When Pigs Fly (Onto My Plate)
Turkey bacon is a crime against bacon.
New Jersey Texting Ruling Not What It's Been Made Out To Be
Marc J. Randazza, the wonderful First Amendment lawyer who came to my rescue when TSA worker Thedala Magee tried to squeeze me for $500K and squash my free speech, has a piece up at CNN that I hope people will pass around (to combat all the misinformation flying around).
Randazza writes:
The headlines and blogs are all abuzz with the latest news: If a driver who's texting gets in an accident and you sent the text, you can be arrested! Terrible, right?Actually, it's not true, despite what you may have been told by people who have seen two episodes of some lawyer show and think they are qualified to be legal analysts. Such ignorance about the law feeds misinformation that grows on itself, doubles back and makes us all dumber.
...The court held that theoretically, someone could be held liable for sending a text to a driver. But the ruling was very clear, and very, very limited:
"We hold that the sender of a text message could potentially be liable if an accident is caused by texting but only if the sender knew or had special reason to know that the recipient would view the text while driving and thus be distracted."
In other words, yes, you can be held responsible if you cause an accident by sending a text message. But only if you knew that the recipient would look at the text message while driving. If you had any reason to have any doubt in your mind, then you will likely not be held liable.
This Is Not The Country We're Supposed To Be Living In: The Form You Have To Sign To Get Cold Medicine At The Drugstore
Sickeningly, in order to get some relief from a very bad cold I'm suffering from, this is the form I had to sign at CVS after I had my privacy violated by government order: I had to hand over my driver's license so the pharmacist could record my name and address for the government. 
Sickeningly, in order to get some relief from a very bad cold I'm suffering from, this is the form I had to sign at CVS after I had my privacy violated by government order: I had to hand over my driver's license so the pharmacist could record my name and address for the government.
I was buying cold medicine -- Mucinex-D, with pseudoephedrine -- which you can only buy from behind the counter, with a disgusting privacy violation.
I found the code mentioned -- and the threat within -- here.
By the way, you, as Joe Ordinary Citizen, are expected to know that you can only purchase so many pseudoephedrine pills per month, or your freedom can be taken from you by mouth-foaming DEA agents.
That said, I was only allowed to buy one package of 18 pills, not two. There was a 24-pack, but it had double the dosage of pseudoephedrine and I didn't want that one. (I get the extended release and I was worried that cutting the pills might result in an inexact dosage or might screw up the extended release.)
It is HORRIFYING and wrong that ordinary citizens who have done nothing wrong are treated as criminals by their government because they want to fly to see grandma or because they want medication for their cold.
(Of course, the cold medicine the government allows sold OTC has been shown to be LESS EFFECTIVE THAN A PLACEBO.)
Oh, and one last disgusting thing: I got home from the drugstore and thought I'd forgotten the bag with my Mucinex-D, St. Ives face wash, and deodorant back in the cart, and I was suddenly terrified.
Yes, beyond the cost of the items and the pain in the ass it would be to go back to the drugstore, I was afraid I would go to jail.
This is appalling and this is not the country we are supposed to be living in.
The DEA and too many other sectors of government have far too much power. I have no idea how that power would be rolled back. We haven't been able to do it with the TSA.
Well, I hope those of you who are silent have enjoyed your rights while you've had them.
Wave bye-bye to the nice Constitution!
California Invents A Time Machine To Suck More Money Out Of Businesses
It's a retroactive tax increase that goes back five years! From the WSJ:
California imposed a huge retroactive income tax increase last year, but some 2,500 small business owners are learning that once is never enough for Sacramento. The state now wants to hit them with a retroactive levy going back to 2008, to the tune of $120 million or more.California has since 1993 let investors cut their capital-gains tax in half if they invest in qualified state businesses. But late last year the state Court of Appeal ruled that the tax break violates the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause by discriminating against out-of-state firms.
Instead of simply ending the tax incentive going forward, the state Franchise Tax Board has ordered investors who used the tax break to pay five years of back taxes. As a special insult, these taxpayers may have to pay interest and penalties on the "unpaid taxes" they were never required to pay in the first place. So the politicians promise tax favors for investment, but when the courts invalidate the favors the politicians punish the folks who did what the politicians asked them to do.
Linkiepoo
Clean up after your squirrel.
Labor Day Savings At Amazon
Up to 60 percent off shoes, clothes, and more at Amazon
Homicidalisms
If I ever ran down the street screaming and waving an ax, it would be over the word "listicle."
Words/terms that make your teeth hurt?
Dave Barry Isn't Just Funny
Here's a right-on bit from a reason interview from years back, posted by Lucy Steigerwald in a blog item with the super title, "Dave Barry Knows the Secrets to Humanity and Freedom: Hookers and Elvis":
After a while, the way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone' s time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives. The way we deal with drugs and sex. I saw one of these real-life cop drama shows, and they mounted a camera in this undercover agent's pick-up truck, right under the gear shift, and they sent him out to pick up prostitutes.So the whole show consisted of this guy, who's quite a good actor, driving to this one street, and young prostitutes come up to him and solicit him. He says OK. They get in. They're trying real hard to be nice. He's going to pay $23, that's all he's got and they said that's OK. Meanwhile, behind him the other cops, these fat men with walkie-talkies, are laughing and chuckling because here they are about to enforce the law and protect society. They take her to some street and then of course they come up and arrest her. This poor woman-I don't know whether she's feeding her drug habit or feeding her kids or whatever. And the cops are so proud of themselves, these big strapping guys.
It just made me sick to see this. To treat these people who are trying to make a living, one way or another, this way, and to be proud of it. It's on television and we're all supposed to watch this and feel good about it. It's just disgusting.
School Has Stopped Being About Learning
Thomas Frank writes in The Baffler:
Consider the standardized testing industry and its shadow, the test-prep industry. One of them is supposedly charitable, the other ebulliently profit-minded, but both of them have raked it in for years by stoking a pointless arms race among the anxious youngsters of the nation, each one fearful lest her dream be cancelled out by someone else's. The testing companies, each of which holds a monopoly over some aspect of the business, charge students hefty registration fees, pay their executives fantastic salaries,* and scheme endlessly to enlarge the empire of the standardized test--persuading more people to take advanced placement exams, for example, and invading grade schools, where "No Child Left Behind" and the push for a "Common Core" have opened up vast frontiers for testing.The test-prep people, meanwhile, match them step for step, charging students far, far heftier fees to help them beat the standardized tests and endlessly scheming to persuade new demographics--grade schoolers, notably--that they need cram school too.* Occasionally, news stories appear announcing that test-prep of this kind has little effect on SAT scores, but it's really the news stories themselves that have little effect. What parent is going to be stingy when their child's future appears to be at stake? And so the test-prep industry has boomed extravagantly for decades now; there are numerous entrants in the field, and the best established of them, Kaplan Inc., has branched out around the globe and into all manner of educational provinces. Although technically owned by the Washington Post Company, its revenues have dwarfed those of the newspaper for many years.
And we're not even going to start with the test-fraud industry, which is apparently booming as well, as cases of mass cheating surface at Harvard, at prestigious Stuyvesant High, at the benchmark-crazy Atlanta Public Schools, and in South Korea, where SATs for the entire country had to be cancelled a few months back.
Consider the "enrollment management" industry, which helps colleges and universities acquire the student body they desire. Since what this means in many cases is students who can pay--the opposite of the "inclusiveness" most universities say they treasure--enrollment management is a job best left to quiet consultancies, who use the various tools of marketing to discover a student's "price sensitivity." In other words, if you give a discount of a certain amount to a student with a certain SAT score, will that be enough to persuade them to pick up the rest of the tab and attend your school? What will it take to lure them to their second choice? Their third? Enrollment management consultants know the answer, just as they know what kind of discounts to offer in order to maximize the institution's revenue and boost its all-important test scores.
Consider the sweetheart deals that are so commonplace between university administrations and the businessmen who happen to sit on the university's board of directors. Consider universities' real estate operations, which are often thuggish and nearly always tax-free. Consider their army of Washington lobbyists, angling for earmarks and fighting accountability measures. Consider their massive investments in sports. Or their sleazy arrangements with tobacco companies and Big Pharma and high-tech startups.
And lastly, consider the many universities that have raised their tuition to extravagant levels for no reason at all except to take advantage of the quaint American folk belief that price tags indicate quality.
He goes into administrator bloat and the sad story of how Cooper Union stopped being free to students -- because the administrators built some architectural trophy building the school couldn't pay off with the limited funds generated by its endowment.
The "free education" thing was collateral damage. Better to be known for "vibrant" architecture, I guess, than for some old-fashioned nonsense about uplifting the non-wealthy.The story of Cooper Union is a typical anecdote of the age of collegiate capitalism, and it's easy to come up with other examples of the lavish, unnecessary spending that characterizes American academia nowadays, that makes it "the best in the world." It's not just the showy new buildings, but the sports teams that give the alumni such a thrill, the fancy gymnasiums and elaborate food courts that everyone thinks you have to have if you want the cool kids to choose your diploma mill over all the others. It's the celebrity professors everyone has decided they must furnish sinecures for regardless of whether those celebrities know anything about the subject they are hired to profess.*
That star is about "Chelsea Clinton, who was hired by NYU as an assistant vice provost and then made cochair of a new campus institute, even though she has not yet finished her doctorate."
Ugh. And I'm not a Clinton-hater. I would have voted for Hillary over Barack Obama in a hot second. Not that I was for Hillary; just that I think she would have been a far better (and far less awful) president than Obama.
via @aldaily
Justice Is Now Ju$tice: State Crime Labs Paid Per Conviction
Radley Balko writes at the HuffPo that many state crime labs are paid by conviction. Horrific and horribly wrong:
In a new paper for the journal Criminal Justice Ethics, Roger Koppl and Meghan Sacks look at how the criminal justice system actually incentivizes wrongful convictions. In their section on state crime labs, they discover some astonishing new information about how many of these labs are funded:Funding crime labs through court-assessed fees creates another channel for bias to enter crime lab analyses. In jurisdictions with this practice the crime lab receives a sum of money for each conviction of a given type. Ray Wickenheiser says, ''Collection of court costs is the only stable source of funding for the Acadiana Crime Lab. $10 is received for each guilty plea or verdict from each speeding ticket, and $50 from each DWI (Driving While Impaired) and drug offense.''In Broward County, Florida, ''Monies deposited in the Trust Fund are principally court costs assessed upon conviction of driving or boating under the influence ($50) or selling, manufacturing, delivery, or possession of a controlled substance ($100).''
Several state statutory schemes require defendants to pay crime laboratory fees upon conviction. North Carolina General Statutes require, ''[f]or the services of'' the state or local crime lab, that judges in criminal cases assess a $600 fee to be charged ''upon conviction'' and remitted to the law enforcement agency containing the lab whenever that lab ''performed DNA analysis of the crime, tests of bodily fluids of the defendant for the presence of alcohol or controlled substances, or analysis of any controlled substance possessed by the defendant or the defendant's agent.''
Balko notes:
Think about how these fee structures play out in the day-to-day work in these labs. Every analyst knows that a test result implicating a suspect will result in a fee paid to the lab. Every result that clears a suspect means no fee. They're literally being paid to provide the analysis to win convictions. Their findings are then presented to juries as the careful, meticulous work of an objective scientist.No wonder there have been so many scandals. I'm sure we'll continue to see more.
Balko's Slate piece with Koppl on how to fix some of the problems in forensic science.
Blinky
This is today's eye chart.
Is It Worth Shutting Down Two Subway Lines To Save A Couple Of Kittens?
And if so, how about to save a couple (thousand...million?) rats?
The question in the post headline is from NYMag's Dan Amira, who noted that there were a couple of cats scurrying around the subway tracks in Brooklyn.
The MTA shut down the B and Q trains for an hour, but as Amira put it, "Apparently herding cats is as difficult as the idiom implies," because an hour later, when service was restored, the cats remained loose.
Amira lays out the pro and con:
Pro: Who cares if a few thousand people were inconvenienced for a little while? These are beautiful, innocent creatures. We should do what we can to protect them from being electrified by the third rail or crushed by a train. What if they were puppies instead of kittens? You are a monster.Con: The subway is the lifeblood of New York and shouldn't be shut down suddenly except in rare, monumentally significant circumstances. What if some people missed job interviews because of the long, unexpected delay? What if they were late for big meetings? What if they missed important doctor appointments? These things probably happened. It's unfortunate, but animals die sometimes. It's not like they were puppies, anyway.
Your thoughts?
UPDATE -- Hah. Loved this tweet:
@tvjrennie
Neuroethics revisited: Train heading for 2 kittens on tracks. You can save but only by throwing 1 kitten at train.... http://goo.gl/Op9BhC
He's joking about the trolley problem.
Don't "Listen To Your Body"
Your body wants you to keep smoking and eat more doughnuts. More on the mush-mindedness of "Listen to your body!" from Dr. Michael Eades' post on on "Starting (or restarting) low-carb":
The surest road to failure in the first few days of low-carb dieting is to listen to your body. The whole notion of listening to your body is one of my major pet peeves. In fact, just hearing those words makes me want to puke. In my experience, they are usually uttered by females with moist, dreamy looks in their eyes, but not always. I just read a ton of comments in recent Paleo blog post in which vastly more males than females actually wrote this drivel.Listening to your body is giving the elephant free rein. If you're three days into your stop-smoking program, and you listen to your body, you're screwed. If you're in drug rehab, and you listen to your body, you're screwed. If you're trying to give up booze, and you listen to your body, you're screwed. And if you're a week into your low-carb diet, and you listen to your body, you're screwed. Actually, it's okay to listen to it, I suppose, just don't do what it's telling you to do because if you do, you're screwed.
...If you want to reduce the time you spend in low-carb adaptation, crank up the fat. If you go on a high-protein, moderate-fat diet (Schwatka's reindeer diet), your body will convert the protein to glucose via gluconeogenesis, so you'll still have glucose to keep the glucose worker enzymes busy and will prolong the conversion to fat and ketones as your primary energy source.
So Rule Number One to reduce the time spent in low-carb adaptation purgatory is: Don't be a wuss when you start your low-carb way of eating. Keep the carbs cut to the minimum and load up on the fat. Eat fatty cuts of meat, cooked in butter or lard if you want, and force your body over to using the fats and ketones for energy as nature intended. I mean, don't try to be noble by eating boneless, skinless chicken breasts - instead insert some pats of butter under the skin of a chicken leg and thigh before cooking, and wolf them with your fingers while the fat drips down your arms. Do not trim the fat from your steaks - eat them from the fat side in. If you leave anything on your plate, make sure it's the meat and not the fat. If you don't already, learn to love bacon, and don't cook it 'til the fat is all gone: eat it wobbly. Wallow in Mangalitsa lardo. And whatever you do, for God's sake, don't listen to your body during this adaptation period or you'll never cross the chasm between fat and miserable on your high-carb diet and slim, happy, energetic and low-carb adapted on the other side.
How The FBI Blew Fort Hood
Mariah Blake has a terrific piece in Mother Jones about how Nidal Hassan, the mass-murdering Muslim at Fort Hood, might have been stopped, had the FBI not had their collective heads up their ass. About the email exchanged by U.S. Military officer Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric with ties to the 9/11 hijackers:
While officials claimed that they were "fairly benign," the FBI blocked then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman's efforts to make them public as part of a two-year congressional investigation into Fort Hood. The military judge in the Hasan case also barred the prosecutor from presenting them, saying they would cause "unfair prejudice" and "undue delay."As it turns out, the FBI quietly released the emails in an unclassified report on the shooting, which was produced by an investigative commission headed by former FBI director William H. Webster last year. And, far from being "benign," they offer a chilling glimpse into the psyche of an Islamic radical. The report also shows how badly the FBI bungled its Hasan investigation and suggests that the Army psychiatrist's deadly rampage could have been prevented.
Advertise on MotherJones.comHasan first appeared on the bureau's radar in December of 2008--nearly a year before the Fort Hood massacre--when he emailed Awlaki to ask him whether serving in the US military was compatible with the Muslim faith. He also asked whether Awlaki considered those who died attacking their fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.
At the time, Awlaki, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2011, was emerging as Al Qaeda's chief English-speaking propagandist. He was also known to have ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers, two of whom attended his mosque in San Diego.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, which was tracking Awlaki, intercepted Hasan's December email, along with another sent in January. A search of the Pentagon's personnel database turned up a man named Nidal Hasan who was on active military duty and was listed as a "Comm Officer" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.
Hasan first appeared on the FBI's radar when he emailed Anwar al-Awlaki to ask if he considered US servicemen who died attacking fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.
Normally, when the FBI unearths this kind of raw intelligence, it issues an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), which is shared with law enforcement agencies and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (This system was designed to prevent the kind of information bottlenecks that allowed the 9/11 plot to go undetected.) But the San Diego agents misinterpreted the "Comm Officer" label in Hasan's file to mean "communications officer" (in fact, it meant "commissioned officer") and believed that a person in this role might have access to IIRs. To avoid tipping him off, they skipped the report and sent a detailed memo requesting an investigation directly to the Washington, DC, Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency team overseen by the FBI that investigates terrorism cases in the capital. The message noted that Hasan's "contact with [Awlaki] would be of concern if the writer is actually the individual identified above."The file languished for nearly two months before it was assigned to an agent for the Defense Criminal Investigative Services, who was on the task force. According to a 2011 report on the Fort Hood shootings by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, DCIS--a law enforcement agency within the Pentagon, which normally deals with fraud and cybercrime among military personnel and contractors--was ill-equipped to tackle a counterterrorism investigation.
Meanwhile, Hasan kept writing Awlaki. Between January and May 2009, he sent the radical cleric more than a dozen emails, and received two relatively benign responses. In one message, ostensibly about Palestinians firing unguided rockets into Israel, Hasan asked Awlaki whether "indiscriminately killing civilians" was acceptable.
If the FBI can't stop terrorist attacks with all the evidence they had, do we really think giving up our civil liberties to get groped by hamburger clerks at airports will do the job?
And about unconstitutionally spying on all of our communications -- when the FBI has beyond obvious signs of a threat, they do fuck all with it. It helps national security how for them to have my conversation with my auntie?
And it helps us how to have the government referring to Hasan's murder for Islam as "workplace violence"? The guy didn't go nuts. He reportedly went "Allah akbar!"
Thursday, I'll Be Going Off To Have My Privacy Violated
Because I've done something criminal? No, because I have a cold and want to buy Mucinex-D with pseudoephedrine, which is great for seriously diminishing cold symptoms. To get it, I'll have to go to the pharmacy window and allow them to see and maybe even photocopy my driver's license and put my name on a list they will send to the government before they will sell me a package.
The government does allow the kind of Mucinex without pseudoephedrine to be sold right on the store shelves, and doesn't require you to show any ID to buy it. Of course, the active ingredient in it, dextromethorphan, in research, was shown to be WORSE than a placebo.
TSA: Transportation "Security" Assholes
You're going on a plane trip; they're going on a power trip. This post from FlyerTalk.com illustrates it so well. The guy writes:
TSA check points usually provide a bit of entertainment for me.On one occasion the lady next to me did not have her cosmetics in ZIPLOK bag and the TSA agent was really yelling at her - I carry a roll of ZIPLOK bags because on my job I have to bag broken parts.
I handed her a ZIPLOK bag. The TSA agent went nuts and started screaming at me.
The lady tried to give me the bag back and I told her he is just mad because we neutralized his problem with you.
At this point I was laughing at the TSA agent. He screamed, "SUPERVISOR!"
When the supervisor came over, the TSA agent explained the lady did not have a ZIPLOK bag and this guy gave her one. Supervisor said problem solved.
By this time everyone around was having a good chuckle. See, TSA is usually good entertainment. I go through TSA with a smile on my face and a song in my heart; they seldom fail to entertain.
PS It's Ziploc.
Yes, Your Noise Is Actually Hurtful To Others
There was an op-ed in The New York Times by George Prochnik on noise:
Mammalian hearing developed primarily as an animal-detector system -- and it was crucial to hear every rustle from afar. The evolved ear is an extraordinary amplifier. By the time the brain registers a sound, our auditory mechanism has jacked the volume several hundredfold from the level at which the sound wave first started washing around the loopy whirls of our ears. This is why, in a reasonably quiet room, we actually can hear a pin drop. Think what a tiny quantity of sound energy is released by a needle striking a floor! Our ancestors needed such hypersensitivity, because every standout noise signified a potential threat....Our capacity to tune out noises -- a relatively recent adaptation -- may itself pose a danger, since it allows us to neglect the physical damage that noise invariably wreaks. A Hyena (Hypertension and Exposure to Noise Near Airports) study published in 2009 examined the effects of aircraft noise on sleeping subjects. The idea was to see what effect noise had, not only on those awakened by virtual fingernails raking the blackboard of the night sky, but on the hardy souls who actually slept through the thunder of overhead jets.
The findings were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.
As Dr. Wolfgang Babisch, a lead researcher in the field, observed, there is no physiological habituation to noise. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don't consciously register noise.
In American culture, we tend to regard sensitivity to noise as a sign of weakness or killjoy prudery. To those who complain about sound levels on the streets, inside their homes and across a swath of public spaces like stadiums, beaches and parks, we say: "Suck it up. Relax and have a good time." But the scientific evidence shows that loud sound is physically debilitating. A recent World Health Organization report on the burden of disease from environmental noise conservatively estimates that Western Europeans lose more than one million healthy life years annually as a consequence of noise-related disability and disease. Among environmental hazards, only air pollution causes more damage.
Noises that bother you?
Here's one that bothers me: When I'm on hold with a business, instead of playing some sort of soft classical music to let me know I'm still connected, they use the time to play a recording to SELL! SELL! SELL!
This does not make me want to buy anything; it makes me consider the penalties for homicide.
It next makes me wonder whether their competitor does the same thing.
For many other noises, Gregg got me what I refer to as asshole-cancelling headphones. There are cheaper ones -- and as far as I know, they don't work.
Linkies
Random acts of linkage.
Why Must Everyone Hang Their Personal Life Out For Everyone?
And why must we assume celebrities who aren't getting caught without panties on at clubs and who aren't spilling all are hiding something?
This was on HuffPo video:
Actress Raven Symone recently came out on Twitter, but Queen Latifah refuses to talk about her sexuality on her new talk show. Why do black women in Hollywood face incredible hurdles when it comes to admitting one's sexual preference?
You don't see a whole lot about Queen Latifah's personal life on her Wikipedia page. Perhaps she hasn't "come out" about her sexuality for the same reason she hasn't "come out" about the rest of her life: She's private.
PR guy Howard Bragman says black celebs don't come out because African American churches are homophobic:
Toronto Bends Over For Islam: Dad Not Allowed To Watch Daughter's Swim Class
Jenny Yuen writes in the Toronto Sun:
TORONTO - When a single dad signed his nine-year-old daughter up for female-only swim lessons, he didn't realize he -- as a man -- was going to be banned from watching her practice.Chris (who didn't want his last name published) was shocked when he had the blinds to the viewing area of the Dennis R. Timbrell Recreation Centre pool in Flemingdon Park shut on him and then was told by staffers it was for "religious reasons."
"I spoke to a staff member and she told me that it's because of Muslim women, that we're not allowed to look at them or whatever," Chris, 38, told the Toronto Sun Friday. "I don't think religion has a role to play in a public pool."
Chris said he enrolled his daughter online through the city's website and registered her for the Ultra Swim 1: Female class - a nine-week course offered for free at the community centre.
Nowhere on the form did it mention that males could not watch the lessons.
So, when he showed up with his child at the pool on March 28 and again on Thursday night, he was confused when told he wasn't allowed to watch.
"She doesn't have a lot of friends and I wanted her to swim with girls," Chris explained. "I don't know what parent wouldn't want to watch their child participate. There were other fathers there who weren't too happy."
..."Without a female-only program, there would be women that wouldn't be able to participate in swimming," Jackson said. "This is the way it needs to be in order to accommodate the programs. We're not opening the door to one cultural group only -- this is all females we're accommodating."
If your religion doesn't allow you to participate in the activities of a secular society, it is your religion that should change. Or you should just accept that some activities aren't for you.
