We Don't Care That There's No Evidence You're Guilty; We'll Jail You Anyway
Cases of police abuse like this seem shocking -- and yet less shocking to me these days, because I read about them almost daily.
A Texas man, Larry Davis, pulled over for running either a red light or a stop sign (the article is sloppy), was suspected by police of a DUI. The police gave him a Breathalyzer test -- which he took voluntarily and on which he blew 0.0. He even offered to give them a blood sample - and did. It looked for several types of drugs in his system and he tested negative for all of them.
...AND THEY THREW HIM IN JAIL ANYWAY. And there's been a criminal case hanging over his head for a year.
Tony Plohetski reports at KVUE News/Austin:
"My reaction was just shock that this happened," attorney Daniel Betts said.WFAA sister station KVUE first reported cases like this in a 2011 joint Austin American-Statesman investigation. One case was that of Bianca Fuentes, who blew below the legal limit of .08 in a breath test.
At the time, county prosecutors were dismissing about 30 percent of drunk driving cases - more than any major Texas county -- because they said APD was bringing them weak cases that wouldn't hold up in court.
A Defenders review finds similar statistics for 2013. Of 5,648 new DWI cases filed last year, 1,559, a little less than 30 percent, were dismissed.
Police are still abiding by a take-no-chances policy, even if it means the cases are later thrown out.
"Take-no-chances"? Horrifying. The "take-no-chances" this country is supposed to stand on is the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" and requiring evidence that somebody is a criminal before taking away their freedom.
Law prof Jonathan Turley blogs:
This is not the first such case. In an earlier arrest, Biana Fuentes below a 0.08 - below the threshold but was still arrested. The cases are routinely dismissed but not after citizens have to spend the night in jail and secure lawyers. No officers have been reportedly disciplined. Indeed, they appear to be following this take-no-change policy that amounts to little more than blind arrests. Police insist that the officer had a reasonable suspicion that he was high on another drug like marijuana and did not want to take a chance. That is quite a standard. The driver voluntarily passes every test, but he is still arrested.
They're All Dying From Pot Overdoses, Really They Are!
Drug warrior testifying before a Maryland State Senate marijuana legalization hearing lays it out -- and gets laid out. Frederick Kunkle writes in the WaPo:
Annapolis Police Chief Michael A. Pristoop thought he came prepared when he testified before a Maryland State Senate panel on Tuesday about the perils of legalizing marijuana.In researching his testimony against two bills before the Judicial Proceedings Committee, Pristoop said, he had found a news article to illustrate the risks of legalization: 37 people in Colorado, he said, had died of marijuana overdoses on the very day that the state legalized pot.
"When he said it, everyone in the room dropped their laptops," Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery) said in an e-mail.
Trouble is, the facts were about as close to the truth as oregano is to pot. After a quick Google search on his laptop, [State Senator Jamin] Raskin--the sponsor of the legalization bill that was the subject of the Senate hearing--advised the chief that the Colorado overdose story, despite its deadpan delivery, had been made up for laughs by The Daily Currant, an online comedy magazine.
More recently in The Daily Current: Girls Scouts in Colorado Selling Marijuana Thin Mints. Oh, the ha-ha-horror, the horror!
via @catoinstitute
Police State Lessons Start Early These Days
Ed Krayewksi, in reason, points out the important lessons public school students are learning these days from zero tolerance policies: don't be honest about mistakes; don't consent to searches.
Chaz Seale,17, was one of the edumicated. His mother says he accidentally confused a can of beer for a can of soda and packed it in his lunch. From ABCLocal's Karla Barguiarena:
"He was in a hurry, running late. We were talking about school and he put it all together and took off for school," [his mother] said.When he realized his mistake at school, Chaz gave the unopened beer to his teacher. But that teacher then reported it to the principal at Livingston High School, who suspended the boy for three days and then sent him to an alternative school for two months.
Chaz said, "I gave it to the teacher thinking I wouldn't get in trouble, and I got in trouble."
Seale says the punishment is excessive. She says she always taught her son to be honest and forthright and now he has to pay a price for that honesty.
Another student gave permission to search his car, thinking he had nothing to hide. Oops. His father, a commercial fisherman, had apparently left a fishing knife in the car, perhaps wedged between the seats. School officials suspended the student for the maximum -- 10 days -- and then he had to attend 90 days at an "alternative school."
Curtailed Speech Is Not Free Speech
On Constitution Day, a Modesto Junior College student was banned from handing out copies of the Constitution. View through to the administrator telling him he can't have a date to exercise his free speech for many weeks, and even then, he will have to do it in a tiny spot outside the student center -- and only there.
Video from theFIRE.org:
The writeup:
Published on Sep 19, 2013 Modesto Junior College in California told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013--Constitution Day. Captured on video, college police and administrators demanded that Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college's tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time.
And the good news -- another victory for free speech by campus free speech defenders, FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:
FRESNO, Calif., February 25, 2014--Yesterday evening, California's Modesto Junior College (MJC) agreed to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed last October by student Robert Van Tuinen, whom the college prevented from handing out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. The videotaped incident drew national media attention.As part of the settlement, MJC has revised its policies to allow free speech in open areas across campus and has agreed to pay Van Tuinen $50,000. Van Tuinen was represented by the firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Washington, D.C., and assisted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
"FIRE is very pleased that Robert Van Tuinen and Modesto Junior College have reached this settlement--and that Modesto Junior College students will now be able to exercise their First Amendment rights across campus," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "But because 59% of colleges nationwide maintain policies that clearly and substantially restrict student speech, there's much more work to be done."
Last September 17--the 226th anniversary of the Constitution's signing--MJC prevented Van Tuinen from handing out copies of the Constitution in a grassy area by the student center. Van Tuinen notified FIRE about the situation, and FIRE promptly wrote MJC, asking the college to rescind its unconstitutional policies. With no satisfactory response forthcoming, on October 10, with FIRE's assistance, Bob Corn-Revere, Ronald London, and Lisa Zycherman of Davis Wright Tremaine filed a federal lawsuit on Van Tuinen's behalf. On December 17, MJC agreed to suspend enforcement of the policies in question while settlement talks took place.
Late yesterday, both parties signed a settlement agreement that awards Van Tuinen $50,000 and reflects three new policies that open up the campus to free expression.
... Free expression is rightfully now allowed in all "areas generally available to students and the community," which include "grassy areas, walkways, and other similar common areas." The settlement also prohibits MJC from reverting to the policies that were in place when Van Tuinen's right to distribute the Constitution to his fellow students was denied.
Meltie
Linkie with bacon, cheese, and mushrooms. No, make that grilled onions.
Spike Lee Rails Against Gentrification Of Black Neighborhoods...
...While residing in one of the fancypants, WASP mainstay-hoods: Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he's lived for years in a 9,000 square foot home. "It was recently listed for $32 million," reports CBS Local.
He added that gentrification has little regard for those who "have a culture that's been laid down for generations."Wednesday night on "Anderson Cooper 360," Lee talked about the speech, his remarks and what he says he meant.
"I don't hate anybody," he said. "My problem is that when you move into a neighborhood, have some respect for the history, for the culture."
Do you think he goes around in lime green pants carrying golf clubs?
You Don't Have To Use The City's Water Or Power, But You Have To Hook Up To Them -- Just Because
Instead of encouraging more people to follow Robin Sperone's lead in living eco, the city of Cape Coral, Florida, is coming down on her hard.
J.D. Tucille writes at reason:
By all accounts, Robin Speronis is engaged in a successful experiment in "living off the grid" in Cape Coral, Florida. The 54-year-old former real estate agent disconnected from city water and power about a year and a half ago. Now she relies on solar panels, propane lanterns, and collected rain water in her duplex and seems quite happy about it. But the city clearly is not. Officials tried to boot her from her home, and have now given her until the end of March to reconnect to the grid. A special magistrate who tossed many of the charges and admits that reasonableness may not play a role in the rules says she will ultimately have to comply. Speronis is standing firm....The entire point seems to be to discourage an interesting lifestyle that's independent of city systems.
This isn't just a local problem. Jennings notes that Cape Coral's code is based on the one-size-fits-all International Property Maintenance Code, which is causing hassles in many places. I personally know the owner of a very nice hay bale bed and breakfast in...an undisclosed location...who captures rainwater and quietly uses it to flush toilets and for other quite sensible purposes that aren't permitted by code. Why she's not permitted to capture and use rainwater in a drought-stricken region is anybody's guess.
I Am Apparently Too Dim To Understand Why This Is Offensive
University of Iowa president Sally Mason apparently felt compelled to apologize for words she used in talking to somebody from the student newspaper there. From KWWL.com:
In an interview published Feb. 18 in The Daily Iowan, President Sally Mason said she was dismayed by the reports of sexual assaults. She said "the goal would be to end that, to never have another sexual assault. That's probably not a realistic goal just given human nature, and that's unfortunate. ..."Criticism erupted over the phrase that includes "human nature."
...Mason said she's been told by several people in the campus community that her remark was hurtful. She said she was "very, very sorry for any pain that my words might have caused."
Could this, perhaps, be hurtful to zombies?
Here, from the Iowa Republican, this nitwittery, employing the "naturalistic fallacy," the mistaken belief that because something is natural, it's good (or, a twist on it, in Mason's critic's case, a belief that because something is natural -- the desire of some to rape, steal, or otherwise violate another human being -- we're saying it's good). Reporter Craig Robinson writes:
A woman who has been assaulted herself wrote, "'That's probably not a realistic goal just given human nature' implies that human beings are naturally inclined toward this type of behavior. Victims and advocates have been fighting to demolish the idea that "rape is OK" for thousands of years. To say that it is natural is to say that it is OK, to say that it is somehow an inbred behavior. I stand for myself as a victim and for many others: Sexual assault is not 'OK,' it is not natural, and it is not an impulse that an attacker can somehow not control. It is not born with them. It is not a part of us as human beings."Female students also protested Mason's speech at the University's 31st Annual Presidential Lecture. As Mason began her remarks, the students filed in front of the of the podium holding signs that read, "This University protects rapist, not victims." While Mason told the audience that she supported the student's positions, they began saying things like, "Sally Mason is too afraid, she doesn't stand with victims." Another said, "Sally Mason is part of the problem at this campus." Others said, "Rape is not in human nature."
Um, yes it is. Evolutionary psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer wrote a whole book on this, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion
Thornhill and Palmer write that "Rape is viewed as a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage". They further state that by categorizing a behavior as "natural" and "biological" we do not in any way mean to imply that the behavior is justified or even inevitable. "Biological" means "of or pertaining to life," so the word applies to every human feature and behavior. But to infer from that, as many critics assert that Thornhill and Palmer do, that what is biological is somehow right or good, would be to fall into the so-called naturalistic fallacy. They make a comparison to "natural disasters as epidemics, floods and tornadoes". This shows that what can be found in nature is not always good and that measures should be and are taken against natural phenomena. They further argue that a good knowledge of the causes of rape, including evolutionary ones, are necessary in order to develop effective preventive measures.
More from Wikipedia:
It has been noted that behavior resembling rape in humans is observed in the animal kingdom, including ducks and geese, bottlenose dolphins,[1] and chimpanzees.[2] Indeed in orangutans, close human relatives, copulations of this nature may account for up to half of all observed matings.[3] Such behaviours, referred to as 'forced copulations', involve an animal being approached and sexually penetrated whilst it struggles or attempts to escape.
It's...What?! Sprinkling?! Noah, Gas Up The Ark!
A very So Cal tweet from Mrs. Abbot Kinney, making fun of the panty-wadding that goes on here when it rains:
@MrsAbbotKinney
OMG!! OMG!! HELP!! It's, it's RAINING!! Nooooooo. Save yourselves! Save the children! Ahhhhhhhh! Gasp!
My reply:
@amyalkon
I used to be from Michigan, where there's real weather. Now I'm from Pathetic.
Selfie: One-Eyed Monkey Jacks
Linkie with the mange.
Sometimes, the animals go a little crazy in the afternoon. This afternoon, somebody lost an eye:
TSA Worker: But D.C. Isn't A State! (You Shouldn't Miss Your Plane Because The TSA Hires The Clueless)
But that's what might've happened to a woman with a District of Columbia license -- you know, from our nation's capital. They issue licenses same as all the states -- with a driver's test and requiring proof of who you are. Residents don't just get them out of Crackerjack boxes, really they don't.
Aaron C. Davis writes in the WaPo about Ashley Brandt's problem as she stood in the pretend security line at the airport after a trip to the Grand Canyon:
According to Brandt, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration took a look at her D.C. license and began to shake her head. "I don't know if we can accept these," Brandt recalled the agent saying. "Do you have a U.S. passport?'Brandt was dumbfounded, and quickly grew a little scared. A manager was summoned, she says. "I started thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I have to get home. Am I going to get home?' "
...But the implication from the TSA agent seemed clear to Brandt: The District is not a state; TSA requires a state-issued ID to board a plane.
Nevermind that Brandt had used her brand-new D.C. license, the one marked "District of Columbia" over a backdrop of cherry blossoms, to board her flight to Arizona days earlier.
Brandt says the agent yelled out to a supervisor, working in adjacent security line. Are D.C. licenses valid identification?
Brandt says she could hear the response, "Yeah, we accept those."
"She didn't seem to know that it was basically the same as a state ID," said Brandt, who had only recently traded her Maryland ID for one from the District. "D.C. is obviously not a state, but I didn't ever imagine it would be a problem -- I mean, the whole population of D.C. has to use these."
A comment below the piece:
observer9
Same thing happened to me at SFO, of all places.The young TSA officer wanted to see my passport because she thought my District of Columbia driver's license somehow was from the nation of Colombia. When I explained to her that I lived in Washington, DC and asked her what the capital of the U-S might be - and where the White House was - she gave me a puzzled look. When I told her it was in Washington DC and I lived in the same city where the White House and the Capitol building are located, it seemed like a light when on in her head.
She called for a supervisor, and then said, "so, you're from the state of Washington?"
The supervisor showed up a minute later and let me through.
Academy award winning security theater.
What's most amazing is that there are still citizens who believe the TSA is protecting us. (Protecting us from what, catching our plane?)
via @tedfrank
Finding The Real You Under All The Labels And Confusion
I had a really unhappy childhood, with few friends, and by the time I was in my early 20s, I was intent on trying to be what other people wanted me to be, because I thought it was the way to have friends.
This is actually no way to have real friends -- or anyone's respect -- and, though it was terrifying, I worked hard to behave as a person with self-respect would, and found that this worked a lot better. A big part of my "becoming" as a person was trying to figure out who I was -- another scary and difficult, but ultimately immensely worthwhile, process.
Peg Streep, who did this wonderful radio show with me on her book "Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work," has a blog post up at Psychology Today on the road to self-knowledge:
For many, locating the true self is a process that can stretch over decades of life; for others, self-awareness remains, for different reasons, out of reach. There are those who find themselves living "as if," in fear of discovery, uncomfortable in their own skins, unsure where the "real" self resides or what it is.At the same time, being able to access the true self increases a person's well-being, satisfaction, and sense of meaning in life, as the work of Rebecca J. Schlegel and her colleagues showed. Your happiness may depend on your ability to find your true self first.
She writes that there are a number of reasons finding the "real me" is so hard for some people, including relying on extrinsic definitions of self -- the definitions imposed on us:
...whether that's of the "obedient" or "willful" child, the one destined to fill Mom or Dad's dream of being a doctor, or who's been told he or she "better not fail"--are more likely, according to the work of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, to experience lower well-being, feel separated from their true selves, and have more trouble setting goals which enhance their sense of self. In the extreme, this can lead to what's been called "the Imposter Phenomenon."First reported by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1976, the study originally focused solely on women, although it's been shown to affect men as well. The phenomenon describes people who feel like frauds because they attribute their success either to chance or to effort instead of ability, all external evidence to the contrary. This, in turn, leads to a fear of being found out or uncovered.
She continues:
Outside influences that skew our self-awareness include wanting and needing validation of the self by others (that need doesn't end in childhood!), and many of us will find ourselves tailoring our actual selves to fit someone else's expectations. This too will engender a sense of self that feels inauthentic or fraudulent. There's risk in showing your true self to someone else, after all --what if he or she doesn't like the real me? --and the desire to be accepted may trump even the need to express the actual self....Think about yourself, and where in the scheme of things you locate yourself. Do you know yourself and do you like what you see--perhaps not unconditionally but well enough? Or is your actual self hidden from view most of the time? The road to self-knowledge starts here.
Here's a link to my radio show with Dr. Edward L. Deci on how to be self-motivated -- intrinsically -- and to best motivate others by encouraging their intrinsic motivation.
Deci's excellent book, based on his work with research partner Richard Ryan, "Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
You Lose Freedom Of Speech When Maryland Thug Cops Say You Lose Freedom Of Speech
Man videotaping cops making an arrest outside a Townson, Maryland bar has cops physically abuse him (as reason's J.D. Tucille reports, "you can see the camera shake and blur as a police sergeant grabs him") and threaten him with arrest if he doesn't leave.
A quote from one of these cops:
We're not fucking around. Do you understand? Do not, do not disrespect us. And do not not listen to us. Now walk away and shut your fucking mouth or you're going to jail.
The guy videotaping protests that he thought he had "freedom of speech."
The cop: "You don't. You just lost it."
The video:
Time For Tax Preparation Reform
Dave Camp, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, writes in the WSJ about what a gigantic, time-sucking, confused mess our tax code is:
Today there are 15 different tax breaks for education--nine for current expenses, two for past expenses and four for future expenses. The IRS instructions explaining it all come to almost 90 pages. That isn't a tax code designed for working families; it is a tax code designed to make money for accountants.
On Wednesday, he says he's releasing "what a simpler, fairer tax code actually looks like":
The guiding principle is that everyone should play by the same rules--your tax rate should be determined by what's fair, not by who you know in Washington. Here is what it would look like:First, the tax code will be made simpler--so every family can do its own taxes confidently, without fearing an audit, or wondering if someone else who can afford an expensive accountant is getting a better deal.
Like the Tooth Fairy, I suspect this ultimately will be an imagination-only measure.
If you question that, here's one more reason it's unlikely to get anywhere:
Second, the tax code will be made more effective and efficient by getting rid of special-interest handouts...
Washington is a town that runs on special interests handouts.
Well, it was nice to hear a little refreshing talk.
Back to business as usual!
(Too cynical?)
Uganda's Anti-Gay Law Doesn't Go Over So Well With Western Donors
Oopsy! Nicholas Bariyo writes in the WSJ that the Western golden goose doesn't much like what Uganda's doing to gays:
KAMPALA, Uganda--Several European nations on Tuesday said they were suspending assistance to Uganda, a day after the country's president signed a law that could see some homosexuals jailed for life.Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark said they would withhold aid to the Ugandan government in protest against the "draconian law."
The diplomatic moves represented the first fallout of Uganda's controversial antigay bill. Although the bill is politically popular in Uganda, it could cost the government of President Yoweri Museveni. Western donors give as much as $2 billion in aid to the country.
On first conviction for so-called homosexual acts, offenders face a 14-year prison sentence. Subsequent convictions for "aggravated homosexuality," which include homosexual acts committed by an HIV-positive person, could bring a penalty of life in prison.
An official at the Norwegian Embassy in Kampala said the measure would immediately affect at least $8 million in aid to Uganda's legal system.
Limey
A Linkie in Manchester...where, if you must have the trivia, I once, long ago, produced a recording of Eartha Kitt doing the voiceover on a Hardee's fish sticks commercial.
Dartmouth College Administrator Finds Due Process Inconvenient
She asks why they can't just go with the "Off with their heads!" approach -- expelling students based on mere allegation of sexual misconduct. (Due process is such a bore.)
And guess whose due process rights are typically violated on campus? Yep -- the penis people.
Sterling Beard writes at campusreform.org:
The head of Dartmouth College's new center to prevent sexual assault asked last week why schools should not expel students who have been accused of sexual offenses."Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?" Amanda Childress, the newly appointed head of Dartmouth College's Center for Community Action and Prevention, asked last Tuesday at a two-day "dialogue" on sexual misconduct at the University of Virginia.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress posed the question to a panel of six college presidents whose campuses have seen high-profile allegations.
