Kelo Revisited
It's Charlotte Allen's latest piece for the Weekly Standard. She says it's hard to figure out what's sadder: the dying city of New London, Connecticut, or the dozens of homes that got seized and razed by the city in the name of "economic development" that never materialized.
The Kelo decision did not come out of the blue, constitutionally speaking. In a 1954 decision, Berman v. Parker, the High Court had ruled unanimously, in an opinion written by William O. Douglas, perhaps the most liberal justice ever to sit on the Supreme Court, to uphold the power of a redevelopment agency created by Congress to seize and demolish almost the entire Southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., on the ground that it was a "blighted area" and "blighted areas . . . tend to produce slums." Blight removal was a "public use," according to Douglas--and from there it was only a short step to economic development as a public use. The Berman and Kelo rulings affirmed a particular kind of liberal vision: that large-scale and intricate government plans trump individuals' property rights. The Berman case involved a thriving department store in Southwest that could not in any way have been said to be a slum property and whose owners wanted it to stay where it was--just as Susette Kelo and the Cristofaros wanted to stay where they were. The only thing to be said for the Berman decision is that Southwest did eventually get rebuilt--although in a blockish, Brutalist fashion that made many architectural critics nostalgic for the old days of "blight."Still, my visit to New London on two subfreezing days in January revealed that the story of the Kelo case was something more than the story of a particularly nasty and overbearing abuse of either eminent domain or government power in general. It was also a tragedy, with all the classical Greek elements: hubris, turn of fortune, cathartic downfall, and possibly the "learning through suffering" that Aristotle in his Poetics argued was the point of tragic drama. Possibly but perhaps not likely: During the five years since Pfizer left New London, the city has placed its hopes in two more grandiose plans for Fort Trumbull and its environs that never materialized, and it may be poised to embark on still another. The story of the Kelo case is in part the story of a city so desperate, so economically beleaguered, that it was willing to try anything to bring a few more residents, a few more revenue dollars into its boundaries.
..."On the local level the case was about taxation and corporate development," Finizio, a lawyer who taught at Boston's Northeastern University, said. "Then, when it got to court, it became a matter of constitutional law, of limits on government power. There, it was not a debate about what was debated about here: economic development, lower taxes, and corporate growth. There were a lot of people on the south side of the city who were tired of paying high property taxes, and they felt that something had to be done. My response to that has always been: If your taxes are too high, you need a smaller house. You don't have a right to bulldoze someone else's house."
Workers At A Small Business Find Out How Obamacare Will Impact Them
These are regular people who work at an auto business:
via @veroderugy
Asinine Crap From Yoga-Doing White Woman Who Needs A Hobby Or Something
A woman named Jen Caron has this ridiculous piece up at XOJane:
IT HAPPENED TO ME: THERE ARE NO BLACK PEOPLE IN MY YOGA CLASSES AND I'M SUDDENLY FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT
I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my skinny white girl body.
Do yoga or don't do yoga.
Black people are a minority in the population. Don't expect your yoga class to look like a commercial with "diversity" casting.
Yoga can be a pursuit of wealthy "elites". Or not.
My sister, for a while, taught it at the San Francisco Y for a bunch of old people. There were worries somebody would bend into some position and never be able to come out.
My mom used to do yoga on the floor of her bedroom while wearing a ratty old bra and sweatpants made of fibers not found in nature.
Granted, she is a skinny white lady. Read into that what you must!
PlusSizePrincess responds.
Parody on The Gloss.
P.S. A number of my friends who are black don't look black.
Also, I'm white and hate yoga. Should I start tanning?
And finally, in the 80s, I used to be one of the Manhattan Rollers, a rollerskating group made up of 20 or so black guys and me and sometimes a girl named Doris from Finland who rivaled me for lack of pigmentation. Should I have been uncomfortable and bowed out?
What Defines An American Family Now
Is that you act like family.
Not whether all the colors match.
Elke
Linkie Sommer
Schools Should Promote Free Expression And Not Suspend Students For It
The notion that the color of a girl's hair, even if it's pink and blue with green polkadots, somehow gets in the way of others' learning is just an obvious pot of crap.
Yet, in Texas, a girl was suspended for her hair color -- a sort of radioactive red. And the school district has a ridiculous (and perhaps unconstitutional) rule that students' hair must be a "natural" color.
From KLTV.com, Emily Black writes:
CARTHAGE, TX (KSLA) -An Ark-La-Tex high school junior says she was sent home from school because of her hair color. She says she doesn't think the color is distracting, and is shocked they are making her change it.Devin Gonzalez is a straight-A student at Elysian Fields High School.
"I got sent home because my hair is red" Gonzalez says.
She should have been spending her Friday in class, but instead she spent it at Signatures Salon getting her hair dyed in the hopes that her principal would lift her suspension.
Gonzalez says her hair has been this color for more than a year. That changed Wednesday when she was sent home from school because her hair color did not meet the dress code.
"I was allowed to come back Thursday because I attempted to dye my hair a different color, but it didn't work obviously," she said.
She says the Elysian Fields principal sent her home again on Friday. The district says student hair must be a natural color.
"The Employee Of The Month Has A Battery"
I was drawn to that headline on the WSJ story by Michael Saltsman about the unintended consequences of increases in the minimum wage -- which probably most regular commenters here can predict: a rush to automate.
Saltsman writes:
Ten years ago it might have seemed far-fetched that a customer could order food in a restaurant without speaking to anyone. But it's a reality now as service employers across the country--including Chili's, Chevys Fresh Mex and California Pizza Kitchen--introduce tabletop ordering devices. A few clicks on an iPad-like device and the food is on its way.Technology has made these changes possible, but that's not what's driving their implementation. Steady federal and state increases to the minimum wage have forced employers in retail and service industries to rely on technology as the government makes entry-level labor more expensive. Now Democrats are pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 at the behest of President Obama, who argued in his State of the Union address that the increase would "help families." Lawmakers should consider the technology trend a warning.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made the connection in a recent interview on MSNBC. Asked if he supported a higher minimum wage, Mr. Gates urged caution and said the policy would create an incentive for employers to "buy machines and automate things."
Saltsman continues (from the unintended consequences department):
"Efficiency" is the positive public face of these changes. Chris Sullivan --a co-founder of Outback Steakhouse who now works with MenuPad, a tablet-ordering company--explained his product to me this way: "It increases productivity, allowing servers to wait on more tables." That means tips may increase for some.But the flip-side of more efficiency is a 20%-25% drop in the number of waitstaff necessary to run a restaurant.
And finally:
There's no limit on who can be replaced: San Francisco-based Momentum Machines has a burger-flipping robot that replaces three full-time kitchen staff, makes no wage demands and stages no walkouts.
That Line Obama Retreaded, That Women Make 77 Cents To Every Man's Dollar, Is Crap
Hanna Rosin lays out why at Slate, going into how the stats don't take into account that women and men work different jobs, different hours, etc.:
The big differences are in occupation and industry. Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying. If you account for those differences, and then compare a woman and a man doing the same job, the pay gap narrows to 91 percent. So, you could accurately say in that Obama ad that, "women get paid 91 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men."The point here is not that there is no wage inequality. But by focusing our outrage into a tidy, misleading statistic we've missed the actual challenges. It would in fact be much simpler if the problem were rank sexism and all you had to do was enlighten the nation's bosses or throw the Equal Pay Act at them. But the 91 percent statistic suggests a much more complicated set of problems. Is it that women are choosing lower-paying professions or that our country values women's professions less? And why do women work fewer hours? Is this all discrimination or, as economist Claudia Goldin likes to say, also a result of "rational choices" women make about how they want to conduct their lives.
Goldin and Lawrence Katz have done about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of men's and women's wages as exists. (They talk about it here in a Freakonomics discussion.) They tracked male and female MBAs graduating from the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2006. First they controlled for previous job experience, GPA, chosen profession, business-school course and job title. Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners. (Note: Never marry a rich man).
And, via @WalterOlson, from the unintended consequences file, Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes in a paper she presented to the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate:
With all these elements working against the unexplained pay gap, it is simply irrational to argue that it exists because of "persistent discrimination." It also shows how government intervention targeted towards discrimination will not be effective. However, supporters of the discrimination theory have kept pushing bills like the Pay Check Fairness Act, which have a higher potential of harming women than helping them. For example, in order to escape the heavy guidelines set by the Pay Check Fairness Act, employers may actually find it easier to hire males than females.
And here's how imposed "fairness" has worked out:
Proponents of wage guidelines, such as the National Committee on Pay Equity, approvingly cite examples of areas where pay equity has been used, but fail to acknowledge major problems with the practice. One example cited occurred in Hawaii in 1995, where nurses, mostly female, were given a sum of $11,500 in their annual raises to equate their salaries to those of adult correction workers, who were mostly male. Another example cited was in Oregon, where female clerical specialists were deemed underpaid by $7,000 annually in comparison to male senior sewer workers. In both cases, working conditions were not taken into account. Working conditions in prisons and sewers are far more dangerous and unpleasant than conditions in hospitals and offices. Most people, given a choice of working in an office or sewer at the same salary, would choose the office. So, to allocate workers into sewers and prisons, one must offer them higher pay.
Wrinkly
Links without Botox. (Come on, let's do a few lines!)
Gotta Love The Parent Who Says A Business Should Have Set Limits For His Child
A Texas teen -- a 16-year-old girl -- survived a 3,000-foot skydiving "mishap," as the New York Post called it. Apparently, her parachute malfunctioned. She hurt her liver, broke her pelvis, her lower-back lumbar spine, a shoulder blade, several ribs, and a tooth. The doctor who treated her can't believe she survived.
From the unbylined AP story in the NY Post:
The girl's parents agreed to let her perform the jump, but her father, Joe Wethington, now says the skydiving company shouldn't have allowed it."I don't think she should have been allowed at 16 to go up there and perform that type of jump, no matter what I say or she says, she shouldn't have been allowed," Joe Wethington said at the news conference. "I find it very hard to believe that the rules and regulations in Oklahoma are that lax. I think there is a flaw there somewhere, and I don't think it's through the state of Oklahoma. I think it's the company. I'm not sure."
Nancy Koreen, director of sport promotion at the Fredericksburg, Va.-based U.S. Parachute Association, said its safety requirements allow someone who is 16 to make a dive with parental consent, though some drop zones set the age higher.
Robert Swainson, the owner and chief instructor at Pegasus Air Sports Center in Chickasha, defended the company Tuesday. He noted that the father went up with his daughter and was the first to jump.
I'm not for mandatory age limits. Some people are mature enough at 16 to handle all sorts of crises. Some of us are not mature at, oh, 36 or 46. The difference is, those of us who do poorly in a crisis may, as adults, be a little more cognizant of that and a little more likely to admit it.
Personally, my adrenaline response is so strong in fear or anger that I become about as intellectually capable as a tree. Thanks to my younger sister, I've found that niacinamide
Free Speech: Are You Offended?
A quote from Stephen Fry:
'It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?'
via @CHSommers
License Plates Aren't All They're Making In Prison
This is sick -- babies are being conceived in prison on conjugal visits and, in many cases, then tossed out to foster care.
Mississippi has put an end to babies conceived in prison by putting an end to conjugal visits. Rebecca "From Fosterhood" writes at Babble:
Christopher B. Epps, the prison commissioner, cited budgetary reasons and "the number of babies being born possibly as a result" as his reasoning to end the program.I consider myself a crunchy liberal and I go out of my way to support my foster children's parents. But when I learned that my foster child was conceived during a conjugal prison visit, my mind was blown. What? Where? How is that allowed? Perhaps my judgment is clouded by my emotional connection to my foster kids, but the experience made me question the rehabilitation policies of prisoners. It's one thing to encourage prisoner connections with family members to reduce recidivism, it's a whole other ball game to create a family for the same reason.
When I had to allow my foster baby to be put into a car with strangers, for a 10-hour day (with six hours of driving) so that she can be taken to visit her mother and father in prison, I was angry, heart-broken and seriously weirded-out. Do they know how to mix her formula? Her nap schedule? I was told she screamed the entire 10 hours, each time. My only choice was to block it out of my mind, I had no control over the situation (I was allowed to accompany her only once).
An NYT piece on the end of conjugal visits is here, written by Kim Sorenson:
Mississippi ended its more extensive family visitations last year but left in place the hourlong visits, which since their inception a century ago have been designed more as a way to control inmates than nurture relationships."Conjugal visits have been a privilege," said Tara Booth, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Corrections Department. "So in that sense, it has, as other internal opportunities, helped to maintain order."
...Announced in December, the decision to stop the hourlong conjugal visits came as a surprise to the handful of prison spouses who rely on them. Several have taken to Facebook and other online forums and written to lawmakers to try to save what they say is an essential part of their relationships. A Mississippi prisoners' advocacy group and a Memphis-based civil rights organization have planned a rally for Friday in Jackson, the state capital, to protest the policy change.
State Representative Richard Bennett has introduced a bill to end the visits:
"I don't think it's fair to the children conceived and to the taxpayers," he said. "You are in prison for a reason. You are in there to pay your debt, and conjugal visits should not be part of the deal."...Ms. Fisher, whose husband is facing 60 years, said she was heartbroken because no more conjugal visits meant no children.
"Let me have that option," she said. "I feel like they are taking away my choice."
Unfortunately, unborn children can't choose to have a dad who isn't incarcerated.
Should they instead have a birth control requirement? Should a conjugal visit be something prisoners are entitled to? Where should the lines be drawn?
Sinkie
A linkie that ate too many donuts.
The Federal Government As Surrogate Parents
Charles Schumer is a big proponent of this, now suggesting that the feds must create a program to outfit autistic kids with tracking devices.
Not surprisingly, it's yet another law named after a dead person (usually a dead child) -- "Avonte's Law," named after 14-year-old Avonte Oquendo who disappeared October 4 and was found dead on January 16 along the East River shoreline in New York.
From the Salon link above:
As Ted Frank, editor of the Center for Legal Policy's "Point of Law" website, noted in January:My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to take care of you child's needs, not that of other citizens, via our taxes and federal government meddling. If I had a kid who wandered off, I might get one of these rather inexpensive devices for dog tracking. (I considered getting one for Aida, but they're bigger than she is and I'm very careful when I open the gate so she doesn't get out.)
Of course, autistic kids often have problems with the feel of certain fabrics and substances and that's something unknown here. What are they going to do, inject them with chips?
via @TimCushing
"Cruel, Self-Righteous": The California Supreme Court Rejects Disgraced Journalist's Bar Application
I'm not one of those people who hates or claims to hate lawyers.
In fact, I'm wildly grateful to a number of lawyers, especially Marc J. Randazza, who took my case pro bono against the TSA worker trying to squeeze me for $500,000, other lawyers who weighed in, my former entertainment lawyer in New York, Melissa, who sometimes comments here, who has done a bunch of contracts for me, and all of those who work for civil liberties, like Greg Lukianoff at FIRE and those at Institute for Justice.
Well, Steven Glass, the disgraced journalist who was a rising star at The New Republic, but turned out to have fabricated a bunch of stories, ended up getting a law degree and passing the bar exam in both New York and California-- but there's a hitch. He tried to get licensed in California but the California Supreme court unanimously ruled that this should not be allowed.
David Plotz really despises Steven Glass -- personally. But he published a piece on Slate about how it's wrong for the California Supreme Court to deny him entry to the California bar. He's struck by the decision's snobbishness:
The Committee of Bar Examiners and the Supreme Court justices--every one a lawyer--don't want to let Glass be a lawyer because they're embarrassed that anyone could possibly think that he's like them. He's not one of us, dear.They gravely insist Glass is not sufficiently rehabilitated. Really? Glass committed his journalistic fraud in the mid-1990s--nearly 20 years ago. For the past 10 years--10 years!--Glass has worked as a law clerk for a California firm, in exemplary fashion. As the judgment itself admits, Glass's boss Paul Zuckerman "became convinced that Glass was one of the best employees in the firm, with a fine intellect, a good work ethic, and reliable commitment to honesty. Glass exhibited great compassion, assisting at a personal level with difficult clients and helping to find resources and social services for some of the firm's many homeless clients. Other lawyers who had worked for or with the firm confirmed Zuckerman's view of Glass as an employee who conducted excellent legal research, was assiduous and hyper-scrupulous about honesty, and stopped to think about ethical issues."
...The Supreme Court also worries that Glass would fabricate documents and deceive clients, a bizarre and backward conclusion. The very first thing anyone knows about Glass is that he was a liar and a fraud. Any judge he appears before will know: This is that lying journalist. Any opposing counsel will be aware: This is Shattered Glass. He's not trying to sneak into courtrooms under a new name: He's Stephen Glass. He is a flashing red highway sign. This is what happens when you Google him. Glass is far less likely than most lawyers to try to sneak something past a judge, because he'll know that every single word he speaks and document he signs is suspect.
Here, from Scott Greenfield's blog, is the sort of person who does get in to a state bar. Popehat on this here. More from Scott. Even more.
Letting Kids Be Kids
From TVNZ in New Zealand, it took a university experiment to allow kids to act like kids again on the playground, but it's had good effects:
Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don't cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."
Letting children test themselves on a scooter during playtime could make them more aware of the dangers when getting behind the wheel of a car in high school, he said.
"When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult's perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don't."
via @notjessewalker
Chestnuts Linking Over An Open Fire
Jack Frost is nipping. Again.
Shoes! Boots! Marked Down!
New markdowns on women's shoes at Amazon
Personally, I like to wear high-heeled boots everywhere but the shower.
Truth be told, however, I wear down booties
A Tweet To Weigh In On
Anna Sutherland tweets:
@annams59
Telling poor women to get their lives in order before having kids sounds a lot like telling them never to have kids
The link she included with her tweet is a piece she blogged for the Institute of Family Studies, "Fighting Family Breakdown Will Take More Than Contraception":
An essential point:
Poor unmarried women don't just have kids because they don't use IUD's. They have kids because they want them.
Have Bank Robbers "Earned The Right" To Be Bank Managers?
Penny Starr writes at CNSNews that the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, told the US Conference on Mayors that the approximately 11 million people who are in the country illegally have "earned the right to be citizens:
"It is also, frankly, in my judgment, a matter of who we are as Americans," he said, "to offer the opportunity to those who want to be citizens, who've earned the right to be citizens, who are present in this country--many of whom came here as children--to have the opportunity that we all have to try to become American citizens."
In no other country does breaking the law get you a prize -- and certainly not one so precious as American citizenship.
I have a number of friends here from other places and they have struggled to do things the legal way.
This suggestion reminds me of Obamacare. Instead of just getting catastrophic care in my 20s, I paid every month for a health care plan so I'd be "in," and not have to try to get in when I was, say, in my 40s or had gotten sick.
Now that whole principle has been overturned, much like the way we give all the kids trophies for their sports performance and never mind whether they met real-world standards, like whether they actually, you know, won.
As Milton Friedman pointed out, as long as we have a welfare state -- which we do (a growing one) -- we cannot have open immigration.
Obamacare Has Backfired; Pot Legalization In States May Set An Example For How To Kill It
Glenn Harlan Reynolds notes in his USA Today column:
As it turns out, most of the people signing up for Obamacare aren't the uninsured for whom it was supposedly enacted, but people who were previously insured (many of whom lost their previous insurance because of Obamacare's new requirements). "At most," writes Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, "they've signed up 15% of the uninsured that they were expecting to enroll. ... Where are the uninsured? Did hardly any of them want coverage beginning Jan. 1?" It looks that way.In fact, there seem to be more uninsured than there were before Obama took office, leaving Jonah Goldberg to ask, "So what was the point of Obamacare again?"
If the program fails, it won't be because Republicans stopped it, despite all the House votes and defunding efforts. It will be because millions of Americans' passive resistance brought it to its knees. Irish Democracy, indeed.
Meanwhile, on the marijuana front, the people of states like Colorado are engaging in an odd, 21st century variety of nullification. Unlike the 19th century John Calhoun version, state laws legalizing marijuana don't purport to neutralize the still-extant federal laws banning cannabis. But the state, and millions of Coloradans, are simply ignoring the federal law and, in essence, daring the feds to do something about it.
Reynolds thinks the way to nullify Obamacare may be the way Colorado de facto nullified federal laws on pot:
(Colorado) started a process that may very well snowball, all without directly attacking the federal laws, or the federal government, at all. Meanwhile, millions of Americans may be in the process of effectively killing Obamacare simply by staying home.As we struggle, mostly in vain, to rein in the metastasizing power of a federal government that has grown out of control, perhaps Irish Democracy offers a solution. Sometimes it seems like that's the only kind of democracy that's likely to make a difference.
Kaus On Inequality
An excerpt from Mickey Kaus' WSJ piece on the problem with the Democrats' new war on inequality ("the defining challenge of our time," says President Obama):
Harsh Truth No. 1: Democrats aren't proposing anything that comes close to reversing this three-decade trend. They got nothin', as the comedians say. Raising the minimum wage may be a good idea, but it affects a sliver of the labor market. It's not going to stop the top 10% from taking home 50% of the nation's income, or 51%. The same goes for extending unemployment compensation. Even the tax increases fought for by Mr. Obama are a blip. On paper they might cut the incomes of the very richest Americans by 6%--until the rich find ways to avoid them.If Democrats are going to get voters to play along they should maybe give them at least an idea of what they propose to do and how it will achieve their goal--without toxic side effects. A better plan is to ask why we care about economic inequality anyway. If the poor and middle class were getting steadily richer, would it matter that the rich are getting richer much faster?
