Pawing Tall: The Littlest Hood Casts The Longest Shadow
Aida and I were on a mission related to my book this morning and hiked the entire neighborhood. It was cold when we left, so she threw on a sweatshirt.
I thought she'd be tired when we got home but she bounced around the house little a furry little rubber ball.
About Time: Parsonage Exemption Ruled Unconstitutional
David Drumm guest blogs over at law prof Jonathan Turley's blog:
The "parsonage exemption" is found in 26 U.S. Code § 107 and states that a "minister of the gospel" does not have to include in his gross income, either the rental value of a home furnished to him or the rental allowance paid to him. Judge Barbara Crabb of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin has held that the "parsonage exemption" is unconstitutional. Crabb wrote in the decision that the tax exemption "provides a benefit to religious persons and no one else, even though doing so is not necessary to alleviate a special burden on religious exercise."The suit was brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) on behalf of plaintiffs Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, both officers at FFRF. The defendants in the case were the Secretary of the Treasury and the (acting) Commissioner for the IRS.
This case is interesting from a "standing" point of view. In order for a plaintiff to have standing to bring suit in federal court, it must be shown:
1) An injury has been suffered in fact,
2) The injury is due to the defendants' conduct, and
3) The relief sought in the complaint would address the injury.
To address 1), the clever scamps at FFRF started paying the two defendants housing allowances. The injury suffered would be their non-entitlement to the exemption to the tax break, and the injury is certainly due to defendant's conduct.
...It has been estimated that the "parsonage exemption" has cost the government $2.3 billion over a five year period. Plaintiff Gaylor observed: "When you're dealing with some of these mega-church pastors with huge mansions, they can be paid an enormous amount in housing allowances."
The judge stayed the implementation of the ruling during the appeal process.
"Just Went To Get A Coffee": When Somebody Takes That Handicapped Space "Just For A Moment"
Marc Randazza posted on Facebook with a link to this photo:
Making a good point...there was a protest in Lisbon, where they parked wheelchairs in the auto spots, with notes that said "be right back" or "I went to just get a coffee."
Heartbreaking: Boy Put In Storage Closet For Behavior Problems
Those in charge at this Christian school -- now out of business, according to a writeup at YouTube -- responded to this boy's behavioral problems by sticking him in a storage closet and coming to check on him every few hours.
The description at YouTube:
A family sues for the return of tuition money from Cornerstone Christian School (Clearlake, California) after there are allegations of abuse. Cornerstone Christian uses the ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum which is infamous for teaching that the Lochness monster disproves evolution. Update: the school appears to have (gone) out of business.
Absolutely hideous way to treat this boy. Yale Parenting Center's Dr. Alan Kazdin has humane and useful (as in, successful) tactics for improving difficult children's behavior and helping them fit in in mainstream classes. He has an excellent book out on this and points out that cruelties like this are not ways to help children but are actually damaging to them and counterproductive. Yay, Judge Judy.
A bit from Kazdin here from Slate:
You begin by deciding what you want the child to do, the positive opposite of whatever behavior you want to stop. The best way to get rid of unwanted behavior is to train a desirable one to replace it. So turn "I want him to stop having tantrums" into "I want him to stay calm and not to raise his voice when I say no to him."Then you tell the child exactly what you would like him to do. Don't confuse improving his behavior with improving his moral understanding; just make clear what behavior you're looking for and when it's appropriate, and don't muddy the waters by getting into why he should do it. "When you get mad at your sister, I want you to use words or come tell me about it or just get away from her. No matter what, I want you to keep your hands to yourself."
Whenever you see the child do what you would like, or even do something that's a step in the right direction, you not only pay attention to that behavior, but you praise it in specific, effusive terms. "You were angry at me, but you just used words. You didn't hit or kick, and that's great!" Add a smile or a touch--a hug, a kiss, a pat on the shoulder. Verbal praise grows more effective when augmented via another sense.
If you don't see enough of the desirable behavior, then you can work on it using simulation play. Wait for a peaceful moment and then propose an exercise. "Let's see whether you can stay calm and just use words when I say no to you. I'm going to say no--remember, this is just pretend--and you stay calm, OK?" You can even switch roles as part of the game. Most kids delight in playing the parent and saying no to the parent playing the child.
Your objective is to arrange for as much reinforced practice as possible, which means you want your child to have many opportunities to practice doing the right thing and then be reinforced in the habit by receiving rewards. Your praise is the most important reward, but you can also add little age-appropriate privileges (staying up for 15 more minutes before bedtime, choosing the menu for dinner), goodies (little five-and-dime gadgets for younger children, downloads or cell-phone minutes for older ones), or treats. And, yes, you reward successful let's-pretend simulation sessions, too. This won't go on forever. A brief but intensive period featuring lots of reinforced practice, often somewhere between a couple of weeks and a month, can make long-lasting or even permanent changes in a child's behavior.
Slinks
Slere, please.
Black Friday Stampede At My House
Mad rush for kibble, which my dainty dog eats like a hog rushing the trough.
Afterward, the shame.
Okay, it is possible she's feeling it on the inside.
In hopes of getting her to eat more slowly without my having to say "Eat!" and "Stop!", we did just have a KONG Wobbler Treat Dispensing Dog Toy
Obama Admin Is Making World Safe From Rapacious Piano Teachers
Government's long, meddling fingers have reached a piano teachers' association, writes Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ:
In March of this year, a small nonprofit in Cincinnati--the Music Teachers National Association--received a letter from the FTC. The agency was investigating whether the association was engaged in, uh, anticompetitive practices.This was bizarre, given that the MTNA has existed since 1876 solely to advance the cause of music study and support music teachers. The 501(c)(3) has about 22,000 members, nearly 90% of them piano teachers, including many women who earn a modest living giving lessons in their homes. The group promotes music study and competitions and helps train teachers. Not exactly U.S. Steel. X +1.04%
The association's sin, according to the feds, rested in its code of ethics. The code lays out ideals for members to follow--a commitment to students, colleagues, society. Tucked into this worthy document was a provision calling on teachers to respect their colleagues' studios, and not actively recruit students from other teachers.
That's a common enough provision among professional organizations (doctors, lawyers), yet the FTC avers that the suggestion that Miss Sally not poach students from Miss Lucy was an attempt to raise prices for piano lessons. Given that the average lesson runs around $30 an hour, and that some devoted teachers still give lessons for $5 a pop, this is patently absurd.
MTNA Executive Director Gary Ingle, who has been at the organization 17 years--and who agreed to talk when I reached out about this case--said that he and the group's attorneys immediately flew to Washington to talk to federal investigators. They explained that this provision had been in the group's code for years, and that it was purely aspirational. The association has never enforced its code, and no member has been removed as a result of it.
The FTC didn't care. Nor did it blink when the MTNA pointed out that the agency has no real authority over nonprofits (it is largely limited to going after sham organizations) and that Congress has never acted on the FTA's requests for more control over 501(c)3 groups. Nor was the agency moved by the group's offer to immediately excise the provision. The investigation would continue.
With a dozen employees and a $2 million budget, the group doesn't have "the resources to fight the federal government," Mr. Ingle says. The board immediately removed the provision from its code, but the MTNA staff still had to devote months compiling thousands of documents demanded by the agency, some going back 20 years.
Grateful
I'm grateful to all of you who comment here, who challenge me when I let something slip by me (and make me better because of it) and make the comments section here so interesting that when I'm dead-tired at 11 p.m., I'm too compelled to post blog items to go to bed.
I also love that there's a spirit of free speech here. I trust that when somebody's a jerk that people here, who are very smart and unwilling to let stuff just fly, will go after the stuff that doesn't quite make it in their comment.
Thanks so much to all of you.
How "Confidential" Works When The Government's All Up In Your Healthcare
A Toronto woman was denied entry to the United States when a U.S. border agent somehow knew about her confidential medical details.
Valerie Hauch writes in the Toronto Star:
Ellen Richardson went to Pearson airport on Monday full of joy about flying to New York City and from there going on a 10-day Caribbean cruise for which she'd paid about $6,000.But a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with the Department of Homeland Security killed that dream when he denied her entry.
"I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,'' said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others.
The Weston woman was told by the U.S. agent she would have to get "medical clearance'' and be examined by one of only three doctors in Toronto whose assessments are accepted by Homeland Security. She was given their names and told a call to her psychiatrist "would not suffice.''
At the time, Richardson said, she was so shocked and devastated by what was going on, she wasn't thinking about how U.S. authorities could access her supposedly private medical information.
The piece continues:
MP Mike Sullivan said what has happened to his constituent is "enormously troubling. . . . How did U.S. agents get her personal medical information?''...U.S. authorities "do not have access to medical or other health records for Ontarians travelling to the U.S.,'' said health ministry spokeswoman Joanne Woodward Fraser, adding the ministry could not provide any additional information.
They don't have access, yet somehow they do.
Be very, very afraid of giving the government any information about you.
It's bad enough we have to give the government a financial stripsearch of ourselves to pay our taxes. Now our health information? If it can be used against you -- well, count on it being used against you.
via @larosalind
Lustig On Sugar On C-SPAN
This is worth watching, said the commenter who sent this to me, and, after watching a half hour of it, I can say he's right:
The description from YouTube:
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, spoke to students at the University of California Hastings Law School, where he studied food policy law. Lustig claimed sugar is the reason we are losing the battle against obesity, and that politics is getting in the way of sound food policy.
Previous posts by me on Lustig are here.
As he notes, a calorie is not a calorie -- per the data. Some calories cause disease more than others and are metabolized differently than others.
I haven't watched the whole video -- had to go to bed -- but Lustig is coming from a data-based place on sugar and it is a substance I avoid, along with starchy carbs.
It seems pretty clear from the video: the reduction of fat in our diets and the increase in sugar in our diets (and be sure you count sugars from starches) has turned our population obese and diabetic. But he points out that it isn't just obese people who have metabolic dysfunction. More than half of our population has metabolic dysfunction. This is costing us big in healthcare dollars. How different might our healthcare problems be if we didn't have a population consuming vast quantities of sugar?
A screenshot from the video (from around the 34 minute mark): 
(He goes into limitations at 36:00.)
Linkssssssss
Patch me, I'm leaking.
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Naked Meat
Guys, tell women why they should or shouldn't be worried that you sometimes go to strip clubs or have lunch at Hooters.
Dumbest Term In Recent Years
Cisgendered -- describes "gender identity where an individual's self-perception of their gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth."
Of course, per that Wikipedia page linked above, somebody has already gone all P.C. on cisgendered's ass:
Helen Boyd, author of My Husband Betty and She's Not the Man I Married, has argued on her blog that cissexual is a less loaded term than cisgender and reflects fewer assumptions about the person's relationship to gender roles and the transgender community.
The term has, according to that Wikipedia page, been around since 1994, but it's been popping up increasingly as of late.
NYC May Ban Vaping Because It Looks Like Smoking
Stupid never seems to go out of style for New York City Council members.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason:
The New York City Council is considering a ban on the use of electronic cigarettes in bars, restaurant, and other "public places"--not because there is any evidence that the devices pose a hazard but because they look too much like regular cigarettes. Councilman James Gennaro, a sponsor of the proposed ban, tells The New York Times, "We see these cigarettes are really starting to proliferate, and it's unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? According to the Times, "Mr. Gennaro said children who could not differentiate between regular and electronic smoking were getting the message that smoking is socially acceptable."So it is not the product that bothers Gennaro as much as the message it supposedly sends. Presumably he would have the same complaint if people started wearing T-shirts proclaiming that "Smoking Is Cool," although banning those might be constitutionally problematic.
The Paranoid States Of America
It's a bomb! No, it's a burrito.
TSA Spends Almost $1 Billion On Behavior Detection Program, Detects Zero Terrorists
The WaPo's Ashley Halsey III reports on Rep. Mark Sanford's questioning of the TSA's John Pistole about the TSA's SPOT screening program (supposed behavior detection. It has detected only an exceptionaly tiny number of offenders that had nothing to do with plots against planes or airports -- stuff like expired passports were the sorts of things found):
The essence of several House members' arguments was captured in an exchange between Sanford and Pistole near the conclusion of the two-hour hearing. It underscored concerns both about racial or ethnic profiling and that people in stressful travel situations are more likely to look suspicious than they otherwise would."This notion of how do [you] get into somebody else's head? I think it's a very difficult place to be," Sanford said. "So you have a system that's set up to look for symptoms [of] stress, fear or deception, but I would ask you, Mr. Pistole, if you were a young kid that maybe got off the track at an early age, . . . you do have a criminal record, and a law enforcement fellow is standing in front of you asking you questions, do you believe you would exhibit stress or fear?"
"It all depends on the individual," Pistole replied. "Yes, sure, potentially."
"What if you were a staunch right-wing conspiracist with very strong anti-government leanings, you've posted some things that probably weren't the best to post on the Internet, but you had the invisibility that goes with the Internet, but now you've got a law enforcement officer probing, asking you questions, would you exhibit stress or fear?"
"Again," Pistole said, "it depends on the individual, but potentially, sure."
"You're an immigrant whose dad and mom came here illegally, would you exhibit stress or fear if someone was asking you questions?
"All situational, again," Pistole said.
..."Which I think raises the point which the GAO report has brought," Sanford said. "You go through a screening system which essentially undresses somebody, you send their equipment through radar detection and other devices. The question is, from a civil liberties standpoint, given those other tests, do you in addition have to go through a screening process based on somebody's interpretation of what might be in your brain?"
"You raise good points, congressman," the unflappable Pistole replied. "There's no perfect science, there's no perfect art of this. . . . This has been over seven years and we have screened by observation over 4 billion passengers, it actually comes out to 50 cents and in some instances 25 cents per passenger."
"In reverse," Sanford broke in, "you could say, a billion dollars [spent] with no results."
"I would say there's a result in terms of deterrence," Pistole said.
Yes, it's deterring us from getting the national debt down by $1 billion dollars -- plus interest.
Oh, wait -- do you think that's not what he meant?
Jonathan Turley lays out the details from SPOT:
Only 0.59% of the passengers flagged were arrested under its Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) program. SPOT is working in 176 airports to "identify passenger behaviors indicative of stress, fear, or deception and refer passengers" and their baggage for additional screening.There were 61,000 SPOT referrals. Of those, 8,700 (13.6%) were referred to a law enforcement officer and, of those, 365 (4%) "resulted in an arrest." That is 365 of 61,000 SPOT referrals or 0.59%. The reasons for arrest are predictable (1) fraudulent documents, (2) illegal alien, (3) other, (4) outstanding warrants, (5) suspected drugs, and (6) undeclared currency. The success rate of the program is likely no more than a random stop program. If you stop people in airports or train stations and subject them to questioning and a background check, you will find the same type of violations in the same rough numbers.
At 365 arrests, we are talking about rough $2.5 million an arrest for things like undeclared currency.
Congress continues to spend wildly on defense and national security regardless of documented waste or failures. Even titanic failures do not result in discipline or termination for officials.
Lynx
Meeee-yowww.
Book Deal At Amazon -- 30 Percent Off Any Book From Now Till Dec. 1
Take an extra 30% off any book offered by Amazon.com from now until December 1st. Enter code BOOKDEAL at checkout. Here's how (restrictions apply). Find a book here
I humbly suggest this book -- I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, by me!
Or shop Black Friday Deals Week
TELLING SOMEONE TO "CALM DOWN" DOES NOT MAKE THEM CALMER!
It makes them want to hit you. At the very least.
Obamacare Website: You Have No Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy, Says Hidden Source Code
Texas Rep. Joe Barton questions an Obamacare contractor about the bit in the source code and whether it should be a "reasonable expectation," that you give up your privacy to sign up for Obamacare -- contrary to HIPAA privacy rules:
(CMS is Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.)
The line: "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system."
More on this here, at Christian Science Monitor, by Mark Trumbull:
Some technology experts, however, said it's not unusual for source code to contain extraneous verbiage that's not relevant or intended to be read by users. The Weekly Standard article itself referred to the no-privacy statement as something "not visible to users and obviously not intended as part of the terms and conditions" for use of the website.
Well, then, why is it there at all?
Or was it.
Supposedly, the code has been removed, according to the Weekly Standard, which first reported on this:
Wednesday, Rep. Barton took up the question with Sebelius, the head of Health and Human Services (HHS) of which CMS is a part. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Sebelius's response:"It is my understanding that that is boilerplate language that should not have been in this particular contract because there are -- the highest security standards in place and people have every right to expect privacy," Sebelius said to Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas).Sebelius assured Barton that the language would be removed saying, "we have had those discussions with CGI [Federal] and it is underway. I do absolutely commit to protecting the privacy of the American public and we have asked them to remove that statement."
Sebelius's response is a tacit admission from the federal government that the inclusion of the statement posed a legitimate privacy concern, a position not shared by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) who uttered his widely reported "monkey court" remark in response to Rep. Barton's inquiry at last week's hearing.
The thing is, even accidentally included code can be used against you. From what I've been reading (and blogging about lately), I find using these government-run ACA websites worrisome in terms of protecting oneself from both the government and hackers seeking your information so they can steal your identity.
Scott Adams: "I Hope My Father Dies Soon"
Moving and right-on post by the Dilbert cartoonist and writer:
I hope my father dies soon.And while I'm at it, I might want you to die a painful death too.
I'm entirely serious on both counts.
My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I'll spare you the details, but it's as close to a living Hell as you can get.
If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.
Because it's not too soon. It's far too late. His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering. Rarely has money been so poorly spent.
I'd like to proactively end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my government says I can't make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So, for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until he dies.
I'm a patriotic guy by nature. I love my country. But the government? Well, we just broke up.
And let me say this next part as clearly as I can.
If you're a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won't do that, because I fear the consequences. But I'd enjoy it, because you motherfuckers are responsible for torturing my father.
What's Minnesota Government Protecting, Nabisco's Profits?
The wonderful Institute for Justice has taken on a case in Minnesota. IJ's Katelynn McBride writes in the Pioneer Press that "restrictions on sales of home-baked goods put the pinch on Minnesota entrepreneurs":
Jane Astramecki is a home baker who runs Jane Dough Bakery out of a custom-made home kitchen in her basement. Her pecan chocolate chip cookies, with their soft, crumbling cookie flakes and melt-in-your-mouth gooey chocolate interior, evoke memories of your mother or grandmother taking a fresh tray of cookies out of your home oven.Working from the home is the only way Jane can work. In 1995, Jane suffered a serious accident requiring three back surgeries and making it difficult for her to sit or stand for long periods of time. Jane needs to work from home so she can lie down in case pain suddenly comes on.
But Minnesota has shut the oven door on Jane's business. Minnesota forbids home bakers like Jane from selling their goods from a retail shop or online. Jane is allowed to sell her goods only at farmers' markets or community events, and even then she can sell only up to $5,000 worth of goods per year -- that's only $96 a week. Home bakers violating the law are subject to a misdemeanor conviction punishable by 90 days in jail or fines of up to $7,500 per violation.
To make matters worse, Minnesota's $5,000 cap applies to gross receipts -- not profits. After spending money on ingredients, renting a stall at a farmers' market and incurring other business-related expenses, a small business like Jane's may be doomed for failure before it even gets off the ground.
Minnesota's restrictions don't affect only home bakers. If a customer wants to purchase one of Jane's custom-made wedding cakes, Jane can bake the cake but is banned from delivering it to the bride's home or to the wedding. The bride would have to go out of her way to pick up and pay for the cake at a farmers' market and, in the midst of everything else she is trying to finalize before the wedding, find a way to transport and store the cake until the wedding.
These restrictions make it impossible for entrepreneurs like Jane to launch a successful small business from the home.
Proponents of the law claim that Minnesota's restrictions protect the public health and safety because home kitchens are not inspected by the government. But the state acknowledges baked goods are safe by classifying them as "not potentially hazardous foods." If Jane's pecan chocolate chip cookies are safe to sell from a farmers' market, Minnesota should not ban her from selling them from other locations.
People want to work and bake. Other people want to buy their goods. What business is it of government to stand in the way?
Le Link
Like Le Car, only it will continue to take you places.
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If You're Over 176 Pounds, The Morning-After Pill Might Not Work For You
If you're as heavy as a lot of American women, you can take Plan B, but you should also start thinking of baby names when you do.
Molly Redden writes at Mother Jones:
The European manufacturer of an emergency contraceptive pill identical to Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, will warn women that the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds. HRA Pharma, the French manufacturer of the European drug, Norlevo, is changing its packaging information to reflect the weight limits. European pharmaceutical regulators approved the change on November 10, but it has not been previously reported.This development has implications for American women. Some of the most popular emergency contraceptive pills sold over the counter in the United States--including the one-pill drugs Plan B One-Step, Next Choice One Dose, and My Way, and a number of generic two-pill emergency contraceptives--have a dosage and chemical makeup identical to the European drug. Weight data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that, at 166 pounds, the average American woman is too heavy to use these pills effectively.
