta manager informed us the pilot had decided, regardless of the outcome of the multiple TSA screenings and my willingness to change shirts, that due to the discomfort my shirt had caused, my wife and I would not be allowed to board the aircraft.
Apparently, the fact that I was deemed not to be suspicious and we had no threatening objects in our baggage was irrelevant to Delta. Instead, the fact that someone had used their imagination to make the determination that I posed a threat was paramount. And appeasing those bigots by preventing us from flying was their preferred response.
...At this point, the transit police began to aggressively question us. I was asked where my brother lives (he was the one who gifted me the shirt). A bit surprised by the irrelevant question, I paused for a moment before answering. "You had to think about that one. How come?," I'm asked. I explained he recently moved. "Where'd he move from?" "Michigan," I respond. "Michigan, what's that?," she says. At this point, the main TSA agent who'd questioned me earlier interjects: "He said 'Michigan'." Unable to withhold my snark, I respond, "You've never heard of Michigan?"
This response did not please her partner, a transit cop named Mark. Mark grabbed his walkie-talkie and alerted his supervisor and requested that he be granted permission to question me in a private room. His justification?: "First he hesitated, then he gave a stupid answer." Michigan, my friends, is a stupid answer. (As a lifelong Ohio State Buckeye fan, I suppose I could've already told you that.)
And then, he decided to drop any façade of fair treatment: the veil was lifted, this was about who I was and how I looked (from a tweet by Arjit):
Says Buffalo-Niagara transit police officer Mark, in requesting authority for additional interrogation: "He looks foreign."Another Arjit tweet:
Did I mention a Buffalo-Niagara transit cop aggressively asked me why my wife didn't take my name? "WHY wouldn't she?" Yeah, that happened.In the world of NFTA transit police, women are the chattel of their husbands. And to indicate such, they must take their husbands' names! My wife's unwillingness to give in to this convention is clearly a sign of my swarthy suspicious character.
Eventually, after more questioning and being sniffed by drug-seeking dogs, we were rebooked on a flight the following morning at 7 am.
Delta enabling this treatment is icky stuff.
And a call to action: If you're traveling, consider going as Arjit did, with this emblem front and center. The shirt's no longer on sale, but you can print out the design and tape it to your back or chest. If we all use our First Amendment rights, they're less likely to be yanked from us.
Perhaps also print this out and bring it for the dummies at the TSA checkpoint so you can board your plane on the day you're supposed to.
via @Popehat
Geezers Are The True Enemy Of "Occupy Wall Street"
Eat your ramen noodles, kiddies, because you've got the elderly to fund! On reason.tv, Veronique de Rugy says that we need to move away from entitlements for all and just take care of the truly needy:
The text at YouTube:
"When you look at government policies, there's a massive transfer of wealth from the young and relatively poor members of society toward the old and relatively members of society," says Veronique de Rugy, a Reason magazine columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.In 1970, de Rugy notes, transfers from the young to the old took up about 20 percent of the federal budget. In a few years, that figure will break the 50 percent barrier as the population ages and Social Security and Medicare ramp up. Those programs are paid for by payroll taxes that suck up around 15 percent of every dollar most workers will ever make.
Yet the #Occupy movement spends most of its energy railing against "the 1 Percent" richest Americans, whose wealth is not gained at the expense of the "99 Percent." Rather, it comes from providing goods and services that people want to consume.
As transfer payments to elderly Americans - irrespective of wealth or need - increase in absolute and relative terms, de Rugy argues that we should scrap entitlements and replace them instead with a "social safety net" that helps poor Americans of whatever age. "There's absolutely no reason to continue paying for lots of people who have accumulated wealth their entire lives," de Rugy tells Reason's Nick Gillespie.
Unions Rool! Detroit Drools! (They've Got A Horseshoer On Staff)
Via the incomparable ("TSA: Snort my taint!") Popehat, aka Ken White, Detroit has a horseshoer on staff but nary so much as a pony. Jarrett Skorup writes at MichiganCapitalConfidential:
Despite having no horses, the water and sewerage department for the city of Detroit employs a horseshoer.Yet even with a department so bloated that it has a horseshoer and no horses, the local union president said it is "not possible" to eliminate positions.
Union rules have turned the department into a government jobs program, some critics say.
The horseshoer's job description is "to shoe horses and to do general blacksmith work ... and to perform related work as required." The description was last updated in 1967.
The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) has a large debt, rising water prices and inefficient services -- using almost twice the number of employees per gallon as other cities like Chicago.
Neighhhhh!
Male And Presumed Dangerous
Via @FreeRangeKids, the notion that every man is a pedophile until proven otherwise not only negatively affects men who want to go into caring for or teaching children (removing male role models), there was this in a Debra Jopson piece in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Eventually men might be spared the experience of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, whose account of a past flight was recalled by Forbes magazine writer Joshua Gans this week.Johnson was delighted when the British Airways flight attendant announced he had to move away from the two restless, difficult children beside him.
''A man cannot sit with children,'' she declared.
Whereupon the children stymied his escape by declaring: ''But he's our father."
Muslims Call For Tolerance By Westerners; In Muslim Countries They Just Slaughter People
The Quran commands that along with gays, people who leave the faith are to be slaughtered, as may be an 11-year-old who allegedly blasphemed the religion (somebody should!), and could be executed for it. Jon Boone writes for the Guardian in barbarian Islamabad:
An 11-year-old Christian Pakistani girl could face the death penalty under the country's notorious blasphemy laws, after she was accused by her neighbours of deliberately burning sacred Islamic texts.Rifta Masih was arrested on Thursday, after complaints against her prompted angry demonstrations. Asif Ali Zardari, the president, has ordered the interior ministry to investigate the case.
As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.
...As with many other aspects of the incident, there is disagreement about exactly what was burned. Some say it was a small pocket book of Qur'anic verses. Others claim it was pages of the Qur'an. Either it was a relatively small quantity of ash carried in an earthenware dish, or it was around half a kilogram of refuse that filled a small plastic shopping bag.
Hammad Malik, a 23-year-old with a shaven head and bushy beard who is deemed a "scoundrel" by the Christian community, said he saw Rifta walking out of the tiny, single-room dwelling where she lived with her parents and sister at some time after 6pm. He said it was pure chance that he noticed her bundle.
"I looked at it but did not know exactly what it was but I could see it had words written in Arabic," he said.
He concedes that no one actually saw her burning anything as the offence allegedly happened inside the house, and she was caught while finding somewhere to throw away the remains. However, the local mullah claims there was a witness: another young girl who caught her in the act and then ran to the mosque to raise the alarm.
...Even though no one has yet been executed for blasphemy in Pakistan, long prison terms are common - one Christian couple was sentenced to 25 years in 2010 after being accused of touching the Qur'an with unwashed hands.
There have also been cases of people killed by lynch mobs demanding instant punishment. Daring to criticise the law is incredibly risky and few do it.
If Allah is so great, why can't "he" tolerate a little criticism from time to time?
Pat Robertson: Quite The Christian!
Bob Allen writes at abpnews:
During a recent broadcast of The 700 Club, a woman sent in a question asking why the men she dated always lost interest in her after finding out that her three daughters were adopted from three different countries and not her biological children that come with child support.Robertson disagreed with a female co-host's gut reaction that it was because they are "dogs" and it is "just wrong."
"No, it's not wrong," Robertson responded. "I mean, a man doesn't want to take on the United Nations."
"You don't know what problems there are," he continued. "I've got a dear friend who adopted a little kid from an orphanage down in Colombia. The child had brain damage -- you know -- grew up weird."
"You just never know what's been done to a child before you get that child," Robertson elaborated. "What kind of sexual abuse there has been, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So you're not a dog because you don't want to take on that responsibility."
Jeremy Weber quotes Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean who has become a prominent advocate for adoption, on Christianity Today:
The issue here isn't just that Robertson is, with cruel and callous language, dismissing the Christian mandate to care for the widows and orphans in their distress. The issue is that his disregard is part of a larger worldview. The prosperity and power gospel Robertson has preached fits perfectly well with the kind of counsel he's giving in recent years. Give China a pass on their murderous policies; we've got business interests there. Divorce your weak wife; she can't do anything for you anymore. Those adopted kids might have brain damage; they're "weird." What matters is health and wealth and power. But that's not the gospel of Jesus Christ. For too long, we've let our leaders replace the cross with an Asherah pole. Enough is enough.
Of course, Robertson, greasy eel that he is, came through with a bullshit apology not long after his remarks, which you can see at the Christianity Today link above.
via @walterolson
What Kind Of Backward Turds Do We Have Running For Office In This Country?
In the WSJ, Siobhan Gorman writes about Todd Akin's rape remarks:
The Republican vying for Democrat Claire McCaskill's Senate seat in Missouri said Sunday that he misspoke during an earlier television interview when he said pregnancies in the case of "legitimate rape" are rare and that women have a biological ability to prevent pregnancy in such cases.Rep. Todd Akin (R., Mo.), who recently won the GOP primary to run for Ms. McCaskill's seat, made his comments in an interview broadcast Sunday by St. Louis television station KTVI and posted on its website. Mr. Akin was asked about whether abortion should be legal in the case of rape.
"From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," Mr. Akin said of pregnancy caused by rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something...I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."
In a statement later, Mr. Akin said: "In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it's clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year. Those who perpetrate these crimes are the lowest of the low in our society and their victims will have no stronger advocate in the Senate to help ensure they have the justice they deserve."
Translation: "Uh-oh, spoke my mind and it might lose me some votes, or at least get me on TV for bad reasons for a few days."
Sounds Like A Good Deal
Shop Amazon - August Headphone Month Savings - Up to 50 Off Select Models
My search window on Amy's Mall is broken -- just going straight to Amazon, no credit for me (thanks, Amazon!).
So, here's a link to a working search window
Advice Goddess Radio: A Little Earlier Tonight, 6-7pm PT, 9-10pm ET -- Dr. B. Janet Hibbs On Fairness
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
My guest this week is therapist Dr. B. Janet Hibbs on love and fairness -- how being fair to each other is the key to happy relationships (and saving relationships in trouble).
Her very wise, very helpful book: Try to See it My Way: Being Fair in Love and Marriage
We'll discuss what fairness has to do with love, how its lack leads to affairs, alcoholism, secret lives, and big betrayals, and what it takes to bring fairness into your relationship.
Listen live at 6pm Pacific and 9pm Eastern at this link or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/20/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon/
And don't miss last week's dietary mythbusting show with cardiologist Dr. William Davis on why wheat is the single worst thing you can eat. (There's no such thing as "healthy whole grains.")
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
I also recommend Dr. Davis' New York Times best-selling book: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health
Listen to all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
A Man With Everything: A Lit-Up Trike Full Of Tecate
Gregg saw this guy with the bike complete with the go-go girl fringe at West Hollywood's Golden Rule liquor store: "Tricked-out three-wheeler, 12-pack of Tecate, doesn't have to worry about anything, and seemed very content with who he was," Gregg said.
Of course, Gregg normally only runs into Jesus or Elvis at the liquor store. "Jesus of Hollywood," he emphasized. (No word on whether Jesus has a special deal with the liquor store to turn water into wine.)
There is, however, the occasional pirate strolling the sidewalk in his neighborhood. (Santa Monica pirates are a little scarier-looking.)
If any of you were wondering why I don't live elsewhere, this is why.
The Tube Top: American Immigrant Entrepreneurism
I loved this story by Pagan Kennedy in The New York Times about fashion magnate Eli Tahari, who arrived here from Iran in the 1970s and says he had less then $100 in his pocket and slept on park benches. He discovered the tube top and turned it into an empire:
According to fashion lore, a manufacturing error resulted in a pile of fabric tubes, and some of these mistakes ended up in a New York store owned by a garment trader named Murray Kleid. Tahari discovered his first tubes in Kleid's store, on sale for $2 each. "Murray Kleid didn't know it was fashion," Tahari says. But Tahari knew that these bandeaus -- made of puckered, Indian-print gauze shot through with elastic -- would be a hit. He bought piles of tubes from Kleid and resold them for $3 to $4."It was an East Village happening. 'I am not wearing a bra! I am a modern hippie girl!' " Tahari said with a hoot, recalling his clients. Around that time, Tahari sneaked into a trade show and, lacking an exhibitor's pass, set up his display in the hall. "I came with my bags of tubes and pictures showing how to wear them," he said. A swarming crowd grabbed order forms as fast as he could hand them out. When security officers tried to bust up the mob, Tahari just moved to another hallway. By the end of the day, he had orders for thousands.
"That was the beginning of my wholesale-fashion career," he said. With the help of a friend, he started a manufacturing operation to churn out tubes in 1973. Eventually orders came in from Africa, South America and Asia.
In 1974, he opened a boutique, and women flocked there for his dresses and halters. He continued to sell his tube tops wholesale. It was the era of "Saturday Night Fever," and Tahari drew his inspiration from nights spent at Studio 54, where he would bring his designs for his friends to wear. "It was totally disco," he said of why the tube top caught on worldwide.
What are some other stories of Americans or new arrivals on our shores making good without the help of family money or anything but their wits?
Why You Should Talk To Strangers In Coffee Shops
(And everywhere). Because you might meet somebody amazing. And you might learn a thing -- or seven.
via Glenn Reynolds
Government Thuggery Doesn't Always Have A Billy Club Behind It
From the WSJ, Institute for Justice president Chip Mellor writes about some of the stories I've blogged recently about people who are being forced to pay fees and go through hours of training in licensing schemes that funnel thousands of dollars to Big Government and sometimes benefit competing big businesses:
For decades, Elmer Kilian has prepared tax returns for his friends and neighbors on his lace-covered dining room table. He is typical of more than 350,000 American tax preparers who may now be put out of business because of an IRS power grab.Under new regulations imposed last year--without congressional approval--the IRS now requires all paid tax preparers to become "registered tax return preparers" by paying extra fees, passing a government exam, and taking continuing-education classes annually. (Exempted from the mandate are attorneys, CPAs and politically powerful "enrolled agents.") Big tax-preparation firms such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt supported the licensing scheme, as did lobbying groups representing CPAs and others who are exempted from new regulation.
This new regulatory burden falls most heavily on independent tax preparers, who may soon be forced out of business. Compliance, especially for seasonal preparers like Mr. Kilian, is both expensive and time-consuming. Out-of-pocket costs of up to $1,000 for continuing-education courses, plus the travel and time required to take the classes, would make Mr. Kilian's venture unprofitable.
Lissette Waugh has a similar story, but her troubles stem from onerous state regulations. A highly sought-after makeup artist from Las Vegas--with clients including Salma Hayek and Arnold Schwarzenegger--Ms. Waugh wants to earn a living by teaching others her craft. The problem is that, even though you don't need a license to be a makeup artist in Nevada, the State Board of Cosmetology is demanding that Ms. Waugh obtain an expensive government-issued permission slip to teach others how to do what she does.
To get that license, she must submit to 700 hours of training and spend thousands of dollars. That's 700 hours she would otherwise spend teaching others to support themselves. Instead, she'll spend them pursuing a pointless piece of government-mandated paper. Nevada's incumbent cosmetology industry, of course, supports such requirements.
More than 100 low-income and moderate-income occupations require licenses somewhere in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. They range from the understandable (school bus driver, emergency medical technician) to the ridiculous: interior designer, makeup artist, florist.
As Mellor winds up his piece:
Untold entrepreneurs stand ready to start their economic engines--if only government officials would relinquish the keys.
Sam Harris On Islam
"There is a religion of peace in this world, but it's not Islam."
A related video:
Also Don't Go To A Job Interview Dressed As A Giant Penis
Or wear a big lifelike dildo on your head when standing up to speak at a City Council meeting.
Pssst! Ladies! Of all the ways to demand respect for women, dressing up like a giant vagina probably isn't one of them.
Too Fast Times At Ridgemont/Santa Monica High
I'm at my fave cafe. Girl, about 16, is sitting at the next table. A pack of cigs and Alcoholics Anon blue book are on on table, along with a notebook she's been writing in. A woman in her early 20s sits down and starts talking. It's her sponsor. Sad.