Childress said a full 90 to 95 percent of sexual assaults on college campuses are carried out intentionally by repeat offenders and go unreported. Though she acknowledged that two to eight percent of accusations are unfounded, she said that concerns about due process are overriding the protection of students.
"It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students. And higher education is not a right. Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege," she said.
Dartmouth defended this woman's remarks, calling them "rhetorical." She was just asking a "provocative" question.
Campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org catch the wafting smell of bullshit. Robert Shibley wrote; on February 14:
Yes, Childress' statement was in part a question, but Dartmouth's statement pretty clumsily elides over the part of the "question" in which Childress says, "It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students. And higher education is not a right. Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege." (At Dartmouth, this "privilege" costs $63,282 per year, $0 of which you get back when you're expelled from the place simply because someone accused you of something.) Dartmouth's suggestion that this question was not a reflection of Childress' opinions about due process doesn't pass the laugh test. Dartmouth obviously hopes nobody will compare Childress' actual "question" with Dartmouth's lame attempt at CYA; attorneys representing students expelled from Dartmouth in the future might be interested in the implications of Childress' statement.The plus side of Dartmouth's response is that at least the college must be a little embarrassed by Childress, right? Well, maybe. But right before Childress made her statement at the UVA conference, Dartmouth gave Childress a promotion, appointing her head of the college's brand new sexual assault center. Looks like Amanda Childress' career is on the rise at Dartmouth. Let's just hope not too many students end up getting stepped on while she makes her way to the top.
Why Not Just March Down America's Streets With White Sheets Over Their Heads?
A genius GOP lobbyist, apparently not comfortable that the Republican party has alienated every possible libertarian, is pushing for a ban on openly gay players in the NFL.
Josh Feldman writes at Mediaite:
Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman is pushing for legislation that would ban openly gay athletes from the National Football League, spurred on by the recent news about Michael Sam publicly coming out. He is appealing directly to Republican members of Congress to propose a bill on the issue, telling The Huffington Post that there are five House members and one senator "interested in co-sponsoring the bill" and he expects more to join on.Burkman acknowledges that normally, conservatives don't like the idea of imposing policy on private businesses, but says that this belief is now "trumped for reason of great urgency or necessity" and it all comes down to the NFL's moral standing.
You want to concern yourself with moral standing? Go to church and root out the pedophile priests.
Pushback Against America's Ruling Class
Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in USA Today that it's possible we Americans are waking up from our long coma. He thinks the signs are there that we have begun resisting encroachments on our freedom. A few of those signs:
First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database. Many local police departments already use license-plate readers that track every car as it passes traffic signals or pole-mounted cameras. Specially equipped police cars even track cars parked on the street or even in driveways....On Friday, after more public outrage, the Federal Communications Commission withdrew a plan to "monitor" news coverage at not only broadcast stations, but also at print publications that the FCC has no authority to regulate. The "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN (pronounced "sin") involved the FCC sending people to question reporters and editors about why they chose to run particular stories. Many folks in and out of the media found it Orwellian.
How this program appeared was, like the DHS program, a bit of a mystery: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said: "This has never been put to an FCC vote; it was just announced." But the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now.
Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience. As J.D. Tuccille reports: "Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines."
This is more "Irish Democracy," passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven't registered, but the state doesn't have the resources and it's doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.
Llinky
It's Welsh for Linky.
Austin Police Chief: Arrested Austin Jaywalker Just Lucky Not To Have Been Gang-Raped By Cops
How do idiots like this man ascend to positions of power?
Jonathan Turley blogs about the aftermath of the ridiculous arrest of the Austin jogger for jaywalking -- and the aftermath. (The official reason for the arrest was "failure to identify" and "failure to identify a pedestrian control device"):
People in Austin were outraged recently when Amanda Jo Stephen was arrested for jaywalking - a crime that ultimately required four officers and left Stephen sitting cuffed and crying on the ground in front of onlookers. The video is below. However, it was the response of Austin police chief Art Acevedo made this even more bizarre and disturbing.When people objected to the treatment this woman and over-reaction of his officers, Acevedo responded that "In other cities there's cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas." At best, that sounds like a flippant dismissal of abuse and at worse almost sounded like Stephen was lucky to get away without a gang rape by officers.
Acevedo was inundated with calls and later apologized for the "poor analogy" and insisted that "I attempted to place the arrest into context by bringing attention to the fact that law enforcement deals with many acts of serious misconduct."
The problem with the apology is that it still misses part of the problem. Putting aside the basis for this arrest, everyday and casual abuses are a major problem of police misconduct. This woman was left cuffed and sitting on the ground in public and then arrested and charged. Four officers participated in the arrest. Arbitrary and over-the-top police enforcement that creates fear of police and a sense of impunity for officers. Then when a chief of police shrugs it off as still better than a rape, it sends a chilling message to citizens and the wrong signal to officers. It is much much worse than a "poor analogy" in my view.
The video, in case you haven't seen it:
Rotten, power-mad bullies.
The Fierce Competition To Make Others Feel Guilty For Their "Privilege"
Frankly, if you aren't born in a mud hut in Pakistan but instead live in the West in a country with some form of democracy, and if you aren't in ill health, you are "privileged."
Personally, I feel privileged that I have a roof over my head, a car to drive (nine years old and still going fine!), and food in my refrigerator.
My landlord came to the USA from someplace unfancy in the UK, worked construction and bought up a bunch of houses in then-questionable areas and rented them out. Well, maybe 20 years later, the houses are now in a hot area and I'm guessing he's doing very well. And I admire the hell out of him for how he built a life and a business here. Sure, some people have it harder than others but if you have a rage to succeed, chances are you can have at least a comfortable life here and maybe a very comfortable one.
This veered off a bit from the new meaning of "privilege," but we'll get right back to that with the blog item I'm linking to.
Julie Burchill writes in the Spectator about how today's left is a competition in shouting one another down. An excerpt from the piece, "Don't you dare tell me to check my privilege":
Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as 'the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination', which seems rather mature and dignified. In reality, it seeks to make a manifesto out of the nastiest bits of Mean Girls, wherein non-white feminists especially are encouraged to bypass the obvious task of tackling the patriarchy's power in favour of bitching about white women's perceived privilege in terms of hair texture and body shape. Think of all those episodes of Jerry Springer where two women who look like Victoria's Secret models -- one black, one white -- bitch-fight over a man who resembles a Jerusalem artichoke, sitting smugly in the middle, and you have the end result of intersectionality made all too foul flesh. It may have been intended as a way for disabled women of colour to address such allegedly white-ableist-feminist-specific issues as equal pay, but it's ended up as a screaming, squawking, grievance-hawking shambles.The supreme irony of intersectionality is that it both barracks 'traditional' feminists for ignoring the issues of differently abled and differently ethnic women while at the same time telling them they have no right to discuss them because they don't understand them -- a veritable Pushmi-Pullyu of a political movement. Entering the crazy world of intersectionality is quite like being locked in a hall of mirrors with a borderline personality disorder coach party. 'Stop looking at me funny! Why are you ignoring me? Go away, I hate you! Come back, how dare you reject me!' It's politics, Jim, but certainly not as my dear old dad knew it.
Suzanne is a life-long left-winger and a feminist -- why, I wondered, were fellow travellers threatening her in so rabid a manner? But this, I was to learn, was par for the crotchety course.
Suzanne's crime, it transpired, was to be 'cis-gendered' as opposed to transgendered (that is, she was born female) and not to have 'checked her privilege' -- what passes for a battle cry in certain ever-decreasing circles these dog days. It's hardly 'No pasarán!' -- rather, it declares an intention that it is better to be nagged to death on one's knees rather than stand by one's principles on one's feet. Consider how lucky you are, born women, before you raise your voice above that of a trans-sister! -- that veritable cornucopian horn of plenty which we lucky breed fortunate enough to be born to a sensory smorgasbord of periods, PMT, the menopause, HRT and being bothered ceaselessly for sex by random male strangers since puberty take such flagrant delight in revelling in, shameless hussies that we are. Add to this that Suzanne was, like myself, born into the English working class, and therefore marginally less likely to have beaten the odds than a dancing dog or busker's cat to have become a public figure, and I was buggered (not being homophobic, there) if I was going to put up with a bunch of middle-class seat-sniffers, educated beyond all instinct and honesty, laying into my girl.
But it wasn't just that. It was an instinctive desire to defend the socialism of my dead father. Because intersectionality is actually the opposite of socialism! Intersectionality believes that there is 'no such thing as society' -- just various special interests.
In my opinion, we only become truly brave, truly above self-interest, when fighting for people different from ourselves. My hero as a kid was Jack Ashley -- a deaf MP who became the champion of rape victims. These days, the likes of those who went after Suzanne would probably dismiss him as a self-loathing cis-ableist. Intersectionality, like identity politics before it, is pure narcissism.
...The insistence of intersectional feminists on the right of transsexuals not to be offended -- tells you all you need to know about the essential stupidity of the movement.
"Affordable" Health Care: It Could Kill You
Stephen Blackwood tells the story of his mother, who has cancer, and the effect of the "Affordable" Care Act on her ability to continue living -- and without going broke.
Like me, she had affordable care before the "Affordable" care came along. Obamacare killed her plan. Blackwood writes in the WSJ:
She'd had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.And then, because our lawmakers and president thought they could do better, she had nothing. Her old plan, now considered illegal under the new health law, had been canceled.
Because the exchange website in her state (Virginia) was not working, she went directly to insurers' websites and telephoned them, one by one, over dozens of hours. As a medical-office manager, she had decades of experience navigating the enormous problems of even our pre-ObamaCare system. But nothing could have prepared her for the bureaucratic morass she now had to traverse.
The repeated and prolonged phone waits were Sisyphean, the competence and customer service abysmal. When finally she found a plan that looked like it would cover her Sandostatin and other cancer treatments, she called the insurer, Humana, to confirm that it would do so. The enrollment agent said that after she met her deductible, all treatments and medications--including those for her cancer--would be covered at 100%. Because, however, the enrollment agents did not--unbelievable though this may seem--have access to the "coverage formularies" for the plans they were selling, they said the only way to find out in detail what was in the plan was to buy the plan. (Does that remind you of anyone?)
With no other options, she bought the plan and was approved on Nov. 22. Because by January the plan was still not showing up on her online Humana account, however, she repeatedly called to confirm that it was active. The agents told her not to worry, she was definitely covered.
Then on Feb. 12, just before going into (yet another) surgery, she was informed by Humana that it would not, in fact, cover her Sandostatin, or other cancer-related medications. The cost of the Sandostatin alone, since Jan. 1, was $14,000, and the company was refusing to pay.
The news was dumbfounding. This is a woman who had an affordable health plan that covered her condition. Our lawmakers weren't happy with that because . . . they wanted plans that were affordable and covered her condition. So they gave her a new one. It doesn't cover her condition and it's completely unaffordable.
Though I'm no expert on ObamaCare (at 10,000 pages, who could be?), I understand that the intention--or at least the rhetorical justification--of this legislation was to provide coverage for those who didn't have it. But there is something deeply and incontestably perverse about a law that so distorts and undermines the free activity of individuals that they can no longer buy and sell the goods and services that keep them alive. ObamaCare made my mother's old plan illegal, and it forced her to buy a new plan that would accelerate her disease and death. She awaits an appeal with her insurer.
What Happens When, Instead Of A War On Drugs, There's A Sales Tax On Drugs
It's like gay marriage. Tiffany's bottom line is probably on the way up, and I'm guessing caterers' and florists' houses are coming out of foreclosure.
In the case of now-legalized pot, there was a boon for a San Francisco Girl Scout, who sold 117 boxes outside a pot dispensary in the span of two hours.
Smart girl!
And speaking of smart, it's so much smarter to tax people for their drugs -- which, by the way, they'll use anyway -- rather than throwing them in jail for them.
The Girl Scouts, not surprisingly, are pearl-clutching over this.
Milkie Way
The linkie way -- and watch out for black holes.
Advice Goddess Radio, Different Time Tonight, 5-6pm PT, 8-9pm ET: Maria Konnikova On How To think Like Sherlock Holmes
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
This should be a fascinating show on the difference between seeing and actually observing, and many of the other habits and practices of Sherlock Holmes.
Science writer and psychologist Dr. Maria Konnikova draws on 21st century neuroscience and psychology to show how we can employ Holmes' thought processes to unlock our own capacities for ever-present mindfulness, astute observation, and logical deduction in order to see more, live more rationally, and, in turn live smarter.
Her book we'll be discussing tonight: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Listen at this link from 5-6 pm Pacific, 8-9 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/24/maria-konnikova-how-to-think-like-sherlock-holmes
A SPONSOR! My show's sponsor is Audible.com. Get a free audiobook download and support this show financially at no cost to you by signing up for a free 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/amya (It's $14.95 after 30 days, but you can cancel before then and have it cost you nothing.)
Don't miss last week's show on mindful quitting.
Quitting isn't just for losers. Sure, there are those people who quit because they're lazy or lack the courage to take on their goal.
But my guest, Peg Streep, is the co-author of an excellent book about judicious quitting -- quitting to get ahead in your job, your social world, and your relationships. The book is the science-based "Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work," co-authored with therapist Alan Bernstein.
Join us as she explains how to know when it's over in love, work, and beyond, and how to engage in mindful and intelligent "disengagement" from goals that have outlived their usefulness so you can live to the fullest in every sphere of your life.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/17/peg-streep-the-science-on-mindful-quitting-to-get-ahead-in-love-work-and-life
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
TSA And Beyond: The Phony Trade-Off Between Privacy And "Security"
Excellent Sheldon Richman piece at The Future of Freedom Foundation. An excerpt:
Most people take it for granted -- because they have heard it so many times from politicians and pundits -- that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we're told, is to find the right "balance." Let's examine this.On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after some aspect of my security. To do its job the firm may need some information about me that I don't readily give out. It's up to me to decide whether I like the trade-off. Nothing wrong there. In a freed market, firms would compete for my business, and competition would pressure firms to ask only for information required for their services. As a result, a minimum amount of information would be requested. If I thought even that was too much, I would be free to choose to look after my security myself. If I did business with a firm that violated our contract -- say, it disclosed my information in a way that violated the terms -- I would have recourse. At the very least I could terminate the relationship and strike up another or none at all.
In other words, in the freed market I would find the right "balance" for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn't be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the "balance" differently for different people. That's as it should be.
He delves into the phony debate on this:
Obama says, "I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved. It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."He meant he and his co-conspirators in Congress and the national-security apparatus will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the "security" side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That's how these things work. Unlike what happens in a freed market, what the government does is intrusive, because it is done without our consent and often without our knowledge. (I hope no one will say that voting or continuing to live in the United States constitutes consent to invasions of privacy.)
Of course, our rulers can't really set things to the security side of the spectrum because the game is rigged. When we give up privacy -- or, rather, when our rulers take it -- we don't get security in return; we get a more intrusive state, which means we get more insecurity.
Reality Or Conspiracy Theory? 1996 Video Of Former LAPD Officer Mike Ruppert Confronting CIA Director John Deutch On Drug Trafficking
This was posted at The Daily Paul:
Ruppert's LAPD record is here. More about Ruppert on Wikipedia. His allegations are here:
I haven't been a policeman now for a long time. I graduated from the LA Police Academy class of 11/73, hit the streets in January of '74 in South Central Los Angeles. It was a vastly different world then; there was no cocaine and we had six-shooters and straight batons and nobody had a radio that you carried around with you. But the world has changed enormously. I specialised in narcotics quickly, and heroin was the predominant drug on the street in my area; it was Mexican brown heroin in those days.And what happened to me was that I met and fell in love with a woman who was a contract CIA agent, a career agent. Now, I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not unexpected to me, but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs. This happened with her in Hawaii, Mexico, Texas and New Orleans, and I kept saying I'm a narc, that I'm not going to overlook drug shipments. That's what basically set me on the irreversible course of events that determined the rest of my life. That was 1977.
The CIA's version from PBS' Frontline:
In October 1998, the CIA released a declassified version of Hitz's two-volume report.The IG's report cleared the CIA of complicity with the inner-city crack cocaine trade. It refuted charges that CIA officials knew that their Nicaraguan allies were dealing drugs. But, the report said that the CIA, in a number of cases, didn't bother to look into allegations about narcotics And the Hitz report describes how there was little or no direction for CIA operatives when confronted by the rampant traffic in drugs in Central American during the 1980s.
via @ronpaulnews
The Crime Of Not Being Properly And Rapidly Boot-Licking
They pop up like blades of grass between sidewalk cracks these days -- the ridiculous arrests of non-criminals on ridiculous charges.
William Norman Grigg posts on LewRockwell.com:
Phyllis Bear, a convenience store clerk from Arizona, called the police after a customer threatened her. The disgruntled patron, seeking to purchase a money order, handed Bear several bills that were rejected by the store's automated safe. Suspecting that the cash was counterfeit, Bear told him to come back later to speak with a manager.The man had left by the time the cops arrived, and Bear was swamped at the register. Offended that she was serving paying customers rather than rendering proper deference to an emissary of the State, one of the officers arrested Bear for "obstructing government operations," handcuffed her, and stuffed her in the back of his cruiser.
A few minutes later, while the officer was on the radio reporting the abduction, his small-boned captive took the opportunity to extract one of her hands from the cuffs, reach through the window, and start opening the back door from the outside. The infuriated captor yanked the door open and demanded that the victim extend her hands to be re-shackled. When Bear refused to comply, the officer reached into the back seat and ripped her from the vehicle, causing her to lose her balance and stumble into the second officer.
Bear, who had called the police in the tragically mistaken belief that they would help her, was charged with three felonies: "obstruction" - refusal to stiff-arm customers in order to attend to an impatient cop; "escape" - daring to pull her hand out of the shackles that had been placed upon her without lawful cause; and "aggravated assault" - impermissible contact with the sanctified personage of a police officer as a result of being violently dragged out of the car by the "victim's" comrade.
The first two charges were quickly dropped. During a bench trial, the prosecution admitted that the arrest was illegal. Yet the judge ruled that Bear - who had no prior criminal history -- was guilty of "escape" and imposed one year of unsupervised probation. That conviction was upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals, which ruled that although the arrest was unwarranted and illegal, Bear had engaged in an illegal act of "self-help" by refusing to submit to abduction with appropriate meekness.
Decades ago, when Arizona was a more civilized place, the state "followed the common-law rule that a person may resist an illegal arrest," the court acknowledged. But that morally sound and intellectually unassailable policy was a casualty of what the court called "a trend ... away from the common-law rule and toward the judicial settlement of such disputes." Referring to the act of unlawfully seizing another human being and holding that person by force as a "dispute" is a bit like calling ... rape a "lover's quarrel."
Disgustingly:
It's not necessary for a police officer to explain why the arrest was made; according to the court, "only the fact of [an] arrest is a necessary element" for the victim to be charged with "escape."
Sound like the America you were expecting to live in?
Welcome To Sharia: Rape Victim In Sudan Gets Off Easy (Only A Jail Term And Not Being Stoned To Death)
From the BBC, the women was 18 and three months pregnant at the time she was raped. (She was house-hunting and lured to an empty property where she was attacked):
She was arrested after video of her allegedly being sexually abused was circulated on social media.Three men who admitted having sex with the woman and two who distributed the video were reportedly sentenced to being whipped.
The three were each sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery, while two got 40 lashes for distributing indecent material, according to women's rights group Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA).
'Brutal'
The woman was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended because she is pregnant, her lawyer, Samia al-Hashmi, told the AFP news agency.She was also fined 5,000 Sudanese pounds ($880; £530).
She had also faced charges of adultery and prostitution, which could have led to a penalty of death by stoning, but these were dropped after she convinced the court she was divorced, reports SIHA.
It says she now faces deportation.
Rape victims are often accused of "zina" -- unlawful sex between unmarried people (adultury). Zina Bil-Jabr is the term for rape. How did the rule that four men have to witness the rape for it to be rape and not adultery (punishable by death) come to pass? One of Mohammed's wives was accused of adultery based on the accusation of three men, and Mohammed (who frequently came up with rules to justify or enable his behavior) liked this wife (Aisha) the best, so the four-man rule was instituted.
In the absence of four witnesses (males only) to attest to a woman's being raped, she is considered an adulteress -- a crime punishable under Islam by stoning. (And not the kind that involves smoking a bowl and then passing out face-first in a plate of brownies.)
