You Can Almost Picture Her Ancestor, The Wolf
(I did say almost.)
Sorry, But IVF Should NOT Be Covered By Health Insurance
From a Vanessa Grigoriadis interview in NY Mag with performer Tanya Selvaratnam, who thinks the rest of us should not only pay for all women's IVF but their egg freezing:
Even though IVF can't fix every fertility problem, it is the most successful treatment we have to help older women get pregnant. Do you think American health insurance should cover IVF?Absolutely. Look at Israel. They have one of the highest utilization rates of IVF, and also one of the highest success rates, because they have pioneered how to make IVF free and accessible to all people. The proof is in the pudding. The economic segregation of who can pursue fertility treatments is just wrong. Every doctor and infertility consultant that I spoke to about this issue agrees -- the insurance system and the political system has to change. We have to start considering infertility as a disease and, in that sense, developing funding and infrastructures that deal with it as a disease, because seeing it as a luxury, like dermatology or plastic surgery, something that's elective, is totally bogus.
A lot of women who use IVF do so because they waited till 42 to get pregnant. Thanks, they can pay the price and not seek a handout from the rest of us. (Your choices, your wallet. I can't afford the new price of my healthcare, as jacked up by Obamacare, as it is.)
Furthermore, not being able to get pregnant isn't an illness that needs to be cured on the dime of the rest of us. If you can't have children that come out of your body, you can have foster children or adopted children.
As for the "unfairness" of this: Shall we talk about the "economic segregation" that prohibits me from having a Bel Air mansion with a guest house and a helipad?
The Kids Are Alright; It's the "Educators" Who Are Morons
Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today that research by professors Jacqueline Wooley at the University of Texas and Paul Harris at Harvard finds a surprising degree of sophistication among preschoolers, who are quite good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. It's the teachers and administrators who have a hard time with it:
At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That's right - - not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction, tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a "threat" in class.To be fair, it probably takes a lot of imagination to turn what sounds like a bit of old-fashioned cowboys-and-Indians play into a "threat." But while the principal, John Horton, gets an "A" for imagination, he deserves an "F" for distinguishing between imagination and reality. Sadly, he's not alone.
You've probably also heard about the 7-year-old Maryland boy who was suspended for gnawing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. And then there's the case of the 8-year-old Arizona boy whose drawings of ninjas and Star Wars characters -- and interest in, gasp, zombies -- led to threats of expulsion. And, of course, there's the six-year-old boy charged with "sexual harassment" for kissing a girl. So much for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.
So is this steady stream of incidents an indication of widespread mental deficiency among America's K-12 educators? In a word, yes.
It's already well-established that education majors have the lowest test scores of any college major, but nonetheless tend to graduate with high grades. That certainly suggests a lack of critical faculties. But the constant stream of stories of zero-tolerance stupidity suggests that there's something more lacking here than just academic smarts: There seems to be a severe deficit of the very sort of critical thinking that the education industry purports to be instilling in kids. One might dismiss any one of these events as an isolated incident, but when you have -- as we clearly do -- a never ending supply of such incidents, they're no longer isolated: They're a pattern.
Who Pays? Brain-Dead Girl To Be Kept On Life Support (After Her Actually Not-So-Routine Tonsillectomy)
Tragic story -- a 13-year-old girl went into hospital for a (supposedly -- see below) "routine tonsillectomy," and something went terribly wrong. The hospital called the procedure a "complicated" one. The girl is now brain dead.
Terry Collins wrote on December 21st for the AP that her family fought in court -- and won a restraining order against the hospital -- in their battle to keep her on life support:
"Ms. McMath is dead and cannot be brought back to life," the hospital said in the memo, adding: "Children's is under no legal obligation to provide medical or other intervention for a deceased person."The family filed a request Friday for a temporary restraining order prohibiting the hospital from taking Jahi off life support or any of her other current treatment.
At the hearing later, the hospital's attorney, Doug Straus, said two doctors unaffiliated with the hospital examined Jahi and concluded that she was brain dead. But he said, "We're happy to cooperate with the judge's suggestion that an independent expert be provided to confirm yet again that brain death is the outcome that has occurred here."
The family's attorney, Christopher Dolan, said the family wanted independent tests of their own because they do not believe the hospital's physicians are sufficiently independent.
The deadline has now been extended to January 7.
Brain death is "the irreversible end of brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) due to total necrosis of the cerebral neurons following loss of brain oxygenation. It should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state."
About that supposedly "routine tonsillectomy" theden.tv reports:
Every single report states that it is a simple tonsillectomy, but that is not the whole truth. The media knows this, but fails to report it and continues the charade. The court documents state that it was far more involved. This is not a simple tonsils-out-and-ice-cream-later procedure but a uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UP3). The AP and Huffpo call it a simple tonsillectomy despite there being court documents that show it was a UP3. A UP3 is invasive, risky and comes with complications, per the NY Times and many sleep disorder forums. They want you to think this was just a tonsillectomy to help the eventual shakedown by the family with this lawyer's help because readers will be shocked to think someone could die from a tonsillectomy.A simple question no media member is asking is why a thirteen-year-old is getting a UP3. A UP3 is a surgery to help people suffering from sleep apnea. They never say she suffered from sleep apnea, because to mention it would distort the narrative. How is a thirteen-year-old already suffering from sleep apnea? Google Image search results show Jahi McMath as obese.
This is the world of obese America, where we see a rise in sleep apnea due to 1/3 of the US being overweight and 1/3 being obese. You probably have a family member with one of those sleep masks to keep an oxygen flow going, and they are probably overweight. This should not affect a thirteen-year-old. Kids are developing not only adult problems, but problems that only fat adults have.
The greater conversation is about obesity and the culpability of the obese themselves. There are money quotes from the mother of McMath about her child being perfectly fine before going to that hospital, but no one bothers to mention her daughter being obese to the point of needing surgery to prevent her from dying in her sleep. Obese is not fine. Maybe they did try a weight loss program, and momma didn't 'mom up' and work hard on getting her kid in shape.
All surgery comes with risk, and obesity sets up people for long term health problems.
And it increases the risks from surgery.
Obamacare Forces Vending Machines Companies To List Calorie Counts
This will only cost them, oh, $25 million or so -- a cost which will be passed on to the people buying food out of vending machines. If you really want to know the calories in a Snickers bar, can't you look the info up on your damn phone?
(warning -- autoplay video at link.)
Slinky
Happy Earth Day, Mr. President...
Why Many Women Become Veterinarians And Few Become Engineers
Terrific long read by Christina Hoff Sommers at American.com. An excerpt:
Rachel Maines, a visiting scholar in science and technology studies at Cornell University, recently wrote an essay expressing amazement with women's progress in veterinary medicine compared with engineering. Nationally, women now comprise fully 77 percent of students in veterinary schools, compared with 8 percent in the 1960s. Maines writes, "To be sure, puppies are cuter than microchips, but most of what veterinarians do isn't about cute. Veterinary medicine...remains irreducibly bloody, messy, and often hazardous.... It certainly requires a rigorous scientific education that is at least as difficult and daunting as what engineering demands."If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination, Congress would be holding hearings on the underrepresentation of men in higher education.
Maines is surprised that women have managed so rapidly to take over this male-centered, science-based field without the benefit of bias workshops or federal equity initiatives. Cornell, she notes, just received a $3.3 million grant from the NSF to build a "critical mass" of women in all the STEM disciplines--ASAP. It is a first principle of the equity movement that role models and mentors are essential for helping women to move ahead in a field. But where, asks Maines, were the mentors and role models in veterinary medicine? She urges her colleagues to study the mystery of what happened.Theorists like Baron-Cohen may have solved the mystery. If he is right, veterinary medicine would be a dream job for the scientifically gifted but empathy-driven female. This challenging and exciting field appeals to the feminine propensity to protect and nurture--and the desire to work with living things. There is an immense literature documenting male and female differences in choice of vocation. It also goes without saying that there are a lot of women who will defy the stereotype of their sex and gladly enter systematizing fields, free of people, children, or animals--professions like mechanical engineering, metallurgy, or agronomy. But the number of men eager to enter these fields is markedly greater.
Back to Math 55 for a moment. Baron-Cohen, along with many other scholars who write about cognitive sex differences, would not be surprised to learn that students who show up in 55 are overwhelmingly male. The Harvard registrar's office reports that a total of 17 women have completed the course since 1990. Still, the equity activists could be right that the few women who defy the stereotype and take such a course have to overcome a "chilly environment."
I located two female survivors--Sherry Gong, currently enrolled, and Kelley Harris, who completed Math 55 with an A last year. "Did you encounter a hostile environment in that class?" I asked Miss Harris. She laughed. "I loved my classmates!" When she once thought of dropping out, it was her male friends in the course who persuaded her to stay. Sherry Gong was taken aback when inquired whether she felt that women in math were unwelcome or marginalized. It was as if I had asked whether women had the vote. "It is 2007!" she reminded me. Sergei Bernstein, a young man now enrolled, told me, "We would like to have more girls."
Professor Emanuel said that although the discrimination report was 'widely praised in public, it was privately deplored and disparaged in the hallways of MIT.'
The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women's and men's career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible. So the question arises: How have so many officials at the NSF and NAS and so many legislators been persuaded that we are facing a science crisis that Title IX enforcement and gender-bias workshops can resolve?
The Death Of A Free Country: Saliva And Blood To Be Taken From Drivers At New Year's Checkpoints
There was some lame LA Times story about this that deemed the drug swabbing of Los Angeles motorists to be "voluntary." I knew that had to be bullshit.
Here's a more likely scenario from PoliceStateUSA:
LOS ANGELES, CA -- As drivers prove their innocence at warrantless police checkpoints this New Year, they will not only be scrutinized over their potential consumption of alcohol. A new technology will enable the police to detect and arrest drivers for having marijuana, narcotics, and "other drugs" in their bloodstreams.The recently unveiled device is a portable saliva swab analyzer, capable of immediately sampling body fluids for the presence of foreign intoxicants. The machines were paid for by grants from the state.
...During police roadblocks, drivers are stopped without probable cause and forced into non-consensual interactions with government agents in which they must demonstrate their sobriety before being allowed to continue traveling down the public street.
The saliva swabs are but one of the searches that police can coerce a driver into allowing. Should the driver refuse a saliva search, the police can seek a warrant for a forced blood draw. Often in large checkpoint operations, a judge is placed on-call or on-site to sign such warrants to confiscate blood.
Such events are called "No Refusal" checkpoints, and they are gaining popularity in many states, such as Tennessee and Georgia. And with the new focus on targeting marijuana and narcotics, we can probably expect to see more of them than ever.
Officials claimed the device could detect marijuana, narcotics, and "other drugs." With approximately 7 out of 10 Americans taking some sort of prescription drug, according to the Mayo Clinic, the question is raised about how many drivers will be arrested because of their prescribed medications.
In a free society, people would not have to be hassled and forced to prove their innocence while traveling down public streets. Police would be better utilized by spreading themselves out and actually looking for reasons to justifiably stop vehicles for breaking traffic laws.
It is one thing if cops see somebody driving recklessly -- whether it's because they had one-too-many beers or they're putting on their mascara in the rear-view. But we have these stops -- treating all citizens behind the wheel as criminals unless they prove otherwise -- because so few people care about the ongoing diminishment of civil liberties in this country.
Overreach By The Federal Government On Pot Shops, Pot Smokers
It is outrageous that we have allowed the government to tell us what substances we are allowed to put in our bodies. I turned on CNN last night while heating dinner and heard a piece with Morgan Spurlock that featured an Oakland pot business, "Harborside Health Center."
Now, I do think there's a lot of bullshit surrounding people's "medical need" for pot, but it comes out of the ridiculous government prohibition. (Sure, there are those whose ailments are helped by pot.)
I'm blogging about this because I was utterly disgusted in hearing about the Federal war on pot shops. There was a pot shop in my neighborhood, and frankly, their business was one of the best neighbors in my neighborhood -- quiet, no problems since they'd opened maybe four years ago. (They were forced to close because they were supposedly "too close" to a youth center, which is actually blocks away, in the neighborhood. I never see kids there but if there were kids there, they can go right into the liquor store and shoplift beer, easy-peasy. The pot shop has an armed guard and probably didn't let anybody in who was under 18.)
About that pot business in the CNN piece, here's a piece on it from February 2013 on HuffPo, by Carly Schwartz:
SAN FRANCISCO -- Oakland's Harborside Health Center, which bills itself as the "largest pot shop on the planet," was dealt a major legal setback last week when a federal judge rejected a lawsuit the city had filed on behalf of the popular dispensary.U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James dismissed the City of Oakland's suit against Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag that had sought to block Harborside's closure. Haag began proceedings in July to shut down the business on the grounds that it had become too large of an operation. Harborside remains open while it challenges the federal effort in court.
"We are, of course, disappointed in today's ruling," said Steve DeAngelo, Harborside's executive director, in a statement. "In the meantime, Harborside will continue to provide our patients with the very best cannabis medicines we can find, in the safest and most beautiful environment we can create, with the very highest level of care and service."
With outposts in Oakland and San Jose, the marijuana megastore serves nearly 108,000 patients and sells roughly $20 million in products each year, generating $3 million in annual local, state and federal tax revenue. Its community, which includes the city of Oakland, has spent the past seven months fighting to save the business.
In a court hearing last month, Oakland attorneys argued that closing Harborside would devastate the health and well-being of many residents, as well as city revenue. Representatives from the Justice Department countered that Oakland had no place in the case, because the city doesn't own the building where Harborside operates.
Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996, when voters passed the landmark Proposition 215. But the drug remains illegal under federal law. In late 2010, the Obama administration launched an aggressive crackdown on California's flourishing cannabis industry. Over the past year and a half, hundreds of dispensaries have shuttered, leaving thousands without work.
Here's a highly successful business bringing revenue to the city and products the citizens want and the government responds by trying to kill it.
Our pothead president.
Volokh bloggers weigh in here, here, here. Reason debate on marijuana and states' rights.
Clinky
Raise an ass to the New Year! Sorry -- that is, a glass. (The ass is too heavy to lift with a single hand.)
Why Go Naked?
Holiday sale. Up to 30 percent off Levis for men, women, boys, girls, and babies. (Babies wear Levis?) At Amazon
Everything else you could possibly want (except illegal drugs and hookers) here.
Thanks to all who bought through my Amazon links all year. It helps support the work I do on this site, helps keep my lights on, and is much appreciated.
Advice Goddess Radio ("Best Of" Replay): Tonight, 7-8pm PT -- Fred Hahn On Science-Based Fitness: How To Be Healthier Than A Fitness Fanatic With Only 15 Minutes Of Exercise
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
I have a rerun for you this week -- but a very good one as well as a very topical one, because a lot of people use January 1st as their start date for getting healthy (and slimmer).
On this show, exercise trainer and rehab expert Fred Hahn explains why slow-speed strength training for just a few minutes a week will make you healthier than that fitness nut who spends his or her week running miles upon miles in the rain and hours in the gym. (He lays out fascinating and solid evidence throughout the show.)
Fred is co-author, with Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, whom I greatly respect, of The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution: The Slow-Motion Exercise That Will Change Your Body In 30 Minutes A Week.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/30/fred-hahn-on-science-based-exercise
Don't miss last week's show with "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams. Adams, obviously, is not a scientist. But he thinks and views his experiences like a scientist and his wisdom is well-supported and worth hearing.
For example, Adams found that it isn't goals that are the key to success, but what he calls "systems."
And Adams advises, based on his own steady stream of failures in business, that "Everything you want in life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out."
As a cartoonist, he thinks of himself as a "professional simplifier." That's what he does in his just-published book, How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and simplifying for all of us what it takes to succeed in business and be happy in life is what he'll be doing on tonight's not-to-be-missed show.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/23/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-adams-on-how-to-fail-your-way-to-success
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.
$100 Million Worth Of Airport "Security" And It Takes Them A Day To Notice That A Guy In A Dress Hopped The Fence At Newark Airport
Ray Sanchez and Ben Brumfeld write for CNN:
The breach at Newark exposed a failure of a $100 million system designed to protect New York City area airports....When Siyah Bryant, 24, allegedly mounted the barrier at Newark Liberty International Airport, it went unnoticed for a day. On Thursday, a review of security camera footage revealed his ascent, according to Port Authority police.
The cross-dressed suspect then ran across two runways to get to Terminal C, two police sources said. Nobody saw it, but he was literally on the screen at the time.
The security apparatus in the Perimeter Intrusion Detection System (PIDS) made by Raytheon Co. combines radar with video cameras, motion detectors and "smart" fencing, according to the maker's website.
Raytheon executives' mansions, and those of their lobbyists, however, are most likely quite secure.
Another Phony Peace Initiative In Israel
Anyone who has the slightest understanding of Islam understands this: There will never be "peace" between the Israelis and the "Palestinians" because Islam commands the death of Jews and hatred toward Jews more than any other people or religion.
Yet our oily idiot Secretary of State John Kerry has brokered a deal for the release of a bunch of Palestinians who cold-bloodedly murdered Israelis, including the elderly, walking to work and otherwise going about their lives.
Sharona Schwartz writes at The Blaze:
Families of those killed by the convicted terrorists are blasting the government for agreeing to release the 26 before they have completed their sentences....Among the prisoners set to be freed are those who stabbed, shot, and strangled their victims, including at least two elderly Israelis.
Some examples include: Abu Mohsin Khaled Ibrahim Jamal who was convicted of stabbing to death 76-year-old gardener Shlomo Yahya whom he ambushed in a public park in 1991.
Abu al Rub Mustafa Mahmoud Faisal and Kamil Awad Ali Ahmad were convicted of murder after killing 20-year-old Israel Defense Forces soldier Yoram Cohen. Ali Ahmad "was also convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 15 Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel," the Times of Israel reported.
Sawafta Sudqi Abdel Razeq Mouhlas was convicted of stabbing Israeli Yosef Malka to death while trying to rob his home in Haifa in 1990.
Mahmud Muhammad Salman was convicted of murder after strangling his victim, Shai Shoker, with a shoelace in 1994.
Barham Fawzi Mustafa Nasser was an employee of Morris (Moshe) Edri. That didn't stop Nasser from stabbing his former boss in the back, literally, killing the 65-year-old in 1993.
Though Muhammad Yusuf Adnan Elafandi in 1992 stabbed two youths in Jerusalem, an Israeli woman saved his life when a lynch mob targeted him.
A court ruled that Abu Hadir Muhammad Yassin Yassin had shot 24-year-old Yigal Shahaf in the head when Shahaf and his wife were walking toward the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City.
Damara Ibrahim Mustafa Bilal was convicted of murdering 48-year-old Steven Friedrich Rosenfeld, who was born in the U.S. and lived in Israel. "Damra and several others accosted Rosenfeld outside the West Bank settlement of Ariel, grabbed the knife he was carrying, and stabbed him to death with it. His body was found on the following day by a Palestinian shepherd," the Times of Israel reported.
Also set to be released are Muammar Ata Mahmoud Mahmoud and Salah Khalil Ahmad Ibrahim, who were convicted of murdering 64-year-old Menahem Stern. Stern was a history professor and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize and was stabbed to death while walking to work in 1989.
Murderers of Jews like these are glorified as heroes in Arab society.
It's a truly sick society that makes heroes of the sorts of animals that do this -- as commanded by their religion:
Hadas Fogel, three months old, was killed by terrorists on March 11, 2011. The terrorists confessed that they left the Fogel home after murdering Hadas' parents and two sleeping brothers but returned to murder Hadas when they heard her start crying.
via @Drudge
A Body Should Not Have Parts Pre-Hacked
If you, once you can talk and make rational decisions, decide that you want to have a part of your body sliced off, well, have at it. Before that time, unless there's some medical need, nobody should be hacking off any bits of your body.
