"...Though A Woman Can Listen To Her Vagina Being Described Aloud Without Feeling Judged"
I'll have you know that my vagina is particularly sensitive to criticism on Monday mornings.
The quote is from a Jodie Gummow Alternet piece that was posted on Salon, "The sexy new fad for mindful living: Orgasmic meditation. Devoted followers of "OM" believe the path to enlightenment lies between a woman's legs."
An excerpt:
Looking for a sexual awakening? For those open to trying the latest new-age craze, orgasmic meditation may be just for you. OM, as it's called among its followers, is a holistic practice between two people where a woman has her clitoris gently stroked for 15 minutes in a non-sexual way by a partner with a goal to building connections and prolonging therapeutic orgasms.
In prior new-age sex fad news, some -- "karezza" practitioners -- claim it's more "spiritual" and even more satisfying to go without orgasms altogether. My column, Coitus Frustratus, on the silliness that is karezza is here. An excerpt:
Alice Stockham, the 19th century Quaker doctor who came up with karezza (named for the Italian word "carezza," meaning "caress"), argued in her 1896 book about it that orgasms "without cause" (such as the desire to make a baby) are "degrading." Stockham called for a more "ennobling" sort of sex, "a quiet affair" that is "devoid of lustful thoughts, that is, the mere gratification of physical sensations" -- or, to put it in more modern terms, "50 Shades Of Reading Next To Each Other In Matching Snuggies."
Hey, College Students: Life Will "Trigger" You. Better Get Used To It
Good editorial in the LA Times criticizing a call by the UCSB Student Senate to include "trigger warnings," "cautions from professors, to be added to their course syllabi, specifying which days' lectures will include readings or films or discussions that might trigger feelings of emotional or physical distress":
Trigger warnings are part of a campus culture that is increasingly overprotective and hypersensitive in its efforts to ensure that no student is ever offended or made to feel uncomfortable.Trigger warnings have been used on the Internet for a long time, first appearing on feminist websites visited by victims of sexual attacks; the goal was to protect assault victims from material that might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder. The warnings spread to a wide variety of websites and material that readers might find troubling.
That's fine for websites that voluntarily choose to caution their visitors, but it's exactly the wrong approach for colleges and universities. Oberlin College in Ohio already has gone further than UC Santa Barbara, issuing official trigger-warning guidelines for professors that sound almost like a parody of political correctness: "Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic."
Worse, the Oberlin guidelines go on to advise professors to remove "triggering material" from their courses entirely if it is not directly related to the course's learning goals. Such instructions come dangerously close to censorship.
Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" is listed by Oberlin as one possible "trigger" book because of its themes of colonialism, racism, religious prejudice and more. At Rutgers, an op-ed in the student paper suggested that study of "The Great Gatsby" should require trigger warnings about violence and gore. And then what happens? Should students be excused from reading a work of great literature, or be allowed to read a sanitized version?
Professors, uncertain of what might be considered too sexual, too warlike or so forth, might issue warnings so broad that they're meaningless, or feel pressured to bleach the syllabus to a pallid version of a real college course.
Students with psychological issues need to learn to deal with them -- seeking therapy, not censorship for all.
Younger Americans Aren't So Hot On American Military Interventionism
I'm not hot on it myself. I don't think we should be -- or can afford to be -- the world's policeman.
Stephen Peter Rosen writes in the WSJ that "America is experiencing a generational shift away from military intervention," and he thinks that we do this at our peril -- and that it's in our national interest to do so, because we'll help prevent the spread of tyranny that can imperil us:
Consider how many Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s view the world. The Cold War to them was unnecessary--a tense and massively expensive arms race for little if any gain. The minor triumphs of the 1990s to them seem unimportant and related somehow to what is uppermost in their minds: the long and painful failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.Al Qaeda killed Americans on 9/11, so killing Osama bin Laden was justified, but the U.S. did not have to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to do that. China and Russia suppress democratic reforms and bully their neighbors, but how will military force help anything?
These younger Americans don't suffer from moral indifference. They can see evil in Vladimir Putin's Russia, Bashar Assad's Syrian regime, North Korea's dictatorship, the Taliban and China's anti-democratic Communist leadership. They understand that there is persecution of Christians and Muslims, Tibetans, women, gays and democracy activists abroad. They just cannot believe that the use of U.S. military power will make things better.
The task, therefore, isn't to convince them that they must support military action when they believe in their hearts that it cannot work. The task is to demonstrate where there are still dangers in the world that threaten America directly and where we must be willing to use force to reduce them, and where the threats are indirect and means other than the use of force are appropriate.
What threatens America directly? The ability to build nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them is spreading. Iran, North Korea and Pakistan have gone to great expense to acquire long-range missiles and nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia purchased small numbers of long-range missiles from China in the 1980s that have little value without nuclear warheads, and in 2009 King Abdullah stated clearly that if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, "we will get nuclear weapons." Russia has thousands of tactical nuclear weapons and has a doctrine that justifies their first use.
I just don't see our intervention in, say, Afghanistan, as producing much more than a bunch of American dead bodies.
Am I wrong in not wanting us going around and invading places that haven't attacked us?
Ted Galen Carpenter writes at Cato with an example of our latest foray -- Uganda, to help the government there track down rebel warlord Joseph Kony:
Make no mistake about it, Kony is a repulsive character. Among other offenses, his followers have drafted children as young as 12 into the movement's armed ranks, and there are numerous allegations of other human rights abuses. But no rational person could argue that Kony's forces pose a security threat to the United States. And under the Constitution, the purpose of the U.S. military is to protect the security of the American people, not engage to quixotic ventures to rectify bad behavior around the world.
What Kind Of Dent Has Obamacare Made In The Ranks Of The Uninsured?
Howard J. Peterson writes at Philly.com that the number is about 10 percent:
On Thursday, the Obama administration announced that enrollment had reached six million. Using McKinsey's findings of 14 percent gaining new coverage, only 900,000 previously uninsured individuals will have acquired insurance as a result of the exchanges.So, there remain nearly 35 million uninsured citizens. No additional enrollment in Obamacare for 2014 was scheduled after March 31, though the administration extended the deadline last week. The penalty for uninsured individuals has been delayed until 2016, reducing the motivation for additional sign-ups. The employer mandate has also been moved until 2016.
Given this analysis we reasonably can conclude:
The first four years of Obamacare have led to solving about 10 percent of the problem of uninsured citizens.
It is unlikely that any material reduction in the number of uninsured citizens will occur during the next three years under the current policies.
Get Drilling
In Amazon's Deal of the Day, the $139 Black & Decker 20-Volt Lithium-Ion Drill Kit with 100 Accessories is only $62.99 -- 55 percent off. Get it here
Forty Links
All the pretty sausages...
Advice Goddess Radio, "Best Of" Replay, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Adam Grant On How Giving Can Lead To Success Or Work To Your Detriment
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
Today's show is a "Best Of" replay, because I have a quick turnaround for a read of the PDF of my book, but it's one of my favorite recent shows and the book it features is out in paperback this week -- so you can get all the wonderful ideas in it while spending a few dollars less.
On this show, Wharton organizational psychologist Dr. Adam Grant talks about his terrific book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
Paradoxically, it's often those who give without looking for anything in return -- who just want to do good, open the playing field to good people -- who ultimately get the most in return. But, Grant warns, there are caveats to this -- and he lays them out in the book and we'll discuss them as well as giving's many nuances and benefits on the show.
This book inspired me to reach out to somebody who I feel wronged me in the past and do some good for them. This particular woman had just lost her job and I heard of a job that she would be good for, and, inspired by Grant's book, instead of being small and petty, I emailed her to tell her about it. She was surprised and grateful and I think it repaired damaged feelings on both of our sides. I at least have managed to let go of what happened -- which wasn't entirely her fault, although she didn't handle it kindly -- and move forward.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/31/dr-adam-grant-on-how-giving-can-lead-to-success-or-work-to-your-detriment
Don't miss last week's show on charisma with Fortune 500 executive coach Olivia Fox Cabane.
Cabane shows, based in solid science, why charisma isn't something people are just born with but something we can all acquire and perfect with knowledge and practice. Even people who aren't extraverts.
I was so impressed by her book that I stopped reading it to go order a friend a copy.
On this show, Cabane lays out how anyone can master the art and science of personal magnetism and attain success in their career, love life, and friendships, and lead a more socially fulfilling life.
Her book we discuss is The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/24/olivia-fox-cabane-how-you-can-master-the-art-and-science-of-having-charisma
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
My show's sponsor is now 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.)
Some Chicago Cabbies Think They Have Constitutional Right To Have Their Competitors Arrested
Institute for Justice attorney Renee Flaherty writes at USA Today:
Anyone who has tried to hail a cab on a cold day understands why competition is important in the transportation market. During this harsh winter, thankfully, innovative new ridesharing services like UberX, Sidecar and Lyft have started heating things up. In cities across the country, drivers using these services, which use smartphones to connect people who need rides with drivers who have cars, have provided countless customers with warm, friendly rides.Yet, wherever there's an innovative new business model, a disgruntled incumbent business is rarely far behind. The latest example comes from Chicago, where the city's taxi companies have filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the city, aimed at stifling competition and compelling the city to enforce its extensive and burdensome taxi regulations against ridesharing drivers.
In other words, taxi drivers are claiming they have a constitutional right to have their competitors arrested.
If successful, this lawsuit could lead to a nationwide explosion of litigation, as members of entrenched transportation cartels hold cities hostage for allowing innovation, consumer choice and job creation.
Protectionism in the transportation industry is nothing new, nor are lawsuits based on ridiculous legal theories. When Minneapolis removed its cap on the number of taxicab licenses, existing cab drivers sued, claiming that it was unconstitutional for the city to break their monopoly and the profits that it brought. Although the taxi drivers lost their suit, it demonstrates how entrenched businesses are fearful of facing new competition.
I do agree that business should not be regulated away by cities and states.
However, one problem is that, say, in New York, there's been a high price of entry to taxi-driving, with medallions being rare and costly. Remove that for some, and those who've paid the entry fee -- well, their situation becomes similar to what I experience in having paid to get into healthcare when I was at my healthiest in my 20s and having paid all these years, then having it be free to anyone with any pre-existing condition they developed at, oh, 49, and never mind the lack of buy-in before that.
Anybody see a way to fix this in the taxi market? Do we just say "sorry!" to those who've spent years paying off a million-dollar New York City taxi medallion?
The Real March Madness: Students And The State Subsidizing College Sports Vanity Programs
The Manhattan Institute's Jared Meyer and Neil Deininger question the vast subsidies going to college sports programs:
While all of their teams lost in the second round of the basketball tournament, the universities of Massachusetts Amherst, Delaware, Western Michigan, and New Mexico State made the final four of subsidies received by their athletic departments. These four public universities each gave over $19 million just to run sports programs.When athletic departments cannot cover expenses, they look for support from elsewhere in the university budget. The NCAA defines subsidies as everything not generated by the department's athletic functions. This usually takes the form of student fees and institutional support. For public schools especially, this money also comes from taxpayers.
Our final four teams are not alone--the tournament based on subsidies was highly competitive. Of the 45 public university teams in the tournament, 41 athletic departments received subsidies that exceeded $420 million in total. Of this amount, $136 million came from student fees and an additional $284 million came from non-athletic school funding.
...Successful sports teams can be advantageous for universities. Being selected for the NCAA tournament boosts a university's profile and usually increases applicants. However, handing out more subsidies to athletic departments is no guarantee of success.
Rutgers University had the biggest athletic department subsidy last year. Rutgers has not made the NCAA Tournament since 1991 and has never been to a BCS bowl football game. Regardless of past disappointments, Rutgers athletics received a $47 million subsidy in 2013, $37.1 million of which was direct institutional support. All that extra money did not keep the basketball team from falling into scandal last year, when the school's athletic director and basketball coach were fired for hiding player abuse.
In 2009, Rutgers finished a $100 million project to expand its football stadium, of which $92.9 million is still owed. In 2013, Rutgers paid $6 million just servicing this debt. At the same time, tuitions and fees for New Jersey residents have risen to over $13,000, making Rutgers one of the most expensive public schools in the country. But at least students can cheer for a losing team to distract them from impending tuition payments.
Rutgers receives more than a fifth of its budget from the state, so New Jersey taxpayers are helping the school to finance what is essentially a $100 million-plus vanity project. This is not an isolated case. All over the country, schools are competing more heavily on who can spend the most on athletics, not who can best prepare students for the difficult job market. University presidents love posing next to big trophies, but they should instead be more focused on delivering students quality, affordable educations.