Elfies
Itsy bitsy linkies.
Couponville
It's down the road from Margaritaville. Savings on all sorts of stuff with coupons at Amazon
Rude And Proud Of It? I'd Like To Help You Get The Word Out
That's what I did late Friday afternoon when some woman parked her silver car smack in the middle of two spaces on my block, instead of doing the polite thing and taking just one.
Now, not everyone realizes that my neighborhood has become a parking hell, and they may not think to park more considerately. I get that. We all aren't always mindful.
When I see somebody taking up two spaces, I tell them about the tough parking situation here -- politely...at first. People who aren't lazy assholes or who don't feel their one chance to have power is to behave with lazy inconsideration to another person will often move their vehicle up.
That's not what happened on Friday.
As the woman who hogged two spaces walked across the street to go off to the shop and restaurant area, I called to her, "Excuse me, ma'am -- we have really scarce parking in our neighborhood. Would you mind pulling up your car so you only take one space instead of two?
She looked at me and decided to be condescending instead. She just kept saying, "You'll be fine. You'll be fine. You'll be fine." And walked on. Continuing to repeat that.
I called after her, "No, I won't be fine because my boyfriend won't have a place to park because you've taken two spaces. And you're ill-raised. What kind of woman raised you to be so inconsiderate?"
I'm sure she's sure she won. Let's see if she continues to feel that way.
I fantasize that little notes like these below will make a cop more likely to pull some asshole over.
Or...at the very least, tomorrow or later tonight, when this entitled asshole gets home, she'll realize that -- oops -- her "fuck you -- I'm entitled!" rudeness wasn't the most winning strategy. I love the idea of loads and loads of people laughing at her as they pull up behind her -- and hope she thinks of that, too.
There is a point to this. If we shame the rude, they might think twice about being rude the next time. Not because they'll become better people, but because somebody has shown them there's a cost to being piggy -- even amongst strangers.
Here's the left side of the back of her car: 
Here's the right side:
(I know -- I make such a poor victim, simply refusing to roll over!)
P.S. I actually thank people and leave nice notes when people park considerately in my neighborhood, like last week when I saw this guy taking pains to move his station wagon up to right before the red, so he wouldn't take more space than necessary. Nice!
TSA: Blame The "Little People" Who Work For Them, Too, Because They Are To Blame
Every person who takes money for violating the bodies and rights of their fellow citizens is absolutely to blame and should be shamed at every opportunity for doing it.
Former TSA worker, Jason Edward Harrington, writes in TIME about his time with the groping security theater provider, the TSA, contending that we shouldn't get (so) mad at the men and women working the security line, when it's their bosses who send down the ridiculous orders:
But our best bet is to take the frustration toward the TSA agent confiscating our over-sized liquids, and re-direct it to the people at TSA headquarters who are being paid the big bucks to make the rules -- the ones who make the call as to whether our toothpaste is verboten and whether our shoes will need extra screening.
Wrong. They all deserve our actively expressed disgust and protest.
First Amendment lawyer Marc J. Randazza, who defended me when the TSA worker came after me for $500,000 for daring to name her name when complaining about her violation of my body and rights, concurs:
The author's premise is wrong -- you SHOULD blame the rank and file. I understand that they do not make the rules. Neither does any low-ranking idiot. But, the policies from above can never go into place without the guy on the bottom who feels important by enforcing the idiotic policies coming down from the top.We are occupied. We have a responsibility to make the lives of the occupiers difficult. Blame everyone who wears the blue shirt.
Melty
Linkie with extra cheese.
Arizona Bill: The "Right To Try" Would Allow Dying Patients Access To Non-FDA-Approved Treatments
In the Free Beacon, Mary Lou Byrd writes:
A bill allowing the terminally ill to use experimental drugs not yet approved for use by the Federal Drug Administration has advanced to the full House in Arizona.Arizona lawmakers passed the bill out of committee and in the next three weeks both chambers of the legislature could vote on it. It would then need to be approved by voters in November.
The Right to Try law would give those who have exhausted all other treatment options the use of non-FDA approved drugs. According to the Goldwater Institute, similar laws are under consideration and in different stages of the legislative process in seven other states.
Supporters of the bill are optimistic it will become law in Arizona and that other states will follow suit.
"This is a fundamental right for people to have," said Christina Corieri, a health care policy analyst at the Goldwater Institute, which helped craft the law. "They have a fundamental right to save their own life, and there shouldn't be a bureaucrat in the picture."
Corieri said patients themselves should have the right to decide if they want to take these drugs, which may or may not have potential side effects.
"We know the side effect that will occur if they don't access these drugs--they are going to die," said Corieri.
Sorry, "Family Values" Anti-Gay Types: Gay Parents Are Just As Boring As Straight Parents
Jonathan Saenz of Texas Values waxed on about the supposed horrible effects of gay marriage during an interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. These are clearly two people who have never met any gay parents. I know a few, and they are as dull as straight parents, spending their time mulling over how to get the kid into the right preschool, blah, blah, blah.
But here are Saenz and Perkins on the fate of gay relationships -- which sounds to me (and probably anybody who's been awake for the last 20 years) like the fate of a lot of relationships, and not just the gay ones. From RightWingWatch:
"Not only does it destroy the definition of marriage, it perverts the word love," Perkins said of same-sex marriage. "It becomes nothing more than a sexual act or a physical act of intimacy. Because you could say two brothers love each other, two sisters love each other, an aunt and an uncle love each other, different folks that may not be able to be married could love each other, so if you change this definition, what's to keep them from entering into some kind of contractual relationship as well? It's absurd."Saenz agreed: "They're not really interested in equality, the homosexual advocates, they just want what they think they can get and what works best for their selfish interests.... They know that the majority of people do not support them because it breaks apart."
Love And Polyamory
Emmett Rensin at LA Review of Books on polyamory. An excerpt:
Let's say you accept the basic bargain of monogamy. You believe that fidelity, if handled realistically, sensibly, and maturely, is the romantic ideal. You believe that we are jealous by nature (at least to a point), and that this is healthy. Even if you've enjoyed sowing your wild oats, you believe that love, true love, makes people want to be exclusive, and finding true love appeals to you. At the very least, you believe in practicality: monogamy means less chance of heartbreak and venereal disease, and your lover leaving you for someone new.You believe, as the majority of our culture does, that true love is a zero-sum game traded in sex.
You try your best, but many partners, especially your earlier ones, fail you, or you fail them. More than 50 percent of ostensibly monogamous people admit to cheating -- chances are, you don't always get what you bargained for.
Or maybe you do, but find there's a more insidious trouble: the exclusivity that was supposed to give you peace of mind... hasn't. Even if your partner doesn't cheat, even if he doesn't leave you for another, you can't shake the feeling that he might: it just seems to happen so much to people around you. How can you ever be sure? You believe jealousy can be healthy at first, but you find it doesn't go away. After awhile, you're unsure if you're more bothered by the prospect of him stepping out behind your back, or just the perpetual knowledge that he could at any time. Is this even the partner you want to worry so much about, or are you just settling? You imagine making a mistake, and you imagine the price the world extracts for such a failure. You remember parents and friends, broken down and trapped in financial or emotional captivity.
Love is supposed to be a challenge. You know that. But you wonder if it always has to be this challenging, or if it ever gets any easier.
The very axioms of monogamy conspire to make things worse. You believe above all else that real love is manifest in sole attraction: but then what happens when you find yourself longing -- even fleetingly -- for a pretty girl at work, or an old, still single friend? Doesn't that mean you don't really love your partner? Doesn't that mean you love this other one instead? You don't, of course, but if true love is wanting exclusivity, then something must be wrong. It can't just be lust, and so you begin to rationalize your attraction. You think about that pretty boy so much, surely it means something beyond sex. But what can you do? Convinced of your failure, you destroy the relationship you have with your lover, and pursue the other. It doesn't work, of course. Once you have them, and the tension's gone, they return to what they always were: a curiosity, and nothing more.
Or maybe not. Maybe you stay in the initial relationship and, decades later, with a partner you barely recognize and lonelier than you ever were alone, you wonder if you should have left, if it's too late now, and if you'll ever stop being too afraid to do something about it.
Either way, you can't help believing that you've failed. You know this is where a lot of people give up and make false compromises: they tune out, or they cheat quietly -- it helps a bit, but not enough. You know that, and you can't stand the thought of becoming one of them.
And in the end, it's just another form of love, another form of relationship:
The big reveal is this: of the kinds of love we fall into, monogamous or polyamorous, casual or serious, there is a common thread of mundanity.
Former ADA Comes Out For Legalization Of Prostitution
Robin L. Barton, a Brooklyn-based legal journalist and a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office blogs at The Crime Report about why she believes in legalizing prostitution:
Although banning prostitution hasn't eliminated the activity, it has made working conditions for those engaged in the profession unnecessarily dangerous. That's why some countries as noted above have taken steps to try to improve their safety.If we really care about the well-being of the women who support themselves as sex workers, legalize prostitution and regulate it like certain cities in Nevada and other jurisdictions currently do.
By doing so, the government could permit prostitutes to work indoors in safer locations than street corners and to take other measures to protect themselves, such as by hiring bodyguards. In short, they could take control over their lives.
Prostitutes would still be vulnerable to violence to some extent. But if their conduct is legal, they may be more willing to come forward if they're victimized by clients or pimps.
The government could require sex workers to be over a certain age and to be licensed. In addition, it could also address health issues by requiring them to get regular physicals and use condoms.
And if prostitution is a legal profession, it could be taxed!
But I believe that the argument for legalizing prostitution goes beyond safety.
Women are entitled to control over their bodies. Just as they should have the right to decide whether they want to remain pregnant, women should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to engage in sexual acts in exchange for money.
If we're honest, the line between having sex with someone for cash or in exchange for dinner or jewelry is a thin one.
And participants in other occupations trade the use of their bodies for money, most notably professional athletes. Is being a hooker really that different?
Via @ScottGreenfield
Heartless Conservatives -- Oops...Give More To Charity
Arthur C. Brooks writes at Commentary:
As I found in my 2006 book Who Really Cares, the average conservative household contributes significantly more to charity than does the average liberal household despite earning less income. According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that "the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.Of the 10 most charitable states in 2012, as ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nine went for Romney over Obama. Three times as many red states as blue states placed in the top 20 states in giving. And all but one of the 10 least charitable states swung President Obama's way.
Why do conservatives give more? The research shows that the largest charity differences owe to religious participation. We see that religious liberals are approximately as generous as their conservative co-religionists. But there are far more religious conservatives today than religious liberals, so the political gap persists.
via @JohnTierney
Sulky
Linkie in a snittie.
Pick Up Menswear, Cheap
If you've already got the man, get the deal at Amazon
Researchers: Letting Your Spouse Have Sex With Other People Could Be The Key To Maintaining A Happy Marriage
Keep in mind that we evolved to feel jealousy and both psychologically and culturally have a sense of possession of our partner (though we can't truly possess someone).
But Tomas Jivanda writes in the Independent/UK about a paper recently published in Psychological Inquiry by Eli Finkel, Chin Ming Hui, Kathleen L. Carswell and Grace M. Larson, "The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen." (Maslow refers to Abraham Maslow and his ideas about "self-actualization":
"Outsourcing" areas of the marriage such as sex to other suitors could make a relationship work in the long run, they argue.For marriages in which the passion and intimacy has gone, Eli Finkel, from the department of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois, advises embarking on an agreed "non-monogamous" relationship.
"It may be that your spouse is a terrific source of social support and intellectual stimulation but you haven't had sex more than twice a year for the last five years and neither of you thinks that's adequate," he told The Telegraph.
"So you could say, that's one of the needs I am going to fulfil elsewhere. I don't recommend cheating, but an openly consensual non-monogamous relationship, that may very well be functional."
In the paper The Suffocation of Marriage, Prof Finkel and his co-authors argue that people now expect more from a partner than ever before - to be a lover, friend, confidant, therapist, and someone to help achieve their long-term goals.
It truly is unrealistic to expect your partner to meet your every need.
I think you have to prioritize -- decide what's most important to you (perhaps having a good dad for the kiddies for one person; perhaps, for another, having a romantic partner) -- and choose accordingly.
This could be realistic for some. (And I have to say, a number of people who write to me engage in this sort of thing, and I do think we overprioritize sex in relationships.) But I think the reality is that many people will have a very hard time with this in practice -- even if they aren't having sex or having sex that often with their partner.
Finkel's NYT piece on this is here:
Our central claim is that Americans today have elevated their expectations of marriage and can in fact achieve an unprecedentedly high level of marital quality -- but only if they are able to invest a great deal of time and energy in their partnership. If they are not able to do so, their marriage will likely fall short of these new expectations. Indeed, it will fall further short of people's expectations than at any time in the past.Marriage, then, has increasingly become an "all or nothing" proposition. This conclusion not only challenges the conventional opposition between marital decline and marital resilience; but it also has implications for policy makers looking to bolster the institution of marriage -- and for individual Americans seeking to strengthen their own relationships.
So do we change our expectations?
It'll Be Hard To Get Care If The Hospitals Are Forced Out Of Business By Obamacare
One more way to force us into single payer, with healthcare through the government, it seems.
(If your "affordable" care is impossible to get, it really isn't care at all, is it?)
At The Daily Caller, Sarah Hurtubise writes that a fourth Georgia hospital has closed in two years due to Obamacare cuts:
The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is, for now, a critical access hospital in southeastern Georgia that holds 25 beds. The hospital is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area's 23 percent uninsured population, and hopes to reopen as "some kind of urgent care center," CEO Karen O'Neal said.Many hospitals in the 25 states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are facing similar financial problems. Liberal administration ally Think Progress has already faulted Georgia for not expanding Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.
But the reality is more complicated. The federal government has historically made payments to hospitals to cover the cost of uninsured patients seeking free medical care in emergency rooms, as federal law mandates that hospitals must care for all patients regardless of their ability to pay.
Because the Affordable Care Act's authors believed they'd forced all states to implement the Medicaid expansion, Obamacare vastly cut hospital payments, the Associated Press reports.
Republicans are now debating mini bailouts for hospitals (per the AP link just above). Ray Henry and Christina A. Cassidy write:
Republican leaders in Georgia and Mississippi may be bailing out hospitals that will lose funding they would have gotten from Obama's health care law. South Carolina's leaders increased payments to some hospitals in a push to improve rural health, though the extra money likely placated hospital officials who might otherwise have pressured Republicans to adopt the Democratic plan.The basic problem is simple: Obama's overhaul is not being implemented as was planned. Its designers assumed that very few people would lack health insurance, meaning the U.S. government could reduce the payments it makes to hospitals for treating poor and uninsured patients. But after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, 25 states refused to expand their government-funded Medicaid programs or are still debating it, leaving large numbers of the poor without health insurance. Without health insurance, those low-income patients cannot fully pay for treatment.
Hospitals in the holdout states still have to treat the poor, but they will get less money for doing it.
Ending Children's Suffering: Belgium Takes A Humane Stance On Kids Who Are Dying In Pain
Megan Daum writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Last week, the Belgian Parliament passed a law allowing terminally ill children to request aid in dying. Adults there have been able to do that since 2002, and a few other European countries have similar measures. But last Thursday's action, which is expected to be signed into law by King Philippe, will make Belgium the first to extend the right to minors faced with "constant and unbearable suffering."...And while the legislation is being called historic in that it's the first of its kind to cover children of any age who can prove a "capacity for discernment," it's not exactly unprecedented. For more than a decade, the Netherlands has allowed terminally ill children older than 12 to request euthanasia in special circumstances.
Contrary to paranoid visions, children in Belgium won't be able to ask for life-ending medication by merely hitting a nurse's call button. They must be suffering from pain that doctors have deemed truly unmanageable. They must get approval from their parents and their medical team, and they must be evaluated by psychologists. They must make the request several times and demonstrate that they understand what they're asking for. And, of course, they must be close to death anyway.
The Netherlands has a similarly careful process, which might explain why in the 12 years since its children's euthanasia law was passed, only five children have received aid in dying. In all but the rarest cases, pain and suffering were managed through palliative care.
To allow those children who are suffering the right to get help ending their suffering is the right thing to do.
The state should not control whether an individual lives or dies; that person, if they are sane and competent to make a decision for themselves, should make the decision.
Children do not have the minds of bunnies. Children who are "of sound minds" should have autonomy over whether they live or die and help in dying if that's what they want.
I put my 15-year-old Yorkie to sleep to end her suffering. Shouldn't a human being be allowed the same compassion?
"Balancing Family And Work Shouldn't Be Hazardous To Your Employment"
Um, why not?
That bit in quotes is the headline on a piece by guest blogger Susan Rohwer at latimes.com:
An employer may decide that you, as a parent, with obligations that take you away from the workplace (or another person, who is not a parent, who isn't giving adequately to their job) is not the best person for the job.
Why should a person with divided commitment to their job make as much and be as valued as a person who is more committed? The more committed employee has more value to the business.
Rohwer writes:
Leaving policies up to the discretion of employers is problematic, though, because sometimes all they see is an unproductive worker instead of a new mom or dad who needs workplace flexibility. The United States needs to make a significant cultural shift in how businesses treat parents. We can start by mandating better laws that hold employers accountable for unreasonable attitudes and policies.
I've been in workplaces and, guess what: It isn't just the "new" mom or dad who "needs workplace flexibility" (translation: leaves at 4 p.m. several days a week to take Cody to soccer).
If you aren't that committed to your job, why should the state force your employer to keep you? On the other hand, if you're such a worthy employee that your childcare or eldercare or other absences are small tradeoffs, your employer will keep you.
Linkua Franca
Speak my linkuage!...
Two Books I'm Excited To Read: Rottenberg and Reynolds
The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Rottenberg, who himself has falling into "the depths," explains depression in evolutionary terms rather than as a product of defects in the mind or brain, and points to new paths to treatment. (I'm copying this off the press release that came with the book, but I've also looked through it, and was very excited about it because it discusses some very compelling ideas about depression I've read in ev psych literature by Randy Nesse and others.)
I'll have Rottenberg on my radio show in March, but if you want to have that possibly sink in better for you, you might want to read his book in advance.
The other book I have here, goading me to drop my required weekly science reading (for my column and radio show) and pick it up, is a slim volume by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself
I find his ideas I've read in his columns about problems in education and the education bubble -- and his observations and ideas about solutions -- compelling and right on. I keep skimming his book when I get a few moments, and will read it in full as soon as I get through my LA Times Festival of Books reading in early April. (I usually moderate panels and sometimes have a pile of reading.)
Oh, and about my describing it as a "slim volume," it's about 100 pages long, which, frankly, many books should be. The writing looks very Elmore Leonard -- not because it's about crime or has a lot of punchy dialogue -- but because it does what Elmore advised in his "10 Rules of Writing." It "leave(s) out the part people tend to skip when they read."
Again, more authors should try harder to do that!
Economist Veronique de Rugy On Switzerland's Possible Guaranteed Income
Switzerland is about to hold a nationwide referendum on granting a guaranteed, unconditional minimum monthly income of $2,800 to every Swiss adult.
I previously blogged a video of de Rugy discussing this. Here's her reason article on the subject, laying out the pros and cons, and noting that there are and have been a number of libertarians in favor of a guaranteed income -- including "such laissez-faire luminaries as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray":
Friedman favored a negative income tax (NIT), in which taxpayers who earn less than the established minimum taxable income level would receive a subsidy equal to some fraction of that difference. (A watered-down version of this became the Earned Income Tax Credit.) Hayek defended a minimum income floor, in which the government provides a conditional income to each adult. Murray's 2006 book In Our Hands argued for an unconditional $10,000 annual cash payment to all adult Americans, coupled with a repeal of all other welfare transfer programs.Their proposals aim to fully replace the current welfare state with a less-bad alternative. In a world where government already redistributes income, with all of the inefficiency that comes with overlapping bureaucracies, the idea of direct cash payments has an intuitive appeal because of its comparative simplicity and fairness.
Any alternative might seem preferable to the welfare system we currently have. Federal welfare in the U.S. today consists of a highly complex maze of 126 separate anti-poverty programs, many of which are redundant. (There are, for instance, seven different housing programs.) While the system benefits the many government employees who manage these duplicative programs, it is neither easy for poor Americans to navigate nor is it an effective way to deliver anti-poverty services.