Who's Killing All The Young Black Men?
Other young black men. Over half the homicide victims in the U.S. are black, although blacks are only 13 percent of the population. In the WSJ, Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields write:
(Trayvon) Martin's death is a racial aberration, according to data kept by the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Law-enforcement officials nationwide are battling a far more widespread and intractable problem: the persistent killing of young black men by other young black men. Battling Black-on-Black ViolenceHillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, met with investigators at the scene of a homicide.
Homicide victims usually are killed by people of their own race and ethnicity. The pattern goes back at least a generation.
Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.
Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.
Overall, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.
Despite the declining U.S. murder rate, killings remain stubbornly high in poor pockets of cities large and small. In some cases, the rate is rising sharply. That increase is draining resources from police, prosecutors, social workers and hospitals.
As of Friday, Philadelphia police had been called to 223 homicides, compared with 198 last year. Chicago has recorded 337 murders, compared with 263 in the year-earlier period, a 28% jump. Public outcry there escalated after June 27, when stray bullets fired by an alleged gang member killed 7-year-old Heaven Sutton in a poor area on the city's West Side. Uproar over the little girl's death led Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to announce a gang crackdown in neighborhoods with high murder rates.
Could the violence be connected to how 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers? Is this the legacy of the welfare state and its subsidization of single parenthood?
The Religion Of Pieces
Dead body parts, that is. And it isn't really a religion but a violent totalitarian system dressed up as a religion. From Islam Watch, Sujit Das posts:
Today who can deny the fact that Islam is different from all other religions, because of the threat of violence to its critics? All other religions can be criticized and even ridiculed without fear of violence. Only with Islam is there a credible threat of violence to its critics. Muslims can criticize Christianity and Hinduism without any fear of violence, but Christians and Hindus cannot criticize Islam without an ever-present fear of Islamic violence. It needs far more bravery to be on that side. A simple, calm, rational debate between all religions is not possible, because the fear of Islamic violence is always in the background. If Islam is, as Muslims claim, a mature, modern, tolerant religion, then why there is a need to the threat of violence? Muslims don't understand the self-contradiction.
The Quran is filled with commands to murder non-Muslims:
A large portion of the Qur'an is full of Jihadi verses and hate speeches against the infidels. As example, here I quote the most "beautiful and peaceful" verse of the Qur'an, known as the verse of sword."Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." (Q: 9.5)
Here's more about the Quran -- a debunking of the notion that the violent passages, demanding that Muslims convert or kill the infidel, are taken "out of context" (as if they can be read in a historical context, like passages in The Bible):
When Jihadi verses are pointed out, Muslims say, "You have quoted out of context". This "out of context" argument, to borrow words from Warraq, is the "old standby of crooked, lying politicians" (Warraq, 2003, p. 400). This could mean two things: (a) the historical context to which the various verses refer; and (b) the textual context, the actual place in a particular chapter that the verse quoted comes from.The Historical Context is out of question. Qur'an is supposed to be the eternal word of God, true and valid for all places and time. If Allah is eternal, then Allah can neither have a past nor a history. Therefore, Muslims actually blaspheme against their God, when they talk about historical context. Secondly, as Spencer observed (2003, p. 127), reading the Qur'an is often like walking in on a conversation between two people with whom one is only slightly acquainted. Frequently, they make reference to people and events without bothering to explain what is going on. Even the famous Muslim scholar and one of the most influential thinkers, Sayyid Qutb, admits that most of the Surahs were not revealed as wholes, but rather bit by bit at diverse occasions, of which there is no historical record agreed upon by scholars. Hence, the only option available to us is that of assumption and preponderaton in this matter (cited Boullata, 2002, p. 363). In other words, the context is often not supplied. Therefore, if the context is not given in the Qur'an, how a verse can be quoted out of context?
The remaining is the textual context. No doubt, there are some peaceful verses in the Qur'an, which were revealed early in Muhammad Prophetic mission in Mecca. Muslims want to prove that Islam is a peaceful religion by quoting those verses. But all the peaceful verses were abrogated by the violent verses of the ninth Surah, because the ninth Surah was revealed toward the end of Muhammad's life. In fact, most Muslim authorities agree that the ninth Surah was the very last section of the Qur'an revealed to him. Many Muslim theologians assert that the verse of sword (Q: 9.5) abrogates as many as 124 more peaceful and tolerant verses of the Qur'an (Spencer, 2007, p. 78; McAuliffe, 2006, p. 218).
As Raymond Ibrahim puts it briefly, when violence in The Bible and the Quran are compared:
The fundamental error is that Judeo-Christian history--which is violent--is being conflated with Islamic theology--which commands violence. Of course, the three major monotheistic religions have all had their share of violence and intolerance towards the "other." Whether this violence is ordained by God or whether warlike men merely wished it thus is the key question.Old Testament violence is an interesting case in point. God clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of God's will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Old Testament is just that--history. It happened; God commanded it. But it revolved around a specific time and place and was directed against a specific people. At no time did such violence go on to become standardized or codified into Jewish law. In short, biblical accounts of violence are descriptive, not prescriptive.
This is where Islamic violence is unique.
...In fact, based on the sword-verses as well as countless other Qur'anic verses and oral traditions attributed to Muhammad, Islam's learned officials, sheikhs, muftis, and imams throughout the ages have all reached consensus--binding on the entire Muslim community--that Islam is to be at perpetual war with the non-Muslim world until the former subsumes the latter. Indeed, it is widely held by Muslim scholars that since the sword-verses are among the final revelations on the topic of Islam's relationship to non-Muslims, that they alone have abrogated some 200 of the Qur'an's earlier and more tolerant verses, such as "no compulsion is there in religion."
...When the Qur'an's violent verses are juxtaposed with their Old Testament counterparts, they are especially distinct for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay nonbelievers today no less than yesterday. God commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites--all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did God give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their Jewish descendants, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam's original enemies were, like Judaism's, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians), the Qur'an rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book--"until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled"[13] and to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them."[14]
The two Arabic conjunctions "until" (hata) and "wherever" (haythu) demonstrate the perpetual and ubiquitous nature of these commandments: There are still "people of the book" who have yet to be "utterly humbled" (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and "idolaters" to be slain "wherever" one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa). In fact, the salient feature of almost all of the violent commandments in Islamic scriptures is their open-ended and generic nature: "Fight them [non-Muslims] until there is no persecution and the religion is God's entirely.
Obama: "Angry Black Man?" "Scary Black Man?" Ri-i-i-ght...
The notion that anybody (let alone Romney) can paint Obama, who generally comes across as Mr. Cool, as an "angry black man" is rather a stretch.
Also, I'm no fan of Romney, but the guy seems to have trouble conveying he's awake, let alone engaging credibly in attack politics.
But, I guess some people will do anything to justify an invite-back on television. Andrew Kirell writes at mediaite:
On Thursday's edition of MSNBC's The Cycle the group discussed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's assertion that President Obama should "take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago." Co-host Touré saw what he believes to be explicit racial connotations beneath what Romney was saying, calling it the "niggerization" of the campaign."That really bothered me," he said. "You notice he said anger twice. He's really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the 'otherization,' he's not like us."
"I know it's a heavy thing, I don't say it lightly, but this is 'niggerization,'" Touré said to the apparent shock of his co-panelists. "You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we've been trained to fear."
Yes, because Harvard-educated former Senator we've had four years to observe in the Oval Office fits so neatly into that stereotype. If I saw this man in a dark alley, I'd be about as afraid of him as I would my neighbor's cat. ("I tawt I taw a puddy tat!")
Also, calling the other side "divisive" is just silly. Of course they are. Politics is built on divisiveness. Democratic and Republican divisiveness helps distract the public from how they're pretty much the same, give or take a few entitlements. (The Republicans loves them their entitlements -- while talking a good game about how they're small government.)
If Gary Johnson had a personality, he probably would have had a shot at being president, and the American people would have had some actual "hope for change."
Virginia Vintners, Why Do They Control You?
Because they can.
Mark J. Fitzgibbons writes in the WashEx that Virgina vintners are tasting the police state:
While the Obama administration is busy eviscerating private property rights at the federal level, Republican-controlled Fauquier County, Va., has decided to follow suit in its own way. Fauquier's Board of Supervisors recently passed a winery ordinance that tramples private property rights and some fundamental civil liberties....At the center of all this is the county zoning administrator, a bureaucratic czar named Kimberley Johnson, whose bullying and heavy-handed enforcement tactics have resulted in calls for her dismissal by county farmers and residents. Johnson was recently the subject of a citizen-farmer "pitchfork protest" in a matter in which she fined one farmer for conducting a pumpkin carving and a birthday party for eight little girls without the proper permit.
The winery ordinance is Obama-esque, passed under the pretext that it protects the health, safety and welfare of the public. It forces wineries to close at 6 p.m. and prohibits sale of food -- something that goes quite safely with a taste of wine -- unless the wineries obtain special permits from the zoning administrator.
The ordinance lists prohibited winery activities such as hot air balloon rides, farmers' markets, and mini-golf, which assuredly threaten the health, safety and welfare of the public, right?
Among the prohibited activities, the ordinance includes anything else determined by the zoning administrator "to be similar in nature or in impact to" the listed activities. That's the equivalent allowing police officers to ticket drivers for nearly anything they wish.
The winery ordinance comes with potential criminal penalties, yet it has weak standards of evidence and due process to protect the innocent. It's a civil liberties and property rights nightmare on its face. Chicago politics and even dictatorships mask their tyrannical abuses of law better than this.
NWA: Nerds With Attitude
Mars Curiosity nerd-rap: "We're NASA and We Know It" via BoingBoing:
Loved the guy with Neil deGrasse Tyson's disembodied head tacked on him.
via @xeni
I Love Seeing The So-Cal Whack Jobs
Los Angeles is like a giant open zoo for them.
I went to the site advertised on the sign. This guy is the inventor of the inventor of the Purviance Pyramid:
Urgent! Mother Earth needs healing. She has a gaping wound at the location known as Fukashima. This wound is growing. The situation threatens your very existence.Purviance Pyramids can heal mother earth but we must participate for it to happen. Twelve 3 foot pyramids moved around will show miracles. 24 purviance pyramids moved around the area will evolve consciousness.
Get your Purviance Pyramid here:
Put your purviance pyramid on top of your car rack, or on top of your RV. Move the purviance pyramid around EACH DAY 5 miles before 7 a.m., and after 2 days of doing that the 3rd day will be clear and free of chemtrails. Move the open air purviance pyramid around every day and the bees will come back in no time! Best chemtrail buster on the planet.
His NY Driver's License Says It's Good Till He's 96
In a letter to the editor in the NYT, Marshall Izen writes about senior citizens and driver's licenses:
I am a robust 88-year-old who, by personal choice, stopped driving five years ago. As a Manhattan resident, I drove very little and did not trust my reflexes.I have peers who drive and shouldn't. I feel very uncomfortable being their passenger. This month, I had to renew my license and decided to do so just in case of an emergency where I had to drive. No problem. All I needed was a note from my optometrist.
My new license is good until I am 96! Shouldn't there be a driver's test for seniors?
Paul Ryan: Lacking In Marital Diversity, Says "Mother Jones"
Saw this tweet:
@tedfrank
Mother Jones complains that Paul Ryan married a thin blonde. How dare he not diversify with an overweight mixed-race gay marriage!
Here's the Mother Jones piece, "Paul Ryan: Frattiest Veep Candidate Ever," by Asawin Suebsaeng:
8. His wife:You know the perception folks have about dudes in fraternities: That they suck down expensive cigars by the case, vote Republican, and only chase after the thin, blonde, white, right-wing, pretty girls?
For the record, Paul Ryan's wife Janna is blonde, thin, conservative, white, and a former cigar lobbyist:
(I don't steal photos, so you'll have to go to Mother Jones to see her picture by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Chris Wilson in their piece.)
Their bit on her continues:
To top things off, Ryan proposed to her at one of his favorite fishing spots: Big St. Germain Lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin. (The happy couple have been known to kill wildlife together, side-by-side.)
That is disturbing to have to do the whole deal, killing your food and all. I prefer mine to be delivered to me with a side of asparagus on fine china.
Helen Gurley Brown: Nobody's Mouseburger
I loved how she wrote about the "mouseburgers," the plain women of the world, and her ideas on how they could get ahead in life. (That's how she saw herself.)
Tracie Egan Morrissey writes at Jezebel about trailblazer Brown, who just died at 90:
Despite the release of Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon's 2009 full-length biography of HGB, hailing her as a feminist icon, the late editor still doesn't seem to get the respect she deserves--even in death. In a piece about HGB this week for the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker suggests that we "not take her seriously," deriding her beliefs as "stiletto feminism" and bitchily referencing her breast implants and disinterest in having children as evidence that she was some selfish, immature dilettante.But HGB's early life was an inspiration for the creation of Mad Men's resident blossoming feminist Peggy Olsen, according to the show's creator Matthew Weiner. She worked her way up from the secretary pool to copywriter at an advertising agency after her boss noticed her talents.
She didn't marry until she was 37, which was considered bizarre in 1959. Even after she was married (to the same man for over 50 years) she chose having a career over having a family and never regretted the decision. That's not how women are supposed to be! Not even modern women! We're supposed to "have it all," or at least want to have it all.
Having it all--a phrase that's been the bane of feminism for three decades--means having a career and a family, or so we've been told. Oddly, though, not by HGB, who was the one who actually coined the term in the early '80s with her book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even If You're Starting With Nothing.
"You can have it all," she later said. "And it's a hell of a lot of work. And it causes considerable stress. I never, so to speak, had it all. But I had my all, which is what I wanted: work and love."
...But part of what made HGB such a trailblazer was that, unlike other feminists, she didn't see high heels and dresses and lipstick and blow jobs as the shackles that bind us to a prison of traditional womanhood, but rather, part of what enables us to revel in the fun of femininity. And that can be really liberating.
...That she managed to piss off both Serious Feminists and traditionalists alike only proves that, in many ways, HGB was ahead of her time.
More on Brown here.
The False Choice Offered, Right And Left
Stossel writes at reason about the compulsion to overlegislate, right and left:
People on both sides think of themselves as freedom lovers. The left thinks government can lessen income inequality. The right thinks government can make Americans more virtuous. I say we're best off if neither side attempts to advance its agenda via government....People tend to believe that "government can!" When problems arise, they say, "There ought to be a law!"
...George W. Bush ran for president promising a "lean" government, but he decided to create a $50 billion per year prescription drug entitlement and build a new bureaucracy called No Child Left Behind. Under Bush, Republicans doubled discretionary spending (the greatest increase since LBJ), expanded the drug war, and hired 90,000 new regulators.
Bush's increases in regulation didn't mollify the media's demand for still more.
Then came Barack Obama and spending big enough to bankrupt all our children. That fueled the tea party and the 2010 elections.
The tea party gave me hope, but I was fooled again. Within months, the new "fiscally conservative" Republicans voted to preserve farm subsidies, vowed to "protect" Medicare and cringed when Romney's future veep choice, Rep. Paul Ryan, proposed his mild deficit plan.
It is unfortunate that the United States, founded partly on libertarian principles, cannot admit that government has gotten too big. East Asian countries embraced markets and flourished. Sweden and Germany liberalized their labor markets and saw their economies improve.
But we keep passing new rules.
World's Biggest Hedge Fund Gets Welfare From Connecticut
Michael McDonald and Saijel Kishan write at Bloomberg:
Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund, intends to build a $750 million headquarters financed partly with state aid in Stamford, Connecticut, according to Governor Dannel Malloy.The company, which paid founder Raymond Dalio $3.9 billion in 2011, occupies five buildings in nearby Westport. The new headquarters is planned for Stamford's Harbor Point waterfront district, Malloy, 57, said yesterday in a statement. Bridgewater also committed to adding hundreds of jobs.
Connecticut agreed to give Bridgewater a $25 million "forgivable" 10-year loan at 1 percent interest to help finance two buildings totaling 750,000 square feet (69,700 square meters). It will also provide as much as $5 million for job training, $5 million for alternative-energy systems and $80 million in tax credits, according to the statement.