There's a battle by divorced parents in Israel over whether their young male child should be circumcised. The mother stands against circumcision; the father is demanding the kid have his foreskin hacked off. There's a piece (in need of a copyeditor) by Rebecca Wald at an anti-circ blog called Beyond the Bris. An excerpt:
Rebecca Steinfeld, a political scientist at SOAS, University of London, who has written and broadcast on the history and ethics of circumcision, told me she sees it another way. "If the rabbinical judges coerce Elinor into circumcising her son, her right to freedom of conscience would be violated," she said. "By compelling her to irreversibly remove a healthy part of her son's genitals without his consent, the rabbinical judges would also undermine her son's rights to bodily integrity--a cornerstone of post-Holocaust human rights law--and an open future, since he would have to live forever with his father's and the judges' choice."Steinfeld points out that "most criticisms of the rabbinical judgment focus solely on the violation of the mother's rights, but it is important to remember that the child's rights would also be undermined if Israel's High Court of Justice fails to overturn this unprecedented ruling."
Faceblots
A Facebook friend posted a photo of a cloud formation somebody thought looked like an angel, and until I read the inscription, I thought it looked like a glowing hot pink vagina.
For The Guy Who Has Almost Everything
His own drone: DJI Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter with Integrated FPV Camcorder (White)
Less loftily-priced year-end deals are here, at Amazon
Minkie
Linkie in a fur coat.
Snoop Buys A Nail Gun
Love this scene from The Wire
And yes, I'm an Omar fan.
The Obama Redistribution
Wendy McElroy writes at The Daily Bell:
A friend is celebrating the season by visiting her children in the States. Like many millennials, her 20-something son is working brutal hours for minimum wage at an unfulfilling job. After visiting with him and his girlfriend, my friend emailed, "These kids are SO stuck in not being able to even pay their rent that they have no energy left to dream anything."A similar story is playing out in family after family across America. Twenty-somethings are holding down two minimum wage jobs because no one wants to hire full-time people for whom they might have to provide health insurance. In a stagnant economy, their unemployment tops the chart. Meanwhile, they are saddled with debt and taxes for entitlements they will probably never receive, like social security.
As I moved through the day, my friend's words haunted me. They perched at the back of my mind as I read a New York Times article that was an odd combination of proclaiming the obvious and writhing to avoid it. One quote captures the dance: "These days the word ["redistribution"] is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans.... But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall." The obvious: The core goal of Obamacare is the redistribution of wealth. The writhing: Obama lied, only he had to lie because of those wretched Republicans.
Paglia On The Sex Education Girls Really Need
From a Bari Weiss piece about Paglia in the WSJ:
Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."
Campus Free Speech Is Now Pretend Free Speech
From a Slate piece by Rebecca Schuman:
The true defining characteristic of the average contemporary academic is total, abject terror of saying anything that might jeopardize her career. Lest a single unfavorable moment be seen by a colleague or administrator, junior faculty on the tenure track often have a second "real" Facebook account under a different name and tweet or blog anonymously. Even tenured academics have much to fear: One wrong move could lose them a grant, promotion to full professor, or any modest raise ever again.
Hinky
Linky, but in a bad neighborhood.
Availability
What does it mean when women say they want men to be "emotionally available"?
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. Feeling a little peaked. I'll post more on Friday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
How To Fix The Mess Made By Obamacare
A WSJ op-ed by U of Chicago finance professor John H. Cochrane calls for us to transition to fully individual-based health insurance and to allow nationally based health insurance, among other improvements:
The Affordable Care Act was enacted in response to genuine problems. Without a clear alternative, we will simply patch more, subsidize more, and ignore frauds and scandals, as we do in Medicare and other programs.There is an alternative. A much freer market in health care and health insurance can work, can deliver high quality, technically innovative care at much lower cost, and solve the pathologies of the pre-existing system.
The U.S. health-care market is dysfunctional. Obscure prices and $500 Band-Aids are legendary. The reason is simple: Health care and health insurance are strongly protected from competition. There are explicit barriers to entry, for example the laws in many states that require a "certificate of need" before one can build a new hospital. Regulatory compliance costs, approvals, nonprofit status, restrictions on foreign doctors and nurses, limits on medical residencies, and many more barriers keep prices up and competitors out. Hospitals whose main clients are uncompetitive insurers and the government cannot innovate and provide efficient cash service.
We need to permit the Southwest Airlines, LUV +0.21% Wal-Mart, WMT +0.18% Amazon.com AMZN -0.92% and Apples of the world to bring to health care the same dramatic improvements in price, quality, variety, technology and efficiency that they brought to air travel, retail and electronics. We'll know we are there when prices are on hospital websites, cash customers get discounts, and new hospitals and insurers swamp your inbox with attractive offers and great service.
The Affordable Care Act bets instead that more regulation, price controls, effectiveness panels, and "accountable care" organizations will force efficiency, innovation, quality and service from the top down. Has this ever worked? Did we get smartphones by government pressure on the 1960s AT&T T +0.75% phone monopoly? Did effectiveness panels force United Airlines and American Airlines to cut costs, and push TWA and Pan Am out of business? Did the post office invent FedEx, FDX -0.13% UPS and email? How about public schools or the last 20 or more health-care "cost control" ideas?
Only deregulation can unleash competition. And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs and innovation.
Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers; lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick. Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses.
Not sure how this will work unless you're in an HMO, like I am, and get in early -- before you get sick:
You have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick.
Claims Of Virgin Birth: Nearly 1% Of Young Women In A U.S. Study
I was born a virgin! (There were few sexual opportunities in the womb.)
Oh, wait -- that's not what they mean.
Sharon Begley writes for Reuters:
Nearly 1% of young women in a U.S. study who have become pregnant claim to have done so as virgins, according to a report online December 17 in the Christmas edition of Britain's BMJ medical journal....The 45 women and girls who became pregnant despite, according to what they told interviewers, being virgins at the time of conception differed in several ways from peers who acknowledged that men had a role in their procreation.
Of those who said they became pregnant as virgins, 31% also said they had signed chastity pledges; 15% of nonvirgins who became pregnant said they had signed such pledges, in which a girl vows not to have sex until she marries.
The 45 self-described virgins who reported a pregnancy and the 36 who gave birth were also more likely than nonvirgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control. About 28% of the "virgin" mothers' parents (who were also interviewed) indicated they didn't have enough knowledge to discuss sex and contraception with their daughters, compared to 5% of the parents of girls who became pregnant and said they had had intercourse.
The ostensibly chaste mothers were also less likely to know how to use condoms, according to the report. UNC biostatistician Amy Herring and public health expert Carolyn Halpern led the group.
Ignorance is one explanation. But there's another.
Take the most famous supposed virgin birth.
If Mary even existed, and if she wasn't ignorant as to how babies are made, I'm guessing she just didn't want to admit slutting around. So..."God did it, Daddy. In the back seat of his cloud."
"Yippee Ki Yay, Metatarsal Fracture!"
What would really happen to Die Hard's John McClane?
via @dorkly
Loopy
Mobius linkie.
Shoes, Shoes, Shoes!
$20 off "party-ready" shoes ('n' handbags 'n' stuff) when you spend $100 or more. Select shoes, etc., at link. Enter promo code HOLPARTY at checkout to get the discount. At Amazon
Welcome To Stockholm Syndrome: Now We're Thanking The TSA For Showing A Bit Of Kindness While Violating Our Bodies And Rights For "Security" Purposes
I've written many times how the TSA provides no protection from any terrorist with two warm brain cells to rub together and how it is therefore not security but obedience training for the American public to be more docile when our rights are yanked from us.
A woman whose late husband gave her the knife that was taken from her for no fucking rational reason by the pretend security officers in police costumes at airports (aka the TSA) wrote a letter about it to the WaPo, calling the return of the knife "a Christmas gift from the TSA."
When the Transportation Security Administration agents identified the knife, there was insufficient time for me to return it to my car and still make my flight. In tears, I told the security agent that I would leave and try to get a later flight but that I was not going to lose that remembrance of my husband. The agent said he would mail it to me and took my address, and I made the trip. Of course, I had some doubt that I would see the knife again, but I decided to risk it.Sure enough, this gentleman -- Frank -- mailed the pocketknife to me at his own expense (even tracking it). This Christmas, I thank a wonderful TSA employee for his thoughtfulness and sensitivity.
Joan Smith, Cross Junction, Va.
Sad. I understand her gratitude, but it's a bit like being grateful to the prison guard who only beat you with his fists instead of his bully club.
If Your Religion Won't Let You Do The Job, You Should Work Elsewhere
I get carsick from my own driving. Thus, I should not be a UPS driver. Since I also get queasy on planes, I also should not be eligible for a job as a flight attendant.
The answer is not to apply for and get these jobs and then ask to never fly a turbulent flight or drive a windy road.
Likewise, a Muslim worker who has problems with the sale of alcohol (or pork or puppies or anything else) to the point where she cannot ring items up at British retailer Marks & Spencer should not be working at Marks & Spencer, but working there she was, under the PC suicide march Western society is engaging in.
From The Guardian:
Marks & Spencer has apologised after a Muslim member of staff refused to sell a customer alcohol. The retailer said that where employees had religious beliefs that restricted what foods or drinks they could handle, it tried to place them in a "suitable role". An M&S spokeswoman said: "We regret that in the case highlighted we were not following our own internal policy."The issue arose after an unnamed customer at a London store told the Telegraph they were "taken aback" when an "extremely apologetic" Muslim checkout worker asked them to wait for another till to become available.
The customer told the newspaper: "I had one bottle of champagne, and the lady, who was wearing a headscarf, was very apologetic but said she could not serve me. She told me to wait until another member of staff was available. I was taken aback. I was a bit surprised. I've never come across that before."
Drinking alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and some Muslims refuse to handle it. M&S said its policy applied to staff of all religions, not just Islam.
The spokeswoman said: "Where we have an employee whose religious beliefs restrict food or drink they can handle, we work closely with our members of staff to place them in suitable roles, such as in our clothing department or bakery in foods.
"As a secular business we have an inclusive policy that welcomes all religious beliefs whether across our customer or employee base. This policy has been in place for many years, and when followed correctly, we do not believe that it should compromise our ability to offer the highest level of customer service. We apologise that this policy was not followed in the case reported."
They say that these employees don't have to work "the tills" if they object to handling alcohol, but this means that stores may sometimes be short-staffed of cashiers and customers will be inconvenienced.
Again, if you have special needs, especially due to your dark ages religion, maybe you should live in a dark ages country where everybody shares them.
Jonathan Turley weighs in on this:
There is a recent case brought by the Obama Administration that could result in greater attention to this issue. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued a trucking company, Star Transport, Inc., in Morton, Ill., for not accommodating the refusal of Muslim truck drivers to deliver any product containing alcohol. EEOC District Director John P. Rowe announced that "Our investigation revealed that Star could have readily avoided assigning these employees to alcohol delivery without any undue hardship, but chose to force the issue despite the employees' Islamic religion." John Hendrickson, the EEOC Regional Attorney for the Chicago District Office added "Everyone has a right to observe his or her religious beliefs, and employers don't get to pick and choose which religions and which religious practices they will accommodate. If an employer can reasonably accommodate an employee's religious practice without an undue hardship, then it must do so."While I am highly supportive of free exercise rights, I fail to see why this is not a bona fide occupational qualification for employees. If you are a cashier or a taxi driver, those positions require the interaction of people of different cultures and values. It depends how you define hardship. It seems to be that trying to track and accommodate the various religious views and preferences of employees is a hardship. It would also require companies to inquire as to the religion of drivers to be sure that it has enough non-Muslim drivers to make deliveries. That itself could be viewed as discrimination. Moreover, the company may have short notice of deliveries or the content of shipping. Moreover, drivers may want to confirm the contents of shipments, causing delay. It seems reasonable to expect people with such religious views to find employment that will not cause such conflicts.
Verbal Communication Is Over
Boyfriend says "Merry Christmas" to bag guy at supermarket.
Bag guy: "No problem."
Obama's "Mingy And Belated Use Of Presidential Clemency"
Walter Olson writes at Bloomberg that while Putin is freeing more than 20,000 from his country's prisons, our president announced "a rather less grand gesture of clemency":
He commuted the sentences of eight people convicted of crack-cocaine offenses -- all of whom have served at least 15 years -- and used his pardon power to erase the criminal records of 13 miscellaneous ex-offenders....According to the Washington Post, one of the administration's motives was, oddly, its wish to help "eliminate overcrowding in federal prisons."
If that's the case, Obama is trying to bail out Lake Michigan with a paint can. The federal prison population has increased by more than 700 percent since 1980 and the number of inmates now exceeds the Bureau of Prisons bed capacity by 35 percent to 40 percent, requiring the use of contract prisons, halfway houses and other makeshifts.
...The War on Drugs is the single biggest driver of our bloated prison population, especially at the federal level, where thousands are serving sentences under mandatory-minimum laws that put low-level nonviolent offenders behind bars for decades, or even life. Although Congress finally acted in 2010 to reduce the notorious crack/cocaine disparity responsible for many insanely long sentences -- in part because of years of complaint from judges loath to be parties to injustice -- it declined to apply the changes retroactively to sentences already handed down.
...Yet, there is no shortage of prisoners being held long after they have met reasonable objectives of deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.
It's baffling that over a quarter-century in which presidents of both parties have relentlessly sought to assert powers the Constitution never granted them they should be so meek about using the pardon powers that our constitutional system unquestionably gives them.
The people in prison for these non-violent drug offenses are disproportionately poor and black. Obama professes to be a champion of social justice. What gives? Any of you who voted for him feeling a wee bit disillusioned...disappointed...dissed?
Related: Clarence Aron's story.
More from Standard.net, from a WaPo editorial:
One person on Obama's list, Clarence Aaron, was serving three life sentences for participating in a drug deal. Another, Stephanie George, was handed a life sentence for stashing her boyfriend's drugs. These are just a couple of the nearly 9,000 people convicted under harsh anti-crack policies that Congress established in 1986 and then revised in 2010. By that point, the old standards were widely considered unfair as well as needlessly expensive."Because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust," Obama said last week, "they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year."
Congress and the president agree that the old rules were unwise, yet many others sitting in prison deserve a chance to show that their sentences did not fit their crimes. The fairest and most comprehensive way to give them that chance would come from Congress, which could impose a broad solution and enlist federal judges to apply it.
Slumlords Are The Big Winners In $1 Billion Lead Paint Removal Ruling
Children are the losers.
Daniel Fisher writes at Forbes about a judge who ordered several companies to pay $1.1 billion to clean up lead paint in California homes.
The judge, California Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg, is rewarding the most neglectful landlords with repairs paid for by these companies and is having the job supervised by David E. Jacobs, a former HUD official who left after auditors discovered $90 million in improper grants to outside organizations.
Even worse, it seems to be more unhealthy to remove the paint than to just keep it where it is, painted over:
Under the judge's highly detailed, 13-point action plan, the money would flow first to properties with "substantial deferred maintenance," defined as 10 or more code violations in the past four years, and in "high-risk census tracts or neighborhoods."In addition to ripping out and replacing the windows of these properties, the judge wants to require "repair of building deficiencies that might cause the corrective measures to fail," including water leaks. In other words, he wants to provide these owners with roof repairs, also on the paint companies' dime.
...Giving the owners of run-down housing hundreds of millions of dollars in property improvements is just one of the curiosities in the judge's ruling. He also plans to order the defendant companies to pay the money directly to the lead-poisoning program within the California Dept. of Public Health, with specific instructions on how it is to be spent.
"That has all of us scratching our heads," said Hardy, since California already has a well-established lead abatement program, partly funded by paint manufacturers, that focuses on proper maintenance instead of the potentially risky practice of trying to remove lead paint from the walls of homes. There's little precedent for a judge ordering an expert state agency, formed by the legislature, to do his bidding, especially when it conflicts with established policy.
The state's policy of containing lead paint under well-maintained coats of non-toxic paint "is a floor, not a ceiling," Fineman said, and total removal is the only true way to protect children. The plaintiffs have "quite of bit of evidence that says this is the way to do it," she told me.
Bonnie Campbell, a spokesperson for the defendant companies, said the judge's plan would actually expose poor children to more lead dust, not less. The vast majority of governments around the country favor keeping lead paint covered rather than removing it, she said. Repeated studies by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, some of them commissioned by the plaintiffs' own expert when he was a top HUD official, found no benefit to physically removing lead paint from windows, for example, because the main risk was lead dust on floors that is often tracked in from lead-containing soil outside. That soil, in turn, is contaminated with lead from exterior paint - which Judge Kleinberg excludes from his order - and the lead that formerly was in automotive gasoline.
"As a public policy matter, it is a very strange thing to take a carefully constructed program, thoughtfully created by the legislature, and turn it upside down," she said. "The implications for children probably aren't going to be good."
No, landlords aren't expected to make their properties safe for the tenants they're profiting from. Companies, years after selling lead paint that the government had no problem with (and even specified the use of) are now being forced to give the worst landlords a repair windfall.
via @WalterOlson
The War On Christmas Dinner
Tonight, I plan to decimate at least half of what's on my plate. I will decimate the rest for tomorrow's lunch.
"Denouncing Binge Drinking Is Not Victim-Blaming"
It's telling young women -- and men -- to be responsible for their behavior; telling them that it's idiotic and dangerous to get so smashed you no longer have control of yourself. You could be raped; if you're on the streets, you could also be robbed -- or worse.
Ruth Marcus, in the WaPo, writes similarly:
Excuse me, but no one's suggesting that our daughters should be holed up in the library studying every night, forswearing any semblance of a social life. Yoffe (disclosure: she's a close friend) is saying that the responsible advice is the one that I've been trying to impart for years to my now-teenage daughters: When you drink (because, let's be serious, they're not waiting until 21), don't drink too much.Consider the female Naval Academy midshipman who started with seven shots of coconut rum and woke up in an off-campus "football house" wondering what had happened. (Answer: Sexual encounters with three midshipmen, two of whom are being court-martialed.)
None of this -- none of it -- excuses men, sober or drunk, who prey on women, sober or drunk, to have sex without giving consent. Men who behave that way ought to be punished. Parents should warn their sons: Not only does "no mean no," being too incapacitated to say "yes" also mean "no."
Here's the sort of ridiculousness this is fighting:
Yale law student Alexandra Brodsky, co-founder of a campaign against campus sexual violence, said suggesting that women drink less "preserves the power structures that perpetuate violence" and demands "that the victimized sacrifice their freedom . . . so we don't have to disturb the status quo."University of Massachusetts philosophy professor Louise Antony likewise warned that it sends the message "that we have chosen to regard misogyny as inevitable."
Feminism, as of late, is too often a terribly toxic thing, as it demands not equality and sense but special treatment and a world that works as the real world does not. This sends a message to women that they are impervious to dangers and challenges (or "should" be). And this ultimately endangers women and hurts men as well. This needs to change but I'm not sure how that can be accomplished.
The President's Top 10 Constitutional Violations Of 2013
Someone should tell President Obama that the document is called "The Constitution," not "The Suggestion."
Ilya Shapiro writes at Forbes of the President's top 10 violations of the Constitution -- just for 2013. An excerpt:
1. Delay of Obamacare's out-of-pocket caps. The Labor Department announced in February that it was delaying for a year the part of the healthcare law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance. This may have been sensible--insurers and employers need time to comply with rapidly changing regulations--but changing the law requires actual legislation.2. Delay of Obamacare's employer mandate. The administration announced via blogpost on the eve of the July 4 holiday that it was delaying the requirement that employers of at least 50 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine. This time it did cite statutory authority, but the cited provisions allow the delay of certain reporting requirements, not of the mandate itself.
3. Delay of Obamacare's insurance requirements. The famous pledge that "if you like your plan, you can keep it" backfired when insurance companies started cancelling millions of plans that didn't comply with Obamacare's requirements. President Obama called a press conference last month to proclaim that people could continue buying non-complying plans in 2014--despite Obamacare's explicit language to the contrary. He then refused to consider a House-passed bill that would've made this action legal.