These pills, which use a compound called levonorgestrel to prevent pregnancies, are the most effective morning-after pills available without a prescription. Other pills sold in the United States require a prescription, are less effective at preventing pregnancy, or cause side effects such as nausea or vomiting. Plan B One-Step, which retails for $50, is the only emergency contraceptive drug in the United States available to women of all ages without a prescription.
...An FDA spokeswoman tells Mother Jones the agency is evaluating whether to require US emergency contraceptive pill makers to change their labels.
What the government really cares about is the superfluous sticker peeling off your Camaro's sun visor.
UPDATE, from a Diana Fleischman tweet:
@sentientist
@amyalkon good correction of the plan B headline http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2013/11/27/how-likely-you-are-to-get-pregnant-if-you-weigh-176-pounds-and-take-plan-b-what-the-research-actually-said/
Your Camaro Has Been Recalled For A Faulty Sticker
Diane Katz at Heritage.org notes that GM is recalling almost 19,000 Camaro's for violating Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 208, which among other things, mandates:
Passenger Cars, Multipurpose Passenger Vehicles, Trucks and Buses (Effective 2-25-97) Shall be equipped with a warning label.
Katz writes:
GM is recalling 18,941 Chevy Camaros because the air bag warning label on the sun visor may peel.Seriously.
The result:
GM also issued a stop delivery order to dealers, and instructed them to inspect the label on each sun visor ("using a finger nail, plastic card, or similar" to determine proper adhesion). In the event a label is prone to peel, the entire sun visor must be scrapped and replaced.This is no small matter, evidently. If the air bag warning label detaches from the visor, the driver and front seat passenger may not be warned of the risks of air bag deployment. Or so goes the reasoning for the adhesion edict. But even when warned via visor label, a driver and front seat passenger have little choice about air bag deployment, since the potentially dangerous equipment is required by the NHTSA itself.
In other words, General Motors is required under NHTSA rules to initiate a recall of 18,941 vehicles because of a danger created by other NHTSA rules. Perhaps it is regulators who should come with a warning label.
New cars and relatively new cars have airbags. Unless you were raised in a cave and only recently been brought back to civilization, don't you know this?
I know there are airbags in my 2004 Honda Insight, so I bought a console doggie seat, because it can be dangerous to have a tiny dog seated in a front seat if the airbag deploys.
But stickers...stickers...
via @tedfrank
Obamacare's Next Big Blow: When Employers Start Dropping Their Healthcare Plans
A Chi Trib editorial:
Abbott Laboratories chief executive Miles White said something last Tuesday that should jolt tens of millions of Americans who watch from a comfortable distance as the giant Obamacare blimp ignites and tumbles to the ground. These Americans are safely ensconced in employer-provided health care coverage -- for now.But there are "clear incentives for companies to drop their health care plans and move people onto the exchanges," White told analysts at a luncheon, referring to the disastrously cranky and unreliable online insurance marketplaces created under Obamacare.
"I can tell you that the employees of Abbott or AbbVie (the pharmaceutical firm Abbott spun off in January) are going to be pretty unhappy about that, you know, if we did that," White said.
If President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders think the outcry against Obamacare is fierce now, watch if millions more Americans get blindsided with the news that they'll be forced into these dysfunctional government online marketplaces. Some will face higher premiums or higher deductibles, and they'll be required to share private medical and financial information on a website with a questionable security firewall, opening them to fraudsters, hackers and cyberchaos.
via @instapundit
"Why Isn't Obama Using Clemency To Correct Injustices? Because He Doesn't Care."
That quote above was an Instapundit tweet to an Atlantic article. Obama can talk about justice and fairness and fairness and justice and keep talking and talking, because it's apparently mostly -- or all -- just talk.
Ron Fournier writes on The Atlantic's site that the President will, on Wednesday, pardon a Thanksgiving turkey:
Which makes this a good time to ask why a liberal constitutional lawyer who bemoans the bloated prison system and proclaims that "life is all about second chances" is--on the matter of clemency--one of the stingiest presidents in U.S. history?Put another way: If a turkey deserves a second chance, why not Weldon Angelos?
Angelos was sentenced in 2004 to 55 years' imprisonment for possessing a firearm in connection with selling small amounts of marijuana. He didn't brandish or use a weapon, nor did he hurt or threaten to injure anybody. And yet the father of young children and aspiring music producer was given an effective life sentence because of a draconian mandatory-minimum federal law.
Even the judge on his case, Paul G. Cassell, found the sentence "cruel and irrational." While urging Obama to reduce Angelos' punishment, the Republican-appointed judge wrote, "While I must impose the unjust sentence, our system of separated powers provides a means of redress."
More than almost any president, Obama has failed to exercise that "means of redress" enscribed in the Constitution, the presidential clemency. But that may be changing. The White House is considering a broad range of clemency reforms.
My guess would be that they're putting the word out that they're doing this. And that words will be the only thing that continue to be put out. Read the end of the piece. There's been a suggestion (by "Administration sources") that reforms are being considered by the White House, and there was this:
In addition to signing the the 2010 crack-powder legislation, Obama has directed Holder to take administrative steps to cut mandatory minimum sentences.
Followed by this:
Broader clemency reforms are not imminent.
(You can keep your 55-year jail sentence whether you like it or not.)
Monkey
Linkie with paws and fur.
A Federal Definition Of "Natural"? Like Admitting We, As A People, Are Dim
Do you think Pepperidge Farm goldfish grow on trees or maybe are caught be fishermen who go out in slickers and yellow hats into stormy waters? Does anyone? Read the label. Taste them. Do these things taste healthy to you?
Matthew Mientka writes at Newsweek that there's a bill in Congress that would, for the first time, legally define natural:
Already some of the biggest names in food and beverage manufacturing are tiptoeing away. PepsiCo Inc. and Campbell Soup Co., among others, have quietly deleted the natural label from products like Naked Juice and Goldfish - the snack cracker brought to you by those ostensible tillers of the soil at Pepperidge "Farms."In the absence of rigorous oversight, the makers of purportedly natural products have multiplied into an industry worth more than $40 billion annually. Compare that with the relatively modest $32 million a year U.S. market value for certified organic products. As far as that goes, the term organic itself was similarly up for grabs in the much of the United States until 1990, when Congress finally authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to set some standards.
I don't eat anything with sugar or flour in it -- the real problems, since those ingredients (along with any starchy carbohydrate) lead to the insulin secretion that puts on fat. (At the Rodale link above on "bill," they make the assumption -- not based in science -- that there's such a thing as healthy whole grains. There is no such thing.) An excerpt:
Current regulations stipulate that any product containing at minimum 51 percent whole grain can be labeled "made with whole grain," but that leaves 49 percent unhealthy refined grains that you'd eat in what you assume would be a healthier product.
Of course, it was the government that told us, based on Ancel Keys' crap "science," that we should eat the unhealthy high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, causing millions upon millions of Americans to wonder why they were exercising their asses off and going hungry (on a diet sans fat) and still ballooning up.
RELATED: The FDA, any day now, could impose burdensome new regulations on businesses requiring the disclosure of calorie counts, writes A. Barton Hinkle at reason:
They are fiercely debated because they are so burdensome: "The Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget estimates the menu labeling regulation to be the third-most onerous regulation proposed in 2010," according to Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez and Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. The rules are expected to cost more than $1 billion and require more than 14.5 million hours of labor to meet.They have been debated so long because bureaucrats have discovered that while calorie labeling sounds simple enough in theory, in practice it is -- in the words of FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg -- "extremely thorny."
Consider, for example, pizza: The legislative director for Domino's says "there are 34 million pizza combinations. We've done the math." Listing the calorie content for each possible variation would require a very large sign indeed.
Yet only one Domino's customer out of 10 visits a Domino's location. The rest order over the phone or online. So shouldn't posting the caloric content on the company website suffice? It should, but it will not: The FDA's proposed standards require actual signs, at every location.
...The object of such Byzantine busybody-ness is plain enough: to "nudge" (former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein's favorite word) people to ingest fewer calories.
Just one small problem: It doesn't work.
"Restaurant menu labels don't work, study shows," reported "Today" back in July: "No matter how much calorie information is on the menu list, people still choose the food they like, not what's supposed to be healthier, researchers from Carnegie Mellon reported Thursday. ... 'Putting calorie labels on menus really has little or no effect on people's ordering behavior at all,' says Julie Downs, lead author of the new study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health."
Yet the federal menu rules are all but inevitable because they are required by law -- namely, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Congress passed the law, and people continue to find out what's in it -- to their dismay.
Why Not Allow Bone Marrow Donors To Be Compensated?
The feds are fighting against it, equating it with paying for organs, says a WSJ editorial.
Congress banned paying for or selling organs like livers and lungs in 1984 but bone marrow is a connective tissue that regenerates naturally in a healthy body. Donations can be made through an outpatient procedure that's much like donating blood:
The technique is less invasive than egg donation and has none of the risks associated with kidney or liver donation. Unlike blood donors, however, marrow donors cannot be compensated, which has led to shortages for patients with life threatening blood diseases and a waiting list of some 13,900.In 2009, the Institute for Justice sued on behalf of Maine resident Doreen Flynn, whose three children have a disease called Franconia anemia and will most likely need bone marrow transplants to survive. In 2012's Flynn v. Holder, the Ninth Circuit agreed, noting that new technology and the ease of marrow donation put the ban wholly out of step with the purpose of the organ donation law.
The Justice Department petitioned for rehearing en banc, insisting that marrow transplants should "not be subject to market forces." When the Ninth Circuit declined to rehear the case, the Administration mobilized HHS, which has proposed a rule that would overturn the Ninth Circuit and define marrow extracted from the bloodstream as an organ. The purpose, says the rule, is to "ban the commodification" of bone marrow used in transplants, "encourage altruistic donations, and decrease the likelihood of disease transmission resulting from paid donations."
None of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. If banning donor compensation encouraged altruistic donations, it would already have done so. The ban has been in place for decades and the result is chronic bone-marrow shortages, which have disproportionately affected minorities who have a harder time finding a donor match.
Should paying for marrow transplants be allowed?
How about paying for organs?
The Scheme Behind Obamacare
Many of us figured this out -- that Obamacare is just the first step toward entirely socialized medicine in this country, but I liked this particular analysis.
Via Reason Foundation's Manny Klausner, Andrew C. McCarthy lays it out at NRO:
Fraud can be so brazen it takes people's breath away. But for a prosecutor tasked with proving a swindle -- or what federal law describes as a "scheme to defraud" -- the crucial thing is not so much the fraud. It is the scheme.To be sure, it is the fraud -- the individual false statements, sneaky omissions, and deceptive practices -- that grabs our attention. As I've recounted in this space, President Obama repeatedly and emphatically vowed, "If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan, period." The incontrovertible record -- disclosures by the Obama administration in the Federal Register, representations by the Obama Justice Department in federal court -- proves that Obama's promises were systematically deceitful.
...The point of showing that Obama is carrying out a massive scheme to defraud -- one that certainly would be prosecuted if committed in the private sector -- is not to agitate for a prosecution that is never going to happen. It is to demonstrate that there is logic to the lies. There is an objective that the fraud aims to achieve. The scheme is the framework within which the myriad deceptions are peddled. Once you understand the scheme, once you can put the lies in a rational context, you understand why fraud was the president's only option -- and why "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" barely scratches the surface of Obamacare's deceit.
In 2003, when he was an ambitious Illinois state senator from a hyper-statist district, Obama declared:
I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. . . . Everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.That is the Obamacare scheme.
It is a Fabian plan to move an unwilling nation, rooted in free enterprise, into Washington-controlled, fully socialized medicine. As its tentacles spread over time, the scheme (a) pushes all Americans into government markets (a metastasizing blend of Medicare, Medicaid, and "exchanges" run by state and federal agencies); (b) dictates the content of the "private" insurance product; (c) sets the price; (d) micromanages the patient access, business practices, and fees of doctors; and (e) rations medical care. Concurrently, the scheme purposely sows a financing crisis into the system, designed to explode after Leviathan has so enveloped health care, and so decimated the private medical sector, that a British- or Canadian-style "free" system -- formerly unthinkable for the United States -- becomes the inexorable solution.
He continues:
Obviously, it would be far less expensive for young people -- who are already disproportionately strained by Obama's no-growth, high-unemployment economy -- to opt for a penalty they are not actually required to pay than to purchase prohibitively costly coverage. After all, under Obamacare, they can wait until they are sick to buy "insurance." That is, Obamacare's architects consciously created the incentive to destroy the program's own insurance exchanges.By the time that problem erupts, private insurance will already be gutted. Coverage requirements will already be dictated by government, as will pricing, with a subsidy structure that builds in progressive wealth redistribution. And doctors will already be beholden to government for patient access, treatment options, record-keeping requirements, and payment. That is, much of the single-payer infrastructure will be in place.
The manufactured financial crisis will be portrayed as a demonstration that exchanges based on the assumption that individuals will take responsibility for their own "private" insurance arrangements do not work. It will be time to solve the crisis by a seamless transition -- there's that word again -- to a fully socialized health-care system, now overtly controlled by the government. "Free" health care for everyone -- with all the substandard treatment, absurd wait times, and rationing that entails -- will be supported by a few "tweaks" to our progressive tax system . . . no more unwieldy, unpredictable premium payments.
That's the scheme. Or maybe you still believe that if you like your private medical system, you can keep your private medical system, period.
Skanky
Linkie is in the gutter again.
Pre-Black Friday Deals Week
Up to 50 percent off select shoes and boots, slippers, handbags, and "men's holiday picks" at Amazon
(See the middle of the page for countdowns to special deals.)
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Edward L. Deci On How To Be Self-Motivated And Best Motivate Others
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Many people seem to think that the most effective motivation comes from outside of us, that motivating is something one person does to or for another. The studies done by my guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Edward L. Deci, find that self-motivation, not external motivation, is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change.
This is essential to understand whether we are trying to motivate ourselves or looking to encourage others to successfully motivate themselves.
On tonight's show, Dr. Deci will tell us what research shows about we go wrong in our thinking on motivation and how we can become more self-motivated -- and thus happier and more successful in every aspect of our lives.
Dr. Deci's book we'll be discussing tonight is Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/25/dr-edward-l-deci-on-how-to-be-self-motivated-and-best-motivate-others
Don't miss last week's show with Dr. Matthew Hertenstein on the behavioral "tells" that reveal who we are.
This show draws on scientific research to reveal some surprising ways we use tiny bits of behavior and mannerisms to correctly predict others' intentions and actions.
It also lays out areas that the research finds we are not so good in making predictions, like in discerning whether others are lying. You'll learn the few signs that actually do suggest that somebody is lying as well as finding out other ways we are prone to err in our assessments of others' skills and intentions.
My guest, psychologist Dr. Matthew Hertenstein has taken a research-driven look at all of this in "The Tell: The Little Clues That Reveal Big Truths About Who We Are."
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/18/dr-matthew-hertenstein-the-behavioral-tells-that-reveal-who-we-are
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Fighting Sexism With Cross-Stitched Man-Hating
Welcome to openly toxic feminism.
Hayley Krischer writes at Salon of "Stitch 'n Bitch" knitting groups:
The misandry message has evolved in the form of arts and crafts. Check Etsy for the word misandry and you'll find super-cute pom-pom knit hats with "misandry" emblazoned between rows of hearts. You'll also find lavender and white heart-shaped misandry hair barrettes, a plastic misandry necklace and a misandry-adorned heart-shaped felt brooch with beads.
Oh, but it's ironic, they protest. That is, except when it's not:
There are women who unapologetically hate men. Scrolling through Instagram the other day, I noticed an author whose work I admire wearing a misandry t-shirt. She suggested it should be a "staff uniform" for her magazine. When I asked her via email if the t-shirt was ironic, she wrote back saying, "To me, there's nothing ironic about misandry. I really do hate men. A lot."
Who hates an entire sex of people? Pretty sick. And typically, whether from a man or a woman, I find this sort of hatred a sign that somebody got together with the wrong person and then, rather than being accountable for choosing badly, decided to just deem the entire sex bad.
Back to the subject of the piece, women used to demand equality. Many who call themselves feminists have now become a toxic force in our society, quashing free speech, deeming rational thought a form of discrimination, and institutionalizing discrimination against men...all in the name of "equality."
Meanwhile, if men so much as tell a dirty joke while seated behind a woman who's offended, she runs off and tattles on them. One of them reportedly lost his job -- possibly over this.
What That Guy On Your Shirt Actually Stood For
Some quotes from the t-shirt icon of the dim and uninformed, Che Guevara:
1) "Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates. Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service."2) "Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!"
3) "The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!"
4) "We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press."
5) "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."
6) "Hatred is the central element of our struggle! Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus."
7) "The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portugese."
8) "The black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead."
9) "I fired a .32 caliber bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died."
10) "I'd like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."
via @instapundit
JP Morgan Invited Questions Via Twitter. Um, Bad Idea.
From HappyPlace, a few of the tweets:
@ExtraDividends
Trophy wives. Worth it or too big of a headache? #AskJPM@freakcorps
How much blood do your executives consume on a monthly basis? #AskJPM@ComparePMPrices
What illegal deals did Jamie Dimon and the other big banks make with Obama at the closed-door meeting on Oct 2, 2013? #AskJPM@AdamColeman4
Can I have my house back? #AskJPM
You Can Never Save Too Much On Shoes
Early Black Friday Sale: 25 percent off shoes, boots, slippers, and handbags at Amazon
Here's one -- a gorgeous ballet flat: Joe's Jeans Women's Jace Ballet Flat
To get the 25 percent off, enter the promo code BFSHOE25 at checkout for "eligible items sold and shipped by Amazon." (The stuff at the link.)
Thank you to all who buy through my Amazon links, which supports the work I do on this site.
In Islam, Criticism Equals Death
From ChersonAndMolsky.com, a piece by Rachel Molschky on how Islam calls for silencing its critics with violence and death. (For example, those who insult Mohammed or Allah -- death sentence. Same with those who commit blasphemy.) An excerpt:
Few dare to criticize the "religion of peace" for fear of a violent retaliation. Ironic? Not really, considering the fact that violence pervades the very essence of this "peaceful" religion....The Islamic response to criticism is death. When there is no self-defense, and armed with no logical explanation in order to combat the critics, the only way out is violence. That's why whenever there are "peaceful" protests, the placards Muslims proudly hold high call for our beheadings. If you've never witnessed this firsthand, there are countless photos to prove it. Men, women and children all parade around with signs calling for our savage murders. Why? Because we dared to criticize.
Yet criticism brings about change, which is how we progress as a society. Sometimes we progress a little too far and make excessive changes, but certainly some reform is a good thing.
Criticism and debate, as the post rightly notes, are how we bring about change.
The problem: The Quran is considered the immutable word of Allah. So, there's no reforming Islam. Those who would try to reform it will be slaughtered per Islam.
More from the piece:
Various denominations of Islam exist as well. However, rather than arguing over theology, it seems quicker just to kill each other to see who wins. You see, Muslims not only kill non-Muslim critics but also other Muslims of competing denominations, i.e. Sunni versus Shia...."Muhammad laid down severe restrictions on such free speech. He assassinated many who insulted him. In the Quran, he promises death and eternal damnation if anyone deviates in words and action from Allah and his messenger. In the hadith (Muhammad's words and deeds outside of the Quran), we read that he kills dissenters and insulters. Later legal rulings, rooted in the Quran and hadith, follow his lead and decree that hard-hitting speech must be stifled. Indeed, the dissenters must die, if they cross the line."
...The punishment for violent Muslim retaliation against criticism should be harsh enough to be a deterrant, and the over-the-top appeasement to the Muslim demands, which go against our society and our sense of right and wrong, must end.
Stinky
Some stench from around the web for the wench, please.
Hilarious: Trying To Turn Facebook Friends Into Real-Life Friends
Guy drops in on his Facebook "friends":
At one point, Gregg wanted to fly me to New Orleans to drop in on yet another one of the Sadly Loserish people (see chapter 9 of I See Rude People) whose identity I'd manage to unmask. I thought that would be hilarious but he was taking me to Paris and I thought it was too expensive on top of that. (I'm the fiscal conservative in our relationship!)
What I do like to do is take the cheaper, non-TSA-groped route to saying hello to, for example, jerks who make illegal political robocalls to me. (They're illegal under California law without a live person first asking you whether you want to hear the recorded message.) I found the home phone number of a woman who owns the company, and every time I got a call, I'd call her at home and chew her out. It was extremely satisfying. She should consider herself lucky I didn't decide to call her at 5 a.m. when I wake up for my deadline days.
Dallas Morning News: Made-Up Sex-Trafficking Statistics Are So Much More Dramatic!
Check out this obvious crap -- unbelievable to any thinking person -- in the November 22 Dallas Morning News.
The Texas Senator and Representative that the paper apparently very credulously and obediently took notes from contend that there are 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted every year -- "in Houston alone."