"This is stealing from the poor and middle class to make a billionaire even richer," Jonathan Pelto, a former deputy majority leader in Connecticut's House of Representatives, said by e-mail. "This isn't economic development."
via @AgainstCronyCap
Jack Kerouac And His Pet Chicken
On the road.
Left, Right And Psycho
Really tired of either side (left or right) blaming sicko murders on left or right political thinking. Psychopaths will find reasons.
Deaf Girl Wants To Be In The Girl Scouts: Who Should Pay For The Interpreter?
Naomi Nix writes in the Chicago Tribune about the family of 12-year-old Megan Runnion, who is deaf, suing the Girl Scouts for disbanding her troop after the cost of the interpreter (paid for by the Girl Scouts) got too high:
The suit alleged that the Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana excluded Megan because of her disability in violation of the federal Rehabilitation Act."She can't be part of the group if she doesn't understand what's being said," said her mother, Edie Runnion.
...But in the fall of 2011, the Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana told Runnion that the "council does not pay for these services," the lawsuit alleged.
...Runnion said she later learned from the Girl Scouts that the group would pay only a maximum of $50 a month for support services for girls with special needs. Megan's family would have to pick up the added expense.
...The cost of an interpreter in the Chicago area averages between $55 to $60 an hour for a minimum two-hour assignment, said Jill Sahakian, director of the Chicago Hearing Society. Sahakian, who has not seen Runnion's lawsuit, said the cost might be higher for evenings and weekends.
Some interesting comments over at Overlawyered, where I found the link to the story:
Allan 08.14.12 at 10:14 am
...Is this a societal cost or a personal cost?I believe that this is a tough question. The liberals in the country have an answer. I am not sure the conservatives or libertarians do.
Don 08.14.12 at 10:29 am
I assume that the parents can communicate with their daughter. Why didn't they provide themselves as interpreters for their daughter.No cost to them, no cost to the girl scouts.
Oh wait, I forget, it might have inconvenienced their schedule
gasman 08.14.12 at 1:59 pm
For every dollar spent by council, thousands of hours of volunteer time is spent. It sounds like her parents are trying to monopolize the dollars and efforts of this organization taking way more than they deserve.So why is this girl not learning to read lips, use a cochlear implant, or otherwise herself become a capable and functioning member of society? It is not up to Scouting to do this for her, but her parents.
UC Davis Study: Triclosan May Weaken Muscles -- Including Heart Muscle
From a UC Davis press release. Research is not in humans, but it's not looking good in the mice and the fishies:
Triclosan, an antibacterial chemical widely used in hand soaps and other personal-care products, hinders muscle contractions at a cellular level, slows swimming in fish and reduces muscular strength in mice, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Colorado. The findings appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America."Triclosan is found in virtually everyone's home and is pervasive in the environment," said Isaac Pessah, professor and chair of the Department of Molecular Biosciences in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and principal investigator of the study. "These findings provide strong evidence that the chemical is of concern to both human and environmental health."
Triclosan is commonly found in antibacterial personal-care products such as hand soaps as well as deodorants, mouthwashes, toothpaste, bedding, clothes, carpets, toys and trash bags. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1998 estimated that more than 1 million pounds of triclosan are produced annually in the United States, and that the chemical is detectable in waterways and aquatic organisms ranging from algae to fish to dolphins, as well as in human urine, blood and breast milk.
The investigators performed several experiments to evaluate the effects of triclosan on muscle activity, using doses similar to those that people and animals may be exposed to during everyday life.
In "test tube" experiments, triclosan impaired the ability of isolated heart muscle cells and skeletal muscle fibers to contract. Specifically, the team evaluated the effects of triclosan on molecular channels in muscle cells that control the flow of calcium ions, creating muscle contractions. Normally, electrical stimulation ("excitation") of isolated muscle fibers under experimental conditions evokes a muscle contraction, a phenomenon known as "excitation-contraction coupling," the fundamental basis of any muscle movement, including heartbeats. But in the presence of triclosan, the normal communication between two proteins that function as calcium channels was impaired, causing skeletal and cardiac muscle failure.
The team also found that triclosan impairs heart and skeletal muscle contractility in living animals. Anesthetized mice had up to a 25-percent reduction in heart function measures within 20 minutes of exposure to the chemical.
"The effects of triclosan on cardiac function were really dramatic," said Nipavan Chiamvimonvat, professor of cardiovascular medicine at UC Davis and a study co-author. "Although triclosan is not regulated as a drug, this compound acts like a potent cardiac depressant in our models."
In addition, the mice had an 18-percent reduction in grip strength for up to 60 minutes after being given a single dose of triclosan. Grip strength is a widely used measure of mouse limb strength, employed to investigate the effects of drugs and neuromuscular disorders.
Why Do So Many Travel Guides Make Excuses For Dictators?
Michael Moynihan writes at ForeignPolicy.com:
In 1933, as Joseph Stalin was busy purging his enemies and building a murderous cult of personality, the New York-based left-wing magazine the Nation advised readers interested in traveling to Moscow that Intourist, the Soviet Union's official travel agency, employed as tour guides "very interesting and attractive young women without hats," skilled in correcting misinformation spread by the capitalist media. Although the hatless apparatchiks from Intourist limited sightseeing to approved destinations -- Ukraine, at the apogee of its brutal famine, was off-limits -- they were nevertheless adept at obtaining "special permits" from the predecessor of the KGB, which, the Nation noted, "far from being a band of terrorist police, is an extremely able and intelligent organization, always glad to help tourists."...These days, the young and progressive book travel online, eschewing tour groups and specialized travel agents. This leaves the task of a travelers' political education to guidebook empires like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, both of which -- while offering what Lonely Planet calls "honest and objective" advice on where to find the perfect pisco sour in Peru or that slice of beach paradise in Cambodia -- provide detailed, polemical asides on the political history and culture of the countries under review.
...For instance, readers of Lonely Planet: Libya -- published before the recent unpleasantness -- are told that Libya's murderous dictator, Muammar al-Qaddafi, was likely framed for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. In fact, the book relates, "One of the most credible theories was that the bombing had been ordered by Iran in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iran Air airbus by a US warship in the Persian Gulf on 3 July 1988." Qaddafi is cast as a misunderstood figure ("A recurring theme throughout Colonel Qaddafi's rule has been his desire for unity with other states, all to no avail"), unfairly maligned by Western governments ("ordinary Libyans suffered [under sanctions] and the world rebuffed repeated Libyan offers to hand over the Lockerbie suspects for trial"), and the victim of media unfairness ("Western reporters, keen for any opportunity to trivialise the eccentricities of Libya under Qaddafi, referred to [his bodyguards] as the 'Amazon Women'").
Oh, he was just a big fluffy bunny!
via @walterolson
Obamacare-Caused Doctor Shortage To Come
From the WSJ, John C. Goodman writes:
Here is the problem: The health-care system can't possibly deliver on the huge increase in demand for primary-care services. The original ObamaCare bill actually had a line item for increased doctor training. But this provision was zeroed out before passage, probably to keep down the cost of health reform. The result will be gridlock.Take preventive care. ObamaCare says that health insurance must cover the tests and procedures recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. What would that involve? In the American Journal of Public Health (2003), scholars at Duke University calculated that arranging for and counseling patients about all those screenings would require 1,773 hours of the average primary-care physician's time each year, or 7.4 hours per working day.
And all of this time is time spent searching for problems and talking about the search. If the screenings turn up a real problem, there will have to be more testing and more counseling. Bottom line: To meet the promise of free preventive care nationwide, every family doctor in America would have to work full-time delivering it, leaving no time for all the other things they need to do.
When demand exceeds supply in a normal market, the price rises until it reaches a market-clearing level. But in this country, as in other developed nations, Americans do not primarily pay for care with their own money. They pay with time.
How long does it take you on the phone to make an appointment to see a doctor? How many days do you have to wait before she can see you? How long does it take to get to the doctor's office? Once there, how long do you have to wait before being seen? These are all non-price barriers to care, and there is substantial evidence that they are more important in deterring care than the fee the doctor charges, even for low-income patients.
For example, the average wait to see a new family doctor in this country is just under three weeks, according to a 2009 survey by medical consultancy Merritt Hawkins. But in Boston, Mass.--which enacted a law under Gov. Mitt Romney that established near-universal coverage--the wait is about two months.
That Pesky Amendment #4
J.F. posts at The Economist about the TSA, the agency that fails at just about everything but power-grabs:
It turns out that the kinds of behaviours that resulted in passengers getting additional screening were things such as walking while black, breathing while Latino and trying to board an aircraft while being Middle Eastern. These allegations came not from the outside (or, speaking as a swarthy man who often travels alone and is often selected for additional screening, not only from the outside) but from TSA officers themselves, who approached the ACLU to complain that rampant racial profiling was making their stated mission more difficult.And that mission, let's remember, is not finding drugs or contraband or warrants or immigration scofflaws, it is, or at least was supposed to be, preventing terrorism. The TSA was created two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 in order to bolster security on America's transport systems. With that in mind, it is not entirely accurate to complain of mission creep when TSA agents show up at train and bus stations. It is accurate, however, to complain when the TSA searches passengers after they have completed their train journeys. And it is accurate--necessary, even--to complain that the TSA has become simply another auxiliary police unit, some of whose officers undergo a scant nine hours of training, who appear relatively unencumbered by the fourth amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, and who, worst of all, are subject to the same pressure for increased arrests and referrals as other police forces.
...The standard response to search complaints is that you implicitly accept the TSA's terms by purchasing an airline ticket and entering an airport; if you don't like it, don't fly. But the TSA can also be found at train and bus stations, on roads and even at non-transport events such as football games. I suppose people who value their fourth amendment rights can just stay home.
Bill Fisher comments on the post:
The behavior detection program has been shown to be hocus-pocus used to conceal a drug interdiction scheme. Is anyone really stupid enough to believe that TSA can train a fast food worker to read minds in six weeks?This is the third major incident in this program in a year involving racial profiling and harassment, illegal interrogations and unlawful searches and there have been others that received less exposure. TSA investigated themselves in the incidents in Newark and Hawaii and found they were innocent. No one was fired or prosecuted for their illegal searches and harassment of innocent people. What a surprise.
Where does this stupidity stop?
In the past two months 35 TSA workers fired or arrested and 66 more disciplined for misconduct on the job. A known pedophile, Thomas Harkins, was exposed in May but remains employed as a TSA Supervisor in Philadelphia. There were a total of 97 TSA workers arrested in the last 20 months including 12 arrested for child sex crimes, over 26 for theft, 12 for smuggling contraband through security and one for murder.
This is precisely the problem with TSA, no accountability when they exceed their authority and those in management are never fired. Even police are subject to prosecution by victims. Not so for TSA employees and this must change.
Quantas, Virgin, BA: Airlines That See All Men As Molesters
Quantas, Virgin, and BA are among them, forcing men to switch seats when they're seating next to an unaccompanied child, on the thinking that merely being male means you're a likely child molester. Jonathan Turley blogs:
A firefighter recounts how he was forced to move on a Virgin Australia flight because there was a child next to him. Qantas has actually defended the discriminatory policy.Ironically, some male travelers may silently relish the idea of never having to sit next to a minor on flights, but most would be insulted by the stereotype underlying the policy.
Women are actually statistically more likely to abuse a child overall. Three-fifths (61.8%) of perpetrators in one study were female. However, in fairness, it should be noted that women are more likely to be caregivers and around children. Moreover, this is for any form of abuse as opposed to sexual abuse. Males are higher in that category. However, the study below found that roughly 30 percent of perpetrators of sexual assault of minors were female. In the category ages up to 18, the percentage went to 40 percent. Another study found the rate to be 20 percent. Overall, studies show that child sexual abuse fell more than 60 percent from 1992 to 2010. The New York Times reported last month that from 1990 to 2010, for example, substantiated cases of sexual abuse dropped from 23 per 10,000 children under 18 to 8.6 per 10,000, a 62 percent decrease, with a 3 percent drop from 2009 to 2010.
Study can vary, of course, but the question is whether this is based on stereotypical or statistical foundations.
In the case of the Daniel McCluskie, 31, the move not only left people staring at him but the attention got worse after the flight attendant thanked a woman who they asked to move to take his seat next to a ten-year-old girl. McCluskie is a senior nurse at the local health district in Wagga Wagga.
Giving Great Head
@LAist tweeted:
The Day the Muzak Died: Kenny G Files for Divorce http://bit.ly/MVtfRu
Blogtalk Radio Is Featuring My Sunday Show With Dr. William Davis 
I've been doing my radio show less than a year -- we started in October of 2011 -- and I guess I'm hitting my stride. My show is consistently one of the five most popular or the most popular in the psychology category, which is pretty damn cool.
Monday morning, Blogtalk Radio emailed Gregg to tell us that the show I recorded Sunday night with cardiologist Dr. William Davis would be featured with a select group of shows on their front page for 24 hours, starting Monday at midnight, Eastern. (Click "Featured Shows" arrow -- I'm on the second screen...but maybe I'll jump up a screen if enough people listen!)
Here are the deets:
Advice Goddess Radio: Cardiologist Dr. William Davis on why wheat is the single worst thing you can eat (there's no such thing as "healthy whole grains").
Listen at the link or download to your MP3 player:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Thanks so much to all of you who listen, especially those of you who listen live and come in the chat room, and thanks to all of you who share the links.
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science. Listen live to all my fascinating guests every Sunday night, 7-8 p.m. Pacific, 10-11 p.m. Eastern, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon
One Intern, $2 Million Taxpayer Dollars
Michael James Barton writes at NRO of something that made my blood boil and then some -- the USDA's $2 Million Man:
It seems that the Department of Agriculture is beyond parody, and its Office of the Chief Information Officer did really spend $2,013,396 on an internship program that only produced one intern.As a general rule, I think internships are great and encourage them in concept. But to really understand how badly this internship program was botched, consider that the taxpayers spend about $500,000 or so a year to pay the president of the United States, with most of the expense being his $400,000 salary. This internship program cost roughly the same as an entire term for the commander-in-chief. Perhaps if this program produced 300 amazing interns in Year One, one could argue it was a good use of taxpayer funds, but in this case the taxpayers would have been better off if the USDA had randomly picked an intern applicant and give him a million dollars in cash in exchange for a promise to never show up to work.
What bothers me the most about these sorts of incidents is the "reform" and "improvements" that are always suggested, as if no one has ever done anything wrong in the office until just now. The discussion seems to revolve around a "fix" that invariably spends more taxpayer money on this or that office. This USDA report asserts that the Office of the Chief Information Officer "could have had more impact if projects and resources had been better planned and effectively managed." But this office isn't new -- it was established in 1996. Is 16 years not enough for an office led by people making six-figure salaries to plan and effectively manage a program?
USDA funding audit document here. My screen shot of the relevant portion:
Paul Ryan Is One Of The Few In Washington Who Can Do Basic Math -- Or Is He?
Joseph Rago writes in the WSJ:
In 2008, amid the poverty of ambition of the late Bush presidency, Mr. Ryan released "A Roadmap for America's Future," a 71-page document that was the first plan in years to take arithmetic seriously. The then-obscure Wisconsin congressman dropped by the Journal to sell his vision, no press secretary, no handlers. "I want to be the Paul Revere of the fisc," he said, according to my notes from the meeting.Mr. Ryan knew as everyone who knows the budget knows that the federal balance sheet can't be improved by zeroing out foreign aid to Mozambique and arts funding for off-off-off Broadway plays. Medicare is such a large share of spending, and growing so much faster than any other item, that fiscal reform must include the popular entitlement.
Yet the larger goal, Mr. Ryan wrote in the roadmap's preface, was to modernize Medicare for "the realities of the new century." His aim was "not to retreat from the commitments made over the past eight decades, but to fulfill them." In a word, to preserve retirement security and the social safety net.
