Easter Sunday "Best Of" Replay -- Advice Goddess Radio: 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET -- Dr. Lenora Yuen On Procrastination
Advice Goddess Radio -- "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Are you a procrastinator? My guest this week is psychologist Lenora Yuen, Ph.D., here to help you cure your habit of procrastination. She'll talk about why you procrastinate and how to stop NOW.
Yuen is the co-creator of the first procrastination treatment group in the country, along with the co-author of her excellent, research-driven book, Procrastination
There's much wisdom in this book -- just in prepping for the show, I've recognized some of my bad habits, and I've started taking small steps to change them. You can do the same (with your own bad habits!). You're sure to get some very wise insight and tips for real and very positive change from the show.
Listen live at 7pm Pacific and 7pm Eastern at this link or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/04/01/dr-lenora-yuen-procrastination
And don't miss last week's show with noted sociologist Dr. Eric Klinenberg, discussing why remaining unmarried and living alone have increasing appeal and what the problems of living solo tend to be -- and how we might solve them.
We'll touch both on living solo as a younger person (whether romantically single or "living apart together" with a partner), and how we can live alone as we age.
Dr. Klineberg's book is Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/25/dr-eric-klinenberg-howwhy-living-alone-can-make-you-happyListen online or download the podcast:
Listen to all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8pm Pacific, 10-11pm Eastern, with podcasts available afterward, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
Revealing Full-Length Nude Photo Of Me
Here.
Inviting Rudeness: The Disappointing RSVPs To Digital Invites -- When You Get Any Response At All
If you've sent an evite (or other emailed invitation -- your own or automated) to some party you've had and had disappointing results, I want to hear from you.
The response or non-response to these things is often very frustrating for the host. Invitees get these things and ignore them, or open them and don't respond, or don't respond till the last minute, or use the annoying "maybe" feature instead of "yes" or "no."
Sometimes, invites go into a person's spam folder or get lost in the crush of mail they get.
If I were having a party, I'd sent an emailed invite and have people respond to me directly instead. Still, with how people are waiting till the last minute to respond, my response might not be that much better.
Perhaps this is due to how overscheduled and how always-on we are (on Facebook, email, and everything else).
What are your thoughts and experiences? (And have any of you come up with any tricks to get non-responders to respond?)
Cesar Chavez Was A Labor Leader, Against Illegal Immigration
Ruben Navarrette, Jr., writes at CNN.com that Chavez was no champion of immigrants -- quite the contrary:
He was primarily a labor leader who was concerned about illegal immigrants undercutting union members, either by accepting lower wages or crossing picket lines. He never pretended to be anything else, and he resisted attempts by others to widen his agenda. When he pulled workers out of the field during a strike, the last thing he wanted was to see a crew of illegal immigrant workers take away his leverage.According to many historical accounts, Chavez ordered union members to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and report illegal immigrants who were working in the fields so that they could be deported. Some UFW officials were also known to picket INS offices to demand a crackdown on illegal immigrants.
In the 70s, the UFW set up a "wet line" to stop undocumented Mexican immigrants from entering the United States.
Under the supervision of Chavez's cousin, Manuel, UFW members tried at first to persuade Mexicans not to cross the border. One time when that didn't work, they physically attacked and beat them up to scare them off, according to reports at the time. The Village Voice said that the UFW was engaged in a "campaign of random terror against anyone hapless enough to fall into its net." A couple of decades later, in their book "The Fight in the Fields," journalists Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval recalled the border violence and wrote that the issue of illegal immigration was "particularly vexing" for Chavez.
UFW loyalists will never admit to this ugly history. But that doesn't change it.
Rush To Judgment
A tweet:
@ggreenwald
I'll just never stop finding it funny listening to Rush Limbaugh lament the loss of traditional marriage as he sits next to his 4th wife
Indoor Veggie Garden Raided By Cops
Heather Hollingsworth writes for AP that the home of a Kansas couple -- two former CIA employees, in fact -- was searched by sheriff's deputies as part of "Operation Constant Gardener," a sweep by Kansas and Missouri agencies that landed pot plants, guns, growing equipment and cash...just not from their house.
The couple, Adlynn and Robert Harte, sued this week to get more information about why their home (in an upscale Kansas City suburb) was searched:
The Hartes' attorney, Cheryl Pilate, said she suspects the couple's 1,825-square-foot split level was targeted because they had bought hydroponic equipment to grow a small number of tomatoes and squash plants in their basement."With little or no other evidence of any illegal activity, law enforcement officers make the assumption that shoppers at the store are potential marijuana growers, even though the stores are most commonly frequented by backyard gardeners who grow organically or start seedlings indoors," the couple's lawsuit says.
...During the sweep, the court filing said, the Hartes were told they had been under surveillance for months, but the couple "know of no basis for conducting such surveillance nor do they believe such surveillance would have produced any facts supporting the issuance of a search warrant."
Harte said he built the hydroponic garden with his son a couple of years ago. He said they didn't use the powerful light bulbs that are sometimes used to grow marijuana and that the family's electricity usage didn't change dramatically. Changes in utility usage can sometimes lead authorities to such operations.
When law enforcement arrived, the family had just six plants -- three tomato plants, one melon plant and two butternut squash plants -- growing in the basement, Harte said.
The suit also said deputies "made rude comments" and implied their son was using marijuana. A drug-sniffing dog was brought in to help, but deputies ultimately left after providing a receipt stating, "No items taken."
An essential point:
"If this can happen to us and we are educated and have reasonable resources, how does somebody who maybe hasn't led a perfect life supposed to be free in this country?" Adlynn Harte said in an interview Friday.
via @radleybalko
Two Things Have Prevented Another 9/11 Attack
Lisa Simeone, in a comment at NJ.com:
What has prevented a 9/11-style attack is two things and two things only: the cockpit doors have been secured, and passengers will no longer silently submit (which is more than I can say for TSA apologists).If you want to go by facts -- a very unpopular position post-9/11, I know -- we in this country have enjoyed safe aviation for over 50 years, with, in all that time, only 2 -- count 'em -- 2 bombs that have been detonated on planes. And both of those occurred in the 1960s. One plane landed safely, no fatalities, no injuries. The other didn't.
The hysteria and paranoia in this country are off the charts. You're more in danger driving to the airport than getting on a plane. Keep giving up your rights, people, and then one day when you find they're all gone, you'll have only yourself to blame.
via @MarkWBennett
Some Link It Hot
When life gives you Jack Lemmon in lipstick...
Digital Deals
Great deals on MP3 music, games and apps for android, movies and TV shows, Kindle Books, Audible audiobooks, software downloads, and video game downloads at Amazon
"I Wish I Were Un Chien Oscar Mayer..."
Biarritz, France. Photo by a friend of mine.
No Child Left Behind (Because Teachers Changed Their Wrong Answers)
Michael Winerip writes on The New York Times about the ex-Atlanta schools chief, then-superintendent Beverly L. Hall, being charged in a massive cheating scandal. It started with Georgia state investigator Richard Hyde getting an elementary school teacher, Jackie Parks, to become Witness No. 1:
Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers -- nicknamed "the chosen" -- who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students' scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.In the two and a half years since, the state's investigation reached from Ms. Parks's third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury.
Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for her; she could face up to 45 years in prison.
During the decade she led the district of 52,000 children, many of them poor and African-American, Atlanta students often outperformed wealthier suburban districts on state tests.
Those test scores brought her fame -- in 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named her superintendent of the year and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, hosted her at the White House.
And fortune -- she earned more than $500,000 in performance bonuses while superintendent.
On Friday, prosecutors essentially said it really was too good to be true. Dr. Hall and the 34 teachers, principals and administrators "conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores," the indictment said, referring to the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.
Jay Rosen, through whom I saw the link, tweeted this:
@jayrosen_nyu
Unless you're a teacher or a parent of school age kids, you have no idea how insane the test score regime is. http://nyti.ms/Ymw4yu Insane.
One Reason Why I Live Where I Live: Wandering Poets
I had to walk over and pick up a couple of books I'd put on hold at the library. On my way back, I turned and said hello to an older man with a cane as I hurried around him.
He remarked on my pace and then asked if he could say something to me. I stopped and doubled back, and he quoted me a poem -- a pretty good one he said he'd written -- about not being in too much of a rush, savoring life, stuff like that.
California has a whole lot of stupid going on, but moments like this in my part of California make me love living here even more.
The Arab Spring-Back
That's my new name for the "Arab Spring," and it seems to fit. A NYT editorial:
Assaults and gang rapes of women in Tahrir have become so common the last two years that the square is now a no-go zone for women, especially after dark. There are no official statistics. But according to an account in The Times on Tuesday, at least 18 incidents were reported on Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the revolution, during a demonstration against the new Islamist-led government.Six women were hospitalized, one was stabbed in the genitals and another required a hysterectomy. Hania Moheeb, 42, a journalist, told how a group of men had surrounded her in Tahrir, stripped off her clothes and violated her for almost an hour.
The scandal is not just that such violence happens. The women are being blamed by conservative Islamists for bringing the assaults on themselves. As Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general and lawmaker, said, "Sometimes, a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions."
Such twisted thinking is not only hateful in itself but is designed to keep women, who were at the front lines of the revolution, out of politics and power. If President Mohamed Morsi, his Islamist-led government and opposition political leaders do not speak out unambiguously and repeatedly to condemn the attacks and also bring assailants to justice, they are complicit in the crimes.
Wow, Islamist-led government takes over and women have no rights. Who woulda thunk it?!
A Link Is Born
Streisand Effect and all.
There Are Enough People Who Think I'm A Huge Ass Without My Giving A Visual Cue
From cheezburger.com, "Who says butt implants are a bad idea?" (Click for photo.)
Need Your Pet Peeves: Eating, Drinking, Socializing Rudenesses
You all have been immensely helpful with your comments here in the chapters I've already completed for my next book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." I've included things I might not have, thanks to your comments and questions.
I'm now doing the chapter on Eating, Drinking, and Socializing. This includes restaurant dining, dinners in people's homes, drinking at bars, and parties at people's homes and elsewhere.
It would really help to have your thoughts on what rudenesses bug you or what questions you'd like to have answered in any of these areas.
If you're a bartender or a waitress, especially, feel free to post.
Or if you have cool ideas about solutions to various problems, feel free to suggest them.
Some areas I'm going to cover, just to give you a few ideas:
•People who assume they can bring their dogs to other people's parties;
•People who bring children at inappropriate times and to inappropriate places;
•People who penalize a waiter/waitress at tip time if the waiter/waitress uses certain gotcha phrases they hate (which he/she is often forced to memorize and say by the restaurant).
•People who save $2 by bringing bad wine to a friend's party -- giving their friends a hangover the next day.
•How to deal with the relative who you can count on to drink too much and ruin every family dinner
Tweet-Shaming Restaurant No-Shows: For Or Against?
LA chef and managing partner of the restaurant Red Medicine, Noah Ellis, went on Twitter to shame people who made reservations and didn't show or call to say they wouldn't make it.
The tweets: 
For or against?
And do the negatives outweigh the positives for a restaurant -- or vice versa?
New Study: Iraq/Afghan War Cost $6 Trillion -- $40K Per US Family
Per a @NickKristof tweet of a WaPo story by Ernesto Londoño about the study by public policy prof Linda J. Bilmes.
We haven't managed to "buy democracy" (or as I wrote recently, to "spread democracy like Skippy Peanutbutter") even for all that money and all those dead or terribly injured American soldiers. That's because this doesn't work -- we've seen that time and time again,
Enough With The Sweetheart Subsidies To Wall Street
Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, writes in the WaPo that the federal government should stop subsidizing Wall Street -- and I sure agree, and then some:
Financial firms can borrow money -- their equivalent of fuel -- more cheaply and with less market scrutiny when they have access to government guarantees of deposit insurance, loans from the Federal Reserve and, ultimately, taxpayer support such as we saw with the Troubled Assets Relief Program in 2008. This safety net was intended to stabilize the financial system by protecting the payments system that transfers money around the country and the world as well as the essential lending that commercial banks provide. But these protections also assure those who lend to banks that they will be repaid regardless of the condition of the bank. Under such circumstances, creditors give the firms a discount on the cost of the funds they borrow.Things are made more difficult by the fact that the largest financial companies now combine traditional commercial banking with higher-risk activities such as trading so that both their banking and betting activities get access to these government protections and the multibillion-dollar subsidy that comes with them. Using subsidized money to finance the conglomerates' bets encourages ever-higher levels of debt, risk and interconnectedness not attainable or sustainable in a truly free market.
While some suggest that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act removed all protections and subsidies for these largest firms, there is no evidence to support that assertion.
...This form of corporate welfare allows the protected giants -- those "too big to fail" -- to profit when their subsidized bets pay off, while the safety net acts as a buffer when they lose, shifting much of the cost to the public. For example, the conglomerates can cover -- and even double down on -- their trading positions for extended periods using insured deposits or discounted loans from the Federal Reserve that come with the commercial bank charter. The subsidy often allows them to stay in the game long enough to win the bet, but it supersizes the loss if the bet should finally fall apart.
This system distorts the market and turns appropriate risk-taking into recklessness. The result is a more concentrated and powerful financial sector -- and a more fragile economy. The way to return the financial services industry to the free market is by separating trading from commercial banks and by reforming the so-called shadow banking sector. Government guarantees should be limited primarily to those commercial banking activities that need it to function: the payments system and the intermediation process between short-term lenders and long-term borrowers.
Non-banking financial activities such as proprietary trading, market making and derivatives should be placed outside of commercial banks and so outside of the safety net.
Linky Charms
Put all the little marshmallows here.
The Supremes' Good And Also Awful Decision On Drug-Sniffing Dogs
Great! The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court that drug-sniffing dogs violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches. Not-so-good -- awful, in fact -- as Steve Chapman writes at reason:
But for some reason Scalia, who wrote the court's latest opinion as well, shied away from extending his impeccable logic. Instead, he said the dog-sniffing was out of line because it involved trespassing on private property. Once the officers ventured into the area owned by Jardines without his permission, the Fourth Amendment limited what they could do.The trespass rationale worries Christopher Slobogin, who directs the Criminal Justice Program at Vanderbilt Law School. "If the next case involves a drug-sniffing dog smelling an apartment that abuts a public sidewalk, presumably Scalia would say there is no search because there is no trespass," he says. "But the privacy invasion of the home would still be just as significant." Plenty of urban residences are within a few feet of a sidewalk, making them vulnerable to an accusatory Labrador retriever.
Justice Elena Kagan agreed, in a concurring opinion. In her view, cops violate privacy rights "when they use trained canine assistants to reveal within the confines of the home what they could not otherwise have found there"--even if they do it from a public way.
Why does it matter? Because dogs are the least of the ways in which the government will eventually be able to monitor spaces that once afforded sanctuary to anyone who wants to be left the hell alone.
Do The Most Irritating People In The World Live In Brooklyn?
Check out this article in the New York Daily News about a Park Slope food co-op. From the preview a friend sent me:
A kale shortage incites widespread panic. A 4-year-old melts down when his parents won't buy him dried papaya spears. And members debate natural childbirth while bagging nuts.
(P.S. To be fair, I'm guessing sections of Santa Monica and San Francisco come in a close second -- or possible tie.)
Idiotic Idea Promoted By LA Times' Dullest Columnist: Tax Email
George Skelton, a columnist I typically find too dull to slog through, writes in the LA Times of a Berkeley city nut jobcouncilman's "gutsy" idea -- proposing the government tax email to save the Post Office:
An email tax -- as part of a broader Internet tax -- could raise money to help keep the Postal Service afloat, Wozniak told the council."There should be something like a bit tax," he said. "I mean, a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would make, probably, billions of dollars a year.... And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email."
...I'm not nearly as concerned about keeping snail mail afloat as fending off these spammers and scammers and denying them free access to my work station. Make them pay. Maybe it'll be a deterrent.
If the Postal Service were to receive the tax money, fine.
Or it could be used to place a laptop on every school kid's desk. Or blanket the country with Wi-Fi. Or combat Chinese hackers. Maybe chase after scammers.
...Here's how I'd set it up:
Emailing within a company would be tax-free. I'd allow everyone a certain number of untaxed, private emails a month -- 100, maybe 200. After that, each message would cost one cent, up to a certain size. If they ran off the screen, they'd cost extra -- just as a bulky letter costs more than a 46-cent stamp.
After 500 emails, the fare would be hiked to 2 cents to discourage the junk-mailers. Copy 500 people on one message, that's 500 emails.
Probably 99% of us wouldn't pay much tax at all.
Not surprising for an LA Times columnist -- the guy appears to be clueless about spam blocking.
And What About "A Marriage Lease"?
I've proposed in the past that a marriage license could be more like a driver's license -- renewable after a period of time. The WSJ gives it as a seemingly negative example in an op-ed about the gay marriage question before the Supremes...but is it? From the WSJ:
Instead of a lasting contract, people who don't want to commit could sign a marriage lease, receiving marriage benefits for a period of years before the union would automatically dissolve without even a no-fault divorce.
"Marriage Has Always Been Between One Man And One Woman"
Except when it wasn't. Like all those times in the Bible:
Many of the Old Testament Prophets and Patriarchs had multiple wives, including Lamech, Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Gideon, Saul, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Elkanah, Ashur, Abijah and Jehoiada. Some interpretations also suggest Moses had a second wife in Tharbis. Other polygamists identified in the Bible include Ahab, Ahasuerus, Ashur, Belshazzar, Benhadad, Caleb, Eliphaz, Ezra, Jehoiachin, Jehoram, Jerahmeel, Joash, Machir, Manasseh, Mered, Nahor, Simeon, and Zedekiah. The first polygamist mentioned in the Bible is Lamech, whose two wives were Adah and Zillah (Gen 4:19). Abraham's wives were Sarah, Hagar (Gen 16:3, 21:1-13), Keturah (Gen 25:1), and concubines (who are referred to as "wives" in other parts of the Bible) (Gen 25:6). Jacob's four wives are Leah and Rachel (Gen 29:28) and despite an oath with their father Laban to not take any additional wives (Gen 31:48-54), Jacob took Bilhah (Gen 30:4) and Zilpah (Gen 30:9). Moses' two wives were Zipporah (Ex 2:21, Ex 18:1-6) and an Ethiopian woman (Num 12:1).Interestingly enough, Aaron and Miriam were punished for disapproving of Moses' forbidden marriage. Gideon "had many wives" (Judges 8:29-32). Elkanah, Samuel's father, had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah (1 Samuel 1:1-2). An accurate list of David's wives would include at least five named wives: Michal (1 Sam 18:27, 19:11-18, 25:44; 2 Sam 3:13-14, 6:20-23), Abigail of Carmel (1 Sam 25:39, 1 Chr 3), Ahinoam of Jezreel (1 Sam 25:43, 1 Chr 3), Eglah (2 Sam 3:4-5, 1 Chr 3) and Bathsheba (2 Sam 12:24). David also took "more wives and concubines" in 2 Sam 5:13, 12:7-8, 1 Chr 14:3. Three additional women are mentioned, but we are not told if they are wives or concubines: Maacah (2 Sam 3:3, 1 Chr 3), Abital (2 Sam 3:3-4, 1 Chr 3) and Haggith (2 Sam 3:3, 1 Chr 3). Lastly, there are the ten concubines, or wives as they are referred to in 2 Sam 5:13, 15:16, 16:21-23, 1 Chr 14:3, bringing David's total to at least 22+ "wives/concubines". The prophet Nathan, confronting David with the murder of Uriah the Hittite, said that God would have given David more wives if he had wanted them.[2Samuel 12:8] According to 1 Kings 11:3, David's son Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.
In addition to the many examples of plural marriage, the Pentateuch also lists guidelines and rules concerning the taking of multiple wives, noting "If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights".[Ex 21:10] The practice of the levir makes it an obligation for men whose brother has left a widow without heir to marry her.[Deut 25:5-10] No allowance is given for a man who already had a wife.
Link It To Me
Wham, bam, thank you, no spam...
TSA Braniac: Let Me Test This Thing -- Ooh, It's Pepper Spray!
Lisa Simeone blogs at TSA News Blog:
Ah, yes, the Brain Trust in Blue, as our writer Deborah Newell Tornello calls them -- every time you think they've topped themselves, they prove you wrong.In the lastest episode of The Adventures of Darwin Award Candidates, a TSA agent at JFK (source of so many shenanigans) was "playing around" with a canister of pepper spray he found on the floor. Oops!
According to the Daily Mail, he thought the pepper spray canister was a laser pointer, and while "playing around" with it, sprayed his colleagues, six of whom were hospitalized.
As Lisa puts it:
That's right, the brilliant "security" soldiers On The Front Lines In The War On Terrorism™ thought a canister of pepper spray was a laser pointer. And these are the people who are supposed to be able to tell the difference between an insulin pump, a purse, a belt buckle, or a breast prostheses, and a bomb.
From the Kerry McDermott story at the Daily Mail:
Earlier this month a former agent who used to work at Newark said of his one-time colleagues: 'I wouldn't trust them to walk my dog.''We're not any big deterrent. It's all for show,' the anonymous ex-screener told the New York Post.
Yes, that's what those of us who are awake and who care about maintaining our civil liberties keep saying.
Feminist Magazine: Eat Cake! Smoke No Bones.
(Especially not for pay!) A tweet:
@ladyluckydeluxe
Feels good when a feminist mag rejects my article about being a sex-worker, but publishes one about how awesome cake is.
Of course, it is possible the article wasn't rejected for subject matter.
But, very often, it's my experience that feminism is fundamentalism.