4. Exemption of Congress from Obamacare. A little-known part of Obamacare requires Congressmen and their staff to get insurance through the new healthcare exchanges, rather than a taxpayer-funded program. In the quiet of August, President Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management to interpret the law to maintain the generous congressional benefits.
5. Expansion of the employer mandate penalty through IRS regulation. Obamacare grants tax credits to people whose employers don't provide coverage if they buy a plan "through an Exchange established by the State"--and then fines employers for each employee receiving such a subsidy. No tax credits are authorized for residents of states where the exchanges are established by the federal government, as an incentive for states to create exchanges themselves. Because so few (16) states did, however, the IRS issued a rule ignoring that plain text and allowed subsidies (and commensurate fines) for plans coming from "a State Exchange, regional Exchange, subsidiary Exchange, and federally-facilitated Exchange."
...9. Assault on free speech and due process on college campuses. Responding to complaints about the University of Montana's handling of sexual assault claims, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, in conjunction with the Justice Department, sent the university a letter intended as a national "blueprint" for tackling sexual harassment. The letter urges a crackdown on "unwelcome" speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere "more likely than not" standard.
via @WalterOlson
The New Parenting: Teaching Your Kids To Question Authority
My parents taught us to respect authority but I read a lot as a kid, including books about how that worked in communist and fascist countries, and decided, "Nuh-uh," and that I would see who seemed deserving of respect.
Now, especially, with the constant push forward of the police state and rights violations painted as "security" or otherwise good for us, I think it's essential for parents to teach their kids to evaluate authority rather than respecting it.
From PoliceStateUSA:
In an effort to condition children to accept the police state, the TSA has released a cartoon depicting an animated family enduring a warrantless federal checkpoint at an airport.The video casts the the travelers and government agents as cute doggie characters that show how fun it can be to go through a checkpoint.
Animated travelers show how easy it is to comply with federal checkpoints.
"It's not scary," explains the father, as he hands his papers to the blue-shirted sentry. "TSA officers are here to keep us secure!"
The children are taught the phrase, "Stop, Screen, and Go!" as their persons, papers, and effects are searched without cause.
They skipped the disgusting groping in the video. ("Bad touch" as it's called in kid lingo.) Sometimes, these days, bad touch is bad touch. Other times, bad touch is good touch, like when an unskilled worker costumed to look like a police officer does it!
It's all about obedience training:
Children who grow up in this age are exposed to police state activities on all fronts. They witness warrantless searches in schools, during travel, on television, at public events, on the streets, and more. When an entire generation has been brought up to accept these behaviors as normal, they are conditioned to offer no resistance in the face of the police state as an adult.
Here's the video:
It is scary to anyone who values the Constitution.
Lunky
Linky as Moose Malloy.
Defendant's Plea: "Not Me!"
Aida thinking of alternate suggestions for how all the little pieces of paper towel ended up all over the rug.
Are You Afraid To Live Next Door To This Guy?
Scott Shackford writes for reason about the unintended consequences of those laws politicians pass to make themselves look "tough on crime":
When Lonny Leon Rivera was 19, in 1989, he had sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend in California. He got busted, pleaded guilty to "oral copulation with a minor," and that required him to register as a sex offender forever in the state.Subsequently, Rivera married the woman and they remain together to this day. However, California treats him as though he's a danger to his community. Attorney General Kamala Harris is going after him for failing to keep his sex offender information up to date. He is petitioning to get off the list.
How sex offender registries fail us:
Oregon Obamacare Exchange: "If You Don't Hear From Us By Monday..." You're On Your Own
Brent Hunsburger writes for The Oregonian:
Oregon's troubled health insurance exchange began robocalling applicants Friday, warning them that if they don't receive enrollment confirmation by Monday, they should seek coverage elsewhere for Jan. 1."If you haven't heard from us by Dec. 23, it is unlikely your application will be processed for Jan. 1 insurance coverage," a woman's voice on the pre-recorded call from Cover Oregon says. "If you want to be sure you have insurance coverage starting Jan. 1, you have other options."
It's yet another sign that the health insurance exchange's technological breakdowns will prevent some -- perhaps many -- Oregonians from getting subsidized coverage Jan. 1, despite Gov. John Kitzhaber's previous assurances otherwise. Out of more than 65,000 applicants, the exchange reports enrolling nearly 30,000, but only about 11,000 of them in private insurance plans.
The calls also suggest the exchange's problems will prevent many of those individuals from receiving tax credits or subsidies in January, even though they qualify for them.
So, the government has cancelled your plan that you liked and were fine with, and you went and signed up on the exchange, and now you have a week, at Christmas, to unfuck yourself.
Nice!
Raise your hand if you think the government should be running healthcare.
Raise your hand and punch yourself in the nose if you voted for Obama. On behalf of the rest of us.
via @reasonpolicy
Social Engineering Trumps "Security"
Becky Akers posts at Lew Rockwell:
Recall, if you will, the TSA's constant claim that security is so overriding a concern its goons must molest you and your children while photographing everyone naked. So you might think it would merely hire the best, most rigorous teachers it could find.
Nope-ies!
Seems the Thieves and Sexual Assailants want "a company to conduct training for [their] Inter-Modal Security and Training Exercise Program (I-Step)." And they are "exclusively" recruiting said trainer from the "economically disadvantaged woman owned small business (EDWOSB [yep, no jargon is complete without an unwieldy acronym]) industry"; milady will "continuously improve the risk posture of the transportation systems serving the nation."...And why? Because bureaucracies "are required to set quotas for hiring EDWOSBs by the Small Business Act, which was enacted in January ... [and] sets government-wide goals that at least 23 percent of all contracts must be awarded to businesses owned by service-disabled veterans, 'socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,' and women."
Seems to me a business owner who's a white guy who grew up in a series of foster homes would trump a vagina carrier for disadvantage -- by far -- but hey, that's just me operating on a purely rational level.
Are You Dim Enough To Work In Government?
An idiot FBI agent filed for copyright with the Library of Congress on a top-secret document detailing the bureau's interrogation measures -- leaving it open for the reading to anybody with a library card.
Nick Baumann writes at Mother Jones:
For years, the American Civil Liberties Union fought a legal battle to force the FBI to release a range of documents concerning FBI guidelines, including this one, which covers the practices agents are supposed to employ when questioning suspects. Through all this, unbeknownst to the ACLU and the FBI, the manual sat in a government archive open to the public. When the FBI finally relented and provided the ACLU a version of the interrogation guidebook last year, it was heavily redacted; entire pages were blacked out. But the version available at the Library of Congress, which a Mother Jones reporter reviewed last week, contains no redactions.The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI's counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What's particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted.
"A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright," says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't violate the copyright because you don't have the document. It isn't available."
"The whole thing is a comedy of errors," he adds. "It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance."
Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: "Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories--and, by the way, aren't copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?"
Llinky
Welsh for "linky."
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: "Dilbert" Cartoonist Scott Adams On How To Fail Your Way To Success
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
"Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams, obviously, is not a scientist. But he thinks and views his experiences like a scientist and his wisdom is well-supported and worth hearing.
For example, Adams found that it isn't goals that are the key to success, but what he calls "systems."
And Adams advises, based on his own steady stream of failures in business, that "Everything you want in life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out."
As a cartoonist, he thinks of himself as a "professional simplifier." That's what he does in his just-published book, How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and simplifying for all of us what it takes to succeed in business and be happy in life is what he'll be doing on tonight's not-to-be-missed show.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/23/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-adams-on-how-to-fail-your-way-to-success
Don't miss last week's show on how to think your way to behavioral change.
Science writer and bestselling author David DiSalvo returned to the show tonight to talk about how the brain operates via a series of "feedback loops," and to explain how we can actually redirect our thinking and influence our brain's response -- in turn influencing how we feel and act.
These insights come straight out of DiSalvo's just-published book, Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life
Drawing on the latest research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioral econ, and communications, DiSalvo replaces "self-help" with "science-help," and gives us practical steps to change our thinking and our lives.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/16/david-disalvo-how-harnessing-your-brains-power-to-adapt-can-change-your-life
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.
Popehat Corrects Some Misconceptions About Free Speech
Ken White at Popehat lays out "Ten Points About Speech, Ducks, And Flights To Africa":
An excerpt:
1. People are consistently saying that private action (like criticism, or firings) violates the First Amendment, either directly or through sloppy implication. Promoting ignorance about our most important rights is a bad thing that we should call out, even when we're currently upset about something. Our rights are under constant assault on multiple fronts, and when we encourage citizens to misunderstand them we make it easier for the government to whittle them away.2. The phrase "the spirit of the First Amendment" often signals approaching nonsense...
I particularly liked this point:
3. Notwithstanding #2, the concepts of proportionality, community, dialogue, love, charity, grace, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and self-awareness are all values decent people ought to apply to a discussion. They aren't about free speech or the First Amendment; they are about humanity. They are more powerful and convincing when applied consistently -- when you do not demand grace of others than you aren't willing to extend yourself. That doesn't happen much.
My personal point of view is that if you hire a backwoods redneck fundamentalist Christian to star in your reality show, you should expect him to say the sort of things a backwoods redneck fundamentalist Christian might say -- about gays, ducks, and other subjects.
Likewise, nobody should expect Snooki to start talking like she's been possessed by Kate Middleton.
An Israeli Security Expert On What A Ridiculous Clown Carnival Our TSA Is
Robert Evans and Rafi Sela write at Cracked:
For a bunch of people in snappy uniforms patting down crotches, the TSA is remarkably unpopular. Nobody likes going through security at the airport, but you probably figured most of it had a point. All those hours spent in line with other shoeless travelers are a necessary precursor to safe flying. It's annoying, but at least it wards off terrorism.That's all bullshit. The TSA couldn't protect you from a 6-year-old with a water balloon. What are my qualifications for saying that? My name is Rafi Sela, and I was the head of security for the world's safest airport. Here's what your country does wrong.
He gives seven examples -- some of which echo what I've been saying, like about the idiocy and waste of considering every single person who flies a plausible suspect.
#5. They Spend All Their Energy on LuggageAbout 99.9 percent of travelers are just that: travelers. They want to get through security, buy a cup of coffee and some duty-free whiskey, then quietly drink and leech Wi-Fi from the airport McDonald's. These people pose no threat to anyone, and there's no point in even checking them. The very few terrorists that exist are like needles in a haystack. But the TSA's approach is to check every single piece of hay, in case it might actually be a needle.
But if you only check luggage and you don't check the person behind the luggage, how do you know he hasn't camouflaged something into the luggage that you can't find? Trust me: Hiding things is so easy to do, it isn't even funny. That's why the only luggage checks we do are to find things like aerosol cans, which might burst on their own. Otherwise, what we care about is intent.
I was at an airport in Newark once when a TSA search of my bags turned up a laser pointer pen I'd been given as a gift at a conference. They told me they had to confiscate it, because apparently laser pointers are just a couple-hundred degrees away from being the new box cutters. Many of you have probably lost trinkets and gadgets in the same way: Would you like to know how to get them back?
I tell the handler, "OK, take it. But that pen is company property, so I'm going to need some sort of receipt."
He says, "What?"
"This pen isn't owned by me. My boss is going to need to see some proof that you took it."
So he calls a supervisor and asks, "Where do we keep the receipts?"
His supervisor says, "What the fuck are you talking about, we don't give receipts."
He explains the situation, and his boss asks, "What's the contraband?"
"A little laser pointer."
"Give it the fuck back! What do you care?"
Two seconds go by and he hands it back to me. It's as easy as that.
The TSA treats each traveler the same because of some stupid idea that everything needs to be fair. Security needs to be done due to risk -- and risk means that in Israel we don't check luggage, we check people. And I'm not talking about racial profiling here; that's a product of poor training. Regardless of race or creed, people with bombs strapped to their body behave in similar ways. The TSA claims that finding IEDs at the checkpoint is their number one goal. But it's the people who mean us harm that we should look out for. Instead of checking intent, they check luggage.
And they don't even do it well: I have orthopedic insoles in my shoes made from composite material. On the machines, that composite looks identical to plastic explosives. I put them on the belt every time, and no one -- NO ONE -- ever questions my shoes. Some security experts suspect that the TSA has never once caught a terrorist at a checkpoint. And we know that at least 16 of them have flown into U.S. airports since 2004.
Meanwhile, Israel's airport security actually has stopped a bomb from getting on a plane using Israeli screening techniques.
He explains the techniques in the rest of the piece.
Welcome To America. Leave Your Hopes (And Your Wallet) At The Door
Victor Davis Hanson writes for Tribune that "young people have been had," calling the young now "the lost generation":
Millions of so-called millennials under 30 must purchase health insurance -- estimated at about $1,700 a year -- that they will hardly use. Their premiums supposedly will subsidize older, in-need Americans who cannot pay the full costs of coverage that they will draw on frequently.We forget that young people are already targeted for a number of government redistribution plans. Of America's age cohorts, the under-30 bunch is the least likely to be employed, and the most likely to work at low-wage or part-time jobs.
Millennials already pay high payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare coverage for the elderly. Yet most economists predict that both programs will soon prove insolvent and will not be able to extend the present level of benefits to young contributors when they retire.
We are currently in the greatest economic slowdown since the Great Depression. The now normal 7 percent unemployment hits the young especially hard. Their jobless rate typically ranges from two to three times higher than the national average. Requiring employers to provide Obamacare coverage will spike unemployment and again do the most harm to those first entering the workforce.
Young people in America owe in aggregate about $1 trillion in unpaid student loans. While in theory some of their interest rates are subsidized, many are not and range from 5 percent to 9 percent at a time when mortgages can still be had for about 4 percent.
...It is often easy to caricature the young. Today's youth see expensive iPhones and iPads as necessary as a prior generation's cheap pencils and pens. Some younger people wear sneakers and shades that cost more than three months of health care premiums. Suburban kids are as likely to be playing video games on weekend mornings as cutting the grass and raking leaves.
All that said, the aging '60s generation has far more to answer for. We are handing over a very different America to our young people. They have received a worse education than did prior generations at a far greater cost in mostly borrowed money.
There are fewer job opportunities and higher taxes. Others ran up the huge debt; young people will largely pay for it over the next half-century. Early marriage and child-raising, a nice house, two cars and pay-as-you-go college for the kids are all becoming a fantasy of a bygone generation.
via @reasonpolicy
Waiting To See What Shakes Out On Obamacare
I can no longer afford my healthcare with the price rise under Obamacare but I'm too afraid to make any changes right now.
Chad Terhune writes in the LA Times about the "Affordable" Care Act:
Monday is the deadline to enroll for coverage starting Jan. 1. People who miss that cutoff date can still sign up as part of the Affordable Care Act through March 31.
I'm going to wait and see what happens until then. I'll then just have paid beyond what I can afford for January, February, and March.
Right now, I keep reading that people who think they signed up might not actually be signed up. Also, it's possible there may be some challenge to the law (other than by the court). Probably unlikely but it is possible. It would be idiotic to "save" money by possibly throwing myself into some bureaucratic nightmare.
I'm just glad I have the option of paying too much for healthcare rather than having to sign up for new healthcare in this mess of a system. Rotten that it's come to that.
Thank you, those of you who voted for Obama, thinking only of what a rock star he seemed to be and how "not Bush" he seemed to be.
Lanky
Links with the ribs showing...
Stupid Question (To Be Imperfectly Honest)
Somebody named Slade Grayson writes at The Good Men Project:
The Question Is...Could You Handle 24 Hours Of Brutal Honesty?
Unmitigated honesty is rude and hurtful -- and childish.
What's wise -- and positive -- is judicious honesty: judging whether people can hear and take in and make positive change with whatever you're thinking of being honest about.
The Latest In Obamacare
Heroin stamped with the word in red.
Employee Bonuses: Bet It'll Pay The Company Back And Then Some, In Goodwill
Jim Romenesko posts about a decision by the owner of The Chronicle in Centralia, Washington, Jenifer Lafromboise Falcon, to give each of the employees a profit-sharing check for $1,386.01:
On Wednesday, Chronicle publisher Christine Fossett walked around the newsroom and distributed red envelopes to staffers. They contained a letter from the owner, Jenifer Lafromboise Falcon, and a profit-sharing check for $1,386.01...."Every full-time employee in the company [Lafromboise Communication] -- which includes one three-day a week newspaper, three weeklies, a printing enterprisecheck and a sign business (about 80 employees) -- received the same amount," says my tipster. "We'd been told earlier in the year that [Falcon] intended to deliver checks as part of a profit-sharing plan. Of course the cynics in the newsroom and elsewhere didn't give the announcement much credence. ...[But] there was an incredible amount of joy in the newsroom and, I imagine, across the company" when the checks were delivered Wednesday.
As Wharton's Dr. Adam Grant pointed out on my radio show, it's by giving (not going Scrooge-y) that people become successful.
Right out of college, I worked producing TV commercials at Ogilvy & Mather, before it was bought by WPP Group. It was an amazing place that hired amazing people. We had a bar at work (Club 12, on the 12th floor, open at 5pm), a strong corporate culture started by David Ogilvy, a nurse on staff (that nobody ever saw), and you could go to a therapist and they'd pay for it. I don't think many people took advantage of that, but it felt like the company cared about us and a lot of us worked long hours and, I think, felt good about it. We felt like family more than employees.
Then, WPP bought the company and cut a lot of the benefits. The company felt like it became merely a business -- hard and cold -- and I think employees responded in turn.
Linksplocious
A distant relative of Diploducus.
You Can't Change Children's Choices By "Removing Gender Stereotyping" From Toy Stores
Some sensible thoughts by Sam Leith in a piece in The Guardian, subheaded, "Removing 'Boys' and 'Girls' signs from the shelves is something we do for ourselves rather than for our children":
My daughter wasn't yet three when it started. First she refused to wear anything that wasn't pink. Then she announced that she wanted to change her name to Cinderella Barbie Sleeping Beauty. This was an achievement.We owned no Disney princess DVDs, had never uttered the word "Barbie", and she wasn't yet at nursery so it couldn't have come the route of the nits.
Are the spores of this stuff, I wondered, in the air?
Now my son is two and a half. Dollies delight him not, no, nor fairies, though by your smiling you seem to say so. The two things in the world that interest him most are fire engines and (oddly) zebras. He has a special dance that he does on sighting a fire engine. When he wakes up in the morning and you ask him what he dreamed about, he says: "A fire engine and a zebra."
Now Marks & Spencer has joined a growing number of retailers in announcing that all its toy marketing will be gender-neutral. Does that mean my next child will grow up free of these obsessions? I'm not counting my fluffy pink chickens.
I don't want to troll all you good people by trying to make the case that marketing toys by gender is a positive social good to be applauded. But I think there is a case - a pretty strong case - for not getting ventilated about it.
My neighbors are parents who send their kids to a charter school, don't allow TV or Barbies, and have toys freely available in their house. The boy plays with Lego, transportation toys, and weapons, and the girl likes girlier toys -- stuffed animals, beading kits, dolls. She is free to play with the Lego and trucks and all, but she does not and has not, from an early age.
Boys and girls are physically and psychologically different and this will not change because toy stores go ridiculously PC.
False Feminist Claims Are Nearly Impossible To Correct
Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in 2009 for the Chronicle of Higher Ed about the myths that persist in feminist "scholarship":
My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:
1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.
2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.
3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.
Here's the exchange that followed Hoff Sommers' piece -- between Hoff Sommers and the aptly-named Nancy K.D. Lemon. The upshot, from Hoff Sommers:
Lemon has just published the third edition of her celebrated, error-ridden casebook. This time, as her response to my Review piece proudly proclaims, she was well aware of my criticisms and brushed them aside with disdain. Law students will now be treated to another round of Elvis sightings parading as scholarship. As I said in my article, my complaint with feminist research is not that authors make mistakes but that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected, and the critic's motives are impugned. Nancy Lemon's response to my article illustrates the problem perfectly.
via @MarkWBennett
Parent Your Brats Or Stay Home With Them
Irish "parents" sued a restaurant after their 3-year-old stuck her finger in an 8mm hole in a sugar dispenser and couldn't get it out. It had to be cut off at a hospital. The lid, that is, not her finger.