I agree with WSJ commenter JOHN HOLSTEAD, who thinks the real interest is in legally bribing voters to pull the D levers:
Contrary to the assumptions made in this article, creating equality of any type is not the ultimate goal of President Obama or Democrats, votes are.All the rest (e.g. income inequality, raising taxes on the top 1%, raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, easing eligibility requirements for disability benefits etc.) is merely window dressing and propaganda designed and intended to turn out voters and their votes for Democrats. The upcoming State of The Union Address will be full of it and can, I expect, be distilled to one sentence: From each according to their ability to pay, to each according to their need.
Milky
Linkiemoo.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Jesse Bering On Sex, What's "Normal," And The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Join me tonight for a thought-provoking, mind-opening show on the underpinnings of our sexuality.
Dr. Jesse Bering's book, Perv
Tonight's show, like Bering's book, will be a fascinating inside look into how our specific sexual desires seem to be shaped in childhood, how sexually not "normal" some of the most seemingly normal people are, and how human psychology leads us to find others' sex practices upsetting and creepy instead of just different from our own.
As Bering writes, "Humans aren't the only sex deviants in the animal kingdom. But we are the only ones to stigmatize each other as disgusting perverts."
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/27/dr-jesse-bering-on-sex-whats-normal-and-the-sexual-deviant-in-all-of-us
Don't miss last Last Sunday's guest, who was not a behavioral scientist like most of my guests, but was one I couldn't resist having on, because the subject he studied in depth -- the asshole -- is one most of us are forced to deal with on a daily basis, and sometimes repeatedly. UC Irvine philosophy professor Aaron James, my guest, is the author of the wonderfully titled "Assholes: A Theory."
Listen as we dig deep into asshole-ishness, as Aaron James answers questions including: What is an asshole? What makes an asshole tick? Is it possible to engage in successful asshole management -- and if so, how? Is it possible for an asshole to reform? And why does worrying that you are an asshole mean you probably have nothing to worry about?
Hear the show at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/20/dr-aaron-james-on-understanding-the-ahole
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.
Book: Hitler Didn't Die; He Moved To Brazil And Shacked Up With A Black Girlfriend
There, the happy couple kept busy by faking the moon landing.
via The Times Of Israel, via @AmPowerBlog
Feminism Gone Toxic: Vagina-Counting As "Equality"
Wendy McElroy writes at Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada that the OSC, the Ontario Securities Commission, edged closer to requiring companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange to impose gender quotas on their boards of directors and in their executive offices.
McElroy points out:
Privately-owned companies are personal property as much as privately-owned dwellings are. Homeowners have a basic right to use their own property, including to determine who can have access. Business owners have a similar right to use their property, including who is hired or promoted. A government agency may use the law to usurp a business owner's property rights just as it may use the law similarly to strip a homeowner of control. In both cases, the agency would be violating the individual's right of private property. If the injustice seems more blatant vis-a-vis the homeowner, that is because a double standard is applied in terms of the law's approach and society's attitude toward personal as opposed to commercial property. Both are private property and they do not belong to the government.
She also takes on the argument that it is a sign that women are oppressed and unequal that they don't constitute 50 percent of the directors and officers (since they are 50 percent of the population):
This argument is false and reflects nothing so much as a political and dangerous shift in the definition of "equality."Equality used to mean equal access to opportunity: women wanted their persons and property fully and equally protected under the law. They wanted to have the same access as men did to public institutions, such as universities and the courts. One of the proudest accomplishments of the 20th century was to erase gender distinctions from the law. But, then, those distinctions were gradually reinserted.
Why? Because politically-correct feminism faced a problem several decades ago. In the 60s and 70s, most legal barriers to women entering all aspects of society had been swept away. Yet "imbalances" continued. There were far fewer female CEOs of corporations, for example. The imbalance was viewed as proof positive that women were still oppressed because a true equality of opportunity would have rendered an equality of results. Thus law needed to favor women through programs such as affirmative action and quota systems. Equality ceased to be about equal treatment under the law and became a cry for privilege backed by government force or threat thereof. This was the first major way in which the new equality differed from the old: it embedded gender privilege into the law.
She also points out that outcomes depend on preferences -- preferences that differ from gender to gender:
Consider how few female firefighters exist. This is not because women are barred from the profession. Indeed, fire departments actively recruit them in order to comply with affirmative action. The lack of female firefighters may be due to nothing more than the well-documented tendency of women to choose less dangerous, less physically demanding jobs that allow them time for their families. In all likelihood, the firefighting imbalance has nothing to do with inequality of opportunity even though there is a marked inequality of results.
And finally she notes that "an equality of results requires government to strip people (especially business ones) of the right to use their own property; it requires a forced redistribution of 'rights', wealth and power."
I posted this Sunday night at 9:28 pm after working on my column and prepping my radio show for tomorrow. I just got off the phone with Gregg, who spent the day at his place going through some documents. My work -- and then my boyfriend and my friends -- is my life. I have no interest in children, save for visiting them, as I did today for a few minutes -- popping out back to say hi to the neighbors' kids and see the new bracelet the little girl made for her brother.
Many women choose to have kids. Sure, some corporations may choose to offer childcare and flextime and other benefits to attract and retain women, but the reality is, a woman with kids will likely make them a priority in a way a man with kids will probably not. That's a different sort of worker you're getting -- a less-committed worker.
Also, McElroy is right on about the sorts of jobs women want. Steven Pinker made a point about this at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Austin a few years back. Regarding how women tend to be kindergarden teachers and men do not, he wondered whether people would think it okay to try to shove men into these jobs the way we try to shove women to, say, become engineers.
(Of course, men who perhaps want to become teachers of little kids rightly fear being accused of being child molesters.)
A Conference Call In Real Life
Hilarious for anyone who's ever been on one of those conference calls like "Go To Meeting":
Warning: Ad at end, after video.
via @DrEades
The Man From Snowy Linkie
Never saw it, but maybe you can dig up a link or two in a snowdrift.
"Southern Flight 242: Bringing My Father Home"
Truly moving story -- a radio piece that aired Friday night on KCRW -- by my friend Will Coley about his father's death in a plane crash when he was a little boy and his trying to understand it as an adult:
Worth hearing. I didn't post this because he's my friend but because it's so moving.
A bit about the story from KCRW:
Will lost his father when he was seven years old, he has only some photographs and a few audio tapes to remember him by. Will knew that his father died in a commercial plane crash in 1977 along with 71 other people, including nine on the ground. It's an event still memorialized in New Hope, Georgia, where the DC-9 attempted an emergency landing on a highway through town. For most of his life, Will was reluctant to learn too many details about the crash that took his father. In fact, it took 35 years until he was ready to make this radio story.
I especially loved hearing his dad's audio taped "letter" about Halloween. It's so easy to take for granted audio we have of people we love. But after they die, it can mean a whole lot.
Sinister Cuteness: Selling The Surveillance State To Your Children
Michael S. Schmidt writes in The New York Times that the NSA has put a furry smiley face on its mission:
WASHINGTON -- The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really "kewl," is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency.
"In the world of diplomacy, knowing what your enemy is planning helps you to prepare," the turtle says. "But it is also important that your enemies do not know what you have planned. It is the mission of the National Security Agency and the Central Security Service to learn what it can about its potential enemies to protect America's government communications."
...With cartoon characters, interactive games and puzzles, the N.S.A.'s CryptoKids website for "future codemakers and codebreakers" tries to educate children about spying duties and recruit them to work for the agency.
As the website says: "It is never too early to start thinking about what you want to do when you grow up."
...And practicing, maybe by turning in your dad for that rolling stop.
Of course, what responsible parents really need to do is teach their kids to think, to value freedom, and to question authority.
via @LucyKafanov
The War On Privacy: The DEA Wants Access To Your Medical Records
Radley Balko blogs at the WaPo about the DEA's attempt to use warrantless "administrative subpoenas" to access information on patients from the prescription drug monitoring database. Such databases, are supposed to protect people. As Balko writes:
The thinking is that by creating databases of patients taking controlled substances, we'll be able to catch drug-dealing doctors and intervene on behalf of drug addicted patients.
Balko continues:
It's easy to imagine how this could be abused, how patient data could get into the wrong hands. Imagine a law enforcement officer looking for ammunition in a divorce or custody dispute. Or perhaps a politician who takes the wrong position on police pensions or police accountability might see his painkiller scripts leaked to the press....But Moffat also touches on another, less obvious problem--the chilling effect this will have on doctors. For example, one of the red flags federal investigators look for when looking for doctors to accuse of "drug dealing" is the overall number of prescriptions a given doctor writes for various controlled drugs. That means that as he's deciding your course of treatment, or whether to prescribe opioids to improve your mother's quality of life as she's dying from terminal cancer, he'll be thinking about how many scripts for those drugs he may have already written for other patients. It's an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, and could influence a doctor's decisions about a patient's treatment with factors that have nothing to do what's best for that particular patient.
Most People Should Go For The Bronze, Says Scott Gottlieb On Obamacare
For most people, anything else is a waste of money, writes Scott Gottlieb at Forbes on Obamacare:
For those who find themselves shopping for health coverage through Obamacare, here's a general tip: save cash on your premiums and buy the bronze health plan. For most consumers, the gold and platinum options will be a waste of money.We analyzed dozens of Obamacare plans, and found one striking result. The networks of providers, and in many cases the drug formularies, are the same whether you're buying a particular insurer's bronze plan, or purchasing the same insurance option in a gold or platinum offering. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Kelly Funderburk and I posted some of our data here.
The bottom line is this. When you're choosing a particular insurance offering, you typically can't trade up to a better benefit by buying the gold or platinum variety of that plan. It's usually the exact same benefit regardless of the metal you choose.
So what varies between these different metal plans? Typically, just the co-pay structure and deductibles. As you pay higher premiums for a gold or platinum plan, your deductibles and co-pays will decline. The insurer will typically cover 60 percent of expected medical expenses in a bronze plan, 80 percent in a gold plan and 90 percent in a platinum plan. So, by buying the costlier plans, all you're doing is fronting a higher premium to buy down your anticipated out of pocket costs. You're not getting a better network of doctors or a better formulary of drugs.
This is great to know. I'm going to have to downgrade my now unaffordable care by March. I don't see the doctor often and seem very healthy but I do see my shrink for my ADHD and need my prescription (generic Adderall) to not suddenly cost like it's generic gold bullion.
Inkie
Stained links.
$488 A Night Hotel Rooms For Union Swells On Grocery Baggers' Dues
Bill McMorris writes at The Washington Free Beacon:
Union bigwigs representing some of the nation's lowest paid workers are holding their annual board meeting at one of Florida's ritziest resorts just months after increasing membership dues.The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.4 million workers, is holding its annual board meeting at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort, where "Victorian elegance meets modern sophistication."
Two-hundred-fifty union officials are attending the 11-day conference ending Jan. 25, although not all are staying at the Grand Floridian. Resort rooms start at $488 per night before taxes and can exceed $2,000 if officials opt for a two Bedroom Club Level suite.
When UFCW officials are not meeting to discuss the union's progress in its battle against Walmart, they can "relax in the sumptuous lobby as the live orchestra plays ragtime, jazz and popular Disney tunes. Bask on the white-sand beach, indulge in a luxurious massage and watch the fireworks light up the sky over Cinderella Castle."
A union spokeswoman confirmed that union leadership had been in Florida "all this week" for the meeting, but declined to elaborate how many people are attending the retreat, nor would she confirm that they were staying at the Grand Floridian.
As Richard Riordan, LA's former mayor, put it about the teachers unions at a reason school choice event, the union isn't about what's good for the students or even what's good for the teachers; they're about power and money for themselves.
Oh, and it's quite possible -- if it's thought necessary -- to get hotel rooms for $200 or less, even in resort areas. The alt weeklies association and the Human Behavior and Evolution Society do this for their conferences every year. They make deals because they know their members can't afford to pay through the nose.
(Other people's money always spends so much easier.)
via @MarathonPundit
The Surveillance State Lives -- Thanks To The Subservience State
Subservient to politicians' self-interest -- and that's politicians left and right.
Sheldon Richman writes at reason:
In sizing up Obama's "reforms" of the indiscriminate gathering of data on every American, remember this: Politicians will do everything they can get away with in pursuit of their own agenda. To them, liberty and privacy are unimportant, things to be gotten around with the minimum of public attention. Should the public get wind of some untoward thing the politicians are up to -- as it did, thanks to Edward Snowden -- they will put on a public-relations show to lull the people back to sleep, enabling the state once again to go about its unsavory business unobserved.That is what's happening here. As Glenn Greenwald aptly put it, Obama's "defining value to the permanent power factions that run Washington" is that he "prettifies the ugly; he drapes the banner of change over systematic status quo perpetuation; he makes Americans feel better about policies they find repellent without the need to change any of them in meaningful ways. He's not an agent of change but the soothing branding packaging for it."
Thus, the appropriate attitude toward the so-called reforms is deep skepticism. You want evidence? Obama expressed confidence "in the integrity of those who lead our intelligence community." He has apparently forgotten that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a boldfaced lie to a Senate committee when he said "No, sir" to this question from Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the [NSA] collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" (Clapper later explained that this was the "least untruthful" answer he could give.) Obama's spokesman said the president "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given."
Obama's own veracity must also be questioned. In his speech he said that when he was a senator he was critical of the George W. Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping. But if that's true, why did he vote for the 2008 FISA law, which, as Greenwald notes, "legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program"?
The assumption I like to make is this: Assume all politicians are self-interested sleazebags until one repeatedly behaves in ways that suggest otherwise.
And frankly, if you think any differently, you are too naive to be voting.
What Really Happened To Daniel Pearl
Compelling long read,"Daniel Pearl's Final Story," at Washingtonian.com by his friend, Asra Q. Nomani. An excerpt:
Danny thought he'd be back at my house in Karachi from his interview by 9 pm. At 10, there was no sign of him, so Mariane and I flipped open his laptop to look for clues about his meeting. We found his source immediately. The man had written Danny from nobadmashi@yahoo.com. In Urdu, a native tongue of Pakistan, badmashi means troublemaker.It seemed like an attempt to mock Danny, and I was instantly angry with myself for not having paid more attention to the nuances of the story he was chasing--had I seen that e-mail address, I could have warned him.
I spent the night working the phone for leads, and the next day Pakistani policemen swarmed my home. It didn't feel right to sit back and watch them, waiting for news. As a journalist, I felt I had to investigate, too. I covered the dining-room wall in blank paper and wrote DANNY on the sheet in the middle; from there, I could map the connections among the people we came across. I'd used the tool while reporting a Journal story about tantric sex, when I'd had trouble keeping straight the different teachers and their students-slash-sex-partners. Danny had thought that was funny, and I imagined how hard he would laugh when he turned up and I could tell him we'd cracked his case thanks to my tantric-sex reporting.
Along with two of my Journal colleagues, Mariane and I chased every lead from our makeshift command center on Zamzama Street, and each day Mariane sat in front of a small shrine to chant her Buddhist mantra, praying for Danny to return. One night in the fifth week of the search, a team of Pakistani police officers, FBI agents, and State Department officials came to the house.
"I'm sorry, Mariane," Mir Zubair Mahmood, the lead Pakistani investigator, said. "I couldn't bring your Danny home."
"No!" Mariane yelled, running to the bedroom where Danny had slept his last night of freedom. I was silent as I followed and took a seat outside her door, repeating to myself a prayer for protection that my mother had taught me as a child: "In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful . . . ."
Mariane emerged. "How do we know it's true?" she asked me.
I took her question back to the group. It was John Bauman, then the US consul general in Karachi, who spoke: "They slashed his throat. They pressed on his jugular vein so his blood would gush out."
The next morning, it rained for the first time during my five months in Karachi. Finally, I sobbed.
Give The Budget Surplus Back To The Taxpayers!
I'm liking the sound of this suggestion from Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican candidate for California governor. Seema Mehta writes for the LA Times:
"If Jerry Brown has a surplus, he should return it to the people he took it from -- the people of California," Donnelly said in a written statement. "Instead, he's giving pay increases to union members while leaving regular, hardworking taxpayers out to dry."The Twin Peaks lawmaker was responding to Brown's State of the State speech, in which the governor laid out his accomplishments of the past year, notably turning a deficit into a surplus.
I suspect this is just attention-whoring but it would be lovely if a politician didn't run California's budget like he's some Beverly Hills divorced daddy paying off his spoiled brat daughter with an unlimited Amex card.
Monkey
Linkie with fur and opposable thumbs.
Dirty, And Not In A Good Way
I got a letter from a guy whose girlfriend likes to go barefoot -- a lot more than she seems to like washing her feet. This sort of thing.
Anybody ever had luck getting a partner to change some habit like this? I think he's either going to have to accept it or use his own feet to mosey on down the road.
No Good Deed Goes Unfined
A man who responded to a Craigslist ad for a sperm donor is now on the hook for child support.
Martha Nell writes for ABA Journal:
William Marotta didn't intend to be a father when he responded to a Craigslist ad for a sperm donor in 2009, and the two women who sought one didn't want that result, either.But, because they didn't have a physician perform the artificial insemination procedure, the written waiver of his parental rights that all parties agreed to doesn't comply with the requirements of a Kansas state statute, a judge ruled Wednesday in the Shawnee County District Court case. That means Marotta is officially the father of a child conceived by one of the women using his sperm and owes child support, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports.
The issue came to the court's attention when the Kansas Department for Children and Families sued Marotta for support in 2012. The state sought to have Marotta declared the child's father so that he can be held responsible for $6,000 that the state has already provided as well as for future child support. The state said Marotta's contract with the two women in which he waived his parental rights and responsibilities is invalidated by a 1994 state law.
via @walterolson
Do (They) Do That To The Guys?
Cate Blanchett asks this of a cameraman who is scanning from the floor up along her dress. Predictably, the HuffPo, via writer Alanna Vagianos, deems this "subtle sexism":
While many of us love to swoon over the glamorous floor-length gowns often seen at red carpet events, Cate Blanchett made us think twice about fawning over a woman's outfit.Blanchett called out the red carpet media pool's casual sexism at the SAG Awards during an E! interview. As the cameraman attempted to capture her gown with a shot scanning up and down the actress' frame, Blanchett crouched down and asked him, "Do you do that to the guys?"
Um, guys all wear the same outfit -- black tie. Nobody wants to see up the length of black pants to a guy's suitcoat.
Also, men evolved to prioritize women's beauty, so we all are more interested in how a woman looks. We aren't going to stop because it isn't politically correct and it isn't "subtle sexism" that we do; just biology and the psychology that goes with.
Fear Of Ideas
Forget whether you agree with this girl or not. Shouldn't she be allowed to express her opinion? What pussies we as a people have become that we deem ideas that we are disturbed by as "bias" -- worthy of silencing.
The story is at SpeakUpMovement.org:
Beth Sheeran was a nursing student at Spokane Falls Community College in 2008 when she spearheaded an effort by a Christian club on campus to sponsor a pro-life event. She had almost completed the extensive preparations when she learned the college was shutting down the event. Her determination to know why brought her face-to-face with the sometimes absurd objections of the faculty and administrators ("Washington is a pro-choice state, and we can't use school grounds for a pro-life display.") and their very real determination to silence free speech on campus. She and other club members were threatened with expulsion, should they so much as hand out flyers with pro-life themes.Realizing that "the abuse of authority would also shut doors to the Gospel," and worried that fear for their education might keep many Christian students from speaking the truth, Beth reluctantly decided to file a suit against the school district whose policies were being enforced at Spokane Falls and other colleges and universities throughout the area. Alliance Defending Freedom represented her, and the district soon settled the case, agreeing to change its restrictive speech policies and restore the First Amendment protections of all students.
What I love about theFIRE.org is that they defend people on campus who've had their free speech rights violated -- no matter what they are advocating and whether they personally agree with it. This is what protects free speech for all of us. The First Amendment is necessary for the people who say objectionable things, not for people who talk like they're reading out of a Hallmark card.
Not Sure Why Anyone Would Want To Vacation Or Work In A Muslim Country
Dubai, supposedly a "moderate" Muslim country, is on the verge of jailing another rape victim.
From Austrian Times:
An Austrian tourist who claimed she was raped by a policeman's son in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates has been told that she is facing jail herself - for having sex outside of marriage.The 24-year-old woman reported the rape to local police expecting that they would take action against the accused, and instead found herself facing charges.
And even more amazing she claims that she was told by one of the policeman that she complained to that she could escape charges if she were prepared to marry the man that she alleged had raped her in a car during an attack on December 2nd, which is a public holiday in Dubai.
She had been in the region with friends on holiday and accepted an offer by the man to drive her home. But once they had walked into an underground car park underneath a five-star hotel in Yemen he had raped her, she claims.
The man then tried to drive the woman away from the hotel but she managed to jump out of the car screaming for help - where other guests helped her and the police were called.
As well as facing charges of sex outside marriage it is also alleged that she had been drinking. Both actions are illegal in United Arab Emirate State.
More info here:
Under Islamic law, rape can only be proven if the rapist confesses or if there are four male witnesses. Women who allege rape without the benefit of the act having been witnessed by four men who subsequently develop a conscience are actually confessing to having sex. If they or the accused happens to be married, then it is considered to be adultery.
Clunky
Linky with big ugly shoes.
Sick: Texas (With The Help Of A Vindictive Ex-Wife) Is Sending A Good Man Who Paid His Child Support To Jail Over A Clerical Error
Clifford Hall's employer was never told of increased child support withholding so it wasn't deducted from his check.