From a paper by Asma Barlas, presented in 2009 at the Conference on Religion and Politics of the Body at the University of Iceland:
Whereas in the early years of Islam, scholars held that both men and women could show those parts of their bodies that were not pudendal, by the thirteenth century, some exegetes had declared the entire body of a free woman pudendal and, by the seventeenth, even her face and hands. Some went so far to call the gaze itself a "messenger of fornication." One finds the same sense of pudendency in the hadith, or narratives, about the Prophet's life that also were compiled centuries after his death. These disparage women as "evil temptresses, the greatest fitna [temptation] for men," "unclean over and above menstruation," "morally and religiously defective," "the larger part of the inhabitants of Hell, because of their unfaithfulness and ingratitude towards their husbands," and as having "weaker intellectual powers" than men. Muslim sexual ethics also exhibit a "fear of the demonic power of sex," and out of this "fear of the uncontrollable, dangerous, and yet fascinating power of sex develops the tendency to see all the dreaded (hence hated) aspects of life in woman."
Nasty and primitive.
And by the way, "female only" swim lessons are kind of discriminatory. Even though they now apparently offer "male only" ones to keep the dirty, dirty girlpeople away from the boypeople.
Many imams will say that men can't contain themselves (from raping women) if they aren't covered up in self-obliterating tents. Well, those of us in Western society seem to mostly do just fine not raping women simply because they're out in shorts.
The Government Is Forcing Businesses To Overcharge Their Customers
The wonderful Institute for Justice has taken on another case -- in Tampa, Florida, where all sedan and limo trips, no matter how short, are required to cost at least $50. Even if the driver wants to charge less. Even if the passenger wants to pay less.
As IJ's Mark Meranta wrote to me, "Consumers need the government protecting them from affordable prices as much as they need a government agency protecting them from pillows that are too soft."
More on their case:
Tampa, Fla.--It shouldn't be illegal for businesses to give their customers a better deal. And yet, in Tampa, Fla., the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission is making it illegal for limo and sedan entrepreneurs to give their customers a better deal when it comes to rides. That is why a coalition including a limo driver, his small business and consumers has joined with the Institute for Justice to sue the Public Transportation Commission today in state court in Tampa under the Florida Constitution.The limo driver and small limo business want to offer cheaper deals and better values to customers. The customers want to accept these offers. There is only one thing standing in their way--the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission.
The commission was created by the Florida Legislature, ironically, to protect transportation consumers in Hillsborough County. It is the only commission of its kind in the entire state of Florida. Not surprisingly, it has passed burdensome regulations and restrictions not common in other places. And these restrictions include requiring limo and sedan drivers to overcharge their customers.
One of the rules specifically mandates that limo and sedan drivers charge at least $50 per ride, no matter how short the ride. The drivers and customers are allowed to agree on a price above the minimum, but agreeing on a lower price is against the law.
"This law is blatant protectionism," explained Institute for Justice Florida Chapter Executive Director Justin Pearson. "Large, politically connected taxi companies love this rule because it prevents competition from limousines and sedans. Even some large limo companies like the rule because it prevents smaller limo companies from competing with them on the basis of price. With the commission's help, these entrenched interests have been able to divvy up the people of Tampa. But that is not the proper role of government. Government is there to protect public health and safety; not to protect businesses from giving consumers a better deal."
"Consumers and entrepreneurs--and not the government--should decide for themselves how much a ride should cost," Pearson said. "It is also unconstitutional for the commission to force consumers to be overcharged and to harm small business owners by preventing them from growing their businesses and creating jobs by offering better values to their customers."
"Tampa is one of only a handful of places where these minimum fare laws exist," explained IJ Attorney Ari Bargil. "Consumers need government protection from prices that are too low as much as they need government protection from pillows that are too soft."
Eight Reasons We Shouldn't Repeat All The Other Mistakes We've Made In The Middle East By Going Into Syria
At reason, Peter Suderman has a list of eight reasons the U.S. should avoid military intervention in Syria. Here are a few:
1. If the rebels win, it's bad news for the U.S. Assad is no friend to the U.S. But neither are the rebel groups leading the charge against the Syrian dictator. Indeed, many of the rebel factions have strong ties to Al-Qeada. If the rebels successfully oust Assad, it's entirely possible that they will attempt to set up a new regime that is intensely hostile to the United States. Intervention on the side of the rebels would also complicate America's already-fraught relationship with Russia, which is close with the Assad regime....3. It's far from certain that any "limited" actions would actually be effective. Most of the talk right now revolves around the possibility of limited cruise missile strikes and/or no-fly zone enforcement. But as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey told NPR last month, the possible results of enforcing a no-fly zone could "include the loss of U.S. aircraft, which would require us to insert personnel recovery forces. It may also fail to reduce the violence or shift the momentum because the regime relies overwhelmingly on surface fires -- mortars, artillery, and missiles." The same goes for targeted strikes. Here's how Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained it to the L.A. Times: "Can you do damage with cruise missiles? Yes," he said. "Can you stop them from having chemical weapons capability? I would think the answer would be no. Should you limit yourself to just a kind of incremental retaliation? That doesn't serve any strategic purpose. It doesn't protect the Syrian people, it doesn't push Assad out."
4. It's hard to keep limited actions limited. As Chairman Dempsey further cautioned, "Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid." And then what?
5. There's no endgame. Not in Syria, where there seems to be no plan beyond a limited initial strike. And not in the region or the world, where the U.S. would be all but committing itself to opposing, through military force, chemical weapons regimes across the world. The problem is that there's no clearly stated long-term objective -- perhaps because no obvious long-term objective is achievable. Given that strikes are unlikely to completely eliminate Assad's chemical weapons capabilities or end Assad's capacity to slaughter through more conventional means, it's not clear what they would be for. Which means there would almost certainly be pressure to give them meaning by increasing America's commitment to the conflict.
Sorry, somebody please tell me again why Obama is so different from George Bush.
Kids Revolt Against Government-Mandated School Gruel
NPR posted an AP story that schools are dropping out of the "healthier" lunch program. (Quotes are mine, because it's the idea of health that the lunch program turns on, not actual evidence-based science.)
Districts that rejected the program say the reimbursement was not enough to offset losses from students who began avoiding the lunch line and bringing food from home or, in some cases, going hungry."Some of the stuff we had to offer, they wouldn't eat," said Catlin, Ill., Superintendent Gary Lewis, whose district saw a 10 to 12 percent drop in lunch sales, translating to $30,000 lost under the program last year.
"So you sit there and watch the kids, and you know they're hungry at the end of the day, and that led to some behavior and some lack of attentiveness."
In upstate New York, a few districts have quit the program, including the Schenectady-area Burnt Hills Ballston Lake system, whose five lunchrooms ended the year $100,000 in the red.
Near Albany, Voorheesville Superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder said her district lost $30,000 in the first three months. The program didn't even make it through the school year after students repeatedly complained about the small portions and apples and pears went from the tray to the trash untouched.
Districts that leave the program are free to develop their own guidelines. Voorheesville's chef began serving such dishes as salad topped with flank steak and crumbled cheese, pasta with chicken and mushrooms, and a panini with chicken, red peppers and cheese.
Check out this craziness:
At Wallace County High in Sharon Springs, Kan., football player Callahan Grund said the revision helped, but he and his friends still weren't thrilled by the calorie limits (750-850 for high school) when they had hours of calorie-burning practice after school. The idea of dropping the program has come up at board meetings, but the district is sticking with it for now."A lot of kids were resorting to going over to the convenience store across the block from school and kids were buying junk food," the 17-year-old said. "It was kind of ironic that we're downsizing the amount of food to cut down on obesity but kids are going and getting junk food to fill that hunger."
To make the point, Grund and his schoolmates starred last year in a music video parody of the pop hit "We Are Young." Instead, they sang, "We Are Hungry."
@melissamcewen, from whose tweet I found the link, left this comment at the link:
Having worked in food policy before, I'm betting the cafeteria at the USDA building serves food closer to what Voorheesville's chef is making than the school lunch guidelines. And I bet they would revolt if someone took away all the food that tasted good by micromanaging its contents. Why don't we get obvious junk food like fried potatoes and flavored milks with added sugar out of schools before we put limits on things like the fat content of plain milk and how much meat can be served? There is almost no evidence that those limits actually are good for kids. In fact some studies show full fat milk is healthier.
Starve your kids of fat and nutrients and their cells may sound the alarm: "Conserve! Pack on those pounds. You never know when mommy's going to feed you milk that's more than white water!"
Today's Winner For Race-Baiting Attention Whoring
Aura Bogado tweets:
@aurabogado
Every time I see @MileyCyrus slap that black woman's butt, I think about the way that enslaved blacks were whipped for white entertainment.
See video #6.
Some commentary on this without the mouth foaming (from Nolan Feeney in The Atlantic).
Ugly: Salon Had To Turn This Into A Race Story
Salon's Joan Walsh should be ashamed of herself -- turning the story of a courageous school bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff, who stopped a mentally ill school shooter, into a race-based story.
It's even titled "The story bigots hate: Antoinette Tuff's courage."
Is Salon that desperate for traffic? Apparently so.
Walsh writes:
The fascination at the heart of Tuff's tale, the reason it's riveting, is the way she used compassion and empathy to disarm a mentally ill man intent on killing. "Was the potential there to have another Sandy Hook? Absolutely," the local police chief told reporters as he praised Tuff....It's worth noting that Tuff is a black woman who helped save a young white man from harm at the hands of police.
Why? Did she save him because he is white or because he is a person?
The story:
As the 911 tape begins, we hear Hill shooting outside, as the dispatcher tells a terrified Tuff to try to get somewhere safe. But when Hill comes back into the school, Tuff begins telling police outside, and the 911 dispatcher, that the cops should "back off" and not enter the building. At first she calls Hill "sir," until she switches to calling him "baby," which is when the momentum shifts and she seems to have a chance to save him from himself. Tuff tells the dispatcher that Hill told her "he should have just gone to the hospital instead of doing this, because he's not on his medication."Gradually we hear her convince Hill to let her help him surrender safely to police.
"I can help you, you want me to talk to them? Let me talk to them and let's see if we can work it out so you don't have to go away with them for a long time ... I can let them know you have not tried to harm me or do anything with me." When he interrupts her to say he's already shot at police, she reassures him, "That doesn't make any difference, you didn't hit anybody."
Then she turns to the dispatcher and begins to negotiate with police. "He didn't hit anybody, he just shot outside the door," Tuff tells the woman. "If I walk outside with him, they won't shoot him? ... He just wants to go to the hospital ... Can you talk to the police and let them know he wants to go outside with me?"
In the midst of all this she soothes Hill by telling him parts of her own story. "Don't feel bad, baby, my husband just left me after 33 years ... I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now, I'm still working and everything is OK."
On the 911 tape we listen as Tuff calmly negotiates taking away Hill's guns - "Put it all up there," she tells him -- and supervises him lying on the floor to surrender. "Tell me when you're ready, then I'll tell them to come on in," she says. She directs the dispatcher, "Let him drink his bottle of water. Don't come in shooting at anything, they can come on in, and I'ma buzz them in." Then she's back to soothing Hill.
"I'm gonna sit right here so they'll see that you didn't try to harm me ... It's gonna be alright sweetie, I want you to know that I love you, it's a good thing that you did giving up. Don't worry about it, we all go through something in life. You're gonna be OK."
Only after the police come in and arrest Hill without incident does she tell the dispatcher, "Let me tell you something, baby. I've never been so scared in all the days of my life. Oh, Jesus."
No Special Snowflakes: Stop Special Privileges For Cops, Government Honchos
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is right on with this USA Today column noting that cops and pols do not deserve special treatment, but they're getting it all over the place:
Sometimes it involves freedom from traffic and parking tickets, like the special non-traceable license plates enjoyed by tens of thousands of California state employees or similar immunities for Colorado legislators. Often it involves immunity from legal challenges, like the "qualified" immunity to lawsuits enjoyed by most government officials, or the even-better "absolute immunity" enjoyed by judges and prosecutors. (Both immunities -- including, suspiciously, the one for judges -- are creations of judicial action, not legislation).
He notes that the Constitution prevents this:
Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution prohibits the federal government from granting "titles of nobility," and Article I, Section 10 extends this prohibition to the states -- one of the few provisions in the original Constitution to impose limits directly on states. Surely the Framers must have considered this prohibition pretty important.Well, yes. But since then we've read it rather narrowly: Basically, so long as people aren't granted titles like Baron, Duke, or Sir, nobody even considers the question of titles of nobility.
He'd like to see the ban on titles of nobility be given a second look:
How would I do it? I'd provide that any rule giving government officials -- whether elected, appointed, or members of the civil service -- preferential treatment compared to ordinary citizens would have to withstand "strict scrutiny." That is, I'd treat discrimination based on government employment status the same way we currently treat racial discrimination. To withstand strict scrutiny, a government action must serve a "compelling government interest," and must be narrowly tailored to serve that interest. And there must be no less restrictive means of achieving the same goal.
And the problem, ultimately:
The growth not only of government, but of a governing class that believes, in a very real way, that it is fundamentally above the law.
I've certainly had enough of that, and I'm tired of people re-electing legislators who lap up these privileges instead of doing the right thing and discontinuing them.
Why We Can't Buy Democracy In The Middle East
Explained in one quick letter to the editor. In Thursday's Financial Times. Via Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed.
Slinky
I'll bring the stairs; you bring the stories.
Maybe Tuna Often Makes My Stomach Hurt Because It Isn't Actually Tuna
It never used to be that way, so I wondered why this would be happening but had no explanation. (Had my stomach changed?)
Christopher Mims posts at The Atlantic that 59% of the tuna Americans eat is not really tuna -- a conclusion found when "nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana took 1,215 samples of fish from across the United States and genetically tested them."
•In Chicago, Austin, New York, and Washington DC, every single sushi restaurant sampled sold mislabeled tuna.•84% of fish samples labeled "white tuna" were actually escolar, a fish that can cause prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage.
•The only fish more likely to be misrepresented than tuna was snapper, which was mislabeled 87% of the time, and was in actuality any of six different species.
Yes, they're feeding you a fish that can cause "prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage."
Tuna, apparently, are endangered.
A College Exit Exam? And How I Only Finished College Because I Know There's A Prejudice Against Those Who Haven't
It makes sense to test for ability in some professions. For example, when I hire a part-time editorial assistant, I give candidates an editing test and I look at samples of their writing.
The editing test involves writing as well, in case somebody turns in an essay that ways, say, first plagiarized by Jonah Lehrer.
But the notion that a college education is what prepares you for a job isn't necessarily true.
And businesses are stupid to do what Investor's Business Daily did to Matt Welch, formerly a reason Magazine writer and the assistant editorial page editor of the LA Times, and now the editor-in-chief of reason.
IBD was all set to hire him -- until they found that he didn't have a sheepskin. Why not? He went to college for three years and learned journalism by working on his college newspaper and then moved to Prague and started a successful newspaper with some of his buddies from the paper.
Matt wrote on his old blog:
[July 13, 1998] -- What do I, an obscure free-lancer, have in common with the exalted likes of Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, Hunter S. Thompson, Nina Totenberg and Ken Layne?We are, all of us, ineligible to work for Investor's Business Daily, the nation's 49th largest newspaper. Why? Because none of us has a college degree.
"I'm sorry," explained the IBD's Mike Krey when breaking the news to me. "I didn't realize the guidelines were so strict."
This was the third time Mike and I had talked on the phone about a job on the computer/tech desk of the Wall Street Journal's main competitor. The first two times went very well, and he was further encouraged by my previous employers' recommendations, such as "there could be no better candidate for your job."
The next step was supposed to be a trial article and perhaps a quick test at the paper's Los Angeles headquarters. But the home office had its standards -- none of the 40-odd editorial staff is without a degree -- and my candidacy was snuffed.
"I was surprised to learn of that policy, and in complete disagreement," Krey wrote to my former editor. "I, too, thought we had a winner."
These are hard words to read when you can't afford to buy health insurance for your wife. Harder still if you hold onto the belief, despite all evidence, that newspapers are ugly and noble collections of diverse, flawed humans whose only shared characteristic is the desire to put out a good paper.
Ironically, I had originally been attracted to Investor's Business Daily because of its spirited help-wanted ads in the trades, seeking candidates who "go against the grain" or "think outside of the box" or whatever.
Idiots.
There's now a piece by Douglas Belkin in the WSJ about post-college testing:
The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be well educated.Even as students spend more on tuition--and take on increasing debt to pay for it--they are earning diplomas whose value is harder to calculate. Studies show that grade-point averages, or GPAs, have been rising steadily for decades, but employers feel many new graduates aren't prepared for the workforce.
Meanwhile, more students are taking inexpensive classes such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, but have no way to earn a meaningful academic credential from them.
HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not "be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."
The new test "has the potential to be a very powerful tool for employers," said Ronald Gidwitz, a board member of the Council for Aid to Education, the group behind the test, and a retired chief executive of Helene Curtis, a Chicago-based hair-care company that was bought by Unilever in 1996.
Only one in four employers think that two- and four-year colleges are doing a good job preparing students for the global economy, according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Meanwhile, GPAs have been on the rise. A 2012 study looking at the grades of 1.5 million students from 200 four-year U.S. colleges and universities found that the percentage of A's given by teachers nearly tripled between 1940 and 2008. A college diploma is now more a mark "of social class than an indicator of academic accomplishment," said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University geophysics professor and co-author of the study.
Employers such as General Mills Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. long have used their own job-applicant assessments. At some companies such as Google Inc., GPAs carry less weight than they once did because they have been shown to have little correlation with job success, said a Google spokeswoman.
Exactly. You need to test for your job if you test. And it helps to be a good judge of character and to be lucky enough to not interview clever sociopaths who can fake it well.
Of course, what I'd want to do is take the test without the college. I learn more independently than I ever did in school. For example, I just posted on one of the ev psych boards I'm on on Facebook to ask for advice on books to read on epigenetics, one of which I just ordered from the library.
Quite frankly, I only finished college because I knew people have a prejudice against those who don't.
252 Examples Of Obama Corruption, Cronyism, Lying, Lawbreaking
How many who voted for Obama spent eight years hissing about the awful things that George Bush did and were silent when Obama did exactly the same or -- often -- worse?
I hissed about how awful Bush was -- and now I'm seeing all the awful and all the broken promises (Transparency? Really? Really?) in Obama.
Dan from Squirrel Hill blog posted these. Here are a few off the top:
1) Carried out military interventionism in Libya without Congressional approvalIn June 2011, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said that Obama had violated the Constitution when he launched military operations in Libya without Congressional approval.
2) Gave a no-bid contract to Halliburton - just like Bush didIn May 2010, it was reported that the Obama administration had selected KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011, just hours after the Justice Department had said it would pursue a lawsuit accusing the Houston-based company of using kickbacks to get foreign contracts.
3) Has an administration full of lobbyists, after promising he wouldn't have anyWhile running for President, Obama had promised that, unlike Bush, he would not have any lobbyists working in his administration. However, by February 2010, he had more than 40 lobbyists working in his administration.
4) Has close ties to Wall St., but pretends to support Occupy Wall St.Although Obama claims to support the Occupy Wall St. movement, the truth is that he has raised more money from Wall St. than any other candidate during the last 20 years. In early 2012, Obama held a fundraiser where Wall St. investment bankers and hedge fund managers each paid $35,800 to attend. In October 2011, Obama hired Broderick Johnson, a longtime Wall Street lobbyist, to be his new senior campaign adviser. Johnson had worked as a lobbyist for JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Fannie Mae, Comcast, Microsoft, and the oil industry.
A few more:
7) Waged the biggest war against medical marijuana of any president, which was the opposite of what he had promised(Details at the site -- a long'un.)
8) Nominated a six-time tax cheater to head the government agency that enforces the tax lawsObama nominated Timothy Geithner, a repeat tax cheater, to head the government agency that enforces the tax laws.
Prior to his nomination, Geithner had:
1) Illegally failed to pay more than $34,000 in social security and medicare taxes2) Illegally declared the cost of his children's summer camp as a form of day care.
3) Illegally failed to pay the early withdrawal penalty when he took money out of his retirement plan
4) Illegally declared non-eligible items as a charitable deduction
5) Illegally declared something which was ineligible as a small business deduction
6) Illegally declared utility expenses which had actually been for his personal use
9) Gave tax dollars to AIG executives, then pretended to be outraged about itObama signed a stimulus bill that spent money on bonuses for AIG executives. Prior to signing this bill, Obama had said, "when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely." However, after reading "line by line" and signing the stimulus bill that protected the AIG bonuses, Obama pretended to be shocked and outraged at the bonuses, and said, "Under these circumstances, it's hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay... How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?" and also said that he would "pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses."
10) Expanded Bush's unconstitutional government faith based programsObama expanded the federal government's faith based programs which had been started by President George W. Bush.
11) Supported Bush's unconstitutional Patriot ActIn May 2011, Obama signed a renewal of the Patriot Act.
12) Increased the national debt more in one term than Bush did in twoThe national debt increased more during Obama's first three years and two months than it did during all eight years of George W. Bush's presidency.
13) Agrees with Bush's support of unconstitutional, indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without filing any chargesIn December 2011, ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero criticized Obama for signing a bill that gave the U.S. government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without any charges being filed or any trial taking place.
14) Agrees with Bush's support of unconstitutional, warrantless wiretappingPresident Obama has defended warrantless wiretapping.
Hope For Change turns out to be The Reality Of More Of The Same -- And Worse.
How Sugary Junk Food Can Turn You Into A Junkie
At WGBHNews, Kara Miller and Amanda McGowan write about a new study by Dr. David Ludwig, of Boston Children's Hospital, who says certain carbs affect our brains much like drugs and alcohol:
In Ludwig's study, participants ate different kinds of milkshakes - identical in color, taste, and texture - except one had a high glycemic index, and the other a low. After the milkshake with a high glycemic index was ingested, blood sugar rapidly rose and then collapsed, just as expected. What was interesting was how this process played out within the brain itself. Four hours after eating, when blood sugar dropped, brain scans of the subjects showed intense activation in nucleus accumbens, the brain's "ground zero" of pleasure, reward, craving, and addiction. Junk food, it turns out, activated the same part of the brain as other addictive substances like drugs and alcohol....How does this study change the way we look at obesity? Traditionally, society has viewed obesity as a question of will power - that many people could just lose that extra weight if they really wanted. But, as Ludwig counters: "If it was simply an issue of will power, frankly, I wouldn't have any patients." Indeed, this study turns that view on its head, by suggesting that processed carbohydrates provoke a reaction in our brain that makes our bodies want them more - in other words, they make it even more difficult for us to eat well. However, that also makes the inverse true, as Ludwig notes: "By choosing the right foods, it can make remaining on a healthful diet easier," he says.
via @PeterAttiaMD
Linksational
Big, bold, bug-free.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Sun, 7-8pm PT: Twins Researcher Dr. Nancy Segal On Nature Vs. Nurture
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Twins research unlocks the answers to numerous questions we all have about human nature:
•How much do our genes determine who we are?
•Can we shift our environment to make the best of the genes we have?
•Where do our personalities come from?
•Why are some sisters so different from one another?
•How much does having rotten parents affect your chances for success?
•Why do some abused children grow up to be criminals and why do some become productive individuals?
Tonight, a very special guest, twins researcher Dr. Nancy Segal, who uses her studies of twins to figure out the rest of us -- such as how much we, on average, are shaped by our environment and how much by our genes.
She's the author of four books on twins, which can be found on her website, drnancysegaltwins.org. Join us tonight as she tells fascinating stories about twins and what her research on twins has to tell us about how we come to be the people we are.
Listen at this link at 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/26/twins-researcher-dr-nancy-segal-on-nature-vs-nurture
Don't miss last week's show with developmental psychologist Dr. Peter Gray, explaining 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 at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/19/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, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Pensive In Vintage Ralph Lauren
Aida and I had to mail a birthday card and a thank you postcard this morning, and it was a little chilly, so we both threw on sweaters.
On tonight's agenda, a radio show (mine), a bath and an earwash (hers).
Petty, Gift-Grubbing Brides
I really can't be bothered to hang on to grudges. It takes way too much effort to remember who I dislike and why.
In fact, there's a woman I know who did something rotten to me at some point, only I can't remember what; I just remember she's a shit and to be avoided.
Gregg really dislikes her because she said something nasty about me to him at a dinner he went to (I was home with food poisoning).