The core problem is that open-ended Medicare, which spends one of five dollars in health care, buys services whose costs are rapidly increasing. It is a "defined benefit." Mr. Ryan wants to move to a "defined contribution," where seniors would get a fixed-dollar subsidy to buy private insurance. Seniors who desire more generous benefits would pay at the margin. This shift to "premium support," akin to the private-sector transition to 401(k)s from pensions, would change the incentives in health care and make medicine more accountable to patient choice.
Today, Medicare's arbitrary fee-for-service price controls pay the best hospitals and the worst hospitals equally, regardless of quality or value. Innovators who deliver better care at a lower cost are rarely rewarded, as they would be in any other industry. Under premium support, networks of providers would be competing for consumers and become more efficient over time, instead of billing taxpayers for their current negative rate of productivity.
Under the 2008 roadmap, seniors would get a straight cash voucher for $9,500 a year (the amount Medicare then spent per person), indexed to a blended measure of general inflation and the rise of health costs. The poorest and the sickest would get more, the wealthiest seniors less. Nothing would change for people older than 55.
Then again, pretty much everybody in government sucks, panders, and worse, and Ryan is no different, and let's not forget that. David McElroy blogs:
Mainstream political reporters are painting the selection of Ryan as a turn to the "radical right" to placate the Tea Party's supporters. A writer for Time magazine even said that Ryan was the choice of the "libertarians on the Wall Street Journal editorial board...." (I haven't run into any actual libertarians yet who are excited about Ryan.)There's only one little problem with this narrative building him up as a fiscal conservative or even libertarian. Ryan's voting record is full of support for things that no fiscal conservative could support, much less a libertarian. Anybody who believes that his candidacy is a win for libertarians or fiscal conservatives isn't paying attention.
One of the most egregiously irresponsible spending measures of the last few years was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which forced U.S. taxpayers to purchase the so-called "toxic assets" of big banks. Pure and simple, it was a bailout for banks to allow them to get loans off their books. Ryan not only voted for TARP, but he enthusiastically supported it. Take a look at the video from the House floor (at the end of this article) of Ryan begging the House to pass TARP and warning of dire consequences if it didn't pass. Is that a fiscal conservative?
Ryan voted for the auto bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Is that a fiscal conservative?
He's voted for Medicare expansion, housing subsidies and extension of federal unemployment benefits. Are those things that actual fiscal conservative support?
In addition, he's voted in favor of a national ID, making the PATRIOT Act permanent, surveillance without a warrant and No Child Left Behind. He favored keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely. Maybe worst of all, he voted for the so-called "stimulus" plans of 2008 and 2009. That's right. Ryan believes in the voodoo economics of John Maynard Keynes. Is any of this the mark of a fiscal conservative, much less a libertarian?
The idea that Ryan is a fiscal conservative or libertarian is puzzling. The facts don't support the contention. (Read more about his record here.) So why are so many people saying it anyway?
Three Women Who Understand Freedom In A Way Few Americans Do
The closing statements of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, at the Moscow Khamovniki District Court.
Sunbeams And Cobwebs
These are two of my favorite little pieces of animation. This one is by Paul Vester:
This is a 1936 Max Fleischer cartoon, with animation by David Tendlar and William Sturm:
TSA: Why Get Your Balls Groped When You Can Just Row Up With A Warhead?
The 58,401 Stooges (aka TSA employees) are so busy pretending to administer security that they fail to actually do it. In New York, a jet-skier, stranded in Jamaica Bay, swam to shore and easily breached all the supposed security they have between the Bay and the terminal. From NBC New York:
Daniel Castillo of Queens swam to shore and then walked past motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras of the airport's state-of--the art Perimeter Intrusion Detection System.The $100 million system is meant to safeguard against terrorists.
Castillo climbed an eight-foot-tall perimeter fence and made his way to Terminal 3, according to The New York Post. He approached a Delta Airlines worker, who alerted authorities, the paper said.
Katie Roiphe: Children Of Single Mothers Really Just Oppressed By Picture Book Families
Katie Roiphe, whose thinking I'm usually a fan of, justifies single motherhood in The New York Times, as if the only thing that makes kids long for a daddy is seeing intact families in picture books:
If there is anything that currently oppresses the children, it is the idea of the way families are "supposed to be," an idea pushed -- in picture books and classrooms and in adults' casual conversation -- on American children at a very early age and with surprising aggressiveness.At 2, my son, Leo, started to call his sister's father, Harry, "my Harry." When he glimpsed Harry's chocolate-brown 1980s car coming down our block he would say, "My Harry's car!" To me this unorthodox use of "my" gets at the spirit of what we're doing: inventing a family from scratch. There are no words for what Harry is to him, but he is definitely his Harry.
...What the studies don't show is that longing for a married father at the breakfast table injures children.
How do you write that and feel okay about it and your choices?
Kay Hymowitz in Slate on single mothers:
Myth 1: You can't generalize about single mothers since their circumstances and life outcomes vary enormously. Social scientists have been studying single mothers for decades. By this point, their findings have taken into account just about any measurable difference you can think of and have been replicated so often that generalizations--especially the poorer outcomes of their children--are entirely justified.That said, it makes sense to separate single mothers into three categories. First are women who were married or in committed partnerships when they had their kids, but who divorced or separated later on. They run the socio-economic gamut, from rich to poor. Second are "choice mothers," single women who planned to become mothers despite being unmarried. Choice mothers tend to be educated, in their 30s or early 40s, and financially stable. Their children are usually born via anonymous or known sperm donor, though hook ups with ex-boyfriends are not unheard of. As the term suggests, "choice mothers" distinguish themselves from the far larger third category: low-income or working-class, young, never-married mothers. The commentariat tends to understand far less about the third group than they do about the first two for the simple reason that they know a lot of middle-class divorced and choice mothers--they may even be divorced or choice mothers--but have only viewed young, poor, uneducated mothers from a distance. For that reason, the third category tends provoke the most stubborn and erroneous misunderstandings...
...In both Promises I Can Keep, and Doing the Best I Can, Edin's forthcoming book on low-income fathers co-written with Tim Nelson, most parents-to-be had been together for only a few months, or even weeks. Those relationships also tended to be emotionally distant. Expectant couples have rarely spent much time doing things together or hanging out with friends and family. Men described themselves as "associating with" the woman who would become their child's mother, not "dating" or "seeing" her. Still, Edin and Nelson find that men are generally happy, even thrilled, when a sexual partner announces that she is expecting, and the pregnancy tends to intensify the association into a recognizable relationship--at least temporarily. Unsurprisingly, many men and women quickly find they have nothing in common and don't even like each other.
...It would be even better if low income men and women had been guided by that old ideal that first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. That idea of marriage invites couples to actively choose a partner, to build a connection, and plan a life together unlike unmarried parents who seem to stumble into accidental families. The mindful planning seems to help.
It helps, but does not guarantee anyone perfect soul mate. But then the perfect soul mate may be the biggest myth of all.
Young Republicans Care Less About What You're Doing Naked
Susan Saulny writes for The New York Times:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Matt Hoagland, the county leader of a group of young North Carolina Republicans, is busy trying to ramp up enthusiasm for Mitt Romney at the grass-roots level. So there are a few things he avoids mentioning to prospective young voters he wants to woo, including the hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage, which have dominated campaigns past."Social issues are far down the priorities list, and I think that's the trend," Mr. Hoagland, 27, said. "That's where it needs to go if the Republican Party is going to be successful."
Zoey Kotzambasis, vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Arizona, considers herself a conservative. But she supports both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Those are not just her opinions.
"A lot of the College Republicans I know share the same liberal-to-moderate social views," she added. "And I think that's changing the face of the party."
Now if only the Republican party could be the actual party of fiscal conservatives, and not the pretend one.
Mistaken Ideas About Grief Had People Thinking She Was Doing It Wrong
Lucy Schulte Danziger's father died on Father's Day in an unexpected drowning. She writes in "Modern Love" in The New York Times:
WHEN friends and colleagues heard that my father had died in an unexpected drowning -- on Father's Day, no less -- they couldn't believe I was at work the next day, that I went swimming in the morning, that I was not at home weeping.They said: "You are in shock. ...It hasn't hit you yet. ...You're in denial."
I wasn't. It had hit me, but more like a warm hug than a punch.
...Everything around and within me is partly because of his fatherly advice, his example and even the fact that he could get impatient and stubborn. His good parts: mentoring young people and being generous with his time and advice. And his bad parts: the occasional eye-rolling and teasing and inability to take criticism.
My dad was so bright that he had skipped a grade, then always seemed to judge us when we delivered anything but high marks at school.
But he also was in awe of my brother's and my physical feats, the marathons and triathlons we competed in. The next morning when I got in the pool I thought about the fact that I didn't have to call him and update him on my triathlon training, because he would just "know" things were going well, since he was all around me and within me now. I didn't need to cry.
I went to work and told the story to my colleagues, and after a little weepiness in the telling, I said, "Look, I want to be here." I canceled nothing and kept going. There was no moment in which I would have said, "And then it hit me," although I might have said, "And then it hugged me."
I felt loved and embraced by the e-mails and texts from friends, and by the comments on Facebook, where I'd put a picture of me with my dad at my wedding party, hugging me and laughing.
But every time I spoke to someone and they said, "I am so sorry about your father," I replied: "Thank you, I'm fine. He died doing what he loved, living fully. No regrets. He loved us and we loved him and we all knew it."
Then they looked at me as if they needed or even wanted to see me cry. In fact, many people who had lost their fathers burst into tears telling me how sorry they were. They were reliving their own grief. I ended up comforting them.
"There is no right way to say goodbye," I told friends who questioned why I wasn't crying, why I was at work. Where else should I be? In a dark room, looking at the walls?
My dad would be at work...
Listen to my show with Dr. George Bonanno on how much of what we believe about grief is not supported by evidence -- like the notion that there are predictable "stages" everyone goes through (there aren't) and the widely held belief that if one doesn't do "grief work," repressed grief will come back up to bite them.
Where The Boys Are
It affects what the other boys will spend on a date, according to a recent study by Vlad Griskevicius. Jill Krasny writes at Business Insider:
Sex ratio, or the number of single adult men versus adult women, impacts economic decisions such as how much a man is willing to save, spend, and borrow, the study found.The fewer women there are, the less likely men will want to save for the future, and the more likely they'll be to take on debt. That is, they'll spend more impulsively when they sense there's a shortage of women.
...The researchers asked 205 individuals (104 female) around the median age of 21.5 years-old to view a series of nature images and headshots. After being told the photos were either of people from a local dating site, recent graduates still living in the area, or people currently on campus, the participants were asked to record the number of men and women they viewed. Then they were asked to make a money decision: Would they'd prefer to receive $35 tomorrow or $45 in 33 days?
The men who sensed a shortage of women said they wanted the money tomorrow, whereas those who felt differently were fine with putting off the pay day until later. The same also applied with regards to saving--men who noticed fewer women around told researchers they were less inclined to put money away in the bank.
Advice Goddess Radio: Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET -- Cardiologist Dr. William Davis
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Wheat is murder. Or, if not murder, a form of slow suicide.
My guest tonight, cardiologist Dr. William Davis, will bust the widely believed myths about "healthy whole grains," the notion that bread "is the staff of life" (it's actually the staff of diabetes and many other ailments), and more.
Listen live at this link or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/13/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
I also recommend Dr. Davis' New York Times best-selling book: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health
Here's a post about "Wheat Belly" by Dr. Michael Eades, who turned me on to Davis and his evidence-based thinking on wheat. My show with Eades and his wife, Dr. Mary Dan Eades is here. A related show, with dietary researcher Dr. Jeff Volek is here.
And don't miss last week's very interesting show with evolutionary psychologist Dr. Geoffrey Miller. We discussed his thinking on how and why we sell ourselves to others through what we buy, and how whether we can do that without spending so much money -- the subject of Miller's book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Here's the link to listen on the web or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/06/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Listen to all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
California Is Employee Unions' Bitch
This state is committing assisted suicide, and it's just crazy to watch.
Hillel Aron blogs at the Native Angeleno about California Assembly Bill 2451, which passed with overwhelming support in the state House, awaits rubber-stamping in the state Senate:
The bill would, in all seriousness, fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to the surviving relatives of public employees who die of natural causes.I swear I'm not making this up.
Let's say a firefighter, policeman or prison guard dies from a heart attack. As the law stands now, if he's still employed, his surviving family is entitled to compensation. The statute of limitation is 4 and 1/2 years- so if he dies of a heart attack 4 years after retiring, his family still gets the money. AB 2451 would remove the statute of limitations- i.e., the cop or firefighter dies of a heart attack or cancer at age 95, the state will still pay out like a slot machine- we're talking $250,000 to $300,000.
I'm with him on the reasons he lays out for this happening, which he lays out at the link.
via @walterolson
He Said; She Said; He Goes To Jail For 11 Years
Community of the Wrongly Accused has this story:
Shocking case: Man spent ten years in prison after his trial judge refused to allow him to present evidence that his accuser had made other false claims against himYesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in San Francisco overturned the sexual assault conviction of a Las Vegas man named Calvin O. Jackson who has spent more than ten years in prison for a crime he may not have committed. The court held that Mr. Jackson was wrongfully prevented from presenting evidence at his trial that the woman who accused him, Annette Heathmon, had made other false claims of prior sexual assault against him. The court explained: "Jackson's defense was that the assault never took place and that he and Heathmon engaged in consensual sex. He contended that Heathmon used the police as a means of exercising control over him whenever they argued, and that her allegations against him were fabricated in this instance, just as they had been in prior instances when the police were called to respond to her claims."
More details about the case at the link. And a comment from one of the bloggers:
To our readers: this decision is ground zero for why we have this blog. We don't know what happened between the two parties the night he allededly assaulted her, but the erroneously excluded evidence likely would be enough to create a reasonable doubt about his guilt. It is appalling that this man spent ten years in prison in light of this.This was yet another case where, no, the system did NOT work the way it is supposed to work.
via ifeminists
Knock-Knock Robberies
I tweeted this:
LAPD: SoCal knock-knock robbers, nicely dressed, w/nice rentalcars, knock on doors to see "if Frankie lives there," to find hs w/no one home
And @VBartilucci tweeted in response:
Olympic-Level Free-Speech Bullying
Via Feebs, Kyle Smith writes at NRO:
When a writer for the London Spectator dubbed this summer's activities "the censorship Olympics," he took note of an alarming new British law that, in affording special trademark protection to Olympics sponsors only, ordered the courts to look warily on any usage by a business (or charity!) of a word or phrase from column A (such as "games" or "two thousand twelve") with one from column B (such as "London"). Police were empowered to "enter land or premises" and "remove, destroy, conceal or erase any infringing article." All previous speech-protection laws and policies were superseded for the temporary emergency.So: A butcher in Weymouth, England, was forced to take down sausages arranged in rings. A village in Surrey was forbidden to hold an "Olympicnic" on its village green. Police ordered a newsdealer in East London to remove Union Jack bunting featuring the words "London 2012."
A pity this wasn't more widely known. We should have encouraged people to infringe. I'm for trademark protection, but this goes way beyond the pale. Free speech shouldn't be limited to those who buy it.
Sounds Like Savings
Warehouse deals in home audio at Amazon
My search window on Amy's Mall is broken -- just going straight to Amazon, no credit for me (thanks, Amazon!) -- but should be fixed eventually (have an email into Amazon about my previous email into Amazon).
So, here's a link to a working search window
Photographing Miami Herald Building; Four Cop Cars Called
Carlos Miller does say that the security guard apparently told the cops that the crew had entered the building, which Miller says is untrue.
How Are The Man Boobs Coming, Soy Eaters?
From the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium, a tweet:
@chriskresser
You would have to eat 1,421 lbs of conventional meat to get the same amount of estrogen as found in 3 oz of soybean oil! #ahs12
Hermosa Beach Meter Maids Making Nearly $100K
It's a tough job, walking around in temperate, sunny weather, writing out little pieces of paper and sticking them on windshields.