According to Cato Institute analyst Michael Tanner, the federal government spends close to $1 trillion each year at the federal, state, and local levels on anti-poverty programs-everything from Medicaid to job training to food stamps. After adding in the bureaucracy that attends to applying for food stamps, rent subsidies, and everything else, it isn't hard to imagine how moving to a cash transfer system would make the entire process far less time-consuming and humiliating for the poor. In addition, getting rid of the bureaucrats who administer these programs would save between 10 and 15 cents on every welfare dollar, a significant amount.
But she also notes that the idea may be problematic in reality:
Pointing to a series of 30 welfare experiments conducted in the 1990s, National Review's Jim Manzi argued in 2011 that of all the policy options tested, only welfare policies that included work requirements pushed people off welfare and back to self-sufficiency. Manzi concluded that taxpayers' moral aversion to subsidizing sloth will ultimately undermine any move to a guaranteed income or negative income tax scheme that lacks work requirements. People, he demurs, seem to prefer the paternalism.But my main objection to a guaranteed minimum income is rooted in the wisdom of public choice: The poor structure of government incentives ensures that good intentions and elegant theories rarely equal expected results in public policy. The biggest risk in implementing a guaranteed income is that it won't completely-or even partly-replace existing welfare programs, but instead simply add a new layer of spending on top of the old. Friedman learned this the hard way: After years of promoting the NIT, he wound up opposing Richard Nixon's NIT-inspired Family Assistance Plan precisely because it would not displace the preexisting welfare state.
So what are libertarians to support? If nothing else, more research: We could use a new series of voluntary, dispersed trials aimed at finding ways to avoid work disincentives while delivering payouts more efficiently and tying the hands of special interests and politicians.
UPDATE: De Rugy at NRO on how the government wastes $100 billion a year -- yes, that's billion -- in improper welfare payments.
Caroline Rothstein Feels Bad About Her Bush
And her penchant for having most of the hairs waxed off of it.
Silly and tiresome bit of handwringing at Salon by Rothstein.
The headline and subhead:
Does waxing make me a bad feminist? Each month I allow a stranger to rip out the hair along my vulva. I'm not sure if I can justify it any more
An excerpt:
The entire procedure lasted from 11:34 to 11:39 a.m. In five minutes my unwanted hair was gone, with a trimmed rectangle still coating my labia, ass, and the bottom portion of my pubic region. But while I walked out an incredibly satisfied customer, as I am every time, I couldn't help but feel like a "bad" feminist. Still.I like examining my vulva: Watching the hair grow back, week by week; the days right after a wax when it's fresh, smooth, and plowed; when the first stubble sprouts. Some become ingrown hairs, and I can pick at them - pull them out with tweezers or push them to the surface with my fingers. I like when it's time for my next bikini wax and I can repeat the process all over again.
It's my routine with my self, my vulva, and my body. It is a sacred time during which I inspect hair growth, witness its extension above my skin, note how it is thinner than it used to be: sparser, more tender, and more distant.
Sometimes I mourn the thicker hair of my adolescence, after puberty, just before I started bikini waxing. Maybe I've permanently altered my body. Maybe this very well impacts women's rights.
...This article is by no means complete or holistic. It is missing endless facts. It is missing historical context in hair removal, fashion, adult entertainment, feminism, gender equity, and more. While I spoke with nearly three dozen individuals from a plethora of backgrounds, sexual orientations, genders, races and professions, it is missing multitudes of voices: trans, genderqueer, and male; it is missing religious perspectives, ideas on class, ethnicity, nationality and disability.
It is also missing being interesting enough to read from beginning to end.
If I ever meet a man who is as agonized about what it means for him to shave his face, I promise, I will unzip my skin and run away screaming.
Charlotte Allen's perfect 11-word response to this silliness -- at her wonderfully-named StupidGirl blog:
Was it really a good idea to allow women to vote?
Florida Police Brutality: Woman Who Records Traffic Stop On Cellphone Physically Injured, Thrown In Jail
The cop insists he knows the law better than she does, insisting it's a felony to record him. It seems she knows the law better than he does. Florida is a two-party consent state for recording conversations, but as the video notes, the courts have upheld the right to record police officers -- as it should be. From Local10:
Steve Silverman explains in reason:
The law in 38 states plainly allows citizens to record police, as long as you don't physically interfere with their work. Police might still unfairly harass you, detain you, or confiscate your camera. They might even arrest you for some catchall misdemeanor such as obstruction of justice or disorderly conduct. But you will not be charged for illegally recording police.Twelve states--California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington--require the consent of all parties for you to record a conversation.
However, all but 2 of these states--Massachusetts and Illinois--have an "expectation of privacy provision" to their all-party laws that courts have ruled does not apply to on-duty police (or anyone in public). In other words, it's technically legal in those 48 states to openly record on-duty police.
Silverman's piece has some very helpful tips on when and how to record the police.
UPDATE: Law prof Jonathan Turley writes:
Now here are two facts that we have repeatedly seen in these abusive arrest cases. She was never charged with the alleged crime -- which does obviously exist. Second, all charges were later dropped.It turns out that in July all officers received a briefing sheet that stressed that citizens have the right to film officers in public. O'Brien therefore roughed up and arrested a citizen without cause after misinforming her that she was committing a crime in engaging in a constitutionally protected exercise. While Florida is a two-party consent state, the Florida Supreme Court has ruled that such consent is not needed with regard to filming police in public.
Brandy-BerningBerning now wisely plans a lawsuit for battery, false arrest, and false imprisonment. Florida will end up paying unnecessary (though warranted) damages and litigation costs because of a failure to properly trained and discipline its officers. The question is what will happen with Officer O'Brien.
I would also like to know why O'Brien was not disciplined after the charges were dropped. Clearly supervisors and/or prosecutors were involved in that decision. Did anyone report O'Brien for discipline? In past cases, we have seen no action taken until the media reveals the abuse and even then officers are rarely terminated. Indeed, even in recent decisions dealing with shootings and innocent citizens, officers have not been simply sent to a couple classes on the use of lethal force.
These incidents reveal a sense of dangerous impunity by an officer who believes that he can physically drag citizens from their cars and seize cellphones.
via @instapundit
Impie
Links with elves.
The Perfect Place To Cut College Costs: Take A Lot Off The Administrative Top
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, whose new book is The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself
A simple stroll through most campuses will underscore this change. The number of buildings devoted to administration is much greater than in past years. Priorities show in other ways, too: While more and more actual teaching is outsourced to low-paid adjuncts who lack job security or, often, benefits, the work of administration never seems to be outsourced this way. Who ever heard of an "adjunct administrator?"At many schools, administrators now outnumber teaching faculty, often by significant margins. According to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, "Part-time faculty and teaching assistants now account for half of instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show. During the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That's a rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of students."
And according to a 2010 study by the Goldwater Institute, administrative bloat is the largest driver of high tuition costs. Using Department of Education figures, the study found administration growing more than twice as fast as instruction: "In terms of growth, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America's leading universities increased by 39.3% between 1993 and 2007, while the number of employees engaged in teaching research or service only increased by 17.6%."
Reynolds notes possible market challenges to the administrative bloat:
The biggest challenges facing overpriced and bloated institutions will come from technology and the market. With lower-priced alternatives appearing online just as buyer resistance to increased tuition is taking off, colleges must adapt. Purdue University President Mitchell Daniels remarked recently, "Why, in 10 or 15 years, will students still find it wise to pay lots of money to go and live somewhere for four or more years, when a host of competitors are offering to bring them excellent teachers and instruction in the inexpensive comfort of their own homes?"
Why Should Any Book Be Banned?
As regulars here know, I don't believe in god. I see no evidence there's a god and I consider it ridiculous to believe in things there's no evidence for.
What I do believe in is civil liberties. And ideas and speech being free.
I was disturbed to hear that a university hotel yanked the bibles in their rooms after the Freedom From Religion Foundation deemed them "unwelcome religious propaganda in the bedside table."
I also find a John Grisham novel "unwelcome," but unless his books are piled up around the room, impeding my path to the bathroom, why would it be a problem?
You don't change people's minds by removing reading material, and frankly, it's a dangerous thing to do -- pressuring a business to remove literature.
As always, the answer to speech you are disturbed by is more speech.
Because the university is a public institution, it should not be paying for bibles. But if they are donated by others, same as if novels or other reading material are donated, what's the problem with letting them be in the rooms?
Why Your Broadband Internet Is So Expensive
A tidbit from a Felix Salmon column at Reuters:
Farhad Manjoo has the explanation for why this should be. Internet service is very cheap for the cable companies to provide, and it's also price-sensitive: if you reduce the price, more people will sign up. As a result, the cable companies would make more money from their broadband offerings if they reduced the price. So why don't they? Because right now, 91% of Americans with broadband also have cable TV (I think, I can't find the link for that right now), and the cable companies make their real money from TV, not broadband. The cable companies therefore have every incentive to price broadband as high as possible, so as to make the marginal extra cost of getting TV as well as small as possible.In the US, cable TV rates are very high; as such, the best way to prevent cord-cutting is to ensure that broadband rates are also very high. That's bad for broadband adoption, but it's reasonably effective at keeping people paying very large sums for TV every month. In other words, high broadband rates are a bit like most newspaper paywalls: they're not so much a way of making lots of money themselves, as they are a way of persuading you to pay lots of money for something else. (Physical newspaper delivery, or cable TV.)
The Drug War Is A Cash Cow For Police
Minnesota state Rep. Carly Melin, who sponsored a medical marijuana bill, found that policing agencies are hooked on drug enforcement dollars, writes Mike Mosedale at PoliticsInMinnesota:
According to Melin, Dennis Flaherty, the executive director of the MPPOA (Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association), explicitly told her that he was worried that legalization -- in any form -- could lead to harmful reductions in the federal grants that are an important funding source for many police agencies....Nationally, the U.S. Department of Justice distributes between $300 million and $500 million annually through a program called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant.
Byrne grants are especially critical to the operations of inter-agency drug task forces, which don't have the same dedicated funding sources as municipal police departments. In 2012, 23 such task forces in Minnesota received a total of approximately $4.2 million from Byrne grants. The money is spent on everything from military-grade hardware to officer overtime.
Critics contend that Byrne grants effectively encourage police to pursue relatively low-level drug offenses, including marijuana possession. Mainly, they say, that's because the performance measures used in determining awards are based on such factors as numbers of arrests or new task force investigations, with little regard paid to the quality of the arrest or the outcome of the court case.
"The agencies that are successful have to demonstrate a commitment to drug enforcement. The nature of that enforcement is much less important," said Norm Stamper, a former chief of police in Seattle who now serves on the board of the drug reform advocacy group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "Those who develop a dependency on federal funds such as Byrne grants are likely going to oppose any kind of initiative to legalize anything that's been a cash cow for them."
via @radleybalko
Psst, Homeland Security Honchos: The Thing To Do Is To Find Actual Terrorists -- Long Before They Hit The Airport
Not to find oil field workers' on-the-job items.
There's a story with a misleading headline, "Explosive found in carry-on bag at Anchorage airport." Steve Quinn of Reuters writes about the "possible threat item" detected as the passenger's carry-on bag was being screened at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Sunday:
JUNEAU, Alaska - Security agents at Alaska's largest commercial airport closed the lone security checkpoint for nearly two hours on Sunday after discovering an oil field worker packing an explosive device.The "possible threat item" was detected as the passenger's carry-on bag was being screened at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Sunday afternoon, said Ann Davis, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman.
The device appeared to be a pipe bomb and the passenger told authorities it was a device used to trigger avalanches, said Airport Manager John Parrott.
The checkpoint area was evacuated and the city's explosive ordinance team took the device to a remote area for disposal, officials said.
The passenger had a ticket to fly on Shared Services Aviation, a joint service between energy companies ConocoPhillips and BP, which transports employees and contractors.
Both firms are oilfield operators on Alaska's oil-rich North Slope.
I know many people who own guns. Not one of them has murdered somebody. They are not murderers but people who want to protect themselves and their family and people who hunt.
What would be meaningful security in this country would be the constitutional kind -- to use probable cause (by trained intelligence agents) to find people plotting terrorist acts, long before they hit the mall or the airport or the Boston Marathon.
You don't stop terrorism by taking away some law-abiding citizen's work equipment. (That's nitwittery, not security.)
UPDATE: "Security" idiocy is contagious. Headline: "UK security confiscates Woody's toy gun..."
Blinkie
I believe your tail light is out.
Cut Costs With Amazon Coupons
On groceries, vitamins, school and office supplies, and more -- at Amazon
Thanks to all who support this site through your Amazon purchases through my links.
I Read Rude People's Email Correspondence (To Me)
They're writing to my advice column address.
I recently spent a good bit of time responding to two people who wrote me for advice and never heard back from either one. I have very little free time these days and every email I answer -- especially those that have not the slightest possibility of making my problem -- is a gift from me.
I don't ask people I know for favors -- not often. I hate to impose, and I'm mindful that people do what they do for a living, even if you are their friend.
I give advice free of charge (as long as people don't ask for their reply to be private). As long as I have the possibility of using it in my column (even if I never, ever would), I'll respond for free.
When I get not even a curt "thanks" in return -- not even an acknowledgment that they've gotten my email in response -- I'm increasingly peeved.
I just sent this to two women who wrote me. One of them wrote about sleep disorders, which is not a subject I will EVER cover in my column, but I replied anyway. The other wrote about a boyfriend who I think sounds like he has aphasia -- probably the result of an undiscovered small stroke in his 30s. That took a good deal of my time (because I know little about it) and I wrote her a lengthy reply. It also is a conclusion that she couldn't come to on her own. My note I just sent is this:
Did you not get my reply? I put time into this. I'm frequently amazed these days when I spend my dwindling free time on responding to someone and don't hear back. Not even a curt thanks. I understand that this may have gone to your spam folder. Perhaps that's the case. -Amy Alkon
What's dumb, on a research-driven level, is that expressing gratitude is good for you.
Mom Of 19 Michelle Duggar's Secret To A Happy Marriage
It's never say no to sex. Hanna Rosin writes at Slate:
Reading last weekend's New York Times Magazine, "Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?," I was feeling a little anxious. My husband both loads and unloads the dishwasher. He sweeps the kitchen floor now and again. When our kids were in diapers, he changed a whole lot of diapers. Is my marriage doomed? But then just in time for Valentine's Day came some advice, via the Today show website: seven tips for "keeping your marriage sexy, even after (a lot of) kids."The advice comes from the best possible source, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. The reason they are good role models is because despite having 19 kids, the "romance is still strong." In fact, they are "like a newlywed couple every day," says Jim Bob. The No. 1 secret? "Say yes to sex, even when you're tired." Apparently a friend once gave Michelle advice she will never forget: "In your marriage there will be times you're going to be very exhausted. Your hubby comes home after a hard day's work, you get the baby to bed, and he is going to be looking forward to that time with you. ... Anyone can fix him lunch, but only one person can meet that physical need of love that he has, and you always need to be available when he calls." But don't worry. This isn't creepy or anything, because, "it's not all sexytime at the Duggars. They abstain when Michelle has her period, and also after childbirth: 80 days before sex if it's a girl, 40 days after a boy."
A very uncomplicated myth is taking hold in our culture, that our perilous drift away from roles based on gender essentialism (women raise kids, men lift heavy objects and sweat) is destroying our sex lives. The New York Times Magazine story is based on a survey that, using information from the mid-1990s, says that when men did certain kinds of "feminine" chores around the house--folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming--couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month. And conservatives love to quote an old health survey showing that evangelical women have better sex. But this glimpse into the Duggars' bedroom reveals what I have always suspected. If it is true that less-equal marriages have more sex, it's not because the men are doused with sexy man pheromones when they fix the car engine but refuse to wipe the counter. It's because the women don't say no.
I wrote about this in my column in 2007:
Relationships are filled with little tasks that don't exactly bring a person to screaming orgasm. A man, for example, doesn't wake up in the middle of the night with some primal longing to bring his girlfriend flowers, rehang her back door, or clean the trap in her sink. Like sex, these things can be expressions of love, but if a guy's going to lock himself in the bathroom, it's not going to be with "Bob Vila's Complete Guide to Remodeling Your Home."So, couldn't putting out when you aren't in the mood be seen as just another expression of love? Joan Sewell, author of I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, told The Atlantic Monthly, "If you have sex when you don't desire it, physically desire it, you are going to feel used." Well, okay, perhaps. But, if a guy rotates a woman's tires when he doesn't desire it, physically desire it, does he feel used?
Actually, we all do plenty of things with our bodies that we don't really feel like; for instance, taking our bodies to work when we have a hangover instead of putting our bodies in front of some greasy hash browns, and then to bed. For women, however, sexual things are supposed to be out of the question. I think the subtext here is not doing things we really don't feel like if it GIVES A MAN PLEASURE. And no, I'm not advocating rape or anything remotely close to it. And, of course, if you find sex with your husband or boyfriend a horrible chore, you're in the wrong place. Otherwise, if you're with a man, and he's nice to you, and works hard to please you, would it kill you to throw him a quickie?
Where do you stand -- fall into bed -- on this?
Welcome To The Government Running Your Health Care (That'll Be $62,000, Please)
Jim Angle writes at FoxNews Politics that "ObamaCare patients with serious pre-existing diseases could face expensive drug costs":
People with serious pre-existing diseases, precisely those the president aimed to help with ObamaCare, could find themselves paying for expensive drug treatments with no help from the health care exchanges.Those with expensive diseases such as lupus or multiple sclerosis face something called a "closed drug formulary."
Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute explains,"if the medicine that you need isn't on that list, it's not covered at all. You have to pay completely out of pocket to get that medicine, and the money you spend doesn't count against your deductible, and it doesn't count against your out of pocket limits, so you're basically on your own."
The plan had claimed it would rescue those with serious pre-existing conditions.
"So it could be that a MS patient could be expected to pay $62,000 just for one medication," says Dr. Daniel Kantor, who treats MS patients and others with neurological conditions near Jacksonville, Florida. "That's a possiblity under the new ObamaCare going on right now."
Slinkie
The linkie came in in a Spandex catsuit...
Advice Goddess Radio, Live Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Peg Streep On The Science Behind Mindful Quitting To Get Ahead In Love, Work, Life
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Quitting isn't just for losers. Sure, there are those people who quit because they're lazy or lack the courage to take on their goal.
But my guest tonight, Peg Streep, is the co-author of an excellent book about judicious quitting -- quitting to get ahead in your job, your social world, and your relationships. The book is the science-based "Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work," co-authored with therapist Alan Bernstein.
Join us tonight as she explains how to know when it's over in love, work, and beyond, and how to engage in mindful and intelligent "disengagement" from goals that have outlived their usefulness so you can live to the fullest in every sphere of your life.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/17/peg-streep-the-science-on-mindful-quitting-to-get-ahead-in-love-work-and-life
A SPONSOR! My show's sponsor is Audible.com. Get a free audiobook download and support this show financially at no cost to you by signing up for a free 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/amya (It's $14.95 after 30 days, but you can cancel before then and have it cost you nothing.)
Don't miss last week's show with Dr. Francesca Gino.
Adorably, we humans see ourselves as rational animals. Research shows us to be anything but.
We are swayed in ways we wouldn't expect in both our decision-making and how well we stick to our plans.
The good news is, the research also shows that our going off track happens in predictable ways. My guest, Harvard Business School professor, Dr. Francesca Gino, both lays out the forces that sidetrack us as we're trying to accomplish our goals and offers guidelines that we can use to keep ourselves on track.
Dr. Gino's recently-published book on this subject is Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Join us tonight and have your eyes opened about the psychological, social, and environmental stumbling blocks that keep us from getting where we want to go.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/10/dr-francesca-gino-on-how-to-make-wise-decisions-and-stick-to-them
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.
Evil Koch Brothers Are Only 59th Biggest Political Donors In America
Who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Koch brothers, who gave $18 million in political donations? Mark Tapscott writes in the WashEx:
Six of the top 10 are ... wait for it ... unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.Sign Up for the Morning Examiner newsletter!