At a Writer's Guild event we went to, when I told Gregg that I saw her in the bathroom, he said something like, "We're not seeing her -- not giving her the satisfaction." And even though he needed to talk to someone there afterward, he pulled me out of the building after the lights came on from the screening like I was a scarf and I truly loved him for that.
Anyway, as you can probably see, I'd already forgotten that that was supposed to be a story about memory, but there are some brides who retain a bitter and indelible imprint in their heads of who didn't give them a wedding gift. They're chronicled in this New York Times piece by Abby Ellin:
Lisa Kaas Boyle, an environmental lawyer in Los Angeles, knows exactly who gave her what for her February 1994 wedding. The silver serving utensils? Courtesy of Uncle Michael. The magnificent Waterford vase with the doors of Ireland etched into the crystal? That came from Jimmy Murakami, the Oscar-nominated animator.For that matter, Ms. Kaas Boyle can also recall, in elaborate detail, which guests relished the five-course dinner at the ornate Rex Il Ristorante (now shuttered), and still failed to give a present.
Nineteen years later, it still irks her. Never mind that initially Ms. Kaas Boyle and her husband, David, wanted guests to make charitable donations rather than give gifts, but were talked into the more traditional approach by their parents.
"One of our groomsmen, a childhood best friend who was already quite famous back then, forgot to gift," said Ms. Boyle, now 48 and the mother of two. "So did a studio head. So did one of my favorite directors. I cherish every wedding vase, every serving utensil, every time I use them, recalling the gifter and the best night of my life. Then again, while I'm filling up a wedding vase with flowers from my yard, sometimes I wonder, 'How could those miserly moguls have forgotten us?' "
Ah, yes: In the hierarchy of social transgressions, the wedding-gift omission, for some, is a sin of the highest order, the cause of relationship breakdowns and unwavering resentment.
Oh, grow the fuck up.
I lost a friend over a wedding gift -- one I gave.
She was a friend I had from New York who'd moved to LA and was working in production (at the VP level), and she knew I had no money at the time. I'd just moved out to LA and I was getting my column started while house- and pet-sitting for friends who were out of town.
She invited me to her wedding -- a lovely lunch at Geoffrey's in Malibu. (Like grudges, I can't remember the actual ceremony. Actually, I think they got married at City Hall or something and just invited friends to the reception.)
I also can't remember the book I gave them, but it was a sort of fun idea -- a children's book my sister loved about two lovers with parts that came out. After fretting and fretting about what I could get them that would be nice and romantic and within my extremely limited budget, I got it at a thrift store but it looked brand new. (It had a name like "Kavalier and Clay," with French-ish names, best my sister can recall -- apparently the memory issues run in the family!)
I guess I was supposed to go to Tiffany's and go into debt, but I don't live that way for myself and I'm not going to live that way for other people. I gave them something -- a book I thought was sweet -- and friends who care about you (at least in my book) don't want you to go into debt for them as some sort of lunch pro quo.
On a related note: The most moving wedding I've ever been to was in the woods in my friend David Wallis' backyard in upstate New York. David and his now-wife Penny got married and he has wonderful friends and they were all surrounding him, and then they had a barbecue afterward on the front lawnish area, with a bunch of pug dogs running around and a zydeco band.
UPDATE: My little sister emailed me with the name of the book this morning -- Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence
Big Jobs Sometimes Require You To Miss Big Family Vacations
Via Joe Wahler, Cheryl Carpenter Klimek writes at BizPak Review:
U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power has been on the job fewer than three weeks but appears to have skipped an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting because it interfered with her vacation:
Government officials told Fox News that Power was in Ireland, that her family is from there and that it was a personal trip.Rosemary DiCarlo, who held Power's position on an interim basis before Power was appointed, represented the United States competently, according to one official, who added that Power had been in constant contact with staff and the White House while on vacation.
Oh, well, goody.
I gave up seeing my friends and going out while I was completing my book. (Yeah, I should have built in a longer deadline!)
But when you aren't just a punch-clock employee, when your job means something to you or your country, sometimes you have to just have to stay home from stuff you've really, really wanted to do.
How The U.S. Crushed Youth Resistence
We are a country with the most depressingly compliant youth. This post, from an Alternet column by Bruce E. Levine, republished at filmsforaction, gives eight reasons why. Here's one:
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: "The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions." A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don't care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of "inert concern" in which "caring"--in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action--is considered "ethical." School teaches us that we are "moral and mature" if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school--its demand for compliance--teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.
via Marc Randazza
Blink
Or wink. But it all goes here.
I Was Dumb And Lucky: Riding With Dogs In Cars
Aida's best reproving look. (Amazing how a dog can look at you like you're about to pee on the floor!)
In my late doggie Lucy's last few years I didn't take her often in the car. She was an elderly little doggie and slept most of the time. But I took her in the car plenty before.
She was well-trained and would sit perfectly still in my lap -- but what an idiot I was not to consider what would happen in an accident.
Well, I've seen the error of my ways, and realize that an unrestrained dog, in an accident, can become a projectile and be horribly hurt or killed.
I have a hatchback, so a car seat that goes on the seat isn't an option because of the passenger airbag, so I got her a console car seat
More doggie car seats
How to keep a tiny dog entertained
An article on dog safety by a Canadian cop at G.W. Little.
NSA Officers Sometimes Spy On Their Love Interests
If intelligence can be abused, it will be.
Siobhan Gorman writes in the WSJ:
WASHINGTON--National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency's enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.The practice isn't frequent -- one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade -- but it's common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.
Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of "INT," such as "SIGINT" for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and "HUMINT" for human intelligence, or spying.
The "LOVEINT" examples constitute most episodes of willful misconduct by NSA employees, officials said.
And we trust them to say it "isn't frequent"? Helloo, gullibility!
Santa's Getting Arrested
Dumbass teen tried to burglarize a North Hills, California home by going down the chimney, got stuck, and needed to be rescued by the fire department. The teen was identified by the homeowner as a friend of the family, said the homeowner. (He was a good friend of her grandson's.)
via @venice311
Slinky
One step at a time.
Pinup Girl And Puppy Drama
Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested puppy, constantly works the sexy poses!
Like an opera star, she also has a bit of the drama queen in her.
In rather traumatic news, when I groomed her yesterday, she screamed like I was trying to kill her, even when the trimmer -- a very nice Wahl
Had I not seen the same thing happen for our wise, compassionate, but gently firm breeder, I would have been even more upset than I already was. (He laughed it off as "puppy drama," which helped.)
So when she shrieked, I held her and calmed her down and petted her, and used a lady eyebrow trimmer on her muzzle. She screamed at that at first, and then I held her and calmed her and petted her more and finally she let me do it.
I was reminded that I only started grooming Lucy after years of her going to professional groomers. Somebody else probably went through the puppy drama far away from my unknowing eyes and ears. (Thanks, Ally! Of Ally Cats and Dogs. I had noooo idea!)
But after our grooming session, this absolutely well-adjusted dog who is fazed not at all by loud noises of an urban neighborhood or the occasionally loud shrieks of my neighbors' baby, started shrieking whenever I picked her up from my lap.
This was upsetting. Like, institutionalize me in the morning upsetting.
But each time, I put my hand around her muzzle (hating to do this every time I did it) and held it and said, "No noise." She was only shrieking from time to time when I picked her up last night, but I was a wreck. She was avoiding me, wanting to go lie down in her little den area.
I couldn't sleep, worrying that I "broke" my darling puppy and that she'd hate me or stop being so happy.
In the morning, I woke up and made coffee and bacon, not coming out to see her or paying attention to her. T., one of the two breeders, told me that your puppy's life has to revolve around yours and not the other way around.
When I went over, she started crying and, painful as it was, I said, "No noise!" and walked away. Each time I went over and she made noise I did the same. I once held her little muzzle. (This makes me feel absolutely HORRIBLE but I'm trying to stop behavior problems before they start.)
Anyway, when she was quiet, I reached in. She was curled up, moping a little, I guess I'd describe it, not bouncing up to see me, which broke my heart. Maybe she did hate and fear me. That would be so horrible.
But we went out for a pee (she peed; I encouraged!, and I gave her a treat afterward and praised her lots, and she bounded after me, happy, and we played with her ball.
Oh, it is really hard sometimes trying to discipline a puppy. All the rest of the teaching and correcting so far has been no problem, because it's only the apparent unhappiness that eats me up!
The Death Penalty And The Fort Hood Jihadist
A tweet in the wake of the guilty verdict for the disgusting jihadist, Nidal Hasan, who gunned down his unarmed fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in the name of Islam. (Warning - turn off your sound before going to the USA Today link. The jerks have one of those auto-play videos.)
@TheWeek
Should Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan get the death penalty?
My answer:
Martyring a true believer is likely a comfort to that person and encouragement to those Muslims who'd follow in his footsteps, mass-murdering the "infidels."
Also, you don't stop barbarianism by matching it with barbarianism. We don't have a right to take a life, even of a horrible person. (We also shouldn't model Muslim countries in hanging people for being gay, jailing or even stoning rape victims, and cutting off thieves' hands.)
Oops! My Parents Forgot To Do Well In Business In Detroit On Account Of Their Being White
Few people in Detroit or the surrounding suburbs are doing well right now.
But, no, it couldn't be due to the car companies' failure to streamline and innovate or any of a number of other really logical reasons.
Jessica Chasmar writes at WashTimes that MSNBC's Michael Eric Dyson blames racism for Detroit's recent bankruptcy:
Host Ed Schultz asked if race could be responsible for the city's downfall."Of course, it's an 85 percent black city," Mr. Dyson replied. "It's been perceived as a colony of black people who are ringed by suburban white areas that are now going into the city to plunder it. The perception is that there is a massive takeover of resources and materials and properties, basically being occupied."
If only. The problem is, the city is abandoned and rotting, not being occupied.
Something tells me this sort of accusation is how Dyson gets people to pay attention to him.
UPDATE: I forgot to include this piece in the WSJ by Steven Malanga, about how Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, drove out the white and middle class:
Young was right that Detroit needed reform to deal with problems sparked by the migration of poor Southern blacks into the city in the 1950s. He and others, white and black, criticized the political power structure in Detroit, and especially its police department, as racially insensitive. The 1967 riots, sparked by a police raid on an after-hours club in a black neighborhood, generated legitimate calls for change.Elected ostensibly as a reform mayor in 1973, however, Young made things worse. He divided the police department along racial lines, creating separate layoff lists of white and black officers. He and his handpicked police chief, William Hart, made clear that policing that resulted in too many arrests or citations in the black community would not be tolerated. "I wouldn't write tickets for black kids," one black officer told journalist Tamar Jacoby in her 1998 book "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration."
When residents complained about a lack of law enforcement, Chief Hart called the protests "racism and sour grapes." Mayor Young declared that "law and order was code for 'Keep the n-----s in their place.'" Detroit became one of America's most violent cities.
Young's divisive brand of governing extended to economic policy, such as it was. When General Motors agreed to build a new plant in the 1980s to help the city's revival, Young and GM targeted the still vibrant, largely white ethnic neighborhood of Poletown to locate the facility. In one of the nation's most infamous cases of eminent domain, the city sued in 1981 to raze some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses and displace 3,500 people.
As some Poletown residents hung on, hoping that court challenges would overturn the takings, Young withdrew services. Residents lived among demolition crews by day and looters by night. Documentary filmmaker George Corsetti described the chaotic last days of Poletown in a 2004 article in CounterPunch: "The night air was always smoke-filled and people slept with guns nearby."
Young benefitted politically from his very ineffectiveness. As the economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer write in their study of urban ethnic politics, "The Curley Effect" (named after Boston's early 20th-century mayor James Michael Curley), as whites fled Detroit, Young's margin of electoral victory grew because his electoral base of poor blacks became a larger share of the city's population.
Health Insurance Should Be For Catastrophes
This has been said before -- that we do health care payments all wrong. We should pay for preventive care and minor expensive and be insured against the major ones.
This below is a terrific example of how health insurance, as its come to be used, like massive student loans that raise the price of education, cause the price of medical care to go through the roof.
Surgeon Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer writes in the WSJ of a patient who saved $17,000 by NOT going through his "insurance" company:
The insurance policy, the clerk said, would pay up to $2,500 for the surgeon--more than enough--and up to $2,500 for the hospital's charges for the operating room, nursing, recovery room, etc. The estimated hospital charge was $23,000. She asked him to pay roughly $20,000 upfront to cover the estimated balance.My patient was stunned. I received a call from the admitting clerk informing me that he wanted to cancel the surgery, and explaining why. After speaking to the man alone and learning the nature of his insurance policy, I realized I was not bound by any "preferred provider" contractual arrangements and knew we had a solution.
I explained that just because he had health insurance didn't mean he had to use it in every situation. After all, when people have a minor fender-bender, they often settle it privately rather than file an insurance claim. Because of the nature of this man's policy, he could do the same thing for his medical procedure. However, had I been bound by a preferred-provider contract or by Medicare, I wouldn't have been able to enlighten him.
Hospitals and other providers make their "list" prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators. No one is ever expected to pay the list price. Anybody who has seen an "Explanation of Benefits" statement from a health plan will note a very high charge from the provider, and an "adjusted charge" based upon the contracted fee schedule, which usually leaves the patient with little or nothing in out-of-pocket expenses. The only people routinely faced with list prices are those few people who have insurance like my patient's--that doesn't include a pre-negotiated fee schedule with contracted providers--or those who have no insurance.
Most people are unaware that if they don't use insurance, they can negotiate upfront cash prices with hospitals and providers substantially below the "list" price. Doctors are happy to do this. We get paid promptly, without paying office staff to wade through the insurance-payment morass.
So we canceled the surgery and started the scheduling process all over again, this time classifying my patient as a "self-pay" (or uninsured) patient. I quoted him a reasonable upfront cash price, as did the anesthesiologist. We contacted a different hospital and they quoted him a reasonable upfront cash price for the outpatient surgical/nursing services. He underwent his operation the very next day, with a total bill of just a little over $3,000, including doctor and hospital fees.
Pink Link
Hot, please.
Thursday: A Long Day's Journey Into Toilet Training
Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested puppy, after yesterday pooping on my bedcovers and peeing the crossword puzzle I'd left on the bathroom floor, rallied late in the afternoon.
Yes, Aida finally, finally realized that my pleas of "Go pee! Go pee now!" made while I was standing outside and she was sniffing the world and looking for a leaf to chew on meant that I wanted her to put pee on grass, and right then rather than 20 minutes from then.
My late Yorkie Lucy took about two weeks to toilet train. Chinese Cresteds have a reputation of being tough to toilet train, but well, bribery worked.
My breeders said they like to use treats to train only sometimes. I planned to do that, and then saw how well treats work compared to just praise and decided that they're the masters and I'm not and I'd better use every trick at my disposal.
Sigh...at least I'm trying to do intermittent reinforcement rather than treating all the time, except for the crucial toilet training!
Oh, and she's learned to come when called, she's learned her name, and she mostly sits in my chair on a pillow when I tell her to stay. Of course, this could be because she's sleepy, not obedient, but we're going to keep working our training!
And she is THE most loving little dog, who tears around the house with delight (though she's not allowed to do that unsupervised yet), and who saw she'd found a home in a big, gentle manpaw when Gregg came home from Detroit for a day the other day to see me and meet her.
Just Say "Help Yourself!" To Drugs
Former D.A.R.E. officer (in charge of communicating drug hysteria to students), Lt. Thomas Foye, was arrested for stealing drugs from the evidence locker. Via MassLive:
Foye, 49, is charged with theft of drugs from a depository and possession of a class B substance (cocaine)....Foye, a former school committee member who was appointed as a provisional lieutenant in May, is expected to be arraigned Thursday afternoon in Palmer District Court.
The incident remains under investigation by state police.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant Attorney General Marina Moriarty and Criminal Bureau Chief John Verner of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office.
In the 1990s, Foye served on an anti-gang unit, and as the department's D.A.R.E. officer -- a role in which he was charged with teaching students in grades 2, 4, 5 and 7 about the dangers of drug use.
Foye's more recent history at the department includes an incident in which a suspect in a drug case allegedly went to his home to intimidate him for his role in the investigation.
The suspect was convicted in January of 2012 on a range of charges, including possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. He was convicted trespassing, intimidation of a witness, and resisting arrest for the incident at Foye's home, during which he threatened to "get even" with Foye from jail and then chest-bumped him, leading to a scuffle.
In an April, 2012 interview with The Republican about a rise in drug arrests and house breaks in Ludlow, Foye said the drug problem in the town was the worst he had seen in 25 years on the force.
via @Broadsnark
Homeland Security Employee Preps For A Race War
So, the DHS is "protecting" us by having hamburger clerks frisk our genitals because we are guilty of needing to fly to see Grandma before she passes, but they can't manage to vet their own?
Via a tweet by Declan McCullagh, this guy's page is truly incredible -- calling for the mass murder of white people:
@declanm
Homeland Security employee preps for "race war": http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/homeland-security-employee-moonlights-race-warrior/68600/ ... "Going to have to kill a lot of whites": http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s01hTmpooioJ:waronthehorizon.com/site/%3Fp%3D1016+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
A screenshot I took from the guy's site:
From The Atlantic Wire, by Abby Ohlheiser:
A Department of Homeland Security employee who works on, among other things, the procurement of guns and ammunition for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spends his nights and weekends preparing for a coming race war and advocating for anti-gay causes, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Meet Ayo Kimathi, a.k.a. "the Irritated Genie," who told his bosses at the DHS that his anti-white, anti-gay site, "War is on the Horizon," was just an entertainment site that sells concert and lecture videos.You see, DHS employees, even those with office jobs like Kimathi's, have to get outside activities approved by their supervisors, according to the SPLC. Kimathi's former supervisor told the watchdog group, which tracks hate speech and groups in the U.S., that despite her former employee's banal description of his extracurricular activities, the actual content of the site left her "stunned." She continued: "To see the hate, to know that he is a federal employee, it bothered me." She added that had Kimathi's site been accurately described to the agency, there's no way the DHS would have signed off on it. Possibly to keep his bosses from looking up his work, Kimathi used only the site's acronym, WOH, in his permission request. In addition to his involvement in the purchase of ICE supplies, Kimathi also had a public profile for the agency, speaking at vendor events. As "Irritated Genie," Kimathi also has a public profile as a black supremacist advocate.
So, they're going to root out terrorists 20 minutes before they board a plane, but they can't manage to root out this guy because...because he "hid" his site by using the initials of the site only in his permission request?!
A quote from the guy's site:
"Warfare is eminent, and in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites - more than our christian hearts can possibly count."
Hey, racist, murder-advocating loser, that would be "imminent."
Welfare Shouldn't Pay Better Than Employment
Joe Carter writes at Acton Institute:
In eleven states in the union, welfare pays more than the average pretax first-year wage for a teacher. In thirty-nines states, it pays more than the starting wage for a secretary. And, in the three most generous states a person on welfare can take home more money than an entry-level computer programmer.Those are just some of the eye-opening and distressing findings in a new study by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes of the Cato Institute on the "work versus welfare tradeoff."
"Welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job, and the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years," say Tanner and Hughes. "The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work. Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour."
...The state-by-state estimates are based on a hypothetical family participating in about seven of the 126 federal anti-poverty programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; the Women, Infants and Children program; Medicaid; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and receiving help on housing and utilities.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, that translates into a package of $49,175 in Hawaii, $43,099 in the District of Columbia ($43,099), $42,515 in Massachusetts ($42,515), $38,761 in Connecticut, and and $38,728 in New Jersey. The state with the lowest benefits package in 2013 was Mississippi, at $16,984, followed by Tennessee ($17,413), Arkansas ($17,423), Idaho ($17,766), and Texas (18,037).
"If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work," say Tanner and Hughes, "they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work. Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements."
He points out that this is not about refusing to provide for the truly needy but taking away an incentive to work for those who are able.
The thing is, if we go by that standard -- and I'm certainly not suggesting we starve the children of the irresponsible women who keep pumping out daddyless babies they can't pay for -- we'll continue to have a problem.
But what's the answer? As long as we subsidize this behavior to this extent, we'll continue to get more of it.
How do we stop incentivizing the behavior without punishing kids for the circumstances of their birth?
Cool Story: Long-Lost Ring, Traded For Chocolate In Wartime, Makes Its Way Home
In the NY Daily News, an AP story:
U.S. Army bomber co-pilot, 2nd Lt. David Cox, traded the ring for chocolate during desperate times as a war captive in one of Adolf Hitler's prisons. Martin Kiss later accepted the ring from his grandparents when he moved to Herrieden, Germany. His American-born neighbor, Mark Turner, helped Kiss return the heirloom.
An excerpt:
After a year and a half behind barbed wire as a prisoner in World War II, 2nd Lt. David C. Cox had just about reached his breaking point.Deliveries of Red Cross parcels to Stalag VII-A had all but ceased, and the U.S. Army bomber co-pilot and his fellow POWs were subsisting on scanty rations of bug-infested soup and bread. Outside the wire, Adolf Hitler's forces showed no signs of giving up.
Cold and hungry, the North Carolinian made a difficult decision. He slipped the gold aviator's ring -- a gift from his parents -- off his finger and passed it through a fence to an Italian POW, who handed back a couple of chocolate bars.
He would never again see the ring. But it did not disappear.
Link-Splat!-Tation
BYOR -- Bring Your Own Roadkill.
Is Your Body Your Property Or The State's?
I think you should be allowed to ask for help in assisted suicide if you are incapable of killing yourself, and if you think you'd improve your looks by wearing a big plate in your lip, I think you should be able to have at it.
Your body should belong to you, entirely, and not the state, and decisions about what's done with it, providing you aren't hurting any non-consenting other person should be yours entirely.
Well, Arkansas is having none of that. Because the state is problem-free -- a veritable utopia amongst states -- they want to ban non-trad body art. From Intellihub.com, via ifeminists, JG Vibes writes:
Fox 16 reported that:
The Senate passed a bill that would ban non-traditional body art and skin implants. The bill's sponsor, Senator Missy Irvin of Mountain View, AR, wants to limit body art procedures, particularly scarification and dermal implants. By a 26-4 vote, the Senate moved to outlaw scarification, a procedure involving the scarring of the skin using heat to form a tattoo without ink, and implants that place ornaments under the skin. The bill now goes to the House.
More from ArkTimes' David Ramsey:
Irvin and a Health Department official testified that they wanted to reduce infections but they mostly employed an "ew gross" strategy of talking about various procedures. They particularly harped on a "tongue-splitting" that was performed in Little Rock, even though that would not be impacted one way or the other by the legislation. Irvin, an ostensibly small-government conservative who loves to use the legislature to boss citizens around about what they do with their bodies, was in fine form. At one point she compared scarification to female genital mutilation in Africa.
Oh, please. Female genital mutilation? I'm thinking we need a vagina version of Godwin's Law.
False Accusation Of Rape: Man Spends Four Years In Jail; False Accuser Gets 60 Days To Be Served On Weekends
A man's life was ruined by this horrible woman, who took four years to recant her false accusation. Jonathan Turley blogs about Elizabeth Paige Coast:
Coast, 26, accused Johnathan C. Montgomery, a former neighbor of raping her in 2000 when she was 10 years old and he was 14. She later admitted that she made up the story and lied on the witness stand at his June 23, 2008, trial.Montgomery's life was ruined and he spent four years in jail. Coast however was sentenced by Hampton Circuit Court Judge Bonnie L. Jones to just two months in jail and ordered to make $90,000 in restitution for perjury. Jones suspended the rest of the five-year sentence and even allowed Coast to serve the remainder on weekends so not to disrupt her life.
Coast blamed her crimes on her reading adult material on the Internet by her mother. When her strict religious mother caught her, the mother (Coast claims) suggested that she was viewing the material because she had been sexually assaulted. She said that the jumped at the excuse to get out of trouble. She said she gave her mother the name of Montgomery when pressed to identify the assailant. Her lawyer insisted that, because she came forward, any jailing would send the wrong message to others who lie about crimes.
Sick. What would send a message is my prescription below.
I feel strongly that those who falsely accuse someone of rape should spend the amount of time incarcerated that the person they falsely accused would have.
Oh, and not surprisingly, religious fundamentalism, once again, is behind lives being ruined.