Assholes.
Nothing like letting your kid go undersupervised and then trying to stick other people with paying for it.
The judge called this "compensation culture gone mad." He awarded the costs of the case to the restaurant (to be paid by the parents).
Here's a statement from the judge reported by the Mirror/UK:
"Quite frankly, this is another case of compensation culture gone mad concerning an extraordinary suggestion that the restaurant should have warned Robyn's mother when she was being shown to a table that the sugar dispenser had a risk associated with it."
via @overlawyered
Lippy
It's a brasserie or a broad. More likely a broad in these parts. Food is pretty bad at the brasserie, but they do serve...linkies!
Free One-Day Shipping On Certain Last-Minute Gifts
Until December 23, at Amazon
Don't forget -- I See Rude People makes a great gift! It's only $13.09, brand new, with Amazon's discount at the link above. (New copies or Kindle books go against my advance, and help me keep writing -- and eating -- and help support this site.)
To search any product and credit me with your purchase (at no cost to you!), go here: Amy's Amazon
And thank you all for all your purchases, from the windshield wipers the other day to the TVs, Kindles, and the sometimes very interesting knives. They are all appreciated.
Is It National Asshole Day?
What's with people who stand right outside strangers' houses and have loud, protracted arguments on cell phones?
Phone's mobile, dude. Except in a tornado, most homes are not.
Apparently, I'm Too Dim
(Or maybe too post-Jewish, atheistic, and too ill-informed about Jesus.)
Can somebody explain this tweet to me?
@Sherman_Alexie
Why don't more Christians realize that Obamacare's ambitions & ideals are overtly Christian?
Obamacare Will Keep People From Being Covered When They Travel
And thus may keep them from traveling at all -- within the United States.
From an IBD editorial:
The American Thinker's Stella Paul has exposed the virtually unnoticed fact that within the ObamaCare exchanges so many Americans are being forced into, "most plans only provide local medical coverage."Paul warns this will have "a profound impact on the real-estate market, particularly the second home sector, and on the travel business." She interviewed one Connecticut retiree whose health required having a winter home in South Carolina. Her $450-per-month, $2,500 deductible, no co-pay Blue Cross policy that had worked well in both states was suddenly canceled.
The new policy she was offered under ObamaCare was twice as expensive, with a deductible costing $1,000 more, and no out-of-network coverage.
Having had a surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, out-of-network coverage was a must. And she found it. "It's $900 a month," she told Paul, "with a $7,000 deductible and a co-pay on everything. Basically, it's catastrophic insurance, and I'll be paying my South Carolina doctors out of pocket."
A prominent New York insurance broker pointed out that most of the policies offered on the ObamaCare exchanges are not national networks, so "if you need routine medical services, they will not be covered when you leave your local area," as they were before.
Travel health insurance, unfortunately, only covers emergencies. So, the broker told Paul, "a large portion of the population will have their insurance as a consideration for their mobility, which they never had before."
Imagine having to take all this into account in making decisions about where in America you want to live.
In Government, Failure Gets You The Job
From a Market Urbanism tweet:
@MarketUrbanism
Consultant that built Portland's slower-than-walking streetcar will try to "fix" LA's
From Neil Broverman at CurbedLA:
DTLA's proposed line would connect South Park to Bunker Hill, and be operated by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the city agency behind the DASH and commuter express buses. And, just last week, the LADOT submitted a grant request with the Federal Transit Administration--the project could get up to $75 million. Even with the grant, the streetcar will probably need more money: An early estimate put the project at $150 to $160 million, and that doesn't include utility relocation costs.
The results in Portland -- man beats streetcar:
In the end -- averaging 3.25 miles per hour, a typical speed for a 43-year-old, 6-foot-1 man, according to an iPhone walking app -- I arrived at the Powell's platform in 31 minutes and 26 seconds. The streetcar with Kraig on board pulled up 58 seconds after that.
Why I'm Keeping My Now-Unaffordable Healthcare
I'm afraid to change it because of nightmares like these, reported in an IBD editorial from December 12:
An urgent mass email to all Senate staff warns not to trust any confirmation from the D.C. health exchange and they may not have insurance come January. Why aren't the rest of us being warned?...Senate staffers who have enrolled through their local exchange, D.C. Health Link (DCHL), were warned of this prospect in an emergency email sent out by the Senate Disbursing Office on Monday.
"Do NOT rely on your 'My Account' page or other correspondence from DCHL" for confirmation that you are covered, the email warns staffers.
The email advises to come to the disbursing office immediately to see if they have a physical confirmation letter, warning, "If we do NOT have a Confirmation Letter for you, YOU ARE NOT ENROLLED and will not have health insurance next year."
The rest of the American people have received no cautionary email, nor are they about to hike down to their local exchange to personally verify their actual enrollment.
Even if they are enrolled, those who've ever had insurance know it doesn't take effect until that first premium is paid and ObamaCare's billing and payment back end remains unfinished and untested....Charles Ornstein, a reporter for the liberal website ProPublica, reports that between 5% and 15% of that number actually have been able to pay their first month's premium, putting the number who have fully enrolled at somewhere between 18,000 and 54,000. The rest may be oblivious to their actual lack of coverage.
I'm hoping at least a few people have let go of their misplaced faith in government by now.
Limey
Linkie with a side of spotted dick, which is a thing the British think of as food.
Shia LaBeouf Rips Off Bukowski, Thinks No One Will Notice
Jordan Zarkin reports at BuzzFeed that, in the wake of a discovery that LaBeouf's short film was "lifted, nearly word-for-word, from a comic by the famed artist/screenwriter Daniel Clowes"...:
Now, an analysis of segments of comic books written and drawn by LaBeouf reveal that he seemingly took passages from other famed writers, including the late Charles Bukowski.
Zarkin continues:
As first noticed by comic writer Josh Farkas, who relayed his findings to BuzzFeed, LaBeouf also cobbled together lines from Bukowski's poem "assault."LaBeouf wrote:
"Poets don't anger anyone. Poets don't gamble. Here, they don't assassinate poets. Here, they don't notice them."Bukowski wrote:
"in america the poets never anger anybody.
the poets don't gamble.
their poetry has the smell of clinics
their poetry has the smell of clinics
where people die rather than live.
here they don't assassinate poets
they don't even notice the poets."
As Mark Hemingway tweeted:
@Heminator
Is there anything sadder than a 27 year-old ripping off *Bukowski* and thinking no one will notice?
Well, maybe the fact that Raymond Chandler was a plagiarist, too. (I discovered this in 2005.)
Dim Celebrity Comes Out Against Free Speech About Fat People
Nardine Saad writes in the LA Times about "Jennifer Lawrence's crusade against Hollywood's body-image issues," and specifically, her words to Barbara Walters -- that it "should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV," just like it's illegal to sell cigarettes on TV:
"I think when it comes to media, the media needs to take responsibility for the effect it has on our younger generation on these girls that are watching these television shows and picking up how to talk and how to be cool," the "American Hustle" star added."So all of the sudden being funny is making fun of the girl that's wearing an ugly dress. And the word fat! I just think it should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV. I mean, if we're regulating cigarettes and sex and cuss words because of the effect it has on our younger generation, why aren't we regulating things like calling people fat?"
When Lawrence was first cast as Katniss, a starving teen fighting for her life in a government-arranged reality show, she was criticized for being too full-figured.
Guess what: When you are making piles of money from being in the public eye, the public mouths are going to flap. Want to avoid being criticized in media? Be a housewife in Des Moines.
The bottom line: The First Amendment is more important than anybody's feelings.
Oh, and I think the government is out of bounds in prohibiting cigarettes and potty language on TV.
You want to avoid smoking and bad language? Develop personal responsibility and watch the meerkat documentaries on National Geographic channel (which I highly recommend anyway).
via @walterolson
Once You Go Blank...
Robert VerBruggen writes at RealClearPolicy about how many people are so afraid of being racist or being considered racist that they simply go mute when the occasion to describe somebody comes up:
Around the turn of the century, I was working weekends and summers at a Kmart to save money for college. One day I took a phone call from a woman who was trying to get a hold of another employee she'd spoken to earlier in the week. Her attempts to recall his name were not fruitful, so she took to describing him: "Tall ... dark hair ... um ..." And finally, meekly: "... black ...""Wait, black ... hair?" I asked, equally tentatively.
"No. Black ... skin."
Mind you, this was a Kmart in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, a Green Bay suburb that back then was about 95 percent white and less than 1 percent black. Green Bay itself was only slightly more diverse. That an employee was black was the single factor most likely to distingiush him from other workers. In fact, at the time we didn't have any black employees; it turned out she'd talked to someone at the other Kmart across town. And yet we were both very uncomfortable using race to solve the problem....There's a bad side and a good side to this. The bad side is obvious: Many white people are so scared of being seen as racist that they're not willing to talk about simple facts -- and, ironically, they end up being seen as racist as a result. Many whites' sensitivity to racism may have gone so far past the point of diminishing returns that it actively harms their relations with blacks. They place so much importance on demonstrating that black people don't make them nervous that black people make them nervous.
If you're going to describe me, the best way to describe me is not that I'm, um, um, a woman who's pretty tall but to say that I have red hair. The same goes for someone who's black in a mostly white area or white in a mostly black area.
You don't end racism by pussyfooting around; I think you make things worse by treating one group of people different than others.
This is a cultural thing and I was pushed in this direction as well but I thought about this (long before reading this article) and decided to talk about black people in the same way I talk about white people -- without going all mealy-mouthed.
via @instapundit
Institutionalized Discrimination Against Men
Cathy Young has a piece in reason about a male student who had a woman file charges of "nonconsensual sexual contact" a year after their encounter, and who, like other males on campus these days, has been denied due process. An excerpt:
New Rules for Campus SexYu, a U.S.-educated Chinese citizen, is now going after the Poughkeepsie, New York, school in federal court, claiming not only wrongful expulsion and irreparable personal damage but sex discrimination. His complaint argues that he was the victim of a campus judicial system that in practice presumes males accused of sexual misconduct are guilty. His is one of three such lawsuits filed last summer. St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is being sued by an expelled student, New York state resident Brian Harris, who likewise claims he was railroaded by a gender-biased campus kangaroo court. And in August college basketball player Dez Wells sued Ohio's Xavier University for expelling him in the summer of 2012 based on a rape charge that the county prosecutor publicly denounced as false.
While the lawsuits target private colleges, they also implicate public policy. That was especially true in Wells' case: When he was accused, Xavier was under scrutiny by the federal government for its allegedly poor response to three prior sexual assault complaints, and his attorney says he was the "sacrificial lamb" to appease the U.S. Department of Education. In the other two cases, there was no such direct pressure, but the charges were adjudicated under a complainant-friendly standard that the Obama administration has been aggressively pushing on academic institutions.
In April 2011, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to college and university presidents laying out guidelines for handling reports of sexual assault and harassment. One key recommendation was that such complaints should be evaluated based on a "preponderance of the evidence"-the lowest standard of proof used in civil claims. (In lay terms, it means that the total weight of the believable evidence tips at least slightly in the claimant's favor.) Traditionally, the standard for finding a student guilty of misconduct of any kind has been "clear and convincing evidence"-less stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt," but still a very strong probability of guilt.
Last May the government reiterated its commitment to the "preponderance" standard in a joint Department of Justice/Department of Education letter to the University of Montana following a review of that school's response to sexual offenses. The letter was explicitly intended as a "blueprint" for all colleges and universities; noncompliant schools risk losing federal funds, including student aid eligibility.
Why sacrifice funding when men, with their right to due process removed, sacrifice so easily?
As Young points out, "The campus is a place where sex happens a lot-including sex in random, often drunken encounters rife with potential for misunderstanding and regret."
This is the last place we should be tossing due process out the window, but it's disgusting that it has been thrown out anywhere in this country, especially at the behest of our government.
As with any crime, I'd rather see a guilty person go free than an innocent person convicted.
And finally, Young is exactly right about this:
In the end, the "rape culture" crusade is not so much about rape as it is about remaking sex. It stigmatizes assertive male sexuality and promotes a sexual norm in which every act must be negotiated in advance and undertaken with a completely rational, literally sober mind.
Welcome to reality. Please leave your rights at the door, boys.
Linker Is Quinker
Do you bounce when you hit bottom?
"I'd Like To Teach The World To Think..."
There was a really dumb illustrated op-ed in the Sunday LA Times that you can tell the author thought was super-clever -- and funny. (What it is is under-funny -- a version of funny that really isn't funny by people who aren't funny but are being funnier than usual.)
Anne Stuhldreher, a "senior program manager at the California Endowment, a statewide philanthropic foundation that aims to end health disparities in California," wrote about Coca-Cola Co.'s "Cap the Tap" program, a marketing plan urging restaurants to push soda and other profit-making drinks instead of water:
"Every time your business fills a cup or glass with tap water, it pours potential profits down the drain. The good news: Cap the Tap -- a program available through your Coca-Cola representative -- changes these dynamics by teaching crew members or wait staff suggestive selling techniques to convert requests for tap water into orders for revenue-generating beverages."Bravo Coke! But I'm puzzled that you've apparently wiped mentions of Cap the Tap from your website since the report surfaced in November. Now is the time to expand the genius of Cap the Tap, not suppress it. To anyone who complains that sodas and junk drinks are the primary source of added sugars in the American diet, I say: "Downer!" Here are some other programs Coca-Cola can start to maximize profits and minimize health.
There were three dopey and uninteresting illustrations in the paper. Here's one: 
Again, you can tell somebody thought they were funny and super-clever. One is "Shoot The Fruit," another is "Zap The Yap" (which refers to zapping mom's mouth with a stun gun so her kids can fill up on "high fructose"), and the third is the above "Table The Vegetables."
Yawnies.
No, Coke isn't healthy. Neither is chocolate cake. Neither are French fries. Neither is that whole-grain bun. (And frankly, a lot of fruit is packed with sugar.)
But Coke can be consumed in a healthy way the same way I consume chocolate ice cream -- on special occasions. (I eat low-carb and have either a tiny chocolate bar or a small scoop of gelato once every week and a half or two weeks.)
It takes personal responsibility. Self-regulation. If you don't have it or apply it, it isn't Coke's fault you're putting on weight; it's yours.
It is naive and ridiculous to think marketers would sit back and not pitch their products. And their pitch is right, of course -- a restaurant makes more money by selling drinks that cost something, whether they're pushing Pellegrino or Coke.
But, ooh, did it every feel squishy and good for Anne to pretend that Coke is the demon and not the government-pushed move from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup and the government-advocated high-carb, low-fat diet that actually makes us fat and diabetic.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of Coke, I liked that old Coke commercial song that inspired the headline of this post. Check it out:
"Male Privilege" -- To Be Denigrated, Dismissed, And Shamed For Being Male
I've blogged recently how women no longer demand equality but special treatment -- to be coddled in the workplace and in academia. In addition, academic feminism has led the march to lie about sex differences (deeming them socially constructed not biologically driven), to shame men for being male, and to deem normal male mating behavior "sexual harassment."
Camille Paglia's opening words from a recent debate, "Resolved: Men Are Obsolete," were published in TIME:
Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today's punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.
...Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments.
Slinky
Sun, moon, stairs...
The New America: No Punishment For Lying To Congress If You're In The Ruling Elite
Jonathan Turley writes that Senator John McCain was irate that the CIA lied to him and to Congress about a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, being held in Iran:
However, unlike demands for the jailing of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden for revealing government abuses, McCain notably did not even suggest prosecuting CIA officials who allegedly consistently and repeatedly lied to Congress. No, he suggests that the latest example of false statements to Congress might require a reexamination of congressional oversight. Now that must be chilling for people who could be charged with federal crimes ranging from perjury to obstruction to false statements to federal officers.I previously wrote a column how our country seems to have developed separate rules for the ruling elite and the rest of us. There is no better example than the lack of response of the Senate to the admitted perjury of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before Congress. While the Justice Department has prosecuted people for the smallest departure from the truth, including testimony before Congress, no one in the Senate is calling for an investigation, let alone a prosecution, of Clapper. For his part, Attorney General Eric Holder is continuing his political approach to enforcing the law and declining to even acknowledge the admitted perjury of Clapper. Now, in a truly bizarre moment, Clapper has written a letter of apology like an errant schoolboy to excuse his commission of a felony crime . . . and it appears to have been accepted. What is curious is that we do not have letters from senators like Dianne Feinstein apologizing to doing nothing when they were all aware that Clapper was lying in his public testimony. Welcome to America's Animal Farm.
From David Keene in the Wash Times, Clapper's lie:
It's worth taking a minute to go back to that hearing, in which Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Clapper very specifically, "Does the National Security Agency collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Mr. Clapper furrowed his brow, scratched his head and said, "No sir, it does not."
Keene called for Clapper's resignation. And yes, that's what it's come to -- newspaper editorials calling for justice, which will be roundly ignored.
Did I Overlook Some Architect-Perpetrated Crime Wave?
It seems Texas has found a clever way to violate people's privacy. Starting January 1, architects who apply for an occupational license there will have to be fingerprinted. Mike Riggs writes at Atlantic Cities:
Texas House Bill 1717 [PDF], passed earlier this year, says that applicants seeking a license from the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners must submit "a complete and legible set of fingerprints, on a form prescribed by the board, to the board or to the Department of Public Safety for the purpose of obtaining criminal history record information." The FBI would also have access to all those fingerprints.The requirement applies not just to new applicants, but also to licensed architects seeking to have their registrations renewed. Violators face a fine of up to $5,000 per day in which they are not in compliance with the new law. Currently only one other state (Massachusetts) even runs criminal background checks on architects. Now Texas is upping the ante.
...Architects in the state aren't alone. The Texas Medical Board requires fingerprints for medical licenses and the Texas Nursing Board requires them for nursing licenses. Same goes for every job type governed by the Texas Racing Commission (ranging from assistant farrier to race announcer to jockey), as well as real estate agents, lawyers, and speech language pathologists.
...So what happens if an architect in good professional standing is revealed to have a minor crime on his record due to being fingerprinted? Could he lose his license, despite the quality of his work? The TBAE absolutely reserves that right.
Disgusting. This happens because no one complains. Or very, very few do.
As I was saying to a friend on Saturday night, this isn't the America we were told we were living in -- in so many arenas in our society, from the courts to police abuses to our government violating our privacy and genitalia in the name of "security."
And yet, no one complains. And we get what we put up with.
via @Overlawyered
13 Things That Are Only True In Porn
Casey Gueren posts on this at StyleCaster. Here are a couple good points that quote Dr. Brandy Engler, a guest from this summer on my radio show:
5. Missionary is out. Whips and chains are in. We're all for experimenting in bed, but that doesn't mean you need to try something new every single night. Porn tends to hint that 'vanilla sex' is bad and that you need to be wild and crazy all the time, says sex therapist Brandy Engler, Ph.D., author of The Men on My Couch. The bottom line: Do what feels good.7. Your reactions are always Oscar-worthy in bed.
When something feels good, definitely let your partner know. But that doesn't mean moaning so loud your neighbors hear it. Women tend to see things in porn they think they need to mimic, "like false or over-exaggerated enthusiasm instead of just your natural response," says Engler. Don't go overboard--your partner will see right through it.
Engler's book, co-authored with David Rensin, is The Men on My Couch: True Stories of Sex, Love and Psychotherapy
The Officer Was Not Seriously Hurt (By The Misbehaving 5-Year-Old)
Laura Hibbard blogs at HuffPo about a 5-year-old who was zip-tied by a school police officer as the school's idea of -- appallingly -- trying to scare him into behaving. (Not a solution for a kid who has biochemically-driven issues with, very likely, impulsivity, sitting still, and focusing.):
What started as an attempt by the Rio Calaveras Elementary in Stockton, Calif. to change the behavior of a student with ADHD, turned into a source of outrage for the boy's mother, KCRA reports.Earlier this year, school officials arranged for 5-year-old Michael Davis to meet with a school police officer in the hopes that the gathering would leave the sometimes-too-aggressive Davis "scared straight."