The Biggest Dimwits Have Top Government Positions, Like Health And Human Services Secretary
Megan McArdle blogs at The Daily Beast that Kathleen Sebelius thinks insurance isn't really insurance unless it covers routine expenses. This is exactly backwards, says McArdle. She notes that insurance covers very large costs most people would have trouble paying, like replacing a house that burns down:
This is the magic of risk pooling. But notice that it's the catastrophe which makes insurance a good deal. You wouldn't get much value from buying "grocery insurance". At best, you'd be paying an extra administrative fee to route your routine expenses through an insurer, rather than paying them directly. At worst, you'll end up with bills skyrocketing as all sorts of perverse incentives appear. After all, if the insurer is paying all your grocery claims, why not load up on filet mignon instead of ground turkey?But insurers try very hard never to sell insurance for less than the cost of your expected claims. If you expect to buy $10,000 worth of groceries next year, it will not charge you less than that for a "grocery policy". And if we all drive up the costs of grocery insurance by consuming more, the insurer can do one of two things: raise everyone's "insurance premiums" to cover a filet mignon budget, or create a list of "approved groceries" that it will cover, and start hassling anyone who tries to file an excessively expensive claim.
Sound familiar?
This is why you should always have liability insurance, but should think twice about collision damage coverage. It's why high deductibles are a good idea--for small expenses, it's better to self insure. And it's why "catastrophic" health plans, which only cover the sort of extremely expensive events that most people would have difficulty financing, are a much better deal than the soup-to-nuts plans that most people get through their employers. Those plans are expensive, both because they're paying for a higher percentage of your expenses, and because they drive up utilization--which means that they drive up next year's premiums even more. Imagine what your car insurance would cost if it covered gasoline, routine maintenance, and those little air freshener trees you hang from the rearview mirror. Then stop asking why health insurance costs so much.
But Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of HHS, thinks that catastrophic insurance isn't really insurance at all.
At a White House briefing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance today is so skimpy it can't be compared to the comprehensive coverage available under the law. "Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don't pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus," she said. "They're really mortgage protection, not health insurance."...The Secretary of Health and Human Services genuinely believes that health insurance should do more than just, well, protect your ability to keep paying the mortgage. Unfortunately, "more" is very expensive and inefficient.
Grotesque Government Pension: $423,664 For The Rest Of Her Life
That's what retired Alameda County (California) Administrator Susan Muranshi will get until she dies.
What was her base salary alone is obscene: $301,000
Jonathan Turley blogs, via SFGate:
Then she is entitled to an over $24,000 "equity pay" amount that guarantees that she will receive at least 10 percent more than anyone else in the county.She then adds roughly $54,000 a year in return for "longevity" of service of over 30 years. Then she adds an annual performance bonus of $24,000 plus another $9000 a year for serving on an ad hoc committee overseeing the sale of excess land. Then she is entitled to an $8,292-a-year car allowance. This all adds up to roughly $425,000 for the rest of her life and she is only 63 years old.
Under the country rules, Muranishi's pension will equal the dollar total of her entire yearly package -- $413,000.
And actually, a commenter at the SFGate site, "pressure cooker," writes:
Again, her TCOE (total cost of employment) for the county, when you count everything was far more than $423,000 mentioned here.The actual figure for 2011 was $663,000 as seen in the Oakland Tribune data base figures. Those are the offical figures including all the perks and medical and retirement and "private pension" and things under "extra" and "misc" ...the whole bag of compensation tricks.
$663,000 for 2011 and no doubt higher for 2012 and 2013. Two million just for those 3 years.
The hidden underbelly of government compensation, By design. When the Contra Costa Times asked for the information, all the public employee groups fought them in court. Finally the public was given the true costs of funding public employees and their pensions.
Ask yourself why they hid it for so long.
Why hide something that is "fair"?
By the way, Muranshi is 63 years old.
Eat the poor!
From Howard Jarvis, via KGO:
Jon Coupal, the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers' Association, said this in a statement, "The obscenely exorbitant salary received by the CAO of Alameda County reveals a fundamental disconnect between our public leaders and ordinary citizens. The 'guaranteed salary for life' is particularly galling and will burden Alameda County taxpayers for decades."A recent study by the state found that Alameda County's public employees has the second highest average salaries in the state. That said, most are nothing like the county administrator's. We're talking about an average salary just over $69,000 per year.
Occupy government, anyone?
The Rivers Of The Amazon
I so appreciate every purchase people make through my Amazon links (you can go to "Amy's Mall" and click on the little "Powered By Amazon" icon on the upper left and I will get credit.
You can also use this link
Anyway, as I was saying, I appreciate all the purchases people make, but when I go to my reports in the morning, I find some more amusing than others.
For example, in today's report: Primos Old Crow Call
Yes, some of us just call AAA. Others are more into the call of the wild. Or, rather, the call to the wild.
"America's Problem Isn't Gay Marriage; It's Marriage"
Roger Simon over at PJMedia gets it. He blogs that conservatives should actually be grateful to gays, who seem to be the only ones who want to uphold the institution of marriage:
Well, some of them anyway. And that's part of the point. Those gays and lesbians who want to get married are largely domestic types who seek to participate in a traditional lifestyle that conservatives normally admire and advocate.I have seen it up close and personal, as they say. My oldest son from my first marriage is gay. (Ironically, he came out to me years ago as a Yale student, just like Rob Portman's son.) For nearly twenty years he has lived in a relationship with his partner that appears as committed as any heterosexual relationship I know. They now have two four-year-old twin daughters who are quite adorable and healthy. My son might blanch to read it, but it's as bourgeois as could be.
This personal story is anecdotal, of course -- but it's also real. And I suspect it is not terribly exceptional. Those homosexuals, I repeat, who aspire to marriage are a self-selected group, more so, perhaps, than heterosexuals, especially given the data I rehearsed above.
...And guess what -- nothing has happened to the institution of marriage, except, sadly, from those heterosexuals deserting it. And that is clearly not the homosexuals' fault.
Yes, I know that the Bible says this and that, but I am not going to enter into a theological debate. ... I would ask, instead, for social conservatives to take their fight off the political playing field.
I have previously pointed out that they would be more successful persuading us gay-marriage adherents of the rightness of their cause outside that arena. It makes psychological sense.
More importantly, as a serial monogamist and devoted romantic about marriage, I would remind them to concentrate on the real problem. Marriage is in serious jeopardy. Pay more attention to that, not to a tiny minority who seek what you already have.
UPDATE: Related -- what really affects children negatively isn't gay marriage; it's divorce, by Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair:
Two out of five children will experience divorce of their parents before they reach the age of 18. About 25 percent of all children will spend time with a stepfamily. Every year, about one million kids under the age of 18 are involved in divorce.Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we should somehow forcibly stop divorce for lots of reasons, most specifically because it's none of my damn business what other couples do with their marriages. My point is, the crowd that whines about the damage that it says would be brought on the institution of marriage if gays were allowed to wed is a bunch of lying hypocrites. If they cared about marriage, they would address the real problem--something that actually undermines marriage. They wouldn't be spending their time making sure a couple that lives together, loves each other, and may even already have kids can't get married.
The IT Nightmare That Is Obamacare
Michael Barone in the WashEx blogs 35-year IT vet John Capron's Linked In post about Obamacare and the technological nightmare upon us:
"Wow, what can go wrong here? Let me assess this based on my years of experience in this industry. The federal government is going to build 50 exchanges, using a data hub that doesn't exist physically and in fact, the design hasn't been solidified, and must be accessible to a variety of data processing technologies that range from archaic to old. Each of the 50 states have different eligibility rules, and with a significant number of states opting out, the federal government now has to learn the intricacies of each state's Medicaid eligibility models which then scale to different applicability rules for different members of a given family. The thousands of pages of bureaucratic rules that will drive requirements haven't been completed yet, and those requirements are needed to drive design not only for the application programs, but for the entire processing architecture. The issue of network, processor, and storage performance has to be decided, modeled and tested. To complicate matters, the convoluted federal procurement rules for hardware and software have to be adhered to, which require mixing different hardware brands, software packages and service providers..."
Cool! How 'bout we just pass the thing and figure out what's in it later?
via @instapundit
Linkatoo
Line my birdcage with frankincense, myrrh, and brand new three-dollar bills.
Didion Speaks For Me On This
I also write to entertain (or, ideally, to make the reader bust a spleen), but this -- below -- is a major part of it:
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."--Joan Didion
From a Brain Pickings blog item by Maria Popova.
Spousal Support After Marriage: Convince Me One Way Or Another
This is a battle of the Advice Goddess Blogwits -- to win me over to your side of the argument on this, because it's a question I'm considering and have yet to make my mind up on.
Stay-at-home mom. Gave up potential professional opportunities to raise her kids (now in their 20s).
She's been divorced nine years and is working full-time, but would have to downscale her lifestyle and wouldn't have money for savings if she no longer took the husband's spousal support payments.
Question: Is it fair for spousal support to go on endlessly (until the spouse retires)? Bear in mind, I'm not asking what's legal, but what's fair?
A consideration: A wife gets no pension from wifing.
Another consideration: When you cut off your career for a child-raising sabbatical, you cut off your potential opportunities and diminish the money you can make.
Another consideration: Doesn't child-raising have value? And what is the long-term value?
Another consideration: What if the marriage broke up when the husband had an affair?
Olson And Boies On Gay Marriage Case They're Bringing To The Supreme Court This Week
Theodore Olson and David Boies, the lawyers taking the gay marriage case to The Supreme Court this week, have an op-ed in the WSJ, "Gays Deserve Equal Rights":
The central question is whether a state may exclude gay and lesbian Americans from what the Supreme Court has called "the most important relation in life"--the institution of marriage. The answer is no....The Supreme Court has recognized at least 14 times that marriage is a fundamental right of all individuals.
...For one to say that the Supreme Court should leave the question of marriage equality to the political processes of the states is to say that states should remain free to discriminate--to impose this pain and humiliation on gay men and lesbians and their children--for as long as they wish, without justification. The Constitution forbids such an indecent result. It did not tolerate it in separate schools and drinking fountains, it did not tolerate it with respect to bans on interracial marriage, and it does not tolerate it here.
Because of their sexual orientation--a characteristic with which they were born and which they cannot change--our clients and hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians in California and across the country are being excluded from one of life's most precious relationships.
Opening to them participation in the unique and immensely valuable institution of marriage will not diminish the value or status of marriage for heterosexuals, but withholding marriage causes infinite and permanent stigma, pain and isolation. It denies gay men and lesbians their identity and their dignity; it labels their families as second-rate.
That outcome cannot be squared with the principle of equality and the unalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is the bedrock promise of America from the Declaration of Independence to the 14th Amendment, and the dream of all Americans. This badge of inequality must be extinguished.
Lynx Fur Coat
Pile it on...
Smoke The Poor!
Greg Beato writes at reason that making cigarettes nearly as illegal and expensive as a Schedule 1 drug has social costs:
According to one recent study, New York City smokers with an annual income of less than $30,000 now spend 23.6 percent of that income on cigarettes! That's more than double the amount they were spending ten years ago, and yet smoking rates of the city's lowest-income residents have only declined a few percentage points in that time.Meanwhile, in an effort to subvert New York City's alleged expansion of liberty, smokers have adopted numerous methods for getting cigarettes more cheaply. Nearby Indian reservations do a brisk trade selling tax-free cigarettes. Roll-your-own shops, which weren't subject to the same taxes as packaged cigarettes until new federal legislation was enacted last year, offered another alternative. And thousands of shops in New York City simply sell smuggled cigarettes. According to the city's Finance Commissioner David Frankel, 46 percent of the 1,900 retailers that were inspected over the last 18 months were "selling unstamped or untaxed product."
Here we see choice architecture at work in insidious fashion: By making a legal but unhealthy product increasingly unaffordable, Mayor Bloomberg and his confederates have effectively nudged thousands of smokers and shopkeepers into criminal behavior. Now, he wants to raise the stakes by increasing the penalties for the behaviors he's induced. A second new piece of legislation he's initiating, the "Sensible Tobacco Enforcement" bill, will, if passed, increase financial penalties for selling untaxed cigarettes and give the Department of Finance the power to shut down repeat violators. Light up and inhale the cool liberating flavor of Prohibition Lite.
Shop Sexist! (P.S. It's Okay To Be Sexist If It Helps Women)
From an email from a regular commenter here:
My neighbor gave me a package of brownie mix. However, this is not why I'm annoyed, despite the fact that I don't really eat brownies because of, you know, carbs.There's a little seal on the label that says "Certified Woman-Owned."
Excuse me? We're certifying businesses now for being owned by women? What the heck does that mean, anyway? Contains extra estrogen?
I'm not exactly sure why this rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because consumers are supposed to see that seal and think, "Yeah! Women are just as good as men," whereas to me it says, "Businesses owned by women can't compete, so we need this seal so you will help us."
Women Are Men's Equals! Unless Somebody's Making A Coarse Joke
Benjy Weinberger went all sob sister on his blog for the ladies of the digital world -- "Men, It's On Us Now":
"We must push back against exclusionary language, sexist banter, brogramming and all the other issues."
My translation: We must infantilize women because they are not our equals. They must be coddled like blind kittens.
(Incidentally, talking like this is a really good way to get feminist sob sisters to have sex with you.)
Benjy was, of course, posting about the Adria Richards/PyCon/SendGrid affair, detailed here by Deanna Zandt at Forbes:
- Adria Richards overheard a conversation behind her (in the audience) at PyCon, where some men were making jokes to each other about "dongles" and "forking." If those words don't make sense to you, they're standard tech terms that can easily be made into sexual innuendo.- Adria took a picture of the men and tweeted it, calling them out for what she felt was inappropriate sexual behavior at the conference. She also blogged about it, and it was posted to Hacker News.
- Internet discussion ensues. A small percentage (happily by men!) of the dialogue was thoughtful and nuanced; most of it wasn't-it turned threatening, racist and misogynistically demeaning pretty quickly.
- One of the men in the picture was fired from his job.
- All Internet hell breaks loose, and Adria becomes the target for some 4chan members, some groups claiming to be Anonymous, and more: death threats, rape threats, racist slurs (including the N-word, comments on her religious heritage, and more), doxxing of her personal info, denial of service attacks on the her website and/or the website of SendGrid, for whom she works.
- Adria is then fired from her job as a developer evangelist for SendGrid, as they've capitulated to the mob.
At almost every juncture, there has been a festering petri dish of sociological behavior to study. A lot of people have been debating whether or not what Adria experienced was valid sexist behavior. I'm leaving that aside for a minute, and picking one particular dish to work with: the focus on many, many people-a lot of them women-on asking the question, "How could Adria have handled the initial situation with the men behind her in the audience differently?" They point out that she should have just addressed them directly, or gone to the conference organizers, or taken on any of a variety of their helpful tips.
A few points:
1. Because you are able to tweet somebody's every overheard remark doesn't mean you should. (Check out the link on "Adria" to her blog item -- it's shocking, both in that she felt she had a right to expose people's private conversation and for what I see as her bullshit justification: It's for THE CHILLLDREN! (Specifically, the girl children, who she assumes are being brought up to be emotional clones of the fragile china doll ideologue she apparently is.)
2. People will say things that you find offensive.
3. If they are not speaking into a microphone -- intending their conversation to be for public consumption -- you don't get to publish their conversation just because you happen to overhear it. The exception would be if they are planning to blow up a building, in which case you should quick-quick, ring somebody with a SWAT team or something.
4. Also, if you want to be treated as an equal, how come you demand to be infantilized? Men are sometimes gross and make jokes in bad taste. (Women I'm friends with are likewise sometimes gross and make jokes in bad taste -- but I generally don't fraternize with the politically correct.)
I've never been troubled by being in an industry where coarse jokes fly around. (In fact, I rather like it.) But if I did have a problem with it, I'd be in a different industry or I'd tell people their language was bothering me...all adult-like 'n' stuff, by moving my lips and making words come out in their direction...not by going all "Mommeeeee! They're saying baaaaad wordssss!" to conference organizers or some other designated/de facto workplace grownup.
5. Also, suck my dongle if you don't like it.
The End Of Privacy Now Coming To FedEx, UPS Shipments
From WND, the Obama admin is demanding that FedEx and UPS police the contents of Americans' sealed packages -- potentially threatening the privacy of all customers sending or receiving packages.
According to the Justice Department, these shipping companies should be flagging shipments of illegally prescribed drugs. (How they'd know what's in the packages is hard to figure out.):
FedEx spokesman Patrick Fitzgerald said his company has a 40-year history of actively assisting the government crackdown on any criminal conduct, but he told WND this probe was very different from the start."What is unusual and really disturbing is it became clear to us along the way that FedEx was being targeted for some level criminal activity as it relates to these medicines that are being shipped from pharmacies, and we find it to be completely absurd because it's really not our role," Fitzgerald said. "We have no way of knowing what is legal and not within the packages that we're picking up and delivering in this situation."
"At the heart of the investigation are sealed packages that are being sent by, as far as we can tell, licensed pharmacies. These are medicines with legal prescriptions written by licensed physicians. So it's difficult for us to understand where we would have some role in this. We are a transportation company that picks up and delivers close to 10 million packages every day. They are sealed packages, so we have no way of knowing specifically what's inside and we have no interest in violating the privacy rights of our customers," Fitzgerald said.
In addition to the unrealistic expectation that the federal government seems to have for the companies to know what's in every package, Fitzgerald said protecting the rights of customers is paramount and the issues go hand-in-hand.
"They clearly are attempting to put some responsibility for the legality of the contents of these packages. That's why for us it goes far beyond even just the online pharmacy situation. This really has a chilling effect. It has the potential to threaten the privacy of all customers that send or receive packages via FedEx because the government is assigning a role on us as law enforcement or taking on their role in a way that is not appropriate," Fitzgerald said.
FedEx sought to diffuse the standoff by offering to stop doing business with any pharmacies that the government suspected to be involved in illegal activities. The Justice Department declined, citing the potential for the pharmacies to sue over a lack of due process.
Oh, that. There's a rule in government: Only trample on people's civil liberties when they aren't likely to sue you shitless.
Linky-Lou
Take us browser window-shopping, willya?
Advice Goddess Radio -- Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Eric Klinenberg, How & Why Living Alone Can Make You Happy
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
On tonight's show, noted sociologist Dr. Eric Klinenberg will discuss why remaining unmarried and living alone have increasing appeal and what the problems of living solo tend to be -- and how we might solve them.
We'll touch both on living solo as a younger person (whether romantically single or "living apart together" with a partner), and how we can live alone as we age.
Dr. Klineberg's book is Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.
Listen at this link at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/25/dr-eric-klinenberg-howwhy-living-alone-can-make-you-happy
And don't miss last week's show with developmental psychologist Dr. Peter Gray that, rather unbelievably, ties in two of my interests -- libertarian philosophy and evidence-based science as a guide for behavior.
Gray explain why our current educational system is actually counterproductive to educating kids. Our way of schooling kids ignores our evolved psychology and how children actually learn, and removes children's natural joy of learning from them in the process.
It turns out that schooling based on the principles of a democracy -- applied to children -- is highly effective schooling for keeping kids engaged, helping them develop self-control, and helping them develop to their fullest and become highly productive adults living meaningful lives.
Peter's fascinating book: Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
Listen here at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/18/dr-peter-gray-why-kids-learn-better-through-play
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes.
Morons At The Department Of Education: The Wisdom Of Mass-Murderers
Why run a quote from Western mass-murdering Hitler (so overplayed!) when you can run one from an Eastern mass-murdering dictator?
Jonathan Turley blogs:
The quote appeared on the "Kids' Zone" website of the National Center for Education Statistics. The quote stated "Our attitude towards ourselves should be 'to be satiable in learning' and towards others 'to be tireless in teaching.'" That was the webpage's "Quote of the Day" section....It is clear that whoever approved it had no idea who Mao was or the atrocities that he committed, particularly during the Cultural Revolution when intellectuals were massacred. The quote was taken down after various sites pointed out the irony. It was replaced by a quote from Lincoln.
Also, the quote doesn't mean what the person probably thought it meant. Satiable is another word for "sated" -- satisfied that you're full. From my Mac dictionary:
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin satiatus, past participle of satiare, from satis 'enough.'
And I think that "teaching," as Mao was intending it, probably means indoctrinating people in Communism and docilely doing what the state wants.
Dangerous Criminals Taken Off College Campus: $5 Drug Deal
A campus employee spotted an exchange between two CU-Boulder students -- one giving the other a prescription pill for ADHD and the other handing over $5 -- reported it, and cops arrested both on felony drug charges. Mitchell Byars writes at The Denver Post:
CU police said Nicholas Busbey, 23, sold Marshall Pedder, 21, a tablet of Vyvanse, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that also can be used as a "study aid" to help keep students up and alert as they prepare for exams.Busbey was arrested on suspicion of the unlawful sale of a controlled substance, a Class 3 felony, while Pedder faces a charge of possession of a controlled substance, a Class 6 felony.
Vyvanse is similar to Adderall, which I take by prescription for ADHD. It transforms my writing day from torture to hard work I love.
As the article notes, some students take it to be able to power up their studying and do better in school. If they choose to do that, why shouldn't it be their choice? Why should the government be allowed to tell you what you can and cannot put in your body and how you can and cannot transform your mind?
via @ariarmstrong
Islam: 15-Year-Old, Raped By Stepfather, To Be Imprisoned, Flogged For "Fornication"
Andrew Buncombe writes at the Independent/UK:
A teenage girl in the Maldives who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather has been ordered to receive 100 lashes after she confessed to having had pre-marital sex with another man. She is said to be deeply traumatised.In an incident that has triggered widespread condemnation, the 15-year-old from the remote Feydhoo island was this week also ordered to spend eight months under house arrest. The flogging - handed down under a system of Shariah Law - will be carried out once the teenager reaches the age of 18 though she can ask it to be brought forward if she wishes.
...According to the Minivan news, the teenager involved in the latest case was sentenced following a police investigation that found she had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather. In the summer of 2012, the teenager gave birth to the step-father's baby, which he allegedly killed and buried beneath an outdoor shower area in their home.