Shakedown! Congress-sleazebag Eleanor Holmes Norton's Voicemail To A Lobbyist
"Brazen! Brazen!" Cenk Uygur says about her de facto demand for a bribe on a lobbyist's voicemail! He notes that it is so normal to demand "legalized bribery" that Congress-sleazebags don't even think to be careful about it.
Disgusting -- and all the more so because it's business as usual.
Very Sad News: Elmore Leonard Passed Away This Morning
Elmore Leonard passed away this morning at 7:15 am. My boyfriend was his researcher of 30-plus years, and I knew and loved "Dutch." He took big bites out of life every day of his life for 87 years, and died in his sunny writer's room, surrounded by his family, who loved him.
Bloomberg obit.
By the way, Elmore was writing until the end, working on his next novel. Three hours before his stroke a few weeks ago, he told Gregg on the phone that he didn't want to fly to accept an award "Because I just want to write my book." Love that.
Nice piece by our friend Mike Lupica, who loved the hell out of Elmore and was a good friend to him.
If You Could Pick The Next President, Who Would It Be?
And why?
Public Schools To Boys: "Boys Should Be Girls!"
Boys being boys play with toy weapons, and if none are available, they'll make one out of, say, a breakfast snack treat.
This is no more sinister than little girls playing with dolls.
It's play. Countless boys my age grew up with toy guns and wildly few of them are killers.
But Christina Hoff Sommers writes in TIME of how this is seen by schools -- as pointing to a need to re-engineer the young male imagination:
As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to "shoot" a "bad guy" -- his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado's Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at "bad guys" in order to "save the world."In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school's zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn't the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys.
Girls occasionally run afoul of these draconian policies; but it is mostly boys who are ensnared. Boys are nearly five times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls. In grades K-12, boys account for nearly 70% of suspensions, often for minor acts of insubordination and defiance. In the cases of Christopher, Josh and Alex, there was no insubordination or defiance whatsoever. They were guilty of nothing more than being typical 7-year-old boys. But in today's school environment, that can be a punishable offense.
She points out as developmental psychologists Gabrielle Principe and Peter Gray pointed out on my radio show:
Play is a critical basis for learning. And boys' heroic play is no exception. Logue and Harvey found that "bad guy" play improved children's conversation and imaginative writing. Such play, say the authors, also builds moral imagination, social competence and imparts critical lessons about personal limits and self-restraint. Logue and Harvey worry that the growing intolerance for boys' action-narrative-play choices may be undermining their early language development and weakening their attachment to school. Imagine the harm done to boys like Christopher, Josh and Alex who are not merely discouraged from their choice of play, but are punished, publicly shamed and ostracized.
Linkeroo Bonsai
The original, unleafy version is here.
Peekaboo!
Chinese Crested Princess Aida, Sunday afternoon, in my lap.
I've had my darling since Thursday and, in between my writing jags (which are also her napping in my lap jags), she's already learned her name, how to walk on a leash and to come when she's called.
She pees on a pee pad and we're working on learning that outdoors is one big bathroom.
It's terribly hard for me, but I put her in her little gated space at night and leave her there. (We nap in the afternoon together in my bed.)
The first night, she cried at 4 am, and I came out (and it broke my heart to do this), but I said, firmly, "No!" and then again, "No!" and went back in my room and closed the door. (I felt like the guy Hitler would have sneered at as "like Hitler.")
This refusal to indulge teaches a puppy that they cannot blackmail you; that you are the alpha in the house. It's hard as hell, as was leaving her in her case on the plane when I could have tucked her in my tiny down jacket and held her, but these things help you help a dog to not have limitations in where he/she can go, what he/she can do.
I used to smuggle my dear late Yorkie, Lucy, on a plane to New York and just say, "Lie down! No noise." She was once perfectly still and quiet for 10 hours when there was a mechanical delay in addition to the flight time. Conspiratorial little thing!
PS When Aida is trained, the gated area will disappear and the house will be hers.
Okay, one more. 
It's hard work being a happy puppy!
A Racine, Wisconsin By Any Other Name
My neighbor said that two of the little girls in her 9-year-old's class are named "India." (I'm guessing nobody went for "Pakistan.")
Hillary Clinton About Drug Legalization: She's Dumb As Wet Cement
Clinton tells Mexican TV journo Denise Maerker that legalizing drug trafficking and consumption just won't work, because..."There is just too much money in it, and I don't think that--you can legalize small amounts for possession, but those who are making so much money selling, they have to be stopped."
At reason, Jacob Sullum calls her on this stupidity:
Clinton evidently does not understand that there is so much money to be made by selling illegal drugs precisely because they are illegal. Prohibition not only enables traffickers to earn a "risk premium" that makes drug prices much higher than they would otherwise be; it delivers this highly lucrative business into the hands of criminals who, having no legal recourse, resolve disputes by spilling blood. The 35,000 or so prohibition-related deaths that Mexico has seen since President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on drugs in 2006 are one consequence of the volatile situation created by the government's arbitrary dictates regarding psychoactive substances. Pace Clinton, the way to "stop" the violent thugs who profit from prohibition is not to mindlessly maintain the policy that enriches them.
Disgusting And Dangerous: Go Over Quota Of 911 Calls, Have Police Force Your Eviction
Erik Eckholm writes in The New York Times:
NORRISTOWN, Pa. -- The police had warned Lakisha Briggs: one more altercation at her rented row house here, one more call to 911, and they would force her landlord to evict her.They could do so under the town's "nuisance property" ordinance, a law intended to protect neighborhoods from seriously disruptive households. Officials can invoke the measure and pressure landlords to act if the police have been called to a rental home three times within four months.
So she faced a fearful dilemma, Ms. Briggs recalled, when her volatile boyfriend showed up last summer, fresh out of a jail stint for their previous fight, and demanded to move in.
"I had no choice but to let him stay," said Ms. Briggs, 34, a certified nursing assistant, even though, she said in an interview, she worried about the safety of her 3-year-old daughter as well as her own.
"If I called the police to get him out of my house, I'd get evicted," she said. "If I physically tried to remove him, somebody would call 911 and I'd be evicted."
Over the last 25 years, in a trend still growing, hundreds of cities and towns across the country have adopted nuisance property or "crime-free housing" ordinances. Putting responsibility on landlords to weed out drug dealers and disruptive tenants, the laws aim to save neighborhoods from blight as well as ease burdens on the police.
But the laws are sometimes forcing victims, especially women facing domestic violence, to choose between calling the police and holding on to their homes, according to legal aid groups and experts on housing and the poor.
"These laws threaten citizens' fundamental right to call on the police for help," said Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard.
My friend Sergeant Heather, through working with domestic violence victims, was able to get some to leave bad situations.
And the article points out, dangerous situations are not confined to domestic violence. I, for one, in Ann Arbor, had a creepy guy living above me who threatened to set me on fire (as a witch). It wasn't that long before the end of the semester and I moved back home. Others mentioned in the police have more immediately violent situations looming. Being a renter in this position should not mean losing the housing you pay for.
Jason Patric Has Been Transformed From A Dad Into A Sperm Donor
Men, and especially men who are Hollywood actors, don't just throw sperm at any woman who wants to be a single mother.
Actor Jason Patric's ex-girlfriend conceived through in vitro fertilization, using his sperm, and Patric's former girlfriend, Danielle Schreiber, is asking the courts to turn him away as a mere sperm donor.
Emily Bazelon at Slate has it right with this remark:
Schreiber's stance shouldn't change the underlying rule: Unless both biological parents agree before birth that the father has no rights at all, courts should presume that he is indeed the father, not just some guy who ejaculated into a cup....Patric says he spent time with Gus after the boy was born, until Schreiber cut him out. He has pictures to prove it. "I want my son back," he told Katie Couric. He says he was there from the start and signed a document stating that he was Gus' "intended parent." Schreiber say that Gus was conceived after she and Patric broke up, and that neither of them intended him to be the boy's father. "It's not about him having a relationship or contact with Gus. This is just about rights," she said, also on TV. "Me preserving my right to be a sole legal parent, not having to share that with someone who has never intended to and never raised Gus."
So far, Patric is losing. A California court ruled that he has no parental rights. The judge interpreted state law to provide that if a man isn't married to the mother of his biological child, and gives her his sperm, then the general rule is that he has no paternity rights. It doesn't matter whether he spent time with the baby afterward--or what might be best for the child.
If you think about it, that's pretty shocking. Usually, family law presumes that two parents are better than one, University of Florida law professor Lee-Ford Tritt pointed out when I called him to talk about this case. That way, a child has two sources of love and income. The two-parent rule doesn't apply to anonymous sperm donors--no one would donate if it did. Also, if the sperm donor is someone the mother knows, the parents should be able to contract away his parental rights if that's what they want. Otherwise, it will be harder for women to go to men they know for sperm, and that's not a good outcome. Sometimes children are better off knowing who their fathers are, even if the fathers aren't legally responsible for them. The law should allow for different kinds of donors and family constellations.
But if there's no clear agreement between the parents, then the law should go back to presuming that the genetic father should be treated as the real father. The judge who ruled against Patric did the opposite. He's saying, in effect, that Schreiber gets to decide to bar Patric from any kind of parental involvement. We're not talking about whether Patric gets to raise Gus--that's a separate custody issue--just about whether he has any leg to stand on in court proceedings about Gus at all. Why should this decision about Gus' parenthood be up to his mother alone, without any consideration of how Patric behaved toward Gus, and whether Gus would be better off with Patric in his life?
This is wildly disgusting, and Patric is trying to get California law amended to change this. It's awful for both fathers and children, and good only for vindictive women.
Knil
It's "link" backwards, of course!
Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Peter Gray, Why Kids Learn Better Through Play
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
*NOTE: "Best Of" replay tonight, due to my trip this week to get my darling new puppy, Aida. Live shows again next week and beyond!
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.
Listen at this link at 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/19/dr-peter-gray-why-kids-learn-better-through-play
Don't miss last week's show with psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson: "Using Science To Set Realistic Goals, Maintain Willpower, And Succeed."
Setting and achieving goals is one of those things in life that we think we know how to do but really don't.
Unfortunately, conventional wisdom like "just think positive" and picturing yourself having achieved your goals actually isn't wise. In fact, there's a good deal of evidence that this sort of thinking can set you up for failure, says my guest on tonight's show, social psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson.
Listen as Halvorson helps us tap into the power of scientifically based thinking on how to succeed. Halvorson lays out the nuances from the science that will help you set realistic goals, maintain your willpower, and deal with the bumps along the way, whatever your goal is: whether it's losing weight, improving your relationship, getting a better job, or succeeding with a new business.
Her book: Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/12/dr-heidi-grant-halvorson-how-to-reach-your-goals
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Bloomberg: No Privacy For Poor People
Bloomberg wants to fingerprint public housing residents. From CBSNY:
The mayor wants to fingerprint more than 600,000 people who live in public housing. He said it would be done to make the projects safer.Bloomberg was responding to questions about Federal Judge Shira Schendlin's ruling on the stop-and-frisk program when the topic shifted to security and the New York City Housing Authority. Bloomberg said there has to be a way to make the projects safer.
"Five percent of our population lives in NYCHA housing, 20 percent of the crime is in NYCHA housing - numbers like that. And we've just got to find some way to keep bringing crime down there. And we have a whole group of police officers assigned to NYCHA housing," Bloomberg said. "The people that live there, most of them, want more police protection. They want more people. If you have strangers walking in the halls of your apartment building, don't you want somebody to stop and say, 'Who are you, why are you here?'"
But residents who live within the confines of NYCHA buildings said the mayor's fingerprinting idea goes too far.
"That's like invading someone's privacy or something. Why you want to fingerprint somebody? It is bad enough you get arrested, you get finger printed, so why you want to fingerprint us? Now Bloomberg needs to get a job. Get out of here already. He's done. Bloomberg is done," Chelsea Houses resident Nino Alayon said.
"Why? For what? We live here all these years, I mean, what seems to be the problem? This is not jail," added Deborah Gatling of the Chelsea Houses.
Notice a pattern here? The government treating citizens unproven to be guilty of anything as criminals? Like at the airports. Those of us who fly are prepared to "assume the position" to be groped by a prison guard. (Remember to ask nicely for a change of gloves before they probe your rectum.)
TSA Thuggos Make Women Drink Their Own Breast Milk And Ruin Perishable Babyfood To Keep Up The Pretend Security
Peter Greenberg writes at his site:
Open bottles, confiscated food, toddler pat downs. The TSA can make travel so much harder for parents. One mom was forced to pump her breasts in a public restroom to prove her empty containers were for milk. Another mom missed her flight because she was held for 90 minutes as her milk was screened.
The TSA dimwits wanted Greenberg's editorial director to open pouches of babyfood that go bad unless consumed within 24 hours. She had four sealed pouches.
He spoke with his supervisor, returned and said that if we didn't want to open the food, all three of us would have to undergo an enhanced screening: me, my husband and our son.I grumpily opened the food and then complained to the supervisor who said, "I understand your frustration but these are the rules" and handed me a photocopied customer service form.
After leaving the area, my husband turned to me and asked the million-dollar question:
"How would patting us down tell them what's in the baby food?"
Again, it's pretend security, designed to give you the impression that they're doing something (never mind that it's not something at all meaningful), and think about the sort of person who needs to turn to the TSA for a job. I might hire them if I needed somebody to mop my floors. I sure wouldn't hire them as "security."
Oh, and they recently terrorized a 6-year-old wearing shorts and a tee-shirt whose shoes were removed, pulling her over and patting her down. As her grandma, Ellen Keiser wrote, "When does the madness stop?"
The answer is: Not until more Americans than just a veritable handful of us start demanding that our rights be respected instead of taken from us.
The Food Police: Massive SWAT Raid Nets Organic Okra
Radley Balko, at HuffPo, writes:
A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers," after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.
Local authorities had cited the Garden of Eden in recent weeks for code violations, including "grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house, and generally unclean premises," Smith's statement said. She said the police didn't produce a warrant until two hours after the raid began, and officers shielded their name tags so they couldn't be identified. According to ABC affiliate WFAA, resident Quinn Eaker was the only person arrested -- for outstanding traffic violations.
The city of Arlington said in a statement that the code citations were issued to the farm following complaints by neighbors, who were "concerned that the conditions" at the farm "interfere with the useful enjoyment of their properties and are detrimental to property values and community appearance." The police SWAT raid came after "the Arlington Police Department received a number of complaints that the same property owner was cultivating marijuana plants on the premises," the city's statement said. "No cultivated marijuana plants were located on the premises," the statement acknowledged.
Again, the danger of having too many laws is that we all become criminals and can be preyed upon by the increasingly militarized police.
Does Sleazevertising Work?
Fool me once, I'll be aggressive about not reading your content (if the promised content isn't there) and I'll never click on your links again.
Scummy eMedTV advertises this: 
But the link goes to a bunch of advertorial about osteoporosis meds. There was a vague article with a bunch of links at the bottom of the page that says only this -- no four anything:
Weight-Bearing Exercise
The best exercise for your bones is the weight-bearing kind. While there are many health benefits that come from bicycling or swimming, these exercises don't do anything for your bones.
Weight-bearing exercises force you to work against gravity. Examples may include lifting weights, walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, tennis, and dancing.
Incorporating weight-bearing physical activity into an exercise plan is a great way to keep bones healthy and to meet physical activity recommendations set forth in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Adults should engage in at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity on most (preferably all) days of the week. Children should engage in at least 60 minutes of moderate physical activity on most (preferably all) days of the week.
And then there was this:
Osteoporosis and Exercise Article Continues on Next Page >
What it was was a ploy to get people into their doctor's office for a bone density test -- surely a way to get them on drug$.
eMedTV is brought to you by these sleazebags.
Abe Linkin
Should've gone to the opera.
People Don't Call 911 Because Their Crocheting's Gone All Wrong
Well, some may, or because they didn't get their pizza on time, but those people are generally prosecuted. Mostly, however, people call 911 because they feel they are in serious and immediate danger. That's what that number is for.
So any officer responding to a 911 call should -- rationally and sensibly -- feel there's a potential for life-threatening danger on the other end. In fact, the same goes for any traffic stop. And cops do feel endangered -- and smart ones know that even a mom in a mini-van could potentially pull a gun.
But now Harris County, Texas sheriff's deputy Brady Pullen is trying to sue a woman because she supposedly "failed to adequately warn 9-1-1 of the dangerous situation he was walking into."
Walter Olson explains at Overlawyered:
Under the "firefighter's rule," which has eroded in some jurisdictions in recent years, emergency rescuers generally cannot sue private parties whose negligence is allegedly to blame for the hazards to which they are responding.
Also, it would seem the 911 operator's job to ask whether things are dangerous and ask for other specifics. Dumb chiseler probably should have sued the city to dig into its deep, taxpayer-funded pockets.
The Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations
I've done some speaking at an inner city school. There, it's the rare kid who has a dad in the home. If they do, they're more likely Latino than black. A regular 11th grade class, not a special ed class, was reading and writing at the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade level.
A lot of these schools just promote the kids whether they've learned sufficiently or not. This has a cost.
For example, Kashawn Campbell became a straight A student at a high school in Los Angeles. It seems that was straight A by terribly "relaxed" standards. Kurt Streeter writes in The LA Times:
School had always been his safe harbor.Growing up in one of South Los Angeles' bleakest, most violent neighborhoods, he learned about the world by watching "Jeopardy" and willed himself to become a straight-A student.
His teachers and his classmates at Jefferson High all rooted for the slight and hopeful African American teenager. He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities.
A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for black students. It was early January, and he stared nervously at his first college transcript.
There wasn't much good to see.
He had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays -- pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases -- were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. The second term was just days away and he had a 1.7 GPA. If he didn't improve his grades by school year's end, he would flunk out.
...Jefferson, made up almost entirely of Latinos and blacks, had a woeful reputation. His freshman year, just under 13% of its students were judged to be proficient in English, less than 1% in math.
...By the end of his senior year, Kashawn's 4.06 grade point average was second best in the senior class. Because of a statewide program to attract top students from every public California high school, a spot at a UC system campus waited for him.
...Would he flunk out?
"All I can do is pray," he said.
One morning this summer he walked slowly to the kitchen table, sat in a black chair and cracked open his laptop. Cal's website had just posted grades.
He scrolled down the page and saw the results for College Writing. His teacher said he'd improved slightly, but not enough. She gave him an incomplete. To get a grade he'd have to turn in two more essays, if he came back to school.
His heart raced. He saw that he'd passed a three-unit seminar. He scanned further, his eyes resting finally on a line that said African American Studies 5A. There was his grade.
A-.
"Yes!" he exclaimed. An A- lifted his GPA above a 2.0.
He wasn't a freshman anymore. He would return to Cal for his sophomore year.
Also, how creepy and awful that there's a dorm floor that Cal State "reserves for black students."
Linksssssssssss
Post before all the air leaks out!
Besieged By Cuteness
Here's a video from my time at the breeders' in New Jersey yesterday.
About the other dogs in the video: This wonderful woman who adopted Aida's sister, Aria, brought her over yesterday. She's a Chinese Crested puff (soft hair all over) while my doggie, Aida, is a Chinese Crested hairless -- the slate-gray doggie with the white hairy bits. Miss Chanel, the bigger doggie, is also a puff.
I am so lucky to have this amazing dog!
Oh, that's me, lying back on the ground, being roamed over by puppies!
Wow, They Blow Up So Fast!
That's actually a possible al Qaeda boob job I'm talking about in the header. Supposedly, there's intel that religion of peace-ers are sending out female suicide bombers with explosives concealed in their breast implants. Olivia Goldhill writes in the Telegraph/UK:
According to Philip Baum, editor of Security International, body scanners are good at identify objects outside the body but not inside and the "possibility of medically implanted explosives is a concern to the industry."Explosives expert Andy Oppenheimer said: "There is a great fear that al-Qaeda are planning on using internal devices to try and get through airport scanners.
"These explosives could be in breast implants."
Another specialist, who asked not to be named, said breast implant bombs could be set off by injecting another liquid.
The expert added: "Both are very difficult to pick up with current technology and they are petrified al-Qaeda are a step ahead here.
"It's pretty top secret and potentially very grisly and ghastly."
Independent security analyst Paul Beaver said: "There are currently deeply serious concerns over body cavities and implants of all kinds - including breast implants - being used to hide explosives.
Again, this is why we should be following our Constitution and only using probable cause to root out terrorism -- reasonable suspicion, by trained intelligence officers, not feel-ups by repurposed hamburger clerks, that somebody is plotting a crime.
Instead, we engage in the idiotic and wasteful act of treating everybody like a terrorist. The methods we use are well-known, so a person plotting a terrorist act just needs to either bribe somebody or engage in some other method to get around them.
via Jay J. Hector
Home With My Puppy: Updated With Photos, Story
More, Friday morning. Meet the princess of puppies! (Did you ever think a dog could look sultry?)
Her name is Aida, which is so perfect, because she is a tiny princess of a star. She's a "hairy hairless" Chinese Crested, born May 11, 2013. Hairy hairless means that she has the darling little after ski-boot hairy feet, a hairy head and a plumy tail, but her body is hairless.
Like My Little Pony! 
She's either in motion or napping, so it's hard to get photos of her right now, but I managed this shot of her sitting down for two seconds.
Her current location: 
She is so, so affectionate and just wants to be in my lap.
She'll need a little trimming -- like some men, she needs to get her back and snout shaved a little. But when the breeders asked me whether I'd have a problem doing that, I told them I'd been grooming a very furry Yorkie to look like a Chinese Crested for 15 years (my darling late Yorkie Lucy), so it would be a whole lot easier if I just had to shave a tiny bit of hair to make a hairless dog totally hairless.
These breeders are amazing people. They don't just look to sell dogs but to place dogs in exactly the right home for the dog. This dog hadn't been adopted because she needed an environment like mine: No other kids, no other dogs, just lots of one-on-one attention.
They both (husband and wife) took the day off yesterday to work with me and Aida and teach me what I need to do. I brought a list of questions and they taught me to groom her and we talked about socializing her and all sorts of other things.
This is how amazing they are: Knowing that I'd be taking a puppy on a long plane ride -- from New Jersey to LA, the husband spent a week driving the kids to karate with Aida in a little case along the way so she'd get used to it. She squeaked a few times but I shushed her and she was very good all the way to LA.
She already seems bonded to me. She wants to be in my lap or with me all the time. I took her out to let her pee this morning and sat on the front steps with my coffee and she just kept jumping in my lap.
It is THE most amazing thing, having 2.5 pounds of puppy love following you around the house.
From Thursday night, midnight:
She was very good on the plane, all the way from Newark Airport to Detroit Metro, where we switched planes, and all the way to LAX.
Two and a half pounds and three tons of adorable and happy.
More tomorrow.
It is completely wonderful to have a little puppy scampering after me around the house. She's in my lap now (at my desk), where she had her first lesson: No eating food off human's plates. It took three firm noes -- one with each of her jumps to reach my plate.
Good doggie! (I promise not to eat your kibble, either!)
Lawbreaking At The NSA: Time For A New Church Committee
Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic that there should be a new Church Committee -- led by Ron Wyden, one of the few who's stood up for protecting our privacy and other civil liberties:
The time is ripe for a new Church Committee, the surveillance oversight effort named for Senator Frank Church, who oversaw a mid-1970s investigation into decades of jaw-dropping abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. If recent stories about the NSA don't alarm you, odds are that you've never read the Church Committee findings, which ought to be part of the standard high-school curriculum. Their lesson is clear: Under cover of secrecy, government agents will commit abuses with impunity for years on end, and only intrusive Congressional snooping can stop them.Why is another Church Committee needed now? For more than a decade, the NSA has repeatedly engaged in activity that violated the law and the Constitutional rights of many thousands or perhaps millions of Americans.
Let's review the NSA's recent history of serial illegality. President George W. Bush presided over the first wave. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he signed a secret order that triggered a massive program of warrantless wiretapping. NSA analysts believed they possessed the authority to spy on the phone calls and emails of American citizens without a judge's permission. Circa October 2001, 90 NSA employees knew about the illegal program, but the public didn't. Later that month, four members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, were told of its existence, and subsequently discredited White House lawyer John Yoo wrote the first analysis of its legality. By 2002, 500 people knew about it, at which point telecom providers were participating.