And from the "some students are more equal than others" file:
Western Michigan and New Mexico State spend $13,782 and $10,454 on academics per student, but spend an additional $70,000 on each student athlete.
Sleepy
Kindly post some linkies while I sleep. I'll post more in the morning. Just did a lot of hours going over my book PDF and I think my eyes are going to fall out.
One link per comment or your comment will be eaten as spam. Merci!
Last Night's Earthquake Snubbed Me
Didn't feel a thing.
I'm both glad and insulted.
What's The Problem With Pink?
I love pink -- hot pink, not so much light pink, but sometimes light pink -- and let's agree that I'm not exactly a shrinking violet.
Yael Kohen writes at NYMag about all the freakouts about girls liking pink:
Last weekend, the New York Times ran a story about the popularity of pink toy weapons, adding fuel to the ongoing debate over the so-called "pink aisle" at toy stores -- that is, the lines of pink Legos, pink science kits, and now pink bows and arrows that manufacturers market specifically to young girls. "The result," the Times tells us, "is a selection of toys that, oddly, both challenges antiquated notions and plays to them deeply." Sharon Lamb, a child psychologist and play therapist at the University of Massachusetts, who is quoted in the story, generally applauds the toys as a good way for girls to express aggressive impulses but tells the Times: "What I don't like is the stereotyped girlifying of this. Do they have to be in pink?"Well, no: Of course they don't "have to" be pink. But when we treat pink -- and the girls who like it -- with the condescension that question implies, what are we really saying? No symbol of girl culture is more powerful than pink; from princesses, tutus, and ponies, to Valley Girl accents and high-pitched voices. Today the color reads instantly as feminine, and carries all kinds of baggage about what it means to be feminine in a particular way -- to be girly.
And what's wrong with girly, anyway? Rolling our eyes at pink feels like another way of treating female culture on the whole as a niche interest, somehow secondary to male culture -- a.k.a. the mainstream. And when it comes to our toys there's an implicit message that the pink doodads are only second best to the tough dude versions in black, camouflage, and blue. (A boy dressing up like Iron Man, a narcissistic arms mogul turned superhero, won't be seen as nearly as silly as a girl wearing a Queen Elsa costume, even though they play to the same fantasy impulses). If we've made pink the most visible representation of girl culture, and also treat it as a symbol of frivolity, then we're unwittingly telling girls (and boys) that the girl world isn't important.
To me, pink is like "bossy." You don't have to get your hot pink thong in a wad about it if you don't feel like a crumb among people. I don't. Hence, I wear a lot of pink and if I could go back in time, I would have worn it head to toe for a lot of years. (The best I could do was a pink short-sleeved-shirt and a floor-length pink tiered skirt I sewed myself out of an old pink sheet and wore till it was in rags.)
Taliban Barbarians Hit The Wrong Gate
Roy Nordland and Jawad Sukhanyar write for The New York Times that the Taliban meant to attack an unprotected Christian daycare center in Kabul, Afghanistan, but...oops!...
They mistakenly burst into the compound next door, where an American government contractor's employees were heavily armed and ready, according to accounts that the contractor and the Afghan police gave on Friday of a wild four-hour shootout here.The contractor, Roots of Peace, which runs agricultural projects financed by the United States Agency for International Development, had taken the precaution of blocking its front gate with an armored Land Cruiser, which guards used to take cover behind and shoot at the attackers, said Gary Kuhn, the group's president, interviewed by telephone from its headquarters in San Rafael, Calif.
That slowed the attackers enough for the guards and the five foreign residents to retreat into the house and upstairs. "There's a circular staircase which is very hard to take cover on. One tried coming up it, and the guard shot him," Mr. Kuhn said, citing accounts from his staff members in Kabul.
While the gun battle was underway, next door, at what apparently had been the Taliban's intended target, a Christian-run day care center that had no armed guards and normally left its front door open, police were able to rescue two dozen foreigners, according to Gen. Mohammad Ayub Salangi, the deputy interior minister, who went to the scene. Their nationalities were unclear but they appeared to be Americans or Europeans.
The friend who sent this to me wrote, "What sick fucks attack a day care center?"
The myth: Mohammed never killed children. The truth?
Muhammad drew a distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim children and implied that it would be permissible to kill a child who has no prospect of accepting Islam...
More on this myth here, and more here on how the Quran allows for the raping of married women taking captive by Muslims. Plus:
As further support that Islam condones the murder of women and children just think about the law of apostasy. In Islam, if a person decides to apostatize then that individual must either revert or be killed. This includes any sane man, woman or child who has reached the age of rationality....3. Concluding Analysis
Our examination has led us to discover that there isn't a single, explicit Quranic reference which prohibits the killing of women and children. The language of the Quran strongly supports the position that even the women and children of the unbelievers are to be targeted in jihad.
The Quran uses inclusive language when commanding Muslims to attack infidels, the people of the Book etc. The Quran doesn't qualify such statements by saying to attack or fight only their men, or by expressly prohibiting any attacks on the women and children.
There are certain references where Muhammad curses women and children, and where a supposed unnamed servant of Allah killed a young boy on the suspicions that he may have turned out to be an evildoer (cf. 3:61; 18:74, 80).
The Islamic narrations and Sira literature provide ample evidence supporting the unjust killing of women and children, i.e. women poetesses and singers are brutally murdered, young boys are beheaded, old men and women are brutally massacred etc.
When we turned our attention to the Muslim scholars we found some of them condoning and justifying homicide bombings and the brutal killing of women and children.
Basically, our investigation has led us to conclude that Islam does permit and condone the brutal murdering of women and children, as well as the bombing of innocent civilians and noncombatants.
Homosexuality, in Islam, will also get you death.
Elfie
Tiny little linkies.
Charity To Strangers Is A Sign You Should Be Institutionalized?
A man is detained for psychiatric attention after being kind to strangers in meaningful ways -- giving them money, and not just a dollar.
M. Caulfield posts at exposingthetruth:
Officials in Halifax, Canada, have detained a man because he had been giving away money to strangers. Richard Wright had been vacationing in the city and decided to spend some of his time giving away various amounts of money to strangers on the street. When they would thank him, he would often tell them to instead "thank God," and his daughter Chelsey claims that he was simply attempting to do good for the world.One women who was a recipient of the Wright's act of kindness, named Cathy, called his act a blessing, one that was able to help her get by until the end of the month. Cathy is on disability and had been running low on money for rent and food for the month. Wright surprisingly gave her $50, which she said she used to buy groceries with. Bill MacNamara and June Bond were having coffee on their porch early in the morning when Wright pulled up in front of their home, he walked up to them and handed them over $100
Following the detainment of her father, Chelsey took to Facebook to defend him and insist that the accusations insinuating that her father has some mental impairment are falsely ludicrous. She affirmed that she strongly believes he does not suffer from any mental issues. Mental health authorities have since detained and admitted him at a local psychiatric ward in Halifax.
It is also claimed that Wright would talk the recipients of his charitable acts about Nikola Tesla and the suppression of his research on free energy. A Facebook group has since been established by numerous members in support of Wright, named #OpFreeRichardWright
So, the message is, you can give money away -- thousands of dollars or more -- as long as you do it through some foundation to nameless, faceless people. If you simply look at people and see they're in need and give them some money, well, you must be nuts.
And no, even if he talked about Tesla and all, this is not a sign he is nuts. If we institutionalized everybody with an attachment to a theory, or theories we find nutty, a good number of the CNN commentators speculating on the Malaysia plane would be strapped to a bed right now.
Two posts from the "Halifax" link above. The first:
Anavrin • 10 days ago
I'm so glad this got reported on. I actually posted on FB yesterday after having the pleasure of meeting this gentleman myself. I had just got off work down on Barrington street and was having a smoke in a parking killing time waiting for my bus. The man was dressed in a wool/red plaid jacket with patched jeans and was sporting a salt and pepper beard with thick sun glasses. When he first walked up to me he was asking how my day and life in general was. I thought he was going to ask for a smoke so I got my pack ready. Instead he was just talking about how life will get better and started mentioning how 46% of the worlds wealth was owned by the 1% who want to rule the world. But he reassured me everything would be okay and a movement was coming to take back the wealth and give it to the people. He even talked about Nikola Tesla and how he was working on free energy but was silenced by those who wanted financial control. Then he said he had a message from God and handled me a brown piece of paper. I thought it would be some sort of religious pamphlet I've gotten from random people before but to my surprise it was a folder $100 bill! I was shocked and actually told him I couldn't take his money. He refused to take it back and said if I didn't need it to give it to someone who did. We spoke a short bit more before slowly walking away. I was still stunned and didn't know what exactly to say except 'If there were more people like you, then everyone could have hope for humanity'.He really made my day and I'm elated this wasn't an isolated incident. Thank you sir, your are beyond words. I have been paying forward your message even if it was personalized for me and just so you know, I bought my gf and I pizza that night and did a Tim's run for my co-workers the next day. I plan to give the rest to the next person I see in need and carry on your message. Thank you so much.
PS: I hope your leg feels better.
The second -- apparently from his daughter:
Chelsey • 5 days ago
Hi everybody, my dad was stopped by the RCMP on his way from home to Charlottetown on Thursday. He was arrested and brought to a confinement area at the QEH hospital in Charlottetown.He was stripped of all his belongings an locked in a small concrete room with a tiny window and a camera inside. He was left there for 8 hours with only 2 pieces of white bread to eat, and he was forced against his will to swallow 2 small white pills. The people there would not tell him what medication he was taking.
When he asked the guard if he could use the phone he was ignored and because frustrated because he was worried about Ashley and I, since he is our soul provider. The workers there did not care whatsoever about me or Ashley, we could have been home with no heat/food but they didn't care. They would not let him contact us.
My dad was also worried about the cats going without food, an the pipes freeing once he was informed that he would be detained for 3 days. At this point he was told to sit down and shut up or he would get a needle. He was then transferred upstairs to a small room and the next day that he would be detained for another 28 more days.
He has now been there for four days and after repeated requests for the toxicology report on the forced medications and a copy of the Mental Health Act, he has still nott received the information. They simply do not care what he says or how he feels. He was not even informed of his right by the police or hospital. He is only allowed out of his room for 30 minutes, this is so unfair.
By now you are probably wondering why he was detained in the first place.. it is because he had some extra money so he decided to share it around with some homeless and needy people in Halifax and Dartmouth. He did nothing illegal, he was simply helping some people out. Since when did being a nice person make you end up in th hospital? They think he is sick and has mental issues.. but I know he does not. He plans to hopefully attain legal help tomorrow. We are keeping our fingers crossed.
My dad is honestly a great guy.. he has always been good to people, and he simply just wanted to help people out. Any support any of you can offer would be greatly appreciated. He is being held at the QEH hospital Unit 9, the number there is (902) 894-0223, he would appreciate your support at this time. Thank you all so much. Visiting hours are MON-FRI 4:30 - 8:30 ; SAT-SUN 11:30 - 8:30.
News stories on this here. One odd bit from a HuffPo Canada piece from 3/26:
Wright's mother agreed that he does not have a history of mental illness, but also said he was not arrested and is not being held against his will, CTV reported.
A Nat Post piece by Tristin Hopper from March 24 had this:
In a Monday afternoon statement, the agency said that nobody can be committed involuntarily unless two physicians deem the person to be "of harm to themselves or others.""We appreciate the seriousness of this situation and the impact on our patient and their family," said Pam Trainor, executive director of Mental Health for Health P.E.I.
She added, "it is important for the public to understand that patients are admitted to our hospitals, programs and/or health-care services because they can benefit from the care that we provide."
Well, maybe because they've decided the person can "benefit" from their care.
About his giving, as I have written and talked about on my radio show with various guests -- Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, who's done a good bit of the research, and Dr. Elizabeth Dunn -- doing kind acts for others is a way to meaningfully increase your happiness.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, as I told a friend recently, I would give money to FIRE and the Institute for Justice and look out amongst my friends, see who's struggling, and give each a bunch of money so they would maybe have the time and backing to get on their feet. And I'd live in a place where I could have some guest houses on the property so friends could come visit and stay for a month or more without our annoying the hell out of each other. (Kind of artists' residences, since most of my friends are either writers or do something creative.)
Am I nuts or something?
What The LAX Baggage Workers' Arrests Say About The TSA's Pretend Security
If it was that easy to get things OUT of bags and cargo, it's that easy to get things in.