Here's the quote from the Dallas Morning News editorial:
Editorial: Cracking down on sex traffickersTwo Texas Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe of the Houston area, are co-sponsoring a bill that would impose stiff penalties on these adult victimizers of up to life in prison. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which has bipartisan support in both houses, would supplement an existing law that focuses primarily on punishing sex-trafficking organizations abroad.
Poe and Cornyn estimate that one-quarter of U.S. sex-trafficking victims have Texas roots. Poe says our state's proximity to Mexico and high immigrant population give the state a particularly high profile. In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year.
Do they work butt-drunk at this paper?
300,000? Do you realize how many people that is?
The NFL football stadium in Houston only seats 71,000 people. Look at the picture. That's a fuckload of people.
And beyond the supposed 300,000 sex trafficking cases that must be busting the walls right off the courts, jails, and paddy wagons, if you know anything about crime stats, this suggests that there are hundreds of thousands more perps -- surely in the Houston area! -- as of yet uncaught and unpunished.
Of course, Houston's population is only 2.161 million. So, throw in my fantasy guestimate of at least 200,000 uncaught and unpunished people guilty of sex trafficking on top of the 300,000 supposedly documented. This suggests that a vast segment of Houston's population -- at least 15 percent and maybe 25 percent -- is engaged in the business of sex trafficking.
Here's a Bureau of Justice Statistics report, by Duren Banks and Tracey Kyckelhahn, BJS Statisticians -- for the USA, not just Houston:
Federally funded human trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010Most suspected incidents of human trafficking were classified as sex trafficking (82%), including more than 1,200 incidents with allegations of adult sex trafficking and more than 1,000 incidents with allegations of prostitution or sexual exploitation of a child. Eleven percent of the suspected incidents opened for investigation were classified as labor trafficking, and 7% had an unknown trafficking type.
Here's Pete Kotz in the LA Weekly on what a crapload the Superbowl sex trafficking myth is. I posted this because that's likely where a number into the hundreds of thousands got its start -- my guess anyway.
And yes, in the absence of people working at papers with any sort of ability to do basic math and basic reasoning, we have elected representatives who are free to make laws based on vast distortions.
Hey, Dallas Morning News editorial page...should we send over a math teacher and the Jaws of Life to help pull your staffers' heads out of their asses?
UPDATE: Maggie McNeill traces the source of the 300,000 number -- a distortion of an absurd estimate from the Estes & Weiner study of 2001, which included in its estimates of children (up to age 21) "at risk of sexual exploitation" consensual homosexual relations, merely viewing porn, living in proximity to the Mexican border, and access to a car:
When interviewed by reporters in 2011, Estes himself estimated the number of legal minors actually abducted into "sex slavery" as "very small...We're talking about a few hundred people."
School, In A Nutshell...
Dr. Brooke Magnanti tweet (click on it to see the note).
Best part is the teacher's admission in the note, "Although he was correct, Alex's actions show a blatant disregard for authority, and a complete lack of respect for his school." (Go, Alex. The note is from 1994, but here's hoping he's continued.)
Incidentally, the teacher's note also shows a lack of regard for grammar (with the unnecessary comma after "authority").
Squirrels
They're storing away links for the long winter.
Where Were You When...?
Loved this tweet by Stephen Green:
@VodkaPundit
I'll never forget where I was when I heard President Kennedy had been shot. 1978, 4th grade social studies.
Congress Should Abolish TSA And TSA Activities That Have Not Shown Substantial Benefit
You know, like how groping and scanning of passengers by repurposed Cinnabon workers has not led to the catching of a single terrorist?
A Cato Institute report by Chris Edwards calls for privatizing security at airports and turning it over to airports and turning intelligence work over to actual intelligence agencies. You know, the kind with trained agents who operate -- supposedly, anyway -- based on probable cause: reasonable suspicion a person has committed or will commit a crime.
No, flying to see Granny does not suggest a person wants to blow stuff and people up.
Edwards' blog item on this is here, at Cato. An excerpt:
We would be better off without a monolithic federal agency that controls all major aspects of aviation security. Most airports in Europe and Canada use private companies for their passenger and baggage screening. That practice creates a more efficient and innovative security structure, and it allows governments to focus on gathering intelligence and conducting analysis rather than on trying to manage a large workforce.Congress should abolish TSA. The TSA activities that have not shown substantial benefits should be eliminated. Passenger and baggage screening--which represents about two-thirds of TSA's budget--should be moved to the control of airports and opened to competitive private bidding. And the remaining parts of TSA--including intelligence and analysis activities--should be moved to other federal agencies.
Edwards' full analysis is here, in a PDF that comes up as a link (no download). An excerpt of a part that especially concerns me -- about our civil liberties:
Airport Screening and Civil LibertiesAviation screening is an important element of aviation security, but that does not mean that all TSA actions are appropriate. Some TSA practices push the legal boundaries of permissible searches and seizures. Another issue is whether the TSA is using its screening activities to discover evidence of crimes that are beyond the scope of its proper role in aviation security.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bars unreasonable searches and seizures. With airport searches, individuals do have a reduced expectation of privacy, and federal courts have held that warrantless searches of all passengers prior to boarding are permissible. But some of TSA's current practices, such as full body pat-downs and the use of Advanced Imaging Technology machines, may be over the legal line.
...The intrusiveness of TSA pat-downs has also caused a lot of concern. Americans have been appalled at reported incidents of offensive pat-downs of young children, the disabled, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that require them to wear items such as insulin pumps, urine bags, and adult diapers. In one case, a woman dying of leukemia was taking a trip to Hawaii. She had called the TSA ahead of time to ask about her special needs. But in the airport security line, TSA agents lifted her bandages from recent surgeries, opened her saline bag and contaminated it, and lifted her shirt to examine the feeding tubes she needed to prevent organ failure--all in front of other passengers and after the TSA refused her request for a private screening. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and other policymakers have condemned the needless harassment that some passengers have received from the TSA.
Another civil-liberties concern is that the TSA sometimes acts as if it had broad police power outside of its transportation security role. For example, recent sweeps by teams of TSA agents at rail and transit stations have resulted in arrests for minor offenses such as drug possession, and this activity seems to simply duplicate local police functions.
When Americans travel by air, they do not surrender all their privacy, and case law bars TSA airport screeners from looking for evidence of crimes beyond plots against aviation security. Yet TSA seems to have developed mission creep at airport checkpoints.
In 2010, TSA screen- ers scrutinized Kathy Parker while she was departing from the Philadelphia airport.105 Parker was carrying an envelope with $8,000 worth of checks, about which Philadelphia police and TSA screeners interrogated her. They told her that they suspected her of embezzling the money and leaving town in a "divorce situation." Police tried to contact her husband by phone, but they were unsuccessful and eventually released Parker.
Aside from invasions of privacy, the frequent congestion at U.S. airports caused by security procedures has a large cost in terms of wasted time. There are about 740 million passenger flights a year in the United States.107 For example, if a new security procedure adds 10 minutes to each flight, travelers would consume another 123 million hours per year. That is a lot of time that people could have used earning money or en- joying life with their families. Policymakers need to remember that citizens value their time and that unneeded bureaucratic procedures destroy that precious resource.
Miami Cops Arrest Man Numerous Times For Loitering AKA Showing Up At His Job
Some really awful abuse of citizens by police in Miami in the wake of a store owner, Alex Saleh, mistakenly agreeing to sign up for what police called a "zero tolerance" program to reduce crime. What was launched was a program of abuse. Julie K. Brown writes in the Miami Herald:
Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years.He's been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.
Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.
Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.
Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.
But Sampson isn't loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.
So how can he be trespassing when he works there?
It's a question the store's owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.
And, like Sampson, many of them have been cited for minor infractions, sometimes as often as three times in the same day.
Saleh was so troubled by what he saw that he decided to install video cameras in his store. Not to protect himself from criminals, because he says he has never been robbed. He installed the cameras -- 15 of them -- he said, to protect him and his customers from police.
Since he installed the cameras in June 2012 he has collected more than two dozen videos, some of which have been obtained by the Miami Herald. Those tapes, and Sampson's 38-page criminal history -- including charges never even pursued by prosecutors -- raise some troubling questions about the conduct of the city's police officers.
The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh's business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.
One of the times Sampson was arrested, he was in the store, stocking shelves.
In another example:
In December, Saleh was followed out of his parking lot by a Miami Gardens police officer, who stopped him after a few blocks. The officer, Carlos Velez, said he stopped Saleh because his tag light was out.Two other squad cars arrived at the scene, bringing the total number of officers on the scene to six. A police dashboard camera captured it all.
"I thought, you know, there is a lot of serious crime in Miami Gardens,'' Saleh said. "Why do they need six police officers on a car stop with a burned-out tag light?''
Another officer, Eddo Trimino, approached Saleh's passenger side, opened the door and removed a gun that was in a bag containing the store's money, Saleh said. They ran a check on the gun, which Saleh was licensed to carry.
They cited him for having a bad tag light, tinted windows and bald tires.
Before leaving, the unit's then-sergeant, Martin Santiago, allegedly told Saleh:
"I'm going to get you mother-f-----,''
The next day, Saleh viewed video of his truck as it pulled out of the parking lot the night before.
His tag light was working.
Simon called Miami Gardens' approach of "selective enforcement'' a clear violation of civil rights.
Great long read story -- the whole thing is worth reading.
And here's to Saleh who is going to sue the city. Since he has, Sampson hasn't been arrested and the police are not as active in the store's parking lot, Brown reports.
It is so important to stand up against rights violations. Not doing it just allows them to continue -- and grow.
via @ATabarrok
Jerry Coyne Uses Deepak Chopra As A Floor-Cleaning Rag
This is my -- heh -- cute way to say that University of Chicago prof Coyne wipes the floor with Chopra in The New Republic.
The backstory:
Earlier this month, The New Republic republished a highly critical blogpost about author Rupert Sheldrake. Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago professor and the author of Why Evolution is True referred to Sheldrake as a "pseudoscientist" and lampooned the allegation that Sheldrake was being persecuted by "militant skeptics." Coyne's piece also derided Deepak Chopra, the physician and alternative medicine figure who has been one of Sheldrake's defenders. Chopra responded with this letter to the editor--and Coyne, in turn responds to the letter below...
Chopra basically lists and lists and lists his credentials. And lists his credentials. And then, waaaah!...intimates that debate of his pseudoscientific quackery is "bullying":
I have a suspicion that readers of The New Republic aren't aware that skepticism has become a bullying, strident movement redolent of the worst aspects of the Internet. Jerry Coyne tosses around the term "pseudoscientist" as if it were a given when applied to Rupert Sheldrake and by implication to me.
All you have to do is read a little Chopra to see that it applies -- and then some. Coyne posts some Chopra in his response. See Chopra's words just below:
Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.You know, the idea here is that if we quieten the turbulence in our collective mind and heal the rift in our collective soul, could that have an effect on nature's mind, if nature has a mind? The gaia hypothesis says nature does have a mind, that the globe is conscious. So a critical mass of people praying or a critical mass of people collectively engaging in meditation could conceivably, even from modern physics point of view, through non-local interactions, actually simmer down the turbulence in nature.
The moon exists in consciousness--no consciousness, no moon--just a sluggishly expanding wave function in a superposition of possibilities. All happens within consciousness and nowhere else.
Intelligence doesn't "appear" at a late stage of evolution. It seems to be inherent in nature.
Consciousness is the driver of evolution. Every time you eat a chicken or a banana it transforms into a human.
I mean, really? I get more rational reality out of my 8-year-old neighbor when she tells me a story.
Coyne cleans up with the following bit:
This is pseudoscience, pure and simple, and no set of credentials, however impressive, can launder it into real science. Photons do not have consciousness, nature does not have a mind, the moon is there whether humans see it or not, and intelligence is not inherent in nature, but a product of naturalistic evolution. As for chickens, bananas, and consciousness as a driver of evolution, I have no idea what Chopra is trying to say--and I'm an evolutionary biologist.Sadly, this kind of obscurantism sells, and has made Chopra a rich man. But no amount of money can buy him respectability in the scientific community. He knows this, and so rails constantly against "bullying strident skepticism." That, more than anything, shows his aversion to true science, for all scientific progress requires a climate of strong skepticism.
-Jerry Coyne
Stanky
Linky with stank.
Pre-Black Friday Deals Week
At Amazon
And don't forget a great and inexpensive gift you can give -- my book I See Rude People. If you buy a new paperback copy or a Kindle copy it goes against my advance and helps me!
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Superwoman, Sit Down, Take A Load Off
Men aren't all that complicated. They want to be needed. And then after they come through for you, they want to be appreciated.
A lot of women don't seem to understand that.
The fact that you're a strong woman isn't reason to do everything.
And whatever you do, if a man does help you, don't criticize him afterward for how "wrong" he's done it.
Oregon Healthcare Website Has Never Worked And Has Zero Subscribers
Other than that, it's really fantastic!
Jonathan Kaminsky writes at Reuters:
(Reuters) - Oregon, a state that fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, is enduring one of the rockiest rollouts of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, with an inoperative online exchange that has yet to enroll a single subscriber, requiring thousands to apply on paper instead.Unlike most other states, Oregon set an ambitious course to make its insurance exchange, dubbed Cover Oregon, an "all-in-one" website for every individual seeking health coverage, including those who are eligible for Medicaid.
But instead of serving as a national model, Oregon's experience has emerged as a cautionary tale, inviting comparisons to technical glitches that have plagued other state-run portals and the federal government's website for those states lacking exchanges of their own.
Oregon's online exchange has remained inaccessible to the public, requiring the state to sign up applicants the old-fashioned way, using paper forms. This has made comparison shopping more difficult for consumers and severely slowed the enrollment process.
Personally, I'd be terrified to put my information into a government website. It's either been hacked or will be soon, says an info security expert.
Government "Survey": Cops Pull Drivers Over In Texas And Ask For Breathalizer, Blood, Saliva Tests
Obedience training for the American public continues -- training to be compliant as our rights are yanked from us.
Scott Gordon writes at NBCDFW (NOTE: there's an auto-play video at the site):
Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at a police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood.It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers.
"It just doesn't seem right that you can be forced off the road when you're not doing anything wrong," said Kim Cope, who said she was on her lunch break when she was forced to pull over at the roadblock on Beach Street in North Fort Worth.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is spending $7.9 million on the survey over three years, said participation was "100 percent voluntary" and anonymous.
But Cope said it didn't feel voluntary to her -- despite signs saying it was.
"I gestured to the guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn't let me and forced me into a parking spot," she said.
Once parked, she couldn't believe what she was asked next.
"They were asking for cheek swabs," she said. "They would give $10 for that. Also, if you let them take your blood, they would pay you $50 for that."
At the very least, she said, they wanted to test her breath for alcohol.
She said she felt trapped.
"I finally did the Breathalyzer test just because I thought that would be the easiest way to leave," she said, adding she received no money.
It's not "voluntary" if you're pulled over without any reason -- without any suspicion you've committed a crime or are guilty of a traffic violation.
How utterly disgusting that the police and the government divert you from your travel without probable cause.
And most egregiously, they gave people "passive" alcohol tests with some device when they rolled down their windows -- before they (stupidly) consented.
Every time you make it easy for government to violate your body, your privacy, your rights, you make it easier for it to happen to yourself and the rest of us the next time.
via Jay J. Hector
In-Country Immigration Checkpoints: You Don't Protect Our Country By Violating Citizens' Civil Liberties At Will
University of Arizona's Terry Bressi talks to ReasonTV about the 300 to 350 times since January 2008 that he's been stopped and the video he's shot of them:
He says the Border Patrol union has attempted to get him fired from the University (by writing letters to the university president) and have written to the legislature and others.
The Reason writeup at YouTube quotes him:
"This is not increasing our security, in fact, it's making us less secure. It's just feeding an empire building, it's feeding agency budgets, and job security for various law enforcement agencies," says the University of Arizona's Terry Bressi of in-country immigration checkpoints....After his first encounter, he started carrying cameras and audio recording equipment, and has since been videotaping his checkpoint interactions. He says this holds officers accountable for their actions, and he hopes that by posting these videos online, citizens will become more aware of their rights.
"A federal agent who is standing in the middle of a public highway, wearing a public uniform, collecting a public paycheck while seizing the public absent reasonable suspicion has no expectation of privacy," says Bressi in regards to filming border patrol agents. "This is something that I like to remind folks of, that the government thinks that we don't have any right to privacy whatsoever, but that's a double-edged sword."
The government should not randomly be stopping us and interrogating us and -- as he puts us -- being forced to prove our innocence on demand.
Slinky
Happy birthday, Mr. President...
The PBS Bobblehead Controversy: Victim-Feminist Science Ladies And The Men They've Co-opted Have Their Panties In A Wad Again
I saw the back end of some Twitter conversations and went to investigate. (I missed this because I was too busy actually writing science -- working on explaining costly signaling so it could be easily understood by ordinary people vis a vis answering a question for my science-based syndicated column.)
The problem is this bobblehead Thanksgiving video -- "It's Okay To Be Smart" -- from PBS Digital and Joe Hanson. (Details on the furor over it below.)
Here's the controversy from Andrew Lapin on Current.org:
A PBS Digital Studios program is dealing with blowback from online viewers and the PBS ombudsman for using bobblehead dolls to caricature sexual harassment of scientist Marie Curie.In the Nov. 11 episode of the irreverent science program "It's Okay To Be Smart," host and creator Joe Hanson welcomes bobblehead figures of famous scientists to Thanksgiving dinner and begins discussing how their scientific achievements reverberate in modern society.
In a running gag that escalates throughout the video, an Albert Einstein doll behaves inappropriately toward a Marie Curie doll. The Einstein doll begins by standing so close to Madame Curie that she complains of him breathing on her. By the end of the episode, Einstein has striped naked, knocked Curie over and assaulted her.
Neither the host nor any of other male characters depicted by bobbleheads, including Charles Darwin, Issac Newton and Nikola Tesla, comment on Einstein's behavior, and Curie is portrayed as helpless.
The video, which has been viewed more than 57,000 times since its posting, drew swift criticism, as online commentators accused Hanson of making light of sexual assault and perpetuating negative depictions of women scientists. Hanson responded in an apologetic Nov. 17 blog post, saying he had intended the Einstein doll "to call attention to the sexual harassment that many women still today experience, often from wannabe Einsteins."
The comment I left on YouTube:
This was humor through scientists being humanized and behaving badly -- as people do. Tesla makes outrageous boasts, for example. One way people behave badly is by hitting on other people who aren't interested. Men do it to women and women do it to men. This video is funny. I deplore those who try to squash any bit of speech that isn't politically correct. The answer to speech you do not like is more speech, not trying to shut down the career of the person who makes speech you have a problem with.
Related -- my response to the Bora Zivkovic witch hunt: "About The Bora Controversy: If There's Anything That Makes Women Unequal To Men, It's The Need To Be Treated Like Fragile Pieces Of China"
The upshot, as I see it: If you feel diminished as a woman and as a scientist because of a video like this, well, I don't think you're much of a person or a scientist.
Men hit on women. Sometimes they do it in a way that is oafish.
Why do men hit on women and not so much the other way around? See basic evolutionary biology. Women are the ones who have babies that need to grow up and be fed and cared for. They are the choosier sex because of it and generally are the pursued rather than the pursuers.
The video is reflecting life. Deal with it ladies -- and all you silly men who feel guilty for being born with a penis and are now compelled to do penance by falling in with the victim-feminists and calling for women to be treated specially instead of equally.
UPDATE: All that's left of the video -- now-censored into "private" status on YouTube:
Why I'm Going To Stick With My Now Unaffordable Health Care For A While
I tweeted to Mickey Kaus, a friend and pundit, about his thoughts on the issue in this blog post, which are pretty much stated in the title: "What Happens If I Change My Health Insurance Plan And Obamacare Gets Changed Or Repealed?"
Mickey posted his reply there, which is advice I think I'll take, though my health care has gone up untenably under the supposedly affordable Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare:
Megan McArdle has a very good post on how the indicia of doom emanating from Obamacare make it more likely to actually be doomed because everyone is scared to sign up.My plan was grandfathered and I see no reason not to renew it (even if it costs more) until it's certain that the Obamacare policies work, including that they pay off. I think that means I'm unlikely to make the March 31st deadline! But I think I will have lots of company.
Randazza: "Sometimes 'Civil Rights' Comes Into Conflict With 'Civil Liberties'"
Marc J. Randazza is the wonderful First Amendment attorney who defended me against the TSA's Thedala Magee, when she tried to suck $500K out of me.
He posted a link to this New York Times piece about a photographer's refusal to shoot a lesbian couple's wedding ceremony:
"But the equal treatment of gay couples is more important than the free speech rights of commercial photographers, she said, explaining why the A.C.L.U. filed a brief in the New Mexico Supreme Court supporting the couple."