The public didn't find out about warrantless wiretapping until December 2005, more than four years after it started, when the New York Times published a story that they'd long been holding.
How effective was the illegal spying?
"In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the FBI in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month," The New York Times reported in a January 2006 followup article. "But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
The Surveillance State Threatens Our Entire Way Of Life
Peggy Noonan writes in the WSJ:
What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious?Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past?
We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state.
...Privacy is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things--the innards of your head and heart, the workings of your mind--and the boundary between those things and the world outside.
A loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications. That is the view of Nat Hentoff, the great journalist and civil libertarian. He is 88 now and on fire on the issue of privacy. "The media has awakened," he told me. "Congress has awakened, to some extent." Both are beginning to realize "that there are particular constitutional liberty rights that [Americans] have that distinguish them from all other people, and one of them is privacy."
Mr. Hentoff sees excessive government surveillance as violative of the Fourth Amendment, which protects "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" and requires that warrants be issued only "upon probable cause . . . particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
But Mr. Hentoff sees the surveillance state as a threat to free speech, too. About a year ago he went up to Harvard to speak to a class. He asked, he recalled: "How many of you realize the connection between what's happening with the Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment?" He told the students that if citizens don't have basic privacies--firm protections against the search and seizure of your private communications, for instance--they will be left feeling "threatened." This will make citizens increasingly concerned "about what they say, and they do, and they think." It will have the effect of constricting freedom of expression. Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.
All of a sudden, the room became quiet. "These were bright kids, interested, concerned, but they hadn't made an obvious connection about who we are as a people." We are "free citizens in a self-governing republic."
Puppylink
The paws that refreshes.
On Plane With Doggie!
On my way home!
Pictures to come!
Dianne Feinstein Finds Free Speech So Annoying
In an age where ordinary citizens are videotaping police misconduct and bloggers are uncovering scoops, Senator Feinstein only wants "pedigreed" journalists to have protections from prosecution for what they say or write. Eric Boehm, at Watchdog.org, writes:
In a proposed amendment to a media shield law being considered by Congress, Feinstein writes that only paid journalists should be given protections from prosecution for what they say or write. The language in her proposal is raising concerns from First Amendment advocates because it seems to leave out bloggers and other nontraditional forms of journalism that have proliferated in recent years thanks to the Internet."It rubs me the wrong way that the government thinks it should be in the business of determining who should be considered a journalist," said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.
But on the other hand, Bunting said, there is a great need for federal shield law in light of recent attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to force journalists to give up information about confidential sources.
The difficulty with writing any such law -- this is the third time Congress has attempted to craft a federal shield law -- is that any such law would have to set standards for who counts as a journalist or what qualifies as an "act of journalism."
There are shield laws on the books in 40 states, but they do not apply in federal court. The First Amendment of the U.S Constitution promises that the right to a free press "shall not be infringed."
The proposed federal shield law would protect journalists from having to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources and other confidential information. The important question, of course, is how to determine that the shield law applies to one person and not another.
In other words, how do you determine someone is a journalist?
Here's how: They're engaging in acts of journalism.
More:
At a congressional hearing on the matter last week, Feinstein said shield laws should only apply to "real reporters."An amendment offered by Feinstein would extend shield-law protections to those who work as a "salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information," though students working for news outlets would similarly be covered. The definition seems to leave out the new tide of bloggers and citizen journalists who thrive on the Internet.
The Underparented Child On Little League, Unleashed On A Hotel
Apparently, there are some Little League brats staying at my hotel. I know this because the little shits woke me up at 11 p.m., making noise in the hallways of my hotel. And P.S. This is a very nice hotel -- Gregg got me a room here because he said he'd feel I was safe here and he wouldn't have to worry.
In bed, awakened, exhausted, I hoped the noise would go away -- and hoped and hoped. It didn't. Finally, I called the front desk, and the lone woman manning it (who really can't do much at 11 p.m. at night or any other time about reparenting people's children) told me it was some Little League brats (though she didn't say brats, but should have).
Hotels are rooms with beds. Many people stay in them, not to have affairs, but to sleep.
If people aren't up to teaching their kids to be considerate of other people -- teaching them of other people besides themselves -- they should use birth control.
Part of parenting, of course, is figuring out what situations are appropriate for your spawn and if they're a little over their head, instructing them in how they should behave.
Parenting, apparently, is a lost art, in many places in this country.
Student Loan Debt Kills Startup Dreams
The government's throwing money at anybody and everybody for college made the cost of college go up -- along with the vast sums of debt students get into going to college. Well, it seems this is killing entrepreneurial ventures.
Ruth Simon writes in the WSJ:
The rising mountain of student debt, recently closing in on $1.2 trillion, is forcing some entrepreneurs to abandon startup dreams and others, including Christine Carney of Orono, Maine, to radically reshape their business plans.Ms. Carney, 29 years old, and her husband, John, 31, started Thick & Thin Designs, making and selling food picks in the shapes of zombies, bikes and deer antlers after a brainstorming session while she was cooking dinner. The couple, both students at the University of Maine, where he is earning a master's degree in fine arts and she is earning her second undergraduate degree, in zoology, sell the picks for about $12 a dozen as decorative cupcake toppers.
But they chose not to purchase a laser cutter, because doing so would require them to take out a business loan--and together they have $140,000 in leftover student debt. Instead, they use a university-owned laser cutter, which limits the size of the acrylic sheets they can work with. Having the student-loan debt "is preventing me from being able to take a lot of chances or risks that are usually necessary when starting a business," Ms. Carney says.
The average student who borrows has piled up about $40,000 in debt by graduation, including parents' loans, nearly double the levels of a decade ago, according to Edvisors.com, which runs college-planning and financial-aid websites. Recipients of graduate and professional degrees who borrow average more than $55,000 in debt at graduation, including undergraduate loans, but not parent loans. That is up from $40,800 some 10 years ago.
Some academic experts say leftover loans are the biggest impediment to upstart entrepreneurship by those who recently received college or graduate degrees. "I mentor students all the time," says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University Law School. "The single largest inhibitor to entrepreneurship is the student loans."
Recent graduates and college dropouts account for a disproportionate share of the founders of technology startups that have transformed the economy over the past decade, says Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many freshly-minted M.B.A.s "are willing to sleep on a couch for a year or two, but they can't do it with the burden of student loans," he adds.
Linkiepoo
Long day, starting with getting felt up at LAX, then a run through the Minneapolis airport, and a continuation of my flight across the country to get my puppy. I'm a little tired, so please post some links -- one per comment -- and I'll post more on Thursday after I'm awake-ier.
How The TSA Punishes People Who Opt Out
I'm going to pick up my doggie, and this takes a plane flight.
Of course, perhaps because I'm not exactly a AAA bra size, I always get "randomly" chosen to have my breasts peeped at on the scanner. I opt out, knowing, for example, that machines using radiation are tested once daily at hospitals but the rights violating scum of the TSA test theirs only once year -- if that. Fuck you, travelers, this is a security puppet show, not about actually protecting you from ANYTHING.
If anything, the idiots endanger us by making us sitting ducks in line for any would-be airport blower-upper.
Well, today, of course, I got chosen for the gropedown and the TSA thuggos did their usual number -- leave my possessions, including my computer, languishing on the belt for anyone to take.
I'm ready for this now, and demand that somebody watch my stuff. They tell me -- as the tall, black, curly-haired man manning the walk-through metal detector did today -- "We just don't have personnel to watch your stuff." (They say that exact same line every time at every airport.)
I made a fuss about this, saying that if you're going to have this grope process, you need to have people to follow through with not leaving people's stuff out for anybody to take. Meanwhile, I looked around and there were a whole bunch of TSA thuggos there who didn't seem all that engaged. I kept demanding and finally tall 'n' curly said he'd get a supervisor.
Mr. Corpuz, a dead-eyed, slugfaced TSA supervisor, finally came over and "watched" my stuff after I kept making a fuss about it being left out.
I believe that causing you to worry about your stuff (rightly, since every other day, some TSA worker is caught stealing) is an intimidation move and punishment for anyone who "opts out" of one form of having their constitutional rights violated for the gropey other.
This is done to us -- including this intimidation move -- because so many Americans are completely complacent about their rights being taken from them.
And shame, shame, shame on all of you who work for the TSA, violating our rights daily to put on the security puppet show, that does not provide security at all. From the looks of so many of these people -- especially the dead-eyed ones -- they couldn't catch a terrorist if he crawled up and stuck a shoe bomb in their underwear.
Again, meaningful security is done by trained intelligence workers acting on real possibilities -- evidence-based possibilities -- that a person is plotting terror, not by treating a girl flying to pick up her puppy like she spent the weekend at an al Qaeda terror device swap meet.
TSA Manager Charged With Sexual Abuse
No, not of the passengers -- nobody cares about citizens' constitutional rights -- but of a co-worker.
Lisa Simeone blogs at TSANewsBlog:
Shane Hinkle, 38 -- not just a TSA agent, but a manager, no less, at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky -- was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a fellow employee. He resigned from the TSA later that day.No, he wasn't fired. But then we all know that:
"TSA holds its employees to the highest ethical standards and expects all employees to conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism."We've heard that line so many times we have it memorized. It's trotted out every time one of the blue-shirted thieves or molesters is caught. (Of course, we also know that many more of them out there aren't.)
Hinkle's mistake was that one of his assaults was caught on camera. Too bad the same doesn't apply to the rest of the poor schmucks who get assaulted while going through security, as thousands of people can attest.
Of course, the TSA is just a security puppet show, not actual security, and it's serviing its actual purpose: Obedience training for the American public so we'll be docile (and maybe even yawn) as our rights are yanked from us.
And, recently, a commenter described the "administrative search" excuse just right: as an "end run around the Constitution." Yep. That's pretty much it.
Yawning As Fast As We Can At The Surveillance State
What stops our rights from being eroded? Standing up for them. Speaking up. Caring enough to do both of those things or at least to support those who do.
But few Americans really seem to care that the Constitution, as of late, is being treated with all the respect of used Kleenex. And I'm not talking about the document itself, but of the rights enumerated within.
From ACLU.org, here are Alex Abdo and Patrick C. Toomey on one of the many breaches of our rights -- how the NSA is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system:
Now we know all Americans' international email is searched and saved, we can see how far the 'collect it all' mission has goneAnother burst of sunlight permeated the National Security Agency's black box of domestic surveillance last week.
According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually everyemail that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant. To accomplish this astonishing invasion of Americans' privacy, the NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest - all in a matter of seconds.
If you emailed a friend, family member or colleague overseas today (or if, from abroad, you emailed someone in the US), chances are that the NSA made a copy of that email and searched it for suspicious information.
The NSA appears to believe this general monitoring of our electronic communications is justified because the entire process takes, in one official's words, "a small number of seconds". Translation: the NSA thinks it can intercept and then read Americans' emails so long as the intrusion is swift, efficient and silent.
That is not how the fourth amendment works.
Whether the NSA inspects and retains these messages for years, or only searches through them once before moving on, the invasion of Americans' privacy is real and immediate. There is no "five-second rule" for fourth amendment violations: the US constitution does not excuse these bulk searches simply because they happen in the blink of an eye.
The government claims that this program is authorized by a surveillance statute passed in 2008 that allows the government to target foreigners for surveillance. Although the government has frequently defended that law as a necessary tool in gathering foreign intelligence, the government has repeatedly misled the public about the extent to which the statute implicates Americans' communications.
There should no longer be any doubt: the US government has for years relied upon its authority to collect foreigners' communications as a useful cover for its sweeping surveillance of Americans' communications. The surveillance program revealed last week confirms that the interception of American communications under this law is neither "targeted" at foreigners (in any ordinary sense of that word) nor "inadvertent", as officials have repeatedly claimed.
Last week's revelations are a disturbing harbinger of future surveillance. Two months ago, this newspaper reported that the US government has been forcing American telecommunications companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers "on an ongoing daily basis", to allow the NSA to later search those records when it has a reason to do so. The government has since defended the program, in part on the theory that Americans' right to privacy is not implicated by the initial acquisition of their phone records, only by their later searching.
That legal theory is extraordinarily dangerous because it would allow the NSA to acquire virtually all digital information today simply because it might possibly become relevant tomorrow. The surveillance program revealed by the New York Times report goes one step further still. No longer is the government simply collecting information now so that the data is available to search, should a reasonable suspicion arise at some point in the future; the NSA is searching everything now - in real time and without suspicion - merely on the chance that it finds something of interest.
That principle of pre-emptive surveillance threatens to subvert the most basic protections of the fourth amendment, which generally prohibit the government from conducting suspicion-less fishing expeditions through our private affairs. If the government is correct that it can search our every communication in case we say or type something suspicious, there is little to prevent the NSA from converting the internet into a tool of pervasive surveillance.
Because of this very real possibility, these programs should be brought out of the twilight zone of the national security state and into the daylight, so that the public can decide for itself what privacy means in a digital age.
From Forbes: 10 simple things you can do to protect your privacy.
Linkhead
Like a lunkhead, but with better content.
The Oprah Handbag Story: Racism Might Just Have Been Lazy-ism
The saleswoman who supposedly told Oprah she couldn't see a handbag because it was too expensive for her (which the saleswoman supposedly assumed because Oprah is black) tells a different story.
Alexander Abad-Santos writes at The Atlantic that the saleswoman denies Oprah's account:
Oprah was in Zurich for Tina Turner's birthday when she went shopping, hoping to score a handsome new handbag -- only to be reportedly refused. But contrary to Oprah's depiction of the incident last week, the saleswoman insists that she did not deny Oprah a chance to look at the $38,000 bag."She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. I simply told her it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags," the saleswoman said in her own defense. At best, that still kinda sorta sounds like not showing someone the bag.
Yeah, but as somebody who's encountered American salespeople and European ones and has noticed the difference, that's entirely in keeping with European "customer service." Admittedly, I'm not shopping in high end stores!
Perhaps Oprah's account is true, and perhaps this was racism. But I think people are often a little quick to leap to that conclusion.
Demonizing The Other Side
A tweet I retweeted:
@bmorrett
Calling Michelle Obama "Moochelle" just bc you hate her politics is stupid, childish, and annoying. Stop it! Holy heck. #headdesk
My tweet in response:
@amyalkon
@bmorrett @blackrepublican Hear, hear. I hate this sort of thing. Also, like her/agree with her or not, she's pretty and stylish & not fat!
My tweet from that morning:
@amyalkon
@kyle_eubank @hugoschwyzer @instapundit Both liberals and conservatives have failings. I'm looking at the individual.
The tweet I was responding to:
@kyle_eubank
So, situation normal for a liberal. @amyalkon @hugoschwyzer @instapundit
If you can't respond to people you have political differences with without name-calling ("Fatty, fatty, two by four...") somebody made a mistake by letting you out of fourth grade.
Is Your Kid An Asshole? Um, Only Because You Turned Him Into One
There are a few bad seeds out there -- irredeemable jerks who are just born all bad.
These types are rare.
The rotten brats we encounter these days are mostly the result of rotten parenting. (I have a whole chapter on this in I See Rude People, the title of which says it all: "The Underparented Child.")
From Jezebel, a blog post, "Be Honest: Is Your Kid An Asshole." An excerpt:
Home LifeNORMAL: Wants to watch cartoons before bed.
ASSHOLE: Requires fucking production of entertainment including but not limited to cartoons, snacks, back rubs before he or she will even discuss bedtime.
NORMAL: Wants to pick out her own clothes.
ASSHOLE: Screams no to every outfit you suggest while throwing each item down one by one on the floor, sobbing.
NORMAL: Throws tantrums sometimes.
ASSHOLE: Throws tantrums every time she doesn't get what she wants.
Yes, I anticipate your responses:
Isn't the parent the asshole here?
Like I said, yeah. Maybe? Probably. But assholes have a tendency to raise little assholes, so even though it's not the child's FAULT, the child is now being an asshole. And that's sad.
But all kids are assholes SOMETIMES, right?
Yeah. Pretty much. You might hear of the occasional kid whose parents claim they never threw tantrums and were model children, and that's likely sometimes real. But having now spent years around other kids as a more observant adult, I can say that certain kids seem to be assholes a lot fucking more often, and after a while you can call it before it even happens.
via lenona
Linkin Continental
With suicide doors, of course.
Dear Condescending Ad Agencies
This is what your ads for women come off like.
Get Your Cancer The Cool, Chinese Medicine Way
It's called the "naturalistic fallacy," the notion that because something is natural, it's good. People take "Chinese medicine" as if it's medicine, as if they have some evidence, beyond some hippie chick's advice, that it actually works and doesn't cause them harm.
Ruth Williams writes at the-scientist.com of some testing that's been done on one of the ingredients:
Plants of the Aristolochia genus have for centuries been used in Chinese herbal remedies, but they contain a naturally carcinogenic compound that causes mutations in the cells of people who consume them, according to two studies published in Science Translational Medicine today (August 7). The papers reveal that the compound, called aristolochic acid, causes more mutations than two of the best-known environmental carcinogens: tobacco smoke and UV light."A lot of people in the lay public assume that if something is herbal or natural that it is necessarily healthy," said Marc Ladanyi, an investigator in the human oncology and pathogenesis program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who was not involved in the studies. "But this work very clearly shows that this natural plant product is extremely genotoxic and carcinogenic."
Despite the long history of Aristolochia use in herbal remedies, evidence of the plants' inherent danger emerged only recently. In the early 1990s, women who had received Aristolochia treatments at a weight loss clinic in Belgium developed kidney problems that progressed to renal failure and, in later years, to abnormal growths in their upper urinary tracts. More recently, Aristolochia contamination of local wheat crops was determined to be the cause of a high incidence of urothelial carcinomas of the upper urinary tract (UTUC) among rural communities on the banks of the Danube river in Europe.
via Unix-Jedi
Sometimes The Concentration Camp Guard Says A Few Kind Words To You As They're Pointing You Toward The Gas Chamber
No, the TSA isn't sending us to our death, just to the line to strip us of our civil liberties in the name of repurposed hamburger clerk-administered "security."
But anyone supporting this process is guilty of enabling the violation of our civil liberties, which is why I was shocked by Christopher Elliott's valentine to the TSA on his blog. Elliott is a colleague of mine at TSA News Blog, where my posts on the TSA are cross-posted, and I've long been a fan of his travel writing, but he's gone astray on this post, and I'm wondering why.
An excerpt:
Like most Americans, Jim Davies believes the Transportation Security Administration might benefit from a top-to-bottom reform.And like most Americans, he wasn't surprised when a Government Accountability Office study revealed widespread employee misconduct, including screeners involved in theft and drug smuggling activities, as well as circumventing mandatory screening procedures for passengers and baggage.
All of which made his recent experience in Philadelphia so noteworthy. As he waited in line to have his ID checked, he saw three elderly men approach the checkpoint.
"One of the gentlemen had clearly not been on a commercial flight in some time," he says. "He presented his Medicare card and then his library card as his ID."
The TSA agent was polite and explained the ID requirements to the passenger. Then he helped him find the right card. A long line quickly began to form behind him.
"Another agent saw what was happening and opened another line so as not to slow down other passengers," remembers Davies, who works for a nonprofit organization in Pittsburgh. "The entire transaction was completed in a polite and helpful manner. I don't know how, but somehow the gentleman cleared the identification process."
The TSA agent didn't see what Davies did: From the back, the elderly man's jacket identified him as a member of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African-American pilots who fought in World War II. He'd helped a war hero get through security.
For every TSA agent who steals, cheats and abuses there are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, who do an outstanding job of protecting America's transportation systems every day.
There, I said it. The TSA sometimes gives you good service.
Maybe it's time to recognize these small acts of selflessness. After all, with employee morale as low as it surely must be, do the TSA's frontline employees have any reason to perform beyond expectations?
If people cared more about their civil liberties, their morale would be far lower, because more people than I would be telling every TSA worker they encounter in the airport that they're horrible for violating our civil liberties for money.
As a commenter on my blog noted, the "administrative search" is an end run around the Constitution, but if nobody's complaining, hey, no need to stop. This is the path to the police state and we are very much on our way.
Sequesters Are Just For The Little People
Obama's dog gets "his own state-of-the-art aircraft," writes Nick Allen in the Telegraph/UK, as he's airlifted to go on vacation with the family in Martha's Vineyard.
Oh, and:
Rooms have to be found for dozens of Secret Service agents, someone has to carry a selection of presidential basketballs.
Sometimes, in a tough economy, Americans have to make sacrifices.
Do let me know when the Obama family plans to join the rest of us in that.
The Police State Marches On: DeKalb County, Georgia
Horrible, horrible to see what goes on when cops think they can get away with it -- apparently harassing a family late at night over a minor civil charge. The video:
"They do not have permission to come into my home," said the guy (the son who lives there) on the phone with 911, but that didn't stop them.
Apparently, they broke into his mother's home before. She says they were coming in this time out of retaliation for a previous complaint she made.
A screengrab I took from the video:
From the CBSlocal story:
Once the door is opened, officers charge into the house before pulling Griffin aside and placing her under arrest. Soon after, another party is reportedly handcuffed off-camera."Put cuffs on his big a**! You gon' [sic] open the door when I tell you to open the door!" one officer is quoted as saying, before threatening to use a taser on the party in question.
Hall is now accusing the police of illegal entry and theft, and said that an officer identified only as Sgt. Magee told another party that extreme force was used "because they made a scene filming us." He also claims that the police did not have a search warrant.
Authorities, however, told WGCL that they did have a warrant for Griffin's arrest for failure to pay a civil fine. They also admitted that the language used - which also included racial slurs - was inappropriate, but that no excessive force was implemented in her apprehension.
Are we really sending cops out in the middle of the night because somebody has an unpaid civil fine? Come on.
There's a better version of the story here, at HuffPo, noting that this was a $1,000 civil fine that was 15 days late. My electric bill is sometimes a month late. Will they start using that to come after the rest of us, too?
An investigation has been launched into what has been deemed "unnecessarily aggressive" and "unprofessional" conduct by the officers. The blogger at PoliceOne, Doug Wyllie, writes:
I haven't read the arrest warrant and I don't know whether or not a warrant to enter and search the home existed. I don't know the history of calls to this residence, or the perceived threat posed by subjects inside. I don't know what the 911 operator told the son when he called.What I do know is this: Any video in which an officer says "I'mma 'tase' the shit out your ass" and "I wish I could cane y'all asses" will be fodder for anybody predisposed to an anti-cop agenda.
The whole video and cop comments are at the PoliceOne link.
And again, waking people up in the wee hours for a civil warrant on money 15 days past due seems motivated by a desire for retribution, not justice.
via Jay J. Hector
Hollywood Hypocrisy: How James Cameron "Lives With Less"
I'm afraid to know what "living with more" would be.
Oh, wait -- apparently, we're the ones who have to live with less.
Linky Sex
Tie up some html and make it squeal.
LIVE SHOW TONIGHT! Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson -- Using Science To Set Realistic Goals, Maintain Willpower, And Succeed
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Setting and achieving goals is one of those things in life that we think we know how to do but really don't.
Unfortunately, conventional wisdom like "just think positive" and picturing yourself having achieved your goals actually isn't wise. In fact, there's a good deal of evidence that this sort of thinking can set you up for failure, says my guest on tonight's show, social psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson.
Join us tonight as Halvorson helps us tap into the power of scientifically based thinking on how to succeed. Halvorson will lay out the nuances from the science that will help you set realistic goals, maintain your willpower, and deal with the bumps along the way, whatever your goal is: whether it's losing weight, improving your relationship, getting a better job, or succeeding with a new business.
Her book: Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
Listen live at this link at 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/12/dr-heidi-grant-halvorson-how-to-reach-your-goals
Don't miss last week's show with psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel on the neuroscience of addiction and personal responsibility.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/05/dr-sally-satel-neurosci-of-addiction-personal-responsibil
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
No, It's Sales-ism
Yawnies. Yet another cry of racism when it's clearly marketplace-ism: The fact that one actor is known in the USA, and the others are not.
From Fox/AP:
The American distributor of the Australian film "The Sapphires" is apologizing for the DVD cover, which some have called sexist and racist, and said Monday it is considering new cover art for future shipments...."The Sapphires" tells the story of an all-female Australian aboriginal singing group in 1968 that overcame prejudice at home to achieve success that included touring Vietnam to entertain American troops.