When he was told of the shortage, he quickly paid the amount he owed ("in a matter of weeks," his attorney, Tyesha Elam, said on HuffPo Live). He was actually notified of an overpayment -- of $1002.26 -- which was applied to his case. Despite this, he was sentenced to six months in jail.
HuffPo Live has the story:
Elam explained, "I assumed as soon as he brought me the receipt catching him up as well as the letter advising him of the overpayment, I thought, 'oh this one will be easy.' I'm thinking, 'let me let the opposing counsel know and we'll be done with this matter.'""But the opposing counsel informed me that she wasn't willing to settle the case. She wanted $3,500 in attorney's fees and she was confident from this judge that she could get it. So she refused to settle. So we had to move forward."
The situation escalated due to a law in Texas, which stipulates that overdue child support could lead to jail time, Elam explained. "As of June 14, 2013, in the state of Texas, a person can get behind on their child support, show up to court, paid up, and still go to jail. The maximum sentence is 6 months in jail, and that is exactly what Mr. Hall was sentenced to."
When he heard the verdict, Hall was shocked. "My mouth just dropped. I'm looking around--I looked at my attorney like, 'she's joking, she can't be serious,'" he explained. "We're just sitting there like, 'wow, I'm going to jail for six months. I'm going to jail for six months. I'm going to jail. This is so unfair, this is not right, this isn't justice. This is not right.' How is this in my son's best interest? That doesn't even make sense."
Elam was unable to appeal the judge's decision, so Hall was left with no choice but to turn himself in. His sentence began on Jan. 21, 2014.
Here's the video:
This is terrible. As the attorney says on the video: In Texas, a person can get behind on their child support, show up to court and pay, and still go to jail.
In this economy, a person can lose his job and fall into tough times and still have the same child support payment he had in better times. I hear of this again and again.
This is crazy. As Clifford Hall points out on the video -- he is going to lose his home, car, and job. He asks, "How is this in the best interest of the child?"
The son's mother and the attorney are behind this -- and it's barely spoken in the video. A vindictive woman and money-grubbing lawyer who care more about winning than a good man losing his freedom -- and more.
The idiot woman apparently has not considered what jailing the father will do to the child support payments. She apparently counter-offered that the father do six months of jail on the weekends -- which would mean he could never see his son.
And here's a guy who seems to be a good man and I would guess, a good dad, who has not been allowed to see his son since November.
His ruling is final, his attorney says. He is doing media in order to make changes for others. (I think it's possible that they may also be looking for attention to possibly get the Texas governor to do something, but that's just a guess on my part.)
This is a sick travesty -- and it's probably just an example of many cases.
Is This The America You Want To Be Living In?
A couple has been accused of a crime, and they were going to pay the estimated $500,000 it would cost for their defense from a home-equity line of credit -- until the government stopped them from having access to it.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason about Kerri and Brian Kaley, accused by the government of trafficking in stolen medical devices, though the government is unable to find any actual victims of their supposed crimes:
The Supreme Court is now considering whether the Kaleys have a constitutional right to challenge the order blocking access to their money before it's too late to mount an effective defense....Technically, the government has not taken the money yet; it has merely "restrained" it, along with the rest of the home's value, in anticipation of a post-conviction forfeiture. But the result is the same for the Kaleys: They can no longer afford to pay the lawyers they chose and trust, the people who have been representing them for eight years and are familiar with the details of their case.
Those details are puzzling. Kerri Kaley, who had a job with Ethicon selling medical devices to hospitals in the New York area, knew that hospital employees periodically would ask the company's sales representatives to take overstocked or outmoded devices off their hands. Seeing an opportunity to make some extra money, she and some of her colleagues began selling the devices, which no one else seemed to want, to a distributor in Miami.
Neither Ethicon nor any hospital has come forward to complain that its property was stolen. Yet the federal government brought criminal charges against Kaley, her colleagues, and her husband, who had helped ship the devices and deposited some of the revenue in his business account.
...The only Ethicon sales representative who has been tried so far- who was able to hire the lawyers she wanted, since her assets were not frozen-was acquitted after less than three hours of deliberation. Two other sales representatives pleaded guilty and received sentences of five and six months, respectively, although the judges in both cases wondered aloud who the victims were.
How National Health Care Is Working For The Swedes
Apparently, you could actually die waiting.
So, from The Local, Swedes are buying private insurance or getting it through their employers so they can skip the long lines for national health care:
More than half a million Swedes now have private health insurance, showed a new review from industry organization Swedish Insurance (Svensk Försäkring). In eight out of ten cases, the person's employer had offered them the private insurance deal."It's quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks' time rather than having to wait for a year," privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio on Friday. "It's terrible that I, as a young person, don't feel I can trust the health care system to take care of me."
The insurance plan guarantees that she can see a specialist within four working days, and get a time for surgery, if needed, within 15.
Welcome to your future!
Sure, you can still get coverage yourself through an insurance company -- until the "Affordable" Care Act ends up putting private insurance companies out of business...just like Obama had hoped.
Minkie
Fur a good time, call...
Can Someone Please Explain The Sherman Thing To Me
Why it was a big deal, that is, and at all surprising or shocking.
Ed Morrissey tweet:
@EdMorrissey Nope RT @DLoesch: Am I the only one who thinks Sherman's rant wasn't a big deal?
My tweetbacks:
@amyalkon
@EdMorrissey @DLoesch I couldn't really understand what he said on the tape but also couldn't understand the big deal.@amyalkon
@EdMorrissey @DLoesch Seemed a big like complaining that the Kardashians aren't (sorry!)...klassy!@amyalkon
@EdMorrissey @DLoesch It wasn't like he farted at tea.
Ed blogged this:
Yes, this wasn't the classiest sideline interview, but there's more to this story than just this interview. San Francisco's receivers do a lot of trash talking during the game; Anquan Boldin got so bad about it during the Panthers game last week that the commentators were practically begging the refs to toss a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct before Boldin touched off a brawl. Sherman had just gotten a flag for giving some of it back, and was clearly sore over that, too. Still not a good reason to go off like this on camera, but there is some more context to it, too.But ... isn't this why networks go on the sidelines and get these interviews in the first place? They want to catch the players at their most emotional in order to get something other than a series of cliches about "it's all about team," give credit to [other team] for playing a tough game," and so on. Usually players are smarter or have enough experience to avoid falling into those traps, but Sherman ... not so much.
"Yes, Marcus. Your Friends Died In Vain"
At Foreign Policy, former military intelligence officer Jim Gourley responds to this comment by former Navy SEAL and Lone Survivor author Marcus Luttrell to Jake Tapper:
"We spend our whole lives training to defend this country, and then we were sent over there by this country, and you're telling me because we were over there doing what we were told by our country that it was senseless and my guys died for nothing?"
Gourley writes:
Yes, Marcus. Your friends died in vain. They went selflessly. They fought bravely. They sacrificed nobly. They lived in the best traditions of duty, honor, and country -- hallowed words which dictate what every American can and ought to be. But they died in vain for the exact reason that they went where their country sent them and did what their country told them to do. America failed you because it failed its obligation to those principles. It gives me no pleasure to write these words, because it applies as much to the friends I lost as it does to yours. But it needs to be said, because the sooner we acknowledge it as a country, the more lives we might save.As I write this, America is two weeks into its 13th and presumably last year of war in Afghanistan. Already, two servicemembers have been reported killed there. The strategic outlook after our withdrawal is not optimistic. Indeed, current events forebode a harsh future for Afghanistan. We are only two years removed from our withdrawal from Iraq and the al Qaeda flag flies over the city of Fallujah, in which more than 120 American servicemembers died. The ultimate failure of American military might to secure Fallujah does nothing to diminish the honorable nature of their service. But likewise, all their gallantry cannot change the fact that they died for an unfulfilled cause. The honor is theirs alone. The disgrace belongs to America.
It's the disgrace of a country that abandoned its civic duty to execute due diligence in weighing the decisions of whether and how to go to war, and then later to hold accountable those that spent precious blood and vast treasure for meager gains. All the while, we convinced ourselves that we were supporting our fighting forces simply by saying that we were. We even made bumper stickers to prove it, never considering what it said about us to wear our hearts next to our exhaust pipes.
The sentiment of upholding the bravery of the fallen to hide the shame of our culpability has been echoed more eloquently but no less cowardice by our national leaders.
Finally, Some Truly Compassionate Conservatism
People who don't understand what it means to be a classic conservative -- as in "classically liberal" -- probably won't get this headline as it applies to this blog item.
That kind of conservatism is supposed to be about personal autonomy and small government, and a decision in New Mexico fits right in with this.
Erik Eckholm writes in The New York Times that a New Mexico judge has affirmed the right to "aid in dying":
A state court in New Mexico said Monday that terminally ill residents have a constitutional right to obtain "aid in dying," a ruling that could make New Mexico the fifth state to allow doctors to prescribe fatal drug doses that suffering patients can use to end their lives."This court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying," wrote Judge Nan G. Nash of the Second District Court in Albuquerque.
The case was brought by two doctors who sought protection against prosecution if they provided fatal drug prescriptions to a patient, and Aja Riggs, a 49-year-old woman with cancer who told the court in a December trial, "I don't want to suffer needlessly at the end."
Arguing their case were the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and Compassion & Choices, a national advocacy group. They asserted that a doctor's help for a competent, terminally ill patient who wished to hasten death was not covered by a 1960s state law making it a felony to assist a suicide.
The state argued that such an action by a doctor was covered by the law and that banning doctor-assisted suicide was consistent with individual rights under the State Constitution.
Judge Nash agreed that the law applied, but said that "the liberty, safety and happiness interest of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying is a fundamental right under our New Mexico Constitution."
Government Built It!
The Obama administration hand-picked the contractor to build the ACA website. That's why hacking expert David Kennedy says he was able to hack into HealthCare.gov in four minutes.
Jessica Chasmar writes in the Wash Times:
Hacking expert David Kennedy told Fox's Chris Wallace that gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes and required nothing more than a standard browser, the Daily Caller reported."And 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to and I stopped after that," he said. "You know, I'm sure it's hundreds of thousands, if not more, and it was done within about a 4 minute timeframe. So, it's just wide open."
"You can literally just open up your browser, go to this, and extract all this information without actually having to hack the website itself," he said.
Mr. Kennedy testified before Congress Thursday that HealthCare.gov was "100 percent" insecure, Washington Free Beacon reported.
Linksy
Banksy blinked.
Even The Worst People, People Who Seek To Censor Others' Speech, Deserve Free Speech Protections
In a fascinating and instructive long read, Ken White at Popehat on the Crystal Cox saga:
This is how the rule of law works: we extend rights to the very people who would deny us those rights if they had the chance.Ariel Castro imprisoned young women in his basement without anything resembling due process, but he got a lawyer and his days in court until he thoughtfully offed himself. We protected the Nazis' right to march at Skokie, and say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, but it doesn't protect the free speech or assembly rights of others. We protect the right of Fred Phelps' family to protest at funerals even though the America of Phelps' dreams is a theocratic hellhole.
So it shouldn't be any surprise that we protect the free speech rights of the disturbed and vengeful blogger Crystal Cox, even though she abuses the legal system in an effort to censor and retaliate against people for criticizing her.
That's how we roll.
Last week the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Crystal Cox's First Amendment rights, and in doing so protected yours, and mine, in important ways. This post is about that decision, and about what Crystal Cox was doing to undercut the First Amendment while the Ninth Circuit was thinking about it. As you will see below, I am one of the people Cox has tried to silence with frivolous litigation even as courts were protecting her right to speak.
Marc J. Randazza, who, with his wonderful associates, defended me against the TSA worker who tried to get $500K out of me, also flies like Popehat -- going after only the true free speech violations. Popehat continues:
Marc Randazza -- who is a friend and occasional client, in addition to being a First Amendment badass -- is not one to take abuse lying down.So when Cox registered a bunch of domains in his name (like marcrandazza.com and marcjohnrandazza.com) in order to bad-mouth him and sell advertisements, he fought back. The results have been very upsetting to Cox.
First, Randazza filed an action with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which resolves disputes over domain names. Marc chose wisely by proceeding narrowly -- he didn't seek to capture domains that were on their face critical or satirical, like marcrandazzasucks.com. Instead, he sought only to capture those domains that used his name in a way that caused confusion, on the theory that Cox registered those domains in bad faith to cause confusion and make ad revenue. Marc knew to narrow his claim like that because he's successfully defended satirical bloggers who use their targets' names in non-confusing and clearly satirical ways, like glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. WIPO agreed, and awarded Marc several domain names that used his name in a confusing and non-satirical manner, and in the process noted that Cox registered the domains fraudulently to commit extortion.
...But Randazza wasn't done. He sued Cox in United States District Court in the District of Nevada. In his complaint, Randazza explicitly disclaimed any intent to sue Cox for theories like defamation or infliction of emotional distress. Instead, he accused Cox of registering domains in his name in order to make money of it, in violation of his rights, and as a pattern of extortion. He noted, for instance, one of Cox's posts titled "Marc Randazza Domain Name for Sale.. Here Kitty Kitty..." Based on that, Randazza articulated causes of action under the federal cyberpiracy and cybersquatting statutes, as well as under state right to publicity statutes. The gravamen of his claim -- and what distinguishes it from most cases of satirical websites -- is that Randazza alleged that Cox acted to extort money from him or make money through selling the domains or collecting other revenue.
Randazza's suit has been successful. United States District Judge Gloria Navarro first issued a temporary restraining order against Cox locking the domains to prevent their transfer, and making this finding:
In this case, Defendants have embarked on a campaign of cyber-extortion. Specifically, Cox sent an e-mail to Plaintiff Randazza that informed him that she had purchased and, in that same email, informed him of her "need to make money." (Pls.' Mot. for TRO, Ex. 8, ECF No. 2-10.)Judge Navarro later issued a preliminary injunction transferring the domains to Randazza.
First Amendment lawyer and scholar Eugene Volokh writes about his defense of Cox here, and how "Bloggers = Media."
Thank you -- Popehat, Randazza, and Eugene -- and all the lawyers out there ultimately defending the free speech of the rest of us with every case they take.
The Most Noteworthy Thing Martin Luther King Did
Hamden Rice writes at the Daily Kos:
What most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general.
The essential point:
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
Rice explains:
I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing "The Help," may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of "assault," which could be anything from rape to not taking off one's hat, to "reckless eyeballing."
...That is what Dr. King did -- not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.
Once the beating was over, we were free.
It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid.
via @marcorandazza
"Freedom Feminism": I'm For It
I recently called myself a "personist," meaning that I'm for fair treatment for all people, male and female, but I can buy into what Christina Hoff Sommers is selling here.
Christina Hoff Sommers writes at reason (in a response to Sharon Presley who slammed Hoff Sommers' book, Freedom Feminism):
Freedom feminism shares with egalitarianism an aversion to prescribed gender roles: Women should be free to defect from the stereotypes of femininity if they so choose. At the same time, however, it respects the choices of free and self-determining women--when they choose to embrace conventional feminine roles. Nowhere do I say women should stay in the home or that women who defy convention are "aberrations." I simply note that, to the consternation of hardline contemporary genderists, many women, when given their full set of Jeffersonian freedoms, continue to give priority to the domestic sphere. Somehow in Presley's mind "giving priority" means a total rejection of the workplace. Not at all. But many women, especially when they have children at home, do appear to have a strong preference for working part-time.
Hoff Sommers is also correct on the biological basis of sex differences:
Presley faults me for accepting the possibility that the sexes are equal--but different. "From a feminist point of view--and from an individualist one--Sommers' stereotyping is unacceptable." She reports that the consensus among "most serious scientists" is that gender differences are small and insignificant. She cites a few of her favorite feminist authors as proof. That won't do. In fact, there is a vast body of serious research indicating a biological basis for sex differences. In 2009, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences under the auspices of the American Psychological Association. This thorough, fair-minded and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than 50 pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences. While these particular studies may not be the final word, they cannot be dismissed or ignored. Presley's instinct is to ignore or dismiss research that challenges her worldview.Presley seems to be captive to a 1970s-style of "free to be you and me" feminism that sought to free human beings from the constraints of gender. But is that truly liberating? In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat. But the most fascinating finding is this: Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, "Higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality." New York Times science columnist (and awesome libertarian) John Tierney summarized the study this way: "It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France."
Why should that be? The authors of the study hypothesize that prosperity and equality bring greater opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are.
Lorakeet
A linkie with bird breath.
Boots!
They're all I wear. And I wear them under evening gown skirts, which I wear as daywear, with a leather jacket or jeans jacket.
The boots are on sale, up to 60 percent off -- at Amazon
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Aaron James On Understanding The A**hole
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Tonight's guest is not a behavioral scientist like most of my guests, but I couldn't resist having him on, because the subject he studied in depth -- the asshole -- is one most of us are forced to deal with on a daily basis, and sometimes repeatedly. UC Irvine philosophy professor Aaron James, my guest tonight, is the author of the wonderfully titled "Assholes: A Theory."
Join us tonight as we dig deep into asshole-ishness, as Aaron James answers questions including: What is an asshole? What makes an asshole tick? Is it possible to engage in successful asshole management -- and if so, how? Is it possible for an asshole to reform? And why does worrying that you are an asshole mean you probably have nothing to worry about?
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/20/dr-aaron-james-on-understanding-the-ahole
Don't miss last week's show on how to parent without paranoia. On it, psychology professor Dr. Gabrielle Principe notes that the panic-stricken parental race to raise tiny geniuses is actually bad parenting -- leading to overcontrolled childhoods that have negative effects on kids' development.
Through looking at solid science on the human brain, Dr. Principe has figured out ways for parents to naturalize childhood again, so a child's environment gels with how the brain was designed to grow.
Her clearly written and dryly witty book: "Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan."
On this show, she busts countless myths about how to raise children and lays out simple, clear advice for how kids can thrive.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/13/dr-gabrielle-principe-parenting-without-paranoia-and-how-kids-actually-learn
She's Guilty Of Something
Aida plus apparently guilty conscience.
I love watching her do the math in her head -- how fast can she get up to the little table, access food there in a bowl, what kind of food is it and will it be worth it to steal vis a vis how much trouble she'll get in from me when I notice her going for it, and whether she has some chance of actually getting what she goes after.
DEA Official Freaks Out Over Pot Legalization (Hint: It's The Money And Power, Not The Potheads)
Eekers, the vast money and power train funneled for drug enforcement could be stopped!
Not one person I know who smokes pot was deterred by the laws against it. I would smoke pot (in a vaporizer) if pot worked for me, which it does not. The laws would not have been a deterrent.
The laws against pot are just a vast complex for employment and power for those in the enforcement and prison industry, and they disproportionately affect blacks and others in the underclass.
Via @againstcronycap, who wrote:
James L. Capra is a career government official. Much of his life has been spent in drug law enforcement. He is a politician and a bureaucrat. He has constituencies he represents. He has federal money to protect. Ending marijuana prohibition means ending a big part of everything this guy has worked for for a long time. He doesn't want to see the footprint of the DEA diminish on his watch, which is understandable.No one in government wants their power diminished. No matter what agency it is they never want to get smaller. Managers, bureaucrats, are not interested slit their own throats. (Who is?) Money is the lifeblood of bureaucracy and the flow of funds must be maintained -always.
Fundamentally what we see here is a turf and funds battle. Mr Capra is defending his bureaucratic ground. That's what people do in Washington DC.
Trafficking groups that "want Billy to be puffing on his bong," as Capra puts it, will be put out of business by legalization, same as the illegal booze industry was by the repeal of Prohibition.
Airbnb And How Government Is Way Behind The Economic Times
Except for the first time Gregg and I went to Paris together, we've rented apartments instead of hotels. I even traded the house I rent in LA for a rental in Paris for a month, taking my late doggie Lucy with me for the month, too.
As for why I like apartments, I prefer to not eat in restaurants every meal and to have the comfort and quirkiness of an apartment. (Our price range is in the quirky zone, like where you rent an apartment in a great area, only it's a seven-floor walkup.) I also like to live as real people live rather than staying in a hotel.
Well, a lot of people are traveling far more affordably by renting rooms or apartments from other people who own or rent them. This is not exactly overjoying the hotel industry and those pols it keeps on a leash.
Andy Kessler writes in the WSJ about Airbnb and how some cities are trying to prohibit people from renting their pads to travelers:
But by far Airbnb's most significant obstacle has come from those who want to protect the status quo--hotel companies and governments collecting lucrative occupancy taxes that they say Airbnb and its hosts avoid paying. New York is Airbnb's most lucrative market, and the company's battle with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is no doubt being watched closely by his peers across the country.The city's 30-day minimum for apartment rentals is "a very gray law," Mr. Chesky says. The law was intended to crack down on slumlords who run illegal hotels in apartments. But since half of Airbnb's New York bookings involve entire apartments, they technically run afoul of the law. The law's passage four years ago brought out some 500 Airbnb supporters as protesters at City Hall, and the company met with city officials, most of whom had never heard of the company, Mr. Chesky says. "They met with us and said 'We've worked on this for four or five years, we're not rewriting the law and going through another four or five years.' That's when I realized we probably had a problem."
Four months ago, Mr. Schneiderman subpoenaed data on all of Airbnb's 15,000 New York hosts. In pursuing Airbnb, the attorney general may be protecting New York's 14.75% occupancy and sales tax, but he's also not disappointing the city's 30,000-plus unionized hotel workers.