And about it, he wrote:
Which is why I no longer support the ACLU. I think the photographer is an idiot. I think her religion is stupid. I think that she should be the subject of a boycott by all people of any conscience. But, the right to be treated nicely is not anywhere near as important as our right to maintain our own conscience. This is bullshit, and shows that the ACLU is not what it claims to be.If they want to be the American Civil Rights Association, then fine. But, sometimes "civil rights" comes into conflict with "civil liberties." In those cases, I say side with civil liberties, and let social pressure take care of the rest. I don't agree that preventing discrimination is the most important value -- there will always be a photographer (and probably a better one) that will photograph a gay wedding. If these dipshits who believe in the magic space zombie want to ignore that market because of something their imaginary friend allegedly told them, then let them take photos of nazi weddings and eat shit and die.
How The GOP Should Fix Obamacare
Holman Jenkins writes in the WSJ:
Americans are beginning to understand that the essence of the Affordable Care Act is that millions of people are being conscripted to buy overpriced insurance they would never choose for themselves in order to afford Mr. Obama monies to spend on the poor and those who are medically uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. Both Mr. Obama and Republicans are blowing smoke in claiming that the damage done to the individual market by the forced cancellation of "substandard" plans (i.e., those that don't meet the purposes of ObamaCare) can somehow be reversed at this point. It can't be.What can be done is Congress creating a new option in the form of a national health insurance charter under which insurers could design new low-cost policies free of mandated benefits imposed by ObamaCare and the 50 states that many of those losing their individual policies today surely would find attractive.
What's the first thing the new nationally chartered insurers would do? Rush out cheap, high-deductible policies, allaying some of the resentment that the ObamaCare mandate provokes among the young, healthy and footloose affluent.
These folks could buy the minimalist coverage that (for various reasons) makes sense for them. They wouldn't be forced to buy excessive coverage they don't need to subsidize the old and sick.
If this idea sounds familiar, it was proposed right here three years ago, after the 2010 elections in which Democrats lost the House due to public disquiet over ObamaCare.
Because such a move could be sold as expanding the options under ObamaCare and lessening the burden of an unpopular mandate, it always had potential to draw Democratic support. That's doubly true now that Democrats are saddled with President Obama's promise that anybody who liked their existing insurance can keep it. Mr. Obama's promise is not literally keepable but the national charter would be the next best thing, letting millions find policies that are a good deal for them in their particular circumstances.
And, yes, this would also blow up the disingenuous financial engine of ObamaCare. This is a feature not a bug.
The ObamaCare exchanges would devolve into refuges for those who are medically uninsurable. But this seems increasingly likely to happen anyway. Having assumed the job of subsidizing the people, the federal government should do so honestly and openly and efficiently.
via @JohnTierneyNYC
Lunkie
Linkie with a dunce cap.
"Obamacare's Disproportionate Impact On Successful Freelancers"
From a tweet:
@DouthatNYT
Obamacare's disproportionate impact on successful freelancers is a small but notable factor in the WH's PR mess: http://bit.ly/1daehUh
Here's the piece in the New York Observer by Bruce Barcott. The headline:
My Obamacare Cancellation: "Seething at a President I helped elect."
Barcott writes:
We received the letter in the mail a couple months ago. The good people at Regence Bluecross Blueshield were pleased to inform us that due to Obamacare our current low-monthly premium, comically-high deductible medical policy would no longer exist come January 1, 2014. Pleased, because a new and better plan would be offered in its place. Old monthly premium: $578 for a family of four (non-smoking, helmet-wearing, and paternally snipped). New premium: $1,123. A 94% increase.Once the sound of boiling blood dissipated, in my head I heard my Republican friends chuckling at the sight of a liberal Democrat hoisted ten stories high on his own petard. How's the view up there, Obamacare Ollie?
For the past 15 years my wife and I have made our living as freelance writers. (To young readers, I say: Do not do this. Your bliss is marvelous, but its following will need to be supported by a banker, plumber, union machinist or tenured faculty member.) As such, our health insurance is our own concern. Over the years we've held on to our coverage by letting our co-pay and deductible rise and our covered procedures fall. You may be aware that the three-tiered state exchange policies are labeled Gold, Silver, and Bronze, reflecting their price and level of coverage. If our policy still existed it would fall into the column of Wood.
But Wood we had--and Wood we liked.
No more. O.K., into the state exchange we go. I voted for it. Fair enough.
It is our good fortune to live in Washington State, where our Democratic governor embraced the Affordable Care Act and set up a state exchange that is, according to those who've studied such things, the best in the nation. The website allowed me to find a plan that looked reasonable. Premera Blue Cross had a Preferred Bronze 5500 for $889 a month. Okay. Not so bad. Downside: $3,600 more in annual premiums. Upside: Free eyeglasses for the boy!
He sneers at the obvious wild BS that the policy change Obama announced -- that insurers will be allowed to keep offering the plans they cancelled will result in any insurance company offering those policies again.
Two perceptive comments on the site:
Bonnie Droege Ramthun, Erie, Colorado
If our health care system was designed by capitalists, it would be cheap, competitive, easy to use and as full of features as our smart phones. If our smart phones were designed by socialists...
LeRoy Moore Jr., Super expert at High Tech Stuff
If our smart phones were designed by socialists they would be called C.B. radios. Good comment.
It's The Bitches Not The Bitches In The Media
In The New York Times, John Tierney writes of research that suggests that nasty female competition -- not the media -- drives women's dissatisfaction with their bodies:
To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers.This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she "embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective," meaning a "low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts." Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt.
In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility.
They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, "What the [expletive] is that?"
Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her breasts "were about to pop out."
The results of the experiment jibe with evidence that this "mean girl" form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.
"Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals," said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. "The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men."
Stigmatizing female promiscuity -- a.k.a. slut-shaming -- has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.
And about those cries of blame the media!?
"To a large degree the media reflects trends that are going on in society, not creates them," said Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University. He found that women's dissatisfaction with their bodies did not correlate with what they watched on television at home. Nor were they influenced by TV programs shown in laboratory experiments: Watching the svelte actresses on "Scrubs" induced no more feelings of inferiority than watching the not-so-svelte star of "Roseanne."But he found that women were more likely to feel worse when they compared themselves with peers in their own social circles, or even if they were in a room with a thin stranger.
Economist Tyler Cowen On Why Too Much Regulation Is A Problem -- And Should Be For People Right And Left
George Mason econ prof Cowen writes in The New York Times:
Conservatives typically complain about too much regulation, but liberals should be concerned, too, because pruning away rules we don't need should help usher in an economy with more job creation and stronger economic growth.The total number of federal regulatory restrictions is now more than one million. And they're not all necessarily good ideas. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration has banned some useful asthma treatments because they have a slight negative impact on the ozone layer. The nation has medical-device regulations that take longer to satisfy than those of the European Union.
Many regulations, when initially presented, can sound desirable. The problem is that, taken in their entirety, excess rules divert attention from pressing issues like the need for innovation and new jobs.
Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, compares many regulations to "pebbles in a stream." Individually, they may not have a big impact. But if there are too many pebbles, a river's flow can be thwarted. Similarly, too many regulations can limit business activity. When the number of rules mounts, it can become hard for a business to know whether it is operating within the law's confines. The issue is all the more problematic when federal, state and local constraints all apply.
...We don't really know the total regulatory burden in our economy today, in part because there are too many rules and side effects to add up all the costs. Nonetheless, we are continually increasing the obstacles to doing business. America has lost the robust productivity growth of much of the postwar era, and the share of start-ups in the economy has been falling each decade since the 1980s. Although overregulation is hardly the only culprit, it is very likely contributing to the problem.
The point isn't that we should eliminate all regulation or give up on clean air and water. In fact, we may need tougher guidelines -- albeit simpler ones -- to govern what is permissible for activities like financial risk-taking or burning coal. Still, a paring back of regulation in many areas, based on clearer priorities, seems in order.
Republicans Are The Party Of Pretend Small Government
They are hot to keep shelling out our tax dollars in subsidies to farmers writes Joseph E. Stiglitz in The New York Times:
House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace. Republican proposals would shift government assistance from direct payments -- paid at a set rate to farmers every year to encourage them to keep growing particular crops, regardless of market fluctuations -- to crop insurance premium subsidies. But this is unlikely to be any cheaper. Worse, unlike direct payments, the insurance premium subsidies carry no income limit for the farmers who would receive this form of largess.The proposal is a perfect example of how growing inequality has been fed by what economists call rent-seeking. As small numbers of Americans have grown extremely wealthy, their political power has also ballooned to a disproportionate size. Small, powerful interests -- in this case, wealthy commercial farmers -- help create market-skewing public policies that benefit only themselves, appropriating a larger slice of the nation's economic pie.
Yknil
.yad sdrawkcab s'tI
The "I Don't Get It" Files
Can anybody please explain why anybody outside of Toronto has the slightest interest in their substance-abusing train wreck of a mayor?
When "Policing" Is Really About A Desire To Win At All Cost (Even If A Kid Or Two Dies)
Cops use baton to break windows at minivan full of kids; one shoots at it:
Jonathan Turley writes about the story of the New Mexico traffic stop of Oriana Ferrell, who (idiotically) drove away when she was pulled over on a routine traffic violation:
First and foremost, it should be noted that Ferrell had violated a host of laws. She fled the scene, engaged in a high-speed chase, resisted arrest, and police say that they found two marijuana pipes in the car. However, it is the discharge of the weapon that shocked many of us.Ferrell was originally pulled over for going 71 miles per hour in a 55 miles per hour zone. She argues with the officer who goes back to his car only to see Ferrell drive away. At this point, he is aware that there are five children in the car aged 6 to 18.
He then pulls her over again and yells at her to get out of the van. When she refuses, he tries to force her out. When her teenage son gets out to confront him, the officer pulls his taser and the teen goes back into the car.
He tells her that she will be charged and to get out as she argues with him. She inexplicably insists that she did nothing wrong and "didn't run away." She gets out of the car and the officer tells her to face the van to be cuffed. After she locks herself back into the van, the officer takes his baton and starts to break windows even though he knows that children are seated inside. The flying glass constitutes an obvious threat to the children and this is the first serious breach that I can see. I do not understand why they do not immobilize the van or why he decides to break the window next to the children rather than the driver.
As he is smashing the windows, she drives away. That is when another officer fires three shots directly into a van filled with children. It is a shocking use of force with no concern for the children inside the van. At this point, Ferrell is only accused of a minor traffic stop, leaving the scene, and resisting arrest. There has been no weapon or attack on the officer. Yet, this officer put three slugs through the back of a van filled with children.
Ferrell then leads the police on a 10-minute chase before turning herself in. The New Mexico State Police have not removed any of the officers from active duty.
Disgusting. What does it take, the dead body of a child?
As Turley notes about the disturbing excessive force used by police, "The police had multiple cars and could easily stop a minivan without resulting to the use of potentially lethal force."
And that's why I contend that this stop -- and many other police actions where there's similar unreasonableness (which is sometimes fatal) -- is really about cops' desire to "win" fueled by indignation and rage that a person would dare challenge a cop's authority.
I'm A Lightbulb Hoarder
An NBC/KSHB.com story. The headline:
"The era of the incandescent light bulb ends in January, consumers can choose from many new options"
I ordered 120 incandescents (for $34, total) a few years ago so I could continue having nice attractive light in my house.
I live in a tiny house about a mile from the ocean, need no air conditioning, use little power, and drive a car that basically runs on granola bars (a 2004 Honda Insight). I spent $93 on gas last year. All last year.
And the government is going to tell me what kind of lightbulbs I can use in my house? Nuh-uh.
via @instapundit
America: How They See Us Once They Move Here
Fascinating piece from ThoughtCatalog.com about how émigrés see America. Here's a Russian woman, Natalia Rekhter, who writes, "I'm from Russia. Below are a few things I almost always have to explain or discuss with visitors from Russia":
•Why individual houses are so large? We always get into discussion that house is not just a shelter, but also a manifestation of one's financial achievements.
•Philanthropy. There is no culture of philanthropy in Russia and many view American philanthropy either as a waste of money or as some intricate plot to get some additional benefits.
•People don't walk places. They go everywhere by a car.
•There is almost no public transportation except in a few large cities. People actually have to have cars to get places. Cars are necessity, not luxury.
•Majority of high and middle schools have sport facilities of very high, almost professional quality.
•Many schools have orchestras, bands, theaters of a very high, almost professional quality. Free.
•Every state has a lot of autonomy.
•President's salary is comparable with the one of a plastic surgeon.
•President doesn't automatically become the richest person in the country.
•Majority of things in the US aren't controlled or regulated by the government.
•Children are expected to leave home when they are 18.
•Students prefer and are expected to live in a dorm and not with parents.
•When relatives visit they often stay in the hotel.
•Many children, even in well to do families, work in fast food, car washes and do a lot of other things to get money and it is not an embarrassment.
•Parents have their babies sleeping in separate rooms almost from the day of their birth. (Russians find #11-15 are particularly absurd, offensive, and egotistical.)
•Many Russians believe that American system of primary and secondary education is very inefficient. As a mother, I have to explain that it is very diverse and essentially even in the poorest districts there are tons of resources available for children who are willing to use them. There are also an opportunity for kids to take advanced and extra advanced classes providing they are willing and able to do the work. And this differentiation is available as early as elementary school.
•How well elderly live, even those on SSI and Medicaid. How many services are available to them.
•How open Americans are about their shortcomings and always ready for self-criticism.
•Millions of people don't have medical insurance.
•Some hospitals look like five-star hotels.
•Budgets of some hospitals are equal to h/c budgets of small countries.
•Doctors tell their patients everything.
•Return policies and free refill.
•Idea of a liberal art education. In Russia, after high school graduation, a student should decide on vocation: engineer, doctor, teacher, lawyer, accountant, etc. It seems inconceivable to attend a university and then to graduate without a solid specialty. I often have to explain that not knowing what one wants to do after high school is an acceptable norm in US. A student can still acquire marketable skills, expand his or horizons, get a job after graduation, and, what is even more surprising, obtain an advance degree in a totally different field later. Yes, accountant can attend a med school and become a doctor and musician can go for a master degree in computer science.
It's my experience that people from Russia and Cuba appreciate our freedoms far more than we do.
via @instapundit
Slinky
Fall down my stairs -- or my stares.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Matthew Hertenstein: The Behavioral "Tells" That Reveal Who We Are
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Tonight's show draws on scientific research to reveal some surprising ways we use tiny bits of behavior and mannerisms to correctly predict others' intentions and actions.
It will also lay out areas that the research finds we are not so good in making predictions, like in discerning whether others are lying. You'll learn the few signs that actually do suggest that somebody is lying as well as finding out other ways we are prone to err in our assessments of others' skills and intentions.
My guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Matthew Hertenstein has taken a research-driven look at all of this in "The Tell: The Little Clues That Reveal Big Truths About Who We Are."
Join us to become a more sophisticated reader of others' nonverbal skills -- and maybe even learn how to rejigger your own to send a more desirable message the next time you have a date or a job interview.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/18/dr-matthew-hertenstein-the-behavioral-tells-that-reveal-who-we-are
Don't miss last week's "Best Of" replay. It's one of my favorite recent shows, filled with science news everyone can use -- the science of how to spend our way to happiness.
My guest was 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."
On this show, 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/2013/11/11/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, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Renault Could Electronically Repossess Their Cars
There's a post on Gas2.org by Christopher DeMorro about how French automaker Renault can cut off your car battery if you don't make payments on time:
It's another form of DRM, or Digital Rights Management, that video game and movie companies use to try (and fail) to prevent piracy. Renault, which leases the batteries in vehicle like its Zoe Z.E. electric car in a bid to keep prices down (and probably make a few extra bucks in the long game), also draws a huge amount of information from the battery data.This includes keeping tabs on non-paying customers, and Renault worked a nifty feature into their rented batteries that they didn't exactly brag about in the press releases. In the service contract, however, in the fine print, it is revealed that Renault has the right to prevent charging of the Zoe Z.E. at the end of the battery rental contract. It was also revealed that Renault can do this in the case of non-payment on the car or battery as well, effectively making "your" vehicle worthless.
In theory this is a huge advancement for car dealers, financial companies, and local police departments. The fear I have is when Renault inevitably screws up processing someone's payment, bricking a paying customer's car and essentially preventing them from getting to work, starting a vicious cycle that could really screw somebody over.
via Jay J. Hector
Addictive: The Cinema Of The Vagina
I'll start: How Green Was My Vagina?
The Weird Fetishization Of Virginity, Probably Plus A Slew Of Psychological Problems
Weird, creepy New York Times piece by a 35-year-old woman named Amanda McCracken who has never had sex and has turned that into sort of a thing (probably, I would guess, to cover her unresolved emotional problems that bob toward the surface throughout the piece):
Friends who happily have sex with men they don't love are adamant that I hold out for "the one." Being a virgin has become such a part of my identity, that I find myself living up to friends' expectations on top of my own.I'm not a prude. In fact, I might be a candidate for a Guinness World Record: virgin who has come close to having sex the most times.
I like being naked with boyfriends. I've happily taken on a dominatrix role and men have enjoyed it. I once answered a booty call from an Ironman world champion at his hotel room (purposefully leaving the door cracked in case I needed to yell for help). When the champion informed me that I had not "finished the job," I told him that, considering his world title, he could finish the job himself. I left feeling empowered.
I'm left feeling there's something very wrong with this woman.
And frankly, unless you tell guys about a weirdness like this, it's manipulative and jerky to let them know while you're fooling around that there will be no entry to Vaginaland.
She continues about her virginity hobby -- and related hobbies:
I have always been a saver. When I was a child, I saved my Halloween and Easter candy for over a year. By the time I finally took a bite, the candy was hard and stale. I still have gift cards that are over eight years old. By the time I get around to using them, I realize they've already expired. My fridge is full of exotic jams, untouched and unsavored but certainly spoiled. Full bottles of French perfume decorate my dresser, their fragrance fading every year.Is the same thing going to happen to me? What is the shelf life of virginity?
Um, it really isn't such a big deal. I fooled around lots as a teenager but had sex for the first time when I was maybe 22 (or 23, can't recall) with a boyfriend I met as a teen at camp. (He later turned out to be gay.) We were at his parents' cabin in Morristown, New Jersey. It was funny and fun and not all that sexy, probably because he wasn't straight. We laughed a lot. It no big deal. Just two people being naked together and seeing how the parts worked.
At 35, I still want to save sex for someone who is mutually in love with me and who accepts my virginity as a gift.
Really? Really? The fact that you've probably blown 20 guys but have never had a penis crawl up your vagina is pretty fucking meaningless.
"At Least They Didn't Eat The Dude"
That's what one of my friends said about the Syrian jihadists who beheaded the wrong guy.
From the NY Post, Natalie O'Neill writes:
A group of Al Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels beheaded a fighter then triumphantly waved his head in the air as a trophy -- only to discover the poor guy was actually one of their own, London's The Telegraph reports.Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham are shown in a graphic video clutching the head of a bearded victim while claiming he was a hated member of an Iraqi Shia group fighting for President Bashar al-Assad, the paper reports.
But the killers soon learned that the victim, Mohammed Fares, was actually an allied fighter for Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group that fights alongside their own group of Al Qaeda-linked thugs.
Thugs in the Youtube video are shown in the city of Aleppo holding the decapitated head in front of a crowd of people, some of whom are taking photos and video.
The rebel group apologized for the gruesome case of mistaken identity on Thursday , asking for "understanding and forgiveness."
We understand and we thank you -- for diminishing your ranks by one, barbarian losers.
Le Link
Like Le Car but more mechanically sound.
Slutty Puppy
I think my dog just tried to have sex with my arm! She was just spayed, too. (I'm most worried that my arm seems like an appropriate sex partner to her.)
Teen Gets No Trial, Spends Three Years In Jail For A Crime He Didn't Commit
Jonathan Vankin writes at Opposing Views:
New York's WABC TV broke the mind-bogglng story of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager who was let out of Rikers Island where he served three years -- without ever being convicted of anything.The Kafkaesque nightmare started in May of 2010, according to WABC, Browder (pictured) was walking home from a party, along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.
He was 16 years old, in the 10th grade.
"This guy comes out of nowhere and says I robbed him," the now-20-year-old Browder told the TV station. "And the next thing I know they are putting cuffs on me. I don't know this dude. And I do over three years for something I didn't do."
Bail was set for $10,000. His family couldn't afford to pay. He was given a legal aid attorney who did nothing to help.
There was no evidence against Browder, says his new lawyer, Paul Prestia, who represents the young man in a civil suit he's filed. Beyond the one witness who accused Browder, a stranger whom Browder had never met, there was no physical evidence, no supposedly stolen property or money recovered, no other witnesses -- nothing.
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees people accused of a crime the right to a speedy trial. But Bronx County prosecutors seemed to let that little provision slip their minds.
...At one point, after sitting in jail for 33 months, he went before a judge and was told that he should accept a plea deal and he would be given credit for time served. Browder refused to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, even though he was warned that he was facing a 15-year sentence.