The Australian DVD cover shows four actresses of Australian aboriginal descent prominently in the foreground and the white actor who plays their manager in the background. Their positions are inverted on the American cover to showcase "Bridesmaids" actor Chris O'Dowd.
The Australian cover:
The American cover:
Via @Gorskon, here's actual racism -- ugly, ugly, ugly stuff.
Love This Guy: Guy Does To Banks What Banks Usually Do To Other People
Shoulda read the fine print, dudes.
The idea of beating the banks at their own game may seem like a rich joke, but Dmitry Agarkov, a 42-year-old Russian man, may have managed it. Unhappy with the terms of an unsolicited credit card offer he received from online bank Tinkoff Credit Systems, Agarkov scanned the document, wrote in his own terms and sent it through. The bank approved the contract without reading the amended fine print, unwittingly agreeing to a 0 percent interest rate, unlimited credit and no fees, as well as a stipulation that the bank pay steep fines for changing or canceling the contract.Agarkov used the card for two years, but the bank ultimately canceled it and sued Agarkov for $1,363. The bank said he owed them charges, interest and late-payment fees. A court ruled that, because of the no-fee, no-interest stipulation Agarkov had written in, he owed only his unpaid $575 balance. Now Agarkov is suing the bank for $727,000 for not honoring the contract's terms, and the bank is hollering fraud. "They signed the documents without looking. They said what usually their borrowers say in court: 'We have not read it,'" Agarkov's lawyer said. The shoe's on the other foot now, eh?
Children As Brunchtime Centers Of The Universe
A kid-friendly brunch became a kid takeover, blogged Elizabeth Bastos in The New York Times on Motherlode:
I had friends over for brunch a few weeks ago, and to my dismay guess who automatically climbed into the chairs I had placed around the apartment? The kids. I had billed this event as kid-friendly, but it became a kid-takeover.The adults, in modern parent default mode, hovered on the periphery, as they do at children's birthday parties, standing, holding their plates of cut fruit, and mimosas and ministering to their offspring. "Do you want Mommy to cut up that strawberry, honey?" The mother asked if she could borrow my cutting board.
These kids were not so young that they couldn't deal with a whole strawberry. "Deal with it," my mother would have said.
...I remember once when my mother asked me to pass around radishes with butter, I balked and hissed under my breath that I was nobody's servant, and anyway, nobody likes radishes, and stomped off. But justice was swift. My mother sent my grandmother after me. In no uncertain terms she said, "Elizabeth, that was rude." She didn't say, Honey, I understand that sometimes we don't want to pass the plate of radishes. She didn't say, I'll go around with you and help you pass out the radishes, O.K.? Nope.
And that's what I'm going to say next time I see a child taking up a chair demanding Goldfish when what I'm offering is Gruyère cheese strata, while their parent hovers, trying to take up as little space as possible and seeming embarrassed to even corporeally exist. It's rude to take a chair while an adult sits on the floor, is what I'm going to say to that 3-year-old girl: Honey, your mommy needs to sit down and talk to other mommies. And I'm not going to act like those are dirty words. It's my house, and that's my judgment call.
It isn't the job of other people's children to help at your party, but children these days are treated like tiny royals, and as I wrote in I See Rude People, this will have unpleasant consequences later on.
Blink
Links on a big gold chain.
Some People Take Surf Vacations And Some People Take Serf Vacations
It's the agri-cation: going on a vacation which involves picking crops on a farm.
Yes, your ancestors were maybe potato farmers in Ireland who gave everything they had to come here so you could have a better life, and no sooner do you than you turn to picking vegetables for fun.
Writing about this for the column and just having a laugh at the silliness of it. Yes, there are merits to being on a farm, and some "hay-cations" are fancier than this, but if I'm going to go to the South to pick lettuce, it's going to be the South of France and it's going to be on a menu handed to me by a guy with a French accent who also asks whether Madame would like more wine.
Feel free to sneer -- either at me for being "civilizationist" or at this type of "leisure" activity.
And yes, it is nice to know where your vegetables come from. Mine come from a bin at the supermarket.
It's Only A "Very Public Breastfeeding" When TMZ Posts A Photo Of It
There was a TMZ post about some actress -- Selma Blair -- breastfeeding her kid at The Grove in LA.
The actual news is this: Kid gets hungry; mom responds. This isn't a sex act; it's lunch.
How To Bring Back Deadly Diseases
UCLA med school prof Nina Shapiro writes in the LA Times that anti-vaxxers who lead people to leave their children unvaccinated may be making schools unsafe. She'd like to see all schools declared "unvaccinated-free zones":
The law in California mandates that students in public and private schools be immunized, but it also allows easy-to-get exemptions for personal beliefs.Although some 90% of the state's kindergartners are up to date on their immunizations, it is not uncommon for individual public elementary schools to report that more than one-third of their kindergartners are not.
And if you're thinking this must be a problem unique to schools in low-income neighborhoods, think again. One of Malibu's three elementary schools reported that just 58% of its kindergartners were up to date on their vaccinations, and some other affluent areas throughout the state have schools with similar compliance rates.
Private schools vary widely, but some have rates of less than 20%. Yes, that's right: Parents are willingly paying up to $25,000 a year to schools at which fewer than 1 in 5 kindergartners has been immunized against the pathogens causing such life-threatening illnesses as measles, polio, meningitis and pertussis (more commonly known as whooping cough). In order for a school to be considered truly immunized, from a public health standpoint, its immunization rate needs to be 90% or higher.
Parents have varied reasons for choosing not to immunize their children. Some are concerned that vaccinations raise the risk of autism, although study after study has debunked this myth. Others, concerned that small bodies can't tolerate so many vaccines at once, have decided to spread out the schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though there is little evidence to support this practice. Some parents think that because some of the illnesses for which kids get immunized are extremely rare these days, there's little reason to vaccinate.
But here's the reality: These diseases do exist, and we're already seeing some of them make a comeback.
Pertussis is one of them. Children have died from a disease -- whooping cough -- that was pretty much eradicated once the vaccine became available.
If you don't want to vaccinate your kids, be sure you home school them and see that they're never around any other kids.
(On a related note, Jenny McCarthy has probably been responsible for the illness or death of more children than some serial killers.)
Find the vaccination rate at your kid's California school.
Think About How Many People You Know Who Would Die Without Prescription Drugs
There's a sensational story by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN about the "prescription drug death epidemic," and how a person died every 19 minutes, on average, from an accidental drug overdose.
Is this a problem? Well, obviously.
But so is the demonization of "Big Pharma," especially by people who don't bother to realize all the people they know (perhaps including themselves) who are still alive or who function far better and in far less pain due to prescription drugs.
This blog post was written on 7.5 milligrams of Adderall, which I take for ADHD. Having ADHD I describe as "trying to think while being attacked by a flock of crows."
Oh, and if you don't think there's such a thing as Big Health Food, pushing unscientific shit on people, you're in a walking coma.
Who's Married And Who Has Kids: Today, Sometimes Very Different People
From a @Mugger1955 retweet:
@karol "I'm the only one of my friends who is married but what's funny is I'm also the only one with no kids."- my 24 yr old employee.
Death Be Not Fee-Free
The sleazebags at Bank of America have deducted a $12 monthly fee from the account of a customer who's been dead for years, writes LA Times columnist David Lazarus, and they can legally continue doing this -- for years.
Of course, just because something's legal doesn't make it right. I tried for several years to get the Comptroller of the Currency to do their job and investigate Bank of America for what I exposed in I See Rude People: That they put customers at increased risk for identity theft by not spending the money to connect all their branches on a single computer network.
It turns out that when a customer would go to a B of A that used to be another bank, if that bank wasn't the bank that their branch used to be, the teller would be unable to see anything but how much money they had in their account. Their bank card wouldn't work in the teller's window (to punch in their PIN) and the teller basically had to identify whether it was the account holder with "Gee, I hope it's you!"
Lazarus writes about Bank of America's latest sliminess, over $1,175 in the late Rocco Bersane's Bank of America checking account. Bersane died without a will, but there's a California law that says any amount can be claimed by a deceased person's heirs after 40 days. Problem is, B of A is making that so complicated (to the point where it may cost hundreds in attorneys' fees) that it may not be worth the money for Bersane's son, Rocco Bersane Jr., 32, to proceed:
But he knows this much: BofA shouldn't be entitled to keep charging his dead father a monthly checking-account fee."That's just wrong," Bersane said. "He's no longer with us."
Under California law, funds in inactive bank accounts must be handed over to the state for safekeeping after three years. During that three-year period, though, a bank can keep charging fees to maintain the account.
That would be understandable if a bank had no clue about a customer's whereabouts. The bank arguably would be acting in a customer's interest by serving as custodian of the customer's money.
In this case, however, BofA knows full well that Bersane won't be turning up within the next three years or any time thereafter. He's dead.
Furthermore, the bank knows that Bersane has an heir who is legally entitled to the money.
In a letter dated March 22 to Bersane and Burge, the bank said that it had been "informed that Rocco Bersane passed away." It requested a copy of his death certificate "to make sure the financial relationship is handled appropriately."
Burge did as requested.
In June, she received a notice from BofA informing her that "we've closed our case for Rocco Bersane," noting that "we have taken appropriate action on the financial relationship based on the information we've been provided."
What did that mean? Apparently that the bank would keep helping itself to $12 a month from Bersane's account. Over three years, that would total more than $400.
"I don't want the money," Burge said. "I just want to know how they can get away with this. Why don't they just hand the money to the state?"
Garin Casaleggio, a spokesman for state Controller John Chiang, said officials would be happy to take the money off BofA's hands and hold it until claimed by a relative. But he said the state has no authority to demand the funds until three years of account inactivity have passed.
Dawkins Bashed For Telling The Truth About Anti-Science Islam
Richard Dawkins' tweet:
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge."
He added:
"They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
The furor, from a story in the Independent, by Katie Hodge:
He responded to the barrage of ensuing criticism by telling his followers: "A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past."In a further posting he wrote: "Where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?"
He sought to justify the controversial observation by adding: "Why mention Muslim Nobels rather than any other group? Because we so often hear boasts about (a) their total numbers and (b) their science."
One angry Twitter user hit out at the remarks telling the author: "You absolutely disgust me."
Writer Caitlin Moran added: "Think it's time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again", while Channel 4 News Economics Editor Faisal Islam questioned Prof Dawkins' "spurious use of data."
"Spurious"? Trinity College Nobel Prizewinners here.
Muslim Nobel winners here.
From the Middle East Quarterly: "Islam and Science Have Parted Ways."
From The Chronicle Review, "Does Islam Stand Against Science?" by Wisconsin Public Radio's Steve Paulson:
Islam has a long and tangled history with science, but there's one point that nearly everyone acknowledges: Science in the Muslim world is now in a sorry state. "It's dismal," says Taner Edis, a Turkish-American physicist at Truman State University, in Missouri. "Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice."...Guessoum agrees: "It's abysmal by all kinds of measures: how many books and publications are written or translated in the Muslim world; how many patents come from Muslim inventors; how Muslim students are performing in the international arena."
Data collected by the World Bank and Unesco confirm this bleak assessment. A study of 20 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference found that these countries spent 0.34 percent of their gross domestic product on scientific research from 1996 to 2003, which was just one-seventh of the global average.
Those Muslim countries have fewer than 10 scientists, engineers, and technicians for every 1,000 people, compared with the world average of 40, and 140 for the developed world. And they contribute only about 1 percent of the world's published scientific papers. Another study of OIC nations found that scientists in 17 Arabic-speaking countries produced a total of 13,444 scientific publications in 2005, which was 2,000 fewer than what just Harvard University produced.
Just where religion figures into this scientific black hole is a complicated question, though anti-science pronouncements by Islamic clerics certainly haven't helped.
...It takes a courageous--or perhaps foolish--Muslim scholar to examine the specific historical circumstances in which the Quran was written, or to criticize the Prophet Muhammad.
"For Muslims, this is the word of God," Guessoum says. "The Quran is the revelation. It was written down as revealed to Muhammad. This is dogma, so it's harder to claim that everything is open for interpretation."
The "science" in it, in fact, is not to be questioned. As Todd Pitock writes in Discover:
In many Muslim countries, science must obey the Koran.
From a cached page from Answering Islam:
When Muslims adhere to their religion it is then that they fall behind because of the educational system. There are 1 billion Muslims and only about 16 million Jews. Only about 8 Muslims have won the Nobel prize for science and nearly two hundred Jews have won it. Why? Education is the difference. Muslim education has focused on the Qur'an, and what is not in the Qur'an is not worth knowing. Western education has been open in its approach to knowledge. You can ask any question in the Western educational environment. You cannot question anything in the Qur'an, or Mohammed, or the Sharia. You are to obey. Learn the rules and obey.
Linketeria
Filling station.
Obama And The Congress-Scum Get Taxpayers To Pay A Big Chunk Of Their Health Coverage
The WSJ calls this rescue "worse than last week's leaks suggested: Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi":
At President Obama's personal request, the Office of Personnel Management decreed that the Members don't have to get off the gravy train after all. The eat-your-own-cooking provision begins with the phrase "Notwithstanding any other provision of law." The feds now interpret that clause as a loophole to mean that the Affordable Care Act did not change the 1959 law that created the FEHBP.Since Members and staff still technically meet the definition of federal employees qualified for the FEHBP, the Administration says they're still entitled to enroll in the FEHBP concurrently with the exchanges. The feds then "clarify"--their euphemism--that the regulatory meaning of health benefits in the FEHBP can be ObamaCare plans. Voila, taxpayers will continue to chip in $4,900 for individual and $10,000 for family coverage.
The charitable term for such legal gymnastics is creative. When statutes conflict, the bedrock administrative law obligation is to enforce the most recent statute. "Notwithstanding" clauses are routine catchalls that are supposed to emphasize Congress's intent that a new bill is controlling and pre-empts other laws on the books.
The White House is claiming the clause means the opposite, as if the 2010 law and the 1959 law have nothing to do with each other. That is not how it is supposed to work. When Congress kicked itself out of the traditional FEHBP, it kicked itself out of the FEHBP.
At least the Members will still have to sign up for exchange coverage as the law requires. Given the lawless White House record, it probably considered finding some excuse to exempt Congress entirely and decided that option was too explosive politically. But creating a special financing stream for the political class is almost as much of an abuse.
ObamaCare's complex subsidy system, with varying levels based on income, is not incidental to the exchanges. It's the beating heart of this exercise in wealth redistribution and social and economic central planning. The entitlement's architects never envisioned that well-to-do movers and shakers--Mr. Obama might even call some of them "the rich"--would get (or deserve) taxpayer benefits merely because they happen to run for or work for Congress.
This is how communism works. All things are equal for all people except some people are more equal than others. George Orwell is starting to look like a current events writer.
Fashion Models Aren't Role Models; They're Sales Tools
Because some designers use all-black or all-Asian models -- uncommonly -- and because many designers use an all-white runway crew, does that necessarily mean they're racist or things should be different?
Eric Wilson writes in The New York Times about fashion's "blind spot":
"Black models accounted for only 6 percent of the looks shown at last year's Fashion Week."
Blacks only account for 13 percent of the population. Why is it a crisis that the number doesn't match exactly?
From the story:
Calvin Klein, once a vastly diverse show, has frequently been faulted for its mostly white casting, including by Mr. Scully, who said the company sometimes hired one black model "to not get in trouble."Francisco Costa, the women's creative director, responded in an e-mail that the company looks for diverse faces in its casting. But, he wrote: "There are only a handful of top-level, professionally trained models of color at a particular level out there now, and they end up being booked by other fashion houses and can be seen on dozens of runways each season, which is counter to what we are looking for. We try to present a unique and interesting cast with as many exclusives as possible to create and emphasize that season's aesthetic."
Maida Gregori Boina, the casting director for Calvin Klein and Dior, said that Mr. Costa has pushed for more diversity, "but we don't want to book a model because we are obliged." The Dior casting, she said, was the result of the multicultural concept of the collection, not the criticism, and she actually wanted more minorities represented in the show.
"Unfortunately, you've got what you've got in the agencies," said Ms. Boina, who is half black. "I am conscious I have to do more. But it has to be part of a movement that includes the entire fashion industry."
The old arguments within the industry -- the designers say the agents don't send them black models, and the agents say the designers don't want any black models -- increasingly seem insufficient when luxury fashion has become such a global business, with untold numbers of consumers watching the shows online. It now becomes noteworthy when a label like Dsquared creates advertisements using only black male models or only Asian female models.
Shouldn't they be attacked for failing to be "diverse"?
What's next, demanding that stores show a certain percentage of this or that race or sexual persuasion?
By the way: Personally, I happen to like seeing black models -- especially those with very dark skin, whom I find very beautiful, and I copied my old curly, shorter haircut from a black model's photo in Vogue. So, yes, in that case, you could say she was a role model.
This was interesting -- comment from NYT:
Big M, NYC Just returned from several weeks in China, where it was striking how many billboard and store window ads for major global fashion brands used Western models. Asian faces were not to be found.
President Appears To Lament Lack Of Factual Backing For Burgeoning Police State
Obama quote from his appearance on The Daily Show, with the rather shocking "unfortunately":
"The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are a lot lower than they are of dying in a car accident, unfortunately."
Perhaps he was expressing sympathy for people in car accidents. Perhaps not.
Law prof Jonathan Turley writes:
It was clearly a slip of the tongue but for civil libertarians it was a signature moment since our burgeoning security state seems to be working desperately to keep fear alive. For many who have criticized the rise of the security state, it sounded like an authoritarian Freudian slip. The comment is particularly interesting in light of a recent poll showing Americans afraid more of their own government's attack on privacy than terrorist attacks.Despite new reports of additional massive warrantless surveillance programs, Obama continued the campaign of denial by his Administration and allies in Congress. He insisted "We don't have a domestic spying program." That is clearly untrue given the public acknowledgment of these programs but it does not seem to matter. As usual, Obama seems to be drawing a distinction between collecting such data on every citizen and actually using that surveillance. They only use the information in these massive databanks when they want to. It also does not seem to matter that the only serious questions on this issue for the president appear to be coming from a comedian.
How many of you who voted for him still find him "better than Bush"?
How many of you are a little less naive about how a politician is a politician, and Democrat or Republican, most of them want to remove your rights and take your money and funnel it to people in their district or people who will give them campaign contributions?
Know Your Rights So They Can't Be Yanked From You, As This Cop Tried To Do To This Driver
Disgusting behavior by this officer, who maligns the guy for his tattoos, and then moves on to malign the woman with him for hers, and threatens a search as a form of intimidation.
The guy might have what she perceived to be gang-type tats (he points out that one is his son's name), but he knew his rights: To ask, "Am I being detained?" and "Am I free to go?"
The comment I left for the guy on YouTube:
Good for you for knowing your rights. Please report this incident to the LAPD. It makes a difference when these incidents are reported (I just interviewed an ex-officer/supervisor about this for a book). Cops who are not reported for bad behavior are free to continue it.
Jay told me after he sent me this that it seemed it wasn't the LAPD, but I forgot that was in my comment. I'll try to go change that on YouTube.
via Jay J. Hector
E-Verify Is A Privacy-Eating Monster
Via economist @veroderugy, a smart piece by "The Grumpy Economist," John H. Cochrane:
Massive border security and E-Verify are central provisions of the Senate immigration bill, and they are supported by many in the House. Both provisions signal how wrong-headed much of the immigration-reform effort has become.E-Verify is the real monster. If this part of the bill passes, all employers will be forced to use the government-run, Web-based system that checks potential employees' immigration status. That means, every American will have to obtain the federal government's prior approval in order to earn a living.
E-Verify might seem harmless now, but missions always creep and bureaucracies expand. Suppose that someone convicted of viewing child pornography is found teaching. There's a media hoopla. The government has this pre-employment check system. Surely we should link E-Verify to the criminal records of pedophiles? And why not all criminal records? We don't want alcoholic airline pilots, disbarred doctors, fraudster bankers and so on sneaking through.
Next, E-Verify will be attractive as a way to enforce hundreds of other employment laws and regulations. In the age of big data, the government can easily E-Verify age, union membership, education, employment history, and whether you've paid income taxes and signed up for health insurance.
The members of licensed occupations will love such low-cost enforcement of their cartels: We can't let unlicensed manicurists prey on unsuspecting customers, can we? E-Verify them!
He adds:
Richard Sobel has a nice piece making an important point that I totally missed. E-verify will have to mean a national, biometric identity card. Now, you submit a social security number. What stops people from submitting false names and social security numbers? Hmm need to make sure they are who they say they are...I also didn't think to point out another danger. Now the Federal government and its Big Data base know every time you apply for a job. Hmm, why is that guy Cochrane applying for a job again? Checking how often you apply for a job will naturally be an important way to check against false social security numbers.
Excerpt from Sobel's piece:
Buried in the comprehensive immigration reform legislation before the Senate are obscure provisions that impose on Americans expansive national identification systems, tied to electronic verification schemes. Under the guise of "reform," these trample fundamental rights and freedoms.Requirements in Senate Bill 744 for mandatory worker IDs and electronic verification remove the right of citizens to take employment and "give" it back as a privilege only when proper proof is presented and the government agrees. Such systems are inimical to a free society and are costly to the economy and treasury.
Any citizen wanting to take a job would face the regulation that his or her digitized high-resolution passport or driver's license photo be collected and stored centrally in a Department of Homeland Security Citizenship and Immigration Services database.
The pictures in the national database would then need to be matched against the job applicant's government-issued "enhanced" ID card, using a Homeland Security-mandated facial-recognition "photo tool." Only when those systems worked perfectly could the new hire take the job....The digital ID requirements in S. 744 eliminate that fundamental right to take employment and transform it into a privilege. This constitutional guarantee could in effect be taken away by bureaucratic rules or deleted by a database mistake.
...The determination of whether someone has a right to take a job would be made by two computer files: one in a Department of Homeland Security database and the other on a government-issued ID card. Identity and IDs become "property of the U.S. government."
...E-Verify essentially equates all Americans with "illegal immigrants." Instead of naturalization freeing legal immigrants from carrying mandatory "green cards," universal E-Verify would impose IDs on American citizens. E-Verify effectively creates a "no-work" list for the unverifiable.
This is enormously dangerous and continues what was our march -- and I now consider our jog -- to becoming a police state.
Giving Snowden Immunity: Are You For Or Against It?
Matt Welch blogs at reason that a National Review writer -- though not a staffer -- has argued that everyone's interests would be best served by giving leaker Edward Snowden immunity in exchange for maximum testimony about the NSA under oath.
An excerpt from the NRO piece by Robert Zubrin:
One must...ask the conductors of the chorus chanting "Death to Snowden" why they prefer to have the analyst talking to Russia, Iran, and North Korea rather than to Congress. Is it because the NSA regards the holders of America's purse strings as the greater threat? If so, it would appear that the agency's leadership has misplaced its priorities.On the other hand, Snowden may be lying, or grossly exaggerating, in his accusations of deeply subversive anti-constitutional actions by the NSA. If so, he has done real harm to American freedom by chilling the public with unnecessary fear of a nonexistent panopticon state. Such falsehoods therefore need to be refuted. The NSA has issued denials. Unfortunately, however, because the agency previously lied to Congress and the public about the very existence of the domestic-spying program, those denials have no credibility. If the NSA is now being truthful, it needs to establish that by taking Snowden on in open confrontation.
Snowden and NSA leaders should be brought together face-to-face for questioning in public by a congressional investigatory committee, with both parties allowed to make their points and to counter the assertions of the other. If Snowden is lying, it will come out. If the NSA is lying, it will come out. If either refuses to appear, that party will be discredited.
Are you for giving him immunity? Against it? And why?
Princeton law prof Richard Falk on Russia's offering Snowden asylum: "It's the law, stupid":
Russia's grant of temporary refugee status to Snowden for one year was in full accord with the normal level of protection to be given to anyone accused of nonviolent political crimes in a foreign country, writes Richard Falk [AP]
Was Phoenix Really That Well-Managed?