That must be why it pays so well. Brian Calle writes in the OC Register that Hermosa Beach meter maids, in total compensation, are making nearly $100K in total compensation:
There are 10 parking enforcement employees for the 1.3-square-mile beach city southwest of downtown Los Angeles, and they pull down some disproportionate compensation, considering their job functions. In fact, the two highest-earning employees for fiscal year 2011-12 are estimated to have made more than $92,000 and $93,000, respectively, according to city documents provided by Patrick "Kit" Bobko, one of five council members and who also serves as mayor pro tem. Those two have supervisory roles. The other eight parking-enforcement employees make from $67,367 to $84,267 in total compensation.There are four qualifications for being a city "community service officer," Bobko told me: "You have to be able to drive a standard transmission; you have to able to handle large animals; you have to read and interpret statutes and regulations; and you have a high school diploma or equivalent."
...Bobko also wrote in a memo that the retirement costs for these 10 employees "from [fiscal year 2011-12] through their retirement age at 62 was nearly $1.6 million, and the medical costs for these employees from this fiscal year to their retirement at age 62 would be $1,353,827." Excluding salaries, the [retirement] contributions and medical costs for the 10 employees performing parking enforcement will cost, on average, nearly $300,000 apiece."
...Bobko is pushing a plan to outsource the city's parking enforcement operations, which he says will save money, reduce maintenance costs, relieve the city of accounting functions related to parking enforcement, increase efficiency and, perhaps most importantly, increase revenue and "reduce the city's pension and salary obligations."
There has been opposition to the outsourcing proposal from Hermosa Beach's Police Chief Steve Johnson and Councilman Howard Fishman. Both expressed concerns about letting go full-time city staff. Bobko accurately characterized the resistance: "When you outsource, you take away union jobs."
via Marc Danziger
If It's Legal, The Government Should Pay For It?
Kay Hymowitz writes at Slate.com about four myths about single mothers. The relevent one here:
Myth 3: Single mothers get pregnant because they were ignorant about, couldn't afford, or didn't have access to birth control. There's no denying that there are pockets of profound ignorance about pregnancy or that many mothers are hard up for cash. But these factors cannot begin to explain the 41 percent of American children now born to unmarried mothers. In a paper published this spring in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Melissa Kearney and Phillip B. Levine looked at a 230 unmarried 18- and 19-year olds who were sexually active but not using birth control. Only a tiny fraction--2 percent--said they couldn't afford contraception. A larger but still relatively small 11 percent said they "didn't think they could get pregnant." (The main thrust of the Kearney and Levine paper is that young single motherhood is not a cause, but a consequence, of poverty and inequality, a conclusion I quarrel with here.)An even more recent CDC study came up with a larger number of contraceptive slackers: 36 percent of the women who had an "unintended" birth said they didn't use contraception because they thought they couldn't get pregnant. But almost a quarter of that group--23 percent--also admitted they "didn't really mind if [they] got pregnant." One final reason to doubt the sexual ignorance theory of single motherhood: Teen pregnancy has plummeted over the past 20 years, in part because adolescents are having less sex, but mostly because they are using contraception more reliably. In fact, most--60 percent--of single mothers today are in their 20s; only 23 percent are teenagers. That suggests that a growing number of women know how to not get pregnant in their teens; it makes no sense that they suddenly forget after they turn 20.
The main reason it's so hard to dispel the ignorance myth is because of a rhetorical problem. Researchers separate pregnancies into two distinct categories; babies are either planned or unplanned. On-the-ground researchers find that this either/or thinking fails to capture the experience of a lot of single mothers. Edin and Kefalas, for instance, say their subjects view babies as bringing meaning to their lives. It seems that some women can sorta, kinda want to get pregnant without knowingly intending to get pregnant.
video via @ariarmstrong
Tibor On The New York Times' Paywall
Tibor Machan blogs about the meeting of The New York Times and property rights:
Well, suddenly The New York Times no longer makes it possible for online readers to offer comments easily-to do so one must climb over several walls, email letters to the editor, etc., etc. And reading the comments of other readers is no longer possible (or if it is then it is by no means as simple as it used to be). In other words, The New York Times is making changes, most likely to save money or to avoid having to deal with contrarians among its online readers. I don't actually know what lies behind the changes but I do not like them.However, and this is a notion that the editors and publishers at The Times probably do not appreciate at all, the paper belongs to them and they have the authority-based on the right to private property-to institute the changes however much I and very probably a bunch of other readers do not like them. We are not entitled to the provision of various services from The Times, such as accepting comments from readers, notifying us that the comments have appeared online, etc., and so forth. The paper belongs to them not me and others whose desires are no longer being fulfilled as they used to be. Something has changed at The Times and the publishers and editors there have the right to make the needed adjustments just as they see fit. They do not owe me and others like me a platform for expressing our dismay with what appears in the pages of the paper. Yes, we may wish for this very much. We may even have become habituated to offering up our ideas for the editors and readers to ponder. But that doesn't entitle us one whit to being given room in the pages of The Times.
Only, the publishers and editors and most Op Ed contributors to the paper just don't get it-they are exercising a right that they do not recognize for other people, such as those who do not want to contribute funds the Mr. Obama's health care budget or who do not want to follow mandates to which they gave no consent! These editors and publishers just decided, unilaterally, to close me and thousands of others out from the forums they could continue to keep open to us all. And they probably don't even realize that this right, this authority they have to do so, is entirely inconsistent with their welfare statist public philosophy.
No, I and others like me do not have a right to gain entrance to the pages of The New York Times, in print or online. And the folks at The Times know this well and good and act accordingly. They didn't need my permission to shut me out. It was their right to make that decision.
Which is central to human freedom, based on the right to private property, a right The Times doesn't much like and certainly doesn't defend in its editorials.
Fish In The Pan
My friend Ari LeVaux, who writes the food column Flash In The Pan, went to Alaska and snagged himself a fishie:
Wrong-Door Raid, Cops Shoot Kids' Dog, Make Them Lie By Its Dead Body
Isn't the police state fun?
CourthouseNews says the Dakota County Drug Task Force, the St. Paul Police force, and a DEA agent raided the wrong house -- Roberto Franco's instead of Rafael Ybarra's, the man named in the search warrant:
"There was never a mention of plaintiff, Roberto Franco, in any documents related to the raid search warrant."Plaintiff, Roberto Franco, had never been discussed or considered a suspect by law enforcement, Scovill or any of the defendants directly involved or indirectly involved in the raid, relative to any alleged involvement by Franco in any distribution of contraband prior to the wrong house raid."
Ybarra lived next door, Franco says. He says Ybarra's name, not his, was on the warrant.
But on the night of July 13, 2010, the task force broke down the Francos' doors, "negligently raided the home of plaintiffs, by raiding the wrong home and physically brutalizing all the above-named occupants of said house," the complaint states.
Even after learning that they were in the wrong house, the complaint states, the drug busters stayed in the Francos' home and kept searching it.
They "handcuffed all of the inhabitants of the plaintiffs' home except plaintiff Analese Franco who was forced, virtually naked, from her bed onto the floor at gunpoint by officers of the St. Paul Police Department SWAT team and officers of the St. Paul Police Department."
The complaint states: "Upon forcibly breaching the plaintiffs' home, defendants terrorized the plaintiffs at gun and rifle point.
"Each plaintiff was forced to the floor at gun and rifle point and handcuffed behind their backs.
"Defendants shot and killed the family dog and forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour while defendants continued to search the plaintiffs' home."
One child "was kicked in the side, handcuffed and searched at gunpoint," the family says.
Another child, a girl, "a diabetic, was handcuffed at gunpoint and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication, thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low-blood sugar levels."
During their illegal search, the officers found a .22 revolver in the basement bedroom of plaintiff Gilbert Castillo. The cops "improperly attributed the possession of said weapon to plaintiff Roberto Franco and arrested him."
via @mikeriggs
Was There Reason To Believe She Was Smuggling Cocaine In Her Coochie?
Probable cause? Probable cause? Haven't you seen at the airport? The TSA workers ignore your Fourth Amendment rights and the need for probable cause -- reasonable suspicion you've committed a crime. Why should police respect your Fourth Amendment rights if the Federally employed thugs don't?
Perhaps that was what was in the mind of the cops whom a mom claims strip-searched a her and -- eeuw, gross! -- forcibly yanked her tampon out of her.
Probable cause? Apparently not. No word from the police in the reports that were out on Thursday midnight, when I blogged this. It's her word against theirs right now. But, I've seen such an uptick in reports of really obscene police abuse of individual rights, I wouldn't be surprised if her story checked out.
Broward/Palm Beach New Times' Chris Sweeney blogs:
Last July, Leila Tarantino claims that she was pulled over by an officer with the Citrus County Sheriff's Department. In the suit, Tarantino says she came to a full stop and should have never been pulled over in the first place.A passing cop pulled a u-turn, flashed the lights, and rolled up behind her. Tarantino claims that the cop immediately drew his weapon, pulled her from the car, and refused to explain why he pulled her over. Tarantino's two young children watched all of this unfold from inside her car.
The cop then placed Tarantino in the back of the squad car, where she allegedly sat for two hours. When backup arrived, Tarantino was strip searched on the side of the road, where passing motorists could see everything.
Then, in a gruesome twist, a female officer "forcibly removed" a tampon from Tarantino. Presumably, the cops were looking for drugs, but the lawsuit notes that a drug-sniffing dog was never called in, and cops never found any contraband or anything illegal.
Legal document here.
TSA: Granny Gropers, Grope Thyselves
Philip Hodges blogs at Political Outcast about TSA workers caught smuggling coke and smack at Atlanta Airport:
If you're a drug dealer, sex offender, a child molester or have some other criminal record, and you're having trouble looking for work, look no further than the TSA. They employ all sorts of people with shady backgrounds and questionable characters, to say the least. Who else would be willing to grope little kids and grandmothers and look at images of people's naked bodies on their X-ray scanners?And it's all in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists. I'm sure that's what Richard Cook and Timothy Gregory were thinking when they got involved in a drug-smuggling business at the Atlanta airport. Cook had made a deal with some drug dealers back in January that for every kilo of heroin smuggled through security, he'd get paid $2,500. In February, Cook left the TSA and handed the reins of his drug business over to co-worker Gregory, who received $1,000 per kilo of cocaine smuggled. Little did either of them know, however, that their drug bosses were FBI agents working undercover, and the cocaine and heroin were both fake.
...This case reveals what we already knew to be true about the TSA -- that they employ moral delinquents. It also reveals that our government can engage in criminal activity with impunity as long as they get others to engage in it with them.
via @mpetrie98
Tibor Machan About "Positive Rights"
Negative rights are the sort that "permit or oblige inaction." For example, the Fourth Amendment, that has been torn up at the airport door, prohibits searches without reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed.
College, Cheaper
At least the accessories are -- up to 25 percent off at Amazon
My search window on Amy's Mall is broken -- just going straight to Amazon, no credit for me (thanks, Amazon!) -- but should be fixed eventually (have an email into Amazon about my previous email into Amazon).
So, here's a link to a working search window
Man Goes To Jail For Collecting Rainwater On His Own Property
Kendra Alleyne writes at CNSNews.com about Gary Harrington, an Oregon man who was convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his property who's just begun serving a 30-day jail sentence for it:
"I'm sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty," Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail....Harrington was found guilty two weeks ago of breaking a 1925 law for having, what state water managers called "three illegal reservoirs" on his property. He was convicted of nine misdemeanors, sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined over $1500 for collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his property.
The Oregon Water Resources Department, claims that Harrington has been violating the state's water use law by diverting water from streams running into the Big Butte River.
But Harrington says he is not diverting the state's water -- merely collecting rainwater and snow melt that falls or flows on his own property.
More here. And more from Opposing Views:
According to Oregon water laws, all water is publicly owned. Therefore, anyone who wants to store any type of water on their property must first obtain a permit from state water managers.Though the state Water Resources Department initially approved Harrington's permits in 2003, the state, and a state court, ultimately reversed the decision.
Harrington said: "They issued me my permits. I had my permits in hand and they retracted them just arbitrarily, basically. They took them back and said 'No, you can't have them,' so I've been fighting it ever since."
Protecting Big Business From Little Business
Crony capitalism wins in Holland, Michigan -- beating a 13-year-old kid and his hot dog cart:
via @againstcronycap
The Federal Government's War On Medical Innovation
Paul Hsieh writes at Forbes about what he calls the government's stealth war on medical innovation:
The first prong is through new taxes. Recently, the Cook Medical company announced that it was canceling plans to open new factories because of the impending ObamaCare tax on medical device manufacturers scheduled to take effect in 2013. The 2.3% tax on total sales (not profits) will cost Cook $20 million dollars a year. As a result, the company will not be opening five plants that would have employed up to 300 people each.Cook is not the only medical device company affected by the tax. Stryker (which makes artificial joints) will cut 5% of its workforce. Medtronic has announced the tax will cut into its investments in future products. Jonathan Rennert, chairman of Zoll Medical (which makes advanced cardiac defibrillators) has stated that the tax will mean "less innovation, fewer jobs, and fewer lives saved."
...The ObamaCare tax on medical devices will jeopardize such future advancements. According to Benjamin Zycher of the Pacific Research Institute, this tax will translate into roughly one million life-years lost annually. The casualties could include your mother, your spouse, or your children.
Repealing the medical device tax (and all of ObamaCare) is feasible. The House has already passed such a bill. We only need a supportive Senate and President, which American voters can elect in November if they so choose.
The Psychology Behind Islam's Vendetta Against The Jews
Nonie Darwish, a Muslim brought up in Egypt who converted to Christianity, explains at Jihadwatch:
After a lot of thinking, analysis, research and writing I discovered that Jew hatred in Islam is an essential foundation to the Islamic belief system that Muslims cannot seem to be able to rid themselves of. Jew hatred masks an existential problem in Islam. Islam is terrified of the Jews and the number one enemy of Islam is the truth that must be constantly covered at any cost. It does not matter how many Muslim men women and children die in the process of saving Islam's reputation. The number one duty of Muslims is to protect the reputation of Islam and Mohammad. But why would a religion burden its followers like that? This is why:When Mohammed embarked on his mission to spread Islam, his objective was to create a uniquely Arabian religion, one created by an Arab prophet, which reflected the Arabian values and culture. Yet to obtain legitimacy, he had to link it to the two previous Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity. He expected the Jewish tribes who lived in Arabia to declare him their Messiah and thereby bring him more legitimacy with Arabs, especially with his own tribe in Mecca, the Quraish. Because his own tribe had rejected and ridiculed him, Mohammed needed the approval of the Jews, whom he called the people of the book. But the conversion of Jews to Islam was part of the scenario that Mohammed had to accomplish in order to prove to Meccans that they had made a mistake by rejecting him.
That was one of the reasons Mohammed chose to migrate to Medina, a town that had predominantly been settled by Jewish tribes and a few impoverished Arabs who lived around the Jews. The Jews allowed Mohammed to move in. At the beginning, the Koran of Mecca was full of appeals to the Jews, who were then described as "guidance and light" (5:44) and a "righteous" people (6:153-154), who "excelled the nations" (45:16). But when the Jews rejected the appeasement and refused to convert to Islam, Mohammed simply and literally flipped. The Quran changed from love to threats and then pure hatred, cursing and commandments to kill Jews. Rejection by the Jews became an intolerable obsession with Mohammed.
Not only did the Jews reject him, but also their prosperity made Mohammed extremely envious. The Jewish Arabian tribes earned their living from legitimate and successful business, but Mohammed earned his living and wealth through warfare, by attacking Arab tribes, some of whom were from his own tribe, and trade caravans and seizing their wealth and property. That did not look good for a man who claimed to be a prophet of God. The mere existence of the Jews made Mohammed look bad which led Mohammed to unspeakable slaughter, beheading of 600 to 900 Jewish men of one tribe, and taking their women and children as slaves. Mohammed had the first pick of the prettiest woman as his sex slave. All of this senseless slaughter of the Jews was elaborately documented in Islamic books on the life of Mohammed, not as something to be ashamed of, but as justified behavior against evil people.