Just another bit of evidence that the TSA, with its repurposed Cinnabon workers grabbing at our genitals and taking veterans' commemorative penknives, is windowdressing. If anyone with an IQ over the school speed limit wanted to smuggle something into an airport and onto a plane, they obviously could.
Cop Giving Breathalyzer Ignorant Of Basic Math
Via The Free Thought Project, which headlined this "Cop Gets Irate After Physics Student Owns him in Basic Math":
Lispy
Linkie with a speech impediment.
Outrageous: Taxpayers Are Paying For Oil Paintings Of Government Officials
Colby Itkowitz writes in the WaPo:
As former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's portrait secured its place on the hallway wall outside the secretary's agency office, a Democratic senator renewed her effort to limit how much the federal government can spend on costly oil paintings of federal officials.After the Loop reported this week that Chertoff's portrait cost the agency $30,500 and was in the works several years, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) re-upped a bill she introduced in December that would not completely ban taxpayer-funded portraits, but cap the price tag at $20,000 a pop. It stipulates that federal funds only be used for "officials in line for the presidency," which allows cabinet secretaries to keep one of the perks of the job.
Any official seeking a more expensive replication of him or herself could use private dollars.
Why are we paying for ANY oil painting of ANY government official?
We need to pay down the national debt, not pay big bucks to shine the egos of government officials -- especially government officials like Michael Chertoff, who went on to sell citizens out by using his government contacts and cred, to the tune of big bucks.
via @Heminator
Kobe Bryant Argues For Reasoning Over Automatic Support of Anyone African-American
NewsOne quotes Ben McGrath's New Yorker piece on Bryant and Colorlines' subsequent piece by Jamilah King:
"I won't react to something just because I'm supposed to, because I'm an African-American," he said. "That argument doesn't make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we've progressed as a society? Well, we've progressed as a society, then don't jump to somebody's defense just because they're African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won't assert myself."The profile goes on to quote former NFL running back Jim Brown, who at one point said, "[Kobe] is somewhat confused about culture, because he was brought up in another country." Bryant then defended himself on Twitter, writing, "A 'Global' African American is an inferior shade to 'American' African American?? #hmmm. that doesn't sound very #Mandela or #DrKing sir."
Welfare For Tycoons!
Nicholas Kristof writes in The New York Times about how we subsidize the wildly wealthy. One example:
First, welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: "The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.'s flying on a corporate jet."
Another example:
Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts.In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America's neediest. Hmm. How about if we house the homeless in these publicly supported yachts?
To say our tax code is in need of reform is an understatement.
And not just because we're subsidizing banks, corporations, and coddled zillionaires.
I just wasted several days pulling my tax information together and then lost a writing day driving to Burbank and back to have my accountant. A huge waste of time, life, and productivity.
The ACA Penalties Are Not Just Toothless But Gummy
Abby McCloskey and Tom Miller write in the WSJ:
Those not exempt face modest fines compared with the out-of-pocket cost of paying premiums for ObamaCare-required insurance. For example, the maximum penalties for a single adult remaining uninsured throughout all of 2014 would amount to the higher of $95 or 1% of household income above the federal income tax filing threshold. This is a fraction of the cost of health insurance for potential enrollees in government exchanges.The threat behind the penalties is even less believable. The Affordable Care Act explicitly prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from using its most powerful enforcement tools like criminal penalties and levying property--such as wage garnishment.
If the IRS manages to discover someone without required coverage for all or part of a year, it can do little more than collect the penalty by taking it out of any other income tax refunds owed to an uninsured taxpayer. That risk can be limited or avoided by reducing the amounts withheld from one's regular paycheck for income taxes.
For the mandate to have teeth, the size of the penalty would need to be greatly increased, exemptions would need to decrease, and enforcement would need to be stronger. Good luck with convincing congressional Democrats facing midterm elections to commit political suicide.
Even then, a tougher mandate still might not work. The CBO concedes that there is "little empirical evidence concerning individual people's responsiveness to health insurance mandates." In other countries with much higher penalties, such as Switzerland or the Netherlands, health-insurance mandates have had little success in changing the behavior of the uninsured and largely reinforced existing levels of coverage.
Licky
How many does it take to get to the center?
How Government Does Business And How It Hurts Us: Blocking You From Blocking The Sun's Rays
I have long worn the most protective sunblock available, Anthelios, with mexoryl, which offers strong protection from both UVA and UVB rays.
Europeans have been wearing it for years -- after mexoryl (aka ecamsule) was approved in 1990. Are Europeans dropping dead from its use? No.
But the FDA has long dragged its heels on approval of this and other highly protective sunscreen ingredients. So, I get mine in Paris -- in bulk, for about 12 eu a bottle -- while Americans can pay $30 or more for the same thing, and it's not widely available. (Here is one I found at Amazon for $23.)
Only the parent company, L'Oreal, of this product, is able to add it -- and only to this product and a few other high-priced ones -- because they are the only one who got FDA approval. The price would go down for sunscreens using it -- as it has in Canada -- if there was competition.
Brady Dennis writes in the WaPo about the FDA:
The agency has not expanded its list of approved sunscreen ingredients since 1999. Eight ingredient applications are pending, some dating to 2003. Many of the ingredients are designed to provide broader protection from certain types of UV rays and were approved years ago in Europe, Asia, South America and elsewhere....In the meantime, advocates for newer sunscreens have grown increasingly frustrated.
"These sunscreens are being used by tens of millions of people every weekend in Europe, and we're not seeing anything bad happening," said Darrell S. Rigel, clinical professor of dermatology at New York University and past president of the American Academy of Dermatologists. "It's sort of crazy. . . . We're depriving ourselves of something the rest of the world has."
Even some FDA officials have expressed frustration about how the applications have become mired in a complex regulatory regime, adopted more than a decade ago, that was originally intended to simplify approvals for over-the-counter products used in other countries for at least five years.
"This is a very intractable problem. I think, if possible, we are more frustrated than the manufacturers and you all are about this situation," Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told lawmakers in November when asked about the agency's sluggish over-the-counter reviews.
Part of the holdup, she said, is that the agency must undertake a lengthy rule-writing process before it can add to the list of active ingredients approved for sunscreens. In addition, the FDA has found some applications lacking in safety data. And differing standards mean that an ingredient considered safe in Canada or Japan, for example, might not automatically get a thumbs up from U.S. regulators.
Since last year, a group of dermatologists, sunscreen ingredient companies such as BASF and advocacy groups such as the Prevent Cancer Foundation have lobbied lawmakers and rallied public support for changes to the approval process. Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill introduced legislation aimed at speeding up the FDA reviews. The FDA has planned a public meeting this month to seek input about overhauling its process for evaluating over-the-counter products.
The Idiots Are Running The Educatorium
A mother responded to an emergency call that her little boy, who has Asperger's, was having a panic attack in school. She did what mothers do -- dropped everything and ran straight to his elementary school classroom to calm and comfort him...and was promptly arrested for failing to check in at the front office.
Law prof Jonathan Turley blogs:
Notably, she had just met with the principal a day or so before. Thus, the principal knew Williams. However, ran up to her in the classroom and told her that she failed to sign in. When Williams noted that she was comforted her child and could sign in if someone brought the book, the principal told her it was too late -- the police were on the way.Let assume for a second all the principal saw was not a women with whom she just met but a blur running past the office. Once she clearly saw it was the mother of this panicked child, why wouldn't she call off the police. Instead, the mother was arrested and charged. This brings us to the officers who could have shown greater judgment and simply escorted out the mother with a warning. Then there are the police supervisors and prosecutors who could have declined the charge. No one exercised a modicum of judgment in this situation of a mother rushing to her child.
She was charged with trespassing. The school was locked down briefly and a letter sent to all parents about the incident. It was a mother rushing to her crying child.
Turley, like Harvey Silverglate, has written with concern about the criminalization of everything in America. From the link above to Silverglate's book, Three Felonies a Day:
In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.
Hobby Lobby And Contraceptive Coverage: Where Do You Think The Line Should Be Drawn?
USA Today has an editorial that argues against exempting Lobby Hobby on religious grounds from the Obamacare requirement that health insurers cover all FDA-approved contraceptives, including IUDs and morning-after pills:
The administration has already exempted churches from its "contraception mandate" and, after initially overstepping, provided a workaround for religiously affiliated organizations such as hospitals and schools.The question now is whether a private, for-profit corporation such as Hobby Lobby -- with its more than 600 stores and 14,000 employees -- whose owners are deeply religious, should get similar consideration.
The answer, unless the court can devise a way to finesse the issue very narrowly, is no.
Precedents help explain why. Over the years, plaintiffs have cited religious objections to argue that they shouldn't be subject to laws on racial quality, the military draft, child neglect, drug use and paying taxes. The court has repeatedly rejected these pleas, drawing a line between laws that target or place a substantial burden on religion and those that set broad, nationally applicable standards that some may find objectionable.
In a case that weighed whether Amish business owners should be exempt from paying Social Security taxes, for example, the court said the owners had freely chosen to run a secular business and could not avoid rules that applied to all other businesses.
That's a key issue here. By incorporating, business owners get special protections, such as immunity from personal liability for what their companies do. But owners shouldn't be able to take advantage of the benefits of incorporation while exempting themselves from responsibilities that apply to their competitors. Nor should they be able to impose their religious beliefs on their employees.
Of course, if Obamacare didn't idiotically neglect to untie health care from the workplace, we wouldn't have this problem. As a godless harlot who has paid independently for her own care since her early 20s, I can avail myself of the birth control of my choice, which has been covered by my HMO.
But it seems to me that Obamacare isn't about sense; it's about forcing some people to pay for a lot of other people's care (often making their own formerly unaffordable care unaffordable, as in my case). And it's ultimately about forcing us all into a single-payer system, after private insurance companies are ruined and/or private health insurance becomes too expensive for vast swaths of people.
Lippy
Wet, slobbery links.
The Day The Civil Liberties Died? Ask Those Who Cared When George Bush Was Killing Them
There's no precise day; it happens little by little, until we wake up in a very different American than our Founding Fathers planned on. We've been very poor stewards of our civil liberties, especially lately, and especially if we're Obama or Democrats. Law prof Jonathan Turley writes:
There will come a day when Democrats will seek again to speak in favor of core values of free speech, free press, privacy, and the like. When that day comes, there will be a chorus of howls from civil libertarians who have watched in astonishment as the Democratic Party enabled these assaults on freedom either actively or by acquiescence. The trade of power of principle for the power of personality will, in my view, be judged harshly in history. Obama will leave office in a few years and what he will leave a much larger security system, more extensive surveillance, and a mountain of hypocrisy for his supporters to climb in his wake.
Chase Madar writes at Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch on how Obama expanded the National Security State:
Most striking is the normalisation of domestic surveillance under Obama. The federal government now employs 30,000 people to monitor phone conversations in the US; the Department of Homeland Security, formed only in 2002, is now the third-largest federal bureaucracy, surpassed only by the Pentagon and the Department of Veteran Affairs. The construction of a 1m sq ft (93,000 sq m) domestic surveillance data centre costing $2bn has just been started in Bluffdale, Utah (2)....Only well-funded advocacy groups with experienced lawyers are able to use the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to information about the security state -- and with only limited success.
...During the George W Bush administrations, many liberals found the expansion of the security state a grave threat to Americans' civil liberties. No longer. Since the second world war, the US civil libertarian agenda gains traction only when the Democratic Party is in opposition, as in the early 1970s. As soon as the Democrats occupy the executive branch, such concerns evaporate. Today, many Democrat-oriented intellectuals assure the public that their objection is not to government intrusiveness itself but only to such techniques being in the hands of the wrong political party -- "a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush," wrote the jurist Jonathan Turley.
Green "Licensing": Research Finds Those Who Are "Eco" Tend To Feel More Entitled To Go Asshole On The Rest Of Us
A few tweets by @Kaus_Mickey and another guy reminded me of this concept I heard presented in a talk at NEEPS, the NorthEast Evolutionary Psychology Society Conference. It's called "green licensing," and describes, as Emily Anthes puts it in a 2010 Sci Am piece, how "purchasing a green product could make you more likely to behave more selfishly down the road":
Researchers at the University of Toronto asked college students to shop for products online from either an eco-friendly or a conventional store. Then, in a classic experiment known as the dictator game, subjects were asked to divide a small sum of money between themselves and a stranger. Those who shopped at the green store shared, on average, less of their money.The investigators believe that a "licensing effect" might be at work. "When we engage in a good deed, that gives us a kind of satisfaction," says Nina Mazar, professor of marketÂing and a co-author of the paper. With that self-satisfied feeling can come tacit permission to behave more selÂfishly next time we have the opporÂtunity, Mazar says. Previous research has documented this licensing effect in other contexts; a study published last year revealed that asking people to ruminate on their humanitarian qualities actually reduced their charÂitable giving.