So they sent him back to Rikers.
Then, in June of this year, the case was dismissed and all charges dropped. Browder was free, but not happy.
"I didn't get to go to prom or graduation," he said. "Nothing. Those are the main years. They are the main years. And I am never going to get those years back. Never. Never."
via @Instapundit
Linkin Park
A suburb with suicide doors...
Rare Show Of Standards: Mom Complains That Kid Who Slacked Off In Civics Class Makes Honor Roll
A Florida mom, Beth Tillack, was outraged that her kid was put on the Honor Roll after getting a D in Civics but still having a high enough overall GPA to make the list. Neetzan Zimmerman posts at Gawker:
"The bottom line is there is nothing honorable about making a D," the Pasco County, Florida mom told a local news station. "I was not happy, because how can I get my child to study for a test when he thinks he's done enough."...But thanks to his mom, the Pasco County schools superintendent has announced that the honor roll policy will be changed to allow only students with all A's or A's and B's to be considered for inclusion.
"If you made a C, you're not on the honor roll," Kurt Browning told the Tampa Bay Times.
"It makes my job at home so difficult," Tillack said of the current policy.
She was flabbergasted when Douglas asked for iPod back, saying he earned it through his placement on the honor roll.
"There definitely should be a cut off," she said.
Welcome To College. There's The Duct Tape For Your Mouth.
Every day, I hear more and more about The Speech Police on campus. Stating a fact or opinion that makes someone uncomfortable has become cause to be reported to The Authorities.
Does this sound a bit dystopian sci-fi? I only wish it were.
This blog post was formed out of several true stories I'm avoiding telling to protect the "guilty" -- that is, those guilty of acting like universities are centers of free speech and inquiry.
(Sillies! That's only in old books.)
Tell me your stories of the chill on free speech on campus (or just comment).
Obamacare: "Generational Theft"
That's what Nick Gillespie calls it in TIME, and he's absolutely right. As he explains it:
Is massive stupidity covered under Obamacare? What about sexual promiscuity and heavy drinking? Those are some of the questions raised by a controversial ad campaign that aims to encourage younger Americans to sign up for health-insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act.But there's a deeper issue that the new "Got Insurance?" campaign ignores completely: Why should young and relatively poor people be forced to sign up for insurance that charges them above-market rates to subsidize rates for old and relatively wealthy people?
In this sense, Obamacare is simply the latest instance of generational theft being perpetrated against younger Americans. It's a feature and not a bug of the President's signature health care law that insurance premiums for those under 30 are likely to increase significantly to allow premiums for older Americans to fall. Indeed, the whole plan hinges on getting 2.7 million whippersnappers out of a total of 7 million enrollees to sign up in the individual market during the first year. If too many older and sicker folks flood the market, the system will crash even faster than the HealthCare.gov website.
...Yes, young people foolishly believe themselves to be indestructible. But the actuarial truth is that most of them won't ever need the sort of wide-ranging benefits mandated by Obamacare.
And given Obamacare's ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions and the relatively small financial penalties for not having insurance, the smart move for many people--whether young or old--is to wait until you actually need health care before shelling out for monthly premiums.
Younger Americans may indeed be reckless enough to do keg stands and have unprotected sex on a regular basis, but they're not so dumb as the "Got Insurance?" ads--or the architects of Obamacare--seem to think.
Plink, Plink, Plink
Steal coins out of the fountain; go to jail for 200 years.
Government Promises
A tweet by Daniel Lin:
@DLin71
"If you like your privacy, you can keep it." - NSA
Hey Feminists: "Strike A Blow For Equality. Marry A Poor Man."
A passage on a way men and women aren't equal -- in the choices available to them -- from On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology Is Reshaping the Nature versus Nurture Debate
The scandal of contemporary feminism is that many feminists have it exactly backward. It is not that women have fewer choices than men in modern American society. Rather, they have more "life choices."In fact, with respect to work and "romance," women have three broad choices in modern American society.They can choose to pursue high status in a career only and thus forsake a potential mate, or they can choose to pursue high status in a potential mate only and thus forsake a career, or they can choose to pursue both high status in a career and high status in a potential mate. (If a woman is successful in this third option and children result, these children can always be put in expensive day-care centers or left with high-paid nannies.)
On the other hand, men in modern American society can choose to pursue high status in a career only and forsake a potential mate, or they can choose to pursue high status in a career and high status in a potential mate. But men cannot choose to pursue high status in a potential mate only and forsake a career, because unless a man is of high status no high-status women will want him.
Unfortunately for men, it appears that their options will remain limited. One reason is that powerful, high-status women (many of them avowed feminists, I suppose) who would be in a position to change the culture by marrying low-status males and thus "leading by example" tend, as we have seen, not to want to do so.
Thus, instead of talking about the "glass ceiling," wealthy, well-educated, high-status young women who are feminists might want to consider the following slogan: STRIKE A BLOW FOR EQUALITY. MARRY A POOR MAN.
Having Behavioral Expectations For Kids Works
Principal Todd Irving transformed a school with a "Lord of the Flies" environment, writes Paloma Esquivel in the LA Times:
Irving was hired over the summer to keep Spurgeon under control. The 6-foot-1 former college basketball player had two major goals: First, enforce the small rules; second, give the troublemakers some attention.In the weeks before school began in late August, he asked his vice principals to compile a list of the school's 50 most disruptive students and promised to be responsible for them.
...The second morning of the school year, Irving and his vice principals gathered students into assemblies by grade and took turns explaining a long list of rules and expectations -- pick up your own trash, get to class on time, no fighting, no gangs, no lighters, no stink bombs, no matches.
Students sat quietly, their legs crossed on the floor and pulled at the straps of their backpacks or fiddled with binders.
"No one on this campus will be threatened by other students," Irving told them.
...On a recent morning, before the 8 a.m. bell rang, Irving stood at a busy intersection in front of Spurgeon, greeting students with a handshake, like he does most days.
Principal Todd Irving, left, greets Isaac Martinez, 13, before school starts at Spurgeon Intermediate School in Santa Ana. More photos
Throughout the day, students are in and out of his office. He has frequent conferences with parents, sends administrators and counselors to visit students who don't show up; sometimes he pulls troublemaking students out of class and lets them sit in his office, doing homework or just talking.
So far, suspensions are down -- in the first two months of the year there were 24 days compared with 71 last year, Irving said. All but 12 of the 50 students identified as troublemakers have done well enough that they are no longer required to check in with teachers every period.
...Susan Mercer, the president of the teachers union, who helped file the hostile work environment complaint, said the school was getting better.
"According to what my teachers say, they're really happy. The school has really turned," she said. Teacher John McGuinness agreed.
"This is a pretty easy thing in education," he said. "If you set expectations, tell the students what's going to happen and then actually do it, you usually find that it's effective."
Still, the biggest challenge remains: learning.
Bad Dogs Next Door Untraining My Dog
Yesterday, the jerk actress next door left not only her older dog, a hound who periodically woofs briefly in her backyard, but somebody else's small yappy dog in her front yard.
(I'd heard her tell my landlord's gardner that she was going away, and it seemed clear that nobody was home.)
The little dog yapped for the better part of 45 minutes, on and off, and mostly on.
I finally texted my landlord (who's her landlord as well) but by the time he'd gotten back to me, the yapping had stopped.
I mentioned it to her when she was at her gate in the evening, and to my surprise, she said she was sorry and sounded sincere. (She's the one who, for a while, was having guitar singalongs in her backyard that sometimes went on till 3 a.m.)
Well, because we're all very close here (I'm about eight feet from the neighbors on either side), I try to be very considerate about not inserting noise into their lives. My feeling is, your sleep, your reading, your thoughts, your enjoyment of your house or apartment shouldn't be disturbed because I choose to have a dog.
So, I taught both my late sweet Yorkie Lucy and Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested, not to bark.
Well, for the first time ever, I heard her bark -- just once -- outside. I thought maybe a squirrel had hissed at her. I went out on the porch and said, "No noise!"
(She had barked just once -- one quick bark -- this morning inside when the actress' dogs were yapping for about 30 seconds straight in her backyard.)
And then, while outside, Aida barked a second time. Just one bark. Very worried that this was the start of a bad habit, I ran out, picked her up, held her little muzzle briefly, and said, "No noise! Bad!" a few times and ran her right inside.
I just love this. I train my dog, right from the start, to be a good neighbor and somebody who could give a crap about who they bother, as long as the dogs don't mess on the rug, messes up my work.
Well, I should manage to undo this if I keep up what I always do with training: being immediate, firm, and consistent.
And yes, she'll bark at danger and I let her bark a little while we're playing tag, but then I tell her "no noise" and she listens. The message she's consistently gotten from me is that barking is generally not acceptable, except on special play occasions.
By socializing and training your dog right, you make it possible for them to be in society and you also keep yourself from being that neighbor who makes other neighbors' lives miserable -- as I was yesterday morning when my focus on the science I was reading was interrupted multiple times by yap-yap-yap-yap-yapping.
Rude.
Linkin Mark IV
The mark of the wildebeest.
Weigel On Richard Cohen's Claim That The Tea Party Hates Race Mixing
Right-on blog item by David Weigel at Slate:
The problem with Cohen's column was that he made an assertion about an entire class of people being racist, and did no work to prove it....In an interview with the Huffington Post, he asserted that "I was expressing the views of what I think some people in the Tea Party held," though "I don't think everybody in the Tea Party is like that, because I know there are blacks in the Tea Party. So they're not all racist."
That's still quite an assertion about a group of people Cohen didn't even try to talk to for his column. He could have asked Tea Partiers whether they were bothered by Clarence Thomas's marriage to a white woman, given that she took a (short-lived) role as a would-be Tea Party leader in 2009 and 2010. He could have asked about their reaction to FreedomWorks's outreach director Deneen Borelli, whose husband Tom is white. Or, because anecdotal evidence is only worth so much, he could have "taken the Internet express" to Gallup.com and noticed that 85 percent of whites and 70 percent of elderly people are fine with interracial marriage. He could have shelled out for some current political science research, which suggests that "there is no difference between the racial attitudes of the general white population and self-identified tea party members."
He could have. Instead, Cohen made up a claim about a bunch of conservatives probably holding circa 1960 racial views. It's the sort of claim any columnist with sense or a work ethic would probably veto right away, but it jibes with a sterotype of conservatives, so even the publisher of the Washington Post gave it an attaboy.
Deeming Something "Hate Speech" Has Become The Acceptable Form Of Squashing Speech, Especially On Campus
If you think a college campus is a center for free speech and free inquiry, you haven't been on a college campus for quite some time.
The thought police have been hard at work on campus, and they've found neat ways to deem free speech unacceptable speech. One of their top tricks is to cry "Hate speech!"
A question: Why should hateful speech not be heard?
Hateful speech is best debated when it is above-ground. Debate is the best shot you have for opening and maybe even changing people's minds, or at least letting them know the views of your side and the other's.
The answer to speech you deplore is more speech -- not shutting down speech. Tomorrow, the speech that is shut down as "hateful" could be yours.
Below is a classic example of campus speech-squashing I picked from the campus I visited most recently -- University of New Mexico, where I attended an ev psych conference last year. (This year's conference was in a hotel in Miami -- no campus visit.)
Their student newspaper has an article detailing a disgusting attempt to shut down the screening of a film about the cost of illegal immigration by deeming it "hate speech."
Forget whether you agree on illegal immigration's costs or whether you agree with the term -- or even find it ugly. This is about freedom of speech.
As I wrote recently on my blog, my being for free speech means I will defend your right to free speech even if I'm disgusted to my core by what you're saying.
Ardee Napolitano and Chloe Henson write for the New Mexico Daily Lobo:
The film, titled "They Came to America: The Cost of Illegal Immigration," led to the protest because of its title and its depiction of undocumented immigrants. The UNM Conservative Republicans hosted the screening of the film.Ramiro Rodriguez, a member of the organization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana de Aztlan (MEChA), which was part of the coalition that organized the protest, said he did not support the showing of the video because it was misleading.
"We've actually already had a prescreening of the event," he said. "It is not educational, and it is based off of people's ignorance and thoughts. They don't show any statistics ... they don't give any factual statements or refer to anything."
Conflicts broke out regarding the event after the UNM Dream Team started an online petition over the weekend on Change.org against the screening. The petition calls the screening "hate speech" because "using the word 'illegal' to describe people is legally inaccurate, dehumanizing and has proven to increase violence against real and perceived immigrants."
At press time, the petition had 126 signatures.
Rodriguez said the documentary is offensive to students and does not belong at UNM.
"We're a pro-immigrant campus," he said. "It is affecting students, students who are undocumented on campus. It is referring to them as 'illegal,' and that is dehumanizing. 'Illegal' refers to an act, not a person."
He said he knew people around campus who had already been offended by the documentary, including himself.
Sorry, but the fact that you are offended by a film is not reason to keep it from being shown.
As I've noted time and time again, the answer to speech you don't like is more speech. Making your own film documenting why the views in this film are wrong.
I've noted here that I'm meeting later this month with Greg Lukianoff of campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org out of concern for the general squashing of free speech on college campuses. I believe the speech chill (on students and professors) is, to a great extent, a side-effects of the vast sums of money available in student loans, which have raised tuition prices and created a class of administrative royals whose greatest concern is that their college not appear in a negative article on the newspaper's front page.
I'm looking for any suggestions about potential ways to push back against the speech chill.
Do note that the film incident above is a classic example of how the thought police operate on campus:
1) conservative student group wants to show documentary on the costs of illegal immigration
2) liberal student group decides the best way to fight it is to claim that merely using the phrase "illegal immigrant" constitutes "hate speech", and that the mere fact that they are "offended" is grounds for banning the documentary screening
3) Dean of Students agrees that it is "hate speech", although there's no policy against it -- implying that there should be, since other reputable campuses consider it so.
The underlying guideline here is that any political attitude one disagrees with is "offensive" and hence "hate speech," thereby shutting down any possible debate.
On a related note: Frankly, if you have entered this country illegally -- sans permission to be here -- you are an illegal immigrant! Same as I would be if I went to France and overstayed the 90 days and didn't have a visa to stay longer!
...Okay, sure, to be a little more precise, I'd be une immigrante illégal!
But even if you consider saying so "hate speech," please explain to me why it would be a good thing for "hate speech" -- or any speech -- to be squashed.
What Happens If I Change My Health Insurance Plan And Obamacare Gets Changed Or Repealed?
I am so stressed out about this. I have a grandfathered plan at an HMO -- that just got made more expensive -- and I'm worried about giving it up to go cheaper because Obamacare seems like a leaking boat fast taking on large quantities of water.
Will it be changed? Repealed? If so, what will happen to people who left their plans to make their costs cheaper?
Another complaint: What I really, really don't need to do right now is to worry about having to change a plan I've paid for personally, diligently, for about 26 years so now -- for one example -- I can pay for post-menopausal women to have maternity and prenatal care covered. Yes, post-menopausal!
I liked the spirit of what former pres Bill Clinton said, that the health care law should be changed to allow people to keep their plans that were canceled as a result of Obamacare.
But come on -- what silliness. The horse is out of the barn. Those plans are gone.
Aren't you grateful now to all those elected lazy assholes who said they'd pass Obamacare to find out what was in it?
Another Obama Supporter Shocked At The 88% Rise In Her Health Care Premium
As @MeredithJessup, who tweeted this, wrote, "These stories never get old."
The latest, by Steve Lopez, in the LA Times has a photo caption of Margaret Davis that says:
Margaret Davis of West L.A. wants a health plan that would ensure she wouldn't go broke in the event of a catastrophe. She has been paying $224 a month, but under the new Kaiser plan, her premium would rise to $420.46 a month.
There is this ridiculousness in the story:
She wrote to U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) when she didn't hear from the others, and one of Bass' staffers called Davis to say she'll be looking into the specifics of her case."Any time you do a huge policy change like healthcare, there's going to be all sorts of problems and glitches that need to be worked out," Bass told me Tuesday from Washington, where she said there were new calls for allowing people to keep the policies they have, as President Obama had repeatedly promised they'd be able to do.
President Clinton has urged such a move, and Feinstein's office backed the idea Tuesday. She noted in a statement that her office had received 30,832 contacts from Californians, "many of whom are very distressed by cancellations of their insurance policies and who are facing increased out-of-pocket expenses."
The policies have been disappeared. What is the government going to to, invent a time machine and send us all back in it to before Obama and the congressional Democrats fucked up our health care system and crossed their fingers that it would all turn out okay?
You can get lower prices -- if you give up your high-quality doctor you could afford just fine until you started paying for everybody else:
Steve Jakowchik found Davis a deal at Anthem Blue Cross that essentially splits the difference between her current Kaiser plan and the replacement plan. Davis told me she's inclined to go with the Blue Cross deal unless there's a reprieve and people are allowed to keep existing policies.Jakowchik, meanwhile, told me that among the roughly 100 clients he's assisting, about 30 are getting plans that are more comprehensive, cheaper or both. The other clients are paying anywhere from a little bit more to a lot more for plans that are inferior to what they had, better than what they had or about the same.
The most striking change he's seeing, Jakowchik said, is among clients who can get pretty good deals, but only if they give up access to the doctors and hospitals they now use. Because his practice is on the Westside, he's hearing from clients who aren't happy about losing Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA Medical Center as hospital options.
"I just ran into one of these today," said Jakowchik, who told me about a Marina del Rey family that has to decide between a big premium increase and access to Cedars, or much lower premiums but a choice between hospitals in Torrance or the San Fernando Valley.
Let's be real. This woman first mentioned in the article goes to my HMO. It's the Ford Fiesta of health care, which is to say it drives just fine, but it ain't no Cadillac. Kaiser is now unaffordable for her? That's sick. (It's become unaffordable for me, too, and I have to see about downgrading my care, but I'm terrified that I'll lose my grandfathered status and then they'll change or roll back Obamacare and I'll be fucked.)
Drinkie Link
Get your glass of rubbing alcohol here. Bottoms up!
If Your House Is Burning Down, Do You Care About Firefighter "Diversity"?
Disgusting case of affirmative action in New York, where a woman, Wendy Tapia, was allowed to become a firefighter after failing the running test five whole times. (She still has yet to pass it!)
Susan Edelman writes in The New York Post:
On Dec. 2, she is taking the test for an unprecedented sixth time.Tapia was one of only five women among 285 new firefighters who graduated from the FDNY's Randall's Island training academy on May 17.
The class was hailed as the most diverse group of rookies ever, all of them EMTs or paramedics seeking promotion to firefighter. She joined a group of just 35 women among the 11,000 Bravest.
But Tapia, 31, has yet to work a shift at her firehouse, Engine No. 316 in East Elmhurst, Queens, where she was assigned May 18.
At the end of 18 weeks of probationary training, Tapia failed to run 1¹/₂ miles in 12 minutes without gear, as required by the academy. She blamed a foot injury.
The FDNY let her graduate anyway -- and gave her five more deadlines over the past six months to pass the running test.
She failed all five times, insiders said.
Normally, probationary firefighters who fail the running test at the end of academy training don't graduate -- period. They flunk out but can join the next academy class, start over and get another chance to pass the course.
via @Overlawyered
Why, Until Recently, Ari Armstrong's Cat Got Better Medical Care Than He Did
He writes at The Objective Standard that it would take him three months to get an appointment for a routine physical with his doctor but he was able to get his cat an exam within days, and she received "top-notch care, complete with detailed blood analysis":
Why is the service Americans get from primary care doctors often substantially worse than the service we get from our veterinarians, mechanics, dentists, eye doctors, package deliverers, and so on? Here are a few indicators:• For decades the federal government has, through tax policies, pushed employers to provide employees with health insurance that covers not only emergencies and high-cost procedures but also routine care.
• Consequently, many Americans pay for all their health care through insurance. This setup hides costs from both patients and doctors, and it creates massive paperwork costs for the simplest doctor visits. These costs and consumptions of the doctors' time dramatically reduce the time they are able to spend with patients.
• Through its massive Medicare welfare program, the government also largely dictates the fees that doctors can collect for their services. Because this reduces the amount of money doctors earn and burdens them with bureaucratic paperwork, many doctors are quitting, and fewer bright students are entering the field of family medicine.
• The government's health care payments and regulations are increasingly pushing doctors into large, regimented practices in which their time with patients is further limited.
Thankfully, my story has a happy ending: I found a "concierge" family practice in my area, similar to that of Dr. Josh Umbehr (whom I interviewed for the Fall issue of TOS). The practice accepts no insurance, provides many tests at cost, and charges a relatively low monthly fee (which my wife and I pay from our Health Savings Account). I was able to schedule my physical within days, and my new doctor was able to spend a full, unhurried hour with me.
Attention Shoe Whores
Purple Pen, I'm mainly referring to the two of us, but if the, ahem, shoe fits...