One does not have to be a psychiatrist to see the obvious, that Mohammad was a tormented man after the massacre he orchestrated and forced his fighters to undertake, to empower and enrich himself and his religion. To reduce his torment, he needed everyone around him as well as future generations, to participate in the genocide against the Jews, the only people whom he could not control. An enormous number of verses in the Koran encouraged Mohammed's fighters to fight, kill and curse Muslim fighters who wanted to escape fighting and killing Jews. The Quran is full of promises of all kinds of pleasure in heaven to those who followed Mohammed's killing spree and curses and condemnation to those who chose to escape from fighting. Muslims were encouraged to feel no hesitation or guilt for the genocide because it was not they who did it, but "Allah's hand" was behind the killing.
Mohammed never got over his anger, humiliation, and rejection by "the people of the book" and went to his grave tormented and obsessed that some Jews are still alive. At his deathbed Mohammed entrusted Muslims to kill Jews wherever they found them, which made this a "holy commandment" that no Muslim can reject. Muslims who wrote Sharia, understood how Mohammed was extremely sensitive to criticism and that is why criticizing Mohammed became the highest crime in Islam that will never be forgiven even if the offender repents. Mohammed's message on his deathbed was not for his followers to strive for holiness, peace, goodness, and to treat their neighbors as themselves, but a commandment for Muslims to continue the killing and the genocide against the Jews.
Killing thus became a holy act of obedience to Mohammed and Allah himself. Mohammed portrayed himself as a victim of Jews and Muslims must avenge him till judgment day. With all Arab power, money and influence around the world today they still thrive at portraying themselves as victims. Sharia also codified into law the duty of every Muslim to defend Mohammed's honor and Islam with their blood and allowed the violation of many commandments if it is for the benefit of defending Islam and Mohammed. Thus Muslims are carrying a huge burden, a holy burden, to defend Mohammed with their blood and in doing so they are allowed to kill, lie, cheat, slander etc.
A Dustbuster Walked Into A Bar
Looking for the chicken.
Selling Vegetables And Hosting A 10-Year-Old's Birthday Illegal In Virginia
Unless the government touches you with its bureaucratic fairy wand after you've jumped through various paperwork hoops (and paid the requisite fees).
Government used as a billy club by an annoyed neighbor seems to be how this got started.
The write-up on YouTube from EconomicFreedom.org:
In April, Fauquier County threatened Martha Boneta, owner of a small farm in Paris, VA, with thousands of dollars in fines for a series of alleged violations, including hosting "an event" on her farm without obtaining a special events permit.The event? A small birthday party for the 10-year old daughter of a close friend, Robin Verity.
Martha was also cited for selling produce directly to consumers from her farm without a license. But Ms. Boneta paid for and received a county-approved business license for a "retail farm shop" in June, 2011. However, just one month later, the county Board of Supervisors approved an amendment that restricted "farm sales", and began issuing citations to farmers in the area.
Farmers in the area believe this is a violation of Virginia's "Right to Farm Act", which bars governments from restricting the rights of farmers from earning a living, so they orchestrated a protest during Martha's Board of Zoning Appeals hearing on August 2nd, 2012.
Increasing economic freedom matters to people like Martha. But it also matters to consumers everywhere who should be free to choose the foods they want and buy directly from the farm that produced them.
From RightSideNews' Rick Buchanan:
The truth behind the "event" citations that has a Paris farmer pushing out her hard earned dollars for her defense has now been revealed. How did we get to the point where it costs you $500.00 plus lawyer's fees to defend an act of kindness offered to the 10 year old daughter of your best friend? And is the posting of events on the internet of what you would like to happen or wish you could have for a successful business now a citable offense? What's next? Will the Fauquier Zoning Gestapo employ the use of drones to verify that your back yard barbeque is legal, with 1) not too many people 2) not too much smoke 3) a decibel level of fun not too high 4) cars not parked properly in your yard and 5+) on and on and on? Are they right now combing the internet to discover some contrived infraction to cite you for?The case against the Paris farmer is one that every farmer and citizen in Fauquier County should familiarize themselves with. You may ask what does this have to do with me. In reality, the heavy hand of your Zoning Administrator (ZA) could be citing you if your neighbor brings you to her attention. In a letter written to Ms. Johnson, uncovered by a FOIA request, one of the Paris farmer's neighbors stated "Most of us in Paris do not want any (emboldened in original letter) business run out of her (the Paris farmer's) farm." The Zoning Administrator is apparently listening.
Why should government be involved at all in people voluntarily selling goods to other people who are eager to buy them?
We have way too much government and people who think government is there to protect them are naive. It's all about money and control. And money. And money.
Barack Obama, Exec Producer Of "My So-Called Recovery"
In the non-Hollywood Reporter, non-Hollywood reporter and economist Veronique de Rugy has the Bureau of Labor Stats graph showing that of all the presidents in office since Harry Truman, the itsy-bitsiest recovery belongs to President Hope And Change.
De Rugy, one of the refreshingly non-partisan economists who blogs, writes:
Polls show over and over again that jobs are a major concern for Americans, hence the close scrutiny of employment statistics during presidential campaigns. While presidents don't create jobs, their policies can influence the direction of the economy by creating, or not creating, an environment that is conducive to job creation....We have tried Keynesian economics and it failed. Is Congress ready to give up spending-driven interventions?
I doubt it. They have yet to show any interest in reality-driven interventions.
Yoohoo, Chick-Fil-A Protesters...
Although, as a supporter of civil liberties, I support Chick-fll-a CEO Dan Cathy's free speech rights, as a fervent supporter of gay rights, I sure wouldn't patronize his restaurants.
That said, I'm curious: I consistently read about horrors visited upon gays in Muslim countries -- horrors much more horrifying than mere words -- and I keep wondering where all the protests are, and have been.
In May, for example, four Iranian men were hung for being gay. Hung!
See anybody marching about that? Hear even a peep about it?
In March, there was a report that at least 15 Iraqi teenagers, perceived to be gay, were stoned, beaten to death or shot dead. (Some -- this is horrifying -- reportedly had their heads smashed with concrete blocks.)
Sticks and stones will break gay bones -- and do, with some frequency in Muslim countries.
Where, oh, where are the protests?
L'Exodus To Come
France's Idiot-In-Chief proposes raising their already Eiffel Tower-high taxes to 75 percent, and rich French citizens are looking to bail like rats off a sinking ship. Liz Alderman writes for The New York Times:
Mr. Hollande was elected in May on a wave of resentment against "les riches" -- company executives, bankers, sports stars and celebrities whose paychecks tend to be seen as scandalous in a country where the growing divide between rich and poor touches a cultural nerve whose roots predate Robespierre.Half the nation's households earn less than 19,000 euros a year; only about 10 percent of households earn more than 60,000 euros annually, according to the French statistics agency, Insee.
There is currently no plan to change the tax rates for most people, which is 14 percent for the poorest and 30 percent for the next rung. For higher earners -- people with incomes above 70,830 euros a year -- the tax rate will soon rise to 44 percent, up from 41, in a change that was already set before Mr. Hollande's election.
A tax accountant in Paris with many wealthy clients, Steve Horton, has calculated that a two-parent, two-child household with taxable annual income of a bit more than 2.22 million euros ($2.75 million) now has after-tax take-home pay of about 1.1 million euros ($1.35 million) under France's current tax system.
That household would end up with 780,000 euros, or $966,000, if the Hollande tax took effect, Mr. Horton says. (The same family, with comparable income in Manhattan, would take home $1.55 million, the dollar equivalent of 1.25 million euros, after paying federal, state and city income taxes, he calculated.)
Taxes are high in France for a reason: they pay for one of Europe's most generous social welfare systems and a large government. As Mr. Hollande has described it, the tax plan is about "justice," and "sending out a signal, a message of social cohesion."
..."People have an acceptable amount of taxes they are willing to pay," said Mr. Horton, the accountant, "and if it goes above that, they will move somewhere that's more reasonable."
And then who pays for everybody left?
Oops.
They Tried To Rob The Wrong Man
Via @LewRockwell
Stop-And-Frisk: Never Mind That A Woman Is Not A Man
Welcome to the police state, brought to you by all the Americans who couldn't care less about civil liberties, and make not a peep about their continual erosion these days, on various fronts. Wendy Ruderman writes in The New York Times of disgusting and abusive searches by NYC cops:
Crystal Pope, 22, said she and two female friends were frisked by male officers last year in Harlem Heights. The officers said they were looking for a rapist. It was an early spring evening at about 6:30 p.m. The three women sat talking on a bench near Ms. Pope's home on 143rd Street when the officers pulled up and asked for identification, she said."They tapped around the waistline of my jeans," Ms. Pope said. "They tapped the back pockets of my jeans, around my buttock. It was kind of disrespectful and degrading. It was uncalled-for. It made no sense. How are you going to stop three females when you are supposedly looking for a male rapist?"
via Lisa Simeone
The Government Aims To Eradicate Buckyballs!
Nick Farr writes at AbnormalUse that the CPSC is going after Buckyballs, collections of little spherically shaped magnets that can be manipulated to form infinite kinds of objects. The problem -- kids can swallow the magnets. Of course, the proposed government solution: Sue to stop the company, Maxfield and Oberton, from selling them, even to adults, despite a warning that they are for ages 14 and up:
Nonetheless, the CPSC alleges that the warning is ineffective because parents do not appreciate the hazards associated with magnet ingestion and will continue to allow children to have access to the products, "mouth the items, swallow them, or, in the case of young adolescents and teens, mimic body piercings." Really? Even if parents and children/young adolescents are ignorant to the dangers of magnet ingestion, do they really not appreciate the risks of swallowing small metallic objects? If so, then conceivably any object capable of being swallowed is not suitable for commerce.To make matters worse, the CPSC alleges that Buckyballs are defectively designed because they do not operate exclusively as intended. Again, really? Buckyballs are intended to be used by adults and "shaped, molded, and torn apart." Any unintended operations (i.e. swallowing) are not the result of a defective product, but, rather, poor parental supervision or bad choices.
The question is not whether the ingestion of a small, metallic ball creates a substantial risk of harm. Of course it does. Rather, the question is whether Maxfield & Oberton has placed an unreasonably dangerous product on the market. If Buckyballs were prizes in Happy Meals, then this may be a case for CPSC intervention. These products, however, have been featured in the likes of Maxim, Rolling Stone, and Esquire magazine - not exactly children's material.
Even so, once purchased, consumers should bear some personal responsibility. Product manufacturers are not the absolute insurers of public health. According to a report by USA Today, a 12-year old girl was hospitalized for 6 days upon swallowing Buckyballs after placing them in her mouth to mimic a tongue piercing. If you are old enough to appreciate the apparent attractiveness of a tongue piercing, so to should you be able to recognize the risk of swallowing metallic objects.
More at TIME.
I would have linked to Buckyballs on Amazon to support them, but, per the TIME piece and the Associated Press, it seems the CPSC has persuaded Amazon to stop selling them.
via @walterolson
ORomneycare
If you'd like to see what's to come in that healthcare bill our legislaturds thought they'd pass to see what it was all about, check out the healthcare "savings" from Romneycare in Massachusetts! From the WSJ:
Sure enough, 79% of the newly insured are on public programs. Health costs--Medicaid, RomneyCare's subsidies, public-employee compensation--will consume some 54% of the state budget in 2012, up from about 24% in 2001. Over the same period state health spending in real terms has jumped by 59%, while education has fallen 15%, police and firemen by 11% and roads and bridges by 23%.Meanwhile, Massachusetts spends more per capita on health care than any other state and therefore more than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Costs are 27% higher than the U.S. average, 15% higher when adjusted for the state's higher wages and its concentration of academic medical centers and specialists.
The health-care postman always rings twice, and now medicine itself is the target, instead of unsympathetic insurance companies. Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure--that is, permission to practice. They'll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.
How A Single Oxycontin Pill Nearly Ruined A Man's Life
Kafkaesque true story by Mike Riggs at reason. An excerpt:
James was pulled over for speeding in 2006 in Vero Beach, Florida while driving back to his home in Jacksonville after a concert. The officer who pulled him over said the car smelled like marijuana, and asked to conduct a search. James agreed, because neither he nor his passenger had been using drugs. When his passenger was found to be in possession of a pipe and several screens (but no marijuana), the officer searched James. His pockets were empty save for a single Oxycontin pill. James told the officer he received the pill from a friend at the concert, but that he had never tried Oxycontin, and intended to give it away.A second officer was called to the scene. James' passenger was arrested for possession of paraphernalia, and James was arrested for illegal possession of a prescription narcotic.
The next morning, James' mother drove to Indian River County to plead for a lightening of her son's bond. She told the judge that James, then 24, was both a full-time graduate student at the University of North Florida and a full-time stock broker with Merrill Lynch. James' lawyer advised him to plead no-contest, saying he would likely get probation and then have his record expunged.
"After being assured that the penalty would be light," James told Reason in an email, "it turned into a bigger ordeal than I could ever imagine."
The judge who heard James' case accepted the no-contest plea. Then he began stacking on penalties.
Despite having no criminal record and never having taken Oxycontin, James was required to attend two Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week for an entire year, and 15 weekend-long state-run drug classes (the latter he was required to pay for). Despite the fact that he was going to school at night for his MBA, James was given a curfew, and had to be inside his own home between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. every day of the week, for the entire year. As a final punishment, the judge instructed James to immediately report his arrest to his employer, and to let his probation officer know when he had done so.
With his case settled, James returned to Jacksonville and told his boss at Merrill Lynch what happened. His supervisor told him not to worry. A week later, he was instructed to modify his broker's license to reflect that he'd pled no-contest to drug possession. This is both a federal and a state-level requirement, generally meant to protect investors. It ended up ruining James's career. The modification to his license triggered an internal warning at Merrill Lynch. The firm placed him on paid leave for two weeks, and then fired him.
That's just the beginning of his nightmare. Read the rest at the above link.
Bulldogs In Fancy Dress
Retronaut, from 1905. Via @walterolson.
Bruce Schneier On Our Overreaction To Rare, Terrible Events
Security expert Schneier (who coined "security theater"), blogs at Schneier.com:
Our greatest recent overreaction to a rare event was our response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I remember then-Attorney General John Ashcroft giving a speech in Minnesota -- where I live -- in 2003 in which he claimed that the fact there were no new terrorist attacks since 9/11 was proof that his policies were working. I remember thinking: "There were no terrorist attacks in the two years preceding 9/11, and you didn't have any policies. What does that prove?"What it proves is that terrorist attacks are very rare, and perhaps our national response wasn't worth the enormous expense, loss of liberty, attacks on our Constitution and damage to our credibility on the world stage. Still, overreacting was the natural thing for us to do. Yes, it was security theater and not real security, but it made many of us feel safer.
The rarity of events such as the Aurora massacre doesn't mean we should ignore any lessons it might teach us. Because people overreact to rare events, they're useful catalysts for social introspection and policy change. The key here is to focus not on the details of the particular event but on the broader issues common to all similar events.
Installing metal detectors at movie theaters doesn't make sense -- there's no reason to think the next crazy gunman will choose a movie theater as his venue, and how effectively would a metal detector deter a lone gunman anyway? -- but understanding the reasons why the United States has so many gun deaths compared with other countries does. The particular motivations of alleged killer James Holmes aren't relevant -- the next gunman will have different motivations -- but the general state of mental health care in the United States is.
Even with this, the most important lesson of the Aurora massacre is how rare these events actually are. Our brains are primed to believe that movie theaters are more dangerous than they used to be, but they're not. The riskiest part of the evening is still the car ride to and from the movie theater, and even that's very safe.
But wear a seat belt all the same.
Big Bloated Government Goes International
Per OpenMarket, "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued regulations to protect 6 bird species that do not live in the United States."