Instead, the officer bound his hands and feet with zip ties, charged him with battery on a police officer, and forced him to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
Lieutenant Frank Fordo wrote in the police report that, after placing his hand on Davis, the boy "pushed my hand away ... pushed papers off the table, and kicked me in the right knee."
Instead of calling Davis' mother, Fordo bound the boy's hands and feet, and took him to the hospital.
Scott Greenfield, on whose law blog I found the story, gets it right:
The fact that anyone at the school thought this was an appropriate means of addressing Michael's behavioral issues is beyond comprehension. This is where we expect teachers and administrators to have some minimum level of competency, of understanding, of empathy, to deal with children....In the comments to the HuffPo post, commenter Peter Atwood provides background about the school district's failure.
The mother had asked the district to assess the kid. The district would not do so, violating 34 CFR 104.35, which requires a kid with a disability to be assessed. They also violated 34 CFR 104.32, which requires them to find and offer to assess kids with suspected disabilities. As the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said, the district failed to provide a free appropriate public education (FAPE).If this is true, then it's an outrage aside from bringing in Fordo to scare Michael into submission. This is not merely a legal duty imposed on districts, but a moral imperative in dealing with children. Sorry it's hard to deal with special needs students, but they aren't thrilled with having disabilities either.
And as Scott wrote in the comments on his blog:
This kid wasn't a precocious trouble-maker, but suffers from ADHD with apparent behavioral issues requiring an intervention plan. It's not merely that the school (and police) handled him poorly, but utterly disregarded their legal obligation to him and put him at obvious risk by trying this insane "scared straight" nonsense with an officer who was utterly unqualified and inappropriate for the situation. Schools can be bad with precocious kids; they violate a specific legal duty when they neglect special needs students.
Finky
A link with snitches. Who are very different from Sneetches
Electronics Overstock Event
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Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: David DiSalvo On How Harnessing Your Brain's Power To Adapt Can Change Your Life
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Changing our behavior starts with changing our thinking and doing that successfully takes both insight and practice.
Science writer and bestselling author David DiSalvo returns to the show tonight to talk about how the brain operates via a series of "feedback loops," and to explain how we can actually redirect our thinking and influence our brain's response -- in turn influencing how we feel and act.
These insights come straight out of DiSalvo's just-published book, Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life
Drawing on the latest research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioral econ, and communications, DiSalvo replaces "self-help" with "science-help," and gives us practical steps to change our thinking and our lives.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/16/david-disalvo-how-harnessing-your-brains-power-to-adapt-can-change-your-life
Don't miss last week's show with Wharton professor Adam Grant on Dr. Adam Grant, "How Giving Can Lead To Success Or Work To Your Detriment."
Wharton organizational psychologist Dr. Adam Grant will be on this week talking about his terrific book, "Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success," which draws from research to explain what makes giving both powerful and dangerous to people's achieving their goals.
Paradoxically, it's often those who give without looking for anything in return -- who just want to do good, open the playing field to good people -- who ultimately get the most in return. But, Grant warns, there are caveats to this -- and he lays them out in the book and we'll discuss them as well as giving's many nuances and benefits on the show.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/09/dr-adam-grant-on-how-giving-can-lead-to-success-or-work-to-your-detriment
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.
Instagram Envy: Idiots With Bad Values And Too Much Time On Their Hands
I see my friends, especially my friends who have worked hard as journalists and authors, going places and becoming successful and looking good, and I'm happy for them.
It's irrational to envy people -- you can't have the life they have; you can only have yours. And if you see that their life seems better, and more money is a part of it, you can change your life to try to earn more. Or, let's say they seem happier. You can figure out what about your psychology or looks isn't getting you a great person and try to change that. And the same goes for other areas of your life.
But as I was telling a friend last night, going to Paris over the years (and renting tiny apartments there and meeting people who live in them) taught me that people can live very happily in small apartments, with few clothes and other possessions, and I feel wildly grateful to live with comfort and ease in a way few people have throughout history.
And I say this as somebody who lives in a small, termite-eaten shack, with a 2004 car. I also have a roof over my head and a refrigerator with food in it, and a number of appliances that make my life easier and better.
I have a wonderful boyfriend who loves me and vice versa, a dog that's joy on four legs, and friends I admire and care about. Last night, I went to a party, hung out with many of my friends, and had a friend (the host) show me the library he'd built for all the thick presidential biographies he loves to read, and he told me and another friend stories about what an amazing person George Washington was. Life is not just good; it's great.
An article about Instagram envy inspired this post. Alex Williams writes in The New York Times:
For many urban creative professionals these days, it's not unusual to scroll through one's Instagram feed and feel suffocated by fabulousness: There's one friend paddling in the surf at Positano under a fiery Italian sunset. Another is snapping away at a sweaty Thom Yorke from the third row at an Atoms for Peace concert in Austin. Yet another is sipping Champagne in Lufthansa business class en route to Frankfurt, while a fourth is huddling with friends over omakase at Masa.Members of the Facebook generation are no strangers to the sensation of feeling a little left out when their friends post from that book party they weren't invited to, or from someone's latest transporting trip to the white sands of Tulum. Yet even for those familiar with the concept of social-media envy, Instagram -- the highest achievement yet in social-media voyeurism -- presents a new form of torture.
On Instagram, there is none of the familiar messiness of Facebook (which bought Instagram last year for about $1 billion) or Twitter, where the torrent of wish-you-were-here-but-not-really posts are lost in a clutter of birthday wishes to Aunt Candace, one-liners about airline food and links to the latest Onion headline or New Republic deconstruction of Obamacare.
Instagram, rather, is about unadulterated voyeurism. It is almost entirely a photo site, with a built-in ability (through the site's retro-style filters) to idealize every moment, encouraging users to create art-directed magazine layouts of their lives, as if everyone is suddenly Diana Vreeland.
...Robyn Mermelstein, 35, an executive for a natural foods company who lives in Long Island, often finds herself looking at such shots from one particular friend while breast-feeding her infant daughter at 3 a.m.
"I'll swear that a White House photographer follows them around," said Ms. Mermelstein, who follows 137 people on Instagram, mostly friends, and keeps her account private to prevent others from seeing her photos. (On Thursday, Instagram announced a new feature that will let users share photos with selected friends.) "The full family of four is in every photo. Whether it's the first day of school, apple picking, summer camp, the playground or on vacation, all four super-happy family members fill each and every frame."
It's easy to capture selected images of "the perfect life" but even rich and fabulous people get cancer and get divorced.
via @BernardKingIII
Obamacare Hack: The Exploitable Flaw In The Program
Dr. Michael Eades has read extensively on the new Obamacare law and has discovered a weakness -- or as he refers to it, an "unintended consequence" -- that he thinks will be exploited by many as soon as they figure it out:
Why do people buy insurance? For a few reasons:
* First, they want help with routine medical needs, i.e., doctor's visits, x-rays, lab work, etc.
* Second, they want coverage for any kind of unexpected or catastrophic development. In the pre-Obamacare days, this could be easily accomplished if one were healthy by purchasing a catastrophic insurance policy for a few bucks a month. Now, impossible, because all policies have to meet or exceed the Obamacare standards.
*Third, and probably most important, people want to keep from becoming uninsurable.
And all it took to become radioactive to an insurance carrier was developing a serious disease.
Historically, if you were uninsured and you had a heart attack or developed cancer, you were pretty much screwed as far as getting insured was concerned. You had what is called a pre-existing condition, and though you could get insurance, it would cost you an arm and a leg. If you were insured and got a serious disease, it was a different story. You could still get screwed, but in most states, individual health insurance policies were guaranteed renewable, meaning as long as you paid your premiums your insurance company couldn't drop you. Your premiums, depending upon your policy, might go up at renewal time, but not to the same extent as they would were you applying for new insurance with the pre-existing condition.
So, one of the big reasons young, healthy people would spend the bucks to purchase insurance is so they won't become uninsurable should they have the misfortune to develop a serious and expensive-to-treat disease.
...With this third reason that people opt to buy insurance in mind, here is the hack.
One of the central pillars of Obamacare is that people with pre-existing conditions can get insured easily and at essentially the same rates as those without the pre-existing condition. This means that those of us who have no pre-existing conditions will end up paying more to compensate for the higher expected insurance payouts needed to cover those who do have pre-existing conditions.
...So, if you are healthy, just go without insurance. Pay the $95 fine, which you have to pay only if you are getting back a federal tax refund. If something bad happens to you, God forbid, then go on one of the Obamacare plans and sign up. Simple as that.
You can't be denied for any sort of pre-existing condition. And your rates won't be affected. So why pay for insurance until you need it? Obamacare has effectively removed the main incentive for the young and healthy to opt in responsibly to avoid bankrupting themselves or becoming a drain on their families or neighbors should catastrophe strike.
He also points out that Obamacare is in such flux right now, we can't really know that it will even exist in a few months.
For this reason, and after getting second opinions from pundit Mickey Kaus and economist-pundit Megan McArdle, I've decided to stick with my health insurance that has become (thanks so much, Obama!) too expensive and to see what shakes out of this mess.
License Plate Scanners Are Eroding Our Privacy
Terrific piece by Glenn Harlan Reynolds in Popular Mechanics on automated license plate scanners, mounted on police cars, telephone poles, and elsewhere in order to build a huge database of where people are driving:
This might seem like a small intrusion compared with the electronic spying carried out by the NSA. But not all threats to privacy involve the tracking of emails and other communications.Right now, the law suggests that license-plate scanners don't invade your privacy because they record only events that occur in public. After all, anyone could see you driving down the road or parked in front of a motel. But if officials add up enough bits of information like that, they gradually can construct what the ACLU has termed a "single, high-resolution image of our lives."
There's a legal term for this idea: the mosaic theory. The New York Times ran a story last year about how a man angrily confronted a Target store manager to complain that the company was sending his teenage daughter coupons for baby goods. Were they trying to encourage her to get pregnant? Nope. Target's data-mining operation had found a strong correlation between purchases of about 25 items--scent-free lotions, certain nutritional supplements, and so on--and different stages of pregnancy. The teenager's purchases had fit the pattern. The father apologized to Target a few days later, when it turned out that his daughter was, in fact, pregnant.
Law enforcement agencies may not know or care what toiletries you buy, but they can access credit reports and property tax records, which are public information. Setting that aside, simply tracking our movements can erode our privacy. The Supreme Court recently held that police need a search warrant to attach a GPS tracker to an individual's car, even though the device would just be recording travel along public roads. The decision turned largely on the idea that placing a locating device on your car is a trespass on your property. But five justices also suggested some sympathy to the mosaic theory as a legal argument; whether the court actually adopts such an approach will have to wait for a later case.
The Supreme Court, though, isn't the first step in protecting privacy; it's the last.
He notes that we need to speak up -- to Congress, to state legislatures -- to stop the privacy invasion.
Milky
Linkie with Elsie.
Manhattan Obama Voters Get Some Hard Lessons About Government And The Free Market
Anemona Hartocollis writes for The New York Times about how those in Manhattan's professional and cultural elite who supported the President's health care plan are having their insurance plans canceled and being forced to pay far more for comparable coverage -- if they can even find it:
They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York's individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.
"I couldn't sleep because of it," said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan.
Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.
Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state's health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. "It's like you're blindfolded and you're told that you have to buy something," she said.
The people affected include not just writers, artists, doctors and the like, they said, but also independent tradespeople, like home builders or carpenters, who work on their own.
Oh, and guess what:
Many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the [minimum required] standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers "smaller and disproportionately sicker," and would drive up rates.
Before you vote to be all free with "other people's money" consider that you might be one of those "other people" and the money that you may be spending may be a whole lot more of your own.
And then there's this:
It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people -- liberal, concerned with social justice -- who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.
Thanks for not bothering to rub two brain cells together until well after the election. My affordable care that I've been paying for as an individual for 26 years is now unaffordable, thanks to the -- heh - "Affordable Care Act" that those of you starstruck by Obama helped shepherd in.
via @instapundit
Minnesota Pastor: "The Devil Was Inside" The Girls He Raped
Oh, and I guess he figured there was no better tool to root the fella out than his big erect penis.
Andres Jauregui writes for the HuffPo:
A "self-proclaimed" pastor in Minnesota has been charged with the rape of two girls.Jacoby Kindred, 61, is accused of sexually abusing the daughters of his son's girlfriend beginning when they were only six years old. According to a criminal complaint obtained by the Pioneer Press, Kindred, a pastor with One Accord Ministries, told one victim that "the devil was inside her and he could take the demons out of her."
KARE 11 reports that the alleged abuse "involved fondling, oral stimulation, and rape," and took place mostly at Kindred's Maplewood, Minn., home, while the victims, now 14 and 16, stayed over. Kindred is said to have abused the girls for more than a decade.
Police began their investigation in July after the girls' mother said she found out about a letter written by one of her daughters that described sexual acts with Kindred.
He claims he's been falsely accused but the fact that this reportedly came out after the mother of one of the victims read a letter written by one of her daughters detailing the sex acts with Kindred.
Lumpy
He was either the eighth dwarf or linkie with gravy.
How To Catch A Terrorist (As Was Shown In Wichita) -- And, No, The Answer Does Not Include Unskilled Workers Groping Travelers At The Airport
A man was arrested this morning for planning to bomb the Wichita airport. At the Wichita Eagle, Tim Potter writes:
A Wichita man has been charged in federal court with attempting to explode a car bomb at Wichita MC Airport, U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom.Terry Lee Loewen, 58, of Wichita, is charged in a criminal complaint field today in federal court in Wichita. With one count of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction, one count of attempting to damage property and one count of attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Loewen, who works as an avionics technician, is alleged to have spent months developing a plan to use his access card to airport grounds to drive a van loaded with explosives to the terminal.
He planned to pull the triggers on the explosives himself and to die in the explosion.
Agents arrested Loewen about 5:40 a.m. Friday after he attempted to enter the airport tarmac and deliver a vehicle loaded with what he believed to be high explosives.
Members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) took him into custody without incident.
As I've written (and written), we stop terrorists long before they get to the airport by using trained intelligence officers operating based on probable cause -- not by having repurposed Cinnabon workers grope everybody's hoohoo and pretend it means something.
Toxic Feminism's Long Fingers Reach Down To First Grade
After sending a boy home for "sexual harassment," the school has "downgraded" the offense of the 6-year-old who kissed a girl, reports CBSNews (asshole autoplay video at the link):
Hunter Yelton, the 6-year-old who was suspended from school for kissing a little girl's hand, has returned to school.On Wednesday night, his school downgraded the offense from sexual harassment to misconduct.
The boy apparently had done this repeatedly, but it is absolutely unbelievable that this would be considered "sexual harassment" and not simply behavior to correct in a 6-year-old.
What Kind Of Idiot Pranks The Cops?
A "comedian" was on a cellphone while driving -- illegal in California -- but actually it was a cookie, made to look like a phone.
Gregg: You drive around Southern California, looking for a cop to stop you. This is not a good life model.
What's next, a cookie gun?
From LAist, Matthew Bramlett reported the comedian got his ass hauled into the station for some unpaid parking tickets.
Wow, that was unpredictable.
The Images The Media Doesn't Present
George Bush and Barack Obama -- and the wives of each, and Bill Clinton -- all were pretty cozy in South Africa.
via @reasonpolicy
Limpie
Linkie in need of lift-off.
Choices Have Consequences (Though That's Not What The Feminist Fairy Tales Will Tell You)
Virginia Postrel, the former editor of reason, added on to a quote in a tweet from Ryan Sager (the italicized bit):
@vpostrel
"@ryansager: "Any woman...who had to take maternity leave or depart the office at 6p.m...could never compete with men" Or edit REASON.
Women who expect otherwise are asking to have it all, and sorry, but you just can't have it all.
Sager had tweeted a link to this TIME piece by Liza Mundy, "Working Parents in High-Powered Jobs--One Spouse Must Make Career Sacrifices: The concept of "specialization" in families is having a renaissance":
On Sunday, the New York Times published a front-page piece about the rise in women bankers with stay-at-home husbands. This time, objections were raised by more progressive observers who argued that these women's success is hardly to be celebrated; it just means they are giving in to a rotten corporate culture that requires insane work hours.
I have a personal work culture that requires "insane work hours." I choose it. If I chose to have children, I could only flirt with the work I do in the most surface way.
I also think (based on letters I get and reading I've done) that many women ultimately don't really respect a man who's a house husband. Of course, this isn't true of all women, but we evolved to want men who are providers and when a man is merely providing childcare, that's ultimately a problem, psychologically, for some (and maybe even many) women.
Obamacare's Biggest Losers
Sarah Kliff writes at the WaPo about how the government's loser of a healthcare website is jeopardizing the financial future -- and maybe the lives -- of many who were dumped from their health plans and are now forced to sign up for Obamacare:
After three months and more than 50 phone calls, John Gisler gave up on buying coverage through HealthCare.gov.Gisler wanted to purchase a plan for his 45-year-old son, who has a rare degenerative condition affecting his coordination and speech. His current coverage through Utah's high-risk insurance pool plan ends Dec. 31. By that time, the Obama administration expects enrollees to transition into health plans sold through the new health-care law.
But so far, Gisler hasn't succeeded in purchasing coverage -- but not for a lack of effort.
"We've had three separate applications that failed to make it through," Gisler says. "I have a notebook with all the calls I've made, maybe 50 or 100. It just goes on and on."Earlier this week, Gisler quit trying. Worried about a potential gap in coverage, he decided to forgo his son's $3,000 tax credit and buy outside of the exchange from a local insurance broker.
"We have a son who is critically ill," he says. "We cannot take any chances. Not having insurance would, in no short order, lead our family to bankruptcy."
The Affordable Care Act is designed to expand health insurance coverage. But the law's insurance cancellations mixed with the Web site's problems might leave some people who have coverage now uninsured in the new year.
These are Obamacare's biggest losers: People whose current plans have been canceled but who are having trouble getting through HealthCare.Gov to purchase coverage by Dec. 23 -- the deadline for buying insurance that begins Jan. 1.
The concern is particularly acute for patients with expensive medical conditions, who rely on their coverage for doctor visits and drug refills that would otherwise break the bank.
We're from the government, and we're here to "help."
via @ezraklein
Paranoid School Policies On "Drugs" Lead To Dead Kid
Steve Steve Mertl writes at Yahoo of a tragedy that ensued due to the utterly asinine zero sense policies that keep girls from having Midol in their possession and keep kids who have asthma from carrying inhalers:
The unnecessary death of a child is always tragic but the manner of Ryan Gibbons' demise seems like the stuff of a parent's nightmares.The 12-year-old Ontario boy suffered a severe asthma attack while playing soccer at his school in the village of Straffordville.
But under Ontario school policy, he wasn't allowed to carry an emergency inhaler of asthma medicine. It had to stay locked up in the principal's office.
His mother, Sandra Gibbons, told The Canadian Press Ryan probably panicked as his friends were carrying him to the office to get the inhaler. He blacked out and later died, his inhaler behind that locked door.
My dear late friend Catherine Seipp wrote about this for reason in 2002:
I was relieved when my daughter learned to read and proved she knew how to take her medicine by herself. Plus, unlike most adults, she was careful not to leave it locked in a hot car or sitting in the sun. One day when in the fifth grade, however, she was in tears when I picked her up from school. The teacher had yelled at her when she'd used the inhaler in class, claiming that she didn't really need it.I spoke to Ivanhoe's then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I'd been "breaking the law" for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would "confiscate" it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. "So now what we need to do," he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, "is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law." My arguments about doctor's orders went nowhere. "When your daughter is at school," Principal Baker said, "I am the ultimate authority concerning her health."
That Robert De Niro soundbite from The Untouchables that Howard Stern likes to play -- "I want him dead! I want his family dead!" -- kept echoing in my head as I left the school office. But I'd heard enough misinformed pronouncements over the years from that school -- a jellyfish is a mollusk, "Indian" should be spelled with a small i -- to consider the possibility that the principal didn't know what he was talking about. So I went home and called the Los Angeles Unified School District's director of nursing. Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker's desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly.