You can see this thing in action at various Whole Foods Stores, where the employees are really nice but the customers often seem to be The Biggest Assholes In The Whole World.
Welcome To Washington, DC USSR
Andrew Beaujon at Poynter reported on a March 21 panel at part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center.
New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is "the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation." The administration wants to "narrow the field of national security reporting," Risen said, to "create a path for accepted reporting." Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, "will be punished."The administration's aggressive prosecutions have created "a de facto Official Secrets Act," Risen said, and the media has been "too timid" in responding.
Loopy
Linkie with fruit.
Social Media Fail: Lost Airplane Version
Because you have the ability to use technology doesn't mean you should.
Malaysia Air notified the families of the passengers that their loved ones were confirmed lost...by TEXT MESSSAGE! (Via Jezebel, which has an annoying autoplay video that came up for me -- beware.)
Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia's Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.
There was more (per @BuzzFeedNews) -- but still.
Malaysia Airlines tells CNN that in addition to texts phone calls and in-person briefings by counselors were made to the #MH370 families.
There are formats that just aren't appropriate for communicating the death of loved ones, and the "OMG! ur kiddn" format is one of them.
Going In Drag As A Man For 18 Months Taught A Woman A Lot About Men And Women
Nora Vincent dressed the part of a man for 18 months and ended up getting a bird's eye view -- sorry, so to speak -- of men, and coming out with some sympathy, surprise, and admiration for men. A few bits from her 2006 piece in The Guardian. (I forget who I got this from, so sorry about the lack of credit.)
On women's double-edged desires:
Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men - the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned's dating life.
On dating and the conversations during:
To most of the women I dated, even the odd date meant a lot, especially women who had been out roaming the singles scene for years in their mid-30s, trying to find a mate amid the serial daters.For these women, men as a subspecies - not the particular men with whom they had been involved - were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the psychic damage it had done them. It's hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged, on the defensive.
Many of my dates - even the more passive ones - did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and co-workers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy.
On how regular guys talked about their wives:
One night Jim was talking about his plans for a ski trip. He wanted to find a location that had good skiing, but he also wanted some lively nightlife. "I'd like to find a place that has a good titty bar," he said.Bob chimed in, "Yeah. Count me in on that. I'm definitely up for that." This sparked a short discussion of titty bars and how the married man negotiated them. The ski trip would offer one of the few opportunities for the boys to be boys, since their wives weren't coming along. This had to be taken advantage of, since it was clear that at least Bob's and Jim's wives had expressly forbidden them to go to strip clubs.
Despite all the dirty talk and hiding strip club visits from their wives, they would speak about their wives and their marriages with absolute reverence. It was an odd contradiction, but one that I came across fairly often among married men who talked to Ned about their sexuality.
On women's power:
If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything. Seeing this more clearly through my experience, I began to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because they think that's all they have, their one pathetic advantage over all she seems to hold above them. I make no excuses for this. There are none. But as a man I felt vaguely attuned to this mind-set or its possibility. I did not inhabit it, but I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed.
Vincent's book -- Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man.
Enough With This "We're The Government And We Can Do What We Want And We Don't Have To Tell You Anything About It" Business
The Obama administration, for no apparent good reason, decided to give up US control of the Internet to, in Gordon L. Crovitz' words at the WSJ, "a still-to-be-determined collection of governments and international groups":
The plan announced on March 14 would have the U.S. give up control of the "root zone file" of the Internet and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. This root of the Internet stores all the names and addresses for websites world-wide, while Icann controls Web addresses and domains. The U.S. has used this control to ensure that websites operate without political interference from any country and that anyone can start a website, organize on Facebook FB +0.40% or post on Twitter TWTR +1.60% without asking permission.It's easy to imagine a new Internet oversight body operating like the United Nations, with repressive governments taking turns silencing critics. China could get its wish to remove FreeTibet.org from the Internet as an affront to its sovereignty. Russia could force Twitter to remove posts by Ukrainian-Americans criticizing Vladimir Putin.
...Hearings on U.S. protection for the Internet were quickly called for the House starting in early April. One topic should be whether the executive branch of government has the unilateral authority to transfer control over Internet addresses and root zone management of domains.
Congress doubted that the president could do this on his own when the issue was considered in 2000. The General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office, concluded it was "uncertain" whether Congress has to pass a law. The Property Clause of the Constitution says Congress must pass legislation to effect a transfer of government property. Arguably the president could no more transfer the valuable control over the naming and domains of the Internet than he could give Alaska back to Russia.
Contacted by this columnist last week, a spokesman for the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration said the agency reviewed this legal issue and concluded the administration can act without Congress but refused to share a copy of the legal analysis. Congress should ask for a copy and do its own analysis.
Choos!
This is Cuban for "shoes"! (I think that sounds really cute, so I hope nobody's PC and offended.) They happen to be up to 30 percent off at Amazon
To buy other stuff, Search Amy's Amazon
And thanks to all of you who do buy through my links. You help me keep from writing on scrap paper in candlelight, which is much appreciated (because my handwriting is illegible, and I gesture and knock things over with abandon).
Leggy
Linkie with baby calves.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT: Executive Coach Olivia Fox Cabane -- How You Can Master The Art And Science Of Having Charisma
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
My guest, Fortune 500 executive coach Olivia Fox Cabane, has written the single most helpful how-to book I have every read.
Cabane shows, based in solid science, why charisma isn't something people are just born with but something we can all acquire and perfect with knowledge and practice. Even people who aren't extraverts.
I was so impressed by her book that I stopped reading it to go order a friend a copy.
On tonight's show, Cabane will lay out how anyone can master the art and science of personal magnetism and attain success in their career, love life, and friendships, and lead a more socially fulfilling life.
Her book we'll be discussing is The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism. This promises to be a life-changing show -- don't miss it!
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/24/olivia-fox-cabane-how-you-can-master-the-art-and-science-of-having-charisma
My show's sponsor is now 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 where science meets ancient Chinese philosophy and likes what it finds.
Dr. Edward Slingerland, an internationally renowned expert in Chinese philosophy, draws on both cutting-edge science and ancient Chinese strategies to show how our modern Western approach of striving our guts out doesn't seem to be the way to success or happiness.
In fact, to give one example from his book, it seems that getting practiced enough in something that it comes naturally is the way to avoid forcing things in the moment -- which is actually counterproductive to succeeding.
Dr. Slingerland will talk about this, how achieving that sort of effortlessness is the way to personal charisma, and much more on tonight's show. His book he'll be discussing is "Trying Not To Try: The Art And Science of Spontaneity." Join us and see how we can better our work, relationships, and lives - - if we can just get out of our own way.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/17/dr-edward-slingerland-why-the-key-to-charisma-success-is-not-trying-too-hard
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.
The Ridiculousness Of Trying To Stop Girls From Fairy Princessing
Alice Dreger writes at the Pacific Standard:
It makes me crazy that some of my feminist friends try so hard to stop their kids from being gender-typical. I have one such friend who has a fairy-princess daughter, and my friend keeps trying to keep her daughter butch, as if she owes this to Susan B. Anthony. I asked my friend, "If your son wanted to wear a pretty pink dress, would you let him?" She turned red and said, "Yes." I answered, "Then why isn't it gender-based oppression to deny your daughter a pretty pink dress?"Oy! Is this what we've come to?
While on the road a few years back, I met a stridently-feminist soon-to-be mom who pulled me aside to worry aloud about how she was going to raise her child. How was she going to keep this child free from gender expectations? Here's what I told her: Gender isn't just about oppression. It's also about pleasure. We get pleasure from our genders. You will get pleasure from your child's gender, and will sometimes delight in it the same way you will delight in your child growing and learning how to count. Your child will get pleasure from his or her gender. When we have sex, it is often in gendered ways--we enjoy sex as a woman with a man, or as a woman with a woman. How much more evidence do you need that gender can be joyfully delicious? Why oppress yourself and your child with your expectation that gender is always about oppression?
On this note, let me just say this: People who think gender identities, gender roles, and sexual orientations are all socially constructed are the most naive biological determinists I've ever seen. They think all human brains are completely without structure when it comes to these things; we all have empty slates in our skulls at birth. No, we don't! Really!
Revolving Door Surtax For Government Officials Who Parlay Their Time In Government Into Outrageous Bucks
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is exactly right about officials who work in government and then leave and cash in big. He writes at USA Today:
A few weeks back, I wrote here about taxing the revolving door that takes people back and forth between the federal government and the various industries that federal government agencies regulate. My proposal was to put a surtax -- 50%, say, or maybe 75% -- on the post-government earnings of federal officials in excess of their government salaries for the first five years: Leave a federal job paying $100,000 a year for an industry job paying $600,000 a year, and you'd pay a $250,000 surtax. After all, with folks leaving the Obama administration, as they left previous administrations, for salaries several times what they earned in the public sector, and with excessive entanglement between government and business a growing problem, why not use the power of the IRS to modify behavior?I didn't think my proposal would go very far, but maybe I was too pessimistic. It seems that people are noticing and approving.
Not long after my column ran, it got an endorsement from Boston Herald, which noted: "In his 2008 campaign, President Obama promised to 'close the revolving door.' It's still open." And spinning more furiously than ever."
...The revolving door is just one symptom of a bigger picture: Whatever claims our political class makes about the general welfare, it is really running things mostly for its own benefit. That's why comparisons to theHunger Games, where the fat-cats in the Capital City live it up while the provinces starve, keep coming. Addressing the revolving door problem won't solve things, either, but it might help. And since it's getting more attention, perhaps I should flesh this idea out a bit more.
First, I'd apply it only to political appointees in the executive branch, at least to begin with. I'd be thrilled to apply it to congressional staffers -- and to members of Congress -- as well, but I think that such a bill would face too much opposition in, well, Congress to make it through. But if executive officials are subject to this sort of law, the pressure will grow to extend it the legislative branch as well. (And I wouldn't apply it to people who aren't political appointees because it seems unfair to slap a surtax on someone who finishes his hitch in the Marines and joins a private-security company).
Linkieshines
Don't touch my monkey!
Some Supermodels Have Four Legs
Aida in a handmade sweaterdress I got for $10 off Ebay.
Everyone Can't Become An Engineer
Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg, "If everyone suddenly flooded into 'practical' fields, we'd be overwhelmed with mediocre accountants and incompetent engineers, making lower and lower salaries as they swamped the demand for these services":
The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won't be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.
Those who tout Stem fields as a cure-all confuse correlation with causality. It's true that people who major in those subjects generally make more than, say, psychology majors. But they're also people who have the aptitudes, attitudes, values and interests that draw them to those fields (which themselves vary greatly in content and current job prospects). The psychology and social work majors currently enjoying relatively low rates of unemployment -- 7.7 percent and 6.6 percent respectively -- probably wouldn't be very good at computer science, which offers higher salaries but, at least at the moment, slightly lower chances of a job.
...As any good economist will remind you, income is just a means to utility, not a goal in itself. Some jobs pay well not only because few people have the right qualifications but also because few people want to do them in the first place. In a culture where many people hate oil companies, petroleum engineers probably enjoy such a premium. Plumbers -- the touchstone example for critics who think too many people go to college -- certainly do.
The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning -- the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the "soft" professions that complement them.
...The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn't that I didn't learn Fortran, but that I didn't study Dante.
The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently -- how to figure out what you don't know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field.
Likewise, the most important parts of my education were learning to think and "habits of mind."
Middle School Leggings Bans -- For Some Girls Only
Just when kids are trying out different styles and figuring out who and how to be, a teacher comes around to squash them like bugs -- especially certain girls.
Carrie Goldman writes at Chicago Now about a ban on leggings for girls in middle school -- but just certain girls -- the hot ones, the curvy ones, the heavy ones.
The principal of the school has been very responsive to the concerns and is working to discuss the situation with parents and teachers.But no one has addressed what I think is the biggest problem with the dress code: of the female students, only specific girls are being dress-coded, and the kids have noticed it.
Four Haven 7th graders were talking about the leggings ban with Juliet Bond, who asked if any girls in particular are targeted by teachers for violating the dress code.