These are familiar names: AFSCME ($60.6 million), NEA ($53.5 million), IBEW ($44.4 million), UAW ($41.6 million), Carpenters & Joiners ($39.2 million) and SEIU ($38.3 million).In other words, the six biggest union donors in American politics gave 15 times more to mostly Democrats than the Evil Koch Bros.
Other slots in the top 10 were occupied by AT&T, the National Association of Realtors, and Goldman Sachs.
So, if money is the measure of evil in American politics and the Evil Koch Bros only come in 59th, who is really the most evil donor ever?Turns out it's Act Blue, with just short of $100 million in contributions during its lifetime, which only started in 2004, 15 years after the Evil Koch Bros in the OpenSecrets.org compilation.
Any bets on when Mayer's "Covert Operations II: Act Blue" will appear in the New Yorker?
via @veroderugy
Police Brutality: A Good Samaritan Gets Stomped On And Thrown In Jail
There's a chilling and compelling long read on Medium about a San Francisco man who saw victims of a biking accident, tried to help them by calling 911, and became a victim of police brutality and was thrown in jail. Here's a small excerpt from Peretz Partensky's piece, "Good Samaritan Backfire or How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 for Help":
After 12 hours in jail, more than 6 of them in solitary confinement, the process of checking out was unremarkable. I signed a few papers. Retrieved my backpack. Confirmed the contents -- laptop, wallet, phone, books and keys."The charges will be dropped if you show up on Tuesday. If you don't show up, there will be a warrant for your arrest," I was casually informed.
"Deputy, should I have been here in the first place?"
"No"
It was almost too good to hear. "Then why did I end up here?"
"You have to consider the source." This phrase I remember verbatim.
"How do you mean?"
"I mean, there are a lot of young cops on the street, trying to make a name for themselves."
He did the important thing in the end -- file a complaint. (I interviewed a number of cops for my upcoming book and she says it is very important to do when you experience any sort of misconduct.)
So far, he's had no redress, but I'm hoping he will find some in the Court of Public Opinion -- and have it lead to some disciplinary action (ideally firing) against these officers:
I painstakingly retrieved all possible documentation, including: the police report, transcript of radio chatter, audio of my 911 call, security footage from Radius restaurant (handed to me freely by the owner), Rebecca's and Josh's feedback, and collected photos from the incident and my injuries.I presented all of this to the SF Office of Citizen Complaints. The filing party is not allowed to know the outcome due to the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights (POBAR) but may be notified if an internal investigation is initiated. Many months have passed since my complaint, and I have no sense of progress.
At this point, I'm left no choice but to present this case to the investigative court of public opinion, be it brave or foolish.
His conclusions:
In the hope that it might help some other idealistic, nerdy people from following me down that rabbit hole, I conclude with several public service announcements:•Don't call 911. Obviously, there are exceptions, but the sad lesson is, there are fewer than you'd think.
•Call Lyft to take you to the hospital. (Worked well when I broke my elbow.)
•Take such incidents to trial, where justice isn't veiled by the POBAR. It's not a matter of litigious vindictiveness. It's just the only available way. The SF Office of Citizen Complaints is not a valid alternative.
•Consider wearing a video camera at all times. It has been shown that when police wear cameras and are aware of being filmed, it moderates their behavior. As self reports of the need to use force decrease, so do complaints.
There's A Right To Bear, Not Just Keep, Arms
Walter Olson writes at Cato that the Ninth Circuit Court just recognized the right to actually bear arms:
California law forbids the carrying of firearms in public places without a license and provides that the issuance of such a license requires "good cause." San Diego County, as part of its implementation of that law, has set a number of restrictive policies on what it will consider good cause, which must be exceptional circumstances ("distinguish[ed]... from the mainstream"), and it specifies that concern for "one's personal safety alone is not considered good cause."That's a policy in considerable tension with the language of the Second Amendment, which protects individuals' right not only to "keep" arms, but also to "bear" them. What does the verb "bear" mean in this context? That has given rise to considerable dispute, and some federal courts, such as the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, appear to believe that it provides very little protection for individuals' right to possess guns outside the home.
The Ninth Circuit says that the bearing off arms can't be relegated to a "second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause."
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh on "Turning San Francisco Into San Antonio" hysteria:
Now it might well be that the court will rehear the case, but I think it's important to realize that shall-issue isn't just a "San Antonio" matter. One could as easily say "turning San Francisco into Portland," "turning San Francisco into Seattle," or "turning San Francisco into Burlington, Vermont."In Oregon, pretty much any law-abiding adult can get a license to carry concealed. In Washington State, this has long been the rule. And in Vermont, people have pretty much always been able to carry concealed guns even without a license.
Perhaps I've missed the news, but I don't think people are gunning each other down in the streets in these places.
Milkie
Cow pies and other fine desserts.
Idiocy For Idiots
NBC Los Angeles (with annoying autoplay video at link):
California would become the first state to require warning labels on sodas and other sugary drinks under a proposal a state lawmaker announced Thursday.SB1000 would require the warning on the front of all beverage containers with added sweeteners that have 75 or more calories in every 12 ounces. The label would read: "STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.''
Like we all confuse sugary drinks with broccoli!
Somebody Has To Pay For Health Care Costs
As a self-employed person, I've paid directly every month for my own for decades -- although it's now become unaffordable thanks to how I'm now being forced to pay for everybody else's.
The turkey that is the "Affordable" Care Act is providing health care in the 21st century, when many people are freelancers, as if it's "work till you get a gold watch" 1952. Yes, healthcare is still tied to the workplace. When somebody leaves their job, which happens with frequency these days, they lose their health care and have to start over with the provider at the new business.
At one business forced to provide health care for their employees, the LA restaurant Republique, they're passing health care costs along to customers, with a 3% surcharge added on to every bill, reports LAist.
They quote a KPCC piece:
"I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you this has been an aspiration to solve this issue over the years, so you don't get ruined by rising health care costs," said Chait.Under Obamacare, businesses like Republique with more than 50 full-time employees have to offer affordable health care benefits or pay fines. (This week, that mandate was delayed again, to 2016)
Customer reaction, from the KPCC piece:
"I was very surprised," said a customer sitting nearby, sipping a latte. (She asked not to be identified) "Quite honestly, I had an immediate reaction that was not positive."On Yelp, online reviewers have been less kind, calling the surcharge "obnoxious" and "tacky."
"It is not MY responsibility to take care of YOUR employee's health care. That is YOUR job," wrote one reviewer, continuing, "I will not be returning because of the 3% charge."
Your reaction?
Bush Patrol
I'm getting a lot of calls that I referred to in "I See Rude People" as "the business of abuse" -- survey calls that hijack a phone line you pay for, interrupt your life, and steal your time.
I have a new tactic, and it's fun. I turn it into a sex call. I started out asking the woman, "Are you wearing any panties" and then got into whether or not she was bucking the trend to go back to the full bush.
Click!
"Grand Juries Subvert The Criminal Justice System"
Terrific post at Techdirt by Tim Cushing on how grand juries turn "the merely accused into de facto criminals, indistinguishable from the other prisoners except for the fact that many of their new 'peers' have likely had a chance to avail themselves of their constitutional rights."
He notes that a North Carolina grand jury cranked out 276 indictments in four hours -- roughly one every 52 seconds. Cushing continues:
Some commenters pointed out (correctly) that grand juries don't actually declare anyone "guilty." They just determine whether the prosecution has enough evidence to bring the case to trial.But the system is still broken. Grand juries may not hand out guilty verdicts, but they do have the power to imprison people for an indefinite amount of time simply by indicting them. This is exactly what happened to Justin Carter, the teen charged with making terroristic threats after someone reported statements he made while trash-talking with some fellow League of Legends players. The Dallas Observer has been tracking this case (via Reason), and the phrases below are what have been termed "terroristic threats."
One of the comments appears to be a response to an earlier comment in which someone called Carter crazy. Carter's retort was: "I'm fucked in the head alright, I think I'ma SHOOT UP A KINDERGARTEN [sic]."Carter followed with "AND WATCH THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT RAIN DOWN."
Carter was indicted by a grand jury based solely on these statements. (Police failed to uncover anything else damning after searching Carter's residence.) According to Carter's lawyer, the prosecutor presented the "threats" using a couple of screenshots wholly removed from context to the grand jury, which found these met the requirements of the "terroristic threat" charge.
But Flanary says that Bates presented a truncated version of the comments to grand jurors. They did not see "I'm fucked in the head alright, I think I'ma" before "shoot up a kindergarten." If this sounds like the nitpicking of a defense attorney, that's precisely the point."When you're dealing with speech," Flanary says, "... it is absolutely, 100 percent important that the words that you are charging people with are actually the words that they said and not some misrepresentation. And that's what ... this prosecutor did, is misrepresent to the grand jury what he said."
So, the grand jury indicted Carter and the prosecutor asked for $500,000 bail. Carter was jailed in February of 2013 (the first month of which he spent unindicted while officials sorted out jurisdictional issues), where he was beaten, raped, put in solitary for his own protection and placed on suicide watch. He wasn't released until July when an anonymous donor paid the bail.
Read his whole piece. It's sick how this system is being used to subvert justice.
Previous Cushing post on grand juries here, which he rightfully refers to an entity most notable for its willingness to "indict a ham sandwich." (That quote is Tom Wolfe quoting New York State judge Sol Wachtler in The Bonfire of the Vanities
Next They'll Sue Fork Manufacturers
Trial lawyers are going after Big Food. An IBD editorial:
"Lawyers," Politico reported Wednesday, "are pitching state attorneys general in 16 states with a radical idea: Make the food industry pay for soaring obesity-related health care costs."The objective, says Politico, is to punish the "food and beverage companies" -- Big Food -- that have, "to some extent, contributed to the nation's obesity crisis" and force them to "pay for the costs of that portion."
This hustle is being led by Paul McDonald, a partner at Valorem Law Group in Chicago. His firm has sent the pitchmen out across the country to recruit for the scheme.
McDonald wants the food industry to pay for the "cost of what they're doing," which he says "the taxpayers are paying for."
We're all for taxpayer relief anytime and always.
But let's not get carried away by the promises of healthier food and lower taxes. If the state attorneys general take on this crusade, it will become a shakedown that merely lines trial lawyers' pockets in the mold of the $246 billion tobacco settlement.
Of course, nobody's mentioning that it was the government and the AMA that pushed the notion -- based in scientific hearsay, not scientific evidence -- that Americans should eat a low-fat, high-carb diet: precisely the diet that makes us fat and diabetic.
I eat low-carb and high fat, and it keeps me from getting hungry and helps me remain effortlessly thin.
And let's be effortlessly honest -- this is about who trial lawyers can wring money from. Ted Frank at the Center for Class Action Fairness has shown that big settlements mostly go to the lawyers and, often, little or nothing goes to the class they're supposedly suing on behalf of.
via @reasonpolicy
Blinkie
One-Eyed Jacks.
In Favor Of A Minimum Income
I was shocked that Veronique de Rugy, an economist I have great respect for, likes the idea the Swiss have of a minimum payment to poor people, but her explanation actually makes sense. We'd cut bureaucracy by far and save money by doing this.
The problem, as I see it, is that there's a vast poverty industry to support -- people who earn their living in the government's welfare bureaucracy.
Here's a Mercatus article de Rugy tweeted a link to, "Does an income tax make people work less?"
De Rugy and I tweeted a bit yesterday and she wrote this:
@veroderugy
@amyalkon @MattMitchell80 I actually have mix feelings about mi. In theory, awesome, in practice depending on implementation not so awesome
And then this:
@veroderugy
@amyalkon @MattMitchell80 we shouldn't give up on the idea because it is the right one. This month reason column is on this.
Steal This Idea: Any Old Day Should Be Valentine's Day
People who have to go big on Valentine's Day are either those whose partner buys into it or those who have spent the year neglecting their partner and their relationship.
I find Valentine's Day utterly unimportant and rather annoying, and when I heard Gregg had a trip he needed to take around Valentine's Day, I encouraged him to take it then. (He knows holidays don't mean much to me, but, vis a vis the way a lot of women are, I think it's still sometimes hard for him to believe.)
About the any old day thing: A few nights ago, Gregg texted me a short video of himself walking toward the airport terminal. And when I say short, it was probably six or eight seconds, and he said only two words: "Ice cream."
I squealed and ran for the freezer.
He'd left me a small chocolate ice cream.
Wonderful surprise. I love the little simple surprises like this, and I bet other people do, too. They tell you the person you're with is thinking about making you happy, and not just because there's an official day for that where they're likely to get in a lot of shit if they don't.
It's Awful, What Some People Do To Their Pets
I'm horribly mean -- for Aida's own good. The only time she gets people food is if she's fast enough when Gregg drops some tiny scrap on the floor when he's making dinner. (This doesn't usually happen anyway, because he immediately banishes both of us from the kitchen when he starts cooking.)
People think it's cute and sweet to give their pet table scraps or to let them eat food unmonitored, whether or not that works for the particular pet. Lucy, my late sweet Yorkie, would just stop eating when she was no longer hungry. Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested, is a little piggy who now gets fed out of a food toy she has to push around with her little pom-pom paws to make her little food pellets come out. (For a while, I was saying, "Eat!" and "Stop!" to slow her eating down, but that was a little dull and time-consuming for me.)
Anyway, what inspired this post was a piece in The Atlantic about fat pets. Lindsay Abrams writes that 50 percent of U.S. dogs and cats are overweight. There are some poor, sad fat pets pictured in the piece, too -- just awful to see.
It's this kind of indulgent irresponsibility on the part of owners that makes for sick, uncomfortable, obese pets:
Maverick, a cat enrolled in the Pet Fit Club, was declared by his vet to be the biggest cat he had ever seen. His owners couldn't help but give in to his cries for more food than he needed, until he reached the point where he was having trouble breathing. And even for a cat, he was sleeping too much.
I love this little doggie and have a responsibility to her and part of it is to be judiciously "mean." 
Minkie
Don't let the sharp teeth bite you on the way out.
Truth And Consequences Or Better Left Unsaid?
If the person you're in a relationship with was on a business trip, drank way too much, and kissed somebody at a bar...but is mortified, has never cheated on anyone before, doesn't normally overdo the drinking, and is highly unlikely to repeat that behavior, would you still want to know?
Anti-Free Speech Thuggery
I can't tell who this was a painting of (maybe Gaddafi?), but even if you or I find person pictured the worst human being ever and highly offensive to display on a wall, painting is speech.
You neither have a right to silence somebody's speech by yelling over them so they can't be heard nor by vandalizing their art.
As I've posted here many times before, answer to speech you don't like is more speech -- picketing the painting, writing an op-ed about it, posting signs condemning it around the neighborhood, or any number of other options.
I Love This Girl: UK 13-Year-Old Refuses To Let Big Brother Take Her Fingerprints
Justin King writes at Digital Journal:
Cardiff - Since 2012, over 800,000 children have had their biometric data taken by the government in the United Kingdom via the school system. One 13-year-old girl is refusing to comply with the demands.
King gets a few words from the girl, Melody, whose last name is being withheld due to her age. (King's questions are in italics):
So what made you decide to not comply with the school's demand to surrender your fingerprints?They are taking children's privacy away, collecting their data. Apparently the school will not keep your fingerprint after you have left school, this I doubt very much. Treating us like criminals is not acceptable, but people my age see past this; all they think is that it's 'awesome' or 'easy', but this is just what the school/government wants you to think. This new theory of cutting down school dinner lines has failed, there are actually even more people waiting to buy their food. I refuse to let the school take my fingerprint and collect my data.
Were other students aware of your plans?
Yes, I had told a few of my close friends what I was going to do. In all fairness, I had a lot of support from my friends; they helped calm my nerves and supported me.
Did other students refuse to give their fingerprints?Many didn't want their fingerprints taken, but on the day when the fingerprinting was to take place, there was only me and a friend. And she has now had her fingerprints taken, this is the case with many kids, they don't expect their parents to agree with it, but they're wrong. I'm currently one of very few who are not going to have their fingerprints taken, but I'm happy to stand up for what I believe in.
Do you think it was worth it if you are punished?
It will be worth it, I'm glad I gained the courage to do this.
So many people are so complacent about the government violating our civil liberties. This girl is to be commended -- and imitated.
via ifeminists
Watch Store Operator Shoots Five Robbers
Compelling bit from an old TV show in which Lance Thomas, a Los Angeles store owner, defends himself, his employees, and his customers with guns, multiple times:
An LAPD detective on Thomas and these incidents: "All the suspects had extensive criminal records. They knew what they were doing. They just didn't know who they were doing it with."
He cautions that people who get guns need to be prepared to deal with a confrontation -- and he spent many hours doing that.
The New Normal Is The Old Crazy: Obamacare's Latest Imposition On Businesses
The Treasury department uses the penalty of perjury as a big stick to push businesses around -- to keep employing employees they can no longer afford under Obamacare.
An IBD editorial:
Overreach: In what may be considered an ObamaCare loyalty oath, the Treasury Department orders employers to attest that any employee layoffs are not due to its imposed costs under penalty of perjury.The first rule of business is to stay in business, something which is accomplished by doing what government is incapable of doing -- controlling costs and making a profit by giving customers a product or service they need or want.
ObamaCare is obviously a product neither business nor the individual wants, so coercion is necessary under penalty of law.
Enforced by the Internal Revenue Service, individuals must enroll in government-approved plans or be fined.
Individuals are not allowed, despite presidential promises, to keep the plans and doctors they like and can afford.
Instead, they must accept plans they don't like and can't afford, some getting subsidies extracted from other taxpayers or China. They must grin and bear their reduced health care choices and higher costs.
Even though ObamaCare's employer mandate has once again been illegally and unconstitutionally extended by the president who would be king, business still faces ObamaCare's punitive cost increases down the road and its own form of government coercion.
Layoffs are an unfortunate but sometimes necessary means for a business to control costs and stay in business.
On Monday, a Treasury Department unconcerned with the necessities of the free market said that businesses will need to "certify" that they are not shedding full-time workers simply to avoid the mandate and its costs.
No, your business is no longer your own, and neither are your hiring, layoff, and firing decisions.
Writer Amnesia: I Get It Every Single Week.
Writer amnesia is what I call it when I think I'm too stupid, unfunny, and underclever to pull some piece of writing together -- same as I thought before I pulled some piece of writing together the previous week. And the week before. And the week before.
This is what a timer is for -- writing with a timer, that is. I set mine for an hour and then just make myself keep going. I downloaded one that I have in the top left of my screen so I can see how I'm progressing timewise.
Well, as usual, yesterday, after feeling hopeless about a question for my column I was working on, I pretty much cracked it with 17:33 minutes left. (It had taken me a few hours before that to get it to the point where I had the first line and some pieces to go into it.)
I'm reminded of my friend Susan Shapiro's late uncle's advice. He's novelist Howard Fast
Fast told her that there's no such thing as writer's block. "A plumber never gets plumber's block." ... "A page a day is a book a year."
He's right. And the answer to doing it is that you just have to do it. Make yourself do it. The timer really helps. And it's good for other tasks, too. When I'm bone-tired but still have reading to do, I'll set it for an hour, or sometimes 30 minutes. (There's a point at which you're too tired to be productive, but usually, you're just an emotionally wussy. Like I can be -- without my jackbooted timer.)
Linkguini
Pasta with crazy sauce.
There's Always Room For Corporate Welfare!
Stossel at TownHall:
During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that Congress and the media made sound so tough -- as if every last penny were pinched -- Congress still managed to slip in plenty of special deals for cronies.--NASCAR got $70 million for new racetracks.
--Algae growers got $60 million.
--Hollywood film producers got a $430 million tax break.
There's Nothing So Racist As Affordable Healthy And Even Gourmet Food
The fab grocery chain Trader Joe's has cancelled plans to open a store in a poor neighborhood in Portland after protests from the community. Palash Ghosh writes in IBTimes:
The Portland African American Leadership Forum (PAALF) objected to the proposed development partly because it feared that the new retail complex would eventually push up rental prices in the area and drive out the local black community....Former state senator Avel Gordly of PAALF said at a press conference that the plan to open a Trader Joe's was "just the latest in this long history" of businesses and political leaders driving out black people in the name of economic progress in Portland. "In the past, we have settled for far less," Gordly added. "This is a people's movement for African-Americans and other communities, for self-determination."