During questioning by the police, the teenager reportedly confessed to having had consensual sex with another male. It is unclear whether this individual has been identified, traced or charged. Meanwhile, the teenager's stepfather faces up to 25 years in jail if he is convicted of rape and murder.
...In November 2011, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay urged the authorities in the Maldives to halt the use of flogging. She said at the time: "This practice constitutes one of the most inhumane and degrading forms of violence against women, and should have no place in the legal framework of a democratic country."
Welcome to Islam! Leave your human rights at the door!
Manhunt For Umbrella-Toting Gentleman
Chelsea Krotzer writes for The Olympian of a man carrying an umbrella who was the subject of a manhunt:
A typical Tuesday morning for 42-year-old Michael Di Marzo quickly became a citywide multi-jurisdictional manhunt for him and what witnesses thought was a assault rifle in his hand.Three schools were locked down and delayed as police scoured the area by ground and air, looking for a man described by a teenage tipster as wearing black clothes and a ski mask.
It wasn't realized until hours later what was believed to be something along the lines of an AR-15 or AK-47 was more of a AU-15: a 15-inch compact "assault umbrella."
The "ski mask" was a pulled-up black turtle neck sweater paired with a black watch cap.
Di Marzo had no idea he was at the center of the hunt as he continued about his day March 12, visiting his mother, who had been suffering from complications with diabetes, and doing errands around town.
He took his usual bus routes through town and returned home around 2 p.m., walking the rest of the way through his east Olympia neighborhood.
That's when he noticed a helicopter overhead.
...Playful and theatrical by nature, Di Marzo gestured his umbrella toward the helicopter.
"I can't believe I did that now," Di Marzo said. "It really makes me shake every time I think about it.
Something worrisome has happened in our society -- in that we suddenly see criminals at every turn.
via @walterolson
Linktopia
The land of the entertainingly lost.
Big Whack Attack
An Australian woman got violent after catching her boyfriend whacking off in the shower.
She was sentenced to three months in prison -- but immediately paroled without serving any jail time.
Quran: Men Are In Charge Of Women
One of the reasons it's completely stupid for us to try to export democracy (or rather, try to bribe Muslim countries into becoming democratic with billions of our tax dollars) is that Islam demands the antithesis of respect for the individual and individual rights -- especially for the individual woman.
From the WSJ, Sohrab Ahmari writes of Manal al-Sharif, the woman who got behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia, where women (men's living property, under Islam) are not allowed to drive:
It was a stunning act of defiance in a country that takes very seriously the Quran's teaching: "Men are in charge of women."...As she recounts, a traffic officer stopped the car, and soon members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi morality police, surrounded the car. "Girl!" screamed one. "Get out! We don't allow women to drive!" Ms. Sharif and her brother were arrested and detained for six hours, during which time she stood her ground.
...In November 1979 in Saudi Arabia, a band of Sunni jihadis took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing hundreds of worshipers and security forces. It took two weeks and the help of French commandos to break the siege.
The incident, infidel rescuers included, was a huge embarrassment for the reigning al-Saud dynasty, whose monarchs style themselves as "Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques." To prevent future jihadi attacks, "the government did everything it could to please the fundamentalists," Ms. Sharif says. "It gave them control over education and women. So women were removed from all public life in Saudi Arabia, and there is now complete separation between the genders."
The kingdom had always been deeply religious. Yet it was only after the 1979 siege that the al-Saud began promoting radical Islam at home and abroad as a way of staving off challenges to their own legitimacy. Thus was born what former Wall Street Journal publisher and author Karen Elliott House identifies in her book "On Saudi Arabia" as "Islam Inc."--the symbiosis of clerical obscurantism and oil riches that keeps the al-Saud in power.
One result is a society where women make up just 12% of the workforce and own 5% of businesses, a country where 15 young girls were doomed to perish in a 2002 schoolhouse fire after the morality police prevented their rescue because the students were improperly dressed.
References for how men are in charge of women under Islam are here.
TSA: The People We Should Be Scanning And Searching Are The Criminals Hired By The TSA
If they scanned and groped the unskilled workers (hired with cursory vetting by the TSA) before they left the airports, think of all the crimes they'd discover. In yet another of so many TSA-worker-perpetrated crimes, an Orlando TSA officer was arrested after he took home the computer that some honest traveler turned in to him. Via WFTV:
An honest tourist found a bag sitting in Orlando International Airport and turned it over to a Transportation Security Administration officer. Police say instead of taking it to lost and found, the TSA officer took it home.Police said that early this month, a teenager from Canada left his bag outside the Harley Davidson Store at the airport. His computer and passport were in the bag.
Police said a tourist turned it in to TSA Officer Keith McKnight. They said that McKnight took the laptop to a computer store in Pine Hills and asked to have it wiped clean. They said he used his real name when he dropped the computer off.
The store owner said McKnight claimed he bought it at a flea market on Colonial Drive for $150. The computer is worth $2,000.
Luckily, the people the TSA hires to root out terrorist plotters aren't exactly the cream of the intelligence crop. The kid got an alert on his iPhone and tracked the computer back to the store.
Obamacare: Docs Holding Group Appointments With Patients
Goodbye privacy! Doctor shortages, and probably the cost of being forced to treat patients without adequate compensation, are causing doctors to hold appointments with multiple patients -- up to a dozen patients all at once, writes Michelle Andrews at Kaiser Health News:
Advocates of the approach say such visits allow doctors to treat more patients, spend more time with them (even if not one-on-one), increase appointment availability and improve health outcomes.
Some see group appointments as a way to ease looming physician shortages. According to a study published in December, meeting the country's health-care needs will require nearly 52,000 additional primary-care physicians by 2025. More than 8,000 of that total will be needed for the more than 27 million people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.
"With Obamacare, we're going to get a lot of previously uninsured people coming into the system, and the question will be 'How are we going to service these people well?' " says Edward Noffsinger, who has developed group-visit models and consults with providers on their implementation. With that approach, "doctors can be more efficient and patients can have more time with their doctors."
I don't want to see my doctor in a crowd -- because my health is private. It also seems more likely a doctor would miss things when looking out onto a herd.
Note that at Nofsinger's site, concern is for the doctor's legal well-being and not the patient:
What About Confidentiality?Confidentiality is handled very conservatively in DIGMAs and PSMAs by having all patients (as well as any support persons accompanying them) sign a confidentiality release specifically drafted for this purpose by the physician's corporate attorney or medical risk department. Also, confidentiality is thoroughly covered in the behaviorist's introduction to each DIGMA or PSMA session. In addition, the fact that these are group visits is made clear in all promotional materials as well as by schedulers making the appointment. Keep in mind that psychiatry and behavioral medicine groups have been run successfully for decades--typically even without the need of signing a confidentiality release.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. I'm a little wiped out. Posted a couple of blog items below, but I'll post more on Saturday once I've had a little sleep.
Bagging The Deal
Up to 20 percent off linked handbags, sunglasses, and more. Enter the promo code BAGMARCH at checkout for a discount at Amazon
Hey, Frenchy: If Free Speech Disappears, Anti-Semitism Can Flourish
People don't understand -- it is free speech, having ugliness open to the air, that allows you to see it, making you able to speak against it, and keeping societies free.
Jonathan Turley writes of French Jewish students demanding millions in damages over anti-Semitic tweets. I grew up Jewish, but I will defend your right to say anti-Semitic things -- and the Nazis right to march in Skokie or anywhere else, much as I deplore both.
It's speech we deplore that needs defending -- not speech everyone likes.
From Turley's blog post:
The Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) is demanding 38.5 million euros after Twitter has declined to turn over the identity of people responsible for comments deemed anti-Semitic by the group. The students appear to have no concept or at least concern for the loss of anonymity in free speech. Like others, they are focused only on their insular grievance with no appreciation for the harm caused by such court orders.Jonathan Hayoun, president of the UEJF, expressed no concern of his role in the attack on free speech and simply accused Twitter of "playing the indifference card in not respecting the [earlier] decision of January 24." The company was given two weeks to turn over the identities of the writers. What Hayoun considers "indifference" is a company trying to protect the free speech values that are at the heart of the Internet.
...Hayoun appears completely uneducated, or at least unaware, as to the harm caused by such actions for free speech. He insisted that "[i]n protecting the anonymity of the author of these tweets it is making itself an accomplice and offering a highway for racists and anti-Semites." That is absurd, of course. Twitter like other sites is a highway for public comment and free speech. With valuable speech comes a lot of low-grade speech. That is the cost of free speech. However, once you go down the slippery slope of speech regulation and punishment, that highway will become nothing more than an assembly line for approved and sanctioned thoughts.
Twitter says it will appeal. Original story via AFP.
On a related note, below is a Twitter spat I had yesterday with a person clueless that "free speech" means all speech in this country. Everyone's speech.
The original tweet:
@KFIAM640
La Habra repeals law that prevented day laborers from soliciting work on city sidewalks. http://ow.ly/jigzh
My tweet:
@amyalkon
Free speech for all RT @KFIAM640 La Habra repeals law preventing day laborers frm soliciting work on city sidewalks. http://ow.ly/jigzh
Murphy Linn tweet:
@murphylinn
@amyalkon @KFIAM640 I wouldn't call that free speech
Me:
@amyalkon
Free speech isn't just speech you like and agree with @murphylinn @KFIAM640
Murphy Linn:
@murphylinn
@amyalkon @KFIAM640 YOU ARE A TRAGEDY
Me:
@amyalkon
I work at it. Big on all that Constitution-defending stuff, whether Nazis marching in Skokie or people seeking work @murphylinn @KFIAM640
Me:
@amyalkon
Free speech isn't just for speech you like. It's for speech, period. Read the Constitution before you spout. @murphylinn @KFIAM640
And one more -- with the remedy:
@amyalkon
@murphylinn @KFIAM640 If you don't like illegals using their free speech rights to get work, you are free to use yours to protest.
The "Affordable Care Act" Hasn't Earned Its Name
Dan Danner, Bruce Josten, and Matthew Shay write in USA Today:
Report after report has established that the only changes that have materialized under the ACA are, in fact, the opposite of what small-business owners have been demanding for decades. The law has increased costs and added profound complexity to an already confusing system; higher taxes and thousands of pages of new regulations are having a tremendous impact on the small-business community and have contributed to the slow recovery of Main Street.Leading, nonpartisan budget and tax authorities, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), have confirmed that the Obamacare will levy over a trillion dollars in taxes on an unsuspecting public. Families and small employers cannot afford this. Nor can they afford the 21 tax increases contained in the law--half of which will impact families and business owners earning less than $250,000 a year ($200k for individual filers). Not only does this violate the President's pledge to avoid tax hikes on low- and middle-income taxpayers, it breaks trust with a community of job creators -- most of whom file as individuals.
Job creators will bear the biggest burden of one of these taxes, which is cleverly disguised as a "fee" in ACA jargon, will burden main street job creators the most.. According to the JCT, "a very large portion of the insurance industry fee [will] be passed forward to purchasers of insurance in the form of higher premiums." And "eliminating this fee could decrease the average family premium in 2016 by $350 to $400." Yet, this more than $100 billion tax on small businesses and families was somehow avoided by unions, which were exempt from the discriminatory Health Insurance Tax. Former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin has estimated that the average American family will see their healthcare premiums increase by approximately $500 per year because of the tax -- no small sum for hard-working Americans.
Even the administration's own documents estimate that the Obamacare's new tax rules will add over 40 million hours of paperwork per year to individuals and job creators. And new regulations are still being written, which suggests that this estimate is low.
The Difference Between Thea And Theo? $363,000 In Estate Taxes
From NPR, Nina Totenberg writes that tiny 83-year-old Edith Windsor is taking on DOMA -- the discriminatory federal Defense of Marriage Act that bans equal recognition and benefits for married same-sex couples:
The crux of her lawsuit is that after living with Thea Spyer for more than four decades, and having a marriage recognized as legal in the state of New York, Windsor had to pay $363,000 in estate taxes when Spyer died because the federal government did not recognize their marriage as valid."If Thea was Theo," she says, "I would not have had to pay" those taxes. "It's heartbreaking," she adds. "It's just a terrible injustice, and I don't expect that from my country. I think it's a mistake that has to get corrected."
Windsor asked Thea to marry her in 1967, on a drive to the countryside, giving her a circle pin adorned with diamonds.
At the time, of course, there was no place the two could actually marry. But they led good lives together, even after Thea was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease at first progressed slowly.Thea's first symptom was not being able to complete her golf swing. "It was very gradual," Edie says, but eventually "it turned into a fairly vicious, progressive MS." Edie never thought of Thea as being "sick," but her partner was becoming increasingly crippled.
Edie eventually took early retirement to help care for Thea, and they waited and hoped for the day New York would legalize same-sex marriage. They thought of going to Canada, where same-sex marriage was legal and recognized by the state of New York, but Edie says that with all the lifts and gear that Thea needed to travel, "my feeling was I don't have to drag her though that."
Then suddenly, it was clear that the end was near.
"She got a lousy prognosis, which said within a year, and she got up the next morning and she said, 'Do you still want to get married?' "
Edie said yes. Thea said, "Me too." And they did, flying off to Toronto with "two best men and four best women."
A person should have the right to marry the one consenting adult of their choice, and get the same benefits that all the other people marrying do.
I'm against "marriage privileging" -- giving these benefits to people just because they marry -- but as long as straight people get them, gay people should get them, too.
Make Link To Me
Nasty links.
Insane Government Handouts Available To Women And Hispanics With Gardens
These USDA payouts are supposed to compensate for all the previous insane government handouts -- aka subsidized farm loans -- given to white guys.
James Bovard writes at the WSJ of the USDA's billion dollar farm payout to women and Hispanics who might've once had a thought about applying for a loan to spiffy up their backyard garden:
Are you a woman or a Hispanic who planted a backyard garden between 1981 and 2000? Did you ever dream of asking for a loan for help growing more? If so, you might be a victim of discrimination and entitled to a $50,000 payout from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But hurry--the deadline for submitting your claim is March 25.The USDA announced in September that it would award a total of at least $1.3 billion to women and Hispanics who were not offered subsidized farm loans that they applied for, or said later they would have liked to apply for, from 1981 to 2000. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, saying that his agency was following the "path to justice," invited "women and Hispanic farmers and ranchers who allege past discrimination" to come forward "to receive compensation."
...The bonanza was spurred by the Obama administration's apparent discovery of a constitutional right for every citizen to squander tax dollars while farming. Since most farm loans previously went to white males, Uncle Sam is atoning by giving awards of $50,000 apiece to claimants from other ethnic groups or the non-male gender.
But the Arent Fox law firm in Washington, D.C., and other advocates for female farmers took exception to the USDA's requirement that claimants submit solid evidence that they actually farmed or sought subsidized loans during the late 20th century.
No, I will not be applying -- though I am a woman, have killed many plants I was trying to grow, and have, at times, wished dollar bills would rain down on me as I was watering my soon-to-be-dead plants.
Bovard continues:
The real problem with federal farm loans is that they are prejudiced against common sense and sound business practices. There is no shortage of commercial loans nowadays for competent, credit-worthy farmers. USDA loan programs exist solely to let Congress steer capital to politically favored applicants. The fact that the loans often leave recipients worse off is irrelevant as long as congressmen reap campaign contributions and votes from many beneficiaries.
TSA Fail: The TSA Is Too Busy Groping Innocent People To Stop Known Terrorists
Putting massive resources into a massive fake safety program makes us less safe -- physically safe and in terms of our civil liberties being further and further eroded.
Bill Fisher writes at TSANewsBlog:
The Government Accountability Office (p.46) says behavior detection officers failed to identify 16 known terrorists as they transited airports on 23 separate occasions, as against a success rate of *zero* terrorists identified. The TSA can't find terrorists or weapons with the methods they're using.
I've pulled the relevant section from the GAO report:
Using CBP and Department of Justice information, we examined the travel of key individuals allegedly involved in six terrorist plots that have been uncovered by law enforcement agencies.We determined that at least 16 of the individuals allegedly involved in these plots moved through 8 different airports where the SPOT program had been implemented.
Six of the 8 airports were among the 10 highest risk airports, as rated by TSA in its Current Airport Threat Assessment. In total, these individuals moved through SPOT airports on at least 23 different occasions.
For example, according to Department of Justice documents, in December 2007 an individual who later pleaded guilty to providing material support to Somali terrorists boarded a plane at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport en route to Somalia to join terrorists there and engage in jihad.
Similarly, in August 2008 an individual who later pleaded guilty to providing material support to Al-Qaeda boarded a plane at Newark Liberty International Airport en route to Pakistan to receive terrorist training to support his efforts to attack the New York subway system.
Keep on fingering Granny -- you're doing a heckuva job!
Iraqi Women Are Less Free 10 Years After The Invasion Of Iraq
Saddam was a bad guy, but he kept the religious nutters from taking over. Now that he's gone, things are not good for women. Zainab Salbi blogs at uruknet:
Although the women of Iraq have obtained some benefits on paper, the reality is that they have lost far more than they have gained since the war began in 2003.On the political front, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not appointed a single woman to a senior cabinet position, despite the fact women are guaranteed 25% of the seats in parliament by the constitution. The Ministry of Women's Affairs, a poorly-funded and mostly ceremonial department, is the lone ministry headed up by a woman.
Constitutionally, women were able to secure the ability to pass their citizenship on to their children by non-Iraqi husbands, making Iraq one of a handful Arab countries with such a provision for their female citizens.
But on the other hand, women are no longer guaranteed equal treatment under one law in terms of marriage, divorce, inheritance and custody. That law, the Family Statutes Law, has been replaced one giving religious and tribal leaders the power to regulate family affairs in the areas they rule in accordance with their interpretation of religious laws.
This not only is making women more vulnerable, it is giving women from various sects (Sunni or Shia) or religion (Muslim or Christian) different legal treatments on the same issues.
Economically, women have gone from being visibly active in the Iraqi work force in the 1980s -- particularly in the farming, marketing and professional services sectors -- to being nearly non-existent in 2013.
...The saddest part of the story is the lost memory of what Iraqi women once were. I grew up in Baghdad with a working mother who drove herself to the office and always told me that I could anything I wanted with my life. My mother's friends were factory managers, artists, principals and doctors.
It has been just over 20 years since I left Iraq. Today, female college students ask me if it is true that the streets of Baghdad were once full of women driving, that women could walk around in public at all times of the day without worry, that university campuses were once filled with women who did not wearing headscarves.
Arab Spring? "Spring back," that is!
We have no business invading other countries that have not attacked and do not pose imminent danger to us, no matter how gleeful the jerks leading us get about the notion that we can spread democracy like Skippy peanutbutter.
via @charlesfrith
EEOC: Hey, Employers, Hire Criminals Or Be Sued
Wendy McElroy writes at The Freeman about the EEOC "aggressively punishing" employers who use background checks as hiring filters:
In January 2012, for example, Pepsi settled with the EEOC for $3.13 million. An EEOC press release explained that "Pepsi applied a criminal background check policy that disproportionately excluded black applicants from permanent employment." The background check was deemed to be a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pepsi also agreed to offer jobs to blacks and amend its hiring practices.
The EEOC is applying the theory of "disparate impact." A standard definition of the term is the "adverse effect of a practice or standard that is neutral and non-discriminatory in its intention but, nonetheless, disproportionately affects individuals having a disability or belonging to a particular group based on their age, ethnicity, race, or sex." In short, a hiring practice that is racially neutral in its content, application, and intent is still legally discriminatory if it adversely affects one race more than another. The EEOC views criminal background checks as discrimination against blacks solely because of its racial impact.
The Tiny Footprint Of Urban Cool In The Rust Belt
We were just talking about this the other night, a few of us, vis a vis what's happened to my hometown and Gregg's, the Motor City. There, there's the Heidelberg Project. The WSJ quotes demographer Joel Kotkin, writing at the Daily Beast on the failed "Soho-ization" of Rust Belt cities:
Perhaps the best that can be said about the creative-class idea is that it follows a real, if overhyped, phenomenon: the movement of young, largely single, childless and sometimes gay people into urban neighborhoods. This Soho-ization--the transformation of older, often industrial urban areas into hip enclaves--is evident in scores of cities. It can legitimately be credited for boosting real estate values from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago and Belltown in Seattle to Portland's Pearl District as well as much of San Francisco.Yet this footprint of such "cool" districts that appeal to largely childless, young urbanistas in the core is far smaller in most cities than commonly reported. Between 2000 and 2010, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the urban core areas of the 51 largest metropolitan areas--within two miles of the city's center--added a total of 206,000 residents. But the surrounding rings, between two and five miles from the core, actually lost 272,000. In contrast to those small gains and losses, the suburban areas--between 10 and 20 miles from the center --experienced a growth of roughly 15 million people.
The smallness of the potentially "hip" core is particularly pronounced in Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland and St. Louis, where these core districts are rarely home to more than 1 or 2 percent of the city's shrinking population. Yet the subsidy money for developers is often justified in the name of "reviving" the entire city, most of which has continued to deteriorate.
Kotkin's original article is here. Richard Florida's response is here.
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TSA: Eek! Guns In Carry-On Bags! Two Words: So. What.
Great post at TSANewsBlog by Christopher Elliott, taking the wind out of the TSA thugs' pride in how they've separated passengers and the guns they often forget are in their carry-ons:
During the last attempted hijacking, which happened in China in 2012, extremists reportedly used perfectly legal metal canes to try to take over the aircraft. They failed because passengers fought back.Guns are rarely used to hijack a plane anymore. After a rash of firearm-related incidents in the '60s and '70s, loaded weapons fell out of favor with terrorists. The last time one was used was in 2009, when a lone gunman forced his way through security onto a Canadian aircraft in Jamaica. The standoff ended with no casualties.