Up to 70 percent off men's and women's shoes and some accessories at Amazon
To buy other things at Amazon
And thank you all for all your purchases. They help fund my site and keep the lights and computers on so I can write, and I truly appreciate that.
Linky Dink
"Give me your retired..." (that's the poem on the pool float Statue of Liberty at Leisure World...)
"Always Go To The Funeral"
Deirdre Sullivan writes at NPR:
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.
It's also important to just show the hell up for a friend who has cancer or some other harsh and perhaps terminal disease. You really don't need to know what to say. Being there is really, really important.
via @robpatrob
Sad Comment On The Government Of Hopeless And Changeless
About the massive failure of the massive website for the massive (and experimental) change in our health care system, there was a piece in the WSJ on scam artists lining up to fill in where the Obamacare website is failing.
I read the article, which was fine, but a commenter on the site, Anthony Aaron, quoting a bit from the article, summed it up well:
"...If an insurance shopping website is usable, it's not the federal government's." That kind of says it all, folks ...
Three Assholes Peeing On A Fence Across From My House
Makes my neighborhood smell like a men's bathroom when it rains.
I don't live in the wilderness.
There's a bathroom in the bar (which they surely came out of), but these guys were apparently raised like farm animals to just let their pee fly where it may. Wonder if they do that in their mama's living room. Wonder what their mamas were doing instead of teaching them manners.
Last week, my neighbor and I talked to the guy who takes care of the greenery that grows like ivy on the fence and cleabns the areas on either side. He has to wear a mask to try to block the overwhelming pee smell, he said. Sweet guy -- doing his best to make our neighborhood look nice; goes above and beyond, which my neighbor and I thanks him for and told him we appreciate. These assholes don't think of a guy like this -- or neighbors who have to live with the urine smell -- when they're just letting their pee fly.
Linkietime!
Postie-time!
Advice Goddess Radio, "Best Of" Replay, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Elizabeth Dunn On How Money Really CAN Buy Happiness
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
A "Best Of" replay for you tonight. It's one of my favorite recent shows, filled with science news everyone can use -- the science of how to spend our way to happiness.
My guest is 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."
On tonight's show, 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 from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/11/dr-elizabeth-dunn-how-money-really-can-buy-happiness
Don't miss last week's show on one of my favorite topics -- irrationality.
We like to believe our decisions are rationally driven and make sense. But constantly, our perception and decision-making are clouded by illusions we aren't even aware we have. Some of these include illusions of accuracy in our attention, memory, confidence, and knowledge. These illusions can lead us to make costly -- and even deadly -- errors.
The good news is, by understanding what these illusions are and how we fall prey to them, we can avoid doing it (or at least do it far less), make more rationally-based decisions, and live smarter overall.
To help us do that, my guest tonight, psychologist and researcher Dr. Christopher Chabris is half of the team (with psychologist and researcher Dan Simons) who did the famous and hilarious "invisible gorilla experiment." It's also the title of their fascinating book, "The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us."
On tonight's show, we'll be discussing this experiment and others, why we are so convinced we're perceiving situations correctly when we're doing anything but, and how we can stop that and live like the rational animals we believe ourselves to be.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/04/dr-christopher-chabris-how-intuition-can-lead-us-astray
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Trans Fat Ban: Government Promotes Bad Science; Government Eventually Punishes Companies That Listened
As I've noted on Twitter, it was our government that got companies and people replacing what evidence shows to be healthy fat -- butter and lard -- with unhealthy (but not poisonous) trans fat.
Now, the FDA's planned a de facto ban on trans fats (by removing them from the GRAS list -- Generally Recognized As Safe, which means food manufacturers would have to prove they don't have adverse effects before adding them to products). Now products will have to be remade, which will surely take new approvals from the government, which will surely cost the companies big -- which is a big deal if your company happens to be small.
Michelle Minton writes on Open Market about the ban -- and the likely next targets of the government, sugar and salt:
The de facto ban on trans fat's GRAS status signals a sea change in the agency's approach to food-safety regulation. Historically, the FDA has banned only additives and products that could be acutely dangerous to public health. FDA attempts to limit other ingredients, such as salt and sugar, have met public backlash, but it's unlikely many will step up to defend trans fats, considering the scientific evidence that seems to link its long-term consumption with a slightly increased risk of cardiovascular disease.Since almost any food can become dangerous if consumed in excess over an extended period, this move would set a precedent for the FDA to go after other food ingredients. Unsurprisingly, self-styled "public health" advocates -- always at the forefront of nanny state regulatory efforts - are elated at this prospect.
Ironically, the increase in the use of trans-fats can be credited in large part to advice and advocacy efforts by these same groups. As Olga Khazan at The Atlantic notes:
In the 1980s, some scientists began to associate heart disease with saturated fats, and in response, groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the National Heart Savers Association began to hound manufacturers for "poisoning America ... by using saturated fats," and as a result "nearly all targeted firms responded by replacing saturated fats with trans fats," as David Schleifer wrote in 2012 for the journal Technology and Culture."...Ultimately, there are hundreds of foods and ingredients that if consumed in large enough quantities for a long enough period of time will result in negative health outcomes. The solution is not to ban them but to let consumers access information and make their own choices. Let nutrition groups petition companies to voluntarily list ingredients and offer healthier options if they like, but keep government out of the decision so consumers can make their own choices.
As the debate over trans fat shows, health advocates, research scientists and our own government often do not know what is best for us; individuals must decide for themselves.
via @PaulHsieh
Selling People On Losing Their Insurance And Paying More (And A Site To Tell You The Plans Now Available To You)
From Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, in an interview with the New York Times:
Affordable health care means trying to get more people insurance that had no insurance. Making people who had insurance buy a different product that costs more for less coverage? You can't go home and defend that.
Find out the various plans available to you with this site, TheHealthSherpa, built by three 20-year-olds.
Quote via FutureOfCapitalism. Site from @fmanjoo
Are You All For Free Speech Until You Disagree With Somebody's?
You aren't really for free speech unless you'll defend the free speech of people whose views you absolutely deplore.
Drivers Rarely Cited When They Kill Bicyclists
Daniel Duane writes for The New York Times:
Studies performed in Arizona, Minnesota and Hawaii suggest that drivers are at fault in more than half of cycling fatalities. And there is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you're driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you're not obviously drunk and don't flee the scene. When two cars crash, everybody agrees that one of the two drivers may well be to blame; cops consider it their job to gather evidence toward that determination. But when a car hits a bike, it's like there's a collective cultural impulse to say, "Oh, well, accidents happen." If your 13-year-old daughter bikes to school tomorrow inside a freshly painted bike lane, and a driver runs a stop sign and kills her and then says to the cop, "Gee, I so totally did not mean to do that," that will most likely be good enough."We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run," Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.
Laws do forbid reckless driving, gross negligence and vehicular manslaughter. The problem, according to Ray Thomas, a Portland, Ore., attorney who specializes in bike law, is that "jurors identify with drivers." Convictions carry life-destroying penalties, up to six years in prison, Mr. Thomas pointed out, and jurors "just think, well, I could make the same mistake. So they don't convict." That's why police officers and prosecutors don't bother making arrests. Most cops spend their lives in cars, too, so that's where their sympathies lie.
Colleges Should Disclose If They'll Ditch You As An Applicant Over Your Tweets And Such
Once again, colleges are revealing themselves to be bastions of un-free speech by ditching applicants over their tweets or other online posts.
Oops, as the NYT article by Natasha Singer points out, sometimes there's more than one person with a certain name and sometimes people make fake accounts in somebody's name. Kind of serious if it means you can't get into your college of choice because some idiot administrator hasn't figured that out.
This creeped me out:
Last year, an undergraduate at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who had befriended a prospective student on Facebook, notified the admissions office because he noticed that the applicant had posted offensive comments about one of his high school teachers."We thought, this is not the kind of person we want in our community," Angel B. Perez, Pitzer's dean of admission and financial aid, told me. With about 4,200 applications annually for a first-year class of 250 students, the school can afford to be selective. "We didn't admit the student," Mr. Perez said.
And some do disclose and some don't:
Colleges vary in their transparency. While Pitzer doesn't contact students if their social media activities precluded admission to the school, Colgate University does notify students if they are eliminated from the applicant pool for any reason other than being uncompetitive candidates."We should be transparent with applicants," says Gary L. Ross, Colgate's dean of admission. He once called a student, to whom Colgate had already offered acceptance, to check whether an alcohol-related incident that was reported online was indeed true. (It was, and Colgate rescinded the offer of admission.)
"We will always ask if there is something we didn't understand," Mr. Ross said.
And I can see a new job rising out of this -- social media scrub coach:
In an effort to help high school students avoid self-sabotage online, guidance counselors are tutoring them in scrubbing their digital identities. At Brookline High School in Massachusetts, juniors are taught to delete alcohol-related posts or photographs and to create socially acceptable email addresses. One junior's original email address was "bleedingjesus," said Lenny Libenzon, the school's guidance department chairman. That changed."They imagine admissions officers are old professors," he said. "But we tell them a lot of admissions officers are very young and technology-savvy."
Likewise, high school students seem to be growing more shrewd, changing their searchable names on Facebook or untagging themselves in pictures to obscure their digital footprints during the college admission process.
"We know that some students maintain two Facebook accounts," says Wes K. Waggoner, the dean of undergraduate admission at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
For their part, high school seniors say that sanitizing social media accounts doesn't seem qualitatively different than the efforts they already make to present the most appealing versions of themselves to colleges. While Megan Heck, 17, a senior at East Lansing High School in Michigan, told me that she was not amending any of her posts as she applied early to colleges this month, many of her peers around the country were.
"If you've got stuff online you don't want colleges to see," Ms. Heck said, "deleting it is kind of like joining two more clubs senior year to list on your application to try to make you seem more like the person they want at their schools."
And sure, these are statements that are made public when put out on social media, but a college application is a thing you fill out. They aren't sending a private detective to peer in your windows and follow you to work.
If they were, that should be disclosed, too.
Commenter Michelle at the NYT's site, gets the problem here:
Michelle, Chicago The danger in judging prospective students, or prospective employees on their public speech not related to academic or work performance, is the same in policing speech in any area. It might seem like common sense to exclude someone for rude comments or profanity, or for alcohol related behavior. But what about other things someone might find out through an online search? Should someone be denied a college admission because she's a teenage parent? Or is gay? What about someone's political activities or religion? Would a college be justified in denying admission because the admissions' officer is offended by a political opinion expressed in a tweet, on a FB page, or in the comments section of a NYTimes article? The internet is the 21st century equivalent of discussions in the town square, except now, colleges, employers, and the government have the technological capability to surveil every town square. In a free society, people should not have to worry that their words will be used against them in a way that will limit their freedom or economic opportunity. Which is exactly what these admissions officers are doing. How ironic that universities are supposed to be bastions of intellectual freedom, when exercising that freedom can keep you from entering in the first place.
Another commenter had a great point as well
Gustavo Corral, NYC What is the lesson that colleges are trying to teach? To scrub your profile and present a socially acceptable face? Because that is going to be the consequence of punishing every faux pas of 18 yr. olds.Gone are the days when youthful rebellion was respected. The generation of the 60s and 70s has grown up and now they are in charge of the world. Now lack of sensitivity might as well be lack of wisdom. These are the same people who would have executed Socrates as a disruptive influence on society.
Our society used to mean something. FREEDOM used to be a big part of what it meant. But what freedom is there if everything is demurred?
via KateC
Linkie Binkie Bottle Of Inkie
The cork fell out and you stinkie...
P.S. You can tell us -- did you kiss him?
Water Over The Bridge: Hurricane Sandy And Those Who Rebuilt
Nice piece in the NYT by N.R. Kleinfeld from late October about the rebuilding post-Sandy. And yes, people who live in a flood plain should have flood insurance:
Marco Pasanella engagingly pointed out the jagged white line that ran the length of the brick wall inside his wine shop, Pasanella & Son Vintners, in the South Street Seaport. It was about six feet above the floor. It was going to stay right there. The waterline from Hurricane Sandy.When the East River slammed into the shop, he lost 10,000 bottles of wine. Nasty business for sure, but he prefers that the waterline stay preserved. "I guess I don't want to erase the past," he said. "I feel it's like wrinkles in your face. I don't like the Botox look."
In fact, he had a plaque made with the inscription, "The East River Came to Here. 29 October 2012." He styled it after one on a building in Florence, Italy, that noted the height of the horrid flood of the Arno River in 1966. He was not entirely happy with how it came out, though, and has not mounted it yet.
Customers come, marvel, snap pictures of the line; relatives point to it with a grin. Mr. Pasanella said his wife was sometimes irked. She regards it as "disaster tourism."
As he sees it, Hurricane Sandy, despite its effrontery, had not conquered his wine store; he had conquered it. This was his narrative of the storm.
For some people bruised by the hurricane, the waterline has become something of a signature of survival. Most building owners and homeowners have understandably wiped away theirs as they have repaired and rebuilt what the waves gulped up, trying to forget. But quite a few, as part of their formulas to reconcile with the storm, have chosen to live with that waterline, not always knowing why.
Reminds Me How Much I Love Seeing Great Tap Dancing
You don't see that anymore, but this guy, who is not tap dancing has some great moves.
A young Bunny Briggs (one of my favorite tap dancers -- one of the greats). (Sorry for the source.)
Bunny Briggs in 1991. White-haired and amazing, dancing to a surprisingly slow song for a tap routine.
Government Geniuses Make It Harder To Work Or Drive To A Job For Those Who've Fallen Behind In Their Child Support
At EconLog, David Henderson posts one of his student's thoughts on this:
In many states, people who owe back child support are at risk of losing their driver's licenses as well as their professional licenses. My brother has fallen into this trap several times over the past 5-10 years. Curiously, when his driver's license was suspended, he was denied several jobs due to his being "irresponsible" and not being able drive a vehicle. This is an obvious Catch 22 because, without a job, he cannot pay the child support or pay to reinstate his license, and he will continue to be unemployed, which, in turn, leads to lost revenue for the federal government. Although my brother has never made much money, if he had been a lawyer or doctor and lost his practicing license due to back child support, the lost revenue would have been even greater.The government should remove this punishment for failure to pay child support. No one benefits from making it more difficult for an individual who owes money to make money. According to Wikipedia, 1,372 drivers' licenses were revoked in Tennessee in 2000. These individuals "owed more than $13 million of back child support."
I am not an expert in state law for child support nor do I know who pays what. In the case of my brother, I know the mother was still paid a portion even though he failed to make the payments. From my knowledge, the state paid her.
Suspending a driver's license has adverse effects on the individual who owes money, the custodial parent, and whoever is paying the back child support (whether it be the state or federal government). Many custodial parents rely on child support payments, and when their income falls because they are not receiving the money, the federal government loses money in two ways: first by losing the income tax revenue the custodial and non-custodial parents would have been making and second, by having to provide benefits (unemployment, WIC, etc.)
With our current economic situation, the government should focus its attention on removing federal and state rules and regulations that are counterproductive. Changing state legislation on child support laws would not wholly correct our situation, but it would at least help people obtain and keep jobs. As noted earlier that would ultimately increase the government's revenue and decrease some of the expenses that the governments pay in unemployment and welfare benefits.
via @instapundit
Justice: It Should Happen More Often
For the first time ever, Mark Godsey of The Innocence Project writes at HuffPo, a prosecutor will go to jail for wrongfully convicting an innocent man:
Today in Texas, former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for the murder of his wife. When trying the case as a prosecutor, Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared Morton, including statements from the crime's only eyewitness that Morton wasn't the culprit. Anderson sat on this evidence, and then watched Morton get convicted. While Morton remained in prison for the next 25 years, Anderson's career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.In today's deal, Anderson pled to criminal contempt, and will have to give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and spend 10 days in jail. Anderson had already resigned in September from his position on the Texas bench.
What makes today's plea newsworthy is not that Anderson engaged in misconduct that sent an innocent man to prison. Indeed, while most prosecutors and police officers are ethical and take their constitutional obligations seriously, government misconduct--including disclosure breaches known as Brady violations--occurs so frequently that it has become one of the chief causes of wrongful conviction.
What's newsworthy and novel about today's plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions.
The problem:
Rogue cops and prosecutors going unpunished is the rule rather than the exception. In Illinois, two police officers whose improperly grueling interrogation techniques led to the wrongful conviction of Juan Rivera and others were not penalized when their 3rd degree tactics came to light. Rather, they were recently hired at taxpayer expense to teach interrogation courses to other police officers around the state.
Obamacare: Washington, D.C. Spends $133,573,928 To Enroll Five People In Obamacare
Katie Pavlich posts at TownHall.com:
Earlier this week we learned Delaware has spent $4 million to enroll four people in Obamacare. That was nothing. New numbers from four different healthcare providers show Washington D.C. has spent $133,573,928 to enroll a grand total of five people in Obamacare. That's $26,714,785.60 per Obamacare enrollee.
via @TomDNaughton
Linkinkinkink
Herehereherehere...
She'll Never Be A Woman Now
Okay, that's mainly because she's a dog. But Aida, my wee Chinese Crested, got spayed today. I was nervous as hell, but it's a routine procedure and we have a wonderful, careful vet, and all went well, and we just brought her home. She's curled up now on a very soft bed on my lap.
Here she is the other day just standing around looking elegant -- one of her habits. You can't see it, but she has one paw sort of elevated.
Boy With A Purse. School Officials Go Psycho.
Scott Schackford writes at reason:
13-year-old Skyler Davis, an 8th-grader in Anderson County Junior-Senior School in Garnett, Kansas, just wants to wear his Vera Bradley purse to class, but some folks are just being jerks about it.Based on coverage from KCTV in Kansas, it doesn't appear as though the problem is bullying from other students. Even Skyler's own brother is on his side. It's school officials who are telling him he can't wear his purse in class, going so far as to suspend him.
Unless purses are banned for all -- which they're not and which would be ridiculous (it's a fucking bag to carry your crap in) -- why should they be going all authoritarian on this kid?
Well, it turns out they are very firm on showing they're the bosses, as the kid's mom said she was told the suspension wouldn't be lifted until her son stops wearing the purse, which he'd said on Wednesday that he wouldn't do.
Good for him and for his mom for not knuckling under to these administrative bullies.
Zero tolerance now for handbags? Really? Really?
"Are You Submissive To Men?" Victim-Feminist Asks Me In An Email
Short answer: No, I just feel powerful enough that I don't need to be a shrew.
Got a nasty little string of email from sarasmithdbt@gmail.com (among others), in the wake of Psychology Today's re-featuring of my piece on the realities about beauty on their front page.
She first tried the sneaky approach:
Amy, please please talk more about women being drawn to money and status for your female fans :)
I wrote back:
Thanks, but I'm working on my next book and I only write when they ask me to. They were doing a special issue on beauty and asked.I write this with some frequency in my column.
Also, men pretty much know that women want them to have money and status. This would not be a fascinating piece.
I suspect you are one of those who is pissed off that I would write such things about how women need to take care of themselves instead of saying that men should like ugly women with beautiful personalities.
Apparently, she has pored over my blog:
Amy, why are you defending prisoners? God who cares about them. They have no money or status.
My response:
You're kind of a sick puppy, it seems.I'm for human rights. Whether the human is a man or woman.
Why don't you just come clean, sneaky lady, about what your real issue is.
Always interesting to see the sort of people who have to resort to sneaking. Says a lot about them.
Again, got a problem with me: voice it.
I know that's not the victim-feminist way -- but try to stretch.
She writes:
Are you submissive to men?
Anybody who comments here with any frequency knows I'm not "submissive" to anyone.
The thing, you don't have to always be hammering at people if you feel strong. If you're assertive when necessary, you convey that in your demeanor and people really do not fuck with you, unless they are strangers and then, well they learn.
If you don't feel like a crumb of a person, you can be sweet to the man you're with and not have to always try to grab for power. (Of course, opening your eyes and finding a really good guy is the first step.)
On a related note, Gregg got me an iPhone and put me on a family plan with him. (I'm so frugal that I'd probably still be using my Razr phone otherwise, because I take care of my technology and it tends to last eons, but it makes him happy to give me technology.)
Anyway, yesterday, Gregg asked me whether I'd mind if he switched us from AT&T to Verizon. I said it was nice that he asked me but he really didn't have to; technology is his department and I trust whatever he thinks is best.
Now, if the issue were something I really cared about or something I knew anything about and I had a problem with his approach, I'd say something. And I sure speak up when I need to express myself. But I don't need to do it like a shrew, and Gregg certainly doesn't deserve that -- ever.
In general, I feel powerful and I am powerful. Because I act powerful. I started my own business from nothing when people told me it was impossible and then there's what I consider my greatest accomplishment: transforming myself from a friendless suckup in my early 20s into a person who stands up for our civil liberties and stands up against the rude no matter what people think of me.
Not coming from a place of insecurity means that I can just relax about having to wrest the controls away from everyone at all times.