...Airbnb argues that rather than taking away income from the city, its users bring a significant amount of business by encouraging visits by tourists who might not be willing or able to afford the city's daunting hotel rates. Mr. Chesky says that "62% of hosts in New York depend on Airbnb to pay their rent or mortgage."
The sharing economy is still so new, Mr. Chesky says, that his company is lobbying cities around the world to account for it. Sometimes Airbnb loses: Berlin passed a law that, beginning this year, requires a permit for short-term rentals, or hosts are forced to pay a stiff fine. The law won't kill Airbnb in Berlin, but it will impede the free-flowing nature of the business.
'We're not against regulation, we want fair regulation," Mr. Chesky says. "We're trying to help take this from an activity that existed under the table with Craigslist and bring it out of the shadows. We want to work with cities to streamline the process for hosts to pay occupancy taxes," he says. "People ask, 'Why don't you just pay the tax?' Well, it turns out that in cities like New York, you can't just pay the tax, you can't just send them a briefcase of money, you have to change the laws first. Onerous licensing and permitting are designed for large corporations"--not for Airbnb users.
In this economy, allowing somebody to rent out their room or their apartment may be the difference between that person keeping their place and being evicted.
Who's Distorting Islam?
Daniel Greenfield at blogs at FrontPage:
We all know that the real Islam is a religion of peace. A pacifist religion which was spread by Mohammed handing out bunches of flowers to people and asking them if they wouldn't like to sit down in a circle with him and groove.And then he chopped off their heads if they refused.
...So what does Anwar Al-Awlaki think is the real Islam that America is attempting to distort?
Al Jazeera: The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have quoted CIA investigators as talking about the possibility of targeting you in a drone attack. Why do you think the Americans want to kill you?Awlaki: Because I am a Muslim and I promote Islam. The charge is "incitement"; my relationships with Nidal Hasan, Umar Farouk and some 9/11 attackers, and now I am accused of being linked to 14 cases...
"They want to market the democratic and peaceful US Islam... they want an Islam that has no sharia ruling, no jihad and no Islamic caliphate."
"We call for the Islam that was sent by Allah to Prophet Muhammad, the Islam of jihad and sharia ruling."
I hate to say it, but the droned terrorist has a point.
Ari Armstrong, quoting Craig Biddle, blogs that we misunderstand Islam at our peril:
American leaders fail to recognize the actual nature of Islam and of those who genuinely embrace it. As Craig Biddle explains:Many Muslims around the world aim seriously to "live" and die by Islamic law--and to force everyone else to do so too. This is the explicit goal of Muslims who take their religion seriously--because it is the central commandment of Islam: Muslims must submit to Allah, spread Islam, and, ultimately, make the whole world submit to Allah.As to why many Americans fail to recognize these facts and thus fail to demand that our government recognize them, see Biddle's article. That many Americans do fail to recognize the facts is evident in the frequent headlines about Islamic attacks on and threats against America and Americans--including the attack in Benghazi.
A Muslim woman explains an essential difference between Islam and other religions:
Islam shows a strong resistance to progressive interpretation due to the the central belief that its holy book is always-and-ever infallible, unchanged and unchangeaable, written by God himself.
And she continues:
While I am open to being corrected, I would claim that in the West, most Christians no longer take the violently misogynistic and homophobic parts of the Bible literally, and those who do (eg: the Westboro Baptist Church) do not have the political power or legal recourse to actualize their beliefs, so if they happen to do so it is not of much consequence materially. As such, I'd argue that if it is at all coherent to claim that a religion can be characterized by certain beliefs, we cannot claim that Christianity, in the manner in which it is currently practiced and applied, is characterized by many violent Biblical edicts that have become, in practice and modern thought, no longer relevant. In addition to this, there is a strong Christian presence, normalized in mainstream media, that avidly condemns violence based on misogyny and homophobia as specifically unChristian. In light of this, it would be a gross and unfair misrepresentation to claim that Christianity is characterized by ultra misogyny and violence or that this is a common element of the thought of Christians simply because those elements are present in its core scripture. In addition to being a misrepresentation, it would not be a productive method of discourse because pointing that out has very little to do with reform when governance among Christian-majority countries happens to be secular and thus can combat the attempted legislature of Christian-based laws on secular grounds.
It's a huge problem that Islam has these failsafes built in. We want to believe (as I believed until I started educating myself about Islam after 9/11) that Islam is just another religion. But in a number of ways -- life- and freedom-threatening ways -- it is very much not.
Lanky
Skim link.
Yes, There Actually Is Such A Thing As "Sasquatch Erotica"
A tweet I just saw from Matthew Ingram:
@mathewi MT @knitgrrl: That lady who writes Sasquatch erotica for Kindle is pulling down $30,000 a month. I think I have made life mistakes...
It's for real. Eric Spitznagel writes for Business Insider about author Virginia Wade's success:
"Cum For Bigfoot" wasn't an overnight best-seller. "The first month, I think I made $5," Wade admits. But over the course of 2012, the book was downloaded well over 100,000 times. "And that was just Amazon," she says. "That's not counting iTunes or Barnes & Noble or any of the other places that sell self-published books." With no marketing muscle, no bookstore tours or print reviews or any of the publicity that most top authors use to sell books, she started bringing in staggering profits. During her best months, she says, she netted $30,000 or more. At worst, she'd bank around six grand -- "nothing to complain about," she says.
We Know You Have (Almost No) Choice In Airlines
It's yet another bit of annoying protectionism -- protecting consumers from getting cheaper fares and better service.
Travel writer Christopher Elliott has a blog post questioning why foreign airlines can't fly within America:
Try not to laugh too loudly the next time a flight attendant makes one of those pre-flight announcements to thank you for your business and say, "We know you have a choice in airlines."Now that the USA is down to just three major legacy carriers, thanks to the misguided merger between American Airlines and US Airways, it doesn't take a card-carrying frequent flier to know your options are awful.
But they don't have to be. Imagine if foreign airlines were allowed to offer flights in the United States, competing head-to-head with our new winged monopolies.
"If I could fly Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific on U.S. domestic routes, at prices comparable to American airlines, I would buy those tickets in a New York minute," says John Strohm, a software engineer from Huntsville, Ala.
He's not alone. Once other air travelers have experienced the impressive service some foreign airlines offer, they often wonder: Why can't they do business in the USA?
International airlines do operate in this country, of course, but they're forbidden from flying point-to-point destinations domestically. These laws, which are meant to protect American consumers and jobs, are having the exact opposite effect. Eliminating -- or at least partially lifting -- outdated restrictions could significantly increase competition and improve customer service.
Banning foreign carriers from offering domestic flights might have made sense a generation ago, when the American airline industry was tightly regulated by the federal government, say industry watchers. But today, with only a few megacarriers remaining and the security concerns of the Cold War a distant memory, it's harder to justify the laws.
"Foreign airline competition and capital investment in U.S. airlines could quickly improve passenger service, lower fares, result in new start-up airlines, and relieve overcrowding," says Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights.org.
Some Prisons Of The Future May Be Campuses Of Sorts
Obviously, this approach isn't for just anybody who gets sent to prison but there are some interesting ideas from the "Reset Foundation," an organization to create and fund what would be the first nonprofit edu-prison for adults. The piece, for NationSwell, was written by my friend David Wallis:
The proposed day and evening schedule of learning is not for slackers. Reset's candidates -- limited to men between the ages of 18 and 24, who are serving one- to three-year sentences for crimes not of a violent or sexual nature -- must demonstrate the "personal motivation to succeed." Life skills workshops, such as lessons on parenting and anger management, will start at eight in the morning, followed by two hours of literacy and basic math education. Students then take a career class to learn workplace skills like using computers or writing memos. Lunch might be served with a mentoring session. In the afternoons, students will tackle projects focused on the humanities or science. And the opportunities for education do not end in the evening. Students receive one-on-one therapy, addiction counseling (if needed) and join support groups. Upon release, graduates return to Reset for "ongoing support and check-ins."Should a student flunk anger management, discreet security specialists --whom Wilson describes as "almost like bouncers" -- step in to diffuse conflicts. Reset has yet to determine whether security staff will be unionized. But Porter argues that a positive environment, "and how busy you are," are far more effective at maintaining calm than the threat of a baton to the gut.
Educating inmates has proved to be "the single most effective crime prevention measure," concluded a 2003 study published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change. The study tracked nearly 26,000 released prisoners in Texas; ex-cons who had received an education were significantly less likely to serve time again than those who had not taken classes while incarcerated.
Starbellied Sneetches Security: Stupid New Form Of Pretend Security For TSA, Etc., To Be Instituted By End Of 2014
Via WHNT.com, Huntsville, Alabama, if you want to fly anywhere or get into "federally secured buildings," you'll need a new driver's license:
By the end of 2014, federal security authorities like the TSA at airports or guards at federally secured buildings will look for a new type of identification. It's a driver's license called the STAR ID and most of you are going to need one.STAR stands for "Secure, Trusted, And Reliable." According to the Alabama Department of Public Safety's web site, it's part of a nationwide effort to improve the integrity and security of state-issued driver licenses and identification cards, which, in turn, will help fight terrorism and reduce fraud. It came as a result of Congress passing the REAL-ID Act of 2005.
To fly in the domestic U.S. you must have either a STAR ID or a government-issued passport as of December 1, 2014. This is for anyone born after December 1, 1964. People born before that date will have until December 1, 2017 to secure their new STAR I.D.
How do you get a STAR ID? Even though it will replace your driver's license once you get one, it's not as simple as renewing it at your county courthouse. It's a brand new license, so you'll have to visit the driver's license office in your county.
Welcome to pain-in-the-assville and bureaucratic Kafkaland for some, for sure.
You'll need to bring (to "verify" your identity and date of birth):
-Valid, unexpired U.S. passport
-Original or certified copy of birth certificate
-Consular Report of Birth Abroad
-Certificate of Naturalization issued by Department of Homeland Security
-Certificate of Citizenship issued by DHS
But that's not all. You'll have to verify your Social Security number and other info. More here.
Elfie
Short links.
Congress Wants Low-Income Pregnant Women To Have High Blood Sugar
Count on "public interest" to be self-interest -- this time, from lawmakers from potato growing states.
Congress, for no particular nutritional reason, is encouraging the ag secretary to allow low-income pregnant and nursing mothers to buy white potatoes with the vouchers they receive as part of a government program. From HuffPo/AP:
That goes against the advice of the Institute of Medicine, which advises the government on health issues. The institute has said recipients of such aid already eat enough white potatoes....Although the Obama administration has tried on a few occasions to limit the amount of money the government spends on feeding people white potatoes, lawmakers from the roughly 40 potato-growing states, backed by the potato lobby, have worked to turn back those efforts. In 2011, Congress voted to thwart the Agriculture Department's recommendation that only two servings a week of potatoes and other starchy vegetables be served in federally subsidized school lunches. The USDA effort was an attempt to limit the proliferation of french fries on school lunch lines.
...Along with the massive spending bill approved Wednesday in the House, nonbinding language from lawmakers urges Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to include potatoes in the WIC program. If he chooses not to add them, all he has to do is submit a report to Congress explaining why.
Vilsack hasn't said what he will do. USDA spokeswoman Brooke Hardison said the agency "continues to believe in the importance of basing the nutrition standards for WIC on the best science available."
Those who oppose allowing white potatoes in the federal program worry that the budget language is a sign of more pressure to come from Congress.
Concerned that lawmakers could add potatoes to WIC in a wide-ranging farm bill, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and other groups said in a joint statement that "to change the WIC food package because of pressure from the potato industry" could make the program less effective and that Congress should not be deciding what foods should be included in the program.
A bit on how potatoes raise blood sugar more than sugar. There are some complexities on this, however. Gregg, last night, made us mashed cauliflower in butter, which is delicious, and a great potato substitute.
via NicoleK
Finally: Aggressive TSA Groping At Denver Airport Leads To Sexual Assault Investigation By Police
It is coercive sexual touching that so many of us have been forced to go through simply to board a plane to complete business travel, go on vacation, or see Granny: "Let the government thug grope your sex parts or you can't board your plane."
I had hoped to bring sexual assault charges against the various thugs who groped me, but I was told that it probably wouldn't fly in Los Angeles.
Well, Brian Maass writes at CBS Denver that somebody has finally been successful at getting a sexual assault investigation instituted against a groping TSA thug.
Denver police have initiated a sexual assault investigation focused on Transportation Security Administration officers at a checkpoint at Denver International Airport. It comes after a Colorado woman filed a complaint saying the frisking she received amounted to a sexual assault."It's an open and active investigation," Denver police spokesperson Sonny Jackson said. "We take all complaints seriously and we are on this case as well. We have launched an investigation into it."
The criminal probe stems from a complaint filed by Jamelyn Steenhoek, 39, who was patted down by TSA agents on Dec. 26 as she was escorting her 13-year-old daughter to a flight bound for Philadelphia. Steenhoek was not flying, just getting her daughter to the gate.
"I feel like someone who works for a powerful agency that we are afraid of used their power to violate me sexually -- to put me in my place," said Steenhoek, a working mother for a county social services department. Steenhoke is also a full time college student.
...She said she was ushered into a small private room at the TSA checkpoint with her daughter watching from a few feet away.
"They told me to spread my arms and spread my feet."
She said the female TSA agent seemed to get agitated when Steenhoek tried to hurry the process along so she could get her daughter to her plane.
"At that point she did a pretty invasive search. They are just areas of the body I'm not comfortable being touched in. On the outside of my pants she cupped my crotch. I was uncomfortable with that."
Steenhoek said the agent repeatedly dug her fingers into Steenhoek's armpits.
"The part of the search that bothered most was the breast search. You could tell it shouldn't take that much groping. To me it was as extensive as an exam from my physician -- full touching and grabbing in the front. I felt uncomfortable, I felt violated."She said when the search turned up nothing, the agent repeated it a second time.
"So it didn't make any sense. The whole search was done over and more touching and grabbing than the first time."
The administrative end-run around the Constitution that has us all being treated like plausible suspects plotting terrorism is absolutely wrong -- has no place in a free society and is damaging to the maintenance of our civil liberties.
Every person who stands up to the TSA, who speaks out, who challenges their thuggish power grabs and genital grabs in the name of security -- when it is anything but -- is a friend to civil liberties and all of us.
Never, never allow them to violate you in a private room.
College Campuses Are Centers Of Censorship And Groupthink
Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley have a terrific piece from this April up at theFIRE.org, "6 Ways to Defeat the Campus Censors." Here's the preamble:
It's no longer a matter of much debate that America's college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross abuses of students' and faculty members' fundamental rights. More than sixty percent of America's largest and most prestigious colleges have speech codes that are either unconstitutional (at public universities) or directly contradict promises of free speech (at private universities).
The two authors of this piece come from different political and personal perspectives. One is a liberal and an atheist (Lukianoff), the other a conservative evangelical Christian (Shibley). Our combined decades of work as president and senior vice president of FIRE have convinced us that the groupthink and the pressure to conform, be silent, or talk solely to those with whom you already agree that is fostered by the culture and rules of the modern campus is destructive to students, our educational system, and our society as a whole.
So what can people who recognize the importance of free speech on campus do about it? There are a number of possible measures that might be taken. FIRE is already doing some of them; others would require new large-scale and ambitious initiatives. Some are cultural. Some are political or legal. None are the silver bullet that a lot of us might like, and some have tradeoffs that might make them less desirable. Let's take a look at a few of them.
Here's their recommendation on sexual harassment:
2. Legally End the Slippery Debate about What "Harassment" Really Means.
Since the 1980s, the most common form of campus speech codes has been wildly overbroad or vague harassment codes. Poorly written or purposely broad harassment policies can chill or silence huge swaths of protected speech. For example, Auburn University at Montgomery bans "jokes" about protected characteristics, as well as "making judgments," thus managing to ban with a single policy both Chris Rock and Sandra Day O'Connor.
The Supreme Court has actually provided the solution to this problem, if only schools would listen. It comes from Justice O'Connor's majority decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), in which the Supreme Court set out a standard for peer-on-peer harassment in the educational setting that protects free speech while preventing real discriminatory harassment. Under theDavis standard, behavior becomes punishable when it is (1) unwelcome, (2) discriminatory, (3) on the basis of gender or another protected class, such as race, (4) directed at an individual, and (5) "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities."
The Davis standard is a definition that is serious and that correctly confines harassment to seriously discriminatory patterns of behavior. Such a specific definition is nothing like the countless campus codes that prohibit "inappropriate," "demeaning," or merely "offensive" speech. Adopting Davis would send a strong message that "harassment" can no longer be treated as code for a student's or administrator's supposed "right not to be offended."
Colleges could adopt the Davis standard on their own, or the standard could be written into federal or state legislation. Since all schools receiving federal funding are already bound by Titles VI and IX to have rules against racial and sexual harassment, adding this standard to law would not result in further federal entanglement. Indeed, it would add much needed clarity to federal requirements that confuse nearly everyone involved. It is crucial, however, that the law state that the definition of harassment should be understood as "no more and no less than" the Davis standard, and that the Davis standard definition be the only acceptable definition of harassment in the educational context. Without such language, campuses would simply go back to their current practice of having an arguably constitutional definition of harassment in one part of their code coupled with comically unconstitutional definitions of harassment elsewhere.
Note the essential bit in the Davis standard of sexual harassment. Nothing about a man talking about sex once during a single lunch with a woman -- which, for example, out of the university environment, was said to be "sexual harassment" by Bora Zivkovic, despite meeting none of the standards for that under the law. It's serious stuff that needs to be the standard for punishment. Conduct that is...
(5) "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities."
This, from the end of the piece, about "promoting a cultural norm for debate" is so, so vital:
"Safety" is a much abused term on campus, often invoked lightly to refer to a generalized right for students to feel emotionally unchallenged. That kind of "safety" is a more appropriate goal for K-8 education, and even there it has likely already been taken too far--eighth graders understand a whole lot about disagreement. But there is a kind of safety for which advocates of reform in higher education must press: campuses need to be places where it is safe to disagree at a fundamental level, safe to question and even satirize the university's sacred cows, safe to question the conventional wisdom, and safe even to be wrong, to provoke, and (gasp) to joke. While there has been much talk in the last decade that higher education is moving on to some next level, little progress can be made within the existing models as long as students and faculty can and do still get in trouble for merely stating opinions that administrators dislike.
Linkiebertarians
Free minds, free mirth kits.
Playing Squabble
Anybody ever had any success telling one half (or all) of a publicly squabbling couple that it's hard to be around them? (And by having "success," I mean getting them to change their ways, not notice that there's an extra head to bite off in the vicinity.)
Maybe It's Not All About You And How You're A Woman
Boohoo-itorial in the Express-Tribune by a woman named Sanam Malik about how women are treated like they cannot be "independent" -- which she concludes is the reason the porters at the Lahore airport were miffed that she refused their offers to carry her luggage for pay. 
My tweet:
@amyalkon
@tribuneblogs @TarekFatah @SanouDoll Um, maybe what it's really about is that the porters have children to feed.
And then from the comments:
Oh please, those porters hound everyone not just women. I was with my family at the airport and the porters where constantly persisting my father to let them carry our bags. Can't believe a blog has been made on such a non issue.
Another:
Salman
Sorry to bust your bubble but this has nothing to do with you being a woman
Another:
Saad
Grow a brain lady. Pakistani labourers are persistent but they're only trying to earn a decent day's wage. They are equally as persistent with men. Don't make a feminist drama out of it. You emerged from the international Arrivals lounge and the porters are smart enough to assume that 1) You're loaded and probably generous and 2) that you have little or no idea of the prices in Pakistan so they'd get a more than decent tip for their effort. I am sad I read through so much nonsense.
Turns Out There's Good Discrimination And Bad Discrimination
Tristin Hopper writes for the Nat Post of Canada that Sonja Power, a Nova Scotia high school student, isn't going quietly in the wake of her aikido teacher following provincial law and accommodating a male Muslim student's request that he not be required to touch the dirty, dirty females:
"I felt degraded, discriminated against, I felt like a woman in the 1950s," said Sonja Power, 17, a former student at Halifax's East Coast Yoshinkan Aikido, a school operated out of the city's Lakeside Community Centre. "We wouldn't allow someone using their religion to discriminate against someone's race, so why would they use it to discriminate against somebody's gender?"Ms. Power, a resident of the Halifax suburb of Upper Tantallon, NS, had been a student at East Coast Yoshinkan since the age of six.
In the spring of 2012, Ms. Power, then 15, was just on the verge of earning her aikido black belt when she said a man enrolled at the school and told its owner that, for reasons of his Islamic faith, he was not allowed physical contact with women.
The request would not have been noticed in a pottery class or a fencing course, but Aikido -- like any martial art -- is uniquely physical. The ultimate effect, said Ms. Power, was that sessions were suddenly being divvied up by sex.
The school's sensei (teacher), "would put all the women on one side and then offer a side for the Muslim man so there wouldn't be any problems," she said.
And when it came time for the customary end-of-class handshakes, "he would shake hands with all the other men in the dojo, but he wouldn't even come over and look at the women ... he just ignored us," said Ms. Power.
The man also refused to bow, apparently telling the dojo's sensei that he only bowed to Allah. Bowing is a big part of the Japanese martial art, and aikido students are expected to regularly bow to classmates, the sensei and the front wall of the dojo, which is traditionally adorned with portraits of aikido's pioneers.