There's probably a bad reason why terrorists don't pack guns. Fear of an "explosive" decompression, which was debunked on a popular cable TV show a few years ago. Thanks, Hollywood.
Also, it's just too obvious.
Here's the MythBusters episode:
Elliott continues:
And yet the TSA acts as if it's stopping planes from falling out of the sky by confiscating guns from passengers -- almost all of which were inadvertently packed in a carry-on bag.Consider, for example, the recent case of Robert Kellerman of Long Pond, Pa., who was arrested by Port Authority Police officers in Newark. His "crime"? Accidentally packing his gun in his carry-on luggage. Was Kellerman going to run the plane into a skyscraper or reroute it to Cuba? No. It appears he didn't even know he'd packed the weapon.
Same thing goes for 52-year-old Christopher Ledford of Kennesaw, Ga., who was arrested at the Atlanta airport for bringing a gun through a TSA checkpoint in early February. At the time, he was the ninth air traveler of the year whose gun was confiscated by agents in Atlanta.
These passengers are guilty of only one thing: being forgetful.
Sure, an armed passenger could shoot somebody on a plane -- or in a mall, or blow them away Clint Eastwood-style while walking down the sidewalk.
The fact remains: Guns don't bring down planes.
Oh, P.S., Gregg and I have a friend in the LAPD who spoke at a conference a few years ago, and went into his laptop back on the plane on the way there and whoops, found his gun, which he'd forgotten to leave home.
Why "Gender Differences" In Jobs, Etc., May Actually Reflect Societal Progress
Interesting piece at AEI by Christina Hoff Sommers, commenting on what she sees as pie-in-the-sky 70s feminism in Sheryl Sandberg's just-published book:
Sandberg envisions a time where gender roles all but disappear. "A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes." She blames society for tricking little girls into liking princesses and little boys into preferring superheroes. "The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies."...Sandberg's goal is to liberate her fellow Americans from the stereotypes of gender. But is that truly liberating? In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat. But the most fascinating finding is this: Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, "Higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of sex difference variation across cultures." New York Times science columnist John Tierney summarized the study this way: "It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France."
Why should that be? The authors of the study hypothesize that prosperity and equality bring greater opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are. It is conspicuously the case that gay liberation is a feature of advanced, prosperous societies: but such societies also afford heterosexuals more opportunities to embrace their gender identities. This cross-cultural research is far from conclusive, but it is intriguing and has great explanatory power. Just think: What if gender difference turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being?
Consider, in this regard, the gender disparities in engineering. An article on the Wharton School website laments the paucity of women engineers and holds up China and Russia as superior examples of equity. According to the post, "In China, 40 percent of engineers are women, and in the former USSR, women accounted for 58 percent of the engineering workforce." The author blames workplace biases and stereotypes for the fact that women in the United States earn only 20 percent of the doctoral degrees in engineering. But perhaps American women earn fewer degrees in engineering because they don't have to. They have more opportunities to pursue careers that really interest them. American women may be behind men in engineering, but they now earn a majority of all Ph.Ds and outnumber men in humanities, biology, social sciences, and health sciences. Despite 40 years of consciousness-raising and gender-neutral pronouns, most men and women still gravitate to different fields and organize their lives in different ways. Women in countries like Sweden, Norway and Iceland enjoy elaborate supportive legislation, yet their vocational preferences and family priorities are similar to those of American women.
...An up-to-date manifesto on women and work should steer clear of encounter groups and boys-must-play-with dolls rhetoric. It should make room for human reality: that in the pursuit of happiness, men and women often take different paths. Gender differences can sometimes be symptoms of oppression and subordination. But in a modern society they can also be the felicitous consequences of liberated choice--of the "free to be you and me" that women have been working towards for generations.
via @arthurbrooks
The Color That Matters Most Is Green
Walter Williams writes at the WashEx that sometimes what people see as racial discrimination is another kind of discrimination altogether:
In 2000, black applicants were turned down for prime mortgage loans twice as often as whites; however, white applicants were turned down nearly twice as often as Asian-Americans.The racial discrimination explanation requires that we believe that white bankers racially discriminate not only against blacks but against whites, as well. It also requires that we believe that black-owned banks are in cahoots with white-owned banks, because they, too, turn down black mortgage applicants more often than white applicants. The true explanation is not rocket science. Lenders prefer to lend to people who will pay them back. Average credit scores are higher among whites than blacks and higher among Asian-Americans than whites.
If I'm a lender, trying to make money by making smart loans, I'd be an idiot to discriminate on anything other than how likely you are to pay me back. Some lenders may not like black people -- or white people or Asians.
Again, the bottom line, even with the haters, has to be the bottom line.
Then you can buy a huge mansion or even an island and only invite in people from the race or races you're okay with.
This makes you a person I don't want to have anything to do with, but if you are a lender, lending on the basis of the green, it makes you a smart lender and probably a rich-as-shit one.
Muslim Clerics Turn Jihad Supporters For Job Security
From The Economist, a study by Harvard's Rich Nielsen found, by studying the output and biographies of 91 Salafi clerics and almost 400 of their students, that the main factors behind radicalism in Muslim clerics are not poverty or their teachers' ideology but the poor quality of their academic and educational networks:
Such contacts determined the clerics' ability to get a good job as imam or teacher in state institutions. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where most of the 91 came from, the government has long co-opted religious institutions. Those who failed to land a job were more likely to avow violence as a tool for political change.The figures are startling. Clerics with the best academic connections had a 2-3% chance of becoming jihadist. This rose to 50% for the badly networked.
Mr Nielsen reckons he has proved causation by controlling for other factors--eliminating the chance that those more inclined to extremism shun state jobs, for example. "It's about a glass ceiling," he says. "Clerics who don't get positions must compete to appeal to an audience. Jihadist views are a way of making themselves appear credible, since there is often a high cost associated with it, such as prison time."
Loose Links Sink Kitchens
There's either meaning in there or somebody gave my brain a wedgie.
Marriage-Minded Overcompensating: The Supposed Trend In Pricey, Elaborate Proposals
The NY Post reports on a supposed trend in New York -- of a need for elaborate and costly wedding proposals.
The headline of the Kate Storey piece in The New York Post:
I spent $45,000 on my proposal
Just getting down on bended knee is no longer enough. Popping the question is now a scripted spectacle requiring an elaborate production team of choreographers, cameramen and assistants
An excerpt from her piece:
The sun was setting on the rooftop of the McKittrick Hotel, home of the interactive play "Sleep No More," when Nataliya Lavryshyn and Josh Ogle proclaimed their love for one another last year.Pages from Pablo Neruda's love poems were scattered about, and the pair held hands while Ogle slid a $21,000 diamond ring onto Lavryshyn's left hand, as a small crowd looked on. Afterward, a 1932 Hupmobile whisked them away to the posh restaurant Daniel, where they had dinner in the exclusive skybox, served by executive chef Daniel Boulud.
The next day, the couple jetted off to Greece and France for two weeks, where they stayed in private villas and honeymoon suites.
The whole shebang cost roughly $45,000.
And that was just the wedding proposal.
When it comes to popping the question, New York grooms-to-be are shelling out thousands of dollars to produce elaborate will-you-marry-me? moments. Such over-the-top engagements have even spawned a thriving industry -- proposal planning.
...And what did Lavryshyn -- who said yes, by the way -- think about her guy getting help from a professional?
"Before this whole thing, I didn't know there were proposal planners," says Lavryshyn, who was dating Ogle for several months before he popped the question. "I thought the guy would just have the creativity by himself. But it was all amazing."
She dated him for "several months" before he popped the question?
And she answered yes to spending the rest of her life with a near-stranger? Genius.
But forget their idiotic approach -- what do you think of these elaborate proposals? Ladies? Men?
As my headline notes, I think many these guys may be overcompensating for something. This sort of extravagant proposal sells a guy to a woman for stuff other than the substance of him. Sure, it could be said he wants to delight her -- but if she isn't delighted simply by the fact that you want to spend the rest of your life with her (a life which may go on for quite some time, thanks to modern medicine), well, what do you really have?
Essentially, I think wedding proposal extravagance is for weenies. And maybe for people who don't have much of a relationship but are trying to distract from that with a lot of fanfare.
UPDATE: Tell how you proposed or how you were proposed to, or particularly charming proposals you know of (from people you know -- no urban legends!)
India Is For Rapists: Was Their Tent Too Short?
A Swiss tourist reported being gang raped in India while camping with her husband, and Sean McLain reports in the Independent that an Indian police inspector says she has to share blame for the attack:
Tonight, a spokesman for Madhya Pradesh police caused anger by suggesting that the Swiss woman and her husband were partly to blame for the attack. Inspector Avnesh Kumar Budholiya said the tourists had been careless in travelling to a remote part of the country they knew little about."No one stops there," he said. "Why did they choose that place? They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would have passed a police station on the way to the area they camped. They should have stopped and asked about places to sleep."
Neerja Ahlawat, sociologist and deputy director of the women's studies centre at Maharshi Dayanand University in Haryana said: "This is typical of all the cases that take place in India. The police don't want to take responsibility. Indian women are not safe, in small towns, villages or the big cities, partly because the police are not assuming responsibility for keeping women safe. They blame the dark, the clothes a woman wears, everything but their shirking of their duties."
At least this is suggesting to Western women that going to India is a great idea if your dream vacation involves being gang-raped.
Just Say No To Hugs!
From WJLA, the latest in psycho school administrating -- a proposed ban on hugs for those visiting elementary school campuses (as if this is actually a problem and not just an idea of a problem):
PTA President Trisha Post explained, "The idea of being on a playground and having somebody come up and hug your children makes some parents uncomfortable.""We have had several incidents where a parent would come in to visit a child and then ends up interacting with a lot of our students," Bowling said.
So parents, principals and administrators have been meeting to come up with an even tighter security policy. Not only have they talked about no hugs and no food, but they've discussed a limit on lunchtime and recess visits, as well as a ban on handing out birthday invitations.
"Sometimes I think they go overboard," said parent Donna Brennan.
But St. Mary's County Public Schools Superintendent Michael Matriano countered, "We want to make certain that our parents know when they send their children to us, they have intrusted us to keep them safe."
Wouldn't parents feel safest if schools didn't have dribbling idiots managing them?
And the fact that some parents are psycho to the point of damaging their children isn't reason to coddle them; it's reason to tell them to get help.
Three of my radio shows would set them straight -- Dr. Gabrielle Principe on the science behind why the overstructured, overscheduled childhood is bad for kids. Free Range Kids' Lenore Skenazy. And my show from this Sunday, with Dr. Peter Gray, on why kids learn better through play, and why our schools should be run on democratic principles instead of fascist ones.
Why Is Your Child's Safety The Responsibility Of Some Stranger Who Sold You Instant Soup?
Angie Angers and Susan Hogan write at WPRI about a California mom planning to sue a maker of instant noodle soup in the wake of her 3-year-old son being severely burned after the soup spilled on him:
Burn doctors across the country say instant cups of soup may pose a serious hazard to children, and it may have to do with how the containers are designed.3-year-old Jolan Beam suffered severe burns after his mom says a cup of hot noodle soup spilled on him.
"He climbed into his seat, so I guess my daughter realized he was there so she went to move the noodles, and as she went to move them, it toppled over and it just spilled in his lap completely," said Jolan's mother Latisha.
Latisha says the hot soup caused second and third degree burns to his lap, requiring numerous skin grafts. She says Jolan has had four operations already and will need more.
I'm thinking suing her daughter or herself would prove far less lucrative.
(Friends of mine who are parents test the temperature of food before they serve it to their toddlers.)
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Two "Promising" Young Rapists
I've been remiss in not blogging this yet, but David Edwards' piece at TheRawStory gave me the kick in the ass I needed. His headline:
CNN grieves that guilty verdict ruined 'promising' lives of Steubenville rapists
An excerpt from his piece:
CNN broke the news on Sunday of a guilty verdict in a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio by lamenting that the "promising" lives of the rapists had been ruined, but spent very little time focusing on how the 16-year-old victim would have to live with what was done to her....CNN's Candy Crowley began her breaking news report by showing Lipps handing down the sentence and telling CNN reporter Poppy Harlow that she "cannot imagine" how emotional the sentencing must have been.
Harlow explained that it had been "incredibly difficult" to watch "as these two young men -- who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students -- literally watched as they believed their life fell apart."
"One of the young men, Ma'lik Richmond, as that sentence came down, he collapsed," the CNN reporter recalled, adding that the convicted rapist told his attorney that "my life is over, no one is going to want me now."
At that point, CNN played video of Richmond crying and hugging his lawyer in the courtroom.
"I was sitting about three feet from Ma'lik when he gave that statement," Harlow said. "It was very difficult to watch."
Me? I found it very difficult to look at that photo of the two guys carrying her limp, apparently unconscious body around.
What The Israelis Do When They Aren't Fighting Off The Arabs Who Want Them Dead
Walter Russell Mead blogged this incredible invention -- an exoskeleton that allows paraplegics to walk again:
Incredible sight to see.
Mad Cow
Hilarious video of guy -- Nathan Bverbeez -- testing out his new video camera, finding that taunting cows may not end well.(Warning: Video opens with shot of dead cow.)
Neetan Zimmerman explains at Gawker:
Bverbeez decided to shoot some still footage of a dead cow for some reason.After a minute he noticed a herd of cattle drifting in his direction, but wasn't initially concerned because cows.
...Not his brightest idea, as he would quickly learn while sprinting away for dear life.
I don't know that Neetan is analyzing livestock psychology just right, but the video calls to mind the when one of a friends' goats once had a crush on me. It was rather terrifying.
Krauthammer Wrong On This: "Outside American Soil, The Constitution Does Not Rule"
He was going after Rand Paul, writes Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:
That Paul became the first US Senator on the Senate floor to utter the name "Abdulrahaman Awlaki" - the 16-year-old US-born citizen killed by a US drone in Yemen - bolsters Krauthammer's claim that the Paul filibuster was about more than just the use of force on US soil, but rather posed a challenge to the War on Terror premises generally. That is precisely why Krauthammer - along with all other neocons and, notably, many Democratic Party Obama-supporters - are desperate to discredit the Paul filibuster and the sentiments it stoked: regardless of Paul's motives, the filibuster called into question both the wisdom and legality of the entire Endless War approach to Terrorism.But to discredit this, Krauthammer makes a claim about the US Constitution that is so patently false as to be retraction-worthy. He writes (emphasis added):
"Now we're talking about a larger, more controversial issue: the killing-by-drone in Yemen of al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule, no matter how much Paul would like it to."
Greenwald points out:
Think about what it would mean if Krauthammer's claim were true: does anyone think it would be constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment for the US government to wait until an American critic of the Pentagon travels on vacation to London and then kill him, or to bomb a bureau of the New York Times located in Paris in retaliation for a news article it disliked, or to indefinitely detain with no trial an American who travels to Beijing or Lima or Oslo and who is suspected of committing a crime?
Greenwald supports this further at the link.
What I don't support is the "War on Terror" that has us leaving a trail of American soldiers' bodies in the Middle East and has us sending our tax dollars to try to bribe countries whose cultures don't support democracy in the slightest into becoming democracies.
If you know anything about Islam, you know Muslim cultures do not provide a fertile bed -- or any bed -- for free expression, freedom of religion, and the like. Just ask all those people in Iran now on trial for being Christian. (Though the state charged them with things that obfuscate that a little.)
via @jayrosen_nyu
Feinstein Panders Her Best On Legislation That She Knows Will Never Pass
From The Week, Jeb Golinkin writes about the proposed assault weapons ban and Feinstein's using it to grease her coffers. And she isn't the only one. What pandering you find on the left, you also find Cruz-ing along on the right:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is a very bright woman and a very good politician. When she proposed the new AWB, she knew there was a zero percent chance that it would become law. But she also knew that the people who voted for her are, by and large, anti-gun. More importantly, as the author of the original Brady Bill, Sen. Feinstein is widely viewed as the darling of the anti-gun movement and its allies. By proposing the AWB, Sen. Feinstein can tell all of the donors who care about the gun issue that she fought for the most aggressive legislation possible, and that she will keep fighting -- which will lead to more donations.Feinstein is not the only senator loving every second of coverage of the Senate's consideration of a bill that will literally never even get a vote in the House of Representatives. The most vocal members of the right are also loving it. Take Ted Cruz, for example. By now, you have probably seen the "heated" exchange between Feinstein and the fiery junior senator from Texas, in which Cruz lectures Feinstein about the Second Amendment and Feinstein snaps back that she is not a sixth grader. Well, that was gold, for both of the senators.
...So everyone wins, right? Wrong.
The biggest loser is the American people. Political symbolism has value, but there are too many problems that Congress might actually have the capacity to solve for our leaders to be spending all of their time focused on proposals both sides know will never make it to the president's desk. That applies to House Republicans (stop repealing ObamaCare, it's a waste of time) and Senate Democrats (stop wasting time on gun control measures you know will not pass). Our leaders must get out of the habit of wasting taxpayer resources drafting, amending, debating, and voting on legislation that has no chance of becoming law. Solve the problems you can, and save the individual wish lists for public speeches and your Maddow/Hannity appearances.
How The Tax Man Transformed What Music People Listened To
Eric Felten writes in the WSJ of the stiff wartime "cabaret tax" -- a ruinous 30% (later merely a destructive 20%) excise applied to all receipts at any venue that served food or drink and allowed dancing, leading to the end of the Big Band era:
The name of the "cabaret tax" suggested the bite would be reserved for swanky boîtes such as the Stork Club, posh "roof gardens," and other elegant venues catering to the rich.But shortly after the tax was imposed, the Bureau of Internal Revenue offered this expansive definition of where it applied: "A roof garden or cabaret shall include any room in any hotel, restaurant, hall or other public place where music or dancing privileges or any other entertainment, except instrumental or mechanical music alone, is afforded the patrons in connection with the serving or selling of food, refreshments or merchandise."
The tax hit not just swells, but anyone who liked to go out dancing--which in those days included just about everyone who went out at all.
...The tax-law regulation's other exception had the biggest impact. Clubs that provided strictly instrumental music to which no one danced were exempt from the cabaret tax. It is no coincidence that in the back half of the 1940s a new and undanceable jazz performed primarily by small instrumental groups--bebop--emerged as the music of the moment.
"The spotlight was on instrumentalists because of the prohibitive entertainment taxes," the great bebop drummer Max Roach was quoted in jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's memoirs, "To Be or Not to Bop." "You couldn't have a big band because the big band played for dancing."
The federal excise tax inadvertently spurred the bebop revolution: "If somebody got up to dance, there would be 20% more tax on the dollar. If someone got up there and sang a song, it would be 20% more," Roach said. "It was a wonderful period for the development of the instrumentalist."
Bebop radically transformed jazz. But how differently might the aesthetic impulse behind bebop have been expressed if it had been allowed to develop organically instead of in an atmosphere where dancing was discouraged by the taxman? Jazz might have remained a highly sophisticated popular music instead of becoming an artsy niche.
The cabaret tax was finally eliminated in 1965.
What We Got Promised And What We Got (From The Obama Presidency)
"Lifelong Democrat" Ted Van Dyk, who served in Democratic national administrations and on Democratic campaigns over several decades, writes in the WSJ:
Mr. Obama was elected in 2008 on the basis of his persona and his pledge to end political and ideological polarization. His apparent everyone-in-it-together idealism was exactly what the country wanted and needed. On taking office, however, the president adopted a my-way-or-the-highway style of governance. He pursued his stimulus and health-care proposals on a congressional-Democrats-only basis. He rejected proposals of his own bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, which would have provided long-term deficit reduction and stabilized rapidly growing entitlement programs. He opted instead to demonize Republicans for their supposed hostility to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.No serious attempt--for instance, by offering tort reform or allowing the sale of health-insurance products across state lines--was made to enlist GOP congressional support for the health bill. It passed, but the constituents of moderate Democrats punished them: 63 lost their seats in 2010 and Republicans took control of the House.
Faced with a similar situation in 1995, following another GOP House takeover, President Bill Clinton shifted to bipartisan governance. Mr. Obama did not, then blamed Republicans for their "obstructionism" in not yielding to him.
Defying the odds, Mr. Obama did become the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to be re-elected with an election-year unemployment rate above 7.8%. Yet his victory wasn't based on public affirmation of his agenda. Instead, it was based on a four-year mobilization--executed with unprecedented skill--of core Democratic constituencies, and on fear campaigns in which Mitt Romney and the Republicans were painted as waging a "war on women," being servants of the wealthy, and of being hostile toward Latinos, African Americans, gays and the middle class. I couldn't have imagined any one of the Democratic presidents or presidential candidates I served from 1960-92 using such down-on-all-fours tactics.
...former Democratic presidents would also know today that no Democratic or liberal agenda can go forward if debt service is eating available resources. Nor can successful governance take place if presidential and Democratic Party rhetoric consistently portrays loyal-opposition leaders as having devious or extremist motives. We really are, as Mr. Obama pointed out in 2008, in it together.
It's not too late for the president to take a cue from his predecessors and enter good-faith budget negotiations with congressional Republicans. A few posturing meetings with GOP congressional leaders will not suffice. President Obama's hype about the horrors of fiscal-cliff and sequestration cuts, and his placing of blame on Republicans, have been correctly viewed as low politics. His approval ratings have plunged since the end of the sequestration exercise.
Unfortunately, where both parties can agree to agree is on the idea that they really just want to keep spending us senseless while pretending not to.
Linkalicious
Yummy, horrible things from all over the Internet. Post them here.
Advice Goddess Radio -- Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Peter Gray, Why Play And Principles Of Democracy Are The Keys To Educating Kids
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
This show, rather unbelievably, ties in two of my interests -- libertarian philosophy and evidence-based science as a guide for behavior.