The Government Wants You On Welfare
As A. Barton Hinckle points out in reason, welfare alleviates human suffering, which is good -- and increases dependence on government, which is bad. (Except for those in power in government, I'll add)
It seems the the FDA is trying to give food stamps to people who neither want nor need them. Hinckle writes:
A few days ago the Department of Health and Human Services adopted a change in policy that "ends welfare reform as we know it," according to Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. HHS has decided to grant waivers to states that will knock out the keystone of the welfare-reform arch: the work requirement. That requirement helped cut welfare rolls in half. But now states will be able to "test alternative and innovative strategies," including "multi-year career pathways" and "a comprehensive universal engagement system," whatever that is. Neoliberal Mickey Kaus calls it, probably correctly, a "stay-on-the-dole-while-we-keep-you-busy-with-anything-other-than-actual-work" system.The Department of Agriculture also has been doing its part for the welfare state: It has been producing Spanish-language radio novelas dramatizing the desirability of signing up for food stamps, or whatWashington calls the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). "Will Claudia convince Ramon to apply for SNAP? Don't miss our next episode of Hope Park!" concluded a typical spot. (Once word of the campaign spread, the department deep-sixed it.)
A similar USDA program has been trying to combat ostensibly nefarious value systems - such as pride, personal responsibility and self-reliance. The Daily Caller reports that last year the department handed out Hunger Champion awards to North Carolina officials who developed strategies for "counteracting what they described as 'mountain pride' [by appealing] to those who wished not to rely on others."
I had my struggle years in New York when I couldn't afford a bed (I slept in my old sleeping bag on a door propped up on two milk crates) and once ate only beans in tomato sauce for about three weeks. I'm sure I could have gotten food stamps and probably other assistance, but the thought of having other people support me did not occur to me. Not for a second. I chose the dumbass career in writing instead of doing something that came with a more stable income. Why should anyone else pay for it, except by choice? (I worked as a mover and a bike messenger until I got my next freelance gig...phew!)
Pot, The "Gateway Drug"
And what a gateway it's been, Nick Gillespie points out in reason, for degenerate bong-hitter/gold medal winner Michael Phelps -- in Nick's words, "the most bemedaled Olympian that ever was."
Nick quotes Phelps' apology for smoking pot:
"I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment," Phelps said in a statement released by Octagon, his management firm, and posted on his Facebook site. "I'm 23 years old, and despite the successes I have had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner that people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public--it will not happen again."
Ridiculous.
As Nick puts it:
I don't begrudge him [apologizing], but it's a damn shame that we live in a country and world where even great athletes - not to mention presidents and actors and corporate titans and all sorts of public personalities and private citizens - are coerced one way or another into the sort of self-recriminations that sound like something left over from Mao's Cultural Revolution or the days of the Star Chamber.
And Nick's right on with this, too:
To the millions of Americans arrested for pot offenses since the last Olympics: One day, the leaders of this country will apologize to you and your children and spouses and sisters and brothers and parents. That day, which can't come soon enough, has already taken far too long to get here.To the politicians and legislators who have smoked pot and even campaigned to end the drug war or have taken credit for ending the drug war: What will it take for you to stop at the very least the war on pot that serves no function but the rank wasting of lives, time, money, and other resources?
UPDATE:
In response to my tweet of the link to this post, @jackiedanicki tweeted:
I agree anti-pot laws are wrong, but it's still a gateway drug. Denying this because we hate the laws is irrational
I tweeted back:
Actually, there are gateway PEOPLE. 2 of most successful scientists I know smoke pot. They don't shoot up.
I continued:
Likewise, I drink alcohol. I stop at 2 glasses of wine. "Gateway drug"=glorifying abdication of responsibility
Related piece from Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, "Gateway To Nowhere
How Alcohol Came to be Scapegoated for Drug Abuse":
No drug makes people use it or other drugs. The causes of drug abuse are life conditions that motivate people to act destructively toward themselves and others.
Advice Goddess Radio: 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET -- Dr. Geoffrey Miller
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
My guest tonight on Advice Goddess Radio will be evolutionary psychologist Dr. Geoffrey Miller. You've read about his work -- his strippers study -- in my column:
In a study by psychologist Geoffrey Miller, female lap dancers not on the pill earned an average of $276 a night whereas those on it brought in only $193, making pill-using lap dancers $80 less hot and sexy to men per night.
We'll be discussing how and why we sell ourselves to others through what we buy, and debating whether we can do that without spending so much money -- the subject of Miller's book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Listen live or download the podcast afterward at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/08/06/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
And don't miss last week's fascinating (and even uplifting) show with psychologist and grief expert Dr. George A. Bonanno, who smashed all the widely held myths about grieving and bereavement.
His book is The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss
Here's the link to listen or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2012/07/30/advice-goddess-radio-amy-alkon
Listen to all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
The TSA's Lawlessness
Robert L. Crandall, former chairman and CEO of AMR and American Airlines, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marc Scribner write for McClatchy about the TSA's disgusting use of full-body scanners in 190 airports nationwide:
While the agency keeps installing these devices - which most people agree intrude on our privacy - there are real doubts whether these are actually making anybody safer. Yet because TSA failed to solicit public comments about the scanners - in violation of federal law - the agency is flying blind.In 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Homeland Security, TSA's parent department, to compel TSA to solicit public and expert input. In July 2011, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered TSA to "promptly" begin a rulemaking to allow for legally required public comments.
A year later, TSA, has not even begun the process. The law empowers courts to compel agency action when it is "unreasonably delayed." TSA says it does not have the resources to begin this public comment process. But it has a discretionary budget larger than that of the entire federal judiciary and a staff larger than those of the Departments of State, Labor, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development combined. This supposed lack of capacity has not prevented TSA from opening new proceedings on far less important matters, adding many more body scanners at airports nationwide, and launching the new PreCheck program for frequent fliers during the last year.
On July 17, EPIC petitioned the court to enforce its mandate. Two days later, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed an amicus brief supporting EPIC's petition, along with the National Association of Airline Passengers, Electronic Frontier Foundation and six other organizations.
This rulemaking is the only way to determine whether TSA's air travel security regime is worth its huge costs and adverse effects on the public's well-being. Several independent analyses have found that TSA's use of these machines would be economically wasteful even if they worked as well as TSA claims, but may actually make us less safe.
Ohio State University professor John Mueller has done a thorough analysis of U.S. air travel security. He found that even assuming the scanners are capable of detecting body-borne explosives, the likelihood of a terrorist carrying out such an attack is so low that the massive annual cost of deploying and using these machines outweighs any security benefit and could be much better allocated elsewhere.
Scribner posted at OpenMarket:
This Wednesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered TSA to respond to the Electronic Privacy Information Center's petition for writ of mandamus. The Court also ordered that an amicus brief submitted by CEI be accepted.
Please still sign the petition here to require the TSA to follow the law, and share this petition with everyone you know with a working computer and an email address. 6,000 more signatures are needed by August 9.
Meaningful Gifts
I'm having Dr. Geoffrey Miller on my radio show Sunday night to discuss his book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
I'm almost done prepping for the show, and I just came upon a passage in his book about gifts.
In terms of gifts from a romantic partner, some of the most meaningful gifts aren't very costly -- and then again, some are.
What are some of the gifts you've gotten from a significant other that have meant something to you -- positively or negatively -- and why?
Does Overparenting Hurt Or Help?
That's the question Madeline Levine poses and answers in The New York Times:
Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child's autonomy. These "authoritative parents" appear to hit the sweet spot of parental involvement and generally raise children who do better academically, psychologically and socially than children whose parents are either permissive and less involved, or controlling and more involved. Why is this particular parenting style so successful, and what does it tell us about overparenting?For one thing, authoritative parents actually help cultivate motivation in their children. Carol Dweck, a social and developmental psychologist at Stanford University, has done research that indicates why authoritative parents raise more motivated, and thus more successful, children.
In a typical experiment, Dr. Dweck takes young children into a room and asks them to solve a simple puzzle. Most do so with little difficulty. But then Dr. Dweck tells some, but not all, of the kids how very bright and capable they are. As it turns out, the children who are not told they're smart are more motivated to tackle increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibit higher levels of confidence and show greater overall progress in puzzle-solving.
This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children's talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one's status as "smart" and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes. Dr. Dweck's work aligns nicely with that of Dr. Baumrind, who also found that reasonably supporting a child's autonomy and limiting interference results in better academic and emotional outcomes.
Their research confirms what I've seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.
The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality. If you treat your walking toddler as if she can't walk, you diminish her confidence and distort reality. Ditto nightly "reviews" of homework, repetitive phone calls to "just check if you're O.K." and "editing" (read: writing) your child's college application essay.
Being a good parent seems to require the wisdom to put your own needs and fears aside.
Levine's just-published book on the subject: Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success
Islam Versus The Bunnies
I'm talking about the Baha'i.
Is there a more benign group of religious people than the Baha'i? From the link above:
Bahá'ís believe the crucial need facing humanity is to find a unifying vision of the nature and purpose of life and of the future of society.
More from Wikipedia:
The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind.
Wow, there's some sick shit. Nothing like that nice, peaceful "slay them wherever ye find them" stuff from Islam.
Not surprisingly, the Islamic Republic of Iran is following Islam's dictates and going after the Baha'i -- arresting them for, well, not being Muslim. (Oh, and P.S. The Baha'i are considered apostates -- and in Islam, apostates are to be slain.)
From Mohabat NEWS:
Iranian human rights activists report that Baha'is are being arrested in several Iranian cities.According to Radio Zamaneh, The Society Against Education Discrimination reported on Wednesday that more than 10 Baha'i citizens were arrested in the past day in Esfahan, Shahin Shahr, Villa Shahr and Yazd.
The group also reports that a number of Baha'is have been arrested in Arak.
...The report adds that the homes of these citizens were searched and their computers, CDs, books and documents were confiscated.
In the past three weeks, some 20 other Baha'i citizens have been reportedly arrested in Tehran, Shiraz and Mashhad.
The Baha'i faith is not recognized as an official religion in the Islamic Republic constitution and Baha'i citizens face widespread discrimination in Iran in all walks of life.
More about Baha'i here. More Islamic discrimination against Baha'is here. And here.
Tolerance? That's only for Muslims living in non-Muslim societies like ours.
And again, these people are basically the religious version of daisies.
Tastes Like Road.
(You were expecting chicken?)
Mean-Spirited Knocking Of Olympic Athlete In NYT
Via a @felixsalmon tweet:
NYT prints gratuitous hatchet-job on a US athlete still in competition. Ugh
Jere Longman writes, for some reason (grudge?) in the NYT:
LONDON -- Judging from this year's performances, Lolo Jones seems to have only a slim chance of winning an Olympic medal in the 100-meter hurdles and almost no possibility of winning gold.Still, Jones has received far greater publicity than any other American track and field athlete competing in the London Games. This was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign. Essentially, Jones has decided she will be whatever anyone wants her to be -- vixen, virgin, victim -- to draw attention to herself and the many products she endorses.
Women have struggled for decades to be appreciated as athletes. For the first time at these Games, every competing nation has sent a female participant. But Jones is not assured enough with her hurdling or her compelling story of perseverance. So she has played into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal. And, too often, the news media have played right along with her.
In 2009, Jones posed nude for ESPN the Magazine. This year, she appeared on the cover of Outside magazine seeming to wear a bathing suit made of nothing but strategically placed ribbon. At the same time, she has proclaimed herself to be a 30-year-old virgin and a Christian. And oh, by the way, a big fan of Tim Tebow.
If there is a box to check off, Jones has checked it. Except for the small part about actually achieving Olympic success as a hurdler.
At the 2008 Beijing Games, Jones led before hitting the ninth of 10 hurdles. She stumbled home in seventh place. To her credit, she stood and answered reporters' questions with grace, but her career has since ebbed...
Jere Longman author essay/bio here.
What his essay/bio doesn't say but what is clear, reading between the lines of it: The guy doesn't understand our evolved psychology. We evolved to care about women's looks (just as we evolved to care about men's status and position), and we're not going to stop caring because some bully with a New York Times byline who drank the wymyns studies Kool-Aid uses his position to attack a young woman on the eve of her Olympic event.
The Underparented Child, Screaming Its Little Lungs Out
Woke up late today (my brain said, "Screw you, I'm getting more than five hours of sleep today).
Went to my favorite cafe, which is often at its most serene on Saturday. And it was -- until two parents brought their brat toddler in. One screamset. Two screamsets...
Hey, "parents," at the onset of the second, it's time to take little Kaylie or Phonejack or whomever outside and give her a talking-to and give the rest of us some peace.
Of course...no...wasn't what they did. That would have necessitated getting up, inconveniencing themselves. Better to "inconvenience" the brains and eardrums of everybody else there.
The brat finally quieted down, and they left about half an hour later.
The weird thing was, the mother smiled at me when she was leaving.
Didn't know what to make of that: It's funny that she foisted her loud brat on the rest of us? Was her smile is a sign that she won -- she got to bug the crap out of a bunch of people and nobody came over and told her to take her kid outside?
Really not quite sure how to translate the never mind parenting my child/fuck you/just deal grin.
Grandma Got A Gun
The caution about possibly hitting an innocent person is right, but I just loved the image of the pawn shop owner, a 65-year-old woman with a granny haircut, chasing after the five robbers with her gun:
Barack Obama: Tax Hypocrite
Dr. Helen Smith writes at PJMedia:
If you take a look at Obama's 2011 taxes, you see that he paid a rate of 20.5%, a little higher than Romney but still not that high given his income. Higher than Romney's, but then he had book royalties and wages from his job rather than capital gains etc. But on his itemized deductions, he took deductions for his mortgage, and charitable deductions that substantially lowered his tax burden. He has been trying to lower these itemized deductions for those who make more money (such as himself, one of the "rich") saying that it is not fair. Yet he takes them fully anyway. I assume Mitt Romney has no problem with lower capital gains rates for those investing and taking a risk in business and he takes those deductions. Who is the real hypocrite here?
via @instapundit
The Militarization Of Our Police Departments
A Reason.TV video about the killing of MIchael Nida and cops with machine guns:
Taxes And Fair Shares
From an @AHMalcolm tweet:
Let's see: 47% of Americans pay no federal taxes. 2% of Americans pay 45% of all taxes. And Obama wants them to pay their fair share. What planet's he on?
Economist Veronique de Rugy explains the problem with this:
It's important to remember that, fairness aside, raising the marginal tax rates on any group, especially those already paying the highest rates, could reduce GDP and income across the board, not just for the people paying the initial tax bill. Why? Because the burden of higher taxes on capital formation falls largely on labor in the form of lower wages and hours worked.The same is likely true of an increase in the capital-gains tax, which is what the president seems to have in mind with the Buffett tax. This move would increase the double taxation of corporate income and would seriously reduce capital formation and wages. And for these reasons, it is unlikely to raise much revenue.
De Rugy suggests we move to a consumption tax:
One option people sometime talk about would be to eliminate the corporate income tax, the capital-gains and dividend taxes, and other wealth taxes and simply roll all income into one category taxed at a low rate (the idea being that if there is going to be double taxation of income, it should be done at a lower rate).But this system still penalizes savings and over consumption. A much better alternatively is to eliminate the corporate income tax, the capital-gains and dividend taxes, and other wealth taxes and replace the whole thing with consumption-based tax system. Economically, taxing consumption makes more sense. I would prefer a flat rate; Sumner argues for a progressive consumption tax.
A criticism of the flat-rate consumption tax is that it is regressive. I have a limited problem with that. As I explained yesterday, much of the government spending goes to the middle class and I think they should pay for most of it. That's how the Europeans do it; they use regressive taxes to pay for their government spending. (Their government spending is more progressive than our middle-class-centric system, I should add.) Besides, no matter how we look at it, raising taxes only on the rich won't pay for all our spending on Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. And if it is true that many voters are only in favor of symbolic cuts (to foreign aid, government waste, etc.) and opposed to reforming Medicare, then they should have to pay for it.
Obviously, I find it weird that people would rather get the government to provide most of these services than the private sector or that people would want to be taxed to get their money back in the form of relatively crappy government services. Yet if that's what voters want, those who consume the services should pay for it (not counting the genuinely poor), not push the bill onto future generations.
Cyborg Nation
I want to control appliances with my hair.