California should be renamed Untenable Debt-ifornia, yet Santa Ana just hired Phoenix's city manager for $500,000, writes Paloma Esquivel in the LA Times:
The city of Santa Ana has hired away Phoenix's city manager and has agreed to a salary and benefits package of more than $500,000, making him one of the highest paid city employees in California.David Cavazos is a long-time Phoenix city employee who rose through the ranks from intern to city manager over 26 years.
In Santa Ana, he will earn a base salary of $315,000, the same base amount he made as manager in Phoenix, which has a population of 1.47 million. Santa Ana has a population of about 330,000.
With benefits, the city expects to pay Cavazos $558,625 in the first year of his contract. In the second and third year the city is poised to pay him about $515,000, according to a report prepared for the council.
Among the benefits Cavazos will receive are $36,000 for housing in the first year and $24,000 per year after that. In addition, he will receive $7,500 in moving expenses, several sick and vacation days and insurance benefits.
In an interview with The Times, Cavazos said he doubts he'll reap all of the benefits allotted to him in his contract.
"I haven't taken a sick day in 10 years. Some of those costs are not going to occur," he said.
..."I'm confident that with his experience in business attraction and business retention we'll be able to make up tenfold the first year the difference in salary compared to what we were paying our previous city manager," said Councilman David Benavides.
Maybe he's worth that coin. If so, he's a rare man in government. The problem is, there are loads of people in government -- state, local, and national -- who are making buttloads of money on their way to huge pensions while we and our cities and states and our country are going broke fast.
How The Government Takes Your Money, Your Car, And Even Your Home, Even If There's No Evidence You've Committed Any Crime
Chilling article in The New Yorker by Sarah Stillman on the use and abuse of civil asset forfeiture:
Another case involves a monthly social event that had been hosted by the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. In the midst of festivities one evening in late May, 2008, forty-odd officers in black commando gear stormed the gallery and its rear patio, ordering the guests to the ground. Some in attendance thought that they were the victims of an armed robbery. One young woman who had fallen only to her knees told me that a masked figure screamed at her, "Bitch, you think you're too pretty to get in the mud?" A boot from behind kicked her to the ground. The officers, including members of the Detroit Police Department's vice squad and mobile tactical unit, placed the guests under arrest. According to police records, the gallery lacked proper city permits for after-hours dancing and drinking, and an old ordinance aimed at "blind pigs" (speakeasies) and other places of "illegal occupation" made it a crime to patronize such a place, knowingly or not.After lining the guests on their knees before a "prisoner processing table" and searching them, the officers asked for everyone's car keys. Then the raid team seized every vehicle it could find, even venturing to the driveway of a young man's friend nearly a mile away to retrieve his car. Forty-four cars were taken to government-contracted lots.
Most of those detained had to pay more than a thousand dollars for the return of their cars; if payment wasn't made promptly, the car would become city property. The proceeds were divided among the offices of the prosecutors, police, and towing companies. After the A.C.L.U. filed a suit against the city, a district court ruled that the raid was unconstitutional, and noted that it reflected "a widespread practice" by the police in the area. (The city is appealing the ruling.) Vice statutes have lent themselves to such forfeiture efforts; in previous years, an initiative targeted gay men for forfeiture, under Detroit's "annoying persons" ordinance. Before local lawyers challenged such practices, known informally as "Bag a Fag," undercover officers would arrest gay men who simply returned their glances or gestures, if the signals were deemed to have sexual connotations, and then, citing "nuisance abatement," seize their vehicles.
Detroit Police Department officials have said that raids like the one on the Contemporary Art Institute are aimed at improving "quality of life." The raids certainly help address the department's substantial budgetary shortfalls. Last year, Detroit, which has since filed for bankruptcy, cut the annual police budget by nearly a fifth. Today, "blind pig" raids around the city routinely result in the confiscation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of cars.
Because forfeiture actions tend to affect people who cannot easily fight back, even those who feel wronged seldom contest the seizures or seek public notice. "There's no telling how many Tenahas there are," Vanita Gupta, a deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. Early on, she took an interest in the suit that Guillory and Garrigan were putting together, and her office joined in the effort. "It's very hard to document," she said, noting that many people targeted by the practice are too intimidated to talk. "These cases tend to stay in the dark."
via @overlawyered
Psychiatrist Emily Deans: Coffee May Keep You From Suicide
I just love psychiatrist Emily Deans. Here's another great blog post by her on Psychology Today on how coffee may be protective against suicide:
A recent study done by the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed the coffee-drinking habits of over 208,000 people over decades. In the time frame of the study, 277 of those people died by suicide. Interestingly, those people who drank 2-4 cups of coffee a day had a 50% lower risk of death by suicide. The researchers thought caffeine might be the player here, as caffeine has chemical activity that not only increases alertness (as we well know) but also has some antidepressant effects. The data is consistent with a bunch of previous studies over the years.
This last bit is important. An epidemiologist who encourages me to be skeptical in scientifically solid ways in reading studies has coached me to look for a body of work on a topic, not just go by a single study.
Deans later very clearly explains some of the problems with the "science" you see in mainstream media -- referencing cohort studies like they mean something, when they're really, as I call them, "leaps to conclusions after the fact." In Deans' words:
The limitations of these studies are profound. They are observational and tell us nothing about cause and effect (we can only guess at that). For those reasons, when large observational studies tell me that moderate exercise or fish or oatmeal is good for me, I yawn.We've all been told that these things are good for us by the health authorities for the past gazillion years. Healthy people with adequate impulse control and executive planning capabilities will therefore adjust their lives to eat more fish and get some exercise. They are also far more likely to not drink heavily, not smoke, and get the appropriate amount of sleep etc. etc. etc. And while the epidemiologists say they can pick apart all these variables if they ask the right questions and use the right computer program to take out one variable, I'm skeptical.
But the same limitations that plague the results of these large observational studies that seem to form the backbone of public health advice these days is actually a strength of the coffee study. Coffee consumption is not one of those healthy things we've been told to do. In fact, we are typically told to limit caffeine, because it can make you anxious and irritable and wreck your sleep. So the coffee drinkers are not typically the magical healthy cohort of people who all drink green smoothies and eat lentil soup. In fact, coffee drinkers are more likely to smoke, drink, get poor sleep, and don't exercise as much as those who don't drink coffee. Therefore finding that coffee drinking is associated with less depression and less completed suicide even though coffee drinkers tend to have less healthy habits in general is very interesting.
Draw Linky
A memory from every comic book from childhood.
Myths About The HPV Vaccine
Great post by Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine. Go to the link for the background on the leaping rate of cancer, with researchers believing that up to 80% of oropharyngeal cancers are due to HPV (human papilloma virus) infection. But the essential excerpt, delineating the myths and the reality, is below:
Irresponsible Fear-MongeringMyth: The HPV vaccine has killed at least 21 girls (Mercola says 122).
Reality: Deaths have occurred after the vaccine; deaths have occurred in girls who were not vaccinated; not one single death has ever been attributed to the vaccine.
Myth: The vaccine has caused 9749 adverse reactions.
Reality: No serious adverse reactions have been attributed to the vaccine.
Myth: It has caused 10 miscarriages.
Reality: It has not been linked to miscarriages. Sure, 10 individuals may have had miscarriages after getting the vaccine, but the baseline rate of miscarriage is higher than that in women who have not been vaccinated.
Note: these 3 claims were based on reports to VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System). VAERS only lists things that happened after vaccination; it doesn't mean they were caused by vaccination. Relying on VAERS data is a post hoc ergo propter hoc error in reasoning. 57,000,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered, yet no deaths or serious adverse reactions have been linked to the vaccine.
Myth: It hasn't been properly tested.
Reality: It was tested in thousands of girls before marketing, and the after-market experience with 57,000,000 doses constitutes a further test.
Myth: It hasn't been shown to reduce the rate of cervical cancer.
Reality: It takes a couple of decades for those cancers to appear. Meanwhile, it has reduced the rate of the infections that cause those cancers, so it would be amazing if it had no impact.
Myth: It only covers a few strains of the virus.
Reality: yes, but those are the ones that matter.
Myth: It will lead to promiscuity.
Reality: More than one study has shown that it doesn't.
Myth: Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger," says the FDA knew as early as 2003 that the HPV virus was not linked to cervical cancer.
Reality: What is he smoking? The entire scientific community accepts the strong evidence of a link.
Conclusion
We have a vaccine for cancer! A very safe vaccine that reduces the rate of HPV infections and therefore will reduce the rate of cervical cancer and several other types of cancer. If Michael Douglas had had the option of being vaccinated as a teen, it's possible that it could have prevented his throat cancer. I don't see any valid reason to refuse the vaccine other than perhaps its cost. My daughters were both vaccinated, and if I had a teenage son, I would make sure he got the vaccine too. And before anyone has a chance to suggest it, let me say that I do not receive any pay from Big Pharma nor do I own any stock in the companies that make the vaccines.
Cracking A Joke At The TSA "Bend Over N Spread 'Em!"-Point Isn't Against The Law
They just want you to believe that so you'll be a compliant little kitten and not dare exercise your First Amendment right to free speech when they yank your Fourth Amendment right to not be searched without probable cause.
Lisa Simeone writes at TSA News Blog:
It is simply false to claim that someone is violating a law if he/she makes a joke -- about bombs or anything else -- at the airport security checkpoint. I repeat: it's false.There is no law prohibiting you from cracking a joke. In fact, there's something called the First Amendment that you may have heard of. It prohibits the government from infringing on your right to freedom of speech.
Of course, that doesn't stop the blue-shirted crusaders from telling you you're breaking the law, or from calling the cops, who should know better but who usually side with the thuglets, as they did in the recent case of Frank Hannibal. Which is why Hannibal is suing and will almost surely win -- if his case ever even goes to court, which it probably won't because the TSA and the cops will settle because they know they're wrong.
But here we go again with those pesky facts:
Across the country, travelers are greeted with signs and announcements at airports warning them not to make jokes about bombs or weapons. It has become commonly known that making such jokes is a federal offense. It isn't. There is no Comic Relief Act that makes joking a violation of the U.S. Code. It is an urban legend intentionally created by threatening arrests and twisting existing laws. Even actual prosecutions are rare. In the meantime, there is not a single case of a terrorist warming up his victims with a lead-in joke.Turley agrees that Hannibal is in the right. But he acknowledges that the whole point of this illegal arrest and imprisonment of citizens is to get them to toe the line.
Lisa writes about the latest incident:
A 29-year-old man at Bradley Airport in Connecticut was detained by the TSA and arrested by police for being a smartass.When he was singled out for a scan or a grope -- we don't know which yet -- and asked if he had anything else in his pockets, Jordan Rickard said, "Yeah, a bomb."
The blue-shirted crusaders immediately swooped down on him and called the police. Because, don'tchya know, if you really did have a bomb in your pocket, the first thing you would do would be to announce it to all and sundry.
The complicit media, of course, is playing up this story to the hilt, especially now, in our time of bogus "high alert" abroad and in "the homeland."
Sieg heil.
The man was promptly carted off to jail; his girlfriend wasn't.
Before you get all "he was so stupid to have done that, he got what he deserved," blah blah blah, perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to kiss the ass of every authority figure who comes down the pike. Perhaps you shouldn't allow yourself to be so manipulated by fear. Not to mention by lies and propaganda. Perhaps you should learn to be a little more skeptical and to stand up for yourself and for your fellow man.
Perhaps you should even -- heaven forfend -- stand up for your rights.
Would You Fire Or Retain Him?
A psych prof has been outed as a killer.
Snejana Farberov writes in The Daily Mail:
A beloved 61-year-old psychology professor has been outed as a killer who murdered his family as a teenager and was committed to a mental hospital for only six years after being found insane.The bespectacled, mustachioed chairman of Millikin University's department of behavior sciences in Illinois has been identified by a reporter from the Texas newspaper The Georgetown Advocate as James Wolcott, who murdered his parents and older sister in cold blood when he was 15 years old.
Following the gristly murders, Wolcott had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. After spending six years in a psychiatric institution, he disappeared.
Wolcott later legally changed his name and went on to earn several degrees in psychology and start a new life in academia.
St James' outing as a man who committed triple homicide 46 years ago shocked the community of Millikin University - a Presbyterian school in Decatur with 2,380 students - but his colleagues and students have since come out in support of the professor.
Despite calls for his resignation, the university released a statement saying that St James will stay on at the school and will teach classes in the fall semester.
'Millikin University has only recently been made aware of Dr. St. James' past. Given the traumatic experiences of his childhood, Dr. St. James' efforts to rebuild his life and obtain a successful professional career have been remarkable,' the statement to the American-Statesman read.
St James declined to comment on the story, deferring to the university's statement.
So, fire him? Retain him? And why?
Filmmaking Morons Nearly Meet Their Death
As my film vet friend KateC says: "This is why you get a permit."
Greg Risling writes on SFGate/AP about some idiots shooting a movie in a coffee shop who nearly got shot by cops -- a terrible thing for a cop to go through when he or she unintentionally shoots an innocent person:
For a few harrowing seconds, eight officers from a suburban Los Angeles police department had their guns drawn and pointed at a group of college filmmakers shooting a robbery scene at a coffee shop.One of the actors immediately dropped his fake assault rifle. But another held onto his fake handgun, forcing officers to make a life-or-death choice.
"One of the officers made the decision that had the man moved, he would have been killed," said Glendora police Capt. Tim Staab. "It was just milliseconds from a tragedy occurring."
One of the officers, unaware of the filming, knocked the gun from the actor's hand and handcuffed him, drawing a peaceful climax to what could have been something far worse.
Still, police said it depicted the potential dangers in a movie-making region for amateur film crews who don't get permits and follow proper steps before taking to the streets.
It's one thing if you brought a hand-held camera and you're shooting two old ladies talking on a bench; but masks and guns?
Duh!
Obama's Just One Of Us -- Except For How He's Not
I hate the pretension that any guy who makes it to The White House is "just folks."
Zillow estimated how long various presidents and presidential wanna-bes could afford to rent the White House, which Zillow estimates would sell for $319 million, and rent for $1.8 million a month. Philip Bump chronicled this on The Atlantic Wire:
Al Gore Net worth: $200 million Number of months of rent: Nine years, three monthsHad Gore won in 2000, he would have started paying rent in January 2001. Meaning that, democracy aside, he would only have had to move out in April of 2010.
Of course, Gore's net worth is largely a function of what he did instead of being president: selling Current TV, for example. When he left office in 2001, he was worth only $1.7 million -- not enough for even that first full month.
Mitt Romney
Net worth: $250 million
Number of months of rent: Eleven years, seven monthsHad Mitt Romney won last year, he'd have enough to stay in the building until August of 2024. If he could manage to get by without a car elevator.
John McCain
Net worth: $15 million
Number of months of rent: Eight monthsMcCain is lucky he didn't win the presidency in at least one sense. It would have been awfully frustrating to have spent all that time campaigning just to move out in September 2009.
If he were humble enough to let his wife Cindy chip in, dipping into her inheritance, he'd have $100 million at his disposal -- enough for another four-plus years.
Barack Obama
Net worth: $7 million
Number of months of rent: Four monthsThe president ran out of rent money in May, 2009. We're looking into how he's managed to remain living at 1600 Penn.
Poor dear, President Obama. Before long, he'll be living in some mansion somewhere, being forced to give speeches and write books for millions of dollars.
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Some Of Us Somehow Manage To Wait Till We Get Home And Open The Drawer
From WeirdNews: "Functional Penis Shoe Puts a Dildo on Your Foot." Photo here.
Tawana Brawley Was Served With Court Order To Pay Man She Falsely Accused Of Rape
Love this -- story from January that I missed when it came out and just spotted in a Jonathan Turley blog item. Chuck Bennett wrote in The New York Post that the paper helped falsely accused former Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones track down Brawley, from whom he won a $190,000 defamation award more than a decade ago:
"For at least 25 years, she has been living a major lie," said former Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones, who was falsely accused of raping Brawley in 1987 and finally tracked her down, thanks to The Post."To me, this has always been about responsibility and accountability,'' added the former ADA, who won the $190,000 defamation lawsuit against Brawley, 40, now a nurse in Virginia, more than a decade ago.
At 9 percent interest, that debt, which Brawley never attempted to pay off, now totals $431,492, according to the wage-garnishment papers filed in Virginia's Surry County Court.
Brawley -- whose unbelievable lies made the Rev. Al Sharpton a household name as he bombastically championed her cause -- had changed her name and moved down South in the years since she was exposed.
Her fugitive-like antics long thwarted Pagones' efforts to serve her with the court papers needed to get the financial damages due him.
But The Post finally found Brawley last month, effectively leading Pagones and his lawyer to her.
She was living under the assumed name of Tawana Vacenia Thompson Gutierrez in Hopewell, Va., and working as a licensed nurse at The Laurels of Bon Air, a nursing home in nearby Richmond.
According to Pagones' lawyer, Garry Bolnick, the single mom's wages could be docked 10 to 25 percent per paycheck as retribution for her lies.
Pagones said he might waive his entitled windfall -- if Brawley finally 'fesses up.
..."If she is not going to tell the truth, then it is about the money. That is the only way to hold her accountable," said Pagones, who is now principal owner of a private investigations firm.
I'm with Turley:
I must confess that I have little sympathy for Brawley or the others. I feel sorry for 28-year-old Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., who committed suicide a week after the false charges were made against him, as well as the rest of these men who were demonized in the relentless press conferences and marches by Sharpton and others.
Brawley just started paying, reports Fox News (on August 4):
A quarter-century after her name made national headlines and became infamous, Tawana Brawley is finally paying for making a false rape charge against a former New York prosecutor.Paying $627 per month, to be exact.
The New York Post reports that last week a judge in Virginia, where Brawley now lives under various assumed names and works as a nurse, ordered $3,764.61 garnished from six months' worth of Brawley's wages and paid to Steven Pagones.
But that's far from the end of it, as the paper reports Brawley owes $431,000 more.
The payments are the latest chapter in a saga that began in November 1987, when Brawley, then 15 years old, was found in a trash bag with racial slurs written on her in feces. She told police that six white men had abducted, brutalized, and raped her for four days. Her handlers, including a relatively unknown minister named Al Sharpton, accused Pagones, then a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York, of being one of Brawley's attackers. A grand jury concluded that Brawleys story was a hoax the following year.
From the earlier Post piece about slimy Sharpton:
Sharpton was ordered to pony up $66,000, money that was coughed up by O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran and others.
The President Intervenes So Members Of Congress And Their Staff Won't Have The Same Crappy Health Care The Rest Of Us Will
From the WSJ:
To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.The Affordable Care Act requires Members of Congress and their staffs to participate in its insurance exchanges, in order to gain first-hand experience with what they're about to impose on their constituents. Harry Truman enrolled as the first Medicare beneficiary in 1965, and why shouldn't the Members live under the same laws they pass for the rest of the country?
That was the idea when Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley proposed the original good-enough-for-thee, good-enough-for-me amendment in 2009, and the Finance Committee unanimously adopted his rule.
...Harry Reid revised the Grassley amendment when he rammed through his infamous ObamaCare bill that no one had read for a vote on Christmas eve. But he neglected to include language about what would happen to the premium contributions that the government makes for its employees. Whether it was intentional or not, the fairest reading of the statute as written is that if Democrats thought somebody earning $174,000 didn't deserve an exchange subsidy, then this person doesn't get a subsidy merely because he happens to work in Congress.
But the statute means that about 11,000 Members and Congressional staff will lose the generous coverage they now have as part of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Instead they will get the lower-quality, low-choice "Medicaid Plus" of the exchanges. The Members--annual salary: $174,000--and their better paid aides also wouldn't qualify for ObamaCare subsidies. That means they could be exposed to thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket insurance costs.
Now The White House is stepping in, and leaks have it, Congress will receive extra payments -- subsidies amounting to about $4,900 for individuals and $10K for families...which effectively amounts to a big ole raise while so many in this country are struggling and the deficit is surging.
This country is looking more and more like a Communist one every day. Yes, everybody equal -- and as George O. put it, "some ... more equal than others."
As the WSJ piece put it, "The real class divide in President Obama's America is between the political class and everyone else."
Takes A Linking
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LIVE SHOW TONIGHT! Advice Goddess Radio, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Sally Satel On The Neuroscience Of Addiction And Personal Responsibility
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
How much free will do we have and how much of our behavior is predetermined by our genes?
Evidence about how people recover from addiction, for example, shows that we CAN control our behavior, contrary to those who make addiction out to be a "disease." On tonight's show, psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel will explain ways people recover from addiction and change other behaviors and why the the notion that we are passive victims of our genes and environment simply does not hold up.
Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of what Satel (with her co-author, clinical psychologist Dr. Scott O. Lilienfeld) calls "mindless neuroscience" -- colorful, alluring pictures of brain scans that are used in the media, by irresponsible and sensationalist researchers, and in court to excuse bad behavior and give rise to the notion that we shouldn't be expected to exercise personal responsibility.
On tonight's show, Satel will talk about why this thinking is wrong-headed, one of the subjects of the very smart book she co-authored with Lilienfeld, BRAINWASHED: The Seductive Appeal Of Mindless Neuroscience.
Listen live at this link at 7 p.m. Pacific, 10 p.m. Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/08/05/dr-sally-satel-neurosci-of-addiction-personal-responsibil
Don't miss last week's show with psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, co-author with Dr. Michael Norton, of a terrific, highly readable little book filled with research-driven wisdom: "Happy Money: The Science Of Smarter Spending."
She lays out the myths we hold about how spending in certain ways will improve our lives and will explain all the ways we can rejigger our spending and thinking, often in small ways, to spend smarter and happier.
Dunn, at age 26, was featured as one of the "rising stars" in academia by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and this should be a very interesting and practical show, so don't miss it!
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/07/29/dr-elizabeth-dunn-how-money-really-can-buy-happiness
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Reporting The Facts Of A Story Is Now "Sexist"
L.V. Anderson, at XXfactor on Slate, finds the AP's reporting of a New York woman's death "sexist."
The AP report by Colleen Long:
A 35-year-old media executive on a first date plunged to her death Thursday after the railing on her 17th-floor New York City balcony gave way, police said.Jennifer Rosoff went outside for a cigarette around 12:50 a.m. when she either sat on the railing or leaned on it. Her date told her that she probably shouldn't do it, and then moments later, she apparently fell backward and landed on construction scaffolding at the first floor, authorities said. Police spoke to the man and no foul play was suspected.
A reporting of the facts. Should some of the facts be excluded?
Anderson hallucinates the above reporting into bias, writing the following:
Let's break this down. According to the AP, the crucial facts you need to know about Rosoff right off the bat are that:1. She was 35 and single.
2. She was a smoker.
3. She invited a man back to her apartment late at night on a first date.
4. The man warned her not to lean against the balcony, but she did it anyway.The implication being that this smoking slut totally had it coming. A reader is left with the distinct impression that if Rosoff hadn't invited her date inside, hadn't gone outside to smoke a cigarette, and hadn't defied the advice of the wise and logical man she was with, she would still be alive. According to the AP story's subtext, the problem wasn't that Rosoff's balcony railing was shoddy and unsafe--it was that Rosoff defied gender norms by being unmarried at 35, by being sexually liberal, and by insisting on making her own decisions instead of deferring to men's logic.
Here's Anderson's version:
A 35-year-old media executive plunged to her death Thursday after the railing on her 17th-floor New York City balcony gave way, police said.Jennifer Rosoff, who worked for a new media advertising startup called TripleLift, was outside with a friend around 12:50 a.m. when she either sat on the railing or leaned on it. Moments later, she apparently fell backward and landed on construction scaffolding at the first floor, authorities said. Police spoke to the friend and no foul play was suspected. Buildings officials took part of the broken railing to examine how it could have given way and plan to determine whether the other balconies in the building are structurally sound.
I'd rather read the other. Because it's more interesting because it includes detail, as good reporting is supposed to do.
Also, it's more emotionally resonant that she was on a first date -- looking for love -- and fell to her death. I want to read emotionally resonant reporting; there's too much of the other kind -- flat and gray.
Horrifically Evil Act On The Venice Boardwalk
I used to live near where this happened, on Westminster, near The Morrison (where Jim Morrison supposedly lived but really didn't) and the gargoyle house. Saturday and Sunday on summer weekends are the most packed times there. You can't get through the crowds of people easily.