"Yes," the girls all responded, "The girls that are developed are the ones that get dress-coded. "
Bond, a LCSW who teaches Gender Studies at Columbia College, tried to clarify, "Do you mean that the girls without boobs are not getting dress-coded?"
The girls all replied. "Yes. That's what is happening."
Just last week, a 7th grader with a curvy build came home upset about this. She had worn an outfit with a skirt and leggings, and in the morning, a teacher had said to her, "Cute outfit." But then her homeroom teacher pulled her aside at the end of the day and said, "You know, another girl could get away with that outfit, but you should not be wearing that. I'm going to dress code you." Juliet Bond and the child's mom were discussing the incident, not certain if the message to the child was 'you're too sexy' or 'you're too fat.'
The kids also report that the teachers have been discussing 'appropriate body types for leggings and yoga pants and inappropriate body types for yoga pants and leggings.'
What's with schools playing the mom like this? This is a job for actual moms and dads -- to tell their kid, "Over my dead body are you wearing that to school."
Once the kids are in school, unless they're running around half-naked and drawing everybody's eyes away from the blackboard, the teachers should just do what they're hired to do -- teach -- and not lecture on fashion choices.
A commenter on the site concurs:
Jerry Pipes · Tucson, Arizona
As a reformed teacher, principal and school superintendent, I continue to be amazed at the half-baked rules dreamed up nitwitted school administrators to install barriers against the joy and excitement of learning. When will they ever learn to focus on the important stuff?
via @AndreaKuszewski
In What Universe Does This Seem A Wise Idea?
The West is getting less and less free.
Belgium has banned sexist speech, reports Eugene Volokh on his blog at WaPo, and there is prison time for anyone violating the ban. Rik Torfs, rector of the University of Leuven, and Jogchum Vrielink, coordinator of the Centre for Discrimination Law at the University of Leuven, passed this translation on to Eugene:
Penalization of SexismFor the purposes of this Act, the concept of sexism will be understood to mean any gesture or act that, in the circumstances of Article 444 of the Penal Code,* is evidently intended to express contempt for a person because of his gender, or that regards them as inferior, or reduces them to their sexual dimension, and which has the effect of violating someone's dignity.
Anyone found guilty of [such conduct] will be punished with a prison sentence of one month to one year, and a fine ..., or one of these penalties alone...
* The relevant part of Article 444 Belgian Penal Code refers to the following circumstances/contexts in which the speech/conduct is required to take place:
"Either in public meetings or places;
Or in the presence of several people, in a place that is not public but accessible to a number of people who are entitled to meet or visit there;
Or in any place in the presence of the offended person and in front of witnesses;
It seems it is not just in America that there is a push to deem -- and let's be be honest who this is about -- women eggshells and not equals.
Inky
It was a dark and stormy link...
The Commenter Gets It Right On Solnit's Ire For SF Tech Workers
Rebecca Solnit this time is sniveling in the London Review of Books, this time demonizing the tech workers in San Francisco. Here piece is here. The balanced piece is below her piece -- a letter to the editor about it I've pasted in below:
Letters
Vol. 36 No. 6 · 20 March 2014As a member of the invasive species that Rebecca Solnit has repeatedly singled out, the tech worker, I feel compelled to respond to her description of recent events in San Francisco (LRB, 20 February). Solnit leans heavily on the fact that San Francisco is the densest metropolis in the US after New York, whose supposed building boom hasn't worked to reduce rents. 'Meanwhile San Francisco developers are building 48,000 more units of housing in the few cracks and interstices not already filled in.' Her point is that development won't cure San Francisco's woes.
First, neither San Francisco nor New York figures on a list of the world's fifty most densely populated cities, which is the only true benchmark. Second, New York has added new housing units at a much slower rate per capita than US cities such as Jacksonville, Houston and Atlanta: it is hardly in the midst of a housing boom. Third, San Francisco developers are actively building only 4900 new units, an order of magnitude less than Solnit claims. The remainder of her 48,000 units may be approved, but most are unlikely to be developed for many years because of the sclerotic regulatory process. Anyone who has visited San Francisco knows that outside a few neighbourhoods lining Market - the Financial District, the Tenderloin and northern SoMa - the city is about three storeys tall. Paris, the city I left to come here, is seven storeys high almost across the board. Major Asian cities are much taller. San Francisco could double in height without greatly hurting its open space or aesthetics. The scarcity of shelter in San Francisco is artificially imposed, the result of a decades-long resistance in many parts of the city to any kind of development. That resistance comes from several quarters. A recent high-rise on the waterfront was voted down by a coalition of local wealth and the political left, which is also leading the fight against evictions. San Francisco's incumbent residents would prefer the postcard life of a low, sparsely populated city to the high-rises of an Asian megalopolis. Fine. But that means homeowners are forcing the burden of adjustment onto tenants. You can fight development or you can fight evictions, but you cannot logically fight both.
Like all American cities, San Francisco is for sale, and its real-estate market speaks through price movements. Rents in San Francisco are shouting at us to build more now. That's the only way we'll have enough space to go round. Rather than deal with the fundamental dynamic of supply and demand, Solnit mounts a fairly predictable attack on tech workers, pushing a narrative in which two groups, so unlike in dignity, enter a fight to the death. To read her, one would think that San Francisco's brave natives face a horde of villainous drones and gold diggers, who have descended on a pristine city to pillage its neighbourhoods and hunt down its idealists. This is not the first time she has tarred the industry. In January, she called the tech business a monoculture (every group looks like a monoculture to outsiders). But if she made the morning commute to Embarcadero, she'd see a lot of Indian and Chinese and Eastern European faces there. In San Francisco's start-up hostels, you hear half a dozen languages spoken every day. In a previous essay, Solnit compared tech workers to insects, aliens, Prussian invaders and German tourists in the space of a few paragraphs (LRB, 7 February 2013). The implications are clear. Applied to any other group, these attempts to dehumanise would have invited howls of indignation. Let's be clear: Rebecca Solnit is not from San Francisco. Neither am I. Neither are many of the protesters and tech workers. This is not a battle between the natives and an invading species; it's a negotiation between two different invading species over shelter and tenants' rights, stasis and change. Solnit's parents moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s when she was a girl. She grew up in Novato. I wonder which side of the immigration debate she would have taken when her parents were seeking entry, or when she herself decided San Francisco would be a nice place to live. I wonder who she would have trusted then to assume the mantle of gatekeeper.
There is a basic thread running through American history: economic opportunity draws immigrants. We should manage those migrations, but we shouldn't stop them, because as soon as they end, we're dead. Having sold her apartment in 2012, Solnit now suggests the city socialise housing. In an interview published by Businessweek, she said we should socialise Google and Facebook. Modest proposals. Anyone hawking that sort of revolution has never seen what socialism produced in the suburbs of Moscow. Events in San Francisco are symptomatic of the Great Inversion. The city is doomed to prosperity, and there will be many violent side-effects and much grieving as it transforms itself from a queer refuge to a bourgeois fortress. With luck it can be both. If the protesters play their cards right, they may rally the general population to stop evictions. I hope they succeed. If they do, it will be despite Solnit, not because of her.
Christian Nicholson
San Francisco
General Boo Hoo And The "Bossy" Ban
Debra J. Saunders writes at SFGate:
It's downright irritating when a bossy billionaire blubbers about the subtle messages embedded in language that impeded her success.In the Wall Street Journal, Sandberg lamented that a teacher once told her best friend not to emulate the young and bossy Sandberg. Nobody knows the trouble she's seen.
Instead of telling the world which word not to say, Sandberg ought to be telling girls - and boys - a lesson that doesn't tell them to feel good for just being who they are. Like: Don't be victims.
Or: Don't be babies.
...To me, the Ban Bossy campaign is one of those unnecessary feel-good, pat-yourself-on-the-back schemes that puts lipstick on social media's most dubious achievement, the sanctification of rampant self-promotion disguised as content. You could say it's the Facebook-ization of feminism.
...If ever there is a sign of the feminization of America, it could be that one Ban Bossy celebrity spokesman is former Gen. Stanley McChrystal. That's right, the former head of NATO command in Afghanistan - whose swagger and irreverent attitude toward the Obama White House was so pronounced that he had to resign - has been reduced to piggybacking onto a campaign that exhorts little girls not to let themselves be stereotyped and suggests that teachers conduct "no interruptions" conversations so that every child has a chance to speak.
A wartime general wants to ban bossy? Why even have an army?
Just loved those last two lines.
Groping For Minority Status For Better Litigation Outcomes
About a Muslim man who lost his job and filed a discrimination suit, via CBSlocal, his attorney, trying to build a case for his being discriminated against, said:
He's African American because Tunisia is in Africa...
Sigh. Everybody grabs for the race card when it pays. Go to the story and look at his picture.
That guy is "African American" in the sense it's generally used like South African-born Charlize Theron is.
P.S. Via Wikipedia, the population in Tunisia is "97% Arab-Berber" and "3% others." Some Tunisian faces here.
650 Cases Of Misconduct In 12 Years At Justice Dept: AKA Business As Usual
Appallingly -- but not surprisingly -- Dana Liebelson lays out at Mother Jones disgusting evidence that people's trust in government is vastly misplaced:
Federal prosecutors, judges, and other officials at the Justice Department committed over 650 acts of professional misconduct in a recent 12-year period, according to a new report published by a DC-based watchdog group, the Project On Government Oversight. POGO investigators came up with the number after reviewing documents put out by the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). According to one little-noticed OPR document published last year, a DOJ attorney failed to disclose a "close personal relationship" with the defendant in a case he was prosecuting, in which he negotiated a plea agreement to release the defendant on bond. An immigration judge also made "disparaging remarks" about foreign nationals. POGO contends that this number is only the tip of the iceberg and OPR needs to release more information about this misconduct to the public....Between fiscal year 2002 and FY2013, of the more than 650 documented cases of DOJ employee misconduct, 400 were characterized as "reckless" or "intentional" by OPR. In OPR's latest report, from FY2012, the office received over 1,000 complaints and other correspondence about Justice Department employees (over half of these complaints came from incarcerated individuals) and opened 123 inquiries and investigations.
In one case from 2012, a Justice Department attorney falsely told a court that the government didn't have evidence that a key witness suffered from an ongoing mental-health disorder--when the prosecutor did have that evidence, according to OPR. The attorney was suspended for two weeks and the state bar was notified. In another case, an immigration judge presiding over a case where a father and his daughter were fighting removal from the United States was found by OPR to have "engaged in professional misconduct by acting in reckless disregard of his obligation to appear to be fair and impartial" and to have made biased statements against immigrants. The judge was suspended for 30 days.
OPR isn't responsible for disciplining employees; that's up to others in the Justice Department. OPR also no longer publicly names Justice Department employees found to be conducting misconduct, although it did so for a brief period during the Clinton presidency. In 2010, the American Bar Association passed a resolution asking the Obama administration to release more information about Justice Department investigations, potentially including names, but so far, not much has changed.
A bill was just proposed by Utah Senator Mike Lee and Montana Senator Jon Tester to overhaul the way Justice Department misconduct is investigated, moving oversight from the OPR to the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General, which, in Liebelson's words, "is widely considered to be more independent. "
via @instapundit
Bossylinks
Put them here or I'll...make an idle threat. (I'm more compelling in person, really I am.)
Take 50 Percent Of Your Clothing Off!
Wait -- I mean that there's up to 50 percent off Spring dress clothes for men, women, kids, and bébé at Amazon
Personally, jacket-wise, I go for the moto thing
Six Sex-Free Months: Would You Do It?
A woman wrote me and said that she'd had a habit of jumping into bed too soon -- sometimes hours after meeting a guy.
She made a New Year's resolution to wait six months from when she first starts dating someone before having sex.
I think this is a mistake. First of all, when you set a goal, it's a bad idea to set one that's likely impossible. (She has yet to meet anyone who's a real possibility for a boyfriend, so it's not like she's been tested.)
Also, and the reason I'm posting this here, I think that guys who aren't religious to the extreme (and trying to "save themselves" for marriage) aren't going to be willing to wait six months to have sex with a woman they're dating.
I think she'll either break her pledge to herself and feel bad or chase away guys she tells it to.
Guys? Would you wait six months to have sex?
I Believe This Is Called "Life"
It sometimes gets uncomfortable. (Deal with it, kittens.)