A comment at the site from Andrew Darnel:
Andrew Darnel
Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but I do have a problem with people trying to use religion as a means to change a system that is already in place. For instance, having an entire dojo segregate (as the article indicates) so that one man can have his religious beliefs fulfilled is not cool. The young woman (in this article) was nearing her shodan (first degree black belt), and was most likely wanting to train with other men, perhaps of similar or higher rank. And why not give her that opportunity, especially considering that she was a paying member and had been training since she was 6 years old!!!??Women in martial arts are very valuable training partners. Co-ed training allows students to learn the importance of technique and less on power or strength. Some of the best aikido practitioners I have met were, in fact, women!!! It's obvious that the religious zealot described in this article will never have the pleasure of knowing some of these awesome female aikido practitioners.
Aikido is a "neutral" martial art. I believe that separating men from women goes against the whole philosophy of aikido.
Again, if people of a certain religion can't manage modern society, they should do as the Amish do and keep to themselves or, better yet, live in one of those dark ages countries where they don't let women leave the house without a male guardian and they slaughter those nasty homosexuals.
Got Sharia?
Lumpy
The eighth dwarf. I think Linkie is the bad-seed cousin.
Look At All The Groovy Colors Duct Tape Now Comes In
Somebody (thank you!) bought it in through my Amazon links in hot pink
My late friend Marlowe Minnick used to say that you can fix most problems with duct tape, Wite Out, or a Sharpie. (She meant black duct tape because we only wore black in New York. I called the look "Every day is a funeral for me" -- even though I loved living in New York and was mostly very happy.)
Sex Shuffle
The shuffle feature on music players has its moments -- good and disastrous.
What's the worst possible -- most mood-killing, that is -- song that has or could come up during sex?
Women Demand Discrimination And Then Get Upset About Its Tone
Victim-feminist science bloggers (along with other victim-feminist women) get their big cotton underpanties in a wad whenever there's, say, a photo of a table of people in science (or elsewhere) and only one happens to be a woman.
"More female faces!" they screech. They aren't saying "Let the most qualified people in!"
Meanwhile, if you're a businessperson and you're hiring based on sex rather than talent, you're an ass who's doing damage to your business. I hire an assistant from time to time and I look for the best person I can get to do the job. Most of the time, that person has been a woman. My new assistant is a guy, for one reason only: He was the single best applicant. He is so good that I ended up paying him almost 50 percent more than the starting wage I offered. I'm reminded of that old line, if you can get a woman at, say, 75 percent of the cost of a man, why wouldn't you have an all-female work force?
Well, check out the insulty-face of Kate Clancy, who was invited to some conference on the insistence of another female invitee, who said she'd only come if there were a number of Important Vaginas invited, too.
This isn't about merit; it's a demand for discrimination: Inviting women rather than men.
I'm reminded of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams' book, in which he talks about two businesses he worked for where he was told he'd have no chance for advancement: An order had come down not to promote white men.
If this is how we get to "equality," I'll have none of that, thanks.
I Don't Shoot Cellphone Rudesters...
Some little shit sitting WITH HIS MOTHER on the other side of me was texting during the "Justified" premiere. He's lucky I needed to behave myself (it was a business event for my boyfriend), though I don't shoot people for bad manners; I just try to make them wish they'd never been born.
Bail has been denied for the movie theater shooter, write Jon Silman and Alex Orlando in the Tampa Bay Times:
A Pasco circuit judge Tuesday denied bail to the former Tampa police officer accused of fatally shooting a man over a texting dispute, noting "the evidence of guilt is significant" in the case.Authorities said Curtis Reeves Jr., 71, was in Auditorium 10 at the Cobb Grove 16 theater in Wesley Chapel when he got into an argument with Chad Oulson, 43, seated nearby, who was texting on his phone. The confrontation escalated suddenly, ending with Oulson dead from a gunshot to the chest and Reeves jailed on a second-degree murder charge.
New information about the shooting emerged Tuesday from a court hearing, an arrest report and a news conference held by the Pasco County sheriff.
Neither man threw a punch, according to the report. Witnesses said Oulson hurled a bag of popcorn at Reeves, who then pulled a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol from his pants pocket and fired once, the report states. The bullet struck Oulson's wife, Nicole, in the hand, which was on her husband's chest as she tried to break up the argument.
Sumter County sheriff's Cpl. Alan Hamilton was sitting five seats away and grabbed the gun from Reeves, deputies say. The two struggled for control for a few seconds before Reeves let go. The gun was jammed when Hamilton turned it over to deputies.
Reeves' wife, Vivian, was with him in the theater during the shooting. His son, Tampa police Officer Matthew Reeves, was walking in to join his father when he heard the shot and is not considered a witness.
Pasco Sgt. Steve Greiner said he found Reeves sitting in a theater seat, relaxed with his eyes toward the screen, "almost a distant stare."
Embarrassing Dog Pun Has Been Demoted
"His Park Is Worse Than His Bite"
I would like to say I wrote that headline -- the original header on this piece -- while drunk.
Sadly, I'm sober. Sober enough to refrain from putting it in boldface.
The topic -- from Spokane -- is this headline that seems nuts but is actually true. Via CBS Denver:
Woman At Red Light Hit By Car Driven By Chihuahua
via @PaulHsieh
Samantha Dunn Finds Her Way To The Big Tent
Samantha Dunn is a wonderful writer and a friend I met through our dear late friend Cathy Seipp, who used to talk about how it's the Republicans who have "the big tent."
I'm a Neither -- neither a Democrat nor a Republican (and best described as a fiscally conservative libertarian) -- but I tend to agree with both Cathy's feeling and what Sam writes about here. It's an excerpt from a book chapter she wrote for Anna David's True Tales of Lust and Love
Oh, and, by the way, by this she does not mean that he's simply a guy who colors in the Republican ticket on the ballot:
The man I love personally called Henry Kissinger to tell him about Richard Nixon's funeral arrangements. He ran Orrin Hatch's bid for president and has worked for Rudolph Guiliani and even that poor, dumb bastard Rick Perry. His mother has a framed picture hanging in the house of her arm-in-arm with Robert Dole, autographed with a "Thanks Sharon! Bob." His father is pastor of an Evangelical church, a man who watches a defective television set built with only one channel. Fox News.
She writes about a swanky Republican fundraiser she attended with him:
Jimmy had forgotten matches, so he bummed a light from a woman puffing on her Virginia Slim. The two had worked together on campaigns and fell into easy shop talk, but the woman's eyes narrowed as she began to dish about Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, who evidently leaned too far left to suit her."It's Maria's influence," she hissed. Did I imagine it or had her eyes hardened as she looked at us? "That's what happens when our Republican men hook up with liberal women."
Jimmy immediately became very interested in lighting another cigarette. Meanwhile, I smiled, said nothing, and thought, Lady, if you knew we drove here in my hybrid you'd have me burned at the stake.
Today Jimmy's driving a hybrid, tomorrow he could join a labor union -- all because of this writer chick he's dating. When will it end?
This would not be the last time Jimmy and I would find ourselves in the minefield where love and politics meet. What surprised me was that mostly it was not the intolerant, sanctimonious Republicans but my love-the-world, yoga-practicing, gluten-free progressive best friends who were apoplectic over my new romance. "A Republican? Are you that desperate? Don't you know what they're doing to our country?" (Funny, they were never as worried about the heroin addicts or that one guy who'd seen the inside of Folsom.)
Some friends of mine even disinvited us to a dinner party when they found out what Jimmy did for a living. Too bad. Not only because they made an awesome artichoke risotto, but because they missed talking to him. They missed his encyclopedic knowledge of American history, his fervent love of wilderness and of the American park system, his wry sense of humor, his love of great books, his punk-rockabilly past as a professional musician, his arrest record. They missed joining with me to tell him that he is socially liberal and fiscally just wrong, and they missed the argument over the fiscal part that always gets my blood going.
Mostly they missed knowing a man who is loyal to the people he loves. He is fierce, and smart, and unique, and particular, a man whose sum total is not represented by any politician or confined within the doctrine of political party. He drives me absolutely crazy at times, and there are things we will never, ever agree on, but being with him always makes me reconsider what I do believe, and why I believe it. It makes me look closer at all people and not assume I know everything about them from their (stupid, dumb-ass) bumper stickers. (OK, so I have to work on that part. Maybe.)
I guess I need to mention here that I married him. We eloped. Could you imagine a wedding reception? Just one mention of Ayn Rand and my mother would have broken a chair over somebody's head.
But my point is, I realized that in all those years dating maybe I was the real narcissist, looking for someone exactly like me, who would reflect back to me exactly that which I wanted to see, that which I took to be the indisputable correct way of being. Maybe if we all slept with an enemy, or at least took him to dinner, we'd understand more, maybe even find places of agreement. It happens.
Sam's fave hateful comment posted on Salon:
"A Rebuplican and a redhead; not a soul between them."
Oh, and I've met her husband and he's a super guy.
Linking And Diving
Can kill your iPhone.
I Get More Agitated When I Can't Find A Pen
Saw this hilarious footage last night on Anderson Cooper's "The Ridiculist." He commented on how nothing seems to faze these guys, who work in a Tennessee golf shop. Indeed.
All The Rockstar President's Lies: Just Say Stuff And People Will Believe It
People who voted for Obama and liked Obama seem determined to keep liking Obama. Hellooo, turbo confirmation bias!
Peter Suderman has a collection at reason of all the President's lies. Those who voted for him should be revolting in the streets. But I guess they're all on the phone about the health care they now no longer have or can't afford thanks to Obamacare. Here, below, is an excerpt from his piece in reason, chronicling the many lies of the administration. (It seems they realize they can say anything, and nobody but a few conservatives and libertarians will hold them to account.)
8. "Regardless of how the Marketplace is managed, consumers will be able to access the Marketplace with ease."The administration did not just signal that the federal exchange site, HealthCare.gov, would be ready on time. The president and others also insisted it would be a snap to use.
"Starting on Tuesday," Obama said in a Maryland speech less than a week before the exchanges opened, "every American can visit HealthCare.gov to find…the insurance marketplace for your state." Using the exchange would be "real simple," he said. "It's a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak-same way you shop for a TV on Amazon."
Cohen, the senior exchange official, sang the same tune to Congress in February: "We have been hard at work to ensure the Marketplaces will be easy to use when they become operational."
Reality: As Obama and Cohen were making their promises, they had no idea whether the site would even be functional. On September 26, the day of Obama's Maryland speech, "there had been no tests to determine whether a consumer could complete the process from beginning to end," according to an October report in The Washington Post. That month Businessweek reported that such testing still had not been conducted.
Best Headline Of 2014
On a Max Fisher story in the WaPo:
Iranian news agency says the U.S. is secretly run by Nazi space aliens. Really.
via @notjessewalker
Nobody Should Get "Unemployment" Payouts
We self-employed people don't get a bunch of money handed to us if we lose a client. Nobody should get this money. And it shouldn't be demanded from employers:
Ari Armstrong writes at TOS that government unemployment "insurance" isn't insurance; it's force:
Despite Barack Obama's blather to the contrary, government payments to the unemployed are not "insurance."Real insurance is a financial instrument voluntarily sold and purchased on a free market for the purpose of spreading risks, with the benefits defined by contract. For example, we know that some people's houses will burn down, but we don't know whose; therefore, most of us who own houses purchase home insurance that covers (among other things) destruction by fire.
Although government unemployment welfare has substantially throttled the need for and value of private insurance, some private insurance is still available. For example, people can purchase unemployment insurance to supplement government payments; consumers may purchase credit insurance to cover payments on debts during times of unemployment; and people may purchase private disability insurance to cover unemployment (my wife has this sort of insurance). Some people choose to protect themselves from the costs of unemployment simply by saving money ahead of time. In a market free from government force, insurance companies and other businesses would offer many additional options.
Government payments to the unemployed are not insurance. The so-called customers do not willingly pay for it; rather, government takes the money by force. Most government unemployment funds are confiscated from business owners--a violation of their rights (which makes it harder for business owners to hire people or increase wages).
Private unemployment insurance? Don Boudreaux writes at Cafe Hayek:
Private unemployment insurance was offered long before the New Deal. As Professor Michael Rappaport found, starting around 1910 companies began selling such insurance to railroad workers. Alas, seeking to offer such coverage to other workers, private insurers were consistently blocked by state governments. And when New York's legislature in 1931 finally approved the expansion of private unemployment insurance, the bill was vetoed by none other than Gov. Franklin Roosevelt.
Christopher Hitchens Versus An Indignant Feminist
Via @CHSommers:
Agree with him? Disagree?
Link Jell-O
Sorry...we were fresh out of lime.
Why The Department Of Agriculture Should Be Seriously Downsized
It's a cash cow for bureaucrats and it provides farm subsidies to millionaire "farmers" like Ted Turner and Mark Rockefeller. It costs each American $1,300 a year and makes our food cost more. A right-on short video via Cato:
The Truth Will Sometimes Set You Freer Than You'd Like
Collegiate sports programs are money-making machines. So what if Johnny Football Player can't read, right?
Well, Jonathan Turley blogged that a North Carolina professor looked into the educational standards for athletes and found the athletes sorely lacking in their abilities. As in, 8 to 10 percent of the school's football and basketball players are reading below a third-grade level.
This means, if they get injured or don't make the pros, they can basically work as busboys in a diner after four years of college.
The university reacted predictably -- as did the public. No, not worrying that adults enrolled in it can barely make it through a story from the kiddie section of the library:
The university seemed to go immediately on the offensive, including questioning her data showing a basketball player who could not read or write. What is interesting is the statement that "University officials can't comment on the other statistical claims mentioned in the story because they have not seen that data. University officials have asked for that data, but those requests have not been met." However, Willingham says that the data came from the University and remains in the possession of the University.At the same time, Willingham has received dozens of death threats from fans of the university teams. She has been a source of the local media investigation into the program and is considered a whistleblower by many.
Turley writes:
As many of you know, I love football. However, there comes a time when sports threatens the very soul of an institution. The University of North Carolina (and particularly its faculty) needed to make a choice as to whether it is a leading academic institution or just a facilitator for sporting events.
Back to the story, at the News & Observer link above, it says Willingham found one basketball player illiterate. The university disputes that finding. Also from that piece, a story by Dan Kane, Jane Stancill, and Andrew Carter:
Willingham played a major role in The News & Observer's work exposing a major academic fraud scandal involving the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. In August 2011, the N&O reported that a football player's transcript showed he had taken an upper-level class in the department in the summer of 2007 and received a high grade despite needing remedial writing the following fall semester as an incoming freshman.Willingham told the N&O shortly after that the academic support program was using "paper" classes in which no class was held but a paper assigned to keep athletes eligible. The university confirmed the existence of the "paper" classes in a report released in May 2012.
UNC officials say two people were responsible for the bogus classes - former department chairman Julius Nyang'oro and his longtime assistant Deborah Crowder, who retired in 2009.
Willingham went public with her concerns about athletes' ability to do college-level work, and how the support staff were using the paper classes to keep athletes eligible, in an N&O article on Nov. 17, 2012. Other evidence obtained by The N&O backed her claims, but they have drawn little activity from the NCAA.
Again, as FIRE has found again and again, campuses today -- many of them, if not most -- only pretend to be centers of free inquiry and free speech.
Sure, you can speak and inquire freely -- providing you speak and inquire about the accepted things.
Bill Keller's Piece Criticizing Cancer Patient Lisa Bonchek Adams
Here's a link to Keller's piece in the NYT about Adams, who's blogged and tweeted what she's been going through.
Keller doesn't shy away from the war metaphors.
Her digital presence is no doubt a comfort to many of her followers. On the other hand, as cancer experts I consulted pointed out, Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures.Steven Goodman, an associate dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, said he cringes at the combat metaphor, because it suggests that those who choose not to spend their final days in battle, using every weapon in the high-tech medical arsenal, lack character or willpower.
"I'm the last person to second-guess what she did," Goodman told me, after perusing Adams's blog. "I'm sure it has brought meaning, a deserved sense of accomplishment. But it shouldn't be unduly praised. Equal praise is due to those who accept an inevitable fate with grace and courage."
Xeni Jardin, who's tweeted her own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, tweeted this:
@xeni
She's not a "standard bearer." Or a "hero." Or "warrior." SHE IS A WOMAN IN THE HOSPITAL WHO HAS METASTATIC BREAST CANCER AND 3 KIDS.
UPDATE: Greg Mitchell weighs in at The Nation. Apparently, Keller was pitching in to help his wife, who wrote this piece in The Guardian, which met with a storm of criticism.
UPDATE: Guardian column removed.
Counting Colors
Walter Olson blogs at Overlawyered about what at first sounds like a good thing, a "Dear Colleague" letter sent out by the DOJ and the Dept. of Ed to discourage the pursuit of strict discipline policies by schools for "minor" infractions.
Olson writes that early coverage of the policy makes it sound like the letter is aimed at correcting the absurd "zero tolerance" policies I often blog about. But...
Unfortunately, there's much more. The letter represents the culmination of a years-long drive toward imposing tighter Washington oversight on school discipline policies that result in "disparate impact" among racial or other groups. Policies that result in the suspension of differentially more minority kids, or special-ed kids, will now be suspect -- even if the rate of underlying behavior is not in fact uniform among every group. (Special-ed kids, for example, include many placed in that category because of emotional and behavioral problems that correlate with a higher likelihood of acting out in misbehavior. Boys misbehave more than girls.)If the policy helps speed the correction of some overly harsh, mechanical school policies, both under the zero-tolerance rubric and otherwise, it may have some positive side effects. But the disparate-impact premise is a pernicious one that's sure to create many new problems of its own.
Martin Luther King's "content of character" notion has apparently been torn up and thrown away by the Obama administration.
Now there are punishment quotas. Forget who misbehaves. Now we'll have color charts for who can be punished.
Lunkie
Linkie that got hit in the head one too many times.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT -- Dr. Gabrielle Principe: Parenting Without Paranoia And How Kids Actually Learn
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
***("Best Of" replay this week, because I am completing the final polish on my upcoming book, which I turn in to the publisher Monday morning. New LIVE show Jan. 19 and onward!)
Psychology professor Dr. Gabrielle Principe notes that the panic-stricken parental race to raise tiny geniuses is actually bad parenting -- leading to overcontrolled childhoods that have negative effects on kids' development.
This way of raising children is marketing-driven, not science-driven (though marketers typically claim their toys and learning tools are based in science).
Take Baby Einstein videos. In 2007, UCLA's Department of Health Services chairman Frederick Zimmerman and his colleagues found that kids watching these had a 17 percent decrease in vocabulary acquisition for each hour they spent watching them per day.
Through looking at solid science on the human brain, Dr. Principe has figured out ways for parents to naturalize childhood again, so a child's environment gels with how the brain was designed to grow.
Her clearly written and dryly witty book: "Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan."
Join us tonight as she busts countless myths about how to raise children and lays out simple, clear advice for how kids can thrive.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/13/dr-gabrielle-principe-parenting-without-paranoia-and-how-kids-actually-learn
Don't miss last week's show with social neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Lieberman. His new book is Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
For example, there's a finding by his wife and research partner, Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues that taking acetaminophen (think Tylenol) actually diminished the pain of being socially excluded. Lieberman explains, "Our sensitivity to social rejection is so central to our well-being that our brains" react to social wounds (and ways to heal from them) much like they do physical ones.
An important underlying point in his book is that self-esteem is not just "from within." It's deeply affected by whether we're liked or esteemed -- or bullied -- by others (which research finds even affects our IQ).
We discussed many such interesting and unexpected findings on tonight's show, and discussed ways we can each capitalize on what Lieberman has learned from the research.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/06/dr-matthew-lieberman-how-our-social-selves-drive-life-satisfaction-self-esteem
Hand Condoms For Food Preparers Mandated In California
Sorry, but was there some rash of food poisonings we haven't heard about? People eat at restaurants constantly in the state of California and the entire state isn't sick in bed or puking in a bucket.
Betty Hallock writes for the LA Times about a new law in California forcing chefs and food preparers to wear gloves:
Many chefs are up in arms about having to wear gloves while cooking, in accordance with a new food safety law that goes into effect over the next six months.The new law bans bare-handed contact with many kinds of foods, but some chefs say the law is confusing, ineffective, bad for the environment and can compromise a final dish.
"The band-aid of a blanket glove regulation is potentially dangerous," says Neal Fraser, chef-owner of BLD restaurant and Fritzi Dog. "People get into the tendency to not wash their hands. And environmentally it's very unfriendly. It's funny that at the same time L.A. institutes a plastic bag ban, there's this."
Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that made changes to the California Retail Food Code in an effort to curtail foodborne illnesses, and those changes include a law that says "food employees shall not contact exposed, ready-to-eat food with their bare hands."
That means cooks must wear single-use gloves or use utensils when handling food such as sushi, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables and any cooked components of dishes that will be plated for customers.
"For the most part I use gloves throughout my whole preparation process," said Niki Nakayama, the chef of N/naka who makes sushi as part of her Japanese kaiseki-like meals, "and I have no problem wearing gloves for plating something. I'm on the fence about the cleanliness of gloves all the time."
But most important for her, "making sushi is incredibly hard to do with gloves on. No. 1, the rice is so sticky, the rice would stick to the gloves undoubtedly. Plus you lose that sense of feel, which is everything in sushi making. You have to know exactly the right pressure to put on ingredients. Wearing a glove would hurt the product."
A comment from the LAT site:
LBEastsider:So I see less cleanliness all the way around.