Developmental psychologist Dr. Peter Gray will explain why our current educational system is actually counterproductive to educating kids. Our way of schooling kids ignores our evolved psychology and how children actually learn, and removes children's natural joy of learning from them in the process.
It turns out that schooling based on the principles of a democracy -- applied to children -- is highly effective schooling for keeping kids engaged, helping them develop self-control, and helping them develop to their fullest and become highly productive adults living meaningful lives.
Peter's fascinating book: Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
Join us for an exciting and controversial show that will topple much of what you -- and we all -- believe about how to educate kids.
Listen at this link at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/18/dr-peter-gray-why-kids-learn-better-through-play
And don't miss last week's show with University of Chicago psychologist and researcher Dr. Sian Beilock explaining why we choke under pressure and how we can avoid doing it.
Her book is Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
Listen here at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/11/dr-sian-bielock-how-not-to-choke-under-pressure
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes.
Dog Teach Dog
Love this video of a big dog teaching a puppy how to go down stairs, which relates to one of the subjects of my radio show tonight, how kids learn from associating with kids both older and younger:
The Internet Is/Is Not Destroying The World, Civility, And Human Relationships, And Eating People's Brains
People forget that, more than two centuries before smart phones, blogs, and Twitter, the Founding Fathers slung mud like nobody's business.
For example, Libby Copeland writes that it was said that if Jefferson got elected, men's wives and daughters would be legalized hookers in short order.
And Lincoln compared Douglas to an "obstinate animal," adding, "I mean no disrespect."
There are, rather consistently, these articles saying the Internet has ruined life as we know it, "leading us towards an inevitable breakdown in both human interaction and civility."
Isn't it just a tool -- like a knife -- that can be used to cut an apple or stab somebody to death?
Biden Staffer Decides First Amendment Doesn't Exist Around Gaffe-Prone Important People
Yes, disgustingly, this is an aide to the Vice President of this country acting like the Constitution goes away around Important People.
Biden gave a speech at a university, Jonathan Turley blogs:
A Biden aide proceeded to threaten a student journalist about taking pictures of Biden and [Biden staffer] Dana Rosenzweig proceeded to demand that the student delete his pictures and show her his cellphone. While the Biden office has apologized to the university, it is unclear why this staffer still has a job after such a thuggish confrontation with a journalist....It was not until a formal complaint was lodged by the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism's dean, Lucy A. Dalglish that Biden's office responded. Dalglish rightfully called the incident "pure intimidation."
Barkoff later insisted to Dalglish (still not making any public comment) that the incident was a "total miscommunication." Miscommunication? A miscommunication is sending press to the wrong bus. Forcing the deletion of photos and search a journalist's iPhone is a bit more than a miscommunication. It is an act of intimidation and abuse. So why is there no confirmation of Rosenzweig being disciplined? Even if this reporter was sitting in the non-press section, he identified himself. Moreover, I would be equally upset with citizens being treated in this fashion.
Regulators: "Shove That Uncooked S'More Up Your Ass, Bub!" (Trying For Yet Another Ban On Fun.)
From KMPH, "air quality regulators" are considering a ban on beach bonfires in LA and Orange Counties:
The South Coast Air Quality Management District staff presented such a proposal to the board on Friday.The California Coastal Commission has delayed voting on whether the city of Newport Beach can remove 60 beach fire rings because it first wants the AQMD to offer a recommendation about the pollution the fires create. The commission's staff recommends that the rings stay for the sake of preserving low-cost recreational facilities on the beaches.
Hip-Hip-Hypocrite! (Meet Rep. Pothead)
A New York State assemblyman who voted against medical marijuana was caught driving with a baggie of pot in his car. Kenneth Lovett writes for the NY Daily News:
Assemblyman Steve Katz, 59, a conservative Republican from the Hudson Valley, was pulled over on the state Thruway for going 80 miles an hour in a 65 mph zone when a trooper detected a "slight odor" of marijuana, state police spokesman Sgt. Don Baker said.The trooper asked Katz if there was any pot in the car - and the assemblyman said "yes" and handed over a small bag that contained less than 25 grams, Baker said.
The trooper did not see evidence that Katz was driving while impaired so he ticketed him for unlawful possession of marijuana, a noncriminal violation, and speeding -- and let him drive off, Baker said.
...As as assemblyman, Katz last year voted against a bill to legalize medicinal marijuana.
In a mailer to his constituents, he talked about how "our community has been stricken with an increase in drug use and drunk driving by our youngest citizens."
And on March 8, he put out a statement decrying his community's "struggle against illegal drug culture and the abuse of narcotics."
I would say that the abuse he's most guilty of is supporting the absolutely uncalled-for government squeeze on our liberties by punishing citizens -- often with incarceration -- for possession and smoking of a plant the government has deemed illegal.
Linktagious
Spread 'em here...
Places Your Car Stereo's AWESOME!!! Bass Should Not Go
Place number one: In my ears -- and my spinal cord, through the vibrations -- both of which are in my house, with all the doors and windows closed, as you drive your inconsiderate ass through my neighborhood with your car windows open and your car stereo set on the volume "blast the shit out of other people."
Speaking of shit: This is the audio version of stopping in front of a person's house, pulling down your pants, and taking a big poo on their lawn.
Asshole.
Was your mother off with the sailors when she was supposed to be teaching you to be considerate of other people?
Obama Flies 747 To Chicago To Tout His Fuel-Saving Plan
From Andrew Malcolm at IBD, who captions the photo of Obama coming off the 747 like so:
"I'm going on my large plane now and you're not."
When Some Government Lackey Goes Bully On You
Wise advice from Popehat's Ken White -- "The Trick In Dealing With Government: Find The Grown-Up In The Room":
Some consequences -- often, but not always, inflicted by the government -- are illegitimate. Warren, a business owner who writes at Coyote Blog, encountered such a consequence. When he expressed himself on his blog and linked to a negative Yelp review of a government agency, a functionary from that agency threatened him with loss of government contracts:Well, one day I got a letter via email from a regional manager of the state parks agency whose park was the subject of that Yelp review I linked. I was notified that I had 48 hours to remove that blog post or I would lose all my contracts with that state. In particular, they did not like a) the fact that I linked to a negative Yelp review of one of their parks and b) that I impugned the incredibly noble idea that state parks are all operated by law enforcement officials.There are a lot of things Warren could have done. I'm sure there are a lot of things he was tempted to do, as I would have been. Instead of doing the most viscerally satisfying thing, the most "just" thing, or the most "righteous" thing, Warren did the most effective thing for his business and for the immediate preservation of his freedom of speech: he engaged with the grown-up in the room.
Love what Warren did -- wrote to the General Counsel of the agency, asking her to clarify the boundaries of prior restraint (on speech) vis a vis his doing business with them. Read the rest at the link.
Civil Liberties On US Soil: Police Drones Aren't Just Small Helicopters
Simon McCormack writes at the HuffPo that proponents of the use of police drones in the US claim that they're a lot like police helicopters, which have been in use for decades:
In a blogpost, the American Civil Liberties Union argues that there are important distinctions between the two types of surveillance tools.For one thing, helicopters are far more expensive than drones. "Manned helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft are expensive to acquire, staff, and maintain. A police helicopter costs from $500,000 to $3 million to acquire, and $200-$400 an hour to fly," according to the ACLU.
That means mass use of helicopters by police departments is prohibitively pricey.
By comparison, the ACLU argues, "it's easy to foresee a day when even a professional police drone could be acquired for less than a hundred dollars, including maintenance costs."
Drones can also get places that helicopters can't, meaning they run the risk of becoming more invasive, producing greater privacy concerns, the group said.
"Even the smallest manned helicopter can't fly into a garage or hover unseen outside a third-story bedroom window," the post said.
Drones can also hover silently for days, unlike noisy helicopters that can't stay in the air for nearly as long.
As it is, I'm opposed to the overuse of LAPD helicopters, which costs a bundle. I follow a cop-watcher on Twitter, and several times daily, I'll see even minor crimes being reported being met with "airship on its way."
We shouldn't let the existence of technology drive the erosion of our civil liberties. Because technology exists doesn't mean it's right to use.
Any Kind Of Speech Is RACISM! (When Convenient)
Witness the Twitter exchange. I was searching for something on Twitter, and came upon a tweet from @mehreenkasana. She's since deleted it, so I'll describe it.
Mehreen Kasana tweeted a link to a photo of a woman (I think in Pakistan or some other primitive-istan) getting flowers for some ridiculous International Women's Day.
Kasana noted how wunnnnderful it was that she was getting a flower, failing to take note of the most obvious thing in the picture: The woman was covered head-to-toe in a blue burka -- effectively erasing the identity, individualism, and visibility she would have as a human being with a face.
It rendered the woman what Islam sees women as -- possessions of men, with half the rights of a man.
I tweeted:
@amyalkon
@mehreenkasana What's not beautiful is the woman with a tablecloth over her head to prevent her from being seen as rape fodder - or a person
And got this loveliness back:
@mehreenkasana
@amyalkon White woman injects her unwanted racist opinion to look "progressive." Heard this reductive shit before 100 times. Shoo, laanti.
What's racist, of course, is the notion that I am for individualism and human rights for Muslim women because I am white.
Is it "reductive" to think Islam is appalling -- Islam, which stones women for "adultery," allots a woman half the rights of a man, vaginally mutilates them against their will, and allows men to beat them if they don't leave visible bruises?
What I'd call anyone who would oppose me for being opposed to this is one sick fuck.
You?
UPDATE: Turns out I was able to tweet to her. And this is what I tweeted:
@amyalkon
@mehreenkasana I oppose Muslim stonings of women, beatings by husbands, & giving them half rights of men because I'm white -- or civilized?
Here's her website -- where I actually found the tweet:
@mehreenkasana
This is so beautiful. 1000 flowers were distributed around Kabul to celebrate Women's Day. afghanistaninphotos.tumblr.com/post/449306199... #Afghanistan
And the photo: 
Guess what, lady: It'll be "women's day" when they aren't forced to go around with a blue tablecloth over their head, lest the Muslim men around them throw acid on them, rape them, or worse.
International "I'm Embarrassed" Day
Apparently, March 8 was "International Woman's Day."
Thanks, but I don't need a holiday because I have a vagina.
A Great Way To Get Coconut Oil Without Eating It
Thanks to the person who ordered this from Amazon, giving me the kickback: NOW Foods Virgin Coconut Oil 1000mg, 120 Softgels
And actually, that one above requires you to take three capsules to get the 1,000 milligrams, and this requires just one capsule: Jarrow Formulas Coconut Oil (Extra Virgin), 1000mg, 100% Certified Organic, 120 Softgels
I'm going to get Gregg to order the latter ones, because coconut oil is really healthy -- but, like many people, he can't seem to get into the idea of heating it with half-and-half and putting it in tea, and he should be consuming it daily for the Medium Chain Triglycerides.
I also think it may help keep me from getting sick. I'm under a huge amount of stress right now, due to my book deadline, and working rather punishing hours. (When I turn my book in, I'm going to go to a park and drool for a week.
Regarding Amazon, for other purchases, search here: Amy gets credit at Amazon with this link.
And thanks to all who buy through my Amazon links. Your purchases help fund this site and keep my lights on, and are much-appreciated.
Crass And Tasteless Links, Meet Here
Frolic in the tall grasses and weave daisies into your hair.
Popehat On The Police Misconduct And The Presumption That Police Officers Are Telling The Truth
Ken White writes at Popehat about a cop, Armando Saldate, Jr., who was judged to be a liar on four occasions and a lawbreaker on five others -- information that was withheld from in trial of Debra Milke:
The State of Arizona, based on almost nothing but Saldate's word, has been trying to kill Debra Jean Milke for nearly a quarter-century. Today the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said they can't.Two men murdered Debra Milke's four-year-old son, Christopher. Armando Saldate, Jr. claimed that she confessed involvement in the crime to him. He claimed that she did so in a private interrogation he conducted without recording it -- though he had been specifically instructed to record it. There was no physical evidence against Milke. The two men who killed her son did not implicate her -- in fact, they denied she was involved. The case against her rested on Saldate's word. The prosecutors -- the State of Arizona -- accepted Saldate's word uncritically.
...Multiple courts had found that Armando Saldate, Jr. had committed misconduct violating the rights of defendants ... [and] had lied repeatedly under oath ...
Yes, these facts might have led jurors to doubt the word of Armando Saldate, Jr. The State of Arizona -- through its prosecutors -- eliminated that dangerous possibility by withholding Saldate's record from the defense in the prosecution of Debra Milke. As Judge Kozinski said in today's Ninth Circuit opinion:
This history includes a five-day suspension for taking "liberties" with a female motorist and then lying about it to his supervisors; four court cases where judges tossed out confessions or indictments because Saldate lied under oath; and four cases where judges suppressed confessions or vacated convictions because Saldate had violated the Fifth Amendment or the Fourth Amendment in the course of interrogations. And it is far from clear that this reflects a full account of Saldate's misconduct as a police officer. See pp. 24-25 infra. All of this information should have been disclosed to Milke and the jury, but the state remained unconstitutionally silent.
The Ninth Circuit's opinion overturning her conviction is here.
In Washington, D.C., The Sinkhole Is Redundant
A sinkhole opened up in the city that is the sinkhole for American taxpayer dollars.
Postrel On The Mommy Track Without The Shame
Virginia Postrel calls motherhood "the Middle East of social controversy":
Despite the efforts of would-be peacemakers, impassioned partisans continue battling to claim all the territory as their own. My way, they declare, is the one right way to be a good mother, a real woman, a fulfilled human being.
Postrel, in the WSJ, looks back to the late Felice Schwartz's 1989 Harvard Business Review article "Management Women and the New Facts of Life":
...or, as it was immediately and derisively labeled, "The Mommy Track."Ms. Schwartz, who died in 1996, began with the idea that not all professional women are alike. Some focus primarily on careers, making "the same trade-offs traditionally made by the men who seek leadership positions." But most want children, and once they have kids, these "talented and creative" women, "are willing to trade some career growth and compensation for freedom from the constant pressure to work long hours and weekends."
Instead of treating such women as pathetic losers to be jettisoned for a new crop of recruits, she argued, companies should recognize them as a "precious resource." Such women could bring experience, continuity and talent to middle-management jobs traditionally occupied by short-termers on their way up or "mediocre" men whose ambitions outstripped their ability.
To retain these productive women, wise employers should offer more flexibility, including part-time arrangements. This accommodation would, in most cases, mean slower promotions and lower pay. But, Ms. Schwartz maintained, "most career-and-family women are entirely willing to make that trade-off."
You just couldn't say so in public. Lower pay for less work offended the reigning idea of a serious career. Ms. Schwartz, critics charged, wanted to consign women to "dead-end jobs."
Women, Postrel notes, are no longer making the all-or-nothing choice -- but they are opting for fewer hours, part-time positions, and more family-friendly choices, like using an MBA to start a private consulting business.
The way I see it, the problem comes when so many are quick to say women are paid unfairly. Do the time, make the dime, you could say.
And a question: Are women who are not MBAs and otherwise in high positions allowed this leeway? I would guess not.
On a related note, a friend of mine works only four days a week so she can be home on Friday with her kids. She should make less than a person who works a five-day week -- of course. It was worth it to her boss to accommodate her to keep her -- but, let's be honest, the need for accommodations like this may make many employers hire men instead of women, since women are usually the primary caregivers.
The Merits Of Having Heroin As Legal (And Regulated) As Chewing Gum
Bill Fried writes at Alternet about what it would be like if heroin were legal, taking away the power from the street thugs and the international cartels:
If you plan to go into the chewing gum business, you'll soon learn that the state will not let you:· sell fruit juice or beer and call it chewing gum,In short, what must be in, what must not be in, what you can say about, and who can sell chewing gum, are all regulated. There's no age restriction on purchase, any more than there is on the purchase of aspirin. But make no mistake, this benign substance is heavily and appropriately regulated. And if it weren't? How would you feel about a child being offered a pack of gum--attractively packaged and half price-- containing one part per 1,000 of energy boosting strychnine and no government body charged with preventing this?
· put floor shavings or dangerous chemicals in your chewing gum,
· claim your chewing gum cures cancer,
· hire people to sell your chewing gum on the street without a license....Who regulates heroin? Who sets its potency, price and age limits, who profits from it, sets its tax rate, and decides whether it is marketed to our children?
Street thugs and international cartels. Feeling safer?
Prohibition creates the incentive-laden, free-for-all street anarchy that snares our children as sellers and users. Legalization, paradoxically, means regulation. Meaningful regulation.
It is safe to say that in a country which regulates chewing gum and licenses hair dressers, legal heroin will be tightly regulated, and correctly so. It will be seen as a dangerous, adult-only drug that some can handle without incident, but others cannot. Just like alcohol, only stronger.
Linked Out
Anti-social networking...
The Burbank-Glendale Pasadena Airport Authority Police: Moonlighting As Your Friendly Neighborhood Pot Dispensary?
Note the green cross on their logo at their website.
Genius.
Your tax dollars at...sleep.
Also, the design is cartoonishly ugly.
P.S. Is that a drug scale?!
Email: Your Pet Peeves?
I'm writing the section on email for the Internet manners/rudeness chapter of my next book, and I'm wondering about your experiences with/thinking about email: What's rude, what's annoying, what's smart in the ways people email you and others?
TSA Spokesjerk Bob Whines That Bombs Are Too Hard To Spot Unless They Are Right Out Of A Roadrunner Cartoon
Bombs are too hard to detect by the TSA's force of unskilled workers at the airport who take money for violating American's genitals, dignity, and Fourth Amendment rights.
The LAX Millennium Bomber plot was discovered over the phone, by a guy in Seattle -- a highly trained FBI agent who heard a guy who had a passport saying he was born in Montreal speaking in a French-Algerian accent.
That's how you discover people intending to do harm -- with highly trained intelligence officers.
And you do it long before a plotter every hits the airport, by using probable cause to root out actual plots; you don't treat every American, including U.S. Senators, like a probable al Qaeda member.
That's just idiocy.
Well, for everyone but those profiting from the existence of the TSA, like Michael Chertoff and the the quisling Blogger Bob, quoted in this New York Post story by Philip Messing and Dan Mangan:
The TSA whined yesterday that it's just too darn hard for agents to find bombs -- unless the terrorists use explosives straight out of a Loony Tunes cartoon.That was the agency's sorry excuse to explain how Newark Airport screeners were completely outmatched by an undercover fed who stuffed an IED in his pants and slipped through two layers of security.
"It's not like they're using a cartoonish bundle of dynamite with an alarm clock strapped to it," Bob Burns of the TSA Blog Team posted on the agency's Web site.
"The items are extremely hard to spot."
The Post exclusively revealed last week how the screeners colossally failed a Feb. 25 test at the Terminal B checkpoint, allowing a fed to get an improvised explosive device through a magnetometer and a secondary pat-down.
Cellphones As A Modern Irritant
I'm quoted in a New York Times Science section piece by Douglas Quenqua, briefly referencing points I draw out in detail (referencing scientific data) in I See Rude People:
"When you are overhearing some stranger's inane cellphone conversation, your brain has to work a lot harder at what you're doing, and it interferes with your ability to focus on other things," said Amy Alkon, a syndicated columnist who wrote a book about manners called "I See Rude People." "It gives you what I call a 'neural itching.' "Though surveys have repeatedly placed public cellphone conversations at the top of Americans' pet peeves, there are indications that the problem is easing -- or, perhaps, that people are starting to accept that all this yakking is the new reality. In 2006, 82 percent of Americans said they were at least occasionally annoyed by cellphone conversations in public. In 2012, that number dropped to 74 percent.
Ms. Alkon attributes the drop to a rising rejection of the behavior. "People are starting to recognize that it's really rude to force other people to listen to your conversation," she said, "especially in places where you're trapped, like a train or a doctor's office."
"Classic Airline Stupidity..."
...as commenter Robert Candee put it at the WSJ.
Delta has nixed the frequent flyer accounts of a cellist who was buying two seats -- one for himself and one for his cello -- because they say that violates their policy.
So, he's buying two seats -- but only getting frequent flyer miles for one. Sounds like a screwing to me. And how idiotic of the airline. There are how many world-class cello players buying two seats -- one for them, one for their instrument -- flying the world? Yeah, this stopped a dangerous pattern of abuse.
Scott McCartney has the story at the WSJ:
Renowned cellist Lynn Harrell travels the world on two airline tickets--one for himself and one for his beloved companion, his $5 million, nearly 300-year-old cello. "Cello Harrell" gets its own boarding pass and even collects frequent-flier miles in its own account. Many cellos do, even for high school musicians.But two seats don't always equal twice the miles. Delta Air Lines' frequent-flier rules only allow people, not musical instruments, to collect miles, and Delta has been auditing accounts to catch frequent-flier scofflaws. Violating the rules can draw a severe penalty: Delta wiped out not only Cello Harrell's SkyMiles account, but also Lynn Harrell's personal SkyMiles account last year. Total loss: half a million miles. And Delta banned him from its loyalty program.
"The punitive nature of stripping me of my miles smarts," said Mr. Harrell, 69, who tours through Europe, Asia and the Americas, often on full-fare tickets. He tried to pull strings with Delta, but the airline refused any appeal.
Extra miles for extra tickets is a growing, thorny issue for airlines as more passengers seek extra seats for various reasons, from being overweight to traveling with a pet. Airlines encourage many to buy two seats to avoid liability for valuables and help larger customers avoid encroaching on neighboring passengers. Delta says the intent of its program is to reward customers for the duration of the flight. "An object doesn't have a loyalty experience," a Delta spokesman said.
The benefits that come to double-seat purchasers vary by airline. United Airlines says it double-credits miles to a traveler's account for the purchase of a second seat, whether for a cello or because the customer needs the extra space. But American Airlines and Delta both say miles accumulate one time per flight, regardless of the number of seats purchased, and only a person can have a frequent-flier account.