There's a story at latimes.com by Larry Gordon, "Quarter of UC population had bad experiences on campus, survey finds":
SAN FRANCISCO -- About a quarter of UC students, faculty and staff reported that they had experienced some exclusionary, intimidating or offensive situations on campus and 9% said that had interfered with their abilities to study or work, according to a survey by the university system released Wednesday.Those results in the long-awaited Campus Climate survey elicited mixed responses from leaders of the 10-campus UC system. They said they were pleased that 73% of UC undergraduates reported feeling "comfortable" or "very comfortable" in their classes and only about 7% "uncomfortable." But the officials were concerned about the reports of discrimination and isolation. (Sizable portions of the survey participants said they were neither comfortable nor uncomfortable.)
UC Regent Sherry Lansing said UC's goal should be to reduce the number of people who report feeling isolated and snubbed. "We want a welcoming environment. We know that if 1% feels uncomfortable, that's an environment we don't want," she said at the regents' meeting at a UC San Francisco facility.
I was uncomfortable a lot because I was socially awkward. I worked hard on that. Now I'm far less socially awkward. But I don't expect the world to be all sunshine and flowers and yellow brick road, and I don't think the goal of making an environment "welcoming" is a realistic one. And I'm guessing it involves de facto or explicit censorship. Of course, UC President Janet Napolitano said publicly that that the push to make things sunny and wonderful at all times for all (though that's obviously not exactly how she put it) shouldn't diminish the (already-diminished) free speech on campuses.
The Little Guy Goes After Class Action Abuse
I know what this guy is talking about here. I became one of the two lead plaintiffs in Ted Frank's suit against the class action abuse in a Costco gas case, after I saw him seeking plaintiffs on Overlawyered.com.
I love Costco (they treat their employees well and I get great deals there) and I drive a car that gets about 45 mpg in the city. So, if I got "cheated" because of hot weather when I pumped gas, it was probably for a half cent.
I joined Ted's case because I'm disgusted by what I call "the business of abuse."
This guy is disgusted by it, too. David Lat writes at above The Law of a law student, William Chamberlain, who wrote a hilarious brief objecting to the absolutely unfair way settlements are dispensed, with big bucks going to a law firm, more big bucks doled out elsewhere (sometimes to a judge's favorite charity, Ted explained to me, and never mind whether it relates to the class), and sometimes zero money for the class the lawyers are supposedly representing.
Chamberlain wrote in screenplay form, and I love what he did. An excerpt from the middle, but read the whole thing at Above The Law:
Counsel: Well, one of the things we got in the settlement was an injunction that prevents CytoSport from marketing their product improperly in the future. We both agreed that the injunction is worth $1 million, and that's part of the $5 million figure.Class Member: Huh? We're all sitting right here. We were deceived in the past - we're not going to be deceived in the future, with or without this injunction. How does it help us going forward?
Counsel: Well, you know, maybe it doesn't help you, but there have to be a bunch of other people out there who've never tried Muscle Milk. This will help them - they won't be deceived about this for the next three years! All because of us!
Class Member: All because of you, eh? So prior to this lawsuit, they were misrepresenting the health benefits of their product, and it was your lawsuit that spurred them to change their labeling?
Counsel: Well, to be honest, no. CytoSport had received an FDA warning letter in 2011, and was planning to change their labels prior to this settlement.
Class Member: So what you're saying is that the FDA got CytoSport to stop labeling its products improperly, and you got an injunction to prevent them from doing something they had already stopped doing?
Counsel: Yeah! We worked really hard on that. It was a huge concession.
Class Member: What's your basis for saying that this was worth $1,000,000 again?
via @danieldfisher
A World Where "Meritocracy" Is A Bad Thing
Lauren Orsini writes at ReadWrite.com at the latest in upside-down world-ism, in which a rug announcing a business as merit-based met with snarls from feminists:
You might not immediately notice the latest change to come to GitHub unless you're standing in its San Francisco headquarters and looking down at the floor. GitHub has removed the centerpiece of its faux Oval Office waiting room, a circular mat emblazoned with the phrase, "United Meritocracy of GitHub."...GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath, a designer who also founded the company's all-female lecture series Passion Projects, said the rug first became a problem when photos of it made their way into feminist discussions online.
In theory, a meritocracy should be a good thing. It basically boils down to a society in which people reap the rewards of their skill and effort. But as countless advocates for women and minorities in the tech world have pointed out, meritocracies are a lot messier in real life. The tech industry isn't still predominantly white and male because white men are better at their jobs than everyone else, it's because many white men have had more opportunities to succeed than their minority and female counterparts.
I just read Steve Paikin's piece about how his TV show tries to book equal numbers of women and men but, for example, in economics, finds this a problem because 90 percent of the economists are men.
I highly doubt this is because women are kept out of economics. I think fewer women are interested in becoming economists. Regarding the tech arena, I know and have known geeks -- guys who, at 40, have facial skin like baby's ass because they never left the house or the computer. This just isn't the profile -- in my experience -- of a whole lot of women.
Am I wrong?
Yes, there is discrimination in many arenas of life -- much of it against minorities and some of it against poor whites who can't get funding or paid internships designated specifically for minorities. I am for merit-based promotion -- with an eye to who hasn't had the same advantages as the wealthy kid but who shows promise and can be trained. But that's for a company to suss out, not for them to be pressured and ordered into.
via @instapundit
Our Rigged Criminal Justice System
Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes at USA Today about the sleazy tactics of law enforcement and prosecutors, fishing like mad for ways to declare people guilty (of something, anything) and then plea bargaining them into saying they were (with the threat of a pricey trial hanging over their heads). This means that:
The real action in the criminal justice system doesn't happen at trial, as it does in most legal TV shows, but way before, at the time when prosecutors decide to bring charges. Because usually, once charges are brought, the defendant will wind up doing time for something.The problem is that, although there's lots of due process at trial -- right to cross-examine, right to counsel, rules of evidence, and, of course, the jury itself, which the Framers of our Constitution thought the most important protection in criminal cases -- there's basically no due process at the stage when prosecutors decide to bring charges. Prosecutors who are out to "get" people have a free hand; prosecutors who want to give favored groups or individuals a pass have a free hand, too.
When juries decide not to convict because doing so would be unjust, it's called "jury nullification," and although everyone admits that it's a power juries have, many disapprove of it. But when prosecutors decide not to bring charges, it's called "prosecutorial discretion," and it's subject to far less criticism, if it's even noticed. As for prosecutorial targeting of disfavored groups or individuals, the general attitude is "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
The problem with that attitude is that, with today's broad and vague criminal statutes at both the state and federal level, everyone is guilty of some sort of crime, a point that Harvey Silverglate underscores with the title of his recent book, Three Felonies A Day: How The Feds Target The Innocent, that being the number of felonies that the average American, usually unknowingly, commits.
Such crimes can be manufactured from violations of obscure federal regulations that can turn pocketing a feather or taking home a rusted bit of metal from a wilderness area into a crime. In other cases, issues almost always dealt with in civil court, disagreements over taxes for instance, can be turned into a criminal case.
The combination of vague and pervasive criminal laws -- the federal government literally doesn't know how many federal criminal laws there are -- and prosecutorial discretion, plus easy overcharging and coercive plea-bargaining, means that where criminal law is concerned we don't really have a judicial system as most people imagine it. Instead, we have a criminal justice bureaucracy that assesses guilt and imposes penalties with only modest supervision from the judiciary, and with very little actual accountability.
She Links Me; She Links Me Not
You pluck. I'll keep score.
Monday Night With Amy And Gregg
Boyfriend overhears me asking my dog, "If you didn't have any food, would you eat my face?"
Boyfriend: "Probably."
Yes, this is my life.
Boyfriend: "On the seventh day, the dog says, 'Oh no, it's Amy again.'"
Welcome To The New Feminism: Women No Longer Equal But Infantilized
There's a weepy piece by a woman named Bryce Covert in The Nation, "Why Women Rightly Fear Failure."
It's yet another of a recent genre of pieces and thought that considers women to be fragile little birds.
Covert writes:
I was a bright and precocious child--or a nerd, or a teacher's pet, depending on whom you asked. I loved reading more than TV. I took science classes as an after-school activity for fun. Things at school came easily to me.Except when they didn't. When I was confronted with a challenge I couldn't immediately solve, my whole world crumbled. It didn't take long. Just a few minutes of grappling with something unfamiliar could leave me sobbing and declaring I would never try it again. That may be why I tried and quickly tossed aside piano lessons, ballet classes and basketball teams in turn.
And I never quite shook that habit. When I arrived at college, a small fish in an enormous pond, I received less than perfect grades for the first time in my life. What many might shrug off as meaningless in the grand scheme of life shook my foundations. Did I deserve to be there? Was I smart? Have I gotten everything wrong? Maybe I should have stayed in a smaller pond that would be easier to dominate, I thought.
This reaction to getting lower grades is, apparently, not unique to my perfectionism and me. Women have overtaken men in college attendance. Yet they end up being just about 30 percent of the people who graduate with economics degrees and 41 percent of those from science and engineering programs.
And a pair of studies diagnose one source of this leaking pipeline: these disciplines grade on a tough curve, and as women's grades fall in economics or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) classes, their likelihood of ditching those classes rises. Catherine Rampell, who draws the studies together in The Washington Post, worries this means women are self-selecting out "because they fear delivering imperfection in the 'hard' fields" and urges women "to overcome our B-phobia." She concludes, "Rinse yourselves of the intoxicating waters of Lake Wobegon, ladies, and embrace meaningful mediocrity."
It is troubling that women might be pulling themselves out of a whole area of study because they fear lower grades--a metric that rarely follows students into their professional lives. Yet while Rampell's tough talk might work for some, it ignores the fact that women are brought up to rightly fear failing. Women have been taught to be B-phobic.
Look, I've feared failing but I worked very hard on myself and started going headlong into things that terrify me. In fact, I do it about every week on my column.
This has nothing to do with being a woman: It's about deciding to do what will give me the most out of life and help me make the most of mine.
What seems very counterproductive to this is the current line of thinking that women are eggshells, not equals. That, not simply being born female, is the biggest stumbling block.
If you think that's a stretch, look at Temple Grandin. She's not only a woman, she was born with incredible obstacles attached to her by virtue of having autism. Her mother refused to coddle her and forced her to do things she was uncomfortable with and afraid of, and this is what started her on a path to making something of herself and making a difference in the world.
This, not weepy pieces (and thinking) about how hard it is to be a girl, is the answer.
The People Most In Need Of Education Are School Officials
Constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh blogs at the WaPo that a 9-year-old boy was being bullied for bringing a "My Little Pony" bag to school. School officials' solution? Telling the boy to stop bringing the bag.
Volokh writes:
This story struck me much like the story of the high school kids told not to wear American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo, because of thuggery by some of their classmates.It may well be that the school may restrict speech that yields a disruptive reaction by some listeners, given Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969); the First Amendment generally bans such governmental enforcement of a "heckler's veto," but the matter may be different in K-12 schools. And I understand school authorities' desire to stop the disruption, and get back to teaching.
But such reaction by schools itself teaches students something -- it teaches bullies that, if they threaten enough disruption, the school will react against their victims. At this point, it's just 9-year-olds, and 9-year-olds do some dumb things. (The "thugs" in my headline is a bit facetious, though not much.) But they can be taught before they grow up into 15-year-olds, or 20-year-olds.
In particular, if the school used this as an opportunity to teach kids that they can't beat kids up for being fans of material that is seen as "too girly," the high school students that these kids will grow into might be more tolerant of speech and behavior they disapprove of. And if the school teaches kids that, if they push others around, the school will make those others conform, then the high school students of the future will learn that lesson, too.
via @AndreaKuszewksi
Lurky
Linking around in dark corners of the Internet.
Deal Of The Day -- Refurbed Kindle
$70 off a refurbished Kindle, until midnight tonight only (Wednesday, March 19), at Amazon
Buy anything at Amy's Amazon
Thanks to all you do. Your purchases are much-appreciated!
Pitching Socialism To The Young
Basically, pay through the nose so old people get their healthcare cheaper. Peter Sullivan writes at The Hill that Obama is prodding the young for help on Obamacare:
The White House is hoping young people will come to President Obama's aid one more time over ObamaCare, just as they did when they supported him strongly in both his presidential election victories.The administration is engaged in an all-out push to increase young people's enrollment in ObamaCare with just two weeks left before the deadline to acquire insurance.
Young people have signed up at a significantly lower rate than the administration had hoped, raising fears among Affordable Care Act advocates.