1. Less hand washing since wearing gloves will give workers a false sense that their hands are clean.
2. They glove up with dirty hands, only to re-glove with dirty hands reaching into the boxes of gloves to pull out a new pair and put them on. Thereby spreading germs from dirty hands to clean gloves.
How does any of this make our food safer?
Another comment:
Banana Cream PieHuman hands have been preparing human food for as long as there have been human beings. All off a sudden we must wear bubble suits lest we breathe the same air?
This law just means that inspectors can fine, fine, fine any restaurant they want completely out of business.
How People Who Get Insurance Through Their Small-Biz Employer Will Soon Be Screwed By Obamacare
Ariana Eunjung Cha writes in the WaPo about the second wave of health-insurance disruption, which affects small businesses, and the Obama admin's lie when health insurance plans were getting canceled this past fall, saying that the cancelations only affected the small minority of Americans who, like me, buy individual policies. (As if that's okay.):
But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing -- right before the midterm elections -- could be difficult for Democrats who are already fending off Republican attacks about the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.
Some of the small-business cancellations are occurring because the policies don't meet the law's basic coverage requirements. But many are related only indirectly to the law; insurers are trying to move customers to new plans designed to offset the financial and administrative risks associated with the health-care overhaul. As part of that, they are consolidating their plan offerings to maximize profits and streamline how they manage them.
"If they do it one way, the word canceled gets attached to it. If they do it another way, they say they are amending the policy. It sounds more gentle but it's the same thing," said Gary Claxton, an expert in private insurance at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "The basic point is, for many people in the small-group market at some point soon their coverage is going to change."
The transformation of the small-group market is just one of the many ripple effects of the Affordable Care Act that will reshape the insurance industry in coming years. With millions of previously uninsured people getting coverage, the insurance industry's business model is being upended, and that's leading to changes involving all sorts of products, not just those sold through the online marketplaces to individuals.
All of you Obama voters, about now, are you wishing you'd voted differently?
And also from the piece, check out how the government has yanked away people's ability to buy health insurance through an association:
Also facing disruption are people who purchase insurance through professional or trade associations and don't have any employees. This includes some doctors, lawyers and accountants in solo practice. Under the health law, that type of association plan is not allowed; sole proprietors must purchase coverage on the individual market.Cynthia Rutzick, 49, who has her own law practice in Oak Hill, Va., said that the policy she had been buying for years through the state bar association was already offering the benefits mandated by the health law.
But the policy, which cost $1,500 a month for herself, her husband and their two children and included 94 percent of the physicians in her area, was canceled. The new one, which costs $1,600 a month for her and her two children (her husband is going on Medicare next year) includes 82 percent of area physicians. Her broker said plans like her old one don't exist anymore.
"So I had a blue car, but could not go out and buy another blue car," she said. "I have to buy a red car, and it's not as good and way more expensive."
via @ByronYork
In Canada, It's Now Criminal To Be Upset Or Creeped Out By Somebody's Comment
Christie Blatchford writes for the Nat Post about a case involving a guy's tweets -- which a detective said involved no threats to anyone.
This is the trial of Gregory Elliott, a 53-year-old artist and father of four, who is charged with three counts of criminal harassment against three Toronto feminists.The officer in charge of the case, Toronto Police Detective Jeff Bangild, testified this week in his investigation, he found no tweets from Mr. Elliott that contained any threats to any of the women; had he, Det. Banglid said, he would have laid different charges.
Apparently, a criminal harassment charge is rooted in the alleged victim's perception of the offending conduct.
If said conduct, whether that be actually physically following someone or repeatedly communicating with that person, causes the person "reasonably, in all the circumstances, to fear for their safety", that's enough, says the Criminal Code.
This explains the tone of prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg's questions Thursday to Stephanie Guthrie, the 29-year-old feminist who was the first complainant to come forward about Mr. Elliott.
Several times, as Ms. Goldenberg would wrap up an area of examination with Ms. Guthrie, she would ask how she "felt" about a particular set of Tweets.
And Ms. Guthrie, who is preposterously articulate and self-possessed, would reply, "I was feeling a bit stalked" or "it made me feel scared for my safety ... I felt very much like he was obsessed with me, fixated on me" or "It led me to believe he had an unhealthy fixation ... "
You get the drift: She felt creeped out by Mr. Elliott; therefore, he is criminally charged.
Yet it's clear Ms. Guthrie can dish it out pretty well, too.
In 2012, the same year in which Mr. Elliott allegedly harassed her, she drew attention to a 25-year-old man from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., who had invented a "beat up Anita Sarkeesian" video game, where users could punch an image of the feminist video blogger until the screen turned red.
Ms. Guthrie wondered aloud online if she should "sic the Internet" on the man and Tweeted "I want his hatred on the internet to impact his real-life experience."
Free speech is in jeopardy, and I believe feminism has caused a good bit of this jeopardy. As I tweeted recently:
@amyalkon
Those clamoring for Bora's head on pike are for women not as equals but eggshells
Loopy
Linky with bed restraints.
Baggage Carousel Econ Lesson
David N. Laband writes in the WSJ about "a simple lesson in free-market economics, provided courtesy of the harsh winter weather of recent days in the eastern half of the U.S.":
Coincidentally, the annual meetings of the American Economic Association were scheduled to take place in Philadelphia, from Jan. 3-6. My friend and colleague, Haizheng Li, flew in to Philadelphia late in the evening of Thursday, Jan. 2, landing around 10:45. As he later told me, by then it was snowing heavily. Because of backed-up air traffic, the pilot was not able to park at their arrival gate for 40 minutes. After de-planing, Haizheng waited for another 40 minutes to retrieve his luggage.The AEA conference is huge, with several thousand attendees. Under ordinary circumstances, the participating conference hotels are constantly running shuttles to and from the airport to pick up guests. Taxis are running nonstop. Not on this night.
While waiting to collect his luggage, Haizheng learned from a colleague that the hotel shuttle service was taking two hours or longer. Worried, he went out to the taxi line even before getting his luggage. Snow was falling, the line of prospective customers waiting for taxis was long--and there were no taxis in sight. It was near midnight. The taxi staff said it was unlikely any cabs would be coming in such bad weather.
Haizheng and a number of other passengers were facing the grim prospect of an uncomfortable night at the airport. The food vendors were all closed. Haizheng was tired and hungry--and he was scheduled to make a presentation at 8 the next morning.
Unexpectedly, out of the night came a savior. A man walked through baggage claim asking whether any of the recently arrived passengers needed transportation to one of the downtown hotels. Haizheng didn't ask what the ride might cost, he just said yes. As it turned out, the man took six stranded passengers, plus luggage, to their hotels for $25 each.
No doubt in doing so he broke at least one, probably several, laws regarding passenger transport that are designed to prop up the local taxi cartel. Yet this man's action dramatically improved the lives of six individuals, each of whom undoubtedly would have been willing to pay much more than $25 to get from the airport to their respective hotels. Haizheng told me he would have paid a lot more.
Euvolutionary Exchange blogs about this, explaining:
The logic of "price-gouging" opponents is sometimes hard to follow.People have very few choices, and they are in trouble.
Therefore, we will take away one or more of the choices they do have, because...wait, why?
...The state would have prevented this transaction from taking place, if it could have. Were the six people "exploited"? If you mean, did they have to pay more because they did not have good alternatives, yes they were. The exchange was NOT euvoluntary.
But prohibiting the transaction would have violated the non-worseness principle. They were all bad off. They would have been EVEN WORSE off without recourse to the market.
The driver was not doing this for fun, or out of charity. He was trying to make money. He was THERE because the (implied, shadow, black market) price had risen in the face of transport scarcity. The market told him to help those people who needed help.
A comment from the WSJ by Charles Klaniecki:
Sorry to rain on this free market parade, but I would generally be reluctant to get into an unlicensed cab. With six passengers the risk is lower. And with the exceptional case of a particularly nasty storm, the risk is probably lower still. Still, those taxi shields do as much to protect us customers as they do to boost wages of cabbies.I wish to add that I generally believe in a free market. Here, however a few regulations are desirable.
Vincent P. Emmer replied:
You are free to be reluctant to get into an unlicensed cab. I hope you'd agree that others should be free to take the unlicensed cab.
Gary Lapidus added:
Silly article. Without the local government selling taxi medallions, it would not be possible for the taxi industry to be a source of graft, corruption and patronage for politicians.
via @FriedrichHayek
Dark Ages Fashion For The Ladies
How people in Muslim countries think women should dress in public. From Pew Research Center:
One Smart, Determined Beagle
Dog gets up high and opens a hot oven to break out the chicken nuggets cooking in it. Amazing.
Linkdelphia
Pick me up a cheese steak, willya?
Thank You, Person Who Bought The Camera Equipment
I thought something was wrong at first, when I went into my Amazon stats this morning (for purchases people have made where they go through my links and I get a little kickback). It was almost as high -- already -- as the best month, last month, at Christmas.
Somebody who shoots pictures went through an Amazon
The Intern
She was a lot of help Thursday night. She drank some of my wine and ran away with a highlighter. 
Palestinians Are Starving -- But In Syria
Can't blame the Jooos? Then nobody in the world cares.
Khaled Abu Toameh writes for Gatestone:
The plight of the Palestinian refugees in Syria serves as a reminder to all Palestinians that their Arab brothers do not care about their suffering. In several Arab countries, especially Lebanon, Palestinians continue to be treated as a "fifth column" and an "enemy from within."The Palestinians once again feel betrayed by their Arab brothers, who continue to pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while at the same time starving them to death, killing them and displacing them.
As for the international community, no one seems to be worried about the starving Palestinians in an Arab country. After all, this is not taking place in Israel and no Israelis are involved.
Covert Welfare: Your Student Loans Might Not Just Be Paying For Your Education
Now even middle-income students are paying part of their tuition to pay for those who come from poorer backgrounds, writes Douglas Belkin in the WSJ:
Well-off students at private schools have long subsidized poorer classmates. But as states grapple with the rising cost of higher education, middle-income students at public colleges in a dozen states now pay a growing share of their tuition to aid those lower on the economic ladder.The student subsidies, which are distributed based on need, don't show up on most tuition bills. But in eight years they have climbed 174% in real dollars at a dozen flagship state universities surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
During the 2012-13 academic year, students at these schools transferred $512,401,435 to less well-off classmates, up from $186,960,962, in inflation-adjusted figures, in the 2005-06 school year.
At private schools without large endowments, more than half of the tuition may be set aside for financial-aid scholarships. At public schools, set-asides range between 5% and 40% according to the Journal's survey.
The growth of subsidies is directly related to cutbacks in state aid, according to school administrators. Reductions in public spending for higher education have prompted universities to raise tuition levels, they said, making it tougher for students from poorer families to cover costs. To offset that burden, wealthy and middle-class students pay more in subsidies known as tuition set-asides.
"Without it, there is no way I'd be here," said Maria Giannopoulos, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who receives $5,000 a year through the program.
But former classmate Allie Gardner, whose father works at Costco and whose mother is a waitress, said she resented kicking in the extra money.
"It's this sneaky little thing they've put in place because they know we'll pay it, we're already taking out loans," said Ms. Gardner, who graduated in December.
Please explain to me why Allie and her family should be paying Maria's tuition.
If Your Primitive Religious Beliefs Are A Poor Fit With Western Society...
...Should Western society transform itself to make you comfortable -- or should you maybe live in a country that's a little more Dark Ages, where you'd be more comfortable?
A York University student was asked to be excused from group work because he said his religious beliefs prohibit him from meeting with female classmates. (Those dirty and inferior female classmates.)
From the CBC:
His professor at the Toronto university, Paul Grayson, rejected his request, which ignited a controversy at the university about human rights."I was quite shocked," Grayson told CBC-Radio's Ontario Today. He said he did not know the religion of the student, but fundamentally did not agree with accommodating him.
The sociology professor got in touch with the Centre for Human Rights and the dean's office at York. Both replied that he had to comply with the student's request, with the dean issuing three separate orders to comply.
"I basically refused," said Grayson. "My main concern was that for religious beliefs, we also can justify not interacting with Jews, blacks, gays, you name it. And if this were allowed to go through, then all these other absurd demands could be made."
Grayson said accommodating the student would be against everything he stands for.
...The student participated in the group project, ultimately. But Grayson said the university ordered him to make it clear to the student that he did not have to meet with female classmates.
Michele Mandel quotes Grayson in Sun News:
"We have to make a value choice," he told QMI Agency. "What's more important -- the rights of females who make up 54% of the population, or those of individuals with religious notions incompatible with egalitarianism?"
Welcome to a society committing slow suicide.
The Linky Way
All those stars and none of them are Kardashians.
The GW Bridge Traffic Scandal: Blame Christie! Don't Blame Christie!
Right and left are lining up boringly predictably on L'Affaire Christie. (More on that below.)
New emails suggest a senior aide to Christie--a 2016 presidential contender--ordered a nasty traffic jam in Fort Lee as political payback, write Molly Redden and Andy Kroll at Mother Jones. Two lanes were closed on the Jersey side of the GWB (George Washington Bridge), a massive traffic jam ensued, and ambulances were delayed in going to the sick and dying because of the jam:
"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," Bridget Anne Kelly, a top Christie aide, wrote in an email to Wildstein. "Got it," Wildstein replied.One text message sent to Wildstein on the day of the lane closures referenced mass school bus delays. "Is it wrong that I'm smiling?" the message read.
"No," Wildstein wrote.
"I feel badly about the kids. I guess," the person, who is unidentified, texted back.
Wildstein replied, "They are the children of Buono voters." Barbara Buono was the Democratic challenger to Christie who lost handily to the governor last November.
Numerous messages mock Fort Lee's mayor as he scrambled to learn the reason behind the closures from the Port Authority and spoke publicly about the closures in the aftermath. In one email sent the day of the closures, Wildstein assures Kelly that the Port Authority was responding to Sokolich with "Radio silence."
As Sokolich began speaking to press after the closures, Bill Sepien, Christie's campaign manager wrote, "The mayor is an idiot."
"It will be a tough November for this little Serbian," Wildstein wrote to Sepien, apparently referencing Sokolich's nationality. Elsewhere in the documents, Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director of the Port Authority, refers to Sokolich as "Serbian." Sokolich is Croatian.
Update: Here is Christie's statement on Wednesday's revelations:
"What I've seen today for the first time is unacceptable. I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge. One thing is clear: this type of behavior is unacceptable and I will not tolerate it because the people of New Jersey deserve better. This behavior is not representative of me or my Administration in any way, and people will be held responsible for their actions."Senator Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, replied to Christie's statement, saying, "These revelations are troubling for any public official, but they also indicate what we've come to expect from Governor Christie--when people oppose him, he exacts retribution...And when anyone dares to look into his Administration, he bullies and attacks."
My thinking: It's ridiculous to blame this on Christie, since there's no evidence he knew. This is what grubby politicos do on either side. I'm tired of the positioning, right and left, of their side as angels and the other side as devils. Each side sells us all out in its own boringly human ways.
You Don't "Improve" After Brain Death
You go from "dead" to "still dead" to "yep, still dead."
But the word that Jahi McMath, the brain-dead girl who died recently after a hospital procedure, is "improving" comes from her family's lawyer, Chris Dolan.
From CNN's Ashley Fantz and Joe Sutton:
Under the care of "optimistic" doctors, Jahi McMath -- whom a judge and other doctors have declared brain-dead, over her family's objections -- is "improving" days after her release from an Oakland, California, hospital, her family's lawyer said.Attorney Chris Dolan detailed some of what's happened to the 13-year-old girl since her release Sunday from Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland. Specifically, he said that after initially "doing poorly she is stabilizing," having had tracheotomy and gastrostomy tube procedures.
"She is doing very well and getting the treatment she should have gotten 28 days ago," Dolan said, referring to what happened to Jahi after a December operation.
"Doctors are optimistic that her condition has stabilized and that her health is improving from when she was taken from (the Oakland hospital)."The family hasn't said where the eighth-grader currently is. Dolan has declined to say if she had been transferred to another facility and, if so, to describe that facility.
Instead, they have chosen to lay low as they continue their efforts to care for Jahi. Dolan said the family needs to "heal up from this whole experience" and have "some quiet time" away from media questions.
"(The) family is seeking to focus attention on Jahi," added the lawyer.
Helpfully, this also helps them avoid contact with people who would tell them their lawyer is full of shit.
As I've posted here before, you don't come back from brain death. It's irreversible.
Obama Invites Angela Merkel To Come Have Her Phone Bugged In Washington
Well, that's not what the invitation said, but given all that's gone on, wouldn't that be how you read it?
Jerry Brown's "High Speed" Rail Is Soooo Twentieth Century!
So writes Ronald Bailey at reason -- and he's absolutely right:
California's Governor Jerry Brown (D) is supposed to be a visonary politician. Yet his support for wasting $68 billion (the current estimate) to build a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco harks back to the age of the adding machine and the slide rule. The rail line is supposed to be completed by 2029. That's right, 2029! The whole world of transportation will have been massively transformed by then.Autonomous vehicles will provide the bulk of personal and goods transport by then. Computer-guided vehicles can be more tightly packed on roadways and travel much faster than human-guided vehicles. Gov. Brown's high speed trains are supposed to travel between LA and San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes. It's very likely that speedy autonomous vehicles by 2029 will be able to make that trip in about the same amount of time traveling up Interstate 5, and do it door-to-door, rather than delivering passengers to fixed stations.
In addition, a significant proportion of Americans will no longer own vehicles, but will summon and rent them as needed, thus reducing the total number of vehicles on our roads. All this implies that our current transporation infrastructure is way overbuilt for our future needs.
Also, I met the wonderful new editorial assistant who's working for me. Met him once, that is. We work over Skype as I suspect a growing number of people do. No need to get dressed and get in any vehicles.
More about the rail project from the NYT's Adam Nagourney. Also, as I've blogged before, it turns out (wow, this was unexpected!) that the the projected money just isn't enough. Mike Rosenberg writes in the Mercury News:
California rail leaders said Tuesday it will cost an extra $97 million in office and field work to design the rail line, which has famously seen its construction cost double to $69 billion since voters approved it five years ago. The extra state and federal funds set aside for planning will wind up in the pockets of private consulting firms, including some that earn billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Here's Reason Foundation on what a bad deal this is:
The California High-Speed Rail Authority is overestimating ridership by 65 to 77 percent and will need $124 million to $373 million a year from taxpayers to cover its operating costs and financial losses, according to a new study by Reason Foundation.In 2008, voters were promised a bullet train trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours and forty minutes. However, the Reason study finds the system's fastest non-stop trip is likely to take nearly four hours -- 3:50, and most trips on the system would take 4:40 or longer.
...As a result of these slower travel times, higher ticker costs and low ridership, California taxpayers should expect to pay an additional $124 million to $373 million a year to cover the train's operating costs and financial losses, the Reason Foundation study concludes.
(I voted this train down, of course. Because I am not a drooling moron.)
Linkakeet
A colorful link that bounces around and can sometimes sound like a human on the telephone.
My late friend Marlowe Minnick's lorakeet, Otto, apparently had a crush on me (the red hair, we thought) and once chased me into her bathroom.
Shame Them Off Their Cellphones
Loved this. No, the entire world is not your phone booth simply because phones are no mobile. Manners, not the capabilities of technology, should drive where you use it. If it's an emergency, take your call privately. But how many things are really emergencies?
via Lee Ladisky
What's Wrong With Teaching? Just The Parents, The Administrators, And The Low Standards For Actual Learning
An excerpt from a disgusted and beyond fed-up seventh-grade language arts teacher's email to the Washington Post, posted by Valerie Strauss on "The Answer Sheet" blog:
When I was in middle school, I studied Shakespeare, Chaucer, Poe, Twain, O. Henry, the founding fathers, if you will, of modern literary culture. Now, I was called to drag them through shallow activities that measured meaningless but "measurable" objectives.Forced to abandon my hopes of imparting the same wisdom I had gained through my experiences and education, I resigned myself to the superficial curriculum that encouraged mindless conformity. I decided that if I was going to teach this nonsense, I was at least going to teach it well. I set my expectations high, I kept my classroom structured, I tutored students, I provided extra practice, and I tried to make class fun. At this point, I was feeling alright with myself. I quickly rose through the ranks of "favorite teacher," kept open communication channels with parents, and had many students with solid A's.
It was about this time that I was called down to the principal's office with a terse e-mail that read only, "I need to speak with you." Clueless, I took down my grade sheets, communication logs, lesson plans, and sat down as an adult still summoned down to the principal's office. "I need to talk to you about these students." She handed me a list of about 10 students, all of whom had D's or F's. At the time, I only had about 120 students, so I was relatively on par with a standard bell curve. As she brought up each one, I walked her through my grade sheets that showed not low scores but a failure to turn in work--a lack of responsibility. I showed her my tutoring logs, my letters to parents, only to be interrogated further. Eventually, the meeting came down to two quotes that I will forever remember as the defining slogans for public education:
"They are not allowed to fail."
"If they have D's or F's, there is something that you are not doing for them."