Candee wound up with this about Delta (aka Dumb-ta):
Public image is tarnished (if any airline besides SW actually has a positive image) and Delta is a laughingstock over a ridiculous issue to begin with. This could have been turned to a major positive advantage and a great ad campaign for Delta.Hopefully the Delta CEO reads the WSJ and reverses this quickly if nothing else but to show there's more than an unmanned drone in the drivers seat at the top at Delta. What a hoot. And the spokesperson - lose him real quick.
Dead Palestinian Baby Actually Killed By Palestinian Rocket -- One Fired At Israel
It's a famous image, that of a Palestinian father lamenting the dead baby in his arms, but the narrative that's been believed and widely promoted by various media -- that the baby was killed by Israeli rockets -- isn't what apparently happened.
Silly String Theory
Links of wonder.
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Nobamacare: What Doctoring Looks Like Without The Bureaucracy
Jim Epstein has a terrific piece at reason.com about "direct primary care" -- the way people used to pay for going to the doctor:
Dr. Ryan Neuhofel, 31, offers a rare glimpse at what it would be like to go to the doctor without massive government interference in health care. Dr. Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, charges for his services according to an online price list that's as straightforward as a restaurant menu. A drained abscess runs $30, a pap smear, $40, a 30-minute house call, $100. Strep cultures, glucose tolerance tests, and pregnancy tests are on the house. Neuhofel doesn't accept insurance. He even barters on occasion with cash-strapped locals. One patient pays with fresh eggs and another with homemade cheese and goat's milk.
Removing the bureaucratic hassle removes a good deal of the cost:
"What people don't realize is that most doctors employ an army of people for coding, billing, and gathering payment," says Neuhofel. "That means you have to charge $200 to remove an ingrown toenail." Neuhofel charges $50.He consults with his patients over email and Skype in exchange for a monthly membership fee of $20-30. "I realized people would come in for visits with the simplest questions and I'd wonder, why can't they just email me?" says Neuhofel. Traditional doctors have no way to get paid when they consult with patients over the phone or by email because insurance companies only pay for office visits.
Why did he choose this course? Neuhofel's answer: "I didn't want to waste my career being frustrated."
Epstein explains about health "insurance" as we know it, that it's more than just insurance:
It's also "a payment plan for routine expenses," as University of Chicago business school economist John Cochrane puts it in a superb recent paper. The late free-market economist Milton Friedman pointed out that we insure our houses against fire and our cars against major damage, but we don't also insure ourselves against cutting the lawn and buying gas. That's the main reason innovation almost never makes health care cheaper. Most patients never see the bill for an ingrown toenail removal or a glucose tolerance test, so doctors have little incentive to seek ways to offer their services for less. For simple consultations, why bother with Skype when insurance will pay full price for an office visit.Insurance plans that cover everything, a situation that came about largely because of a quirk in our tax code, have also led to the "bureaucratization of medical care," Friedman wrote in a 2001 essay, in which "the caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or...the government."
More on how Obamacare will exacerbate the bureaucratization of medicine at the reason link.
And a few salient numbers that illustrate the difference:
When she was operating a traditional practice, Davidson witnessed firsthand how our "payment plans for routine expenses" drive up prices and block innovation. She recalls that one insurance company paid $118 for a routine PSA test. Now that her patients pay the bill directly the cost is $18. Insurance used to pay $128 for a bag of IV fluid. Now Davidson doesn't bother passing on the cost of IV bags because they run $1.50 each.
And regarding all the people who think health care should be free, as R C Dean wrote in the comments at reason:
It never ceases to amaze me that people who can come with hundreds of dollars to fix their car never have any money to pay for healthcare.
Digital Etiquette: How Do You Sign Your Email?
And why?
The Week has a piece on this by Chris Gayomali, in descending order of their favorites, starting with "cordially" and "cheers."
"Cordially" seems stuffy and old-fashioned.
I've always been interested in who, among women, xos whom and how that's decided. I think women often wait to see if the one higher in the pecking order xos, and then will xo back.
From Gayomali's piece:
5. "Xoxo," "xo," and all derivatives What it means: Hugs and kisses. (Defining X as "kiss" goes all the way back to 1763, according to The Oxford English Dictionary.)Pros and cons: Last year, The Atlantic investigated xo's quiet invasion of the workplace lexicon: "xo is not a habit unique to 20‑somethings reared on Gossip Girl," wrote The Atlantic's Jessica Bernett and Rachel Simmons. "It has surfaced in the digital correspondence of everyone from Arianna Huffington to Nora Ephron.... In Diane Sawyer's newsroom, staffers say, the anchor uses xo so frequently that its omission can spark panic." Indeed, xo's colloquial brevity is feminizing the workplace -- for better or worse.
Typically used by: Arianna Huffington. Nora Ephron. Diane Sawyer.
(Along the lines of the Pride and Prejudice
Your sig? And your reason for using it -- or none at all?
It Isn't Just The Right Taking A Big Poop On Science
To borrow from Tolstoy, it turns out that each side is anti-science in its own special way.
At Skeptic.com, Kenneth W. Krause reviews Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left
The authors contend that American media have long bestowed a "free pass" on the political Left (primarily progressives), who are just as likely [as the Republicans] to "misinterpret, misrepresent, and abuse" science to advance their ideological agendas. In fact, the authors say, progressives are currently waging an "undeclared war on scientific excellence itself."They accuse progressives of propagating a number of socially destructive myths, among them the assumptions that everything "natural" is good and everything "unnatural" is bad. Accordingly, homeopathy is just as good as or better than traditional medicine, vaccines actually harm children, and nuclear energy promises unprecedented sickness and loss of life.
...Unsurprisingly, progressives have corrupted the social sciences too, perhaps to the point of permanent reputational taint among both the general public and the scientific community. Recall, for example, the oppressive and unscholarly manner in which Harvard president Lawrence Summers was vilified in 2005 for merely suggesting that, one, men and women might have distinguishable natural abilities related to math and science, and, two, that personal preference rather than discrimination might account for female "underrepresentation" in high-end STEM careers.
"Summers learned the hard way," the authors say, "that the feel-good fallacies of progressive thought are stronger than the values of free inquiry and the primacy of the scientific method." Indeed, where was the intellectual debate before Summers' resignation in 2006? Is it really so improbable that different genders evolved or learned different talents? Or is it more likely, perhaps, that academics have been bullied into the "gender equality" camp with threats of being branded as sexist?
...Cornell University researchers Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams recently published a hard-hitting and no doubt divisive paper addressing this very issue. After reviewing 20 years of data, Ceci and Williams--married with three daughters of their own--decided that the evidence of discrimination against women in math-intensive fields is "aberrant, of small magnitude" and "superseded by larger, more sophisticated analyses showing no bias, or occasionally, bias in favor of women."
In agreement with their previous analyses, Ceci and Williams surmised instead that the gender gap results primarily from women's career preferences and fertility and lifestyle choices. In other words, adolescent girls tend to gravitate toward careers focusing on people as opposed to things, and female Ph.D.s interested in childrearing are less likely to apply for or maintain tenure track positions. Incidentally, as a secondary explanation, the duo pointed to evidence for upper tail disparities in cognitive ability.
As for who is worse on science:
The fact is that all ideologues are impediments to science, whether libertarians, religious zealots, and free-market fundamentalists on the one hand, or environmentalists, feminists, and social engineers on the other. Science--indeed, truth generally--is served mostly by those who conceive of themselves as individuals first and group members second (if at all). But seldom if ever are its ends advanced by committed disciples to any idea or cause.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. Two links, at most, per comment, or your comment will be eaten by my spam thang. Want to post three links? Post two comments.
(Tuesday kicked my ass. But, I'll be back up on Wednesday, and will post more blog items in the morning.)
Imaginary Or Toy Guns Cause Idiot School Administrators To Lose All Sense Of Reality
Glenn Reynolds column in USA Today:
A Pop Tart gun, a finger gun, or a toy gun -- even a pink one that shoots, gasp!, soap bubbles! -- isn't any danger to anyone. Nor is playing with toy guns a sign that a kid is mentally ill or dangerous. It's a sign that a kid is a kid.When schools and teachers react hysterically to such non-threats, they're telling us one of two things: Either that they lack the ability to respond realistically to events or that they recognize that there's not any sort of threat, but deliberately overreact in order to stigmatize even the idea of guns. The first is educational malpractice; the second is educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power. Neither inspires confidence in the educational system in which they appear.
Happily, my kid is past the public-school stage. But if I were the parent of a young child, I'd think twice before enrolling him or her in public schools today. When innocent behavior can get a kid hauled off by the police, and subjected to God-knows-what sort of pyschiatric interventions, the dubious reward isn't worth the risk.
Claire McCaskill Got Groped At The Airport
Because there's real reason to believe that United States Senators, like every single one of the rest of us, could be al Qaeda terrorists. (I could also be a purple gorilla, but since there's little evidence of that, should I be searched just to be sure at the airport?)
Her tweet:
@clairecmc
Today in my airport screening, test on my hands was positive. Got private, more aggressive pat down. OMG. #veryuncomfortable
My tweets to McCaskill:
@amyalkon .@clairecmc Do you understand how idiotic & wasteful it is to treat every citizen as plausible suspect, sans probable cause? #TSA@amyalkon
.@clairecmc TSA worker's lawyer demanded $500K of citizen using her 1st Amen right to complain about violation of 4th http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110906/11065015824/tsa-agent-threatens-woman-with-defamation-demands-500k-calling-intrusive-search-rape.shtml
As I keep saying, it is wildly wasteful and ludicrous -- and damaging to the preservation of our constitutional rights -- to treat every person who wants to board a plane as a probable suspect for terrorism, and violate their bodies and civil liberties.
Our elected representatives have sat blithely by as the rest of us have been violated daily at airports around this country. Maybe McCaskill's getting her hoohoo groped will compel her, at least, to awaken from her long coma.
Saudis May Stop Beheadings -- But Not Because The Saudis Have Gone Civilized On Us
Because there's a shortage of swordsmen lately in Saudi Arabia. (So many to behead -- so few qualified for the job!)
@jonathanturley
I Have A Mom, And Her Name Is Not Mike
New York's Nanny-In-Chief Michael Bloomberg had his large soda-banning ass handed to him by a judge, writes Michael M. Grynbaum in The New York Times:
In an unusually critical opinion, Justice Milton A. Tingling Jr. of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the limits "arbitrary and capricious," echoing the complaints of New York business owners and consumers who had deemed the rules unworkable and unenforceable, with confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.The decision comes at a sensitive time for Mr. Bloomberg, who is determined to burnish his legacy as he enters the final months of his career in City Hall, and his administration seemed caught off guard by the decision. Before the judge ruled on Monday, Mr. Bloomberg had called for the soda limits to be adopted by cities around the globe; he now faces the possibility that one of his most cherished endeavors will not come to fruition before he leaves office, if ever.
..."I've got to defend my children, and yours, and do what's right to save lives," the mayor said. "Obesity kills. There's no question it kills." He added, "We believe that the judge's decision was clearly in error, and we believe we will win on appeal."
First of all, if you really wanted to stop obesity, you'd ban the sale of bread. But, that would require, in addition to a huge degree of meddling assholehood, a knowledge of actual dietary science instead of the "Eeek! Don't eat salt!" dietary hearsay Michael Bloomberg goes by.
Second, there's a reason I don't go in people's homes and redecorate against their will to prevent people from tripping and ending up in the hospital or dead, and that's that they haven't invited me in -- to their homes or their lives.
This is not a giant society of children waiting for their mayoral mommy to tell them what they can have for a snack and Michael Bloomberg needs to disabuse himself of the notion that he has any right to tell anybody what to do, save for asking somebody who's stepped on his foot to move theirs, etc.
A tweet by Greg Pollowitz:
@GPollowitz
.@piersmorgan 80% of NYC HS grads can't read at level and you're worried about a soda ban that, if enacted, wouldn't even ban the Big Gulp?
Linkstyles Of The Bitchy And Infamous
Post away!
Depends What You Mean By "Everyone"
Andrew Malcolm blogs about President Obama's assertion, in more than one speech, that "America succeeds when everyone does their fair share":
A new report from the Internal Revenue Service has just revealed that 40 of Obama's White House aides owe their employer, the federal government, a total of $333,485 in back taxes.This is the third straight year that the chief executive of the United States has been unable to get his own staff members to keep up with a citizen's legal income tax obligations. to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes owed.
...In its previous report the annual IRS audit accounting found that 36 of the Democrat's White House aides owed $833,000 in back taxes. The year before it was 41 Obama staff members owing $830,000.
...Congress required the IRS to make the annual report of all federal employees with an eye toward making up-to-date taxes a condition of government employment. That idea, you'll be shocked to learn, has not yet passed Congress.
Idiocy From Airline Exec On TSA Policy To Allow Small Knives
Via the HuffPo/AP, Delta CEO Richard Anderson wrote to TSA thuggo-in-chief John Pistole to complain the new policy:
Richard Anderson's letter to TSA administrator John Pistole on Thursday says he shares the "legitimate concerns" of Delta flight attendants about the decision. He says allowing small knives will do little to speed up passenger screening -- but adds risk for cabin staff and passengers.
A question: In the years before we installed legions of unskilled workers to grope our genitals and policies prohibiting a war vet from bringing his commemorative pocketknife on the plane, exactly how many knifings were there in the air?
Mothering-Turned-Smothering -- Society-Wide
Lenore Skenazy, in a guest essay spot at Cato, writes about how insane things have gotten in overprotecting kids:
How far has society gone in dreaming up new dangers to protect our children from? Until you take a step back and look at all the new laws and regulations, you probably have no idea. So to start out, let's test your Child Safety IQ. Which of the following did NOT happen this past year?(A.) Local licensing authorities outlawed soap in pre-school bathrooms for fear that children might suddenly start drinking it. Now kids must come out and ask an adult to squirt some soap in their hands.
(B.) Unaccompanied children under age 12 were banned from the Boulder, CO, library, lest they encounter "hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors, furniture...and other library patrons."
(C.)The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of certain fleece hoodies sold at Target because of lead paint on the zipper, which presumably could raise blood lead levels if the zippers are eaten.
(D.) Children under age 18 were prohibited from gathering on the streets of Tucson, AZ, for fear they might "talk, play or laugh" in groups, which could lead to bullying.
(E.) A New Canaan, CT, mom was charged with "risk of injury to a minor," for letting her 13-year-old babysit the three younger children at home for an hour while the mom went to church.
(F.) A Tennessee mother was thrown in jail for letting her kids, aged 8 and 5, go to the park without her, a block and half away from home.
And the answer is (D.) -- all the rest actually happened. Lenore explains:
The message to parents? The government is better at raising your kids than you are. The message to kids? You are weak little babies. The government will swaddle you in safety.
How quickly we've become a nation of seriously pathetic wimps.
via @WalterOlson
TSA Worker On What A "Security" Scam The TSA Is
Via Conan The Grammarian, a TSA employee writes in the NY Post, "A LOT of what we do is make-believe."
No kidding.
He says he doesn't fully grope the little kids the way he's supposed to, and can get away with this because most TSA supes are "too daft to actually supervise."
Did you know you don't need a high-school diploma or GED to work as a security screener? These are the same screeners that TSA chief John Pistole and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano refer to as a first-class first line of defense in the war on terror.These are the employees who could never keep a job in the private sector. I wouldn't trust them to walk my dog.
An agent got through Newark last week with an improvised explosive device? That's not even news to anyone who works there. It happens all the time. The failure rate is pretty high, especially with federal investigators, and the pat-down itself is ridiculous. As invasive as it is, you still can't find anything using the back of your hand on certain areas.
When there are internal tests, conducted by the Newark training department, it's easy to cheat because they use our co-workers. You could be working with someone all morning, and then they're gone. Word gets around the checkpoint. Someone will come over to you and say, "Hey, it's Joe. He's got a blue duffel bag."
What are the chances of you being on a flight where something happens? We always said it's not a question of if terrorists get through -- it's a question of when. Our feeling is nothing's happened because they haven't wanted it to happen. We're not any big deterrent. It's all for show.
A real pat-down is when a police officer pulls you over, uses his hands to search, actually goes into your clothes. We have to use the back of our hands around certain areas. It just doesn't work. It's a really bad way to pat somebody down.
If I had to guess, I'm sure lots of things get through. One screener told me about something he did going through security when he went on vacation. Let's just say the screeners did not catch something that was really obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
Disgusting Attempt To Enforce Islam's Backwardness At UCL -- Foiled
A person in London, Dana Sondergaard, posted a shareable post on Facebook that a friend sent me:
Tonight I attended a debate a UCL on Islam and Atheism. After having been told the event would NOT be gender segregated, we arrived and were told that women were to sit in the back of the auditorium, while men and couples could file into the front.After watching 3 people be kicked out of the auditorium for not following this seating plan, Dr. Krauss bravely defended his beliefs of gender equality and informed event staff that he would not participate unless they removed the segregated seating.
Needless to say, the staff got their shit together pretty quickly and the event (thankfully) continued. Props to Dr. Krauss for standing up for his beliefs, especially in such a biased environment! -- with Lawrence Krauss.
More here.
Links Vegas
A city of links rising up out of the desert...
Advice Goddess Radio -- Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Sian Beilock, How Not To Choke Under Pressure
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
On this week's show, University of Chicago psychologist and researcher Dr. Sian Beilock explains why we choke under pressure and how we can avoid doing it.
Her book is Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
Join us tonight to find out how you can exhibit the sort of grace under pressure that makes for winning performances -- in life, business, sports, public speaking, and the arts.
Listen at this link at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/11/dr-sian-bielock-how-not-to-choke-under-pressure
And don't miss last week's show with psychology professor Dr. Gabrielle Principe on the science behind why the overstructured, overscheduled childhood is bad for kids and advice how to naturalize childhood again so a child's environment gels with how the brain was designed to grow.
Her clearly written and dryly witty book: Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan.
Listen here at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/04/dr-gabrielle-principe-parenting-sans-paranoia
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes.
Who Are The Perverts?
WalMart workers and Arizona police put a family through nightmare, taking kids away for a month, in yet another case of bathtime photos being seen as child porn. The parents were even put on a registry as sex offenders. They're suing WalMart for not disclosing their policy
More in the Daily Mail here.
Nasty Partisanship Down To The Wardrobe
This nasty comment about Michelle Obama -- on a photo I saw posted on Facebook -- is the sort of petty partisanship I really dislike.
As a libertarian, fiscal conservative, and somebody who knows a few things about dietary science, and as I commented on the person's post, I disagree with Michelle Obama on a host of things.
That said, she is stylish and doesn't look terrible in this particular photo, although the outfit is a little busy and not the best look on her.
It's certainly not worthy of such a nasty remark.
If you don't like somebody's political thinking, criticize that.
Virtual Honey Trap
When people are lonely, they really, really want to believe that what they want to be real actually is. Loneliness and a big ego can be particularly dangerous.
Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist and UNC professor in the physics and astronomy department, says he thought he was talking with a Czech bikini model. He's now in a Buenos Aires prison on drug smuggling charges. An excerpt from the fascinating New York Times Magazine piece by Maxine Swann:
Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a "glamour model," of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. "Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?" Of course he could, he assured her.Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children -- and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She'd said so many times.
Frampton didn't plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he'd be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.
While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: "I said: 'Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You're in big trouble.' Paul said, 'I'll be careful, I'll make sure there isn't cocaine in there and if there is, I'll ask them to remove it.' I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn't know he didn't have money. I said, 'Well, you're going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?' And he said, 'You can contact my brother and my former wife.' " Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon's warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.
On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn't get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had "sentimental value." The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.
Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly "doing physics" and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage -- "That's my bag," he said, "the other one's not my bag, but I checked it in" -- he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the "Milani" suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
Green Eggs And Links
They were out of ham.
Designer Jools, Up To 70 Percent Off
Clearance sale at Amazon
The Considerate Criminal
The considerate criminal delivers him or herself right to the door of the police station.
TSA Thugs Miss Another One -- Undercover Agent With Fake Bomb In His Pants
They're always there to cup your balls -- because the TSA's unskilled workers violating your body and your rights aren't about security but about jobs for people who'd otherwise be out of work, money for the connected Chertoffs of the world...and mainly about training you to be obedient when your rights are yanked from you.
The New York Post's Philip Messing writes:
The undercover TSA agent who got past Newark Airport screeners with an improvised explosive device in his pants exposed a stunning lack of security that the agency had better fix before al Qaeda strikes again, Rep. Peter King warned yesterday.The Long Island Republican wrote a scathing letter to Transportation Security Administration boss John Pistole demanding "immediate answers" about how the fed was able to get past a magnetometer and a secondary pat-down with the inert device, which he then could have brought onto a commercial flight.
The chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence called the Feb. 25 breach -- which was reported yesterday exclusively by The Post -- "yet another in a long line of security failures discovered at Newark."
The entire TSA is one huge "security failure," with thieving pedophiles and murderers as employees (police thyself first?!), and as a matter of principle.
As I've said before, it is simply ludicrous to think it is security to treat every single member of the flying public, even if they're 6 and in a wheelchair, as if they're a plausible member of al Qaeda.
It is ludicrous to have unskilled workers performing "security" as people board planes, when you find terrorists by having highly skilled intelligence workers use what the Constitution sets out -- probable cause (reasonable suspicion somebody has committed or will commit a crime) -- to investigate perps long before they ever enter an airport, mall, or other public arena.