(It must be really exhausting to be a victim-feminist.)
P.S. Sarah was one of a couple people pissed off at the PT article who intimated that I'm a "borderline."
As commenter Jerry put it here so well:
Internet diagnosis of mental illness, the first refuge of the incompetent.
Annoying Phraseville
The update on the sneer "Forget to take your meds?!" (and its variations) is aggrandizing oneself by accusing somebody of being a "borderline."
Some total stranger. By email, that is.
At least in my case, over the past two days, in email I'm getting from victim-feminists who are IRATE that I wrote a piece for Psychology Today suggesting something other than "Men should want you for your personality!"
If You're Going To Screw Up Big On The Job, Government Is The Place To Do It
Jonathan Turley reflects on the massive screwups in the Obamacare launch and website:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly assured Congress and the public that the system was ready after almost a half billion dollars in federal funds and years of preparation. She never informed Congress that her top tech officer (who has now resigned) refused to sign off on the program due to concerns of the lack of full testing and that various experts expressed doubts about the launch. However, Sebelius and her aides insisted on effectively launching in the blind. Putting aside how one may feel about national health care, this would seem an objective measure of the lack of performance. This was the single most important task not just for Sebellius but the Administration and was a failure. For those who have fought hard for health care, the failure played into the hands of critics. Yet, with a program named after a Democratic President, there seems an unwillingness to separate the merits of Obamacare from the poor administration of the rollout of the program. While officials are now profusely apologizing, it seems that (unlike most citizens) high-ranking officials are immune from performance based termination. That is the subject of the column in USA Today.On Oct. 1, millions of citizens came face to face with one of the most embarrassing blunders of our generation. After almost half a billion dollars spent on the computer registration system for Obamacare, the website coughed, sputtered and appeared to descend into an immediate coma as millions tried to log on. One reason is that the Obama administration never fully tested it.
For many, the greatest surprise was not that the government spent wildly on a defective system, but that the failure did not result in a single termination. While the agency's top technology officer, Tony Trenkle, wisely is retiring, the appearance of the still employed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a congressional hearing this week led many to ask a reasonable question: What does it take to lose a government job?
If recent scandals are any measure, the answer is chilling. Of course, one would have thought that a$400 million debacle would fit easily under "fireable offenses." This is particularly the case when contractors testify that it was the administration that decided not to fully test the system. Then there is the use of a contractor that was terminated earlier in Canada for allegedly fouling up the computer system for Ontario.
... one can understand Sebelius' response to critics that "the majority of people calling for me to resign ... are people I don't work for." Indeed, the people whom she works for measure success along political, not performance, lines.
Link Trap
Don't let the dryer catch fire.
I Don't Often Read Novels But This One I Loved
I mostly read science -- books, papers -- but when we were going to Paris the last time, I needed a book and Gregg picked one out for me in the airport. (Gregg was the late Elmore Leonard's researcher of 30-plus years, and has a way with knowing what to read.)
The book is The Book Thief
I just saw they've made it into a movie. I'll see that but I highly recommend the book.
One More Reason To Try Not To Buy Products From China
No, not that it'll make some huge dent in the Chinese economy, the few people who will care enough to do this.
Also, there's so much made in China that this is rather impossible to do much of the time.
But if enough people get behind boycotting (or largely boycotting) Chinese products, maybe we can force a little change, or start to force some change.
Change? Cory Doctorow posted a screen shot of a letter in a Kmart Halloween decoration from a prisoner in a Chinese forced labor camp. Many of these prisoners are prosecuted for their religion -- their practice of Falun Gong.
More at Consumerist.
"Anti-Rape" Panties
A blogger who calls herself "Stupid Girl" asks:
Which is sillier, the feminist overreaction or the pants themselves?
Here's the video (which wouldn't embed right).
She notes the predictable feminist responses -- for example, rage that these panties might not fit fat ladies and trannies -- and then writes:
My favorite reaction is the 5933 comments generated (so far) once the vid got posted on World Star Hip Hop. Many are NSFW-but here are a few samples:* i will buy this for my girl i set the lock though* what is rape? is it something to eat?
* A bae let me see how yo ass look in these boy shorts... Gotcha bitch. Insecure nigga cuff trick
* Aint nobody tryin to rape none of these flat pasty booty bitches...them look like the same shorts Miley Cyrus was wearin on the VMAs
And as you might expect, WSHH contains more practical advice to women about avoiding rape than all the feminist sites lumped together:
uhhh as yall can see, it was straight white bitches wearin that shit cuz they the main ones doin dumb shit like gettin drunk or too fucked up to remember some shit and they need that, u aint see no nigga bitch wearin that shit, they got mace, taser, pocket knife, and a fuckin rock in they purse, they aint worried bout shiddd and the cousin dayday just got out so u kno she straight lmaooOh, but we can have women arming themselves for self-defense-that would be violent! And we can't tell them not to binge-drink because "that would shift the blame for rape from men." And we certainly can't tell them that wearing a short skirt and high heels while walking alone late at night isn't a prudent idea-because that would be "slut-shaming."
Related: Serena Williams. I wrote on that post:
Where she's right is that people need to be taught take responsibility for themselves and to be taught that getting seriously drunk can get you seriously imperiled. Especially girls, but boys, too.
via @meancharlotte
College Campuses: It's The Money, Not The Free Speech And Inquiry, That's The Bottom Line
Related to my recent posts on the injustice done to now former Sci-Am blogs editor Bora Zivkovic, I got a bunch of email this past weekend from academics telling me about the chill on free speech on campus. Two of these people connected the diminishing of free speech to the money.
To explain, Glenn Reynolds has written about the education bubble and how the vast sums of money available in loans has caused tuitions to rise and to break students. His book is The Higher Education Bubble
I haven't found the time yet in between my weekly science reading to get to Glenn's book, but it seems that the money has also led to administrations to act less like college administrations and more like very bottom-line-concerned corporations, leading to these chills on free speech. It is, in short, about the money.
Their greatest concern is not about free inquiry but about bad press for the college and administration and squashing anyone's free speech that might lead to that.
Related, by Greg Lukianoff, the president of campus free speech defender theFIRE.org: The Campus surveillance state.
Greg's book: Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.
The description of the book on Amazon points out the cost of the college speech stifling to all of us:
For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America's colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues....This culture of censorship is bleeding into the larger society. ...Intolerance for dissent and debate on today's campus threatens the freedom of every citizen and makes us all just a little bit dumber.
If you are an academic, please feel free to comment here anonymously. I will not reveal or even look at your IP or anything else. Please also feel free to send me your suggestions on this via email at the "contact" address above (by my masthead).
I'm meeting with Greg Lukianoff in a few weeks to discuss this climate and see whether something can be done about it. Regular commenters here are, for the most part, very smart. It would help to have your ideas.
And remember: this is massive money and now-entrenched and powerful administrations we're talking about.
One thought I had is to use the Obama admin's Dept. of Education. They put out a directive diminishing due process on campus (especially for men), and it's working. Perhaps it's possible to get them to put out some directive about free speech.
"And All The Children Are Above Average"
As Garrison Keillor quips on his show.
A friend sent me that line in an email about how Canada has succumbed to the whiner and "merit is mean!" types.
Matthew Coutts blogs at Yahoo.ca that a Calgary school has ended its honor roll program because of hurt feelings by those who don't make the cut:
According to an article in the National Post, Calgary's St. Basil Elementary and Junior High School has stopped rewarding Grade 7 to 9 students for academic excellence by ending its honour roll program.While the decision ostensibly punishes those students who would succeed by ending what little we currently do to celebrate academic success, it is made with those who fall short in mind. According to school officials, awarding excellence affects those who don't receive the award more than those who do receive it.
"Awards eventually lose their lustre to students who get them, while often hurting the self-esteem and pride of those who do not receive a certificate," officials said in a letter to parents, obtained by the Post.
True self-esteem is not based on whether you win or lose but whether you acted with integrity.
He quotes the Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz:
What a shock when these kids learn that the real world hurts your feelings time and again. Not only that, the real world doesn't care that it hurt your feelings. It doesn't even care if you pick yourself up and go on -- that's something you need to do for yourself.
Linky Sex
A show-me state.
The Speech The President Should Have Given On Obamacare
Rich Lowry has a great piece in the New York Post -- the speech the President would have given if he were committed to telling the truth instead of selling us all the healthcare version of a really bad lemon of a car:
Some folks are going to lose their insurance. Millions of them, in fact.Let me be clear: Just because you have insurance you like, doesn't mean you can keep it. If it doesn't meet the new federal standards, your plan is going to get canceled. I guarantee it.
...Now, because of the marketplace we'll set up, you're going to go online and shop for new insurance. Some of you are going to get a better deal. If you don't make much money, you're going to get help from the government. [Cheers.]
But let me be clear again -- and Axelrod hates this part [Laughter] -- many of you are going to pay more than you did before. Maybe double. Because all of these new regulations cost money. You don't believe in a free lunch, do you? [Confused murmurs.]
What we're proposing is to get young, healthy people onto the exchanges so they can subsidize everyone else, by buying coverage they don't want or need at a price that is higher than before. Why would they do that, you ask? [Faint laughter.] That's what the individual mandate is all about. We've got to force them.
As for the doctor you like, you might not be able to keep him or her, either. [Murmurs.] If you have to change your plan, your doctor may not be in the network. And to try to keep costs down, the networks in the exchanges are really narrow. By the way, top hospitals probably aren't going to accept a lot of plans from the exchanges, either.
...Now, I can hear some of you right now saying that universal coverage is worth it. [Yeah.] But let's be careful about that. The respected Congressional Budget Office says under my plan tens of millions of people will still be uninsured in 2020.
via @DrEades
The Cluelessness Of Vegans Regarding Slaughtering Animals For Food
Dr. Michael Eades is right on in his 2009 post, "A better way to die?", inspired by a vegan he heard "prattling on about the cruelty of slaughtering animals for food":
These people are clueless. They somehow believe the natural world is a kind, safe place where animals lie about enjoying nature and drift off to sleep when it's time for them to die.
While golfing, he hears odd sounds and comes upon a hawk tearing apart a young crow:
This scenario with the screeching crows diving impotently at the tree while the hawk perched impassively, squeezing the last bits of life from the dying bird, impressed upon me once again the cruelty of life in the wild. Tennyson had it right, "Nature, [is indeed] red in tooth and claw." As I watched it dawned on me that each diving crow was destined for a similar gruesome fate. Even the hawk itself would ultimately come to a bad end when it either got injured or got too old to hunt.There are few easy deaths in the natural world. I hearkened back to my days as a young engineer when I worked for a company that designed and built waste-water, pollution-control systems for various industrial concerns.
...In the course of my time on the job, I spent a fair amount of time in a number of slaughterhouses. I didn't know what to expect the first time I went to one. I had visions of its being some kind of nightmarish charnel house from an Hieronymus Bosch painting with squealing animals trying to escape and blood running knee deep. The reality was anything but.
The slaughter process was orderly and the animals being led in - actually they walked in without being led - calmly trudged to their ends in single file through the narrow chutes. They didn't wail or bellow; they didn't try to escape; no one was standing above them driving them with cattle prods. It was...orderly. That's the best word to describe it.
Once the animals were stunned, they dropped instantly. Workers attached the unconscious beasts to a hoist that lifted them and started them on their way to becoming the meat we buy in the supermarket. I spent countless hours in these facilities, and never saw the cruel treatment of any animals. About the worst that would happen would be that a steer would get turned around in the entry area and cause a little momentary chaos until it got straightened back around.
In the end, he writes this:
Death is almost never pleasant in nature. ... Those of us who eat meat owe it to the animals we consume to do everything in our power to make their lives pleasant and their deaths painless. Thanks to the efforts of Temple Grandin and others - not to mention the financial incentives to provide better quality meat - we can do this. Given the choice, I think domestic animals would quickly throw their lot in with us rather than be left to the tender mercies of nature, which would be the choice made for them if vegan activists were in charge.
It Used To Be "Absolutely Unimaginable That This Could Happen In America"
This is utterly horrible. Horrible, horrible, unwarranted Police State behavior.
A man was given numerous invasive rectal exams, without consent, which found nothing, because cops decided that he "appeared to be clenching his buttocks" after they stopped him for rolling through a stop sign.
These include enemas, anal probes by doctors, sedation and a colonoscopy.
Steve Watson writes at InfoWars.com:
KOB Eyewitness News 4 reports that details of the case emerged during a federal lawsuit recently, with medical records and police reports indicating that deputies with the Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office and police officers with the City of Deming forced David Eckert to undergo multiple anal cavity searches, saying they had probable cause to search for drugs.His crime? Not making a complete stop at a stop sign.
While a doctor at one emergency room refused to go along with the "unethical" process, physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to carry out the anal exams, happy that the police had secured a search warrant from a judge.
...The lawsuit states that Eckert never gave consent for any of the procedures to be carried out and was vocally resistant throughout. In addition, the dubious warrant was not good in the county where the procedures took place. To rub salt in the wounds, the Gila medical center has billed Eckert personally for all EIGHT procedures.
"If the officers in Hidalgo County and the City of Deming are seeking warrants for anal cavity searches based on how they're standing and the warrant allows doctors at the Gila Hospital of Horrors to go in and do enemas and colonoscopies without consent, then anyone can be seized and that's why the public needs to know about this," said Eckert's attorney, Shannon Kennedy, who is arguing that there wasn't sufficient probable cause in the case.
"This is like something out of a science fiction film, anal probing by government officials and public employees," Kennedy stated, noting that the ordeal lasted over 14 hours, with some of the procedures being carried out AFTER the dubious warrant expired.
People need to wake up to what this country is becoming and has become -- ideally, before somebody sticks a latex glove up their ass.
via Jay J. Hector
Eat Fat To Lose Weight. Yes, Really.
A friend emailed me for some tips about low-carbing and I noted, among other things:
Low carb is THE best way to lose and keep off weight but it's best to eat a high fat, low-carb diet. This per Dr. Jeff Volek, a dietary researcher I respect, among others. (I look for a body of work finding the same finding rather than just going by one researcher and one study.)Volek's book is really helpful.
She had been making a common error, eating low-fat meats.
Looking for further information to help her, I found this post by Tom D. Naughton:
Dr. Volek was writing about carbohydrates in that paper, but if excess dietary protein also elevates fasting insulin in some people - even to a relatively small degree - that could cause a similar suppression of ability to burn body fat. That might explain (again, I'm speculating here) why Jimmy regained a lot of weight on his low-carb diet and why he's losing again now. Restricting calories didn't work, adding "safe starches" to his meals didn't work, but lowering his protein intake and getting an even higher proportion of his calories from fat is working, at least so far.
I also sent her to Dr. Michael Eades' blog. He's a terrific source for information on dietary science, and particularly low-carb dietary science. He not only tells you what a study says, he explains the science and what's good and what are any limitations.
Link, Link, Link
Here, here, here...
Playdog Centerfold
Yet another slutty pose by my dog.
Obamacare: Wave Bye-Bye To Low-Cost Health Insurance At Community Colleges
From CBS New York:
Many students have found themselves in health care limbo this semester. Community colleges in New Jersey used to offer cheap health insurance for hundreds of dollars a year but they had to drop the practice because Federal Law prohibits the sale of bare bones policies.Under the Affordable Care Act it would have cost more to run the program and the cost would have been passed on to students.
"More than a thousand dollars per student and that is dramatically different," said Union County Community College, Vice President of Administrative Services, Stephen Nacco said.
Students like Carlos Arias depended on the low-cost health care.
"I'm kind of healthy right now but I am worried that when something happens I'm not going to go to the hospital," Arias said.
The result, from the subhead: "Some students have been left without insurance."
via @JoanneLeeJacobs
The New America We're Living In -- Police State America
Try something -- being shocked like you would about this if it were 1990.
Jdogue1 writes at LSU's Law Review about Fiore v. Walden -- yet another story of a cop confiscating people's cash and making them prove that it wasn't illicitly obtained. (What a quaint reverse on "innocent until proven guilty," huh?)
Airport security searches are a hassle to all travelers. While most passengers make it through a checkpoint with all of their belongings intact, others are not so lucky. Often, personal items such as lighters, face razors, and hand lotion are seized and discarded, much to the dismay of the items' owners. While losing one's favorite brand of shampoo to a security search can easily be written off as a necessary inconvenience of modern-day air travel, losing a personal item worth nearly $100,000 is much harder to stomach. But this is exactly what happened to professional gamblers Gina Fiore and Keith Gipson when Atlanta DEA agents confiscated the couple's hand luggage containing roughly $97,000 in legally obtained winnings. Upset-to say the least-the couple filed suit against the confiscating officers in a Nevada district court. The case eventually made its way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals whose decision on the matter has brought into question a number of longstanding notions regarding a state's ability to exercise personal jurisdiction over foreign residents.The facts of the case are as follows. Returning to Las Vegas after a gambling excursion in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Fiore and Gipson had a layover in Atlanta, during which local DEA Agents-obviously concerned that the exorbitant amount of money was somehow drug related-stopped the couple to inquire into the nature of the funds. Fiore explained to Anthony Walden, one of the questioning officers, that she and Gipson were professional gamblers and that the money in their possession was their "gambling bank" and winnings. Additionally, Fiore showed Walden her trip record, listing all the casinos the couple had recently visited as well as gaming results. Although the couple was residents of both California and Nevada, the couple only showed officer Walden their California drivers' licenses. Unconvinced by the couple's story, officer Walden confiscated the money but told the couple it would be returned to them if they showed proper proof of its validity. After returning to Nevada, Fiore was able to gather this proof, and upon presenting it to officer Walden, the money was returned (seven months after it was confiscated).
Depends Whether It's George Bush Or Barack Obama
Dr. Paul Hsieh about the President's recent, um, um, speakings on Obamacare:
@PaulHsieh
...is remembering all those anti-war bumper stickers: "Bush misspoke, people died!"
Obamacare And The Cancer Survivor Who's Had Her Life-Saving Healthcare Killed
Edie Littlefield Sundby writes in the WSJ:
Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University's Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.
...But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.
You would think it would be simple to find a health-exchange plan that allows me, living in San Diego, to continue to see my primary oncologist at Stanford University and my primary care doctors at the University of California, San Diego. Not so. UCSD has agreed to accept only one Covered California plan--a very restrictive Anthem EPO Plan. EPO stands for exclusive provider organization, which means the plan has a small network of doctors and facilities and no out-of-network coverage (as in a preferred-provider organization plan) except for emergencies. Stanford accepts an Anthem PPO plan but it is not available for purchase in San Diego (only Anthem HMO and EPO plans are available in San Diego).
So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive--but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.
Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.
What happened to the president's promise, "You can keep your health plan"? Or to the promise that "You can keep your doctor"? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.
For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people's ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that's a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that's the point.
Linker Is Quinker
Pick your poison ivy...
I'm Still Not Understanding Why It's Horrible To Go In Costume As Someone Of A Different Skin Color
If you went as me, you'd probably wear a bunch of white stuff on your face because I am white like a bottle of fresh Wite-Out. No, there's no history of white minstrel shows (more about those below), but you wouldn't be going as a negative representation of white people but as me.
The same goes for people who've recently gotten in trouble for darkening their skin to go as black characters from sports and TV.
Juliana Hough went as a character (who happens to be black) from "Orange Is The New Black," and wore makeup to make her skin look more like the actress. And was pilloried for it.
Now, California high school coaches and a volunteer teacher who dressed up as the Jamaican bobsled team -- complete with black faces -- have been suspended. Law professor Jonathan Turley blogs:
They were not doing a minstrel show but were going as the Jamaican bobsled team featured in "Cool Runnings." The party was at the San Diego State University....I certainly understand why many find black face to be offensive and I am surprised that people continue to use it in costumes. However, free speech and association protects different values and expressions. Citizens are not required to satisfy majoritarian views on proper humor or, as the English call it, "fancy dress."
About the minstrel show:
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface.Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, happy-go-lucky, and musical.
Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of what some whites considered significant aspects of black-American culture to be.
About the blackface issue, Hough wrote about her costume:
"I am a huge fan of the show Orange is the New black, actress Uzo Aduba, and the character she has created. It certainly was never my intention to be disrespectful or demeaning to anyone in any way. I realize my costume hurt and offended people and I truly apologize."
If you're a commenter here who happens to be black, do you find any sort of coloring of a person's skin in costume (to go as someone who is black) unacceptable?
Fatscrimination
Agree or disagree with this tweet from Sara E. Mayhew?
@saramayhew
"Fat" isn't what you are, it's something you have. Stop promoting yourself as part of a culture of people discriminated against. @skepchicks
Really Bad Judgment Goes Viral
Being in your early 20s can mean, at least sometimes, being an utter idiot.
I can't exactly brag about all of my judgment at the time.
No, I didn't costume myself as a victim of a recent tragedy where people lost their lives and loved ones and limbs -- as did Alicia Ann Lynch of Michigan.