Free Money Is No Incentive At All
Marlin Stutzman and Michael Needham write in the WSJ, in a piece about how 80% of the supposed "Farm" Bill goes to food stamps (as we approach $16 trillion in debt):
The Obama administration wants to make Americans more dependent on government, not less. Witness its recent decision to gut the federal work requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the program created by the 1996 reform of welfare.Instead of removing work requirements, we should be expanding them. Adding common-sense work requirements to the food-stamp program would begin the process of reversing the corrosive aspect of government dependency.
Yet even discussing such measures is difficult, if not impossible, when the food-stamp program is carried under the banner of a farm bill. The Orwellian language of Washington creates unnecessary confusion and makes responsible governing needlessly difficult. It is time to have a farm-only farm bill, and move other policies separately.
Chicken
Why chicken? Why a road? Why, why?
Smartphones In The Hands Of Idiots Are Stupidphones
Another asshole, texting while driving, lucks out and lives and lucks out further by not killing anyone else. Chance Bothe's story is here.
Doo The Right Thing
I like this.
A Bunch Of Amtrak Riders Forgot To Thank Us Taxpayers For Lunch
We've all been buying burgers, sodas and more for Amtrak riders. Joel Gehrke writes at the WashEx:
Taxpayers lost $833 million over the last decade on the food and beverages supplied by Amtrak, which managed to spend $1.70 for every dollar that received in revenue."Over the last ten years, these losses have amounted to a staggering $833.8 million," said Rep.John Mica, R-Fla., in a statement previewing a House hearing today. "It costs passengers $9.50 to buy a cheeseburger on Amtrak, but the cost to taxpayers is $16.15. Riders pay $2.00 for a Pepsi, but each of these sodas costs the U.S. Treasury $3.40."
Notiepoo to sockpuppet Michael Hiltzik (@latimeshiltzik).
Hiltzik got his Twitter sockpanties in a wad yesterday over my post about taxation of Olympians' medals and all the taxes that go to pay for big bloated government and the big bloated welfare state.
Pssst...Hiltzik...there are bajillions of examples like this one above. It takes only simple math to figure out how and why that's a problem.
Why American Olympic Team Clothing Made In China Isn't A Bad Thing
Harry Reid doesn't surprise in mewling to the press about the Chinese-manufactured clothing of the American Olympic team. Stossel cleans up at reason:
It seems logical that Americans lose if American clothing is made overseas. But that's nonsense. First, it's no surprise the uniforms were made in China. Most clothing is. That's fine. It saves money. We invest the savings in other things, like the machines that Chinese factories buy and the trucks that ship the Olympic uniforms.The Cato Institute's Daniel Ikenson's adds: "We design clothing here. We brand clothing here. We market and retail clothing....Chinese athletes arrived in London by U.S.-made aircraft, trained on U.S.-designed and -engineered equipment, wear U.S.-designed and -engineered footwear, having perfected their skills using U.S.-created technology." That's free trade. Trade makes us richer.
While making the clothes in America would employ some Americans, the excess cost would mean that the Olympic committee had less to spend on other products--many of which are made in America.
Losing jobs like cutting, sewing and working on a loom is a sign of progress because working in factories is unpleasant. It's good for most Americans when factory jobs are replaced by engineering and design jobs. Art Carden, an economist from Sanford University's Brook School of Business, explained that "one could argue that the American uniforms were not manufactured in China, but grown in the soybean field in Iowa. We export soybeans to China. Because we're incredibly productive in the soybean market, we get more uniforms at lower prices (and) the Chinese get more soybeans at lower prices....Everybody wins."
Tierney, previously, on sweatshops, in the NYT, via Greg Mankiw:
Has any organization in the world lifted more people out of poverty than Wal-Mart?...Making toys or shoes for Wal-Mart in a Chinese or Latin American factory may sound like hell to American college students -- and some factories should treat their workers much better, as Strong readily concedes. But there are good reasons that villagers will move hundreds of miles for a job. Most ''sweatshop'' jobs -- even ones paying just $2 per day -- provide enough to lift a worker above the poverty level, and often far above it.
Somebody Called Backwards Day And Then It Got Stuck That Way
Or something like that. Because 305 kids in D.C. with crappy academic records are being paid -- yes, paid! -- to attend summer school. Lisa Gartner writes in the WashEx:
The rising ninth-graders are earning $5.25 an hour to participate in the "Summer Bridge" program, which targets students identified by D.C. Public Schools as less likely than their peers to graduate high school within four years.The 95 students who voluntarily signed up for the summer school program will receive half of an elective credit. But to fill the 400-student session with at-risk students, DCPS reached out to the Department of Employment Services. More than 300 students flagged by DCPS and who had signed up for the Summer Youth Employment Program were told that school would be their jobs this summer.
...This summer isn't the first time the city has paid students to learn. The District allowed a Harvard University group to pay about 3,000 middle-school students up to $100 a month for good grades during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. Grades overall didn't improve significantly.
This sort of thing has been studied. Sam McNerney posts at Why We Reason about "Misguided Incentives In Schools":
In a study done back in the 1970s, researchers put in place a reward program at an elementary school to increase students' interest in math; for every three hours the students' did math they earned credits they could use to get prizes. In one aspect this worked - kids spent more time on math. But after the teachers removed the prizes (they told the students' they had to be fair to the rest of the students in the school), the students' interest in math "plummeted to a level below where it had been during the pre-reward baseline period. In other words, it didn't just go back to where it had been before the reward program was instituted, as an economist might have predicted - the kids were now less interested in the games than they were when the program started."
via ifeminists
Criminalizing Capitalism
Our government seems to be in the business of crippling business, however it can. Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, writes in the WSJ about the raid on his company's guitar factories last August under the Lacey Act:
Originally enacted as a means to curb the poaching of endangered species, the law bans wildlife and plants from being imported if, according to the interpretation of federal bureaucrats, the importation violates a law in the country of origin.The fingerboards of our guitars are made with wood that is imported from India. The wood seized during the Aug. 24 raid, however, was from a Forest Stewardship Council-certified supplier, meaning the wood complies with FSC's rules requiring that it be harvested legally and in compliance with traditional and civil rights, among other protections. Indian authorities have provided sworn statements approving the shipment, and U.S. Customs allowed the shipment to pass through America's border to our factories.
Nonetheless, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to enforce its own interpretation of Indian law, arguing that because the fingerboards weren't finished in India, they were illegal exports. In effect, the agency is arguing that to be in compliance with the law, Gibson must outsource the jobs of finishing craftsmen in Tennessee.
This is an overreach of government authority and indicative of the kinds of burdens the federal government routinely imposes on growing businesses. It also highlights a dangerous trend: an attempt to punish even paperwork errors with criminal charges and to regulate business activities through criminal law. Policy wonks call this "overcriminalization." I call it a job killer.
...Many business owners have inadvertently broken obscure and highly technical foreign laws, landing them in prison for things like importing lobster tails in plastic rather than cardboard packaging (the violation of that Honduran law earned one man an eight-year prison sentence). Cases like this make it clear that the justice system has strayed from its constitutional purpose: stopping the real bad guys from bringing harm.
There's a proposed bill in the House -- the Retailers and Entertainers Lacey Implementation and Enforcement Fairness (Relief) Act -- to reduce the chances of accidental breaking of the Lacey law, but he says "broader change is needed."
Juszkiewicz recently endorsed the "Right on Crime Statement of Principles," asserting that criminal law is overly blunt for the regulation of non-fraudulent business activities, and argues costly criminal proceedings should be reserved for those acts that threaten public safety.
On a related note, which I blogged about previously, here are a bunch of armed government thugs taking over the hippie health food coop near me. P.J. Huffstutter writes in the Los Angeles Times:
With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.
Blocks away from Rawsome, the raw food coop that got raided, is the hood, where people shoot each other with some frequency. Yet, the government is going after a bunch of people named Rainbow armed with only raw milk cheese.
This was a place where people who wanted to sell certain foods were selling them to people who wanted to buy them. Why is that any of the government's business?
Need Your Dating Rudeness Experiences For My Next Book
I'm starting the chapter on Dating Rudeness for my next book. It focuses around rude things people do in dating and how to respond to them when you're on the receiving end.
You can also let me know topics you'd like to see covered. I will, of course, be covering texting and cell phone use on dates, so don't bother with that unless you have a truly unique example
Some examples of things in the ball park:
•What to do or say when somebody asks you rude questions on a date. (Got any specifics?)
•If somebody on a dating site messages you to critique your appearance, etc.
•If an Internet date looks nothing like his or her picture.
•At what point in dating do you have to verbally tell them that you don't want to see them again?
Please post your dating rudeness examples here!
Win A Gold Medal, Get Bent Over By The IRS
Big government must be funded!
Jonathan V. Last writes at The Weekly Standard, via Hugh Johnson at Americans for Tax Reform:
Americans who win bronze will pay a $2 tax on the medal itself. But the bronze comes with a modest prize--$10,000 as an honorarium for devoting your entire life to being the third best athlete on the planet in your chosen discipline. And the IRS will take $3,500 of that, thank you very much.There are also prizes that accompany each medal: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze.
Silver medalists will owe $5,385. You win a gold? Timothy Geithner will be standing there with his hand out for $8,986.
So as of this writing, swimmer Missy Franklin--who's a high school student--is already on the hook for almost $14,000. By the time she's done in the pool, her tab could be much higher. (That is, unless she has to decline the prize money to placate the NCAA--the only organization in America whose nuttiness rivals the IRS.)
And more on the U.S. tax ridiculousness at atr.org:
The U.S. is one of the only countries that taxes income earned overseas by her own taxpayers. A French company earning a profit in the United States pays taxes to the IRS, but never has to pay tax to the French authorities. An American company earning a profit in France, however, must pay tax to the French government, and then pay an additional tax to the IRS should they want to bring that money back to the United States. The amount that must be paid to the IRS is the difference between the U.S. corporate income tax rate of 35% (tied for highest in the developed world), and the tax already paid overseas. Most of the time, this means that employers looking to bring capital back to the United States must pay an additional tax to the IRS of well over 10 percent, and in some cases as high as 35 percent.Not surprisingly, this punitive tax treatment incentivizes companies to keep earnings overseas. Today, $1.4 trillion is sitting in foreign bank accounts, effectively unable to come to America because of this anti-competitive tax treatment. Industry estimates calculate that alleviating this tax burden in 2012 will result in a capital inflow to the United States of at least $800 billion. That's non-inflationary, non-stimulus wealth flowing into the country in order to create jobs and invest in America.
This was tried in 2005, and the results were successful. Over $300 billion flowed into America that year as a result of repatriation. Because a small tax of 5.25% was imposed, the Treasury received a revenue windfall of nearly $20 billion. Should a similar repatriation opportunity exist in 2012, it's reasonable to expect $800 billion to flow into the United States with a Treasury revenue windfall of over $40 billion.
Over time, the U.S. must move from a "worldwide" tax regime that seeks to tax U.S. employers all over the world. Instead, we should adopt a "territorial" regime which only seeks to tax profits earned within the United States. This is the system our global competitors use, and it's an essential step toward making our country a good place to create jobs and do business. Repatriation is a good step in the direction of territoriality, and should be seen as progress toward that goal.
via Jay J. Hector
I Know, Nobody Comes To Me For The Cooking Tips
I always joke, "I don't cook; I heat."
But, as heaters go, I make the most of it.
In the morning, I microwave three strips of bacon in a lidded 14" Pyrex bowl.
I was cooking Italian parsley in it afterward (three minutes in a little leftover bacon grease, until crispy), but I found something more nutrient-rich: Kale.
Now I cook the hell out of the kale instead. When the bacon bowl is just out of the microwave, I dump out most of the grease into a little dish to save, leaving just enough to get all the kale wet (I cook about a cup of the raw stuff).
After six minutes on medium in my microwave it turns into little greasy bacony potato chips, except not out of potatoes. (Burnt, the stuff is odious, but keep in mind that your microwave temp may vary.)
Kale is super-healthy -- one of few sources of substantial vitamin K -- and cooked in bacon grease, it's nice and filling. And you could cook an old shoe in bacon grease and it would taste great.
Kale, not cooked, is slightly worse fare than an old shoe.
Gina Kolata's Schoolgirl Grudge Against Gary Taubes
Terrif CJR piece by Paul Scott on how investigative science journalist Taubes, who has persuaded countless people to drop pounds and improve their health through eating low-carb, just can't catch a break -- or an honest, professional, evidence-based piece of reporting from the NYT's Gina Kolata:
For fans of pique and bad manners, you could do worse than her largely stenographic Q&A with Dr. Jules Hirsch, an emeritus professor and emeritus physician in chief at Rockefeller University. Hirsch waved off the JAMA paper's findings as an artifact of water-loss in a low-carbohydrate diet. He referred to the paper's premise as "hocus-pocus." There was the title: "In Dieting, Magic Isn't a Substitute for Science." Hirsch invoked "the law of science," and "the inflexible law of physics," but Ludwig knows a little bit about science too. As the Harvard endocrinologist pointed out in a letter published the following week, the study controlled for the effects of water weight in several different ways. Oops.It wasn't Kolata's first drive-by. She cited Hirsch in a memorably hostile review of Taubes' book, Good Calories, Bad Calories in October 2007, that dismissed his exhaustive reporting out of hand. (Kolata had her own, competing diet book out at the time, Rethinking Thin, meaning that she probably shouldn't have gotten the assignment.) From her patronizing lede ("Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom") to her weirdly personal ending ("I am sorry, I am not convinced"), she knew something was wrong with the book, only she didn't know what. "[T]he problem with a book like this one," she wrote, "which goes on and on in great detail about experiments new and old in areas ranging from heart disease to cancer to diabetes, is that it can be hard to know what has been left out."
Poor Taubes. No one warned him that 600 pages of evidence were never going to be enough. The theory that weight gain boils down "calories-in, calories-out" is the last man standing in the diet wars. The principle anchors the comforting American belief that personal responsibility explains all of our ills. It validates all that wasted time on the treadmill that people like Kolata and others endorse. It keeps us watching shows like The Biggest Loser. It leaves the door open to low-calorie, high-carbohydrate food products that make the economy hum, are portable, do not require we learn to cook, make children stop crying, and taste good. Any efforts at reporting science to the contrary will always have a rough road.
Buy Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories or Why We Get Fat (an easier read) and see the results of just one of the many people who's read about Taubes and changed her diet accordingly.
Via @MrEades - another source of evidence-based eating. Read him at proteinpower.com.
Creepo Cop Turns Daddy-Daughter Hand-Holding Ugly
This is such a depressing story -- a dad's story of how he got pulled over by a cop for walking to the library, hand-in-hand with his youngest daughter, presumably a little kid (from the game they play). Lenore Skenazy has an email from the dad at Free Range Kids:
We were walking to the library together, and she was holding my hand and trying to pull me into telephone poles and whatnot as we walked, which is a silly game that she enjoys. Suddenly a police car pulled up beside us, lights on and everything. The cop gets out of his car, says "Sir, please step away from the child," then proceeds to crouch down and ask her if "everything is okay."After re-asking a few times, getting a more and more nervous "yes" each time, he stands up and informs me that someone had called 911 reporting what looked like a young girl being abducted. My daughter and I both explained what was really happening, and not only did he not even apologize, he chastised ME for not being, and I quote verbatim here, "More thankful someone was watching out for my daughter."
Yes, how wonderful that people assume merely being male is cause for suspicion of being a pedophile.
What's wrong with me that I look at a dad out with his little girl and smile and think back on how my dad used to take me or all three of us girls with him to his office on Saturdays. We'd color and then he'd take us to someplace forbidden like McDonald's for lunch. (It's a wonder I haven't been in and out of institutions for years from the horror of this.)
In case you missed it, here's my radio show with Lenore Skenazy.
You Can Be Arrested In Britain For Being An Asshole -- On Twitter, No Less
Friend wrote to me:
Thought of you in this example of Olympic rudeness. Kid humiliates defeated British diver Tom Daily in tweets. Says Daily let down his dad who died of brain cancer last year. Brits pissed, police arrest the psycho.
My response:
Rotten kid. Then again, I find it completely creepy that you can be arrested in Britain for being an asshole.It's worse in Russia.
But, I think most people only see Russia as a pretend free country.