...However, some neighborhood residents said they were looking forward to Trader Joe's opening and resented the PAALF's stance. "All of my neighbors were excited to have Trader Joe's come here and replace a lot that has always been empty," said Nghi Tran. "It's good quality for poor men." (The property has been vacant for 20 years.) Tran, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, blasted the PAALF, noting, "They don't come to the neighborhood clean-ups. They don't [even] live here anymore."
Some local businessmen also expressed their frustration. "There are no winners today," said Adam Milne, owner of Old Town Brewing Co., which is located near the proposed Trader Joe's complex. "Only missed tax revenue, lost jobs, less foot traffic, an empty lot and a boulevard still struggling to support its local small businesses."
I'm reminded of the talk about "food deserts," and Caitlin Flanagan's piece in The Atlantic on the healthy and affordable food at both the Ralph's grocery store and the Superior Super food warehouse store in Compton. (Scroll down to end of post.)
Related -- Dalrymple from 2002: "The Starving Criminal."
Andrew Gumbel On The Amanda Knox And Raffaele Sollecito Trials And What Passes For Justice In Italy
My friend Andrew Gumbel, a thoughtful and meticulous journalist who spent five years as a correspondent in Italy, co-wrote Raffaele Sollecito's book about his trial and Amanda Knox's. At LA Review of Books, Gumbel takes on "the Nightmare of Italian Justice" that is and has been the trials of Amanda Knox and Sollecito:
ANYONE FOLLOWING THE BYZANTINE TRIALS of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student accused with her onetime boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of murdering her roommate in Perugia, will have noticed that criminal justice in Italy doesn't work the way it does in other countries. First they were guilty, then they weren't, now they are again. In the United States, this is commonly referred to as double jeopardy and is barred under the Constitution. In Italy, it's pretty much business as usual.When the pair was first arrested, more than six years ago, they were left to rot in jail and for months -- in Sollecito's case in solitary confinement -- before charges were brought. They didn't qualify for bail because bail does not exist in Italy. The prosecution regularly leaked information to the media but did not formally share its investigative findings with the defendants or their lawyers until the summer of 2008, by which time the public was broadly convinced they were no ordinary college students, but rather, depraved sex addicts who had forced the victim, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, into a satanic orgy before brutally stabbing her to death.
To this day, it remains doubtful whether evidence ever existed to substantiate such a scenario.
The case went to trial with the prosecution refusing, despite repeated requests, to hand over the raw data on which it based its forensic analysis. The data was crucial because the prosecution claimed it had found traces of Kercher's DNA on the tip of a kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon (Knox's DNA was on the handle), and traces of Sollecito's DNA on a torn bra strap recovered from the crime scene. Neither claim would survive independent scrutiny.
That scrutiny, though, did not come until after Knox and Sollecito had already been convicted.
...The latest developments in the case are, if anything, more perplexing still. The principal forensic evidence against Knox and Sollecito was thrown out on appeal, along with much of the eyewitness testimony, after it was shown to be false, unreliable and, quite possibly, spun out of whole cloth. That's why the two defendants were exonerated, and why Knox was able to fly home to the United States at the end of 2011. But it was not the end of the story. Under Italian law, no verdict is considered "definitive" until it has been reviewed and approved by the high court. And the high court elected last March, as it often does, to send the case back for retrial at the appellate level. By this point the evidence against Knox and Sollecito was in tatters, and nothing new had emerged to incriminate them further. Yet the new appeals court in Florence decided that they were guilty anyway and, under the same bright media spotlight that has shone since day one, recommended sentences of 28-1/2 years for Knox and 25 years for Sollecito.
Gumbel makes the point that the Italian "justice" system operates like this day in and day out. They don't really like the idea of "reasonable doubt," and though it was a standard introduce as legal reform in 2006, they kind of seem to ignore it. In fact, Gumbel points out, in these cases, there was no physical evidence placing Knox and Sollecito at the scene, but prosecutors ignored this and pretty much wrote fiction -- what could have happened if the two had been there.
He also points out that Knox, at the time of the murder, was 20 years old and an American exchange student, and had known Sollecito for only a week. Is it really plausible to you that, at the point two young people barely know the basic details about each other, that there's, oh, nothing on TV one night so they brutally murder one of their roommates?
The Government Lets Itself Get Shafted On Penis Pumps
There's no money that spends quite as easily as other people's.
Paula Span writes in The New York Times that the government has overpaid for penis pumps.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services dispatched its Office of Inspector General to review Medicare payments for vacuum erection systems, less formally known as penis pumps. Its recent report revealed that Medicare was paying "grossly excessive" prices for these devices (which draw blood into the penis, creating an erection that allows a man to have intercourse).From 2006 through 2011, the investigators found, Medicare paid on average $451 per pump. Medicare beneficiaries were responsible for a $90 co-pay; Medicare put up the remaining $361. That was more than twice what the Department of Veterans Affairs paid per pump: $186. Searching online, the investigators found that consumers could buy similar pumps for even less.
And Medicare paid for a whole lot of these items -- more than 473,000 pumps over six years. Had it paid what others paid, the Inspector General's report concluded, taxpayers could have saved more than $14 million and beneficiaries almost $4 million each year.
Even the highly rated ones can be had for far less at Amazon
Up, up, and awaaaaaaay!
Linkiemath
Here's one to start the polymathery.
No Need To Go Topless, Ladies
New markdowns on ladies tops and sweaters -- and jeans, dresses, and more at Amazon
Oh, and now, there's also today's Amazon Deal Of The Day: 75% off Men's
Victory For The Little Guy Tax Preparer
I love how the Institute for Justice goes to bat for the little guy against federal and state licensing schemes.
If you look closely at these and who's behind them, you'll see they're usually designed to protect, no, not the consumers, but the businesses of people already in business from people trying to compete with them.
The latest from the IJ is a ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the IRS had no legal authority to impose a nationwide licensing scheme on tax-return preparers.
From an IJ email:
The decision affirms a January 2013 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, which struck down the IRS's new regulations as unlawful. Both courts rejected the agency's shocking claim that tax-preparer licensure was authorized by an obscure 1884 statute governing the representatives of Civil War soldiers seeking compensation for dead horses.
Background here at the IJ's site:
Congress never gave the IRS the authority to license tax preparers, and the IRS can't give itself that power.But in 2011, the IRS imposed a sweeping new licensing scheme that forces tax preparers to get IRS permission before they can work. This is an unlawful power grab that exceeds the authority granted to the IRS by Congress.
The burden of compliance will fall most heavily on independent tax return preparers and small businesses. Unsurprisingly, big firms such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt support the licensing scheme. As The Wall Street Journal explained: "Cheering the new regulations are big tax preparers like H&R Block, who are only too happy to see the feds swoop in to put their mom-and-pop seasonal competitors out of business."
These regulations are typical government protectionism. They benefit powerful industry insiders and at the expense of entrepreneurs and consumers, who will likely have fewer options and face higher prices. But tax preparers have a right to earn an honest living without getting permission from the IRS. And taxpayers--not the IRS--should be the ones who decide who prepares their taxes.
That is why on March 13, 2012, three independent tax preparers joined the Institute for Justice in filing suit against the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Government Fingers In Everybody's Business
I hate public cell phone calls with every inch of my being and then some, but it is not government's business to tell private businesses where they can and cannot allow them.
Naturally, that's just what they're doing -- with a House committee marking up a bill today to prevent cell phone calls on planes, Prohibiting In-Flight Voice Communications on Mobile Wireless Devices Act (H.R. 3676).
Marc Scribner writes at Open Market:
The bill would bar travelers from making cell phone calls on commercial flights--a response to the Federal Communications Commission's recent proposal to relax its longstanding ban on in-flight cell phone use.H.R. 3676 purports to solve a problem that doesn't exist by depriving consumers of travel choices, as I explained recently in an op-ed in USA Today. To be sure, I sympathize with travelers who fear being stuck next to a chattering bore for a long flight. However, the FCC's deregulatory steps wouldn't require any airline to offer voice calls in-flight; rather, the new rules would merely permit airlines to experiment with in-flight calling if they so choose.
The bill's sponsors concede that some in-flight phone calls are acceptable, exempting Airfone-style in-seat phone calls from the ban. If voice calls on commercial flights are so bad, why continue to allow some passengers to make them on some planes?
Supporters of the bill have fretted about the prospect of passengers loudly yakking away on long in-flight cell phone calls. Yet the technology that enables in-flight cell phone calls usually charges roaming rates for voice calls, discouraging passengers from spending hours on the phone.
...According to a major flight attendants' union, the bill is needed to prevent the "air rage" that will supposedly ensue if cell phone calls are allowed during flight. But the FAA examined this theory as well; its study could not identify a single instance of "air rage" occurring due to in-flight voice communications in the countries where these services have been available since 2008.
If you are sitting next to me on a plane forcing me to listen to your loud public cell phone call, what will happen is that I will record you and post it on YouTube for all to hear -- in hopes of deterring others from doing the same.
And if there are some airlines that allow cell phone calls in flight and others that do not, those others will get my business.
No government needed whatsoever...see?!
The President Who Would Be King
From the WSJ, the President is a "do as he wants" not "do as the laws say" kind of guy. He's been busy rewriting Obamacare to suit himself:
"ObamaCare" is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law's employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever.ObamaCare requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, but last summer the Treasury offered a year-long delay until 2015 despite having no statutory authorization. Like the individual mandate, the employer decree is central to ObamaCare's claim of universal coverage, but employers said the new labor costs--and the onerous reporting and tax-enforcement rules--would damage job creation and the economy.
Liberals insisted that such arguments were false if not beneath contempt, but then all of a sudden the White House implicitly endorsed the other side. Now the new delay arrives amid a furious debate about jobs after a damning Congressional Budget Office report last week, only this time with liberals celebrating ObamaCare's supposed benefits to the job market.
Well, which is it? Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker's paradise, in which case by the White House's own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.
Meanwhile, Obamacare is screwing over people like me who don't work for a company or get their healthcare through it. William Kristol and Jeffrey H. Anderson ask at The Weekly Standard:
Why should millions of Americans who get insurance through their employer get a tax break, while millions who buy it on their own through the individual market do not?
Yes, it's 21st century healthcare, designed for 1952. Thanks so much, Obama!
Hello, Fellow Infidels!
Alan Caruba explains at Canada Free Press:
What does it say about Islam that both the Super Bowl in America and the winter Olympics in Russia require massive security against an attack by jihadists?What most people in America and the West have not been able to grasp is Islam's hatred of the infidel--the unbeliever. It has existed for fourteen centuries. On top of that is the schism within Islam between Sunnis, the majority of Muslims, and Shiites.
Because few among us have actually lived among the Muslims of the Middle East our understanding of that particular element of Islam, Arabs and Persians, is gained only by the daily headlines of the way they kill one another in those nations where the Sunnis and Shiites are locked in a war to gain or retain power.
While Islam looks and sounds like a religion, it is more a political and economic entity concerned with controlling those populations where it is dominant, largely keeping them unable to resist the despots, monarchs, and clerics in charge. Iran's Supreme Leader, for example, is worth billions.
What the West has yet to grasp is its intent on world domination. That is why jihad--the so-called holy war--is a central pillar of faith.
This sounds like crazy talk. It's not -- for anyone who's done any measure of reading in the Quran and Hadith and about the history of Islam.
Sphinxie
The Lynx That Regresses.
NSA Spying Is Dangerous Beyond Citizens' Privacy Concerns
Law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds points out in USA Today that there's a threat to our constitutional separation of powers, making it easier for the President to spy on and blackmail his enemies:
As the Framers conceived it, our system of government is divided into three branches -- the executive, legislative and judicial -- each of which is designed to serve as a check on the others. If the president gets out of control, Congress can defund his efforts, or impeach him, and the judiciary can declare his acts unconstitutional. If Congress passes unconstitutional laws, the president can veto them, or refuse to enforce them, and the judiciary, again, can declare them invalid. If the judiciary gets carried away, the president can appoint new judges, and Congress can change the laws, or even impeach.But if the federal government has broad domestic-spying powers, and if those are controlled by the executive branch without significant oversight, then the president has the power to snoop on political enemies, getting an advantage in countering their plans, and gathering material that can be used to blackmail or destroy them. With such power in the executive, the traditional role of the other branches as checks would be seriously undermined, and our system of government would veer toward what James Madison in The Federalist No. 47 called "the very definition of tyranny," that is, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands."
...Rather than counting on leakers to protect us, we need strong structural controls that don't depend on people being heroically honest or unusually immune to political temptation, two characteristics not in oversupply among our political class. That means that the government shouldn't be able to spy on Americans without a warrant -- a warrant that comes from a different branch of government, and requires probable cause. The government should also have to keep a clear record of who was spied on, and why, and of exactly who had access to the information once it was gathered. We need the kind of extensive audit trails for access to information that, as the Edward Snowden experience clearly illustrates, don't currently exist.
I especially liked this idea he included:
In addition, we need civil damages -- with, perhaps, a waiver of governmental immunities -- for abuse of power here. Perhaps we should have bounties for whistleblowers, too, to help encourage wrongdoing to be aired.
Honey, I Blew Up The Kids!
Instructor accidentally blows up the students he's teaching to blow themselves up at suicide bomber training camp.
Duraid Adnan writes for The New York Times:
BAGHDAD -- A group of Sunni militants attending a suicide bombing training class at a camp north of Baghdad were killed on Monday when their commander unwittingly conducted a demonstration with a belt that was packed with explosives, army and police officials said.The militants belonged to a group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which is fighting the Shiite-dominated army of the Iraqi government, mostly in Anbar Province. But they are also linked to bomb attacks elsewhere and other fighting that has thrown Iraq deeper into sectarian violence.
Twenty-two ISIS members were killed, and 15 were wounded, in the explosion at the camp, which is in a farming area in the northeastern province of Samara, according to the police and army officials.
From SomaliAtheism:
They call this "Shuhaada" in which a mass murderer is placing himself/herself in the front seat of Allah's heaven where killers are (allegedly, no facts whatsoever as no one has ever come back from dead) rewarded with all sorts of Earthly rewards including wine, women (72 - all proven virgin by Allah!), sweets and other assortments of the prefered kind by men of the ancient Mid Eastern desert tribes. There has been no confirmation of any type whether female suicide bombers will also receive 72 virgin men each, although the mere mention and question would most likely warrant death. This is the reason why almost all suicide bombers are young males. There is no clear explanation as to whether a male suicide bomber who has had more than 72 virgin females on Earth would be offered additional virgins to either match or surpass previous numbers. Regardless, no better way to get closer to Allah than mass murder.The killer is talking about great battles that have allegedly taken place in the area in which he claims that 700 Muslims outnumbered 3,000 mushrikiin (kufars.) Islam is full of similar stories about "great battles" obviously designed to motivate the brainwashed gullible fools. Well-crafted legendary stories of Islamic figures or small group of Muslim fighters overcoming powerful opponents. The youth would later emulate the heroic fighters one of which the Islamic terrorist in the video mentions. They romanticise about following the footsteps of great "Muslim warriors" to get to the Janna.
Soap Opera Diplomacy: Ambassadorships To Big Election Fundraisers Rather Than The Qualified
Darren Smith guest posts at Jonathan Turley's blog about the latest Caroline Kennedy to be nominated to an ambassadorship:
President Obama nominated Noah Mamet to become the next Ambassador to Argentina. In a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday Mr. Mamet stated that though he traveled extensively around the world he had not the opportunity yet to travel there. He was successful in generating much cash for then Candidate Obama's first election campaign, reported to be in 2008 $500,000.00 and for the re-election campaign of President Obama another $500,000.00 in 2012.Yet Mr. Mamet is not unique in his past travels. In January George Tsunis, President Obama's nominee for the Ambassador to Norway, stated to Senator John McCain during questioning that he had not been to Norway but more importantly the hotel magnate showed his lack of complete knowledge of Norway's government when he made reference to Norway as having a president, it is a constitutional monarchy, and earned the ire of at least one Scandinavian newspaper referring to what it described as a "'faltering, incoherent performance." Another mistake was to declare the Norwegian Progress Party as being having "fringe elements" that "spew their hatred" when in fact seven of Norway's cabinet ministers are members of this party. But despite this he won Senate confirmation. He too is a successful bundler of campaign contributions: $50,000.00 to Senator John McCain's campaign and over $1,000,000.00 for President Obama's.
Why isn't this called out for the political sleaze it is?
Is everybody too busy watching the Kardashians?
Smith winds up with this -- and he's absolutely right:
It is not only a credibility issue for the United States it is also frankly perceived by some nations as an insult to their government and nation. That is the United States did not respect their nation enough to provide the best diplomat available to them but instead toffered a much less diplomatically qualified ambassador they view as a crony. The ambassador was not offered to benefit their nation but reward a political ally, and certainly not a highly capable diplomat as their country has endeavored to provide to the United States.And it remains a question as to how well these candidates would control a diplomatic crisis in these nations, such as when a civil disorder or upheaval faced the country and consequently the United States. It is one thing to be successful in handling public relations and business crises, but it is much more magnified in geopolitical politics where entire nations are involved. Could these candidates be successful in such circumstances and are the United State's interests best served by a less than the best candidate available?
It would be of benefit to rely more on a merit system to staff our diplomatic corps rather than the spoils system often used. Outcomes are certainly indicative of priorities in our government.
Taubes: Why Nutrition Is So Confusing
One of the things I respect most about Gary Taubes is how driven I see he is to root out and tell the truth -- the best evidence-based truth he can get his hands on.
He is one of those people who will tell you straight out when he doesn't know. In this, he's in the minority.
Taubes writes in The New York Times:
Back in the 1960s, when researchers first took seriously the idea that dietary fat caused heart disease, they acknowledged that such trials were necessary and studied the feasibility for years. Eventually the leadership at the National Institutes of Health concluded that the trials would be too expensive -- perhaps a billion dollars -- and might get the wrong answer anyway. They might botch the study and never know it. They certainly couldn't afford to do two such studies, even though replication is a core principle of the scientific method. Since then, advice to restrict fat or avoid saturated fat has been based on suppositions about what would have happened had such trials been done, not on the studies themselves.Nutritionists have adjusted to this reality by accepting a lower standard of evidence on what they'll believe to be true. They do experiments with laboratory animals, for instance, following them for the better part of the animal's lifetime -- a year or two in rodents, say -- and assume or at least hope that the results apply to humans. And maybe they do, but we can't know for sure without doing the human experiments.
They do experiments on humans -- the species of interest -- for days or weeks or even a year or two and then assume that the results apply to decades. And maybe they do, but we can't know for sure. That's a hypothesis, and it must be tested.
And they do what are called observational studies, observing populations for decades, documenting what people eat and what illnesses beset them, and then assume that the associations they observe between diet and disease are indeed causal -- that if people who eat copious vegetables, for instance, live longer than those who don't, it's the vegetables that cause the effect of a longer life. And maybe they do, but there's no way to know without experimental trials to test that hypothesis.
The associations that emerge from these studies used to be known as "hypothesis-generating data," based on the fact that an association tells us only that two things changed together in time, not that one caused the other. So associations generate hypotheses of causality that then have to be tested. But this hypothesis-generating caveat has been dropped over the years as researchers studying nutrition have decided that this is the best they can do.
He argues for what's missing -- truth-telling about what's missing instead of the rush to treat hypotheses as facts.
He winds up his piece with this:
Obesity and diabetes are epidemic, and yet the only relevant fact on which relatively unambiguous data exist to support a consensus is that most of us are surely eating too much of something. (My vote is sugars and refined grains; we all have our biases.) Making meaningful inroads against obesity and diabetes on a population level requires that we know how to treat and prevent it on an individual level. We're going to have to stop believing we know the answer, and challenge ourselves to come up with trials that do a better job of testing our beliefs.Before I, for one, make another dietary resolution, I'd like to know that what I believe I know about a healthy diet is really so. Is that too much to ask?
Flunkie
The linkie is in a sleep study.
Advice Goddess Radio, Live Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Francesca Gino On How To Make Wise Decisions And Stick To Them
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Adorably, we humans see ourselves as rational animals. Research shows us to be anything but.
We are swayed in ways we wouldn't expect in both our decision-making and how well we stick to our plans.