Laura Beck posted on Jezebel:
Alicia Ann Lynch did something really fucking dumb. On Halloween, the 22-year-old from Michigan tweeted and instagrammed a photo of herself in costume as a Boston Marathon bombing victim. Ouch.She made a mistake; a damn big mistake. Then, she posted that mistake on the Internet, making it into the biggest mistake of her short life*. Angry Internet people made short work of tracking her down and emailing, calling, and threatening to rape and murder her.
And yes, her costume is in terrible taste.
But in ages past, somebody who did something like this would have had small-scale disapproval and probably learned what a jerk she was. At this point, she's lost her job and is still dealing with a flurry of threats of violence and death.
But before people go after somebody like this in horrible and violence-threatening ways, something to consider: You, in your 20s, ever done anything in really terrible taste?
Imagination Unacceptable If It's From A Boy's Mind
Boys are men in progress.
Men evolved to fight battles and defend women, and boys' interests reflect that, like in how they love to play with guns and other war toys.
This doesn't mean they want to go kill all their classmates.
When I grew up, every boy in my neighborhood and school had guns and war toys. How many of the people in my high school class of oh, 365 people, murdered other people? Well, none that I've heard of.
Yet, a headmaster of a Scottsdale Country Day School threatened to expel an 8-year-old for drawing "highly disturbing" pictures.
I'd call them "highly normal pictures."
Rebecca Thomas writes on KPHO.com (where the drawings are pictured):
The three images in question depict a soldier, a ninja and a Star Wars character - possibilities for the 8-year-old's Halloween costume.Each of the drawings show the character holding either a gun or a knife.
"I think we really send our children the wrong message when we show that, as adults, we're so afraid of our shadow that an innocent picture - that any 8-year-old might've drawn - is cause for this kind of concern," said Jeff.
During the meeting, the headmaster also showed Jeff his son's journal, where the headmaster had highlighted words he found violent and unacceptable.
One passage about escaping a killer zombie at a haunted school read:
"I'd open the window, but, stand back quickly. Booby-trapped. Shoot the gadget - a rope gun - I'd swing across without getting hit."
Many of the third-grader's other journal entries were about saving the earth and protecting humanity.
...But Jeff said the headmaster told him he couldn't guarantee the safety of other students with his son around.
Of course, the kid has no history of violence -- but now, simply thinking boythoughts can get you thrown out of school.
via @davekopel, @instapundit
Linkiebellies
Pull out all the pineapple ones for me...
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE SHOW! Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Christopher Chabris On How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Tonight's show is on one of my favorite topics -- irrationality.
We like to believe our decisions are rationally driven and make sense. But constantly, our perception and decision-making are clouded by illusions we aren't even aware we have. Some of these include illusions of accuracy in our attention, memory, confidence, and knowledge. These illusions can lead us to make costly -- and even deadly -- errors.
The good news is, by understanding what these illusions are and how we fall prey to them, we can avoid doing it (or at least do it far less), make more rationally-based decisions, and live smarter overall.
To help us do that, my guest tonight, psychologist and researcher Dr. Christopher Chabris is half of the team (with psychologist and researcher Dan Simons) who did the famous and hilarious "invisible gorilla experiment." It's also the title of their fascinating book, "The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us."
On tonight's show, we'll be discussing this experiment and others, why we are so convinced we're perceiving situations correctly when we're doing anything but, and how we can stop that and live like the rational animals we believe ourselves to be.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/04/dr-christopher-chabris-how-intuition-can-lead-us-astray
Don't miss last week's show, which overturns many of the myths long-held about how to negotiate.
There have been two major schools on negotiating -- Ury, Fisher and Patton's "win-win"/"relationships are everything" approach and Roger Cohen's "nail 'em to the wall" hardball approach.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler finds that these rigid, one-size-fits-all strategies often clash with the real-world realities of negotiating. Drawing on his and his colleagues' research, he finds that the most successful negotiating techniques are born of an ability to adapt while negotiating, and use agility, creativity, and wise preparation.
He'll advise us all on how to adapt (and do all the rest) in order to win in negotiation, the subject of his book we'll be discussing on the show, "The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World."
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/10/28/harvards-michael-wheeler-adaptation-is-key-to-negotiation
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
My New Term: I'm A Personist (As Opposed To A Feminist)
I hope "personist" is a term people will adopt and start using to direct their thinking and behavior -- and especially people who have previously called themselves "feminists."
There's a laughably unrealistic flow chart on how to know whether you're a feminist by Rebecca Searles, the "Social Community Editor" at the HuffPo, who apparently has little interest in how feminism tends to play out in reality.
Feminism professes to be about equal treatment but it is too often about demanding special treatment for women. This is why I am not a feminist. I am a personist. This means I care about injustice, whether it happens to people with ladyparts or manparts.
Being a "personist" means that I am most concerned about the biggest "rape culture," which is the one that men in prison experience. (More men than women are raped in America every year, and most are raped in prison.)
Being a "personist" also means that I expect equal treatment of men and women on the job, meaning that women don't get to demand to be treated like special fragile flowers. Meaning that we expect them to speak up when they're uncomfortable and not wait and snivel -- and snivel and snivel -- and then blow up all over the Internet and get a man fired.
Being a "personist" also means I don't see "sexual harassment" as "whatever a woman says it is," including a lunch conversation from a man with a woman who is not an employee, who is hoping for a blogging job that does not pay, and who becomes uncomfortable with the conversation at lunch but has been trained by feminism that she can just tattle to the authorities at a later date. No need to speak up -- as we'd expect a man to do -- to simply say, "Time to change the subject!"
Are we ladies "equal" -- or just pathetic?
Toxic Feminism And "Sexual Harassment Creep" Ruining Innocent People's Lives
In legal terms, sexual harassment comes in two flavors -- the coercive, quid pro quo kind ("Have sex with me or you lose your job") and the "hostile environment" kind, which involves a work environment "permeated with sexuality." Wayne State law professor Kingsley Browne, the author of the excellent book, Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality, told me via email: "The legal question is whether the harassment is sufficiently 'severe or pervasive,' and the way you show that something is pervasive is to show that there's a lot of it."
Well there's been what I've deemed "sexual harassment creep," in which sexual harassment is now whatever people say it is, like in the case of a woman who got uncomfortable about the lunch conversation with Bora Zivkovic, the then-Scientific American blogs editor -- who has since been fired over this and other accusations of sexual harassment that in no way meet the standards for it.
I've posted on this -- here are a couple of my posts:
About The Bora Controversy: If There's Anything That Makes Women Unequal To Men, It's The Need To Be Treated Like Fragile Pieces Of ChinaAnnouncing "The New Feminism": The Last Thing Some Women Want Is For You To Treat Them As Men's Equals
And because academia has become a sort of witch hunt with ivy for any who don't toe the PC line, I've gotten a number of emails (in addition to comments) from professors who support an equality-driven view of equality, as I do, but who fear academic ruin for saying so publicly.
This means, for example, expecting women to act like adults and speak up when they are uncomfortable about the subject of conversation, rather than tattling to an authority figure. (This is the standard, for instance, in stalking. You can't complain to the police that a person is stalking you unless you've told them you don't want the contact.)
I got a great detailing of some of the injustice that's been done (and the sick thinking that goes into these revelations) from a professor I know who needs to remain anonymous. I'm posting it below.
Here's my timeline about recent events that occurred after Bora Zivkovic was accused of sexual harassment. It paints a dire picture of Stephanie Zvan's eagerness to indict people for "harassment" without identifying first whether the evidence for such behavior exists. This rush to judgment is an endemic problem in the online atheist community, but is particularly pervasive at Freethought Blogs.1. Bora, who claimed that the first report of harassment (sexually suggestive conversation) was a one-off affair, didn't tell the truth: several other women accused him of similar harassment and, in light of that, he resigned his position as head of science blogs for Scientific American.
2. Christie Wilcox, a grad student at the University of Hawaii who blogs on the Discover network (her site is called "Science Sushi"), was, I believe, mentored by Bora at one time.
3. When the Bora affair happened, Wilcox put up a post on her site expressing disapproval of Bora's behavior.
4. Stephanie Zvan, a particularly nasty and vindictive blogger at Freethought Blogs, had already written a post criticizing Bora, and wrote a message of sympathy on Twitter to one of the women who had reportedly been harassed by Bora.
5. Wilcox "favorited" Zvan's tweet.
6. Zvan then used Wilcox's "favorite" as an excuse for posting some information about Christie that Zvan had been holding onto since 2011.
The information revealed by Zvan was this: Wilcox was at some alcohol-laden karaoke bash and tried to kiss a guy on the lips. He pulled away, which made her angry. Wilcox then tried to kiss a woman on the lips; she pulled away, too.
This was apparently construed by Zvan as "harassment". Zvan then revealed that Wilcox had continued to harass the guy (who was married), sending him "frequent and inappropriate text messages." At the 2012 Science Online conferene, Zvan said that Wilcox even went to his room, winding up on the bed while the guy slept in a chair. This, too, was seen as sexual harassment.
Zvan, then, took Wilcox to task for being infatuated with this guy, casting Wilcox as a harasser almost on par with Bora.
But it turned out that Zvan didn't have all the details.
Wilcox was blindsided, of course; why would Zvan hold onto this information and finally reveal it after two years? Zvan's explanation was that it showed that sexual harassment was not limited to males harassing females, but could go the other way as well. But that doesn't hold water in light of the two-year delay.
7. Then another science blogger--the married guy--outed himself; it turned out to be Brian Switek, who blogs about dinosaurs and paleontology for National Geographic.
I don't know why Switek revealed his identity, since nobody had done so before. Perhaps it was in support of Wilcox, since he also revealed that the attraction was not one-sided: they had both sent salacious text messages to each other. In other words, it was an on-again-off-again business (I don't think they actually had sex), with Switek and Wilcox texting each other amorously, and then Switek, feeling guilty about doing this while married to someone else, repeatedly pulling back. He finally wrote a blog post explaining what happened.
8. Zvan's original post about Wilcox disappeared, and she offered a rather lame apology for her accusations. It included this:
"I mistook being part of a set of events as they unfolded as being the same thing as having a full enough view of those events to know that I could comment on them without getting her perspective. I should not have done that. As a result, I published an account of her actions that has not fully stood up in the face of further scrutiny. For that, I am truly sorry."
I take this convoluted explanation to mean that Zvan rushed to judgment without doing her homework, which to me bespeaks an eagerness to smear someone without proper investigation.
***
The upshot is that accusations of sexual harassment are flying thick and fast, yet much of it, as in the Switek/Wilcox case, seems to involve normal sexuality, often expressed under the influence of alcohol.
Of course I deplore mistreatment or harassment of anybody by the opposite sex, especially when that involves the coercion inherent in a power imbalance; but this isn't what happened with Wilcox and Switek. The episode appears to depict only two people attracted to each other, with one of them married. Svan mistakenly damaged three lives just to make her point that "women can harass, too." Lord knows what kind of shape Switek's marriage is in. Svan has apologized, but the damage was done. This is what happens in a rush to judgment--a frenzied "witch hunt" to root out all vestiges of perceived sexism. And it has gone too far.
This is probably more than you want to know, but so be it. It's gotten to the point that if two people have sex when both are inebriated, the male--but not the female--is deemed a rapist. I don't understand why the woman isn't a rapist, too.
Several of my female friends, who are strong women, have objected to this "women-as-fragile-china" business, and for so doing have been accused of being "sister shamers" or "chill girls." It's even been insinuated that they do this to court powerful men or get invitations to conferences. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The piling-on of the atheist bloggers, particularly at Freethought Blogs, has been hurtful to these women, which is bad. But I hope it's also been hurtful to Freethought Blogs, which are increasingly turning into the Sex Police. The Freethought-Blog version of feminism seems to be mostly about slut-shaming and defaming anyone who doesn't do exactly what those self-proclaimed Arbiters of Purity deem acceptable behavior. That's hardly freethinking!
Undercover Cop Makes $30 Pot Bust -- On Bernie Goetz
Police resources are being used to entrap those big-time criminals, people who see the opportunity to make two or three $10 bills by selling some of their pot stash. That's how it comes off to me, at least. Michael Schwirtz writes in The New York Times that the subway rider who became famous in the 80s for shooting four teens who tried to mug him is back in the news:
Mr. Goetz, 65, was arrested Friday evening after attempting to sell $30 worth of marijuana to the female officer, the police said. The officer approached him in Union Square and asked if he was selling, according to the police. Mr. Goetz said that he was, and went back to his apartment. When he returned, about 7:30 p.m., he was arrested....On Saturday evening, Mr. Goetz was arraigned on charges of possession and the sale of marijuana, and released on his own recognizance, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office. His next court appearance was scheduled for Dec. 18.
The story was first reported in The New York Post, which tells a slightly different and somewhat incoherent story.
Two comments from the Post:
Swapster.com
Thanks for serving the community, Mr. Police State. You should all be proud... you got a $30 tissue package of weed off the streets.david ng
The cops busted Bernie for $30 worth of pot? He is probably trying to pick up the woman. Are they kidding me? Where were the police when 200 NYers call about the Biker s attacking innocent SUV family with a 2 year old child on board? Wait a minute, the undercover cops were there helping the biker gangs!
Linkage
The age of aquariums.
"I Am A Princess And You Are Not"
Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested, mostly looks like she is posing for paparazzi. 
In Palace news earlier Thursday, the princess had her butt shaved.
Boston Bombing And The TSA: Treating Everyone As A Suspect Is Too Much Noise
From Washington's Blog, mass surveillance REDUCES our ability to stop terror attacks:
We've extensively documented that mass surveillance does NOT help prevent terror attacks.Top experts have said that treating everyone like a potential terrorist WEAKENS our ability to protect America.
The former head of the NSA's global intelligence gathering operations - William Binney - says that the current spying program not only violates Americans' privacy, but sucks up so much data that it INTERFERES with the government's ability to catch bad guys.
They quote an Israeli-American terrorism expert, Barry Rubins, who talks about what I've said about the TSA but applies it to the NSA's efforts to spy on everybody with a telephone:
What is most important to understand about the revelations of massive message interception by the U.S. government is this:In counterterrorist terms, it is a farce. Basically the NSA, as one of my readers suggested, is the digital equivalent of the TSA strip-searching an 80 year-old Minnesota grandmothers rather than profiling and focusing on the likely terrorists.
There is a fallacy behind the current intelligence strategy of the United States, the collection of massive amounts of phone calls, emails, and even credit card expenditures, up to 3 billion phone calls a day alone, not to mention the government spying on the mass media. It is this:
The more quantity of intelligence, the better it is for preventing terrorism.
In the real, practical world this is--though it might seem counterintuitive--untrue.
...If, however, the material is almost limitless, that actually weakens a focus on the most needed intelligence regarding the most likely terrorist threats. Imagine, for example, going through billions of telephone calls even with high-speed computers rather than, say, following up a tip from Russian intelligence on a young Chechen man in Boston who is in contact with terrorists or, for instance, the communications between a Yemeni al-Qaida leader and a U.S. army major who is assigned as a psychiatrist to Fort Hood.
That is why the old system of getting warrants, focusing on individual email addresses, or sites, or telephones makes sense, at least if it is only used properly. Then those people who are communicating with known terrorists can be traced further. There are no technological magic spells.
It's Not The "Radical Shaykh"; It's Islam
It is Islam that is "radical" -- in its demands to slaughter the "other" (non-Muslims), stone women for "adultery" (including rape not witnessed by four men), and slaughter gays.
Linksplotting
The links thicken...
LAX TSA Shooting: TSA's Pretend Security Has Its Price
As I've said over and over, we are less safe thanks to the TSA gathering us like sitting ducks to wait to go through their pretend security. From the AP:
Gannon says the gunman entered the terminal, pulled an assault rifle from a bag and began shooting at a screening checkpoint before entering the terminal.
The TSA has never caught a terrorist. But now people are injured and at least one person is dead thanks to the bullshit security theater they put on, gathering targets together for any shooter.
Tweet-hat
A tweet from @Popehat:
The most unrealistic part of the Viagra ads is showing household remodeling projects leading to implied sex instead of bitter recrimination.
Don't Fuck Me Pumps
Got this shoe ad emailed to me. Should have had a subject line like "Shoes to keep men from wanting to have sex with you." 
The Obama Admin's Obamacare Lies Made Plain
Megan McArdle goes back in time, looks at the promises (the lies), and lays them out on Bloomberg:
The administration reiterated that, in Obama's words, "We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period." They also promised that the average family would save $2,500 a year on premiums. There was no fine print about how some folks would lose their insurance, be forced into narrower doctor networks, and see premiums rise, even though they seem to have known what was going to happen.And the wonk community did not exactly hasten to disabuse them. The risks of higher premiums for some were acknowledged in an aside, but they were not headlined. Unless you were reading volumes of writing about health care very carefully indeed, it wasn't hard to miss that little detail -- at least one former Democratic staffer whose boss voted for the law seems to have been unaware that this was a possibility until her rates increased.
For that matter, I still see regular commenters on the liberal wonk blogs that I read repeating the canards about cost savings from uncompensated care, preventive medicine and so forth. I know that many of them were reading those blogs when they pointed out that these things aren't true, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in, perhaps because these pronouncements did not get quite as much airtime as analysis of the benefits of the law.
A history lesson from CNN's Political Ticker blog -- that "Senate Democrats supported rule that led to insurance cancellations." Chris Frates writes:
Washington (CNN) - Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama's promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.
McArdle via @instapundit
Campus Leftists Vs. Free Speech
Peter Beinart has a wise piece up at The Daily Beast on the wrong-headed shutting down of NYPD police chief Ray Kelly's talk at Brown University by students angered by the NYPD's racial profiling. Beinert writes:
Unfortunately, they're the latest in a long line of campus activists who believe their anger trumps other people's free speech.Kelly is only the most recent victim. In 2002, protesters prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at Montreal's Concordia University. In 2009, activists at the University of North Carolina shut down a planned speech by anti-immigration congressman Tom Tancredo.
There's something deeper going on here. On the surface, campuses like Brown's seem hegemonically liberal. But in my experience, that apparent consensus conceals a crucial gulf between students and faculty who hold left of center opinions but accept basic norms of fair play and students who consider freedom of speech a scam employed by the powers that be to perpetuate their racism/sexism/classism/imperialism/homophobia. Convinced that freedom of speech is an illusion denied them outside the university gates, they take revenge in the one arena where the balance of forces tilt their way.
...To my mind, Ray Kelly's policies towards African Americans, Latinos and Muslims are abusive and unfair. I cringed at the prospect of him becoming Secretary of Homeland Security. But that's beside the point right now. Every decent liberal should defend his right to speak against the latter-day totalitarians who denied it yesterday.
It is totalitarianism to shut down speech, even speech you find utterly deplorable.
The way you deal with that speech, as I've written many times before, is with more speech.
A comment under Beinert's piece:
Resiliant
I make no judgement here about Ray Kelly or NYPD's policies.These Brown students are just immature and uninformed students. As a college professor, I can tell you that 1) More than half have no understanding of the Constitution and its Amendments, 2) Many cannot even correctly tell you how many stripes there are in the American flag and what they stand for, 3) There is no room for views other than their own because they already know all there is to know AND, 4) As one student told me, "Right or wrong, we all stick together." They planned ahead and went together to a presentation with their "stick together minds" made up.
Some students will mature, and some will not; some will become more informed and many will not.
The Hindenburg Haunts Hydrogen Technology
My dear friend David Wallis has a piece on this in The New York Times:
WHEN Rebecca Markillie of ITM Power in Sheffield, England, attends trade shows to promote her company's ambitious plan to build hydrogen fueling stations for cars in Britain, she sometimes must calm skittish consumers. "You get people saying, 'Oh, no: hydrogen. That is dangerous,' " she said. "And you go, 'Well, why do you say that?' And straightaway, the only knowledge of hydrogen would be the Hindenburg."Thomas Kosbau, principal of Ore Design and Technology in Brooklyn, which hopes to power homes by harnessing algae that produce hydrogen, often deals with similar doubts from investors. The Hindenburg, he frets, "is synonymous with hydrogen technology."
The Hindenburg, a diesel-propelled Zeppelin held aloft by hydrogen, erupted in flames and crashed in Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937, killing 36 people.
The film of the silver giant floating in the sky, then suddenly catching fire and crumpling to the ground, and the emotional recorded dispatch from the scene of the radio reporter Herbert Morrison -- "Oh, the humanity!"-- retains a jaw-dropping power.
...The behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions," imagines that the hydrogen-Hindenburg association develops through an unconscious question-and-answer session: "What do I know about the risk of hydrogen? Let me try to remember past cases that used hydrogen? Oh, yes, I remember the Hindenburg explosion -- very vividly. It thus must be the case that this is dangerous."
Consumers, he observes in an email, tend to search their memories for dangerous examples, "and if they find one, they estimate the risk as much higher."
Sausage Links
Bacon's next of kin.