...Rescue inhalers work by opening the bronchial passages, ideally to 100 percent of what they should normally be. It can't dilate them any further, so a non-asthmatic student who grabs another student's inhaler would feel no change in his breathing. The only likely side-effect might be a mild jitteriness. Inhalers aren't dangerous; asthma, which kills around 5,000 people a year, is. What's really frightening is how it can surprise you. I know children with severe asthma who have never been hospitalized; my daughter, who rarely wheezes badly, caught a simple, non-feverish cold when she was five that put her in the hospital for four days. Parents who've experienced such situations, who've been forced to acquire a certain level of expertise, can be impatient when school officials -- many of whom don't even know that asthma can be fatal -- dismiss their concerns as paranoia.
Minkie
Fur a good time...
How Every Part Of American Life Became A Police Matter
At Mother Jones, Chase Madar writes about how, "from the workplace to our private lives, American society is starting to resemble a police state." An excerpt:
Overcriminalization at WorkOffice and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee targeted by a federal prosecutor for the "crime" of incorrectly processing a travel agency's bid for state business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George Norris, sentenced to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.
Increasingly, basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance, Human Rights Watch reports that a new law funnels delinquent (or allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal courts, where failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and incarceration, even though debtor's prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth century.
And the mood is spreading. Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008 and the rising cries of progressives for the criminal prosecution of Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally sound financial system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians. A few high-profile prosecutions for insider trading (which had nothing to do with the last crash) have, of course, not changed Wall Street one bit.
"Godless Harlot"
That's what my business card used to say: "Amy Alkon, godless harlot." Really.
A related tweet from Daniel Gilbert:
@DanTGilbert
Atheists need better marketing. For example: "Dear Christians, we are the ONLY people who don't think our god is better than yours."
A feature of religion is believing in the "tradition" that you grew up in. People born Christian believe in Jesus; people born Muslim believe in Allah, and so on. They "just know" because they were just told that guy is god.
The Sleep Of A Tiny Creature Without Deadlines
Aida, cozy, while I write my ass off: 
Is The Rent Really Too Damn High?
Or are incomes too damn low?
John Aziz writes at The Week:
A new study from Harvard University shows that in the last thirty years, rents have risen and the income of renters has fallen:Indeed, more renters than at any point in recent history -- just under half -- are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. And of these renters, many are even devoting 50 percent of their income to rent.
This is clearly problematic. People who can't afford their rent have to cut back on other essentials like food, transportation, and heating.
Here are his suggestions, all of which I disagree with:
So where does that leave the growing numbers of people struggling to pay the rent? Building more housing would not only create a larger supply, thereby driving down rents, but would also create jobs in construction and infrastructure. Raising taxes on corporations and high-income earners can yield funds to create jobs for the unemployed, build infrastructure, and invest in public projects like going to the moon. The strong economic growth and low unemployment of the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by much higher taxes on the wealthy, and much more infrastructure building. And as I've argued before, the government could even start redistributing wealth in a more direct fashion.
Your more rational and economically sound ideas?
One Day, A Computer Will Fit On A Desk...
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke on the future, from 1974.
via @blazingcatfur
Government Blog For TSA Praises TSA; The Reality Comes Out In The Comments
A commenter fact-checked their ass, as the saying goes.
The government's post is "TSA Week in Review - 34 Firearms Discovered This Week - 30 Loaded."
The commenter:
Anonymous said...12,000,000 people flew last week on 210,000 flights.
TSA missed 70 weapons, so a total of 100 weapons, none of which were possessed by a terrorist, were brought into US airports.
100 out of 12,000,000 flyers = .0008%
100 out of 210,000 flights = .05%
TSA found 34, so 66 people got on those 210,000 flights. Since none were threats to aviation safety, no one was threatened and no planes fell out of the sky.
These useless blotter blogs are statistically insignificant. Stop pretending the TSA is doing anything more than wasting $8,000,000,000 per year.
The TSA itself says in court documents that no terrorists are trying to blow up planes.
The TSA is an embarrassment to America.
And, as other comments there point out, don't forget the two-inch toy gun confiscated from the sock monkey.
Linkers Can't Be Choosers
Or is it that they shouldn't beg on Wednesdays?
The "Truth" Is Not What's Winning Out In Forcing Creative People To Do Business With People They Deplore
A site, truthwinsout, posted this graphic. 
What's "winning" here is the antithesis of freedom and self-determination.
I've posted before that if I were any more pro gay rights, I'd have a girlfriend, but I'm also pro freedom and self-determination and, well, Marc J. Randazza put it just right on Facebook:
I'm sorry, but I agree with the fundamentalists on this one.An artist, of any type, should never be forced to create something they do not want to create -- even if their motivation is based in superstition, bigotry, and stupidity.
Of course, comparing gays to nazis is just pathetic, so its still a fail.
TSA Monkeys Disarm Toy Monkey, Preventing Him From Taking Over The Cockpit With His Two-Inch Toy Gun
Andrew Johnson writes at NR of the latest show of the "security" we have at airports -- separating a toy sock monkey from his two-inch toy gun:
TSA agents in St. Louis, Missouri, disarmed Rooster Monkburn, a cowboy sock money, of his two-inch toy gun after a woman brought the stuffed monkey through security. Agents said that it posed a threat because it could be confused for a real gun, according to local reports."[The agent] said 'this is a gun,'" said Phyllis May, recounting the experience to fly back to her home in Washington state. "I said no, it's not a gun it's a prop for my monkey."
Do you feel safer? 
Boy Suspended For Firing Pretend Arrow At Another Student
There's apparently a race in U.S. school districts to see which can be the most idiotic in punishing children for being children.
From Metro.UK, a Pennsylvania 10-year-old faces expulsion from his middle school for, yes, pretending to fire a pretend arrow at another student:
According to the Rutherford Institute, which is defending the youngster, Johnny was accused of breaching the school's regulations on using weapons, even though the bow and arrow were not real.He was reprimanded after the girl he 'fired' the bow at notified a teacher.
The Rutherford Institute's president John W. Whitehead said: 'We all want to keep the schools safe, but I'd far prefer to see something credible done about actual threats, rather than this on-going, senseless targeting of imaginary horseplay.'
What I'd like to see is parents demanding the expulsion of the idiots behind these policies and the sell-out idiots enforcing them.
And it isn't just parents whose kids are affected who should be standing up but all parents.
Of course, it is generally boys who play with weapons, so these policies tend to amount to boys being suspended or expelled for being boys. (It's only later that schools suspend or expel girls for carrying Midol.)
We have become a country of pussies and enablers of that and few people seem to care.
Lunkie
Linkie with stupid sauce.
"If You Leaf Me Now..."
I think my plants like to die to spite me.
Gratuitous Photo Of My Dog In A Cable-Knit Sweater
Bonus picture of me in an ugly dress at around 8 years old in the back. 
And yes, there are always books on the floor at my house.
How A Small-Time Pot Arrest Ate A Great Teacher
He says he wasn't even smoking pot. The cop pulled a butt of a joint off the ground. Another Drug War casualty. The injustice here is stunning.
He was never found guilty of anything. The evidence wasn't there. But he wasn't allowed to come back to his job.
via @979KingsRoad
All Men Are (Still) Criminals And Can't Wait To Rape You
In the continuing feminism-driven push to completely criminalize being born male, there's a quote from an assistant city attorney in Madison, Wisconsin about a business charging $60 an hour for hugs, snuggling, spooning.
Personal opinion on this business concept: Eeeuw. But that's beside the point.
There's a story on this from the AP by Todd Richmond that includes this quote from the assistant city attorney:
"There's no way that (sexual assault) will not happen," assistant city attorney Jennifer Zilavy said. "No offense to men, but I don't know any man who wants to just snuggle."
I don't want to, oh, just take out the garbage, but if you hire me to do that, I'm going to do that and not rob you of whatever you have of value whenever your back is turned and then pawn it or sell it on eBay.
More from the piece:
(Zilavy) said no city ordinances address snuggling businesses. She's drafting regulations that would allow health inspections as well as create licensing requirements. She also planned to take Hurtado up on his offer to watch security footage of a snuggle session and view client rosters.
Of course, the government must be a part of this because, wow, how could grown, consenting adults manage to conduct business between themselves without government extracting a licensing fee and deciding what works for them?
via @radleybalko
The Kafkaesque Country We've Become
The Identity Project website has details from the first lawsuit challenging a US government no-fly order. The plaintiff is a woman, Dr. Raninah Ibrahim.
Dr. Ibrahim, of course, was the one witness who had no option of testifying in person at her own trial. The State Department's witness today confirmed that Dr. Ibrahim applied for a U.S. visa in 2009 for the specific purpose of coming to San Francisco to be deposed in this case. Knowing that was the purpose for her trip, the State Department denied her application for a visa.The government's attorneys objected to questioning about why that visa application was denied, and most of those objections were sustained on the grounds that the reasons for the visa denial, like those for the "nomination" and placement of Dr. Ibrahim on the no-fly list by the FBI and its Terrorist Screening Center, were "state secrets."
However, the limited State Department testimony that was allowed to be presented in open court suggested that the State Department visa officers who denied Dr. Ibrahim's application in 2009 did so purely on the basis of the fact that her name had been placed on a watchlist in 2004 or 2005, without any review or even knowledge of the "derogatory" information (if there was any) which had been alleged by the original "nominating" FBI agent to provide a basis for that watchlist placement.
Here's the most chilling bit:
(FBI documents) showed that the mere opening of an investigation was itself deemed to be sufficient grounds for placing a person on a watchlist, without the need to evaluate whether there had been any factual predicate for the opening of the investigation. This contradicted the government's claims about the existence of threshhold evidentiary criteria for watchlist decisions.
Here's more that reflects an America I think most of us believe we're not supposed to be:
The essence of Prof. Kahn's testimony was the absence from the watchlist procedures of essential elements of due process: notice, opportunity to be heard, and the ability to have decisions reviewed by an entity independent of the decision-making agency. As Prof. Kahn summarizes this in his book, on the basis of information including interviews with the officials who established and operated the system of watchlists:The watchlisters are prosecutor, judge, jury, and jailer. Their decisions are made in secret and their rules for decision -- like their evidence for deciding -- are classified. There is no appeal from the decisions of the watchlisters, except to the watchlisters themselves.This is key to Dr. Ibrahim's complaint, which is both (1) that there was no, or no sufficient, factual basis for her placement on the no-fly list and other watchlists, and (2) that the decisions to place her on those watchlists violated due process, regardless of any evidence on which they might have been based, because she was not given notice, an opportunity to rebut any allegations against her, and an opportunity to have the decisions independently reviewed.
More about Ibrahim here (scroll down for her biography and education).
Abe Linkin, International
Fjord's theater.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Adam Grant On How Giving Can Lead To Success Or Work To Your Detriment
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Wharton organizational psychologist Dr. Adam Grant will be on this week talking about his terrific book, "Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success," which draws from research to explain what makes giving both powerful and dangerous to people's achieving their goals.
Paradoxically, it's often those who give without looking for anything in return -- who just want to do good, open the playing field to good people -- who ultimately get the most in return. But, Grant warns, there are caveats to this -- and he lays them out in the book and we'll discuss them as well as giving's many nuances and benefits on the show.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
Don't miss last week's show, "Dr. Carl Alasko On Blame -- Why It's Toxic And How To Actually Resolve Conflict."
My guest was psychotherapist Carl Alasko, Ph.D., talking about blame -- one of the most toxic and destructive components of relationships and so many human interactions.
We discuss how to stop blaming and how to take healthier -- and far more productive -- steps to problem-solving, in relationships and beyond.
Alasko has written a very comprehensive book on blame -- Beyond Blame: Freeing Yourself from the Most Toxic Form of Emotional Bullsh*t.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/02/dr-carl-alasko-on-blame-why-its-toxic-and-how-to-actually-resolve-conflict
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.
One More Reason To Love Librarians: The American Library Association Wants To Protect Your Privacy From The Government
I have been grateful to librarians (to whom I put an acknowledgement in my last book, I See Rude People, my whole life.
They don't disappoint now.
Here's an article on CommonDreams, "Nation's Libraries Warn of NSA's 'Ravenous Hunger' for Data," by Andrea Germanos.
It includes this letter to American Libraries Association members from ALA President Barbara Stripling. An excerpt:
When we spoke out in 2001 against the passage of the PATRIOT Act, we were concerned about Section 215, a provision of the law that allowed the government powers to obtain "business records and other tangible things" from suspected terrorists. We were fearful that the government would come into libraries without warning and take library records on individual patrons without reasonable suspicion. Libraries were one of the first groups to publicly oppose the bill, and many legislators and privacy experts have noted that Congress would not have understood the chilling impact on privacy if librarians had not brought it to the nation's attention. Librarians were so vocal in their opposition to the law that Section 215 was called the "library provision." We could not have imagined then what is happening today. Today, in spite of the leak allegations, the government continues to use the "library provision" to vacuum up private communication records of Americans on a massive scale.Even the most cynical among us could not have predicted that the Obama Administration--an administration that campaigned on the promise of greater government transparency and openness--would allow a massive surveillance program to infringe upon the basic civil liberties of innocent, unsuspecting people. We understand the responsibility of the government to investigate terrorism and other harmful acts. But the need to protect the public does not mean that Americans have to relinquish their Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the process. ALA has already joined other civil liberties groups to call for more legal review, judicial oversight, transparency and public accountability. Our country needs to find the right balance.
We need to restore the balance between individual rights and terrorism prevention, and libraries are one of the few trusted American institutions that can lead true public engagement on our nation's surveillance laws and procedures.
via Lisa Simeone
Government-Approved Property Theft: "They Paved (The Artist's Studio) And Put Up A Parking Lot"
In Philadelphia, real life is starting to echo that part about paving and parking lots in Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi".
Institute for Justice's Nick Sibilla writes at Forbes.com that Philadelphia wants to call "eminent domain" (blandly evil words meaning "forcibly take a person's property") on an artist's studio and turn it into a parking lot and supermarket:
James Dupree has been celebrated around the world for his art. But now he is being condemned by the city of Philadelphia--literally....A native son of Philadelphia, his studio is just blocks away from his childhood home in the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia. After eight years of renovations and sweat equity, Dupree's studio has become a part of the community. Dupree has hosted and taught art classes at his place and has plans to start a mentorship program to educate inner-city youth on entrepreneurship and aesthetic appreciation. Visitors can rent part of the studio out on Airbnb.
But the city of Philadelphia has other plans for his property. In November 2012, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) was authorized to acquire 17 properties to build a supermarket in Mantua. According to the redevelopment plans, the PRA wants to bulldoze Dupree's studio to make room for the privately-owned grocery store and its parking lot. No tenant has been identified yet, but the supermarket project has received $2.75 million in state subsidies.
In an egregious lowball, the city offered Dupree $600,000, which is less than a third of the asking price for his studio. Even worse, it was a drive-by appraisal--"they didn't even come into the building," Dupree said in an interview.
Later on, two appraisers from the city actually entered his studio. But this time, the PRA reportedly offered him just $40,000 more. That figure is supposed to compensate Dupree for all the extensive renovations he's made and the more than 5,000 pieces of art in his studio. These works represent a lifetime of painting, spanning four decades.
...Yet rather than respect his right to property, according to Dupree, "they would rather steal it:"
"These eminent domain laws have been changed where they can go into these communities, seize their property, relocate the tenants for next to nothing, and then sell that land back to a private developer for a profit, under the guise of 'the good of the community.' I find this totally un-American."
Incredibly, his studio was seized just four days before an eminent domain loophole was closed.
...Dupree is determined to keep fighting, both in and out of court. To raise awareness, he's partnering with the Institute for Justice and building coalitions to press the city to return his deed. In one month, a petition on change.org has already garnered almost 2,000 signatures.
"Just give me my deed back," Dupree remarked. "I want to decide when and if I sell my property, on my terms."
This is an egregious violation of his rights, and we all need to stand up against these and oother violations of our civil liberties. Because it's the right thing to do, and because every violation makes the next one more possible. And because we could be next.
Going back to "Big Yellow Taxi," in it, Joni Mitchell has some words that pertain to our civil liberties, of which property rights are an essential one:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
Don't Assume Your Doctor Is Operating Based On Anything More Than Medical Hearsay
A must-read @DrEades post -- "Statin madness: A close encounter with medical idiocy." An excerpt of what is a detailed post:
But back to the statin prescription.How could any doctor in his/her right mind write such a prescription for an 86 year old, totally paralyzed man who has normal cholesterol? Even one who has elevated cholesterol? After about age 50, the higher the cholesterol, the greater the longevity. So, again, why would anyone write a prescription for a non-benign drug to an elderly patient? Plus, the chance for rhabdomyolysis is greater in the elderly who take statins as well as those who are taking a ton of other drugs, as is my dad. It's a set up for disaster with no potential upside to balance the risk. It is blind stupidity to prescribe a statin under these circumstances.
And not just any old statin. The script was for a large dose of Lipitor, a fat-soluble statin. Fat soluble statins are much more likely to be involved in drug interactions, and they can induce insulin resistance and possibly cause diabetes. If you're going to give an unnecessary drug, why wouldn't you at least give one with the fewest side effects?
There are seven statins available right now. Five of them are fat soluble and two are water soluble.
Fat soluble statins
Atorvastatin (Lipitor)
Cerivastatin (Baycol)**
Fluvastatin (Lescol)
Lovastatin (Mevacor)
Simvastatin (Zocor)Water soluble statins
Pravastatin (Pravachol)
Rosuvastatin (Crestor)I doubt that one doctor in 500 who prescribe statins know there are lipid soluble and water soluble and which are which. Now you're ahead of the game.
If I had to take a statin or prescribe on, I would certainly take or prescribe a water soluble one. These drugs pretty much pass through the kidneys unchanged, and since they don't have to be metabolized in the liver, there is less likelihood of serious liver problems, which are a problem with the lipid soluble statins. And, as I mentioned above, the lipid-soluble statins are more inclined to cause drug interactions, insulin resistance and probably diabetes. Why use them at all?
Great Deals On Books Released All Day
At Amazon
Linker Is Quinker
I have to stop drinking bathtub gin when I post. Or was I playing bathtub gin rummy? Memory fails.
Don't fail to amuse. Or excite. Or horrify. Or something.
Today's Greggism
Boyfriend: "You're feigning helplessness to exploit male labor?"
Me: "You mean it's Saturday?"
Sign to be hung by exploited boyfriend later today:
Higgs Boson Prof Believes He'd Never Get A Prof Job Today
Decca Aitkenhead writes for The Guardian that the requirement that professors keep churning out papers makes physicist Peter Higgs doubt that he could keep a university job today:
Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.The emeritus professor at Edinburgh university, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers following his groundbreaking work in 1964 which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass.
He doubts that a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."
Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
Edinburgh university's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".
Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.'"
@briandavidearp, @sbkaufman
E-Cigs And New York's "They Look Too Real!" Argument
Reason Foundation's Adrian Moore tweeted:
@reasonpolicy
Nanny NYC Health Commissioner Says E-Cigarettes Must Be Banned Because They Look Like the Real Thing
My tweet back:
Tofurky, meatless meatballs, and those hotdogs made from tofu feet and snouts should be next on the "looks real" hit list.
Moore's tweet linked to this Jacob Sullum piece at reason:
Yesterday the New York City Council held what The New York Times describes as "one of the most scientifically vague and emotionally charged health committee hearings in recent memory."
He continues in another reason piece:
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."
Xlinka
The Warrior Linker.
Thanks For All These Purchases + The Vitamins I Take
I am grateful for all your purchases on Amazon -- even the tiniest grocery item!
I do sometimes get bowled over by the kickbacks I get -- like $47 for the wild 3D TV somebody bought the other day, and the 7-inch Kindle (yet to come up in my accounting; still just in the orders).