What am I not doing for them? I suppose I was not giving them the answers, I was not physically picking up their hands to write for them, I was not following them home each night to make sure they did their work on time, I was not excusing their lack of discipline, I was not going back in time and raising them from birth, but I could do none of these things. I was called down to the principal's office many more times before I was broken, before I ended up assigning stupid assignments for large amounts of credit, ones I knew I could get students to do. Even then, I still had students failing, purely through their own refusal to put any sort of effort into anything, and I had lowered the bar so much that it took hardly anything to pass. According to the rubrics set forth by the county, if they wrote a single word on their paper, related or not to the assignment, I had to give them a 48 percent. Yet, students chose to do nothing. Why? Because we are forced to pass them. "They are not allowed to fail," remember? Teachers are held to impossible standards, and students are accountable for hardly any part of their own education and are incapable of failing. I learned quickly that if I graded students accurately on their poor performance, then I have failed, not them. The attention is turned on me, the teacher, who is criticized, evaluated, and penalized for the fleeting wills of adolescents.
What else was there to do but quit?
Finally, I would love to teach, but I'm truly angry that parents put so much stress, fear, and anticipation into their kids' heads to achieve a meaningless numeric grade that is inconsequential to their future needs, especially since their children's teachers are being cowed into meeting expectations and standards that are not conducive to their children's futures....Though I referenced Robert Greene Ingersoll formerly, Clifford Stroll has already addressed our country's educational misgivings in a single sentence: "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, and understanding is not wisdom." It is time that we fall on our sword. In our rabid pursuit of data and blame, we have sacrificed wisdom and abandoned its fruits. We cannot broaden our students' horizons by placing them and their teachers into narrow boxes, unless we then plan to bury them.
via @KateC
Well-Put, Friedersdorf: "It Is Immoral to Cage Humans for Smoking Marijuana"
Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic:
Under the law in 48 states, here's what can happen when an adult is thought to possess marijuana: Men with guns can go to his home, kick down his door, force him to lay face down on the floor, restrain him with handcuffs, drive him to a police station, and lock him in a cage. If he is then convicted of possessing marijuana, a judge can order that he be locked in a different cage, perhaps for years.There are times when locking human beings in cages is morally defensible. If, for example, a person commits murder, rape, or assault, transgressing against the rights of others, then forcibly removing him from society is the most just course of action. In contrast, it is immoral to lock people in cages for possessing or ingesting a plant that is smoked by millions every year with no significant harm done, especially when the vast majority of any harm actually done is borne by the smoker.
That there are racial disparities in who is sent to prison on marijuana charges is an added injustice that deserves attention. But if blacks and whites were sent to prison on marijuana charges in equal proportion, jail for marijuana would still be immoral.
America has used marijuana charges to cage people for so long that it seems unremarkable. The time has come to see the status quo for what it is. A draconian punishment for a victimless crime has been institutionalized and normalized, so much so that even proponents of the policy are blind to its consequences.
This country was started by civil libertarians. We need to understand the sick place we've gone, with all the overregulation and rights violations, and get back to those roots fast.
Slurpee
Cherry linkie with complimentary brain freeze.
Anybody Have Vonage (Or Some Sort Of Internet Telephone Service) And Like It -- Or Hate It?
As I blogged earlier today, I just heard from my health care provider that my now-unaffordable care rate hasn't finished rising (they just hadn't gotten around to giving me the entire rise in rate...I'm guessing because they were waiting to see how much the ACA would cost them.
I need to cut my expenses in any way possible.
Gregg got me an iPhone and put me on a family plan with him, so I don't pay for my cell phone, but because I do radio shows from home, I need a land line. I also need to make long distance calls fast sometimes, without going on Skype or otherwise going through a bunch of procedures. But I need to make all of this as cheap as possible.
Any suggestions, based on your experience, would be helpful. (I'm a little worried about what happens to my phone call if the Internet goes out.)
NSA To Senator Who Asked Whether They Spied On Congress: Blow It Out Your Keister
Jonathan Turley blogs:
Sen. Bernie Sanders asked the National Security Agency (NSA) a question that one would have thought would be easy to answer: has the NSA spied on Congress with its massive surveillance programs? The answer that came back was chilling in what it did not say. The NSA would only assure Sanders that it has "the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons." That must be a bit unnerving for Congress since it has allowed the NSA to strip citizens of the most basic privacy protections....In the meantime, the highly controversial secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (that is widely viewed as a rubber stamp for the intelligence community) renewed its approval of the National Security Agency's telephone-records program on Friday -- giving the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans' phone calls. That is the 36th time the program has been approved by the FISA, which allows for no opposing counsel or public access to the court. Under the FISA law, the standard guarantees surveillance orders with virtually no articulated suspicion in comparison to the standards under the Fourth Amendment.
Jahi McMath Isn't "Wasting Away"; She's Dead
Sad case -- the parents of the teenager who died after a tonsil operation about a month ago were ignorant about the meaning of brain death, and remain ignorant. But they have help -- from self-interested parties -- in remaining ignorant.
In an SFGate piece, Henry K. Lee and Carolyn Jones report that the dead body of the girl is "receiving nutrients," according to the family. The family is clueless that brain death is irreversible. It's not the same thing as being in a coma, for example. There's no coming back from it:
One day after being moved out of Children's Hospital Oakland, Jahi McMath, the teen declared dead 26 days ago, was being treated at an undisclosed location where she is being given antibiotics and nutritional support, her family and their lawyer said Monday.Lawyer Christopher Dolan and Jahi's uncle, Omari Sealey, said Jahi was "safely" moved from Children's on Sunday night in an ambulance.
"We're very relieved that she got safely to where she needed to be, because we were all very afraid that given the fragile condition as she wasted away at Children's that she might not make it," Dolan said.
He said Jahi is being stabilized so that she can be given a feeding tube and that she was already receiving potassium intravenously.
...The hospital planned to disconnect Jahi's ventilator a week after she was declared brain-dead, but her family - who believes that she is alive because her heart and lungs are still working - won a restraining order to stop the hospital.
The restraining order is set to expire at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Dolan has argued that families, not doctors, should decide when a brain-dead patient is dead. He's also argued that the determination of death was a violation of the family's right to freedom of religion.
...Medical experts say patients on ventilators can continue for weeks or even months, but each case is different.
The amount of money being spent to keep a dead body in a hospital bed is sick.
From an NBC News piece by Erik Ortiz:
What is the cost of keeping someone brain dead alive? With medical care, doctors and equipment required, it doesn't come cheap. Caplan estimates it could be a staggering $7,500 per day.And would insurance cover it?
No, because, legally, the person is considered dead.
And how sad that such ignorance will keep the family hoping for a recovery that will never come. Of course, they have help. Daniel Borenstein writes at MercuryNews (Winkfield is Jahi's mother):
Unfortunately those around her aren't helping. Instead, they seem to be reinforcing false hope. Winkfield is being misled by the Schiavo Network; her attorney who keeps battling to keep the respirator running and move Jahi to a care facility; and members of the media who repeatedly describe the machine as "life support."
Sleep expert Brandon Peters, M.D., weighs in similarly:
When the brain is dead, when there is no chance of recovering the person who has been lost, it is not ethical to keep the body's tissues alive artificially. Once the machine is turned off, the body functions will also cease. Therefore, the machines are understood to be sustaining the function of tissues that cannot now, or will not ever, sustain themselves independently. Much like blowing air into an empty paper sack, when the effort to inflate the sack ceases, it stills.Therefore, medical doctors are legally and ethically obligated to discontinue medically futile care when brain death has been determined. In most cases, the family will be informed of the situation, given a chance to gather and say goodbye, and the machines will be turned off. This is the standard of care. This is what happens in intensive care units throughout the world. For some reason, which is not fully apparent, this is not what happened to Jahi McMath in Oakland.
The window of opportunity was left open and ignorance flooded in. Belief that she could recover defied medical reason. Even despite multiple physicians attesting to her brain death, her family clings to the hope that she will come back to them. No one with brain death has ever done so. Lawyers took the place of doctors. Decision-making by those with the expertise, the experience, the understanding of medicine was undermined by legal wrangling. Religious figures, dubious ethicists, and a parade of attention-seekers marched into view.
Rethinking Health "Insurance"
I've posted on this before -- the notion that we shouldn't be paying for our routine care with "insurance" -- but this op-ed in the LA Times by George P. Shultz, Scott W. Atlas and John F. Cogan says it well:
As the acute problems of the Affordable Care Act become increasingly apparent, it also has become clear that we need new ways of ensuring access to healthcare for all Americans. We should begin with an examination of health insurance.Insurance is about protecting against risk. In the health arena, the risk at issue is of large and unexpected medical expenses. The proper role of health insurance should be to finance necessary and expensive medical services without the patient incurring devastating financial consequences.
Over the last decade, however, Americans have come to expect their health insurance to subsidize the consumption of all medical care. Rather than simply protecting against financial catastrophe, insurance has become a pass-through mechanism to pay for every type of medical service, including routine ones.
This shift in expectation has meant that health insurance stands out as entirely different from all other types of insurance. Ask yourself: Would you use automobile insurance to buy gasoline? Would you use homeowner insurance to finance painting your house?
This wrongheaded view has played an important role in contributing to rapidly rising healthcare costs. Patients with insurance do not perceive themselves as paying for the cost of routine services, nor do their physicians and other healthcare providers. The natural result has been a more-is-better approach, with patients and doctors embracing costly healthcare services that are often of little value to the patient. Given healthcare's crucial role in well-being, it is important to assist individuals who can't afford even routine medical expenses, but it shouldn't be done through hidden insurance subsidies.
The entire concept of health insurance must be reconsidered. One attractive option for insuring those in need would be to expand the use of high-deductible health plans in combination with health savings accounts. This approach provides a cost-effective vehicle for insuring against catastrophic medical expenses while simultaneously helping individuals defray the costs of routine medical care.
Their conclusion:
Insurance is key to protecting individuals and families from the risk of financial devastation and to ensuring access to major medical care. Public financing of the routine and fully anticipated health needs of chronically ill and low-income people is important, but insurance isn't the proper vehicle for accomplishing that.The first essential step in reforming the health system is to recognize what insurance is and what it is not. Coupling that important understanding with a vital modernization of the healthcare delivery system is an essential first step toward a greatly improved healthcare system.
If only the "Affordable" Care Act had actually solved problems like this one instead of causing so many.
I just got a call from Kaiser today and learned that my raised rate for healthcare -- my now unaffordable care -- will become even more unaffordable very soon. It turns out they aren't finished raising the price and I'll find out what the even more unaffordable price is before March 15 -- my deadline to downgrade it to something less unaffordable.
Thanks so much, Obama, and everyone who voted for him.
If I like my healthcare...well, never mind because I won't be able to afford it after getting in 20-plus years ago, in part, to keep this from happening (like it does to people who suddenly decided to get into an HMO when they go seriously ill).
How crazy that doing the responsible thing for so many years ends up being meaningless.
Monkey
Linkey with a lot of body hair.
Wanting To Have Sex Without Getting Pregnant Isn't A Medical Condition
Terrific post by Sheldon Richman at reason on why the "Contraception Mandate" should be dumped from the "Affordable" (my italics) Care Act:
In the wacky world of American politics, if you as an employer have a religious objection to paying for your employees' contraceptives, it is you who is contemptuous of religious freedom.As the New York Times editorial board lectured a judge who thinks otherwise, "the threat to religious liberty comes from employers trying to impose their religious views on workers."
You read that correctly. Refusing to pay for other people's birth-control products -- more specifically, opposing a government mandate to pay -- is equivalent to imposing your religious views.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) mandates not only that employers provide comprehensive medical insurance to their full-time employees, but also that the coverage include contraceptives -- at no cost to employees. Because contraceptives are not found free in nature and insurance companies are for-profit businesses, not charitable foundations, this means that the explicit expense must be borne by employers.
This raises a host of issues. For example, if employers have to pay up front for their employees' contraceptives, the money will likely be subtracted from some other form of compensation, perhaps other noncash benefits. So employees will pay after all; they just won't realize it.
Moreover, the use of contraceptives is not an insurable event because it is a volitional action. Insurance was devised to provide financial protection against unlikely but costly happenings, such as major disease, fire, and storms. It was not supposed to be a way to get other people to pay for the routine things you want to buy.
Coverage for contraceptives is like fire insurance that covers arson committed by the policyholder. It's the kind of thing that only government can bring into existence -- by threatening those who fail to comply. The corruption of language is just one of many offenses here. (See my "Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable.")
As anybody posting here regularly knows, I'm a big ole atheist, who believes in believing only according to evidence, not just having faith that there's a big man in the sky who supposedly gives a shit if you don't give the cashier back that extra $5 she handed you.
But I'm also a big ole fan of civil liberties, and if your religious beliefs don't permit contraception, we have absolutely, positively no business telling you that, never mind, you'll just have to do it anyway.
Adults who have sex should to the adult and responsible thing and pay to prevent unwanted conception. And no, the argument that it will save money if we all just pay for the irresponsible and violate people's religious beliefs in the process, isn't a good one.
Ron Johnson's Lawsuit Against The Special Snowflake ACA Exemption For Congress
Love this guy -- a Republican Senator from the moo-moo state of Wisconsin, filing suit "to make Congress live by the letter of the health-care law it imposed on the rest of America." From his piece in the WSJ:
By arranging for me and other members of Congress and their staffs to receive benefits intentionally ruled out by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the administration has exceeded its legal authority.The president and his congressional supporters have also broken their promise to the American people that ObamaCare was going to be so good that they would participate in it just like everyone else. In truth, many members of Congress feel entitled to an exemption from the harsh realities of the law they helped jam down Americans' throats in 2010. Unlike millions of their countrymen who have lost coverage and must now purchase insurance through an exchange, members and their staffs will receive an employer contribution to help pay for their new plans.
It is clear that this special treatment, via a ruling by the president's Office of Personnel Management, was deliberately excluded in the law. During the drafting, debate and passage of ObamaCare, the issue of how the law should affect members of Congress and their staffs was repeatedly addressed. Even a cursory reading of the legislative history clearly shows the intent of Congress was to ensure that members and staff would no longer be eligible for their current coverage under the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan.
The law states that as of Jan. 1, 2014, the only health-insurance plans that members of Congress and their staffs can be offered by the federal government are plans "created under" ObamaCare or "offered through an Exchange" established under ObamaCare.
Furthermore, allowing the federal government to make an employer contribution to help pay for insurance coverage was explicitly considered, debated and rejected. In doing so, Congress established that the only subsidy available to them would be the same income-based subsidy available to every other eligible American accessing insurance through an exchange. This was the confidence-building covenant supporters of the law made to reassure skeptics that ObamaCare would live up to its billing. They wanted to appear eager to avail themselves of the law's benefits and be more than willing to subject themselves to the exact same rules, regulations and requirements as their constituents.
Eager, that is, until they began to understand what they had actually done to themselves.
Passive-Aggressive Note To Asshole Neighbor
Loved the text of this -- A MESSAGE TO THE LATE NITE CAT LADY. By Mitch Wagner on Cory Doctorow's tumblr.
Unintended Consequences: Save The Horses! (Send Them To The Glue Factory)
New York's new Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday:
"We are going to get rid of horse carriages, period. We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape. . . . They are not humane. They are not appropriate for the year 2014. It's over. So, just watch us do it."
The quote is from an NRO piece by Jillian Kay Melchior explaining that the ban will hurt tourists, the drivers, and the horses:
And while the new mayor has made no secret of the scorn he bears for the property of New York City's richest residents, in this case he's also disregarding the rights of small-business owners like Malone, who are struggling to remain in the middle class.Malone owns his own carriage and two horses, and uses his earnings to support his wife and three kids. His father, an Irish immigrant, drove horses in Central Park before him, teaching his son the trade from age 9. Before that, four generations of Malone's family worked as blacksmiths in Ireland, "so you can say horses are in my blood," he says.
"I'm a New Yorker -- I don't scare easy," Malone adds. "But don't get me wrong. Any time it's not in your hands, it's scary. . . . What it would mean to me personally would be the end of my lineage. It would be unconstitutional, un-American to steal my business, to take my horse away from me. And I'm 44, been doing this for 26 years. That pretty much makes me unemployable for anything else."
Malone may fare poorly if de Blasio gets his way, but his horse could fare even worse.
Horses are expensive -- with food and boarding, they can cost thousands a month -- so they're particularly vulnerable in the bad economy. And a horse's unemployment crisis can have deadly implications; the fact that no slaughterhouses are currently in operation in the United States, far from preventing horse deaths, has resulted in the outsourcing of slaughter for animals that have become too pricey for their owners. Up to 100,000 American horses are shipped to their demise in Mexico and Canada each year.
"A lucky horse is a horse with a job and a purpose," Malone explains. Central Park's tourism circuit employs about 200 horses. If the industry were banned, these horses would be jeopardized, and even if their high profile won them a new pasture home, they'd almost certainly displace other horses around the country, causing more slaughters -- a fact acknowledged by de Blasio's predecessor.
Contrary to popular belief, the Central Park horses are well cared for, says Christina Hansen, a Central Park carriage driver and the founder of Blue Star Equiculture, a nonprofit group that helps provide for and pasture homeless and retired horses.
Lanky
It's a skinny linkie, extra foam.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT -- Dr. Matthew Lieberman: How Our Social Selves Drive Life Satisfaction And Even Self-Esteem
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in science.
Dr. Matthew Lieberman's new book is Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
For example, there's a finding by his wife and research partner, Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues that taking acetaminophen (think Tylenol) actually diminished the pain of being socially excluded. Lieberman explains, "Our sensitivity to social rejection is so central to our well-being that our brains" react to social wounds (and ways to heal from them) much like they do physical ones.
An important underlying point in his book is that self-esteem is not just "from within." It's deeply affected by whether we're liked or esteemed -- or bullied -- by others (which research finds even affects our IQ).
We'll be discussing many such interesting and unexpected findings on tonight's show, and discussing ways we can each capitalize on what Lieberman has learned from the research.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/06/dr-matthew-lieberman-how-our-social-selves-drive-life-satisfaction-self-esteem
Don't miss last week's show with exercise trainer and rehab expert Fred Hahn, who 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 or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2013/12/30/fred-hahn-on-science-based-exercise
Obese Barbie: Not A Good Idea
Who should be Plus-Size, Double-Chinned Barbie's counterpart, drug addict/wastrel Ken?
Because many people are now fat doesn't mean it's something to emulate or encourage.
In fact, it's tragic so many kids are allowed to plump up, and even more tragic that our government and the AMA contributed to this by putting out the advice that we should eat a low-fat, high carb diet: precisely the diet that makes people fat and diabetic.
And finally, this might be a great marketing ploy for a modeling agency featuring overweight ladies, but the notion that little girls will actually want fat-looking dolls seems rather ridiculous.
Our standards for beauty are evolutionarily driven and also driven by what is high status in a culture (which, by the way, is also ultimately evolutionarily driven).
Our genes don't care about what's PC.
American Spies Don't Need More Spy-Power; They Just Need To Get Off Their Asses
The Obama admin claim that we need to have the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records to prevent terrorist attacks is a stinking load.
CNN National Security analyst Peter Bergen writes that we had sufficient intel pre-PATROIT Act to stop 9/11 and a host of other terrorist attacks on and off American soil -- if only we'd effectively used the intel we had:
On Friday in New York, Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that NSA's bulk collection of American telephone records is lawful. He cited Alexander's testimony and quoted him saying, "We couldn't connect the dots because we didn't have the dots."But is it really the case that the U.S. intelligence community didn't have the dots in the lead up to 9/11? Hardly.
In fact, the intelligence community provided repeated strategic warning in the summer of 9/11 that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attacks on American interests.
Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community.
The CIA itself also had its own spectacular failure in the run up to 9/11, which wasn't a failure to collect intelligence, but a failure of information sharing. The CIA had quite a bit of information about two of the hijackers and their presence in the United States before 9/11, which the agency didn't share with other government agencies until it was too late to do anything about it.
The government missed multiple opportunities to catch al Qaeda hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar when he was living in San Diego for a year and a half in the run up to 9/11, not because it lacked access to all Americans phone records but because it didn't share the information it already possessed about the soon-to-be hijacker within other branches of the government.
The shoe bomber and mass murdering Major Hasan were just two of the others not stopped when we had more than adequate reason to do so.
Bergen gets it:
All of these serious terrorism cases argue not for the gathering of ever vaster troves of information but simply for a better understanding of the information the government has already collected and that are derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence methods.
via @BoingBoing @CoryDoctorow
The Latest In The Race To Declare Everything A "Hate Crime"
It isn't just Muslim Men and women who are dressing in burkas (to blow up themselves and the infidel rest of us); predictably, people (who may not even be Muslim) are wearing them to rob banks.
Naturally, an idiot legislator -- a Pennsylvania state rep, Ron Waters -- is saying, "There oughta be a law!" Yes, a law declaring it a "hate crime" to do a criminal act while wearing religious attire is what he's proposing.
(Of course he proposing that it be non-denominational, as if people are going out dressed like Orthodox Jews to rob banks. You can just hear the teller now: "Hey, you carrying the sack of money, 1868 Poland wants their look back!")
Here's the video:
Schlinky
Your schtairs or mine?
Cool! My Boyfriend Had A Character On Elmore Leonard's "Justified" Named After Him
In the Freep piece by Julie Hinds today, quoting "Justified" gentleman-showrunner Graham Yost:
"If I give those out, then they're no longer cookies," says Yost. But he did reveal that Koechner's character is named Gregg Sutter, the same name as Leonard's longtime real-life researcher.
He's talking about a Florida policeman character played by "Anchorman 2" star David Koechner.