Obamaconomy: New Jobs Created Are Probably Second Or Third Jobs
Felix Salmon blogs at Reuters on the "stagnation behind the excellent jobs report":
The number of multiple jobholders rose by 340,000 this month, to 7.26 million -- a rise larger than the headline rise in payrolls. Which means that one way of looking at this report is to say that all of the new jobs created were second or third jobs, going to people who were already employed elsewhere. Meanwhile, the number of people unemployed for six months or longer went up by 89,000 people this month, to 4.8 million, and the average duration of unemployment also rose, to 36.9 weeks from 35.3 weeks.
via @MargRev, via @Richard_Florida
The Roadkill Ribeye: Now Legal In Montana
Apparently, it's been illegal to pick up a squashed deer or other animal and bring it home for dinner up till now, because the Montana Legislature just approved a measure that would "allow" citizens to salvage fresh roadkill for...vittles.
A New York Times editorial says the idea of eating roadkill is "becoming" noncontroversial:
The 95-to-3 vote indicated how noncontroversial the idea is becoming in rural America. Auto collisions between man and beast have become routine, and the value of fresh roadkill is well appreciated by adaptive hunters and by food bank operators, who help the poor survive."There's a lot of good meat being wasted out there," State Representative Steve Lavin, the bill's sponsor, told The Daily Inter Lake, speaking as a veteran state trooper who got the idea from patrolling highway carnage for 20 years. If the Senate agrees, Montana will join Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and West Virginia in permitting roadkill to be salvaged under a variety of safety and health regulations.
Montana state troopers would issue permits to salvage newly killed deer, antelope, moose and elk -- but not bighorn sheep and other valued animals that might invite motorized poaching. About 6,000 deer died in Montana after colliding with automobiles in 2011, as did 500 other animals, including mountain lions and black bears.
A friend of mine from my New York days, hailing from Pennsylvania, used to joke that her father would bring home roadkill for dinner -- and I don't think she was joking.
America's "Robber Barons" Were Neither
Reason Foundation's Manny Klausner always sends me interesting links, and this is one of them. It's a piece by David R. Henderson at EconLib.org on the myth that Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were villains -- "robber barons," specifically:
One of the most prevalent myths about economic freedom is that it inevitably leads to monopolies. Ask people why they believe that, and the odds are high that they will point to the "trusts" of the late 19th century that gained large market shares in their particular industries. These trusts are Exhibit A for most people who hold this view. Ask them for specific names of the villains who ran these trusts, and they are likely to point to such people as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. They even have a label for Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and others: robber barons.But a careful reading of the economic research on the "robber barons" leads to a diametrically opposite conclusion: the so-called robber barons were neither robbers nor barons. They didn't rob. Instead, they got their money the old-fashioned way: they earned it. Nor were they barons. The word "baron" is a title of nobility, one typically granted by a king or established by force. But Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and many of the others referred to as robber barons started their businesses from scratch and were granted no special privileges. Moreover, not only did they earn their money and not only were they not granted privileges, but they also helped consumers and, in one famous case, destroyed a monopoly.
Consider the case of Cornelius ("Commodore") Vanderbilt. Even the excellent recent book Why Nations Fail, by MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist and economist James A. Robinson, gets the Vanderbilt story wrong. And not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. They claim that Vanderbilt was "one of the most notorious" robber barons who "aimed at consolidating monopolies and preventing any potential competitor from entering the market or doing business on an equal footing."
In fact, it was Vanderbilt's competitor, Aaron Ogden, who persuaded the New York state legislature to grant Ogden a legally enforced monopoly on ferry travel between New Jersey and New York. And Vanderbilt was one of the main people who challenged that monopoly. At the tender age of 23, Vanderbilt had become the business manager for a ferry entrepreneur named Thomas Gibbons. Gibbons' goal was to compete with Aaron Ogden by charging low fares. In doing so, they were purposely breaking the law--and helping their passengers save money. In the case Gibbons v. Ogden, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, indeed, the New York state government could not legally grant a monopoly on interstate commerce. In short, Cornelius Vanderbilt was not a monopoly maker in this case, but a monopoly breaker.
Read the rest at the link.
Lego Spill
Cuter than oil. Not as bad for the birds.
A Lego spill shut down a highway in West Virginia.
Spill your errant links here.
Errant Lego always welcome.
Mandatory Paternity Tests: For Or Against?
Sometimes, a father has an inkling that a child is not actually his, and sometimes he would rather not know because he wants to raise that child as his own.
Then there's the argument that a child has the right to know his biological father -- to know his origins, to develop a relationship with his father, and because it's important for knowing medical history.
And there's a great deal of paternity fraud -- where men are either not told they have a child or are forced to pay for one who is not theirs if they fail to meet terms of Kafkaesque bureaucracies, where they don't respond to a letter (that they sometimes never get) denying being the father of the child. Men have been, with some frequency, deemed to be fathers of children even when the DNA is not shown to match after they've been forced to pay child support for years.
Men's rights organization Fathers and Families is calling for making paternity tests "mandatory" in the headline in their email they just sent me -- and then "widespread" in the body of the email.
Where do you stand on mandatory paternity tests?
It Took Bill Clinton 20 Years To Realize DOMA Unconstitutional, Unfair?
Couldn't the guy just admit to political pandering? Is there anybody in politics who can still remember how to tell the truth?
Clinton writes in the WaPo:
On March 27, DOMA will come before the Supreme Court, and the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution.
Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples. Among other things, these couples cannot file their taxes jointly, take unpaid leave to care for a sick or injured spouse or receive equal family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees. Yet they pay taxes, contribute to their communities and, like all couples, aspire to live in committed, loving relationships, recognized and respected by our laws.When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that "enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination." Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.
via @SteveSilberman
Buying Democracy -- It Never Works: Most Of The $60 Billion In Iraqi Aid Wasted
Law prof Jonathan Turley blogs:
In the last few weeks, the Administration has been pushing hard to show how sequestration has produced dire consequences even though it involved only $85 billion (including the implausible claim that thousands of illegal aliens had to be released due to the cuts). For some of us who have complained about the Administration giving billions to Israel and other countries, it was a hard sell even if you do not agree with sequestration. Now a report has come out showing, as has been discussed for years on this blog and other sites, most of the $60 billion given to Iraq in the last ten years was wasted or lost to open corruption. The long documented waste of billions did not cause either the Bush or Obama Administration (or Congress) to take meaningful steps to stop the funding or, better yet, pull out of the country.
In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen's findings show open theft and waste that continued without correction from U.S. officials. The corruption enriched Iraqi leaders and left a string of unfinished buildings and projects across the country. Yet, officials continued to pour money into reconstruction despite media reports showing that the money was evaporating into the bank accounts of corrupt officials or doomed projects. There is no record of a single official being disciplined for this waste.Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the U.S. funding was simply a case of "misspending of money."
Absolutely. Our money spent to bolster your country instead of ours in yet another failed attempt to buy democracy.
TSA News Blog Numbers Guy Bill Fisher Calls Janet Napolitano Out On Lie About TSA Lines
He quotes activist and author Becky Akers, "who has written extensively on the TSA and has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the agency."
She notes:
Even Congress, no bastion of common sense, observed in that House report, "A private sector entity in the face of a shrinking customer base usually must downsize. TSA, by contrast, has continually grown its ranks despite fewer travelers."...Now, despite an annual budget of almost $8 billion, the TSA insists its poverty will keep us standing in line for hours. Fine: Let's return aviation security to the airlines, where it belongs and where it resided until the '60s."
Fisher blogs:
The agency has swollen despite a decline in the number of passengers. The agency had 45,500 workers in 2008 and screened 650 million passengers. But in 2011 the TSA needed 48,000 workers to process fewer than 640 million passengers. TSA staffing exceeded 50,000 workers in 2012, with estimates as high as 58,000....As we have written here before, the average cost per screening is $11.21. But the TSA 9/11 security fee is $2.50 per U.S. enplanement (or screening), which leaves taxpayers to pay $8.71 for every passenger who uses a U.S. airport.
Incredibly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security has now threatened to hold passengers hostage in airport security lines if there are even the most minuscule cuts in funding of this bloated agency. Napolitano's ill-conceived and baseless statement makes one question whether this was a threat of extortion or simply an indication of her incompetence.
Hey, Politicians: Who Ya Gonna Bleed?
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn writes in the WSJ that, since 2002, total federal spending has gone up 89 percent, while median household income has dropped 5 percent. He writes that "In other words, while families have been doing more with less, government has been doing less with more":
Sequestration will force cuts to waste that wouldn't otherwise be cut. The administration has claimed that its hands are tied and terrible things will happen, yet its warnings seem calibrated to sound scary but not too scary. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that cuts to air-traffic control will force flight delays but won't compromise safety or cause air disasters.He can avoid both with smart cuts. I sent him a letter this week detailing $1.2 billion in savings that would more than cover his $600 million shortfall. He could start by curtailing subsidies for "Airports to Nowhere" that serve fewer than 10 passengers a day. The department also has $34 billion in unobligated funds lying around that could help prevent delays and disasters.
The same is true of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Instead of forcing Americans to spend more time in airport screening lines, she can find savings in the wasteful grant program that gave America an underwater robot for Columbus, Ohio, and a BearCat armored-personnel carrier to guard a pumpkin festival in Keene, N.H. (population 23,000). Trimming this $830 million grant program by just one third could avoid Transportation Security Administration furloughs entirely.
But if cabinet secretaries insist on using furloughs, they could start by furloughing employees who already don't bother to show up for work. In a 2008 report, I found that the 3.5 million hours that federal employees were AWOL in 2007 could be used to screen 1.7 billion checked bags, or enough to avoid security delays for nearly four years.
... Forcing working families to bear the brunt of Washington's refusal to use discretion in spending cuts is economically indefensible and morally reprehensible.
And business as usual for both parties.
Pathetic Supposedly Progressive Dems On Why They Didn't "Stand With Rand"
Must we be petty partisans on everything? Can't Republicans and Democrats agree that the Constitution is worth standing up for?
Apparently not.
Reason's Nick Gillespie pointed to the Huff Post's Luke Johnson and Sabrina Siddiqui, who asked a number of leading progressive Dems where they were during the filiblizzard orchestrated by Rand Paul.
Gillespie writes:
With the exception of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Senate Democrats were scarcer than hen's teeth (and Durbin didn't join the filibuster so much as ask questions about the killing of Osama bin Laden rather than engage questions about the rights of U.S. citizens).Here are some of the saddest responses from exactly the sort of bleeding-heart Dems who say they care about executive-branch overreach, sticking up for the little guy, you name it:
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio): "I don't know, there's a lot of debates I don't join that I agree -- I've got stuff to do and was doing a lot of other things."...photobucket.comSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt., who caucuses with the Ds): "I'm working right now on many, many, other issues."...
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.): "Everyone's got a lot of priorities and people are busy."...
...Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.): "We all were shocked Republicans were doing a real filibuster instead of a procedural filibuster."
These senators sound like Baby Bear: "It's too hot! It's too cold! My porridge is lummmmpy!"
Slippery Eric Holder Evading Questions About When And Where The President Can Kill Suspected Terrorists
Jacob Sullum writes at reason that Texas Senator Ted Cruz asked Holder a straightforward question -- is killing a suspected member or ally of Al Qaeda on U.S. soil constitutional if he does not pose an immediate threat of violence?:
Since the Justice Department says it is legal to kill such people in other countries, and since it ties this power to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress approved after 9/11, which it says includes no geographic limits, Cruz's question was perfectly reasonable. Yet Holder repeatedly dodged it, to the point that Cruz gave up on getting a straight answer, complaining that Holder kept talking about the propriety of using deadly force against a suspected terrorist who is just "walking down a path" or "sitting in a café" (as in Cruz's hypothetical) instead of its constitutionality. At the very end of the exchange, Holder made a confusing statement that Cruz interpreted as a concession: "Translate my 'appropriate' to no. I thought I was saying no." No to what was not clear, since Cruz had phrased his question several different ways.In his two-sentence letter to Paul today, Holder writes: "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no." Earlier today Brian Doherty noted that "engaged in combat" is ambiguous, especially because the Obama administration argues that the people it identifies as members or allies of Al Qaeda are engaged in combat even when they are driving down the street or sitting in their homes, far from any active battlefield. Furthermore, the question Holder chose to answer is restricted to targeted killings using "weaponized drones," leaving open the possibility that other methods could be used, and it applies only to U.S. citizens, leaving open the possibility that immunity from summary execution in this country hinges on nationality.
Parsing Holder's statements this way may seem far-fetched, but he should not be allowed any wiggle room, given the way the administration has twisted language to justify what looks like assassination as an act of self-defense.
Loose Links Sink Sluts
The above statement is, of course, utterly meaningless, unless you're high off your ass, in which case...you tell us.
Rand Paul On Restraints On Government Power
A reason.tv video from his filibuster:
The Latest Attack On Privacy: The Internet's Patriot Act, aka CISPA
Jeff Saginor writes at The American Prospect:
At its heart, the bill is a warrantless wiretap of your entire digital existence. CISPA would grant Google and Facebook carte blanche to turn over personally identifiable information they deem relevant to the national cyber-security effort directly to federal agencies. Say your computer becomes infected with spyware that you don't even realize is there--a likely scenario given the Electronic Frontier Foundation estimates that 40-90 percent of all computers have been infected at one time or another. This fact alone would authorize Comcast or Verizon or whoever you pay for the privilege of delivering Internet to log your every online movement, and share that data with the government or other private companies. Once the government's got hold of it, however, the bill further allows the sharing of that data between federal agencies and the military, a precedent-setting departure from current privacy law with the potential to create vast databases filled with the personal information of millions of American citizens. "Once that private information is in the hands of the military," Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology says, "it can be used for purposes completely unrelated to cyber security." If this sounds like the top-secret phone logging that the NSA has been carrying out with the help of major telecoms for nearly a decade, that's the point. CISPA would simply enshrine perpetual real-time spying on American citizens in law.As Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Graduate Cybersecurity Program explains, "even other laws that allow a company to maintain privacy, if it can be tied to cyber security under CISPA, that can be shared," Meaning CISPA would trump any state or federal privacy protections already in place. Or, as Colorado representative Jared Polis bluntly put it during the floor debate, "waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cyber security."
CISPA's definition of a cyber threat is chillingly vague. The language describes any "efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy," or to "gain unauthorized access," to a computer system or network. That means virtually everything--from guessing your office's WiFi password to cracking Lockheed's top-secret network and stealing drone schematics--would fall under CISPA's jurisdiction, and would therefore be ripe for warrantless surveillance.
Rogers justifies the broad liberties his bill takes with your personal information by obfuscating his true aims. "We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will," he says. "So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that." The trick, of course, is that the entire Internet is built on zeroes and ones. Those zeroes and ones, when strung together, tend to form patterns, sentences, pictures, mosaics of our entire digital lives. Calling that a privacy protection is like saying words are only made up of letters. Don't worry, that private email the NSA just vacuumed up? It's mostly R's and T's.
"Short Skirt 'N' Frisk": No, Carrying A Condom Is Not Probable Cause
Via @Instapundit, a truly disgusting story out of New York -- Short Skirt 'N' Frisk, you could call it.
Rebecca Baird-Remba reports at BusinessInsider that New York cops are stopping, searching, and hauling away women who are minorities or transgender and who happen to have condoms in their purse:
Police claim they are discouraging prostitution by confiscating women's condoms or cuffing women who carry them. But half of the people whose condoms were taken away still had to engage in sex work later that night without a condom, according to SWP's study.And a growing number of sex workers say they are afraid to carry condoms because it's likely to get them arrested. Forty six percent told PROS they hadn't carried condoms while working because they feared police harassment, and the number rose to 75 percent among trangender prostitutes.
..."I find no probative value at all in finding a condom," Judge Richard M. Weinberg of Manhattan Criminal Court told the Times. "In the age of AIDS and H.I.V., if people are sexually active at a certain age, and they are not walking around with condoms, they are fools."
Bloomberg Just Proclaimed Himself Your Earmommy
This guy's greatest disappointment is probably that we don't have royalty in the US and that he can't proclaim himself king.
He has to satisfy himself with acting like everybody's mommy. His latest is to campaign against too-loud headphones. Now, I hate people on public transportation with loud, leaky headphones (probably about three times) as much as the next person, but telling you not to ruin your hearing -- that's your actual mommy's job.
From Gothamist:
According to the NY Post, Bloomberg's health officials are "planning a social-media campaign to warn young people about the risk of losing their hearing from listening to music at high volume on personal MP3 players." An iPod can reportedly hit 115 decibels, even though research warns that above 85 decibels encroaches on unsafe levels.A rep for the DoH says the "public-education campaign is being developed to raise awareness about safe use of personal music players... and risks of loud and long listening." Hearing loss went up 30% amongst teens between 1988 and 2006, according to one health survey. And while hearing loss is the spin of the campaign, if it has any success it will help with Bloomberg's quality-of-life initiatives as well--he has taken on noise levels since he started out in office.
The campaign will cost $250,000 (or 1,250 pairs of Dre Beats headphones) and is being financed through a Fund for Public Health grant.
In other words, probably being paid for, at least in part, with taxpayer dollars
Student-Based Budgeting For Schools
Lisa Snell writes at Reason Foundation about a smarter way to fund schools:
The growth of student-based budgeting in school districts and a few states mirrors a national trend toward more decentralized school funding where the money follows the child. In the United States, we are in a transition period, moving from funding institutions to funding students. K-12 education funding is moving closer to the funding model for higher education, where the money follows students to the public, private or nonprofit school of their choice. We are moving away from a K- 12 system funded by local resources and driven by residential assignment to a system where funding is driven by parental choice and student enrollment.Public funding systems at the state and local level are adapting to a "school funding portability" framework, where state and local school funding is attached to the students and given directly to the institution in which the child enrolls.
...Student-based budgeting proposes a system of school funding based on five key principles:
1. Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he or she attends.
2. Per-student funding should vary according to the child's needs and other relevant circumstances.
3. Funding should arrive at the school as real dollars--not as teaching positions, ratios or staffing norms--that can be spent flexibly, with accountability systems focused more on results and less on inputs, programs or activities.
4. Principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels of funding, including federal, state and local dollars.
5. Funding systems should be as simple as possible and made transparent to administrators, teachers, parents and citizens.
Handbook here.
Links Stew
Tastes like alligator. Shoes.
Rand Paul Filiblizzard: "Stand With Rand"
Still ongoing as Rand Paul stands up for the Constitution -- as so few people do these days. Some tweets about his filibuster to block Brennan's nomination over the issue of drone strikes:
@TPM
Rand Paul's filibuster enters the 11th hour: http://bit.ly/YAzgVA@amyalkon
"Once you give up your rights, you will not get them back."--Rep. Ted Cruz, TX. He's absolutely right. Psst, TSA, drone, & Obama apologists@amyalkon
I love that Rand Paul was reading from Alice In Wonderland. I've always wanted a hookah-smoking caterpillar as a pet. Preferably w/a monocle
Watch live here.
A quote from Paul:
I will speak until I can no longer speak, I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our constitution is important, that your right to trial by jury is precious, that no American should be killed on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.
How The TSA Is Like Giraffe Repellant
Smart Christopher Elliott piece at TSANewsBlog calling bullshit on recent Chicago Tribune editorial claiming that the TSA has prevented terrorism (by, most idiotically and wastefully, treating every single American who flies as a plausible suspect as an al Qaeda member):
"So the next time you hear someone carp about TSA procedures, ask him or her how many times the agency, formed 70 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has failed at that mission," the editorial concludes.That, too, is an odd thing to say. Because the TSA hasn't apprehended a single terrorist with its famous 20 layers of security.
And the logic of claiming that because there's been no 9/11 rerun, the TSA has been successful, is a 21st century version of Russell's Teapot. Or, as my colleague Lisa Simeone would put it, it's like saying you've applied giraffe repellent to your front lawn and then claiming it worked because it's prevented a giraffe infestation.
Yes, terrorists have been stopped, but neither the underwear bomber nor the shoe bomber were apprehended by the TSA. They were stopped by alert passengers.
White House Cutting Back On Tours For Public, Not Calligraphy
Daniel Halper writes at The Weekly Standard about where the bite is being placed to save money during the sequester:
With the White House closing its doors to public tour groups in order to save money for the sequester, it's worth remembering some of the other costs the White House incurs annually.Like the "Chief Calligrapher," Patricia A. Blair, who has an annual salary of $96,725, and her two deputies, Debra S. Brown, who gets paid $85,953 per year, and Richard T. Muffler, who gets paid $94,372 every year.
@DougAndTRae
TSA: Normalizing Failure
Debra Burlingame has it right on the TSA's new policy allowing certain small knives (photo at link):
@DebraBurlingame
#TSA lying to you. New knife policy is about normalizing failure. Deadly folding knives too hard to detect: Voila! Now permitted.
Beer Goggles A Myth: Alcohol Makes You Horny For Basically Whatever's Still Moving At 2 am, And Maybe A Few Things That Aren't
From AOL, a new study by psychologist Dr. Amanda Ellison:
A new study by the U.K.'s Durham University questions the long-held belief that alcohol consumption makes a person drop their standards as to whom they'd drop their drawers for.Study author psychologist Dr. Amanda Ellison said that alcohol doesn't make people look more attractive, it just increases their level of lust.
"There is no imagined physical transformation, just more desire," Allison said, according to MSNnow.com. "Alcohol switches off the rational and decision-making areas of the brain while leaving the areas to do with sexual desire relatively intact."
Ellison said it is a fluke of nature that the lust section of the brain -- the oldest part -- still functions after consumption of alcohol, the Metro reported.
A Home For Wayward Links
Pull up a stool and feed one a bowl of cold porridge, while you're at it.
Choos For Men
Up to 60 percent off shoes for men at Amazon
Nancy Reagan: Just Say "Pass Me That Crack Pipe!"