The good news is, the research also shows that our going off track happens in predictable ways. My guest tonight, Harvard Business School professor, Dr. Francesca Gino, will both lay out the forces that sidetrack us as we're trying to accomplish our goals and offer guidelines that we can use to keep ourselves on track.
Dr. Gino will be discussing her recently-published book, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Join us tonight and have your eyes opened about the psychological, social, and environmental stumbling blocks that keep us from getting where we want to go.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/10/dr-francesca-gino-on-how-to-make-wise-decisions-and-stick-to-them
Don't miss last week's show on how to assert yourself.
Assertiveness isn't about "building a good disguise," Dr. Randy Paterson explains. "It's about the courage to take the disguise off." It's "about being THERE."
Paterson, a clinical psychologist, is the author of the excellent book I've recommended in my column, "The Assertiveness Workbook: How To Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships," and that's exactly what he and I will be laying out on tonight's show.
Paterson takes a very rational, behavioral approach and gives extremely practical tips for how to change, and this show should help even already-assertive people notice and shore up areas where they could do better.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/03/dr-randy-paterson-how-and-why-to-be-assertive
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.
Good News! Girl Won't Have To Register As A Sex Offender For Posting Nude Selfies
Of course, that's only because she's a juvenile. She was still arrested on child pornography charges -- for posting nude photos of herself to Twitter.
At HuffPo, David Lohr writes:
Authorities received an anonymous tip describing the photos, which were posted to Twitter around Jan. 30. The girl, a student in James City County, admitted to posting "multiple" lewd photos of herself to the social networking website last week, according to police."One of our school resource officers made contact with her and her mother," Stephanie Williams-Ortery, a spokeswoman for the James City County Police Department told The Huffington Post.
"The young lady acknowledged that she had posted the pictures of herself [and] the mother acknowledged that the photos were of her daughter," Williams-Ortery said.
According to police, the girl, who has not been named, also admitted to sending photos directly to male acquaintances she was hoping to impress. She has been charged as a juvenile with felony "possession, reproduction, distribution, solicitation and facilitation of child pornography," Williams-Ortery said.
via @jbrodkin
Christian Israeli Arab Soldier Says She Would Give Her Life To Protect Israel
Robert Spencer explains at JihadWatch:
This video gives the lie to the "Palestinian" jihad propaganda about Israel being an "apartheid" state, as well as to the all too common characterization of the Israeli defense against the "Palestinian" jihad as the "Arab/Israeli conflict." Many Christian Arabs do not support the jihad against Israel, and many non-Arab Muslims do support it. The conflict that Israel faces is not with Arabs as such, but with Islamic jihadists who believe that its existence is an insult to Islam.
This video was posted on the Israeli army's blog. Yes, everyone has one these days.
UPDATE: Israel "Apartheid" Week posters.
Impy
Links with elf shoes.
From The "Get Off My Fucking Lawn!" Files
Asshole kids have been slamming skateboards into the pavement for over an hour near my house.
You have no idea how fucking annoying that is until you hear that SLAM! every 15 or 30 seconds or so for a prolonged period of time. And no, I do not live in or near a skateboard park.
I'm prepping my radio show for tomorrow, so I can't drown them out with music (I'm talking my notes into the computer), and noise-canceling headphones don't drown this kind of sharp noise out.
I hope these kids' parents run over spike strips on their way home and are awakened at 3 am every night for the next week by hippos having rough sex.
Annoying Somebody Until They Agree To Have Sex With You Is Now Rape
Christina Hoff Sommers writes in the WaPo about how a CDC sexual violence study overstates the problem, reporting that "More than 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime":
It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault. Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, "When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?" A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of "alcohol or drug facilitated penetration."What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape -- indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).
Other survey questions were equally ambiguous. Participants were asked if they had ever had sex because someone pressured them by "telling you lies, making promises about the future they knew were untrue?" All affirmative answers were counted as "sexual violence." Anyone who consented to sex because a suitor wore her or him down by "repeatedly asking" or "showing they were unhappy" was similarly classified as a victim of violence. The CDC effectively set a stage where each step of physical intimacy required a notarized testament of sober consent.
About Trying Cases In The Court Of Public Opinion
Dahlia Lithwick writes on Slate about the accusations made recently in the press against Woody Allen by Dylan Farrow:
Recognize that these are opinions and inferences, not "evidence." They are not "cases," and we are not adjudicating this mess in any kind of court. Recognize that dressing your personal opinions up in fancy talk of "burdens of proof" and "presumptions of innocence" helps clarify almost nothing and confuses a great deal. Mob justice often has all the trappings of an unbiased search for truth, but it's actually just an (understandable) outpouring of rage and blame. We have statutes of limitation, not to punish complaining witnesses but because the legal system recognizes that memories and evidence are degraded over time, even as umbrage on both side burns brighter than ever.Investigative journalism is one thing. But the Court of Public Opinion is what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies. It allows everything into evidence and has no mechanism to separate facts about the case from the experiences and political leanings of the millions of us who are all acting as witnesses, judges, and jurors. So go ahead and tweet your truth or publicly shame someone who is tweeting hers, but don't believe for an instant that this is how complicated factual disputes get resolved or that this will change hearts and minds about our woefully anti-woman, anti-victim culture.
The Court of Public Opinion is a wonderful place to be heard, to test new ideas, and an even more gratifying place to tear apart those whose opinions offend us. It rarely brings about justice for the parties in a lawsuit, however, because the Court of Public Opinion is usually more about us than them. The one thing the legal system carefully protects against is the perfect narcissism of believing that we are the only ones in the courtroom who matter. And that's the one quality our media most often rewards.
Sleepy
It's late Friday night and sleepy is what I am. So post some linkies here and I'll post more in the morning.
The Non-Infantilized Version Of A Female Geek
Her attitude reminds me of that of a female friend of mine -- a woman who's a tenured professor of engineering. She's all about putting out good science and expects to be judged on her merits -- and judges others accordingly.
She lives far away but when we're together, we get together and look like we were kidnapped from different walks of life and held hostage in the same coffee shop. I wear evening dress skirts -- everywhere -- and she wears a hoodie with her college's name on it. Her goal in getting dressed? Looking like she's not naked.
Susan Sons, who started coding when she was 6, on the machine her dad used to track inventory, writes at Linux Journal:
I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is "old" (sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father's age than mine.The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.
When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there--it means I can ignore that end of things--but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.
It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:
•The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no make-up.•The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.
•The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should worry about it.
With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!"
I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited. They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12 men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.
I've never been segregated into a "Women in X" group, away from the real action in a project. I've got enough clout to say no when I'm told I should be loyal and spend my time working on women's groups instead of technology. I'm not young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada Initiative who'd have me passive-aggressively redcarding anyone who bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social conflict I have is because of my sex.
Here's a news flash for you: except for the polymaths in the group, hackers are generally kind of socially inept. If someone of any gender does something that violates my boundaries, I assume it was a misunderstanding. I calmly and specifically explain what bothered me and how to avoid crossing that boundary, making it a point to let the person know that I am not upset with them, I just want to make sure they're aware so it doesn't happen again. This is what adults do, and it works. Adults don't look for ways to take offense, silently hand out "creeper cards" or expect anyone to read their minds. I'm not a child, I'm an adult, and I act like one.
This Guy Looks Like He's About To Fall Down The Stairs While Sleepwalking
He couldn't look less menacing.
I'm talking about the lifelike statue of a man at Wellesley that some wymym have their own tightiewhities in a bunch about.
At Slate, Amanda Marcotte posts:
It's funny and is, unsurprisingly, a big hit on Instagram. It's also creating controversy, as reported by the Boston Globe, as many students object to the statue on the grounds that it's scary. Zoe Magid, a junior at the university, started a Change.org petition demanding that the statue be moved inside the museum. "Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture by Tony Matelli, entitled 'Sleepwalker,' has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community," she writes, adding variations of the word trigger two more times.
It's becoming clear what "rape culture" means -- a culture created by women to get attention. If you can't get it for being powerful -- which is what I was raised to think of myself as and to be -- get it for being a victim, living in fear, waiting for the next opportunity to read victimization of you into even the most innocuous images or situations.
More from the piece:
The museum director Lisa Fischman responded to the petition in an email that highlights how much the statue does not resemble a rapist who is coming to get you: "Arms outstretched, eyes closed, he appears vulnerable and unaware against the snowy backdrop of the space around him. He is not naked. He is profoundly passive. He is inert, as sculpture."This email did not placate the critics of the statue, who left dozens of comments, mostly written in feminist jargon. "Your claim that Sleepwalker is passive is spoken in privilege and without regard to the many students on this campus who have faced and survived assault, racism, and many other forms of violent oppression," writes one commenter. Another likens the statue to real-life sexual assailants and harassers: "You claim that Sleepwalker is inert, passive - free of action or blame. Funny, so do his real-life counterparts." One woman gets a wee bit excited with, "He 'appears' like a creepy pervert! There are so many talented artists who create BEAUTY! This is not art! It's a sexual assault!" Notably, no self-identified rape survivors piped in to say that the statue reminded them of their own experiences, but that didn't hold back the tide of speculation that it might traumatize them.
The fact that something makes you uncomfortable is not reason to yank it off the planet. It is reason for you to look the other way -- or to use it as a jumping off point for animated conversation at cocktail parties. (P.S. Please leave me uninvited to those parties.)
How Obamacare Tempts Doctors To Cut Corners
Paul Hsieh, MD, writes at Forbes:
ObamaCare ... creates new conflicts of interest for physicians. One of the primary goals of ObamaCare is to control health costs (i.e., "bend the cost curve downward"). Under ObamaCare, doctors will face increasing incentives for undertreatment rather than overtreatment.For example, ObamaCare includes pilot programs to replace the current fee for service model with "bundled payments." Hospitals and doctors would receive a fixed sum for treating a patient's condition (e.g., pneumonia or stroke), regardless of what it costs the providers. If the hospital and doctors treat the patient for less than the bundle, they keep the excess. But if their costs exceed the bundled payment, they must absorb the loss. In theory, bundled payments eliminate incentives to overtreat patients. But they can also create dangerous incentives to undertreat.
A hospital administrator might ask a physician, "Does Mrs. Smith really need the stronger, more expensive antibiotic that covers 99% of the bacteria? Or can she get by with the cheaper drug that only covers 85%? We've already burned through her bundled payment for this hospital admission, so anything we do now comes out of our pockets!"
I'm a bit of an odd duck -- as a person and as a patient. I lost some cognitive abilities (suffering diminished memory, for example) for three weeks following the anesthesia for an endoscopy. Am I just going to be given the "standard" care for everybody? It would seem very possible.
Hsieh offers some protective measures patients can take:
Patients can ask their doctors if they have any incentives to limit their care (just as they can ask if their doctors have any incentives to favor particular treatments or tests).Patients should also consider paying cash when appropriate. New federal regulations allow patients who pay cash to request that the details of their medical care not be sent to insurance companies. This frees your doctor to concentrate on doing what's best for you without worrying that his treatment decisions might skew his practice statistics.
Some patients may also benefit from "direct pay" or "concierge" practices outside the standard insurance system. This allows the doctor to work for the patient, without interference from the government or government-controlled insurers.
This sure wasn't the Obamacare we were promised -- the need to interrogate doctors to prevent our getting skeeved by them, the need to do tricks to preserve our privacy, and the need to go outside the system to get adequate care.
But it was absolutely to be expected. Anyone who is surprised about this is too naive to be voting.
Slurpee
Linkie in cherry Coke.
We Assume It's Awful
There are principles and codes we just accept without thinking too much about them.
For example, why do we think it's awful if you date your friend's ex-wife? Say they got a divorce and you really weren't good friends with the guy. People will still ding you for doing this. (A violation of Bro Code -- which says you just don't date a buddy's ex.)
Welcome To The Total Pussification Of Western Culture
Of course, much of this was brought on by feminism, but now (predictably) the effects are even coming to roost on a women's studies professor.
A "shy" male sued a women's studies teacher for a human rights violation for failing him after he was too skeered to be around all those wymyn and attend class.
To be fair, I find women's studies environments logic-starved, suffused with man-hatred and victimhood, and thus somewhat terrifying.
But the fact that you are afraid of something isn't reason to crawl under your bed and hide from it but to deal with your fears. Well, that's the way it used to work in this country and Canada.
(Imagine this: "The British are coming! The British are coming!" and all the colonists hiding behind furniture and hoping they go away.)
The story from RawStory's Scott Eric Kaufman:
A male University of Toronto student filed a claim with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal accusing his Women and Gender Studies professor of discriminating against him when she failed him for never having attended the course.Wongene Daniel Kim claims that Professor Sarah Trimble's course was the only one that would fit in his schedule, but when he arrived on the first day, he discovered he was the only male in the class.
"I felt anxiety," Kim told The Toronto Star. "I didn't expect it would be all women and it was a small classroom and about 40 women were sort of sitting in a semicircle and the thought of spending two hours every week sitting there for the next four months was overwhelming."
So he left the classroom, and never returned, citing the fact that he is "a generally shy person, especially around women." He remained enrolled in the course, however, and asked Professor Trimble to waive the 15 percent of his grade that was based on participation and attendance.
As was her right, she refused.
When he asked her to change his grade at the end of the semester, she again refused.
Kim then filed a complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal claiming she had discriminated against him because he was male.
Their finding:
"The applicant has not satisfied me that his claimed discomfort in a classroom of women requires accommodation under the [Ontario Human Rights] Code. He admitted that his discomfort is based on his own 'individual preference' as a shy person."
More Evidence That Government Justifies Its Existence By Bothering People
The excerpt below is the end of a letter from a mother about her dying son, Ethan Rediske, 11, who has cerebral palsy and is blind. The state of Florida is requiring her to prove that her son still can't take another standardized test and can therefore keep his waiver:
Why is Ethan Rediske not meeting his 6th-grade hospital homebound curriculum requirements? BECAUSE HE IS IN A MORPHINE COMA. We expect him to go any day. He is tenaciously clinging to life.
Story by Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post. Via @Popehat.
More from the story:
Ethan wasn't the only brain-damaged child in Florida to be forced to take a standardized test; I have written in the past about Michael, another Florida boy who was born with only a brain stem -- not a brain -- and can't tell the difference between an apple and an orange, but was also forced to take a version of the FCAT last year. (See here, here and here.) There are many others in Florida and across the country as well.Why does Florida -- and other states, as well as the U.S. Department of Education -- force kids with impaired cognitive ability to take standardized tests? Because, they say, nearly every child can learn something and be assessed in some fashion. Even, apparently, a boy born without a brain.
Publicity last year in Florida about some of these cases sparked interest among some state lawmakers to pass legislation to make it easier for severely disabled students to get waivers from taking these tests. The U.S. Department of Education sent a letter warning lawmakers to keep assessing all children, and one Florida Education Department spokesman told me that "waivers do not apply to students with a chronic situation." Legislation did get passed but it wasn't what some had hoped. It allows parents to request a waiver (Michael's parents abandoned him shortly after he was born, and he lives in an Orlando care facility for children called the Russell House), and the state has set out a long series of actions that have to be taken -- including approval by the education commission -- to get a waiver.
Washington's Gambling Commission Bans Old Folks Homes' Card Games
Jacob Sullum writes at reason about the Snohomish, Washington city council's considering whether retirees will be allowed to continue playing poker, bridge, and pinochle at the local senior center -- as they have for 25 years:
Five years ago, alarmed at the prospect of for-profit card rooms, the city council passed an ordinance that bans games played for money when any "organization, corporation, or person collects or obtains or charges any percentage of or collects or obtains any portion of the money or thing of value wagered or won by any of the players." That made the games at the senior center illegal, since each participant pays a "donation." No one noticed that the center had become a den of crime until someone ratted out the card players to the Washington State Gambling Commission, which in December ordered them to cease and desist. In response to the outrage provoked by that command, the city council last month approved a measure that allows nonprofit organizations to sponsor money card games until April 30. Now it has to decide what happens after then."We've got a big criminal record," card player Peter Richard tells KING, the NBC affiliate in Seattle. "18 years of playing for dimes!" He adds, regarding the gambling commission's order, "I thought they were off their nut!" Another player, Bill Huested, piles on: "If you gave them an IQ test, the needle wouldn't move."
Do you get the idea that these old dudes should be running things and the city council should be banned from doing anything?
The President Of Beretta Tells Maryland Off
In a piece in the Wash Times, Ugo Gussalli Beretta writes:
My family has operated our business from the same small town in northern Italy for 500 years. This means that when we make a commitment to a local community, our hope is to do so for decades, if not centuries, to come.We apply this same philosophy to all of our factories and locations throughout the world. Such a commitment is not a one-way street, though.
In return for our investment in jobs, facilities and assistance to the local economy, we ask for respect and a supportive business climate.
We deserve such respect. We make the standard sidearm for the U.S. armed forces. We also make firearms that police and consumers use to save their lives and the lives of others.
They were looking to expand production in their facility located in the Maryland suburbs:
Unfortunately, as we were planning that expansion, Maryland's governor and legislature voted in favor of new regulations that unfairly attack products we make and that our customers want.These regulations also demean our law-abiding customers, who must now be fingerprinted like criminals before they can be allowed to purchase one of our products.
We have seen these types of legislative proposals in Maryland before, and they never seem to reduce crime. Maybe this is because the proponents of such legislation blame the product instead of human misconduct.
They've moved their facility to a state more welcoming to them and personal freedoms -- Tennessee.
We chose Tennessee also because the vast majority of its residents and their elected officials have shown that they respect and honor the American tradition of personal freedoms, including the right to bear arms.
via Jay J. Hector
Inky
Links with a little trail of paw prints out the door.
How Prohibition Makes Drugs More Dangerous -- And Even More Deadly
It's the hysteria, not the facts, and the prohibition, not the drugs, that makes some so deadly to some people.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason that drugs laced with substances -- like fentanyl -- that can be dangerous or deadly wouldn't be a problem if drugs were legal:
Prohibition magnifies drug hazards by creating a black market where quality and purity are unpredictable:According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, fentanyl is "roughly 50-80 times more potent than morphine," so it's the sort of ingredient you'd want to know about before snorting or injecting that white powder you just bought. This kind of thing--passing one drug off as another, delivering something much more (or less) potent than the customer expects--almost never happens in a legal market. When was the last time you bought a bottle of 80-proof whiskey that turned out to be 160 proof? The main reason liquor buyers do not have to worry about such a switcheroo is not that distillers are regulated, or even that their customers, unlike consumers in a black market, have legal recourse in case of fraud. The main reason is that legitimate businesses need to worry about their reputations if they want to keep customers coming back. It is hard to build and maintain a reputation in a black market, where brands do not mean much.
And no, addiction isn't a "disease." I wrote about it here in relation to porn:
Sure, porn can pose problems in a marriage or relationship -- when used to excess. The same goes for golf clubs, credit cards, and Hostess Ding Dongs. Of course, when there are problems, people love to blame the thing being used instead of the person doing the using. This thinking is fed by the damaging contention that addiction is "a disease." Multiple sclerosis is a disease. You can't decide to not have multiple sclerosis. You can decide to stop engaging in some behavior. You might not want to stop, it might be terribly hard to stop, but if the stakes are high enough, you will. Just ask some guy who tells you he can't stop looking at porn. Sorry, but if his house catches fire, he's not going to sit there at the computer simultaneously getting off and getting crispy.
More here:
An addiction treatment specialist I respect, Dr. Stanton Peele, in "7 Tools to Beat Addiction," writes, "When people turn to an experience, any experience, for solace to the exclusion of meaningful involvements in the rest of their lives, they are engaged in an addiction." Another addiction therapist I respect, Dr. Frederick Woolverton, in "Unhooked," explains that what all addictions have in common is a longing to avoid "legitimate suffering" -- difficult emotions that are a normal part of being alive.
Stanton Peele writes at reason that it's the "addiction as disease" treatment industry that taught Philip Seymour Hoffman that he was helpless before drugs:
Hoffman is not a good symbol for the efficacy of American treatment. He was famously abstinent after having entered rehab at 22. Then, supposedly abstinent for 23 years, he took some pain medications and went completely haywire, progressing to rampant heroin use. According to this model, a person who is addicted to heroin who simply samples a painkiller is doomed to all-out relapse by this "cunning, baffling and powerful disease."But what are we to make of the stunning, continuing findings over the decades that most people recover from heroin and other drug addictions? Even a well-known figure associated with AA (but one who displays intellectual integrity) like William White can declare: after analyzing 415 scientific reports of recovery, from the mid-19th century to the present, that "Recovery is not an aberration achieved by a small and morally enlightened minority of addicted people. If there is a natural developmental momentum within the course of these problems, it is toward remission and recovery."