Cool As Hell Helicopter Pilots
Kid loses radio-controlled plane in tree; helicopter pilot sees it and he and his co-pilot pull it out:
You can tell that this guy, the pilot, is a total pro at what he does. Also, I'm sure there are great female helicopter pilots and I've met a woman who pilots big commercial planes, but this strikes me as very much a guy job.
I'm also reminded of my friend Rodrigo, who's a young pilot for American, loves the hell out of flying and takes a lot of pride in what he does. I was telling him at a party recently, LA is a city full of bullshitters, but, as a pilot, he's one of the few people who we know has an actual skill he's seriously qualified for.
via @jonathanturley
"Income Inequality" Didn't Make Dasani Homeless
Kay Hymowitz writes at City Journal about Dasani, the subject of a recent New York Times piece about being a homeless child:
Chanel, Dasani's mother and herself the daughter of a welfare-dependent drug addict in Brooklyn, has six children by three different men, a long history of debilitating drug use, an explosive temper, and numerous arrests. Her husband, Supreme, has brought his own drug addiction and two more children by a deceased wife into the mix; Elliott makes vague reference to previous children as well. At some point, Supreme worked as a barber, but as far as we can tell, Chanel has never held a job. In truth, she isn't much of a mother, either. She is often "listless from methadone"; the family's room is filled with "piles of unwashed clothes." Dasani appears to be the primary caretaker of her seven siblings. She wakes up early to change and feed her baby half-sister and get the other children ready for school; understandably, though her school is only two blocks from the shelter, she is chronically late. What role, if any, her parents play in this morning chaos known to every mother and father, rich and poor, is left unsaid.Elliott is an honest enough reporter to admit "parental dysfunction." But, as she told Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, she wanted to center her story on a child in order to avoid "the politics of blame"--referring, presumably, to those who have found fault with Chanel and Supreme's many precursors. True to the progressive spirit, Elliott implies that the structural forces arrayed against Chanel and Supreme are so great that the two are powerless to help their children. (It should be mentioned that in Elliott's nearly 30,000 words, she makes not a single reference to Dasani's genuinely invisible father.)
But on several occasions, "Invisible Child" unwittingly reminds us that there might be ways out of the family's misery. Chanel inherits $49,000 on her mother's death; within a short time the money is gone, and she can't figure out where it went. A local charter school, the lifeline for many other poor parents and children, advertises its "rigor and excellence"; Elliott sniffs that it sounds "exclusive." In the wake of welfare reform--howlingly protested by the New York Times, by the way--Chanel's mother, Joanie, "turned her life around," landing a $22,000-a-year job cleaning subway cars. Calling her first day of work the "the happiest day of her life," she was able to save enough for "a cozy apartment in Bedford Stuyvesant" and to earn a pension that would be inherited--and apparently squandered--by Chanel.
Yes, clearly, it's all Donald Trump's fault.
Link to The Moynihan Report here. From Wikipedia, "It focused on the deep roots of black poverty in America and concluded controversially that the relative absence of nuclear families (those having both a father and mother present) would greatly hinder further progress toward economic and political equality."
via @walterolson
The TSA Destroys Bigger Instruments, Too
Poland's concert pianist Krystian Zimmerman lost a whole piano to the TSA:
Zimerman has had problems in the United States in recent years. He travels with his own Steinway piano, which he has altered himself. But shortly after 9/11, the instrument was confiscated at JFK Airport when he landed in New York to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. Thinking the glue smelled funny, the TSA decided to take no chances and destroyed the instrument. Since then he has shipped his pianos in parts, which he reassembles by hand after he lands. He also drives the truck himself when he carries his instrument from city to city over land, as he did after playing a recital in Berkeley on Friday.
Lisa Simeone, who emailed me the linke, wrote: "I think the LA Times probably got their agencies conflated; I bet it was CBP again and not TSA that destroyed his piano."
Most Linkly To Recede
Like a hairline, running away in fear from your forehead.
Watch A Bit Of A MOOC On Learning Math And Science; Help My Friend
A friend of mine, engineering professor Barbara Oakley, is preparing a massive open online course (MOOC) for Coursera about how to learn math and science (and pretty much anything else) more easily using insights from neuroscience.
Her first brief ten minute video is here. She'd appreciate it if you might be willing to watch the video, and then comment in the very brief survey here.
Also, if you might know middle school, high school, or college students who would be willing to watch and comment on the video, please just pass along the links and urge them on. This video something that is meant to help learners of all ages, whether they are struggling or excelling at math and science -- and your comments and others' will help let Dr. Oakley know whether she's on the right track.
Feel free to also leave comments here.
About That Sneer That Something's A "First World Problem"
And the thinking that it should just be ignored or lived with (you entitled brat)...
Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg:
Rising expectations aren't a sign of immature "entitlement." They're a sign of progress -- and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a "third world problem."Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.
Gregg has Amazon Prime and there have been times he's ordered something for me or Aida late on a Sunday night -- paying no extra for any special delivery -- and it's been delivered to my door before 8am Monday morning.
This is absolutely incredible. I love living in this world.
Some People Just Get High On Their Own Poor Reasoning
New York Times writer David Brooks would be one of them, with this dumbass column on how pot legalization is going to cause the entire country to be able to afford to lie on their parents' living room floor contemplating the weave of the rug.
Josh Greenman had a fun suggestion:
@joshgreenman
Fun game: replace "smoking weed" with "drinking beer." http://nyti.ms/Knnknu
Here's a bit from Brooks's column:
For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don't remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.
We didn't give it up for the obvious health reasons: that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers; that smoking and driving is a good way to get yourself killed; that young people who smoke go on to suffer I.Q. loss and perform worse on other cognitive tests.
I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that's basically the point). I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.
We gave it up, second, I think, because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner. He may have been the smartest of us, but something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.
Third, most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn't really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more satisfying pleasures. The deeper sources of happiness usually involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Here's the really dumb bit:
We now have a couple states -- Colorado and Washington -- that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.
With freedom comes responsibility, dimwit.
Furthermore, in the places I've lived -- Ann Arbor, New York City, Los Angeles (rather hood-adjacent) -- pot has been inexpensive and readily available. In New York, I could have gotten it from the service -- Weed Deliver -- that delivered psilocybin mushrooms to my door, $5/dose.
Cheap gin was also readily vailable.
I am neither a gin-sucking drunk nor a pothead. Nor am I a wino, despite the fact that you can get $3 box wine (or very cheap, forget the exact price) at Trader Joe's.
The argument that some people won't do well with liberty isn't justification for denying it to others.
People can develop personal responsibility. They can't develop freedom.
Crazythink On Sex: Turning Psychological Problems Into A Career In Feminist Academia
I discovered this rad-fem crazy, Sheila Jeffreys
I quoted her ridiculousness in an old column:
"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man, she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression."
Here's a blog post of hers. (Note: PIV = Penis In Vagina.)
Just to recall a basic fact: Intercourse/PIV is always rape, plain and simple.This is a developed recap from what I've been saying in various comments here and there in the last two years or so. as a radfem I've always said PIV is rape and I remember being disappointed to discover that so few radical feminists stated it clearly. How can you possibly see it otherwise? Intercourse is the very means through which men oppress us, from which we are not allowed to escape, yet some instances of or PIV and intercourse may be chosen and free? That makes no sense at all.
First, well intercourse is NEVER sex for women. Only men experience rape as sexual and define it as such. Sex for men is the unilateral penetration of their penis into a woman (or anything else replacing and symbolising the female orifice) whether she thinks she wants it or not - which is the definition of rape: that he will to do it anyway and that he uses her and treats her as a receptacle, in all circumstances - it makes no difference to him experiencing it as sexual. That is, at the very least, men use women as useful objects and instruments for penetration, and women are dehumanised by this act. It is an act of violence.
As FCM pointed out some time ago, intercourse is inherently harmful to women and intentionally so, because it causes pregnancy in women. The purpose of men enforcing intercourse regularly (as in, more than once a month) onto women is because it's the surest way to cause pregnancy and force childbearing against our will, and thereby gain control over our reproductive powers. There is no way to eliminate the pregnancy risk entirely off PIV and the mitigating and harm-reduction practices such as contraception and abortion are inherently harmful, too. Reproductive harms of PIV range from pregnancy to abortion, having to take invasive, or toxic contraception, giving birth, forced child bearing and rearing and all the complications that go with them which may lead up to severe physical and emotional damage, disability, destitution, illness, or death (See factcheckme.wordpress.com for her work on the reproductive harms of PIV, click on the "intercourse series" page or "PIV" in the search bar). If we compare this to even the crappiest online definition of violence: "behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something". Bingo. It fits: Pregnancy = may hurt, damage or kill. Intercourse = a man using his physical force to penetrate a woman. Intention / purpose of the act of intercourse = to cause pregnancy. PIV is therefore intentional harm / violence. Intentional sexual harm of a man against a woman through penile penetration = RAPE.
Here's somebody who clearly has psychological problems -- serious ones -- who has turned them into a career. That's quite an accomplishment.
Santa Ana Wants To Grab And Destroy The Real Mr. Miyagi's Dojo
It's the sanitized term, "eminent domain," describing the taking of private property for projects supposedly beneficial to the public -- in this case, space for foliage along a roadway. From Tracey Oppenheimer at Reason.tv:
From reason's write-up on YouTube:
Karate legend Fumio Demura has shaped much of the karate culture we are familiar with today. He's trained iconic martial arts stars like Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and Pat Morita, and has also acted in popular martial arts films.Demura's credits include working as Mr. Miyagi's stunt double in The Karate Kid franchise, Mortal Combat, Rising Sun, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Real Miyagi is a soon-to-be-released feature documenting Demura's life. Demura credits his "dojo," or studio, in Santa Ana, California for much of his success.
"A dojo is not just a studio, not just for fighting. It's the development of better human beings," says Demura.
Yet Demura's dojo may not be around for much longer. The City of Santa Ana is planning to acquire his property as well as eight other small businesses as part of the Bristol Street Widening Project. The project has been around since the early 90's, and is just now reaching the phase that threatens these businesses.
"It's just a very slow process," says Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido. "You have to deal with every single homeowner, every single business owner."
Mayor Pulido says that this section of Bristol Street is especially important because it's a major gateway into Santa Ana, and thus requires more lanes in order to ease traffic congestion. However, the businesses believe that the city can indeed widen the streets without acquiring their properties.
The city's current plan allots 30 ft. for landscaping, and those 30 ft. are crucial for the businesses to be able to remain untouched. Christina Rush represents the Bristol Street businesses, and says they can take care of the landscaping themselves.
"We can give you that in our plan, through our landscaping, through architectural elements, outdoor seating," says Rush. "We can achieve what the city wants, that park-like look, while still allowing the businesses to retain their properties."
Rush has met multiple times with city representatives, and expects a resolution or at least more debate at the city council meeting on Jan. 6. She says the businesses have no intention of giving up their properties without a fight.
"I'd like to stay as much as I can, because this is an old house. We fixed it. So hard we were working," says Demura.
Linkguini
With meatless meatballs, which are at their best as improvised weapons.
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Do Men Hate Going To Weddings?
I once lied and said Gregg would be out of town so he wouldn't have to go to a wedding of some friends of mine.
It's one thing if it's friends of both of yours or a friend of his who's getting married.
If you're a guy who hates going to weddings, or if you are with a guy who hates it, tell me why.
The Nanny State Takes Over The Grocery Store Checkout
No more plastic bags at the supermarket. I use these bags, no, not to strangle the pigeons but to pick up doggie doo so my landlord's gardener won't have to and to store my bacon in the refrigerator.
Little Shiva, who designed my masthead, makes clothes and panda masks out of them. And other art.
But the government knows best!
Catherine Saillant writes in the LA Times:
For Los Angeles residents, the perfect holiday gift this year might have been a reusable grocery bag. On Wednesday, large grocery stores will be prohibited by law from providing free plastic bags.Shoppers will be required to bring their own bags when stocking up on food and goods, or pay 10 cents per paper bag provided by the grocery store. Smaller independent markets and liquor stores that sell groceries will become subject to the ban July 1.
...Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based environmental group and ban supporter, acknowledged that some shoppers who reuse plastic bags to dispose of animal waste will miss them. On its website, the group suggests using old newspapers to scoop up dog waste during walks, or to reuse bread bags or produce bags, which will still be available.
"You can also use the cereal bag from the cereal box,'' said Sarah Sikich, science and policy director for Heal the Bay, which has been pushing for a bag ban for seven years. "People get creative when they have to."
We don't eat cereal. (If Gregg even eyes a Corn Flake, I'll kill him.)
I predict an increase in dog poop everywhere.
For my tiny dog's Tootsie Roll-sized poopies, I can take a paper towel in my pocket if we go for a walk.
Great Danes? Not so much.
By the way, when certain cities, like West Hollywood, were early on the ban, check out the unintended consequences: Gregg changed grocery stores and started going to one that didn't charge for bags. He had to drive just a block out of his way, but he was happy to. He's so pissed off about this now -- plus he likes driving -- that he's contemplating going grocery shopping in the rather hilariously named "The Inland Empire."
Crony Government: Why Most People's Houses Will Be Filled With Hard, Ugly Light
I'm a bulb hoarder -- bought 120 incandescents before the law passed. And no, thanks, I don't like the hard light of expensive LEDs.
Timothy P. Carney at Wash Ex talks about the reality of why we have this law now, with the government telling American companies and consumers that there's to be no more manufacture of the traditional incandescent bulb as of January 1. It was industry, not environmentalists, who killed traditional bulbs:
The 2007 Energy Bill, a stew of regulations and subsidies, set mandatory efficiency standards for most light bulbs. Any bulbs that couldn't produce a given brightness at the specified energy input would be illegal. That meant the 25-cent bulbs most Americans used in nearly every socket of their home would be outlawed.People often assume green regulations like this represent the triumph of environmental activists trying to save the plant. That's rarely the case, and it wasn't here. Light bulb manufacturers whole-heartedly supported the efficiency standards. General Electric, Sylvania and Philips -- the three companies that dominated the bulb industry -- all backed the 2007 rule, while opposing proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescent technology (thus leaving the door open for high-efficiency incandescents).
This wasn't a case of an industry getting on board with an inevitable regulation in order to tweak it. The lighting industry was the main reason the legislation was moving. As the New York Times reported in 2011, "Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards."
Industry support for the regulations struck lawmakers and journalists as a ringing endorsement of the regulations. Republican Congressmen Fred Upton, who has since flip-flopped and attacked the regulations, cosponsored the light bulb provision in 2007. His excuse, according to conservatives I spoke to: It couldn't be that bad if the industry supported it.
Asshole.
A bit more:
Capitalism ruining their party, the bulb-makers turned to government. Philips teamed up with NRDC. GE leaned on its huge lobbying army -- the largest in the nation -- and soon they were able to ban the low-profit-margin bulbs.The high-tech, high-cost, high-margin bulbs have advantages: They live longer and use much less electricity. In the long run, this can save people money. But depending on your circumstances, these gains might be mitigated or eradicated.
The current replacement for traditional bulbs are compact fluorescents (those curly bulbs). They give off UV rays, contain mercury gas, take a while to get bright and don't last any longer than regular bulbs if you flip them on and off a lot.
My landlord changed a fixture by my door to CFL. The result? If I want to see anything there, I need to use a flashlight I keep there on a table because the light takes so long to come on.
U.S. Customs Staffed By Morons
A virtuoso flautist who performs regularly with The Boston Camerata had 13 of his instruments destroyed by some idiot at Customs. From The Boston Globe:
A US Customs official at New York's JFK Airport mistook the instruments for pieces of bamboo and destroyed them. Razgui, a Canadian citizen who lives some of the time in Brockton, had flown last week from Morocco to Boston, with stops in Madrid and New York. In New York, he says, an official opened his luggage and found the 13 flutelike instruments -- 11 nays and two kawalas. Razgui says he had made all of the instruments using hard-to-find reeds. "They said this is an agriculture item," said Razgui, who was not present when his bag was opened. "I fly with them in and out all the time and this is the first time there has been a problem. This is my life." When his baggage arrived in Boston, the instruments were gone. He was instead given a number to call. "They told me they were destroyed," he says. "Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.
Will this letter set a time machine in motion, sending him back to the day before he flew here and had his bags examined and his flutes wood-chipped by a dead-eyed, culture-deaf, government-employed idiot?
via @instapundit
UPDATE: US Customs refuses to apologize. And also from ForeignPolicy:
The CBP official said Razgui's luggage was unclaimed and added that "fresh bamboo is prohibited from entering the United States to prevent the introduction of exotic plant pathogens."
Unless I'm wildly mistaken, flutes made out of bamboo aren't made of the fresh stuff but dried bamboo. Just guessing here -- as somebody who played flute, oboe, piccolo, and recorder for a number of years. And here's a photo. That look like "fresh bamboo" to you? (For those of you who, unlike me, don't have it adjacent to your yard, fresh bamboo is GREEN!)
Walking The Plink
I drive to pick up the mail in a pirate. You?
Common Core: Am I Just Too Dim To Understand Fourth-Grade Math?
Stossel posts at reason about Common Core, another great "solution" forced upon us by our government:
Common Core de-emphasizes correct answers by awarding kids points for reasoning, even when they don't quite get there.A video went viral online that showed a worried mom, Karen Lamoreaux--a member of the group Arkansas Against Common Core--complaining to the Arkansas Board of Education about complicatedly worded math problems meant for fourth-graders. She read to the Board this question: "Mr. Yamato's class has 18 students. If the class counts around by a number and ends with 90, what number did they count by?"
My answer: Huh to the third power.
Also, don't elect representatives who believe government (and bureaucracy) is the solution, not the problem.
Your response?
Melissa Harris-Perry Eating Crow Pie Today
Romney's son and daughter-in-law adopted a baby who happens to be black. I'm not a Romney supporter, but I don't care whether the baby has tiger stripes and a tail; people who adopt kids and who are good parents to them are to be commended.
Anyone who mocks them because the baby's color doesn't match the rest of the family is an asshole beyond compare.
Also, going after a politician is fair game. Going after his kids' kids -- including one born and brought into the family only recently -- well, that's lower that low, whatever you think of the person's politics.
Well, after a firestorm on Twitter and elsewhere, Melissa Harris-Perry apologized for her segment putting up the baby for mocking in which her panelists joked about the baby being the only black person in the picture.
Weird -- this tweet of hers:
@MHarrisPerry
As black child born into large white Mormon family I feel familiarity w/ Romney family pic & never meant to suggest otherwise. #MHPapology
"The Good Intentions Paving Company"
Joseph Epstein writes in the WSJ that this term may have come from Saul Bellow -- who may have picked it up elsewhere.
The phrase derives of course from the proverb holding that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.ObamaCare is a nearly perfect example of the Good Intentions Paving Co. at work. A president and the leadership of his party decide that it would be a fine thing to bring universal health insurance to the nation--what a sweet notion, really--except when they enact the law it turns out to bring in its trail confusion, anxiety, probable loss of employment, added personal and public expense, and aggravation all round.
One might think the board of directors of the Good Intentions Paving Co. are all liberals, but they are not. One of the firm's most impressive undertakings was hatched in the Oval Office among George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Why not, they decided, knock off a wretched tyrant and bring democracy to a Middle Eastern country and thereby stabilize the region--all in one bold action? Tens of thousands of violent deaths and many billions of dollars later, with car bombs regularly exploding in downtown Baghdad, and with Sunni and Shiite hatred not in the least abated, the Good Intentions Paving Co. deserves to take another bow.
The Good Intentions Paving Co. has a highly efficient public-relations department, which is especially good at giving its projects promising titles. Consider affirmative action. The firm's executives who put that intention into play thought that by lowering college-admission standards for members of minorities, injustices would be redressed and the climb to equality secured. How could the Good Intentions executives have known that colleges would in turn lower their academic standards?
...Only because it encourages--one might even say incites--feelings of virtue in those who are swept up by its projects does the Good Intentions Paving Co. stay in business. Meaning well, after all, ought to count for something. Unfortunately, when it comes to public policy, good intentions are only slightly better than bad intentions, and not always even that. The reason is that the Good Intentions Paving Co. has never been greatly interested in side effects, in the collateral damage that good intentions so often bring with them. Nor has the firm's record been notable for taking into account human nature, with its obstinate refusal to obey the dreams of politicians, however alluring they may seem.
Hate The Rich (Until Donation Time)
Bret Stephens writes in the WSJ on the two sides of Barack Obama. There's the man who talks about "ordinary folks" and how unfair it all is to them thanks to the richies, and then there's the man who turns right around and goes on a Hollywood handout bender:
To illustrate the evils of income inequality, the president said this:"Ordinary folks can't write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else's expense. And so people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government."
This is coming from the man who signs legislation, such as Dodd-Frank, that only high-priced lawyers can understand; who, according to the Guardian newspaper, has spent much of 2013 on a "record-breaking fundraising spree," making "30 separate visits to wealthy donors," at "more than twice the rate of the president's two-term predecessors."
Kinky
You? New Year's Eve?
Cool Things I Learn About People Reading And Commenting Here
I should tell you that I can never, ever tell WHO purchased what. Not a clue on that. And that's how I like it, as somebody who respects people's privacy. But I just love seeing the sorts of things people buy. This morning, in my Amazon reports, there was this:
The First 100 Chinese Characters: Simplified Character Edition: The Quick and Easy Way to Learn the Basic Chinese Characters (Tuttle Language Library)
Recently, somebody was buying some intense knives.
Of course, my favorite things to see are the shoes.
Appreciate every purchase! Thank you all for all of them and for helping support my work on this site.