Annalee Newitz at io9.com posts Cliff Roth's hilarious, "almost seamless re-edit of the the famous 'Just Say No' speech given by the Reagans in September of 1986 -- except in this version, the President and the First Lady are doing their best to get us all hooked on drugs:
Mean Girls, High Up In The Workplace
How about them female bosses? Peggy Drexler writes in the WSJ that women who rose up to positions of power were supposed to be mentors to women who followed, but whoops, something is amiss in the professional sisterhood:
The term "queen bee syndrome" was coined in the 1970s, following a study led by researchers at the University of Michigan--Graham Staines, Toby Epstein Jayaratne and Carol Tavris--who examined promotion rates and the impact of the women's movement on the workplace. In a 1974 article in Psychology Today, they presented their findings, based on more than 20,000 responses to reader surveys in that magazine and Redbook. They found that women who achieved success in male-dominated environments were at times likely to oppose the rise of other women. This occurred, they argued, largely because the patriarchal culture of work encouraged the few women who rose to the top to become obsessed with maintaining their authority.Four decades later, the syndrome still thrives, given new life by the mass ascent of women to management positions. This generation of queen bees is no less determined to secure their hard-won places as alpha females. Far from nurturing the growth of younger female talent, they push aside possible competitors by chipping away at their self-confidence or undermining their professional standing. It is a trend thick with irony: The very women who have complained for decades about unequal treatment now perpetuate many of the same problems by turning on their own.
...Men use fear as a tool of advancement. Why shouldn't women do the same? Until top leadership positions are as routinely available to women as they are to men, freezing out the competition will remain a viable survival strategy.
I Think (And Write My Ass Off), Therefore I Nap
I'm working some crazy hours lately, and I'm doing it -- productively -- by napping. I wake up at 5 a.m., and on my non-deadline days, nap at around 10:30 or 11, setting my clock for 26 minutes (in case it takes me five minutes to fall asleep), then eat lunch. And then I work for about four more hours and nap for another 26 minutes, and then work into the evening (sometimes with one more brief nap in between).
Chileans are also working a lot of hours -- and napping, according to an AP story in the WaPo. They even go to special nap facilities where they pay for a nap room. (I just grab Lucy, bundle her up in some covers, like she likes, and crawl in my bed.)
A bit from the story:
Chileans work 2,068 hours a year, second only to South Koreans, among the 34 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The number far surpasses the 1,695 hours U.S. workers average each year.All that work, and the stress that comes with it, means sleep suffers for many people. But on-the-job napping is frowned on, and siestas are viewed as a waste of time synonymous with sloth.
"I think when someone says: 'I'm going to take a siesta,' the rest brands them as lazy people who can't adjust to work hours," said Karin Schirmer, the owner of Espacio Siestario, which roughly means Siesta Place.
"We often feel like we need to spend a lot of hours at work to be socially accepted, but they're often unproductive," Schirmer said. "People assume that a siesta will be a waste of time but it's priceless. It's a bigger value than all the money you have at the bank."
Recent research has shown the benefits of a daytime snooze.
In its November 2009 issue of Harvard Health Letter, the university's medical school found that since 2000, researchers there and elsewhere have discovered "sleep improves learning, memory, and creative thinking."
"In many cases, the edifying sleep has come in the form of a nap," the article said.
Research has found that nighttime air traffic controllers improve their reaction time and vigilance when given 40 minutes for forty winks. A NASA-financed study by a team from the University of Pennsylvania found that letting people doze for 24 minutes increases cognitive performance.
Snoozing was widely debated in Chile when a lawmaker tried to implement legislation in 2003 to enshrine a 20-minute siesta as a right. He cited the napping habits of famous men such as Napoleon, Winston Churchill and Salvador Dali, and quoted Albert Einstein as praising the benefits of naps. But the project was scrapped and is ridiculed to this day.
Linksie And The Blowfish
Swimming upstream as fast as they can.
Egyptian Muslim Cleric: Christianity Started Out As Penis Worship
Oh yeah, and according to him, Christian women raise dogs and cats as a substitute for husbands:
Is this like those old "Draw Binky" ads? (See Jesus' penis!)?
Public Cell Phone Yappers: Were You Talking To Your Doctor Because You Were, Just Then, Dying Of A Heart Attack?
Woman gets thrown out of gym for talking on her cell phone.
She gives the ridiculous excuse that she was talking to her doctor -- as if this somehow would...make it less annoying to the rest of us? As if this means the world should stop and the rules should be lifted for her? (Sure, this is sometimes a legitimate excuse. See my headline.)
If I lived in Massachusetts, and if I went to a gym, I'd join that gym.
Why The TSA Is A Taxpayer Ripoff
Dan Morgan-Russell, a college freshman majoring in international relations, writes at USC's Daily Trojan:
John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State, found that the costs of maintaining the full-body scanners and other security measures at airports costing more than $1.2 billion per year is only justified on a cost-analysis basis if there is guaranteed to be a terrorist attack every two years and the TSA is able to stop that threat. Because TSA has repeatedly been unable to stop a trainer from bringing bombs through airport security, and the costs are astronomical, the TSA needs to take a look at seriously reforming policies. There are low-cost and less invasive alternatives to stopping terrorist threats that have proven to be just as effective as the measures currently in place in U.S. airports.The goal of the TSA is to stop a terrorist attack. The difference between a terrorist attack and a run-of-the-mill murder is that a terrorist attack is specifically designed to instill terror in the minds of the victims and the countrymen of the victims. Thus, the attacks on 9/11 were more than just 3,000 dead Americans; it was a nationally significant event that has shaped American policy for years, causing leaders to take us into two unjust wars and a nebulous mission to stop terrorism worldwide. By comparison, cancer kills 3,000 Americans every two days but curing cancer is much less of a national priority than stopping terrorism. When it comes to instilling fear in the minds of Americans, however, terrorist groups like al-Qaida have been unable to perpetrate a major attack against the U.S. since 9/11. Yet, every year, the TSA intimidates millions of American travelers.
The people most likely to be harmed and stopped because of the policies of the TSA are not terrorists. Average American travelers, who are more concerned with having enough leg room on the plane than with murdering innocents, are the most likely to be adversely and disproportionately affected by the current TSA practices.
Urine For A Treat
I just love this. Artist Richard Jackson's sculpture outside the Orange County Museum of Art.
Highway Bribery: Kerry Says US Forking Over Hundreds Of Millions To Egypt
Bend over, taxpayers! John Kerry -- called "The Sequester Jester" Sunday by @Drudge -- has the national wallet and he's opened it up and handed over $250 million to Egypt for their great record on women, tolerance of Christians and related stuff.
It's called "millions in aid" in the AP headline, and within the piece they quote Kerry as saying (probably with a straight face) that it's to support Egypt's "future as a democracy." (Sequester that, Obama!)
From the AP story by Matthew Lee:
Yet Kerry also served notice that the Obama administration will keep close watch on how Morsi, who came to power in June as Egypt's first freely elected president, honors his commitment and that additional U.S. assistance would depend on it.
Right. They didn't do shit to get this money, and won't have to do shit to get the next handout.
Um, speaking of buying democracies, is my memory funny, or have we not done too well in that arena?
Then again, maybe this could be seen as a sort of national stripper tip -- to all the Egyptian men who tried to strip the clothes off Lara Logan and other women they violated. Because they were there and they were female, or because, as Muslim clerics say, if women aren't covered up, Muslim men can't be blamed for what happens. (Not exactly a nice commentary on Muslim men or Islamic culture, but hey, we aren't supposed judge another culture as lesser than ours, now are we?)
McElroy: "California Can't Chase Away Business Fast Enough"
Wendy McElroy writes of the latest California obscenity at the Future of Freedom Foundation:
Shortly before the Christmas holidays and oh so quietly, the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) rescinded a tax break that dated back to 1993. The Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) exclusion allowed small businesses and investors who met certain conditions to exclude or to defer 50 percent of the profits of sold stock from their personal income taxes. The incentive was intended to lure startup companies of under $50 million into the state.Now those who were ensnared have not only lost that tax break for the future; many are also being taxed retroactively back to 2008. Plus interest. Plus possible penalties.
...But the numbers are less important than the precedent being set. Apparently, those who complied with tax law can still be hounded by a tax agency that reaches back several years to change its own rules and then demands payment or else. The precedent is particularly dangerous, because it came from tax-board staff rather than from elected officials. A massive and arbitrary power rests in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats.
...The cofounder of one business and a well-known mentor to other startups, Anderson explains the impact of the FTB policy, which may be irreversible even if the retroactive tax is abandoned.
You can't really plan for the future when the rules of the game are changing retroactively. You feel insecure investing in the state, why would you take that additional risk when they've set a precedent now showing that anything could happen anytime?"
"No Humanity" Policy At Assisted Living Center Causes Woman To Die
Absolutely disgusting. Barbara Duck blogs about this at her health care blog, The Medical Quack.
The 911 worker begs the nurse to give the phone to a passerby so she can school them in how to perform CPR. "Are we just going to let this lady die?" the 911 operator asks.
And the answer was, yes, because the nurse stood by policy at the assisted living home, Glenwood Gardens, that said they are not to give CPR.
The CPR operator begs her to find a stranger.
Futilely.
And the woman did die. Here's the TV report with the audio of the 911. The coldness of the woman in refusing to give CPR was just chilling.
Why Obama's Crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Will Fail
America's biggest scam is getting bigger, explains ReasonTV's Nick Gillespie:
And check out the government's sneaky, announcing current savings that actually came from a years-old lawsuit.
Chain Link Fence
No Rottweiler.
Advice Goddess Radio -- Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Gabrielle Principe, Parenting Sans Paranoia--Why The Overstructured Childhood Is So Bad For Kids
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
The panic-stricken parental race to raise tiny geniuses is actually bad parenting -- leading to overstructured, overcontrolled childhoods that have negative effects on kids' development.
This way of raising children is marketing-driven, not science-driven (though marketers typically claim their toys and learning tools are based in science).
Take Baby Einstein videos. In 2007, UCLA's Department of Health Services chairman Frederick Zimmerman and his colleagues found that kids watching these had a 17 percent decrease in vocabulary acquisition for each hour they spent watching them per day.
Through looking at solid science on the human brain, psychology professor Dr. Gabrielle Principe has figured out ways for parents to naturalize childhood again, so a child's environment gels with how the brain was designed to grow.
Principe is a developmental scientist who has spent about 20 years researching young children, and she's also a mom of two young kids. Her clearly written and dryly witty book: "Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan."
Join us tonight as she busts countless myths about how to raise children and lays out simple, clear advice for how kids can thrive.
Listen at this link at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/03/04/dr-gabrielle-principe-parenting-sans-paranoia
And don't miss last week's show with Dr. Stanton Peele on the personal responsibility approach to overcoming addictions and bad habits.
Peele talks about how to fight addiction without a 12-step program. He also busts many of the myths many people hold about addiction -- as well as the excuses they cling to for why they can't overcome their self-defeating, destructive behaviors. He offers practical thinking and steps for change, and we discuss unhealthy love and relationships as well as substance addiction and more minor and common bad habits.
Peele wrote a really fantastic book, co-authored with Archie Brodsky, called Love and Addiction, and more recently, and also very wise, the book, 7 Tools To Beat Addiction, which we'll be discussing on the show. He blogs at Psychology Today and The Huffington Post.
Listen here at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/02/25/dr-stanton-peele-overcome-your-addiction
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes.
Government Knows Best! (Starve On That, Dude)
@Instapundit linked to a Real Clear Politics Thomas Sowell article on Cass Sunstein and the notion that government knows best, and there was this shocking passage in it about protectionist policies:
Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible.
From Living History Farm:
During the early years of the Depression, livestock prices dropped disastrously. Officials with the New Deal believed prices were down because farmers were still producing too many commodities like hogs and cotton. The solution proposed in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was to reduce the supply.So, in the late spring of 1933, the federal government carried out "emergency livestock reductions." In Nebraska, the government bought about 470,000 cattle and 438,000 pigs. Nationwide, six million hogs were purchased from desperate farmers. In the South, one million farmers were paid to plow under 10.4 million acres of cotton.
The hogs and cattle were simply killed. In Nebraska, thousands were shot and buried in deep pits. Farmers hated to sell their herds, but they had no choice. The federal buy-out saved many farmers from bankruptcy, and AAA payments became the chief source of income for many that year.
The Work Life Of A 20-Something
For those in the fun professions, there isn't much room for life-life. Teddy Wayne writes in The New York Times:
"We need to hire a 22-22-22," one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year. Perhaps the middle figure is an exaggeration, but its bookends certainly aren't. According to a 2011 Pew report, the median net worth for householders under 35 dropped by 68 percent from 1984 to 2009, to $3,662. Lest you think that's a mere side effect of the economic downturn, for those over 65, it rose 42 percent to $170,494 (largely because of an overall gain in property values). Hence 1.2 million more 25-to-34-year-olds lived with their parents in 2011 than did four years earlier....A recent posting by Dalkey Archive Press, an avant-garde publisher in Champaign, Ill., for unpaid interns in its London office encapsulated the outlandish demands on young workers. The stern catalog of grounds for "immediate dismissal" included "coming in late or leaving early without prior permission," "being unavailable at night or on the weekends" and "failing to respond to e-mails in a timely way." And "The Steve Wilkos Show" on NBCUniversal recently advertised on Craigslist for a freelance booking production assistant who would work "65+ hours per week" (the listing was later removed after drawing outraged comments when it was linked on jimromenesko.com).
"The notion of the traditional entry-level job is disappearing," said Ross Perlin, 29, the author of "Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy." Internships have replaced them, he said, "but also fellowships and nebulous titles that sound prestigious and pay a stipend, which means you're only coming out with $15,000 a year."
Once a short-term commitment at most, internships have become an obligatory rite of passage that often drags on for years.
...On (intern Lucy Schiller's) last day at one job, her 75-year-old supervisor asked her to help move some heavy things in her house. In her garage, the supervisor opened a door from which issued a blinding stream of light.
"It was a huge room filled with her own field of marijuana plants," Ms. Schiller said. "She conscripted me for no pay to harvest it overnight. She makes $35,000 per crop and it goes straight to her retirement account."
The intern's payment the next morning: a breakfast burrito.
A few comments from the NYT:
KellyS, Berkeley:
As someone who has worked in a creative field for 20 years, I have been watching this happen over and over, and getting more extreme each year. I used to be able to fight management to ensure my interns were paid $10/hour but I can't get that any longer now that everyone knows these desperate young people will work for free. What choice do they have? Sit at home or at least get some experience and try to claw their way into a career.These kids will do anything to get a paying job and will also try to take the jobs from paid staff by proving they are willing to work all night, all weekend, whatever is asked. The result is that the paid staff with years of experience are also working nights and weekends to preserve their jobs. It's horrible to do in your 20s, and impossible in your 40s.
D.PDX, OR:
Here in Portland one couldn't help notice that one of the big athletic apparel/shoe companies (no, not the one in Beaverton) has more internships listed on its website than full-time positions. Sure, they appear to be great opportunities but the responsibilities and skills required lead one to guess that what is really going on is an attempt to fill positions they used to pay people to do.
JAustin, TX:
Tell them not to go into such a hopeless industry. That would be the best thing you can do for them. Not everyone can be a writer/actor/publicist/, and no one can afford to work for free in their prime earning years.
When will this change a little? Maybe when some 22-year-old working 22-hour days falls asleep behind the wheel and takes out a family of four.
Is That A Pop Tart In Your Lunch Bag?
Yet another story pointing to how stupid are the people in charge of educating America's children. A Maryland kid chewed his breakfast pastry (probably a Pop-Tart) into the shape of a gun, and got a two-day suspension, reports Katherine Mangu-Ward at reason. Here's the video:
Timeless Link Story
Once upon a tine...
No, that's not an accident. It's a love story that starts with a fork in the road.
What's Your Dealbreaker In A Relationship?
SidneyAnne Stone polled men and women and posted their answers at GoodMenProject.
Certain themes emerged, she said, upon polling 20 women:
•Lying
•Cheating
•Stealing (you would be surprised how many women told me this has happened to them)
•If he EVER hits, shoves or in any way raises his hands to you in anger
•Already has kids that he doesn't take care of or see
•Doesn't want kids and you do or vice versa
•Workaholic or unemployed (equally undesirable apparently)
•Lazy/unmotivated
•Never wants to go anywhere with you
•Never pays for anything/cheap
•Cries too much
•Bad in bed/no chemistry
•Inability to communicate
•Does not have a mind of their own/not passionate about anything/doesn't have their own opinions
•Negative attitude
•Lives with parents
•Not close to family
She said some women had no dealbreakers, which is sad.
And men she polled (no word on how many) said their dealbreakers were:
•Smoking
•Needy
•Too independent
•Always fussing and primping/pays too much attention to their looks
•Out of shape/doesn't take care of themselves
•Know it all
•Dumb
•Can't support themselves/contribute financially to the relationship or marriage (but the same man confessed to me that he also feels emasculated when his partner makes more than he does)
•Not saying what they want/mean and expecting us to figure it out
•Jealousy
•Bad teeth
There are some contradictions here, of course, but a big one I hear from men:
Not saying what they want/mean and expecting us to figure it out
From women, "cries too much" was a little bizarre.
Your thoughts? Your dealbreakers?
Why You Shouldn't Friend Your Mom On Facebook
From HappyPlace, a mom had the Peruvian government hunt down her 25-year-old son, on a four-month bike trip across South America with his girlfriend, after he stopped posting on Facebook.
via @BrianAitken
Hysterical Message People Are Posting On Facebook
This -- or some version of it -- typically appears in one big blog of text, but I've paragraphed it up for reading ease and fun. Well, ease.
It's easy to do so everyone should do this for their friends to stop the end of any privacy on Facebook!WARNING!!! FACEBOOK HAS CHANGED THEIR PRIVACY SETTINGS ONCE MORE!!! DUE TO THE NEW "GRAPH APP" ANYONE ON FACEBOOK (INCLUDING OTHER COUNTRIES) CAN SEE YOUR PICTURES, LIKES, AND COMMENTS.
The next 2 weeks I will be posting this, and please once you have done it please post DONE! Those of you who do not keep my information from going out to the public, I will have to DELETE YOU! I want to stay PRIVATELY connected with you.
I post shots of my family that I don't want strangers to have access to!!! This happens when our friends click "like" or "comment"... automatically, their friends would see our posts too. Unfortunately, we cannot change this setting by ourselves because Facebook has configured it that way.
PLEASE place your mouse over my name above (DO NOT CLICK), a window will appear, now move the mouse on "FRIENDS" (also without clicking), then down to "Settings", click here and a list will appear. REMOVE the CHECK on "LIFE EVENTS."
By doing this, my activity among my friends and family will no longer become public. Now, copy and paste this on your wall. Once I see this posted on your page, I will do the same. THANK YOU
Facebook privacy settings should be considered "privacy" settings. That said, the notion that anybody is going to take some picture of your infant grandson's ass in the bathtub and put it on a porn site and that that photo will follow him forever...well, it's a little implausible.
I use Facebook to post links I've already posted here and to follow the work of various researchers I know. If I have information that I don't wish to have the world see -- like Gregg's photo, because he's more private than I am, and I respect that -- I don't post it. My friends know what he looks like. My parents have met him. Otherwise, a face with the name is really pretty unnecessary.
Old Biddies Rate Kim Kardashian's Sex Tape
"What is her problem? She's just laying there."
"That's the Brazilian."
3 Grandmas Watch Kim Kardashian's Sex Tape - Watch More Funny Videos
Hugh More
And stuff.
Coffee Spill In Southern California
The pages have gone to the rehab center on my porch to dry out.
Target Stores Eat Your Privacy As A Matter Of Policy
My boyfriend looks pretty young for his age, which is almost 62. Yes, that's "almost 62," not "almost 22."
Yet, when he went to buy wine at Target on Friday, they told him he had to show his driver's license. That it was "company policy."
And then they told him that he didn't just have to show his driver's license, they had to scan it or he couldn't buy the wine.
He didn't buy the wine.
I hope you won't either, and that you won't patronize stores like Target that insist on recording your personal information as a condition of shopping there, or buying certain items there.
And remember, you have no guarantee that Target will guard your privacy. A driver's license number is a key to the ability to get other identification or do who knows what in your name.
Spread the word -- don't shop at Target or other privacy-eating businesses. And spread the names of other businesses that demand your data as a condition of checking out with the stuff in your basket, and spread the word not to shop there.
Watertown, New York Bans Roommates
Reason.tv's Nanny of the Month, written and produced by Ted Balaker:
Ted notes that banned roommates would include everyone from unmarried couples to domestic partners and soldiers sharing a home.
"We Found Our Son In The Subway"
Moving account of how two gay men, now married, became dads. Peter Mercurio writes in The New York Times:
The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years earlier, in a dark, damp subway station.Danny called me that day, frantic. "I found a baby!" he shouted. "I called 911, but I don't think they believed me. No one's coming. I don't want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something." By nature Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I knew I had to run.
When I got to the A/C/E subway exit on Eighth Avenue, Danny was still there, waiting for help to arrive. The baby, who had been left on the ground in a corner behind the turnstiles, was light-brown skinned and quiet, probably about a day old, wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt.
...Three months later, Danny appeared in family court to give an account of finding the baby. Suddenly, the judge asked, "Would you be interested in adopting this baby?" The question stunned everyone in the courtroom, everyone except for Danny, who answered, simply, "Yes."
...The caseworker told us that the process, which included an extensive home study and parenting classes, could take up to nine months. We'd have ample time to rearrange our lives and home for a baby. But a week later, when Danny and I appeared in front of the judge to officially state our intention to adopt, she asked, "Would you like him for the holiday?"
What holiday? Memorial Day? Labor Day? She couldn't have meant Christmas, which was only a few days away.
And yet, once again, in unison this time, we said yes. The judge grinned and ordered the transition of the baby into our custody. Our nine-month window of thoughtful preparation was instantly compacted to a mere 36 hours. We were getting a baby for Christmas.
Linkin Boulevard
The Boulevard of Broken Axles, Los Angeles, California.