The fewer young and healthy people sign up, the higher premiums are likely to rise for older people for whom insurance is more of a necessity.Still, experts say fears of the law entering a "death spiral" if not enough young people enroll are overblown.
But even so, the need for young enrollees is acute, and it is forcing President Obama to try to reconnect with an important part of his base. He won 60 percent of the youth vote in 2012, but that support is not easily translating into enrollment.
The administration originally forecast that those between the ages of 18 and 34 would account for 38.5 percent of enrollees. The actual number, for those signing up between Oct. 1 and March 1, is 25 percent.
via @veroderugy
Canada's Steve Paikin TV Show Criticized For Not Booking Enough Women
My comment under the piece by Canadian TV host Steve Paikin, host of "The Agenda With Steve Paikin:
We ask a variation of the same question every night when we book guests for The Agenda. Why, oh why, do we have such a tough time getting female guests on our program?...We constantly talk about this in our production meetings. Why can't we get more female guests? I don't think it's the case that we're not trying hard enough. I frequently get and send emails to our producers at 2 o'clock in the morning. Our team works ridiculous hours to get the best program on the air we can. And still, those female guests prove to be elusive.
In that "Binders Full of Women" program we did, we learned some of the reasons why it's so hard to find female guests. For example, if we're doing a debate on economics, 90% of economists are men. So already you're fishing in a lake where the odds are stacked against you. And unfortunately, it's the same for foreign affairs, politicians, the sciences, labour issues, and the list goes on. The vast majority of "experts" in the subjects we cover are men.
But we've also discovered there also seems to be something in women's DNA that makes them harder to book. No man will ever say, "Sorry, can't do your show tonight, I'm taking care of my kids." The man will find someone to take care of his kids so he can appear on a TV show. Women use that excuse on us all the time.
No man will say, "Sorry, can't do your show tonight, my roots are showing." I'm serious. We get that as an excuse for not coming on. But only from women.
No man will say, "Sorry can't do your show tonight, I'm not an expert in that particular aspect of the story." They'll get up to speed on the issue and come on. Women beg off. And worse, they often recommend a male colleague in their place.
You have to understand: no producer sets out to book a show with five, white, 60-year-old, male guests. Think about it! Everyone in the current affairs business wants guests who are brilliant, but who also accurately represent the population they serve. For us, it goes beyond that. Many of us who work on The Agenda have kids. We want those kids to know that expertise doesn't just come in a 60-year-old white male package. We want our daughters, in particular, to see that expertise can come in a female package too.
But still, despite our commitment, despite our efforts, despite EVERYTHING, there are too many days when it feels as if female guests are an endangered species.
A comment I left under his post:
You had me on -- on a fascinating show -- for my ideas on rudeness, presumably, and not because I have girlparts. But I don't have children and my work is my priority. This makes one more available. Having children is a choice. Women who make that choice cannot expect to have the same life and opportunities as women and men who are more devoted to their work. PS Ladies with roots, buy one of those crayons at Amazon or put mascara on them. I mean, really...could no one figure that out? (When putting out your ideas is your priority, you tend to figure out a way.)
Oh, and in response to this by Paikin:
"No man will say, 'Sorry can't do your show tonight, I'm not an expert in that particular aspect of the story.' They'll get up to speed on the issue and come on"...
My mother told me to always say yes to opportunities, and then go do your homework and work like hell get yourself in shape for whatever you'd said yes to. More parents apparently need to teach their kids this.
The Most Plausible Explanation For Malaysia Air Flight 370's Disappearance
Chris Goodfellow writes on GooglePlus: "Smart pilot. Just didn't have the time." An excerpt from the details:
A lot of speculation about MH370. Terrorism, hijack, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNN - almost disturbing. I tend to look for a more simple explanation of this event.
Loaded 777 departs midnight from Kuala to Beijing. Hot night. Heavy aircraft. About an hour out across the gulf towards Vietnam the plane goes dark meaning the transponder goes off and secondary radar tracking goes off.
Two days later we hear of reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar meaning the plane is being tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the straits of Malacca.
When I heard this I immediately brought up Google Earth and I searched for airports in proximity to the track towards southwest.
The left turn is the key here. This was a very experienced senior Captain with 18,000 hours. Maybe some of the younger pilots interviewed on CNN didn't pick up on this left turn. We old pilots were always drilled to always know the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us and airports ahead of us. Always in our head. Always. Because if something happens you don't want to be thinking what are you going to do - you already know what you are going to do. Instinctively when I saw that left turn with a direct heading I knew he was heading for an airport. Actually he was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi a 13,000 foot strip with an approach over water at night with no obstacles. He did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000 foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier towards Langkawi and also a shorter distance.
Take a look on Google Earth at this airport. This pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make that immediate turn back to the closest safe airport.
For me the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense if a fire. There was most likely a fire or electrical fire. In the case of fire the first response if to pull all the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one.
via @veroderugy
Linkmeat
Get your saturated fat here. Or put it here.
Worthy Books By Friends
I saw somebody had linked this this morning on Twitter and it reminded me to remind those of you who actually cook (unlike me -- I just heat) about it. It's my friends' Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg's The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs
From Publishers Weekly at Amazon:
A standalone reference for cooks of all skill levels. An alphabetical index of flavors and ingredients, the book allows readers to search complimentary combinations for a particular ingredient (over 70 flavors go well with chickpeas; over 100 are listed for oranges), emphasizing the classics (chives with eggs, nutmeg with cream, sardines and olive oil, etc.). Entries for ingredients such as chicken, beets and lamb span multiple pages and feature menu items from chefs such as Grant Achatz of Alinea, Alred Portale of Gotham Bar and Grill and Le Bernardin's Eric Ripert. Regional tastes are well-represented in broad entries for classic German and English flavors, as well as the more fine-tuned flavors of, for example, northern France or West Africa. The listings, combinations and short essays from various chefs on different matches are meant to inspire rather than dictate-there are, in fact, no recipes included. Instead, the volume is meant as a jumping-off point for those comfortable in the kitchen and eager to explore; though experienced cooks and chefs will benefit most, novices will find themselves referring to this handsome volume again and again as their confidence grows.
Pretty amazing ranking:
The Devil Who Supports Our Policies Is Our Friend (Or At Least Not Our Enemy)
Patrick Cockburn writes at The Independent on the current state of Al Qaeda:
The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa'ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the US, closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures formerly associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture and domestic espionage. Governments justify this as necessary to wage the "war on terror", claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.Despite these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not only not been defeated but have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa'ida was a very small organisation, but in 2014 al-Qa'ida-type groups are numerous and powerful. In other words, the "war on terror", the waging of which determined the politics of so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed.
How this failure happened is perhaps the most extraordinary development of the 21st century. Politicians were happy to use the threat of al-Qa'ida to persuade people that their civil liberties should be restricted and state power expanded, but they spent surprisingly little time calculating the most effective practical means to combat the movement. They have been able to get away with this by giving a misleading definition of al-Qa'ida, which varied according to what was politically convenient at the time.
Jihadi groups ideologically identical to al-Qa'ida are relabelled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of US policy aims. In Syria, the US is backing a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a "Southern Front" based in Jordan against the Assad government in Damascus, but also hostile to al-Qa'ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly "moderate" Yarmouk Brigade, which is reportedly to receive anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, will be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN), the official al-Qa'ida affiliate. Since it is likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups will share their munitions, Washington will be permitting advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy.
...Al-Qa'ida is an idea rather than an organisation, and this has long been so. For a five-year period after 1996, it did have cadres, resources and camps in Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently, al-Qa'ida's name was a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs such as the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women and waging holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, as heretics worthy of death. At the centre of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This has turned out to be a way of using untrained but fanatical believers to devastating effect as suicide bombers.
It has always been in the interests of the US and other governments that al-Qa'ida should be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or the Mafia in America as shown in the Godfather films. This is a comforting image for the public because organised groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and may spring up anywhere.
via @marcdanziger
Earth Alarm Clock
"If you weren't awake before, you are now, slacker."
--The Earth's Tectonic Plates
There was a lengthy 4.7 that felt like the epicenter was under my desk chair. Yes, I'm an earthquake weenie.
The Obama Admin: The Most Opaque Transparent Administration Ever
Jonathan Turley blogs:
Remember that politician around 8 years ago who promised the most transparent Administration ever? Well, long ago, President Obama distinguished himself by withholding documents, pictures, and documents from the public and Congress. This includes the withholding of photos for the simple reason that they will embarrass the government or be used by critics like the pictures of Osama Bin Laden. (In the case of Bin Laden, it appears that the account glamorized in movies like Zero Dark Thirty may not be true and that U.S. forces allegedly riddled the body of Bin Laden with countless bullets, according to a new report).However, the Administration has gone well beyond the simply embarrassing. It has defied Congress in refusing to turn over documents to oversight committees, prompting a vote to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder be prosecuted for obstruction. (The Administration then prevented prosecutors from acting on the charge). A new analysis by the Associated Press shows what is already well known in Washington, President Obama has created the least transparent presidency in decades. The AP found that the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
...The hostility of the Obama Administration to inquiries from the public, the press, or Congress is obviously part of a broader attack on civil liberties. From surveillance to kill lists to torture, the Administration has held tightly to information that could be used by critics.
The President who would be king -- and is doing a pretty good job of it.
Ban The Death Penalty
A Bloomberg editorial has some strong arguments for this:
After the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a four-year ban on capital punishment in 1976, 32 states brought the death penalty back. The results can't be called a success. There's no good evidence that the death penalty has deterred the worst crimes, and it has been dispensed inequitably. Innocent people may well have been put to death -- a mistake, unlike wrongful imprisonment, that cannot be corrected. Executions should be banned by act of Congress for this simple reason: Experience has shown that the death penalty doesn't serve the cause of justice.If capital punishment deterred the most awful crimes any better than decades of imprisonment, that would be an important fact. A century of research has failed to produce convincing evidence that it does. Comparing murder rates in states before and after the death penalty was reintroduced can't filter out other influences on crime, such as changes in demographic and economic conditions. Comparing states with and without capital punishment is also inconclusive; in death-penalty states, capital crimes can be punished by long terms in prison instead, so their respective effects can't be untangled.
How likely is it, really, that a killer will be more deterred by the risk of the death penalty than by having to spend the rest of his life in prison? The claim fails the test of common sense. Criminologists and police chiefs say the death penalty just doesn't influence murderers -- partly because its application is so haphazard.
This arbitrariness, of course, is a gross injustice in its own right. As well as being confined to people who live in certain states, the death penalty has been imposed disproportionately on the poor and uneducated, on defendants with substandard lawyers, and on those whose victims were white. A study in Maryland found that a black killer of a white victim was 11 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white killer of a black victim. These disparities violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.
Worst of all, execution risks imposing the ultimate and irrevocable punishment on the wrong person. The 18th century English jurist William Blackstone wrote that it is better that 10 guilty people escape than that one innocent suffer. A system that accepts any risk, however small, of putting the innocent to death should provoke special revulsion.
9 Reasons Why Raising Minimum Wage Is A Terrible Idea
Ira Stoll lays out the points at reason. Here are a few:
1. It's a big country. The costs of living, especially housing, vary widely in America from state to state and city to city. If the point of raising the minimum wage is to provide a "living wage," why should the minimum wage in low-cost areas such as Texas or Oklahoma be the same as in high-cost areas such as San Francisco or Manhattan?5. It's not clear that it's constitutional. The Supreme Court, in its opinion in the 1923 case Adkins v. Children's Hospital of District of Columbia, made a strong argument that a minimum wage was a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of contract embedded in the Fifth Amendment's language about due process and the deprivation of liberty and property: "To the extent that the sum fixed exceeds the fair value of the services rendered, it amounts to a compulsory exaction from the employer for the support of a partially indigent person, for whose condition there rests upon him no peculiar responsibility, and therefore, in effect, arbitrarily shifts to his shoulders a burden which, if it belongs to anybody, belongs to society as a whole." The Court later, in the 1937 case West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, reversed Adkins by a five to four margin. But maybe the court was right the first time around.
6. Even if the freedom of contract isn't protected by the Constitution, it's a natural right that should not be infringed. As President Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, "the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God." If two free people want to enter into a voluntary, consensual agreement that doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights, why should the government stop them? If someone wants to work for $5 an hour, and someone wants to hire that person for that much, and no one is forcing either one of them to enter into the agreement, by what authority does government step in and stop them?