Truly appreciate all these purchases. They help support this site by helping fund my life in these days of many newspapers just hanging on.
Here's a link for whatever you want to buy: Search Amazon and credit Amy for your purchases.
Also, a friend called yesterday to ask about what vitamins I take. I get asked this a lot, so I'm going to post them below. (You should get your D level tested after about three months of taking it to see where you are.)
•Bio-Tech - D3-5 5000 IU 250 caps. These are pharmaceutical-grade, recommended by Dr. Michael Eades, and about the size of a grain of rice.
•Vitamin K2 MK-7, 100 mcg, 120 Mini Softgels - The Gold Standard 100% Natural Vitamin K2 in Organic Olive Oil and Certified Free of GMOs and Allergens
. These put calcium in the right place. Gregg takes them (for heart health) and I take them for bone health.
•Doctor's Best Strontium Bone Maker (340mg Elemental), 120-Count
. (For bone health.)
•Source Naturals Magnesium Malate 1250mg, 360 Tablets
. (These correspond with Vitamin D and are needed to increase its effectiveness. Magnesium is also an extremely essential part of our diet that we don't seem to get enough of. Also recommended by Dr. Michael Eades.)
And no, I don't take calcium. As cardiologist Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, put it on my radio show, taking calcium for bone heath is like trying to build a backyard patio by throwing bags of cement out your back door.
Also, I eat a "ketogenic" (low-carb diet) and eat between one and two cups of kale a day (made in bacon grease), and have probably a tablespoon of very healthy Medium Chain Triglycerides in organic coconut oil daily, which I make in chamomile tea with organic half 'n' half. Sound gross; it's actually great!
The idea of drinking tea with coconut oil, which I've been using successfully to quash a migraine in progress, came via psychiatrist Emily Deans, another practitioner of evidence-based dietary medicine, especially in service of psychological health.
Floss One Tooth: How To Ingrain A New Habit
The secret to changing habits may be starting small, Drake Baer writes at FastCompany that the tinier your habit change, the easier it is to establish:
After coach/speaker/workshop leader Margaret Lukens found out that the secret to changing habits is to "make them so small that they seem trivial," she decided to put the theory to the test. While she'd always meant to be a regular flosser, she never quite got the oral hygiene habit to stick. So she decided to put her mouth where the motto was: she'd floss just one tooth to establish the habit. Her takeaway:Don't try to cajole yourself into action by saying that you're going to do one tooth then do them all. Just floss one. Do it every day. And watch what happens. I can tell you what happened to me - one day, about three weeks in, I had an itch for completion. I wanted, needed to floss them all. I wasn't even particularly aware of the change, which seemed natural and unconscious. And now I can't not floss. Mission accomplished.In flossing just one tooth, Lukens avoided biting off more behavioral change than she could chew. But once she started flossing just one tooth every day, she worked up an appetite to floss fully. Soon after, the habit became automatic. It integrated into her routine.
The "floss one tooth" example is a classic of productivity, care of Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, whose research into lazy-smart habit formation we've talked about before. Since the habit is so tiny--like flossing one tooth--you'll feel ridiculous for not getting it into your day. Then, over time, that minuscule becomes a part of your day, rather than no part at all. You could think of that absurdly tiny habit as a skeleton for an extension of your routine--once it becomes "normal" to your routine, you'll glide right into it.
Since the habit is so tiny you'll feel ridiculous for not getting it into your day.
The tiny habit hack can be applied across areas: To eat healthier, eat one extra vegetable. To become more mindful, sit for five minutes of meditation. To get more knowledgeable, savor two pages of reading. And to get more active, you could do like Tiny Buddha's Stephen Guise did and challenge yourself to doing one pushup per day.
I do one minute of slow-burn workout with weights. Inevitably, I feel so good about that, I want to add more minutes to it. Yesterday, I did 10, which, per my show with science-based fitness trainer Fred Hahn, is about all you need to do every five days. (I do more than that now because it's good for my brain.)
via @adamleealter
Yawnies: Another Accusation Of "Sexist!"
Gregg used to joke that a woman who used to be in the LA writer/pundit circle, Moxie, is "just to the right of Genghis Khan.
Moxie was completely wonderful in my late friend Cathy Seipp's last moments, stroking her head and talking to her in the sweetest way, and was like a big sister to Cathy's daughter in the year or so that followed, and for these things I'll love her always.
But politically, we don't agree at all on a number of things. We could just duke it out and duke it out and duke it out and never change each other's mind.
But, as I used to joke, it was more productive for us to talk about shoes.
And yes, that really was my joke about us.
And now, that line in an ad for the DC Metro is the source of a brouhaha among the usual suspects -- Jezebellies, yawn, yawn, yawn -- crying "Sexism!" 
Going back to Moxie, the truth is, we had many interesting conversations about things other than shoes -- including politics, education, and social issues. But when you have no hope of changing somebody's mind, sometimes it's unpleasant to spend the whole evening fighting futilely. So you look for things on which you have common ground.
The point is, it is necessarily not a sign of sexism to suggest that women should just talk about shoes or men should just, say, talk about baseball.
Sometimes, it's just a pass at a joke. Really.
And the ones this little brouhaha says the most about, really, are those who see sexism and horrible insults at every turn.
Really, is there anything that says you're small and unequal like the inability to take a joke?
An Economist On Why It's Time To Get Rid Of The TSA
Mercatus economist Veronique de Rugy writes at the Wash Ex:
So what is the TSA good at? In 2011, the TSA proudly thwarted birds, turtles, science projects, and Chinese throwing stars -- but no terrorists. Embarrassing, but perhaps not surprising: Research from the RAND Corp. suggests that cockpit security, passenger vigilance and passport verification are the most effective security procedures. Given that the TSA spends two-thirds of its budget on ineffective, expensive passenger- and baggage-screening procedures, it is easy to see why the agency is better at catching turtles than terrorists.TSA incompetency is an easy target for late-night talk shows but the agency's troubles are no laughing matter. Not only is it ineffective, it is incredibly wasteful and expensive. Since its creation, TSA's budget increased from $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2002 to $7.9 billion in fiscal year 2013. To that amount, we need to add the $606 billion in estimated lost tourism revenue from unreasonable procedures over past decade. What's more, many TSA agents have been caught stealing travelers' personal items and squandering budget money. Waste is rampant: another GAO report shows that agents intentionally lower productivity to raise wages -- and ultimately increase costs on taxpayers.
It is also a lot of money for an agency whose main role -- preventing attacks in the style of Sept. 11 -- has already been generally accomplished. Cockpit barricades, passenger vigilance, and passport screening are already implemented and effective at lower cost. What about baggage screening? If the TSA prevents terrorists from bringing explosives onto planes, wouldn't this be worth the cost? Even here, the TSA fails; there is evidence TSA agents do not systematically check bags for explosives.
Indications of the TSA's wild incompetency and runaway spending have grown so numerous that they cannot be ignored. It is time to de-nationalize airline screening and turn it over to private companies motivated by profit.
As Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute writes: "Studies have found that TSA's screening results have been no better, and possibly worse, than that of the private screeners. And a House report in 2011 found that private screeners at San Francisco International Airport were far more efficient than the federal screeners at the Los Angeles International Airport."
She notes that private screeners are used at all Canadian airports and in 80 percent of European ones.
The problem is who is going to make change. Unfortunately, her "if/then" statement at the end reveals the problem:
If politicians care more about security than they do about power, they will privatize airport screening.
A Free Speech Champion Speaks Freely: A Chat With Harvey Silverglate
Free speech champion Harvey Silverglate on his career in free speech, how the campus leftists he defended turned out to not be for free speech (just for their speech being defended), and on Harvard's free speech fakery.
Silverglate founded an organization I support -- theFIRE.org, which defends free speech violations on campus pro bono.
He says he is considered a right-winger by the left but he actually says he's a liberal -- but a "classic liberal": a civil liberties liberal.
I wish I shared his optimism, as he puts it at the end of the video, that "the modern PC university is gonna bite the dust."
Kinky
Linky with a dog collar.
Who Gets The Friends In The Breakup Or The Divorce?
Ever had somebody demand that you stop being friends with their ex or soon-to-be-ex when their relationship broke up? What happened and how did you react?
Or...were you the person who made that request or demand? And if so, why?
And finally, is it justified or more justified if your ex was the one who broke up the relationship?
Plan On A Doctor Shortage
Acton Research Fellow Jonathan Witt writes in The American Spectator:
A curious feature of recent U.S. health care reform efforts -- easily overlooked amidst the daily media grind of canceled plans, crashing websites and new restrictions -- is the irrational belief that we can extend more health care to more Americans while rendering a career as a family physician increasingly unappealing....My brother-in-law Bruce Woodall, a physician who has worked stateside and in the developing world, gave me another way to understand this response. Those who go into family medicine, he said, often have an independent and entrepreneurial streak. They have visions of owning a family practice one day and aren't attracted to the idea of simply working for the government. But increasingly, that's what family medicine in the United States amounts to. The result is that an increasing number of physicians who can leave, do.
Self-interested alarm is a rational response to this trend, since we already face a physician shortage, but so too is moral outrage on behalf of physicians. Medical students work extraordinarily hard for years, risking enormous personal and financial capital to become professional healers. How has the political establishment responded to this courage, perseverance, and sacrifice? By subjecting the working lives of doctors to the regulatory whims of political insiders and bureaucrats.
via @ActonInstitute
Gloria Steinem Gets Presidential Medal For Helping Turn Feminism Toxic
Cathy Young, one of my favorite critics of what feminism has become, writes at Real Clear Politics about President Obama's award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to feminist icon Gloria Steinem last week:
Despite her undeniable talent and charisma, Steinem is practically a poster girl for the gender-war paranoia and the ideological dogmatism that have led the women's movement down such a destructive path.How does Steinem represent modern feminism's worst features? Let me count the ways.
Dogmatic denial of sex differences. There is a perfectly legitimate argument (to which I myself am sympathetic) that male/female differences are culturally influenced and less important than individual differences. There is certainly widespread support for the loosening of traditional gender-based restrictions. But Steinem takes the anti-difference view to fanatical extremes of what dissident feminists Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge have dubbed "biodenial." In 1997, interviewed for John Stossel's ABC News special, "Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference," Steinem derided scientific research on sex differences in brain functioning as "anti-American crazy thinking." She also suggested that upper-body strength tests requiring firefighters to lift heavy loads were sexist. What about situations when firefighters have to carry injured or unconscious people out of burning buildings? Steinem insisted, with a straight face, that it was better to drag them, since "there's less smoke down there." While I thought the ABC special leaned too much toward generalizations about difference, Steinem made the worst possible spokesperson for the skeptics.
Fixation on male villainy. Like many in the sisterhood, Steinem does not let her belief in absolute equality interfere with a focus on men as perpetrators of violence and evil. In theory, she blames "the patriarchy," asserting that it has robbed men as well as women of full humanity; she has even said (rightly) that we won't have real equality until we recognize men's capacity for care and nurture just as we have recognized women's capacity for strength and achievement. Alas, actual, unreconstructed men usually appear in Steinem's writings as dangerous brutes.
In her 1992 book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Steinem writes, "The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home." She has also touted the long-discredited notion of a long prehistoric period of peaceful, benevolent, egalitarian "gynocentric" societies later displaced by violent, oppressive male rule.
Other bits of her legacy on the list include junk scholarship, misinformation, the victimhood cult, contempt for free speech, and knee-jerk partisanship. Young continues:
Steinem is an undeniably talented and charismatic woman; her message is often couched in appealing terms of female empowerment, freedom, and basic fairness. But in practice, her advocacy promotes far less positive values. This is a Medal of Freedom recipient who has backed attacked on free speech and colluded in the imprisonment of innocent people.If the President wanted to honor the feminist movement, a far better choice would have been a posthumous award to Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, who, whatever her flaws, rightly warned against embracing anti-male, anti-family ideologies that treat relations between the sexes as class warfare. Steinem is a class-warfare feminist. In honoring her, Obama signals the importance of organized feminism to the Democratic base -- but also boosting the notion that we are locked in a "war against women" in which the gender warriors are our last line of defense.
Generation Pathetic
Therapist Brooke Donatone is seeing the helicopter-parented 20- and 30-somethings, and she's finding it common for them to be unprepared to be on their own or act as adults. An excerpt from her Slate piece:
Amy had mild depression growing up, and it worsened during freshman year of college when she moved from her parents' house to her dorm. It became increasingly difficult to balance school, socializing, laundry, and a part-time job. She finally had to dump the part-time job, was still unable to do laundry, and often stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to complete homework because she didn't know how to manage her time without her parents keeping track of her schedule.I suggested finding a job after graduation, even if it's only temporary. She cried harder at this idea. "So, becoming an adult is just really scary for you?" I asked. "Yes," she sniffled.
Amy is 30 years old.
Her case is becoming the norm for twenty- to thirtysomethings I see in my office as a psychotherapist. I've had at least 100 college and grad students like Amy crying on my couch because breaching adulthood is too overwhelming.
In 2000, psychologist Jeff Arnet coined the term "emerging adolescence" to describe extended adolescence that delays adulthood. People in their 20s no longer view themselves as adults. There are various plausible reasons for this, including longer life spans, helicopter parenting, and fewer high paying jobs that allow new college grads to be financially independent at a young age.
I also find that kids don't want to live away from home, even if they can afford to. I, on the other hand, wanted to be on my own from the time I was in my early teens, and even before.
Independence -- of thought, action -- really seems to be missing in a lot of kids.
And I'm not one of those "Kids these days...!" types. I do think there's a change and much of it has to do with how overscheduled, overly programmed and helicopter-parented kids are.
When I was 8, I used to just run down the street to the park, play in the creek and around the place, and come home at dinner time. Now, allowing your kid to do this is called "child endangerment."
Hostess Tlinkie
I would have sold my grandmother into slavery for one during The Bulgar Wheat Years, as a friend refers to my childhood.
The GOP's "Anger Entrepreneurs"
Via @WalterOlson, there are those on the political right who, as he put it, would "rather keep their perpetual fund-raising machine oiled than actually win elections."
John Podhoretz and Michael Medved write in Commentary, "A GOP Civil War -- Who Benefits?":
Many of these Anger Entrepreneurs on the right mine their gold in the negative emotions of conservatives who are having grave difficulty making sense of a world in which almost everyone they know dislikes liberalism and despises Obama but in which liberals and Obama seem to have the upper hand. The answer seducing all too many of them is that their cause has been sabotaged from within and that the best route to greater success lies in removing the saboteurs.The rewards for marketing a successful message can be vast. Last year, a fight inside the conservative organization FreedomWorks led to the departure of its chairman, former Representative Dick Armey. He was bought out with an astounding $8 million handshake--from a grassroots group formerly known as Citizens for a Sound Economy dedicated to fiscal prudence and the promotion of ideas. With the departure of Armey, an experienced political hand, FreedomWorks broke free to dedicate itself in 2013 to threatening Republicans who did not support the effort to shut down the government.
Perhaps the greatest example of the growing power of this outside entrepreneurship came this year when South Carolina firebrand Jim DeMint resigned from his Senate seat to take over as head of the Heritage Foundation and its recently organized political arm, Heritage Action. With Heritage Action's extraordinarily aggressive advocacy of the argument that the only acceptable vote for a conservative to take in September 2013 was the immediate and total defunding of ObamaCare, DeMint showed he could be far more influential outside the realm of electoral politics than he ever had been within it.
And what DeMint and his fellow activists insisted upon meant certain defeat. Perhaps they honestly believed along with Cruz and Lee that there would be a national uprising against ObamaCare (before its disastrous implementation began) that would force Democratic senators from Republican-voting states to withdraw their support and vote to destroy it perhaps with enough new recruits to the cause to override the president's promised veto. But once it became clear that this was a fantasy and some 22 Democratic senators would never turn against ObamaCare, and there would be no defunding, they refused to abandon their infatuation with glorious martyrdom. You proved your loyalty and fealty to conservative principles only if you agreed to go down with the ship.
...Republicans will win meaningful victories only when they lose their appetite for martyrdom and fratricide and concentrate on forcing the other side to pay a political price for its own incompetent performance and dysfunctional ideology. Most Republicans, as the history of the last 40 years demonstrates, want precisely that. The question now is whether this real majority will be overrun. If that happens, the truest beneficiary of the intra-Republican civil war will be the Democratic Party, and those who divided the right will deserve some share of the blame for the advancement of the very policies and principles they claim to abhor.
Also, I believe Republicans keep many libertarians from voting for them by adhering to social conservatism instead of simply being for free markets and small government -- conservatism that entails not trying to control others at every turn.
The President Who Never Ran Anything Beyond Words Across A Page
Peggy Noonan blogs in the WSJ about why Obama was so credulous -- so quick to believe everything would be rosy with vast healthcare changes -- when it is, as she writes, "a leader's job to be skeptical of grand schemes":
And this president wasn't. I think part of the reason he wasn't careful is because he sort of lives in words. That's been his whole professional life--books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it's been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It's all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you'd expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time.People say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll, never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance! And you know, his policies were probably gold-plated--at the law firm, through his wife's considerable hospital job, in the Illinois Legislature, in the U.S. Senate. Those guys know how to take care of themselves! Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe that's to his credit, knowing he was lucky. Too bad he didn't know what he didn't know, like how every part has to work for a complicated machine to work.
Here I will say something harsh, and it's connected to the thing about words but also images.
From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who've seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they're credentialed. But they've only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they're seeing movies in their heads. They haven't read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They've only seen the movie--the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said "Not another war" and Bobby said "Pearl Harbor in reverse" and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar and said "We can fry a million of 'em by this afternoon, Mr. President." Grrr, grrr, good guys beat bad guys.
His problem right now, she notes, is that people think he's smart, sophisticated, in command, and aware of "pitfalls and complexities." And thus...to blame.
Dog Baths -- Oh, The Indignity
Loved the photos (about "the indignity of canine bath time") posted at The Week by Lauren Hansen.
Those shot were taken by dog photographer Sophie Gamand in collaboration with groomer and pet stylist Ruben Santana. See more of Gamand's porfolio at strikingpaws.com. (Loved the bottom left one on her DogVogue page. She looks like a lady who lunches from the 20s.)
I don't have any bathtime photos of Aida, but here's a post-bath shot:
The House On TSA: Never Mind The Constitution. Fight Like Hell For Loose Change.
The loser Congressturds have fought for something truly important -- how to dispense the loose change the TSA is left with after doing an administrative end run around our constitutional rights.
Oliver Knox writes at Yahoo:
Show your boarding pass. Hand over your ID. Take off your shoes. And your belt. And empty your pockets. Liquids in the baggie, laptops in the bin. Stand still for the scanner. Now leave $531,395.22 in cash at the TSA checkpoint.That's how much money forgetful passengers left in Transportation Security Administration's plastic bins in fiscal year 2012 -- a windfall the agency uses to supplement its aviation security budget. For now.
The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to redirect that mountain of pocket change to the United Service Organizations (USO), which supports U.S. military troops.
"The TSA has been keeping the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters from your change purse to pay for their bloated bureaucracy," said Rep. Jeff Miller, R.-Fla., the measure's chief author. "If TSA representatives get to play 'finders keepers' with your hard-earned cash, what's the incentive to try to get the loose change to its rightful owners?"
Brave legislator Miller! You go, guy!
What's next, a bill to say teddy bears are cuddly?
Obama Admin Wants To Give Big Bailout To Health Insurers
The "Affordable" Care Act? Really? Affordable for whom?
There's a piece reported by Robert Pear in The New York Times with the headline "Insurers Are Offered Assistance For Losses." That's coded language for taxpayers are going to be paying big for the Leviathon fuckup that is Obamacare:
Facing a political furor over the cancellation of insurance policies, Mr. Obama announced on Nov. 14 that he would temporarily waive some requirements of the new federal law and allow insurers to renew "current policies for current enrollees" for a year.Insurers criticized the president's move, saying it could upset the assumptions on which they had set premiums for new insurance products providing coverage in 2014.