This guy in the dark-colored (apparently) Dodge Avenger was standing outside his car on Dudley Avenue and then got in and purposely drove forward speedily and then onto Ocean Front Walk, the boardwalk, and apparently tried to hit as many people as he could.
One woman, apparently on her honeymoon, is dead, and others are seriously wounded.
The Santa Monica police have the car and @Venice311, our local crime-reporting blogger and tweeter, has the most updated accounts (better than most of the mainstream media outlets), with video.
I think I may have seen the driver. Traverse City, Michigan friends' kid is in town working as an intern at a production company. He met me at my place and I took him out for a coffee, and on the way there, at the corner by my house, I noticed a car -- very dark, very narrow window space -- stopped at the corner. The guy may be on neighbors' security video, as I told police, in case it helps their investigation to see what he was doing and possibly get clues about his state of mind, if it was indeed the same guy.
By the way, I believe there were barriers to the beach at Dudley -- as seen in the photo at Yo Venice (scroll down) -- and the guy may have plowed through them and over them.
At LAist, blogged by Emma G. Gallegos, Photo of some of the aftermath -- strewn sunglasses and possessions -- near the sunglass guy I bought my sunglasses from, and this account:
The hit-and-run happened around 6:01 p.m. at the Venice Boardwalk near the intersection of Dudley Avenue, according to City News Service. Witnesses told CBS that the driver seemed to be in control of his car and intentionally swerving into people in the crowd. One witness said the driver was "out for blood." Others said the driver sped up after hitting pedestrians.Kevin Salveson, 44, told the Los Angeles Times that he heard a scream when he turned to see a car plunging into a booth. He turned his wheel and headed toward another booth. He looked into the car and described what he saw: "His window was open and I looked in the car and I saw him...smiling."
The driver headed south on the boardwalk before turning on Sunset Avenue. He later abandoned his car about a mile away at Ocean Park Boulevard and Beverly Avenue and fled on foot. About an hour after the crash, a man matching the description of the driver walked into the Santa Monica Police Station and told them that he was connected to the incident, the Los Angeles Times reports. Police would not comment on whether the 20-something male was intoxicated. He was not yet charged, and his name has not been released.
The driver left a path of destruction on the Boardwalk. Alice Gruppioni, 32, of Italy was pronounced dead in the hours after the crash. Of the 11 others injured, one is in critical condition. This video captures the immediate aftermath of the crash. (It isn't graphic, but it does show some disoriented, injured victims awaiting medical treatment.)
UPDATE -- from a tweet:
@Venice311
Had the name last night, LAPD just confirmed NATHAN CAMPBELL being held on 1 million dollars bail for Venice Beach Boardwalk massacre.
KTLA says he's 38. LA Times says he's 35. From the LAT piece by Andrew Blankstein, Ari Bloomekatz and Abby Sewell:
He said he saw the vehicle hit a woman who sells turtles and a man who appeared to be homeless."All the turtles flew everywhere," as did mannequins outside of storefronts, Jenkins said..
He said the vehicle appeared to speed up after it hit the pedestrians and "zoomed all the way down" for several blocks.
KABC AM news reporter @MichaelLinder has middle name of suspect:
@michaellinder
Nathan Louis Campbell, 38 arrested for murder. Dodge sped down Venice Boardwalk Sat nite, 12 hit, Italian woman on honeymoon dead. $1m bail.
Great Medical Advice
Ari Armstrong, blogging about his wife's experience with uterine fibroids, notes that some or even many doctors have a tendency to find a need for whatever is their particular speciality:
Don't necessarily act on the first "expert" advice you hear from a doctor (or anyone else). The first doctor my wife saw gave her terrible advice. I chalk this up to the "hammer and nail" phenomenon: The first doctor happened to do hysterectomies, so that's what she thought my wife needed. The second doctor happened to do laparoscopic surgery, so that's what he thought my wife needed. In fact, she needed neither of those procedures.Thankfully, we kept digging, and we learned about embolization. The idea is that a doctor runs a tube up through the main artery in your leg up to the uterus. Then the doctor strategically releases silicon particles to block or restrict the blood flow to the fibroids. Assuming this goes well, the fibroids shrink and are absorbed by or discharged from the body.
I'm Linking...I'm Linking...
Beats melting, a la the witch in the Wizard of Oz.
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Study: Camping Could Help You Become A Morning Person
(Story.)
Amy: Staying at The Four Seasons and ordering breakfast at 3 could help you not give a shit.
(Welcome to the life to which I'd like to someday become accustomed!)
Texas Cops Doing Unconstitutional Cavity Searches On Women On Side Of Road
I'm watching the second case first (I've already seen the first one). The cop had no probably cause to search the car. He didn't ask to search the car; he said, "When I search the car..." And the same goes for having a female cop finger her vagina and butt, or as he puts it, "Searches your body..."
The NY Daily News story by Deborah Hastings:
The first video was graphic enough. Two women, as shown in a Texas state trooper's dash cam recording, are probed in their vaginas and rectums by a glove-wearing female officer after a routine traffic stop near Dallas.A few days later, a second video surfaced. It was an eerily similar scenario, but this time the traffic stop was just outside Houston, and with different troopers. Two women, pulled over for allegedly speeding, are subjected to body cavity searches by a female officer summoned to the scene by a male trooper.
Unlike the earlier tape, this one had clear audio. Yells can be heard as the female trooper shoves her gloved finger inside one woman.
In both invasive incidents, the female troopers don't change gloves between probes, according to the horrified victims.
Texas officials say the searches are unconstitutional. So do attorneys for the shaken women, who have filed federal lawsuits.
But lawyers and civil rights advocates tell the Daily News these cavity searches are really standard policy among the Texas Department of Public Safety's state troopers, despite their illegality -- not to mention that they were conducted on the side of the road in full view of passing motorists.
"It's ridiculous," said Dallas attorney Peter Schulte, a former Texas cop and prosecutor. "We would never put our hands anywhere near someone's private parts," he said of his time as a police officer in the city of McKinney. "When I saw that video I was shocked. I was a law enforcement officer for 16 years and I've never seen anything like it."
Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, who oversees state troopers, denied an interview request from The News. In an earlier statements about the videotaped traffic stops, McCraw said his department "does not and will not tolerate any conduct that violates the U.S. and Texas constitutions, or DPS training or policy."
So how did Texas troopers hundreds of miles apart get captured on dash cams conducting body cavity searches under nearly identical conditions?"The fact that they both happened means there is some sort of (department) policy" advocating their use at traffic stops, Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project told the Daily News. "It's such a prohibited practice. I don't know why they think they can do this. It's mind-boggling."
The video:
I blogged about the first case mentioned here before.
More:
She did the right thing by filing a formal complaint -- and then a lawsuit, when nothing was done. We need to fight for our rights when they're taken from us -- lest our rights being taken from us becomes any more of a habit than it's already become...at airports and beyond.
The Gayest Homophobes You'll Ever See (From France, Of Course)
In Paris, most of the men, gay and straight, look, act, and dress gay, so it's not surprising that the French anti-gay marriage group, La Manif Pour Tous, manages to out-gay the gays. 
From The Atlantic Wire, Alexander Abad-Santos writes:
In France, there wages a (bizarre and perhaps unintentional) war among the country's anti-gay groups. In this war, there is apparently a race to to be, at once, more homoerotic and more homophobic than the next anti-gay group. Today we meet La Manif Pour Tous, who decided a bunch of very fit shirtless men straddling a giant pole is the best way to flaunt their anti-gay stance."Shirtless guys ... on top of one another ... clutching a giant pole ... in pink shorts and those guys are protesting gay marriage? This has to be some kind of joke," your brain is probably telling you. But we kid you not. Those men are holding the logo La Manif Pour Tous, an anti-gay group in France, and are featured on the group's Facebook page.
Come on, baby, shinny up my pole against gaydom!
P.S. Check out the photos at The Atlantic. These guys have out-gayed most American gay guys. And lest you think this is gay guys poking (heh) fun at the homo-haters, the pole shot is right there on their Facebook page.
The Food Won't Get Insulted If Your Kid Doesn't Eat It
Smart mom, Maryann Jacobsen, writing at Motherlode, in The New York Times:
Dear Camp Counselor,Thanks for making camp a fun experience for my daughter. When it comes to her lunch and snack, please allow her to decide when she is done eating and to eat her food in any order she likes. Thanks!
This is the note I include in my 6-year-old daughter's lunch box when she spends the day at summer camp. I know from experience that she is often asked to eat more than she wants, or is instructed to eat her "healthy foods first" when others supervise her eating.
As a family nutrition expert, I don't make my children eat more when they say they are done, and there is no order in which they must eat their food. But when I go to birthday parties and observe other families in restaurants, I can see I am in the minority. There was the 4-year-old boy at a Mexican restaurant who declared he was full, only to have his mom instruct him to finish his taquito, and the 6-year-old at the party who was told to finish her broccoli and ended up throwing it up at the table. Then there are the parents who tell me their toddlers beam with pride after finishing all their food, because they learned at day care that an empty plate is a "happy plate."
Research tells a similar story. A 2007 study, published in Appetite, revealed that 85 percent of parents attempt to get young children to eat more at mealtime using praise, food rewards and reasoning. Another study, published in Pediatrics this May, showed that more than half of parents asked their adolescent children to eat all the food on their plate, while a third prompted their kids to eat more even when they stated they were full.
This isn't about pointing fingers at parents. After all, getting children to eat all of their meal was a necessity for most of human history, when food was scarce. Children didn't have the luxury of taking only a few bites or skipping a meal, because the next meal wasn't certain. But today, we live in a food-plenty environment in which the next meal, snack and eating opportunity is certain and bigger than ever. Despite this reality, children are still born with the ability to regulate their food intake. Unfortunately, research shows controlling feeding practices, like "clean your plate," negatively affect food regulation skills as children age.
My parents raised us to "clean our plates," and after I got older, I had to train myself to only eat until I was full. Now, I will leave even a tiny piece of meat on my plate and put it in the refrigerator -- unheard under the old Alkon regime. And I never feel so full that I feel sick -- awful feeling that we turned into a phony virtue, or at least forgot to give another look as time went by.
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The Post Office Express Mail, "Guaranteed" Next-Day Noon Delivery
In reality, the only thing that will end up racing is your pulse as your stress level climbs when you try to find your package and the person you're told to call at the local post office says it "might" be there tomorrow. Might. Even though the sender paid for it to be there by noon today -- "guaranteed."
To borrow from that Fedex line, the USPS should advertise like so, based on my unfortunate experience today:
When it absolutely, positively needs to be there by noon and you'd like to spend the entire day wondering where it is, whether it might get there the next day or sometime during the next week, and calling around to post offices and then being told to call back in a half hour because nobody's there.
I actually know never to rely on the Post Office for overnight mail, but the package had already been sent.
Be Glad I'm Not A Homicidal Maniac, Lady Texting While Crossing The Street
Even nice people probably want to plow you down with their cars.
And yes, I'm talking about one of those. Rudies. Who. Plods. Across. The Street. Because. They. Are Texting. And too bad. If. You. Must. Be. Somewhere.
This Blog Item Encouraging Male Self-Loathing About Made Me Throw Up Three Times
I've long believed that apologists for being male like creepy Hugo Schwyzer saw their apologism as a canny strategy for attracting women.
The late evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith called this indirect approach the "sneaky fucker strategy." (Just love that!) Michael Brooks writes in The New Statesman:
The late John Maynard Smith took red deer as an example of where things go wrong. While the powerful males are busy rutting, many of the females slope off to have sex with the less macho males of the herd (Maynard Smith labelled them the "sneaky fuckers").
This blog item by some guy named Michael Urbina, who saw the vagina light after taking a women's studies class, is the latest hurl-producer. It's called "101 Everyday Ways for Men to Be Allies to Women." Here are a few bits from it:
1. Recognize your privileges, especially your male privilege (and white privilege if applicable).I'm very intentional in making this point first. Understanding all of your privileges are the core principle of allyship towards women and people who identify outside the gender spectrum. Male privilege is a set of privileges that all men (or anybody that identifies as male) benefit from under patriarchy. All of these privileges are at the expense of women and other subordinate groups.
And affirmative action? What do we call that?
There are going to be some advantages for men, in some cases, and for women in others. Some people will be richer or prettier or of the same religion as somebody hiring. There's racism, classism, and all sorts of ism all around. But more and more these days, men are getting the short end, including in truly important ways, like in their loss of due process on campus.
At University of Michigan, I sat down with a table of black women eating in my Alice Lloyd dorm. They looked at me like I'd just peed on the floor. It was an uncomfortable lunch. But the same thing can happen with a clique of the popular, trendy girls of any colors, and has -- to me, and probably to a lot of other people. Shall we whine about this? Hate ourselves for our advantages, whatever they may be? Or just try to act well as individuals?
22. Take a Women's Studies class.If you're in high school or college, think about taking a Women's Studies class. I promise you that this will change your perspectives as a man. It will change your life. Taking my first Women's Studies class provided me the entry point to talk about gender, patriarchy, and oppression in the United States. It also led to me later deciding to be a Women's Studies Major. Trust me, take an introduction class. If you're done with college, seek out workshops or classes in your local area. The internet is a great resource. I'm sure you can find some great online classes or webinars.
Nobody should take women's studies. It preaches man-hating. It is the antithesis of an objective study of anything. It's religion without the Church.
The honest approach would be appreciating being male and how it's different from being female and not being ashamed to appreciate a beautiful woman. I'm sure not going to stop. Then again, I'm a straight woman, and nobody's taught me that I should go cane myself for looking at some woman's cleavage, which I do from time to time, when it's nice or somehow outrageous.
Life is too short to avert your eyes. Just try not to get caught in a 10-second communing with anybody's nipples.
The Difference Between Science-Based Medicine And "Complementary And Alternative Medicine" (CAM)
Cancer surgeon David Gorski writes at Science Based Medicine:
"Alternative medicine," so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or, as it's become fashionable to call it, "integrative medicine" is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I've discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based medicine, crave the imprimatur that science can provide, the respect that science has had. That is why, no matter how scientifically implausible the treatment, CAM practitioners try to tart it up with science. I say "tart it up" because they aren't really providing a scientific basis for their favored quackery. In reality, what they are doing is choosing science-y words and using them as explanations without actually demonstrating that these words have anything to do with how their favored CAM works....A more important fundamental difference between CAM and real medicine is that CAM practices are not rejected based on evidence. Basically, they never go away. Take homeopathy, for example. (Please!) It's the ultimate chameleon. Even 160 years ago, it was obvious from a scientific point of view that homeopathy was nonsense and that diluting something doesn't make it stronger. When it became undeniable that this was the case, through the power of actually knowing Avogadro's number, homeopaths were undeterred. They concocted amazing explanations of how homeopathy "works" by claiming that water has "memory." It supposedly "remembers" the substances with which it's been in contact and transmits that "information" to the patient. No one's ever been able to explain to me why transmitting the "information" from a supposed memory of water is better than the information from the real drug or substance itself, but that's just my old, nasty, dogmatic, reductionistic, scientific nature being old, nasty, dogmatic, reductionistic, and scientific. Then, of course, there's the term "quantum," which has been so widely abused by Deepak Chopra, his acolytes, and the CAM community in general, while the new CAM buzzword these days to explain why quackery "works" is epigenetics. Basically, whenever a proponent of alternative medicine uses the word "epigenetics" or "quantum" to explain why an alternative medicine treatment "works," what he really means is, "It's magic."
...So, yes, "conventional" medicine doesn't always get it right. Occasionally it gets it wrong, on rare occasions spectacularly wrong. But unlike most CAM modalities EBM/SBM is self-correcting. It actually does abandon treatments that don't work. The process might be messy and ugly at times, but it does happen. For example, many years ago, angina pectoris was sometimes treated with a surgical procedure known as mammary artery ligation. The idea was that tying off these arteries would divert more blood to the heart. The operation became popular on the basis of relatively small, uncontrolled case series. Then, two randomized, sham surgery-controlled clinical trials were published in 1959 and 1960. Both of these trials showed no difference between bilateral internal mammary artery ligation and sham surgery. Very rapidly, surgeons stopped doing this operation. A similar example is one I mentioned above: bone marrow transplantation for advanced breast cancer, which was similarly rapidly abandoned after randomized clinical trials showing it to be no better than the previous standard of care. I'm not saying that this happened without conflict or disagreement; proponents of these therapies can always find reasons to discount the clinical trial evidence. But in the end evidence and science do win out.
Now compare this to CAM practices. Can anyone name a CAM treatment that was abandoned by CAM practitioners as a result of research and randomized clinical trials showing that it doesn't work? A single one? I can't. That's the difference between CAM and EBM/SBM. The day that I see a CAM practice go extinct, like bilateral internal mammary artery ligation for angina pectoris, is the day that I might start to take seriously CAM practitioner claims that they are science-based.
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Please clean up after your Doug.
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Classic Movies Remade
Pick any flavor they can be remade in, a la a certain religion, region, etc., and give your remake's title. Here's mine:
Classic movies, the Jewish remake: "Star Trek: The Wrath of Sammy Kahn"
The Relationship Heroics That Mean The Most Are Often The Least Dramatic
Women tend to long for something fairy-tale or chick flick-esque, with the guy who realizes he loves them at the last minute, runs through the airport, and maybe even jumps on the nose of the plane.
The truth is, the heroics in a relationship are usually much less dramatic -- and sometimes aren't as appreciated or aren't as appreciated as they should be.
Lisa-Jo Baker writes at HuffPo:
He drove us all home 18 hours over two days.Three kids and hundreds of miles and potty breaks and princess pull-ups, the car covered in the markers I'd bought for window art. Turns out the soft beige ceiling of a mini van makes a perfect canvas. Rainbow swirls color the door panels and there are goldfish crackers crushed so deep into the seats that they will likely be there come next summer and this same road trip all the way to Northern Michigan and the lake that his family have been coming to for decades.
He's never run through an airport for me.
Three times he's held my hands, my shaking legs, my head, my heart as I've bared down and groaned a baby into being. He has run for ice chips and doctors and night shifts and laid himself low to help me hold on through the hard rock and roll and push and pull of labor and I've never drowned holding onto his hand.
If a guy is your hero, tell him. Coincidentally, I emailed Gregg that about a half hour before I saw this story. He was today, which is pretty much "business as usual" for him, and I truly appreciate that and try to be worthy of that and take good care of him.
Some Unemployed Workers Are More Equal Than Others
Welcome to crony capitalism! Laid-off Boeing workers get an unbelievable sweetheart deal. Dominic Gates writes in The Seattle Times:
Thanks to a federal program lined up by their unions, local workers laid off during the current dip in employment at Boeing Commercial Airplanes will enjoy a financial cushion that's much, much plumper than what the average unemployed state resident gets."Compared to what Joe Worker gets when they get laid off, our members have a pretty extensive safety net," said Connie Kelliher, spokeswoman for the International Association of Machinists (IAM).
The U.S. Department of Labor has approved Boeing workers -- union or nonunion, production workers or engineers -- laid off between April 2012 and June 2015 for a package of benefits that includes drawing unemployment pay for up to 2½ years, rather than the regular six months.
The Labor Department ruling also means that if laid-off Boeing workers need to travel, say to California, for a job interview, the government will reimburse 90 percent of the costs.
If they relocate for a new job, the government will pay 90 percent of their moving expenses and provide an additional lump-sum relocation allowance of up to $1,250.
While unemployed, they'll also get a tax credit for nearly three-quarters of their health-care premiums. And they're eligible for a grant of up to $25,000 toward the cost of a degree.
And for those workers over 50, if they have to take a lower-paid job after leaving Boeing, the government will provide up to $10,000 over two years in supplementary pay to make up some of the difference.
All these benefits flow because the Labor Department recently granted the IAM's petition for federal aid under the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program, which is designed to assist U.S. workers who have lost their jobs as a result of overseas trade or outsourcing.
And after a parallel petition from the white-collar union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the government broadened the approval to include all Boeing Commercial Airplanes workers, even nonunion employees.
The Department of Labor explained the decision by saying the company's job losses here can be attributed to outsourcing because Boeing has acquired aircraft parts from foreign countries, "which contributed importantly to worker group separations."
Things are tough for lots of us for lots of reasons, some of which involve foreign trade. You get a deal like this?
via @againstcronycap
Edible Landscape? City Wants You To Rip It Out
Because Los Angeles has no problems whatsoever but how to push around law-abiding citizens, the Bureau of Street Services has taken time off from ignoring potholes to going after citizens who have planted vegetables in parkways.
Here in my neighborhood, we have Mari, who has taken to beautifying the fence around the home of two guys who live near us. You know what we say to her? "Thank you so much! That looks really nice!"
In the LA Times, Steve Lopez writes:
South L.A. resident Teger's run-in with the bureaucracy began last week, with a visit from a tree surgeon with the Bureau of Street Services."I was ready to leave, and a city truck pulled up behind and was kind of aggressively honking. He said he'd been getting complaints from our neighbors," said Teger. She found that hard to believe, considering all the support she's gotten from neighbors. The garden has become a neighborhood magnet, she said, with kids and adults coming by to watch plants grow and share the harvest.
Teger said she was told to remove the parkway plants within 48 hours, and she was flabbergasted. She'd worked hard on that garden, building it with help from Finley and Florence Nishida, cofounders of L.A. Green Grounds, which has been helping homeowners build gardens in South L.A. and elsewhere.
The part of the garden that's outside Teger's front door is fine under city guidelines. But she was told that five fruit trees, several herbs and a couple of squash plants on the parkway violate city code and have to be removed immediately.
"This is ludicrous," said Finley, who thinks the city could find better things to do, especially since negotiations are underway to relax parkway gardening restrictions. He's now generating support for edible gardens in a Facebook campaign and told me he's contacted City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, asking him to help move things along.
"If you go to Brentwood," said Nishida, "do you think those people have permits" for their overgrown rosebushes, bougainvillea and other plants on parkway strips?
Even in Teger's neighborhood, numerous violations of the parkway code, with nonedible plants and trees, could be seen on nearby properties.
Check out the dangerous-looking lemon tree-let she's admiring in the photo at the link. Do you think it sneaks out of the soil and robs homes in the wee hours?
If You Can't Afford Diapers, You Can't Afford To Have A Baby
Whatever happened to the notion of waiting to have children until you can afford to care for them?
Eryn Brown writes in the LA Times that poor women don't have enough diapers:
There have been days, since her son Ezekiel was born 11 months ago, that Los Angeles mom Beth Capper has gone without food to keep up her supply. One friend was arrested for stealing some.It's not drugs or alcohol or even baby formula that has put her in such a bind. It's diapers.
"There's no way around buying them," said Capper, a 41-year-old single mother who doesn't work because of a disability.
Across the country, mothers like Capper are facing the same predicament. According to a report published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, diaper need -- the inability to afford to keep a child in clean diapers -- affects a "substantial" number of low-income Americans, with nearly 30% of mothers questioned in New Haven, Conn., reporting that they did not have enough for their children.
It's a problem that often goes unnoticed.
"I call it the silent epidemic," said Caroline Kunitz, who runs Pacific Palisades-based L.A. Diaper Drive, which will distribute 1.5 million diapers to nonprofit partners around Southern California this year.
The "silent epidemic" seems to be that people are bringing children into the world they cannot afford to care for properly.
I wrote to Eryn Brown at the LA Times to try to get her to fill in some of the reporting missing from the piece. My email:
Can you please fill in what was left out of the story?What's Beth Capper's disability that prevents her from working? How long has she had it?What is her profession or was her profession?
If this is the Beth Capper who is an LA punker, I notice that a woman of this name was on the bill for a music event in March, 2013. Had she gotten sick since then?
Was there a father in the picture? Did he die? What happened to him?
Could she at one time afford to support a baby or did she just have one anyway?
Is Beth Capper a friend or acquaintance of yours and is that how she came to be in the story but with almost no detail about her?
-Amy Alkon
Brown's email address sent back this reply:
I am out of the office until Tuesday, August 6.
Any bets on my ever getting a reply?
A comment at the LA Times site:
guinevere1
The woman in the article has an 11 month old child. This means that the father of the child was around at least 20 months ago. Is there some reason he cannot help pay for diapers? The notion of cloth diapers not being an option is frankly, ludicrous. They have been around for many years and are still around. They can easily be washed at a laundermat if that is what these mothers use for washing facilities.
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