So Hoffman is an exception, one who tells us an important story. Let's turn to Charles Winick's 1962 classic, "Maturing Out of Narcotic Addiction," in which he found that two-thirds to three-quarters of known heroin addicts graduated off the Federal Bureau of Narcotics' rolls by their mid-thirties. Indeed, Winick surmises, we need a theory to account for the minority who fail to recover: "The difference between those who mature out of addiction and those who do not may also mirror the difference between addicts who struggle to abandon addiction and may develop some insight, and those who decide that they are 'hooked,' make no effort to abandon addiction, and give in to what they regard as inevitable."
Corralled by the disease theory in rehab in his early 20s, Philip Seymour Hoffman failed to allow himself to mature out, to develop a realistic assessment of his own strength relative to pharmaceuticals and other drugs. As a result he was left vulnerable, not to a cunning, baffling and powerful substance, or disease, but to an emptiness and learned powerlessness, or helplessness, in this area of his life, which so contrasted with his forcefulness and mastery in his acting career.
More from Peele here -- on how government says you can't overcome addiction...contrary to what government research shows.
It's The Choices
Christina Hoff Sommers writes at the Daily Beast that women tend to flow into less remunerative professions -- those where they point to a 4-year-old's toy bridge instead of standing on a girder and building one:
Consider, for example, how men and women differ in their college majors. Here is a list (PDF) of the ten most remunerative majors compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but one of them:1. Petroleum Engineering: 87% male
2. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male
3. Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male
4. Aerospace Engineering: 88% male
5. Chemical Engineering: 72% male
6. Electrical Engineering: 89% male
7. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% male
8. Mechanical Engineering: 90% male
9. Metallurgical Engineering: 83% male
10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% maleAnd here are the 10 least remunerative majors--where women prevail in nine out of ten:
1. Counseling Psychology: 74% female
2. Early Childhood Education: 97% female
3. Theology and Religious Vocations: 34% female
4. Human Services and Community Organization: 81% female
5. Social Work: 88% female
6. Drama and Theater Arts: 60% female
7. Studio Arts: 66% female
8. Communication Disorders Sciences and Services: 94% female
9. Visual and Performing Arts: 77% female
10. Health and Medical Preparatory Programs: 55% femaleMuch of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors. Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.
...Have these groups noticed that American women are now among the most educated, autonomous, opportunity-rich women in history? Why not respect their choices? For the past few decades, untold millions of state and federal dollars have been devoted to recruiting young women into engineering and computer technology. It hasn't worked. The percent of degrees awarded to women in fields like computer science and engineering has either stagnated or significantly decreased since 2000.
Uncle Linkie
Some relation or no relation whatsoever to a giant rabbit I read about in my childhood named Uncle Wiggly. Or my pork chop was laced with LSD and I'm seriously high.
Thinking Of Panning For Gold Soon?
Levis, up to 30 percent off, at Amazon
Life Has Only Recently Started To Come With Warning Labels
You should have used birth control if you need to have a printed warning in order to know keep a small object away from a kid so young (and/or in a stage) that he puts everything in his mouth.
(And never mind that a 3-year-old can't read.)
A New Jersey family is suing The Bronx Zoo because their child swallowed a souvenir penny given out by the zoo last summer. Alex Napoliello writes at NJ.com:
The penny was given to each member of the family as part of a promotional deal featuring a Dinosaur Safari exhibit, the New York Post reports.An employee at the zoo handed the coin directly to 3-year-old Ethan Yi, who then swallowed the penny -- imprinted with the words "Dinosaur Safari."
...Family lawyer Howard Myerowitz told the Post that the jagged edge of the penny scraped and cut the inside of Ethan's stomach. The entire ordeal left the uninsured family with more than $50,000 in medical bills, he said.
The family is seeking unspecified damages from the Bronx Zoo and the Wildlife Conservation Society, the report said.
Ethan's mother, Kelly Yi, said there was no warning about the dangers of swallowing the coins.
From the Post, a quote from the "mother":
"There's a warning sign for everything. Even the hot coffee has a warning sign," she said.
Yes, because life is filled with morons and litigious assholes who make other people pay when they fail to take responsibility for themselves and their children.
My mother watched us the way an eagle watches small woodland animals that look like lunch. There's a name for this: It's called "parenting." It's kept children alive for much of human history.
Elway Doesn't Believe In Taxpayer-Funded Safety Nets -- For The Poor, That Is
From Pando Daily, which notes that this is the philosophy of Hall of Fame quarterback and Denver Broncos executive John Elway, who told Fox News why he supports the Republican party:
I don't believe in safety nets. Obviously, we've got to have some kind of safety nets. But I think my philosophy is when given the opportunity to go take advantage of that, I think that's when you get the best out of people.
David Sirota writes at Pando:
As Pando reported last week, the NFL is the beneficiary of one of the most lucrative taxpayer-funded social safety nets in the entire American economy. The league itself is exempted from paying taxes, and NFL teams receive on average $900 million in taxpayer subsidies every year. Elway's team has been the beneficiary of some of those subsidies through the taxpayer dollars that went into building the Broncos' own stadium.
Sirota continues:
Though the NFL legend did give himself some wiggle room ("we've got to have some kind of safety nets"), he certainly implied that he is a staunch opponent of exactly the kind of perpetual bailouts and corporate welfare programs that subsidize the profits of his own league.
From AgainstCronyCapitalism, New Jersey gave the NFL a super tax break for the Super Bowl, and paid for security. It was an $8 million gift:
No sales tax on Superbowl tickets and 700 cops for security all paid by the state of New Jersey.
From Gregg Easterbrook in The Atlantic, "How The NFL Fleeces Taxpayers":
Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It's time to stop the public giveaways to America's richest sports league--and to the feudal lords who own its teams.
Sirota via Lisa Simeone
"The Great War" (In Your Pants)
Unintentionally pathetically funny video out of Brigham Young University comparing masturbation to war.
I love the guy with the binoculars (apparently watching the wanker wanking).
Paul Szoldra posts at Business Insider:
A video from the Housing and Student Living Office of Brigham Young University-Idaho is using war imagery to warn students about the perils of masturbation.The video, first posted to YouTube in December but recently found by Raw Story, is titled "Wounded on the Battlefield," and starts with a voiceover from University President Kim B. Clark, who describes the "great war" against masturbation as a "battle" against an "enemy" that is "cruel, ruthless, and relentless."
...Essentially, the message of the video is that if you don't tell your roommate to stop masturbating (or tell the university), it's like leaving him wounded to die on the battlefield.
"In our modern society, the enemy has spread fear of getting involved when someone's in trouble, and has fostered a social stigma against people who speak up in the face of evil," Clark says over ominous background music. "The enemy whispers, 'Don't get involved. It's not your problem.'"
At least they didn't say that masturbation is like Kristallnacht.
via @Popehat
Obamacare Pushers' Big Guesses Were Wrong
Michael Barone writes in the WSJ that that rush of uninsured people who were supposed to be signing up for Obamacare is more of a trickle:
A McKinsey & Co. survey of those thought to be eligible for ObamaCare health-care exchanges found that only 11% of those who bought new coverage between November 2013 and January 2014 were previously uninsured.Two small insurance companies told Wall Street Journal reporters for a Jan. 17 article that only 25% and 35% of those purchasing their policies were previously uninsured. Larger insurers don't yet have numbers, but it seems that far fewer of the uninsured than expected are signing up. The latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll reported that only 24% of uninsured under 65 had a favorable view of ObamaCare while 47% had an unfavorable view.
One reason may be that ObamaCare requires policies to cover not just the expenses of catastrophic illness--the sort of thing auto and home insurance policies cover--but routine medical expenses and procedures that many individuals will not need. To that extent ObamaCare policies are not insurance but prepayment of routine expenses. Apparently many of the uninsured aren't interested in prepaying for health insurance any more than they are interested in prepaying their credit cards.
A second assumption of ObamaCare's architects is that health insurance will make people healthier. That assumption has been tested in Oregon. In 2008 the state government, with limited Medicaid funds, held a lottery to determine which people who were eligible for Medicaid would be enrolled. The result was an unusual randomized control trial of similarly motivated people with and without insurance. The results, reported in the May 2013 New England Journal of Medicine, were that after two years there was no significant difference between insured and uninsured in blood-sugar level, blood pressure and cholesterol levels--although those with Medicaid saved money and were less likely to suffer depression.
Emergency room use was also supposed to go down under Obamacare. But in an Oregon study, "those with Medicaid were 40% more likely to go to emergency rooms than those without insurance."
Barone explains that there's been a disconnect between those who think they know what's good for us -- comprehensive coverage for all (to the point that post-menopausal women have maternity and prenatal care) -- rather than letting people have the freedom to choose what's good for them.
Linkin Logs
If a tree falls on your foot...
Who Benefits Most From Welfare?
The administrators of welfare, that's who.
At BrackenWorld, A Very British Dude blogs:
The welfare state is supposed to prevent poverty. It is, in fact, its major cause.The problem is one of incentives, and not just those faced by the poor themselves. It's obvious to anyone who isn't paid handsomely to farm the poor, that for many people, it's simply irrational to work. Once they've paid for taxes, clothes, transport and lunch, they're considerably worse off than they would have been had they stayed in their pyjamas and watched Jeremy Kyle. Why would you take a miserable, boring, unpleasant minimum wage job instead of existing on benefits? The job insecurity at the bottom of the pyramid and the bureaucratic complexity of informing the authorities of a 'change in circumstance' is a further barrier. So when when the low-waged is "let go" after a couple of weeks, he's got to re-apply for Housing benefits, Job-seekers' allowance, Council Tax Benefit, income support and so on, from scratch. He may be genuinely destitute as a result of payments stopped, then restarted again too late, thanks to an abortive effort to "do the right thing". Is it really any wonder so many feel trapped?
So, who benefits from this system? Certainly not those getting the benefits many of whom are comprehensively trapped in a life they wouldn't have chosen. Not the Children of those getting benefits, who learn no other life thanks to the distorted incentives faced by their parents, but in whose name the benefits are paid. Certainly not the people paying the bill, John Q. Taxpayer, who thanks to the system face a sullen and resentful underclass, some of whom spend their non-working lives looking for ways to relieve you of your easily saleable property in order to buy sufficient narcotics to break the tedium for a few hours.
The main benefit of the benefits system accrues to those employed on secure graduate salaries to administer the system. These people are the farmers of the poor.
via @LibertarianView
How Government Does Business
Money that does not come out of the pocket of the person spending it spends so much easier.
From the WSJ:
In 2012 Senator Tom Coburn's office examined workforce training in Oklahoma and found that Job Corps spends $76,000 per participant to place youth in jobs that are often minimum-wage and don't require training. Culinary students have been put to work as funeral attendants, tour guides, baggage porters and telemarketers.
Press One For English
This is the Coke commercial from the Super Bowl. My relatives came here around 1900 from various European peasantvilles, speaking Russian and German, and they all learned to speak English. They saw it as an essential part of being American.
Allen West quoted Teddy Roosevelt:
Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country."In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn't doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.
We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
Leeks
Links with a sort of oniony something-something.
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I'm Not Watching The Superbowl; I'm Watching The Superbowl On Twitter
My fave (per the photos of Joe Namath):
@AlbertBrooks
At halftime Ted Nugent is going to shoot Joe Namath's coat
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Randy Paterson On How And Why To Be Assertive
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
NOTE: Superbowl Sunday "Best Of" replay. Back with live shows again next Sunday, on Feb 9!
Assertiveness isn't about "building a good disguise," Dr. Randy Paterson explains. "It's about the courage to take the disguise off." It's "about being THERE."
Paterson, a clinical psychologist, is the author of the excellent book I've recommended in my column, "The Assertiveness Workbook: How To Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships," and that's exactly what he and I will be laying out on tonight's show.
Paterson takes a very rational, behavioral approach and gives extremely practical tips for how to change, and this show should help even already-assertive people notice and shore up areas where they could do better.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/03/dr-randy-paterson-how-and-why-to-be-assertive
Don't miss last week's thought-provoking, mind-opening show on the underpinnings of our sexuality.
Dr. Jesse Bering's book, Perv
This show, like Bering's book, is 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 or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/01/27/dr-jesse-bering-on-sex-whats-normal-and-the-sexual-deviant-in-all-of-us
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.
Obama's Cheap Shot: Basically, Advising Prep School Grads From Wealthy Families To Study Welding Instead
Virginia Postrel at Bloomberg reality-checks the President, who took a cheap shot:
He attacked art history. "I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree," he said.It was the cheapest of cheap shots because, as I noted in a column two years ago, almost no one majors in art history. Art history majors account for less than 0.2 percent of working adults with college degrees.
It was also a cheap shot because art history isn't a major naive kids fall into because they've heard a college degree -- any college degree -- will get you a good job. It's an intellectually demanding major, requiring the memorization and mastery of a large body of visual material, a facility for foreign languages, and the ability to write clearly and persuasively. And it's famously elitist.
...If the president had been serious about his message, he would have compared learning a skilled trade to majors that are actually popular, such as communications and psychology. It would have been much braver and more serious to take on the less-rigorous majors that attract lots of students. But it wouldn't have gotten a laugh.
TSA: How Hard Is It To Get A Boxcutter Past The Repurposed Mall Food Court Workers Manning Airport "Security"?
Recall that boxcutters were used by the 9/11 terrorists on the planes they used to mass-murder 3,000-plus people for Allah.
Of course, back then, people didn't tackle terrorists on planes because we -- naive, Enlightenment-encouraged infidels -- were of the belief that terrorists wanted a bag of money and a trip to someplace that didn't extradite to the US.
All that's changed (along with reinforced cockpit doors) -- but the TSA's pretend "security" ignores that.
From a Christopher Elliott post:
Andy deLivron says he's no threat to aviation security. But he flies with box cutters in his checked luggage -- the same weapon used by the 9/11 terrorists. And he recently packed the sharp tools in the wrong suitcase.By the time deLivron, a sales manager from Pottersville, NY, realized the box cutters had been misplaced in his carry-on bag, it was too late. He was already past the TSA screening area at Dallas Love Field and boarding his flight to Orlando, where he planned to catch a connecting flight to Albany, NY.
DeLivron missed his connection and had to spend the night in Orlando.
"But now I had a problem toss the knife or try to get it home in my carry-on bag," he says. "I decided if I could place the knife on edge in my carryon it would be highly likely that security would miss it again. Sure, enough I was right. My carryon went right on through in Orlando."
Yes, you read correctly. TSA agents missed a box cutter in his carry-on luggage. Twice in a day.
And no planes fell from the sky.
Elliott notes, as I have:
If there's a consensus among security experts, it's that the meaningful screening takes place long before you arrive at the airport, and that's where the failures of 9/11 happened.
Far easier for lawmakers and Homeland "Security" thuggos to make you take off your shoes than to take responsibility.
Weepy
One of the Seven Links, along with Dopey, LOLly, Farky, Dancer, and Blitzen.
The Business Of Being Nice, Friendly, And Really Helpful
I just experienced really nice, above-and-beyond helpful treatment from a guy in the shoe department at the Santa Monica REI store.
(No, I do not have a high fever and am not considering -- horrors! -- camping. I needed a replacement for the wonderful REI down booties I wear to write in. I cannot write with cold feet!)
They were out of these, and when he heard how much I love them, he ended up getting on their system and finding a handful of these floating around stores around the United States and ordered them from a Virginia store for me. I should have them by Friday, until which time I'll wear my old ones, which are currently being held together by hope and a few stitches I made in the edges.
(Sierra booties and others just don't hold a candle to the REIs, which I bought slightly used off eBay the last time.)
By the way, you encourage companies to have this sort of culture -- or maintain it -- if you do what I try to do: Take a moment to dash off a note about how you appreciate this to the corporate office. And then try to reward companies like this with your business.
I also called the store to tell the manager, but...turns out the guy was the manager. He said, at REI, they try to treat everybody the way he treated me.
Trader Joe's is another business with nice, caring, go above and beyond employees. (I've had them offer to unload a truck to get something for me that wasn't on the shelf a number of times.) What are others?
The TSA Does Protect People -- Just Not The People You Think
From a Philip Weber post, TSA News Blog anti-TSA journo colleague Bill Fisher explains:
The purpose of TSA is solely to protect elected officials from being held directly accountable for a future 9/11 as they were in 2001. This is why TSA has been protected for over a decade by two administrations and countless lawmakers of both parties despite horrendous failure rates, repeated criminal activity among screeners, and hundreds of thousands of passenger abuse complaints.
Yes, this is about protecting ELECTED OFFICIALS, not We The People. And we are paying through the nose with our tax dollars, hours and hours of the individual traveler's time -- and, most dangerously, with the erosion of our civil liberties.
The Brats Came In On Little Pig Feet
Apologies to Carl Sandburg and the fog.
One's kids are free to have "anti-establishment" opinions (as these parents ludicrously claimed their young spawn did) -- providing that's not simply their mommy and daddy's code for their underparented children's acting out in a museum.
Sorry-ass excuses for parents, Kait Bolongaro and Stuart Trevor, who founded the All Saints fashion label, says their daughter was just "seduced by a ladder of jewel-coloured shelving" when she crawled on a $10 million Donald Judd installation at the Tate Modern.
It's a parent's job to teach kids what's appropriate, and to leave their wee and unparented brats home until they can behave according to the rules in museums, restaurants, and elsewhere.
David Churchill and Rashid Razaq write for The London Evening Standard:
Ms Bolongaro, whose father is an art collector, said of her daughters Sissi Belle and six-year-old Harper Bea: "There are some beautiful statues that they have climbed, the Henry Moore at Liverpool Street, ones along the South Bank where they are interactive and the Diana Memorial."It's not right, but they were just interested. Their only crime was to be seduced by a ladder of jewel-coloured shelving. Sissi has always been anti-establishment but she would never hurt anybody."
What a load of crap. That "anti-establishment" translation again: "My brat is underparented and refuses to behave well and I'm not going to bother instructing her."
As I wrote in I See Rude People, if you don't have it in you to parent children, kindly use birth control.
What's next for these kids, dropping by the Louvre to put a Hitler mustache on the Mona Lisa? Because creativity?
Milwaukee Public Schools: Preventing Kids From Getting Educated One Way Or Another
Once again, an American public school system reveals what they truly care about, and no, it's not educating kids but maintaining teachers union power and money. From the WSJ:
The longest line in the U.S. isn't outside a Super Bowl stadium. It's black parents lining up for a chance to get their kids into a charter school or a school choice program. The lines form in places as varied as New York City, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee. Only one thing is guaranteed: opposition, whether it's New York's new "progressive" mayor Bill de Blasio or the Justice Department leaning on Louisiana's voucher program. Today we'll visit Milwaukee.St. Marcus Lutheran, one of Milwaukee's successful independent schools, tried to buy a vacant former public school on the city's north side. The public school system said--get lost.
The 130-year old St. Marcus has become a much-sought school for kids in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, thanks to a graduation rate of over 90%, compared to 65% at Milwaukee Public Schools. The school currently enrolls some 730 students grades K-8, and has hundreds more on the waiting list. Ninety-percent are black and 89% are low income.
In 2013, St. Marcus made a bid on the nearby Malcolm X school building, vacant for six years. The school offered $1.25 million for the vacant building and pledged another $5 million to $7 million toward improvements. But rather than accept the offer that would have expanded a successful school, the public school district opted to sell the building to developers at a loss.
The school system agreed to sell the building to developer 2760 Holdings for just over $2 million. The developer plans to demolish half the structure for a housing and retail space, while the school would lease back the other half for its own plan to create a school at a cost of $4 million over four years. In October, Milwaukee County Court Commissioner Serena Pollack wrote a letter to Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and others, asking that they investigate a transaction that appeared both "fraudulent" and a loss to taxpayers.
Slouchy
The link that couldn't stand up straight.