Many people with serious illnesses were excluded from the old policies. As a result, the administration said, people on those policies may be healthier than average.
If they do not enroll in the new health plans, the administration said, the average cost of claims for people in those plans may be higher than expected, and this increase in costs could lead to unexpected financial losses for insurance companies.
To reduce this risk, the administration said it could provide financial assistance to certain insurers through a program under which the government will share in their losses and profits for the next three years.
Any such assistance would come on top of federal subsidies that the government plans to pay insurers to make coverage more affordable for low- and middle-income people under the new law. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those subsidy payments will exceed $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
The administration said it could not immediately determine the cost of the assistance for insurers because it did not know how many people would stay in existing plans or how many would decide to enroll in new policies that provide additional benefits and consumer protections, as required by the 2010 health law.
via @FBNStossel
Morons On Tour
From the WSJ:
Thinking of taking a holiday in forbidden North Korea so that you can one-up your friends who spent two weeks in exotic Bhutan? The best advice: Don't.That's a lesson being learned the hard way by Merrill Newman, a retired executive from California who visited North Korea in October for what was supposed to be a 10-day tour. Instead, the 85-year old Korean War vet was yanked off a plane and has been detained in a Pyongyang hotel for more than a month. State media recently released a video of Mr. Newman reading from a four-page statement in stilted English. "I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK and Korean people," it read. "Please forgive me."
The Democratic People's Republic is also holding Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour-company operator taken prisoner by the North last year and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in April on accusations of committing "hostile [and religious] acts to bring down the government." He has lost some 50 pounds and required hospitalization.
Apparently, there are still people who believe that being American is some sort of magic fairy wand against all ills. Thanks, pay for your own way out of North Korea, and we'll wave to you when you're back.
Linskter
Like hipsters, but without all the hideous 70s attire.
"Millennials Must Move Beyond #HandsOffMyBirthControl To #HandsOffMyHealthInsurance"
I have said over and over that it is idiotic that, in an age when most people stay in jobs only a short time, not the old gold watch-time, that we still link employment and insurance.
It is by paying out of pocket, independently, for my own insurance for 20-plus years that I have maintained a consistent provider and have been credited for all the years I've paid in.
Cathy Reisenwitz writes at Forbes that people could afford both health insurance and birth control if we were allowed actual markets for them:
When ObamaCare mandated that all insurance plans cover birth control, it created a situation devoid of good options. Forcing religious business owners to choose such plans clearly violates their religious liberty. Forcing women who work at such businesses to pay out of pocket for birth control while they pay for plans which cover Viagra is grossly unfair.Millennials get this fundamental unfairness, which may be why most of them do not believe that an employer's personal religious beliefs should affect their access to birth control. One poll found that 62 percent of Millennials believe religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception or birth control at no cost.
But it's important for Millennials to look at the bigger picture. The ObamaCare birth control mandate creates an us-versus-them situation exactly because it exacerbates a more fundamental flaw in the American health insurance market. Namely, that there isn't one.
The first impediment to a true market in health insurance is the link between employment and insurance. This is a totally artificial, government-created link which has way outlived its utility. If people chose their health insurance themselves, they could decide whether to get a plan which covers birth control. Delinking the two would be as simple as a few changes to the tax code. But ObamaCare does not address this issue.
ObamaCare was supposed to help delink the two by offering unemployed people affordable health insurance plans. The problem there is actually the second way ObamaCare impedes a market for health insurance. By outlawing high-deductible, catastrophic care plans, it makes exactly the kinds of plans Millennials need most illegal. The last thing anyone needs when chronically under- and unemployed is to pay for insurance which covers breast implants. But under ObamaCare, there's no avoiding it. You are either covered with an extremely expansive plan, or you're paying the fine and going without insurance at all.
It's also illegal to shop across state lines for insurance, which Reisenwitz points out is "a law with no utility."
Spam Arrest: Um, No
A professional photographer I know from around town wrote me wanting to take pictures of me, free of charge. I'm thinking there must be a catch, but I don't know -- and won't know -- because I got this bullshit anti-spam thing from Spam Arrest that I am for sure not filling out and sending back.
The bit they want you to sign -- note the $2,000 part:
SENDER AGREEMENT - By clicking the "VERIFY" button above, and in consideration for Spam Arrest, LLC forwarding your e-mail (and any e-mails you may send in the future) to the intended recipient (the "Recipient"), you agree to be bound by the following Sender Agreement:You represent and warrant to Spam Arrest and the Recipient that any e-mail you desire to send to the Recipient is not "unsolicited commercial e-mail" i.e., the e-mail does not primarily contain an advertisement or promotion of a commercial product, service or Web site; unless the Recipient expressly consented to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request for such consent or at the Recipient's own initiative. Further, you represent and warrant that your transmission of any e-mail does not violate any local, state or federal law governing the transmission of unsolicited commercial e-mail, including, but not limited to, RCW § 19.190.020 or the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. You understand and acknowledge that it is fair and reasonable that you agree to abide by the restrictions set forth in this agreement. You acknowledge and agree that this agreement is central to Spam Arrest's decision to forward your e-mails to the Recipient. Accordingly, if you violate this agreement, Spam Arrest and the Recipient shall be entitled to (1) temporary and/or permanent injunctive relief to restrain any further breaches or violations of this agreement; and (2) damages in the amount of two thousand dollars ($2,000.00) for each violation of this agreement. You acknowledge that such remedies are appropriate and reasonable in light of the costs and expenses Spam Arrest incurs as a result of eradicating and filtering unsolicited commercial e-mail. You acknowledge that the $2000.00 remedy is a reasonable estimate of Spam Arrest's and the Recipient's actual damages. This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Washington and the exclusive venue for any action related to this agreement shall be held in the state and federal courts located in Washington. You hereby waive any right to object to venue or jurisdiction based on inconvenient forum, lack of personal jurisdiction or for any other reason.
Two words: Fuck you.
A few more words: You want to get a reply from me, whitelist me, buttwad.
Spam Arrest might block "100 percent of spam," but probably blocks a good percentage of mail from people like me who actually read the shit they're signing.
And P.S. A judge said Spam Arrest's "$2,000 liquidated damages provision is invalid."
Drone-azon?
A Ryan Calo tweet:
@rcalo
BREAKING: Etsy to begin delivering packages by barn owl.
Narcolinksy
I nap, therefore I am.
Democrats And Republicans Come Together To Screw The Middle Class And Rebuild Rich People's Mansions
If David Geffen's beach house gets washed away, I think it should be David Geffen's insurance rate that covers the cost, not the tax dollars of some middle-class family in Van Nuys (among others).
But a bipartisan caucus wants to keep the flood plain subsidies flowing, says an editorial in the WSJ:
Federal flood insurance is a classic example of powerful government aiding the powerful, encouraging the affluent to build mansions near the shore. Congress finally had the gumption to reform the program in 2012, but now the beachfront homeowner and housing lobbies are trying to reverse this progress.National flood insurance is a 1960s-era program that had its finances blown sideways by Hurricane Katrina and again by Hurricane Sandy last year. The program is $24 billion in the red, with $350 million cash on hand and a $6.4 billion credit line--on $1.3 trillion of insurance in force. But thanks to the bipartisan Biggert-Waters reform signed by President Obama in July 2012, the federal insurer is slowly raising its rates to actuarially sound levels.
That's been a shock to the affluent beachcombers who are accustomed to artificially cheap insurance. Businesses, vacation homes and homes with "repetitive" flood losses will see rates rise 25% a year until those "rates reflect true risk," according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers the federal insurance program. About 20% of the national insurer's 5.5 million policyholders will be affected.
Cue the caterwauling from the 1% and their elected representatives. In June the House voted 281-146 to delay premium increases for a year, a turnaround from the 406-22 vote that passed Biggert-Waters only a year ago. California Democrat Maxine Waters is protesting that she didn't know what was in the law that bears her name--which seems plausible to those who have followed her career. She'd like more Americans to build homes in flood zones and have poor Americans pick up the tab when insurance premiums don't cover losses.
Republicans, too, want a reform rollback. Phooey.
Want an ocean view? You pay when the ocean meets your bedroom, or at least pay for the insurance that will.
Hampshire College Sex Blog: Best Not To Use The Word "Women"
The question and the beginning of the answer:
Anonymous asked: How do you recommend women keep their genitals fresh and clean without any unnatural products?Great question! First, we'd like to quickly address the language of saying "women" instead of "female-bodied people:" not everyone who identifies as a woman has a vagina/vulva.
via @CHSommers
Do You Think Women Demonize Male Sexuality?
Men are highly visual and variety-driven. Men want to have sex with you, your sister, the grocery clerk with the little pinkish brown mole between her breasts.
Female sexuality is different. Women don't want to have sex with strangers, for example, and aren't turned on by mere parts.
I see a demonization of male sexuality, and think the notion many women have -- that it's wrong, not just different -- has at least some underpinnings in feminism.
"Men are pigs!"? Really? Why?
How Obamacare Limits Medical Choice
Excerpt from a WSJ editorial:
Even as President Obama reluctantly granted Americans thrown off their health plans quasi-permission to possibly keep them, he called them "the folks who, over time, I think, are going to find that the marketplaces are better." He means the ObamaCare exchanges that are replacing the private insurance market, adding that "it's important that we don't pretend that somehow that's a place worth going back to."Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare's insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.
Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans "substandard," but he doesn't mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn't designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals. In his view, many people must pay first-class fares for coach seats so others can pay less and receive extra benefits.
...Meanwhile, ObamaCare's plans are limited to essentially four. Yes, four. The law converts insurance products on the ObamaCare exchanges into interchangeable commodities that finance the same standard benefit at the same average expense over four tiers known as bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
So, for example, a bronze plan covers 60% of health-care expenses and the beneficiary pays a lower premium to pick up the remaining 40% out of pocket. Platinum carries a higher premium for a 90%-10% split. But there can be little deviation from the formulas--that is, there is little room for innovation or policy choice--to suit customer preferences.
In any case all four tiers are scrap-metal grade, because the rules ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferior medical product. The new mandates and rules raise costs, so insurers must compensate by offering narrow and less costly networks of doctors, hospitals and other providers in their ObamaCare products. Insurers thus restrict care and patient choice of physicians in exchange for discounted reimbursement rates, much as Medicaid does.
Minkie
Coat me with links.
Cyber Monday Deals
At Amazon
Thank you so much, everybody who's been buying through my links. This helps support this site and keep my lights on, and it's much-appreciated.
Here's a general search you can use any time -- Amy's Amazon Search Window
Advice Goddess Radio, "Best Of" Replay, Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Carl Alasko On Blame -- Why It's Toxic And How To Actually Resolve Conflict
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
*Thanksgiving weekend "Best-Of" replay on a topic we can all use some help and insight on -- blame: How ineffective it is, how damaging it is, and how to stop blaming and be constructive in getting ourselves and others to change. Back with a live show next week!
My guest tonight is psychotherapist Carl Alasko, Ph.D., talking about blame -- one of the most toxic and destructive components of relationships and so many human interactions.
We'll be talking about how to stop blaming and how to take healthier -- and far more productive -- steps to problem-solving, in relationships and beyond.
Alasko has written a very comprehensive book on blame -- Beyond Blame: Freeing Yourself from the Most Toxic Form of Emotional Bullsh*t.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/02/dr-carl-alasko-on-blame-why-its-toxic-and-how-to-actually-resolve-conflict
Don't miss last week's show with Dr. Edward L. Deci on how to be self-motivated and best motivate others.
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 discuss on the show is Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/11/25/dr-edward-l-deci-on-how-to-be-self-motivated-and-best-motivate-others
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.
That Viral "Poverty Thoughts" Essay Is "Tragically Fictional"
The woman who wrote it has merely imagined what it's like to be in poverty and is using her imaginings to wring tears and cash from the gullible on the Internet, writes Angelica Leicht in the Houston Press:
There are times when the good deeds that happen by the magic of the Internet make us quite giddy. This time? Well, this time they make us cringe, to the tune of $100,000.If you haven't read the "insightful" personal narrative that recently went viral, "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or poverty thoughts," there's a good chance it's somewhere on your Facebook news feed. This thing is everywhere.
The essay, which is being touted as a poignant look at the "terrible" decision-making processes of the poor, is the product of writer Linda Walther Tirado's personal experience with poverty. Linda, a married mother of two, speaks of having to live in seedy motels, where there are roaches that she stabs with toothpicks. She can't cook for her family because she lacks a kitchen, and she's afraid of attracting more roaches, so they survive on junk food in said seedy motel.
Oh, and not only does Linda say she's living in seedy motels and stabbing roaches, but she's also working two jobs, taking a full load of college courses, and is banished to a life as a cook in the "back of the house" at a restaurant, as she is deemed too unsightly as a waitress -- or apparently a legal secretary -- due to an unfortunate set of teeth. She's in desperate need of dental work, and her body is full of infection, but she can't afford to spend the money on medical or dental care. It's a tragic, tragic story.
It's also tragically fictional.
You see, Linda Walther Tirado, or "KillerMartinis," as she's known on her Kinja screen name, wrote this brain-grating essay, and it's all about being subjected to the pitfalls of poverty. Linda's not actually poor, though, nor was she raised in what most would describe as poverty. Unless you consider a boarding school education as a marker for poverty, anyway.
The inferences on what it's like to be poor -- from the roach-infested living quarters to the lack of wholesome food -- would almost be laughable, if they weren't such freakin' gross stereotypes written by a person who has never experienced true poverty. That little fact takes it from laughable to infuriating.
What's also infuriating is that Linda -- who is panhandling for $100,000 worth of donations on GoFundMe -- wrote this piece, and the comments and rebuttals to it, while masquerading as a "poor person," but has now decided to clean up the mess by copping to her past as a person from a much different background.
One who went to private schools, owns a home, works as a freelance political consulted, is married to a Marine, has met President Obama, and taken some lovely vacations.
Here, from her blog:
I started kindergarten a year early. I went to an exclusive private school where we didn't have grade levels. They grouped us by age and we had workbooks in different subjects depending on our ability level. When my parents transferred me to a closer school with normal grades, they put me in fourth grade. I was seven. They wanted to put me into fifth grade, but my parents thought it would be too difficult for me socially....I had private music lessons from the age of four. I was an award-winning singer, piano, and flute player by seven. I owned twenty-three instruments when I was twelve. I toured Europe as a featured soprano the summer after I graduated high school.
Boohoo, huh? Send wet Kleenex and money.
TSA Rolls Out Detention Pods At Airport Exits
These exit pods briefly detain passengers as they're leaving the airport. They cost $60 million of our tax dollars at the Syracuse airport, though a spokeswoman claims they will save money on police at airport exits. How making people wait to leave makes us safer, someone please tell me. (In fact, these would seem to endanger people in the case of a need to leave the airport fast, as Lisa Simeone points out below:
From the Daily Mail:
"We need to be vigilant and maintain high security protocol at all times. These portals were designed and approved by TSA which is important," said Syracuse Airport Commissioner Christina Callahan.
Lisa Simeone comments at TSANewsBlog:
Ah, yes, because you never know when someone is leaving the "sterile area" loaded with explosives and, not satisfied with detonating a plane in mid-flight, wants to blow up the parking garage instead.Apparently these things were installed so that the TSA wouldn't have to staff the exits. And, of course, because somebody -- the manufacturer -- is making big bucks off them. As always with so-called homeland so-called security, follow the money.
But the first thing I thought of was, what if you get trapped inside? What if your bag doesn't fit and you get stuck? (Watch the video.) What if there's an emergency at the airport and you have to get out quickly? You can't, because these things let so few people at a time through. They're not like subway turnstiles, which are mechanical, and which, of course, you could always jump over. These are electronic. Which means they can be prone to failure. What if there are a lot of planes landing at once and a crowd forms at the portals? Then you have to wait in line to get out.
Well, why not? You have to wait in line to get bullied and groped by the TSA when you're entering the airport, why shouldn't you also be inconvenienced when you leave? Gives the whole experience a nice symmetry.
This is about the money. As commenter David Gilmore wrote at TSANewsBlog:
What a waste of money. Some contractor was masterful at manipulating the government to get a contract using their own language. TSA approved. wehooo.
This seems to mean nobody can ever pick you up at baggage claim again, help you with your luggage. What if you're a little old lady in a wheelchair?
How Many People A Year Die From Terrorism In The US?
There's a poster up about terrorism that points out an important statistic -- that for the last five years for which data is available, 4.6 Americans per year died from domestic terrorism attacks:
American media and elected officials talk about the threat of terrorism daily. In the last decade, the threat of terrorism has been used to justify special exemptions from the Constitution, invasions of other countries, secret surveillance laws, monitoring of innocent people with no reasonable cause for suspicion, and continuous budget deficits, as vast sums of money go to fund the military and surveillance apparatus.When examined, the actual death toll from terrorism in the United States is astonishingly small. In the last 5 years for which data is available, an average of 4.6 Americans per year died from domestic terrorist attacks. And when we look at the publicly known terrorist attacks that have been thwarted, we see that they were small in number, limited in destructive capacity, and in a majority of cases, would probably have never come to fruition on their own.
How likely are terrorists to launch some devastating attack?
Conventional weapons, like bombs or guns, are naturally limited in their potential to take human life, barring having an army of people to use them. Given that there are approximately 16,000 homicides per year in the United States, it's hard to make an argument that conventional terrorist attacks, currently averaging 162 deaths per year (when 9/11 is included), should give rise to spectacularly large expenditures or sacrifice of freedom.While there's no evidence that terrorists have any potential to attain them, more dangerous are chemical and biological weapons. In theory, certain chemical and biological weapons could kill thousands in a single very successful attack, though the Rand corporation writes, "the resources and capabilities required to annihilate large numbers of persons--i.e., to achieve a genuinely mass-casualty chemical and biological weapon or nuclear/radiological device--appear, at least for now, to be beyond the reach not only of the vast majority of existent terrorist organizations but also of many established nation-states."
They point out as I have:
Given the astonishingly small risk of terrorism to American lives, and the fact that most of the responses to it don't even seem to target the real dangers of this phenomena, it doesn't take a huge leap to make the argument that the real purpose of the "war on terror" is not saving lives, but rather providing a wide-ranging and never-ending justification for a whole range of regressive policies. By invoking terrorism, the government has justified wholesale invasions of other countries, a massive stripping away of our basic liberties, and shifting money to military contractors and away from things that threaten human life on a huge scale.
We all need to care about this and speak up against it. Too few of us are now, and this is why the encroachment on our civil liberties -- and on numerous fronts -- marches on.
Related: "Accidentally Revealed Document Shows TSA Doesn't Think Terrorists Are Plotting To Attack Airplanes," posts Mike Masnick. He quotes a TSA statement from one of their documents from heroic Jonathan Corbett's lawsuit (from a classified document a bumbling 11th Circuit Court clerk forgot to file under seal):
"As of mid-2011, terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports; instead, their focus is on fundraising, recruiting, and propagandizing."
Hey, but let's keep up that Security Puppet Show. Think of all those unskilled workers in police-like costumes feeling your coochie in the name of security who would otherwise be unemployed! Think of how rolling back the "security theater" would roll back the roll-back of our civil liberties -- if just a little. Can't be having Americans having their constitutional rights respected. We've gone so far in the other direction!
Learning About "Tax-Incidence"
Via OldWhig, who tweets as @aClassicLiberal, I came to this blog post by A Very British Dude, with the term "tax-incidence":
Lefties often reject widely accepted economic concepts like tax-incidence, the idea that the economic burden of a tax doesn't always fall on those writing the cheque. If corporation tax was abolished, some of the extra money would go to shareholders who pay CGT and income tax on dividends (at a slightly lower rate), however much would go to customers in the form of lower prices (does anyone argue that the mobile phone market isn't competitive?) with the money spent (and taxed elsewhere) or workers in the form of higher wages, resulting in a much higher rate of tax.
Stinks
Pepe Le Pew me.