8. It would reduce the incentive for low-wage workers to get an education and move up to a higher-paying job. The lower the minimum wage, the more eager a minimum wage worker would be to enroll in a community college course at night, improve his or her skills, and apply for a higher-paying job. Making the entry-level jobs higher paying increases the risk that workers will get stuck in them for longer instead of moving on to something more rewarding.
Loopy
Those fruity links.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Edward Slingerland On Why The Key To Charisma And Success Is Not Trying Too Hard
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
On tonight's show, science gets together with ancient Chinese philosophy and it likes what it finds.
Dr. Edward Slingerland, an internationally renowned expert in Chinese philosophy, draws on both cutting-edge science and ancient Chinese strategies to show how our modern Western approach of striving our guts out doesn't seem to be the way to success or happiness.
In fact, to give one example from his book, it seems that getting practiced enough in something that it comes naturally is the way to avoid forcing things in the moment -- which is actually counterproductive to succeeding.
Dr. Slingerland will talk about this, how achieving that sort of effortlessness is the way to personal charisma, and much more on tonight's show. His book he'll be discussing is "Trying Not To Try: The Art And Science of Spontaneity." Join us and see how we can better our work, relationships, and lives - - if we can just get out of our own way.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/17/dr-edward-slingerland-why-the-key-to-charisma-success-is-not-trying-too-hard
My show's sponsor is now 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 an evolutionary (and revolutionary) understanding of depression -- its causes and possible solutions.
We have a depression epidemic in this country, now affecting more than 15% of the population, and it's striking people at younger and younger ages. It seems clear that our current modes of understanding and treating depression just aren't working.
My guest, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg, draws on research to show why we are failing to help depression sufferers and turns to our evolutionary roots to offer a nuanced understanding of why we get depressed, explaining why our modern environment's mismatch with our evolved psychology can drag us depression. All of this leads to insights on how we might help depression sufferers get better, or, at the very least, not lead them to feel defective and broken because they are depressed.
His inspiring and scientifically rigorous book we'll be discussing tonight is The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/10/dr-jonathan-rottenberg-on-depression-an-evolutionary-understanding
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.
I Hope This Woman Goes To Jail
Scumbag Vera Nazarian, who says "I operate a small press," sure is an operator. She spent $19K of money she says is owed to her authors on her personal expenses -- assuming that's true and not just a scam to squeeze strangers for cash.
She now has her hand out on one of those mooch sites (indiegogo) to get other people to volunteer to pay what SHE owes.
Oh, and she insists the money people give will actually get to her authors, unlike the last time when she kept their money.
Guess what: If you are a publisher and you owe your author money, that money needs to be reserved for your author.
"I couldn't figure it out" or "I didn't get around to figuring it out" is not an excuse. Not a valid one. Not for a second.
Here's what she wrote on mooch site indiegogo:
In Brief...Hi, I'm Vera. I operate a small press. I mostly publish public domain stuff, and my own books, but I have also published books my some of my friends.
Now, in recent years I have had a horrendous run of personal bad luck. So I used all the money the books generated for personal stuff, and I didn't stop to figure out what percentage of the money should go to my author friends. I am, in fact, still using these monies as they come in because, well, otherwise I and my aging mother and my two cats will be out in the snow. That would not be good.
Anyway, at one point I finally did get around to figuring out how much money was due my authors, and holy smokes, it added up to more than $19,000!!!
So, here's what I would like for people to do: donate some money. Your contributions will wind up in a special account that I just opened up. I truly promise, cross my heart, that I will finally send all my authors the money they are owed.
Sincerely yours,
Vera.
She continues with the longer version down the page:
The total amount of Norilana Books royalties owed to everyone is $19,198.36. Together with the Indiegogo fees, the amount I must raise is $20,926.21.I have set up a dedicated bank account just for this campaign. All the funds placed in this account will be disbursed to the authors directly. I will not get a single cent.
And now I ask you with all my heart to help my authors out.
It is astonishing to me that people have it within them to ask people to pay their debts like this. What she did is ILLEGAL and I hope she goes to jail. Maybe she'll do kickstarter for her bail.
Deirdre Saoirse Moen takes a skeptical look at Vera's claims.
Food Colonialism -- Handwringing Over Veggie Trends
Ridiculous post at BitchMedia by Soleil Ho, "The Cost of Kale: How Foodie Trends Can Hurt Low-Income Families":
The phrase "food gentrification" is a lightning-quick synthesis of complex values and ideas into a compact form. Though it may seem unduly weighed down by its provocative nomenclature and its association with the plagues of coffee shop Columbuses that have descended on places like Brooklyn, Oakland, and New Orleans, gentrification's original meaning holds true: it represents renovation, refurbishing, rebranding--and, some would add, rebirth--seemingly for the purpose of accommodating WASP tastes. At times, food gentrification and neighborhood gentrification can be seen to work in tandem, as in cases where community gardens have attracted wealthier residents to working class neighborhoods. Whether it's the fetishization of hole-in-the-wall restaurants, twerking, or Sriracha, the gentrification cycle has birthed the momentary relevance of countless ideas and materials. Their blip on the mainstream radar is at once both novel and tragic; typecast Cuban groceries and Korean BBQ joints function as both pawn and king in the game of conspicuous consumption that manifests through venues ranging from Instagram to the Academy Awards.A quick glance at any food-related hashtag or blog will show you that the presentation of our meals has become a kind of dilettante art form. Like aristocratic incense sniff-offs of Heian-era Japan, amateur-level foodies flaunt works like an arms race where the winners are the ones who can pull out the most obscure ingredient and the most sophisticated combination of aromas. Like it or not, Whole Foods has successfully mastered this process and is now able to mobilize a substantial PR fund to kickstart new trends from the ground up.
For example, Whole Foods' work to establish certain produce items as cancer-fighting "superfoods" has proven to be an effective and profitable marketing tool. In the European Union, it is illegal to sell a product as a "superfood." According to a BBC article on the subject, the marketing of an item as a "superfood" has correlated with price increases. In the United States, we can see this at work with kale, which has been heavily marketed as a superfood since 2011. Since then, the average price of a bunch of the hardy green has increased by 25 percent: from $0.88 a bunch to $1.10.
It's hard to believe that these forces are working simultaneously: how can we fetishize the act of eating so much while also making food more inaccessible to the people who need it the most?
What a bunch of ridiculous bullshit. Caitlin Flanagan showed that in an Atlantic piece:
Anyone who says that Americans have lost the desire and ability to cook fresh produce has never been to the Superior Super Warehouse in Compton. The produce section--packed with large families, most of them Hispanic--was like a dreamscape of strange and wonderful offerings: tomatillos, giant mangoes, cactus leaves, bunches of beets with their leaves on, chayote squash, red yams, yucca root. An entire string section of chiles: serrano, Anaheim, green, red, yellow. All of it was dirt cheap, as were the bulk beans and rice. Small children stood beside shopping carts with the complacent, slightly dazed look of kids whose mothers are taking care of business.What we see at Superior Super Warehouse is an example of capitalism doing what it does best: locating a market need (in this case, poor people living in an American inner city who desire a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and who are willing to devote their time and money to acquiring them) and filling it.
Who can't afford to eat organic or much organic food? I can't. Not much, anyway. I also don't think it's all worth it.
I eat organic half-'n'-half, pasteurized butter, and Omega-3 eggs. Otherwise, it's the regular stuff. What saves money is not eating packaged foods, including cookies, crackers, potato chips, and the rest.
And, pray tell, what's the answer, Soleil Ho? Telling wealthy people it's like drowning a kitten every time they eat a serving of collard greens?
Slinky
Post your wiggle links here.
New Jersey's Crony Capitalism: Protectionism For Franchised Car Dealerships
In banning automakers' direct-to-customer sales, who are they hurting? Just the customer, who will likely pay more for cars this way.
This is like telling Apple they can't open and run their own stores; they have to let some guy open an Apple store instead.
From the WSJ, Christina Rogers and Mike Ramsey report on another great move by New Jersey, the traffic jam state (among other states who have done similarly), stopping Tesla's direct-to-consumer sales:
Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -2.87% will stop selling its luxury electric cars in New Jersey on April 1, after the state said Tuesday it wouldn't license the company to sell vehicles directly to consumers, bypassing franchised dealers.The defeat for Tesla, which owns its own stores, came despite a furious 11th-hour lobbying effort. A senior Tesla executive had accused New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie of breaking a deal to hold off on a rule change requiring all car retailers in the state to have a franchise agreement with an auto maker. The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission approved the rule change Tuesday.
Mr. Christie's spokesman countered that Tesla knew that it was operating outside state laws.
Tesla has been battling in New Jersey and other states to defend its direct-sales model against attacks by franchised dealers representing rival brands.
Tesla's problems have their roots in decades of mistrust between independent car dealers and auto makers. Over the years, dealers have fended off efforts by the auto makers to set up company-run stores that could compete with them. The dealers have pushed for--and won--state legislation to protect their franchises.
Dealers fear Tesla's model could cause directing selling to spread to other manufacturers, ending a century-old system that protects the sales territories and investments of many independent businesspeople.
Crony capitalism! It's what keeps your car payment higher!
Related: Crony capitalism in the sky -- keeping your airline ticket prices higher.
Pushback On The Removal Of Due Process From Men On Campus
Brooklyn College professor KC Johnson posts at MindingTheCampus:
In something close to a first-of-its-kind decision (in a similar case filed against Holy Cross, the judge sided with the university; comparable cases against Vassar and St. Joe's remain pending), U.S. District Court judge Arthur Spiegel has upheld much of the lawsuit filed by former Xavier basketball player Dez Wells against the university. A gender discrimination and libel case based on an allegation of rigged procedures against Wells will go forward.To review the allegation: after what he claimed was an incident of consensual sexual intercourse, Wells was accused of sexual assault. In a mere 27 days from accusation to judgment, the university concluded that Wells was "responsible for rape" after a process in which Wells couldn't cross-examine his accuser and was deemed a rapist based on a preponderance-of-evidence threshold. All this occurred while Cincinnati authorities determined that there was no basis to pursue criminal charges; prosecutor Joseph Deters deemed the Xavier process "fundamentally unfair."
In the Wells case, "justice" was swift--and unjust. So Wells filed a federal lawsuit, claiming gender discrimination and libel, and urging the court to overturn the result of Xavier's disciplinary tribunal, called the UCB. One advantage universities have in these sorts of proceedings is that unjustly expelled students often will shy away from filing a lawsuit, since the mere act of going to court will make public that their former school branded them a rapist. But in Wells' case, he already had been subjected to taunting behavior from opposing crowds--including, most shamefully, from Duke students, who should know something about procedural improprieties and rape allegations--because of the highly-publicized nature in which Xavier handled the claims.
More from Allie Grasgreen at InsightHigherEd about the removal of due process from men under Title IX:
FIRE and other groups concerned about the erosion of students' due process rights have protested OCR's requiring a lower standard of evidence against the accused than criminal courts, at 50.1 percent certainty for a finding of guilt, and a recent resolution agreement at the University of Montana that broadened the definition of harassment to include "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature." Such campus-specific agreements are widely considered general guidance for what OCR expects, and OCR called Montana's a "blueprint" for colleges nationwide.
via ifeminists
What's A Military General Doing Fighting The War On Drugs?
Jacob Sullum notes at reason that last month, General John F. Kelley, who is in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, said that he would need more ships if we expect him to win the war on drugs.
Huh?
Wait -- national defense?
That's supposed to mean defending our country against attack, not against those who wish to sell leaves and powder to willing buyers.
Sullum writes:
Yesterday Kelly complained that budget cuts have forced him to dial back drug interdiction in the Caribbean. In both cases, Kelly's complaints sound like good news to me."Because of asset shortfalls, we're unable to get after 74 percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling," Kelly told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I simply sit and watch it go by." Mother Jones--which last year warned that "More Cocaine Could Soon Be on Our Streets, Thanks to the Sequester"--may be sympathetic to Kelly's plight. But since trying to stop Americans from snorting arbitrarily proscribed powders up their noses has absolutely nothing to do with national defense, it looks to me like giving the Pentagon a bit less money than it anticipated is forcing some perfectly appropriate and long overdue prioritization.
Lippy
Linkie with sassback.
Savey Jones's Locker
Shop Amazon's Spring Outlet Event.
It's Tough Work, Running Around Filled With Excitement At Being Alive
Aida, nappily. 
She reminds me how to live (except, maybe, for the parts about running outside to take a poo by the tree out back and how she eats her food out of a ball she has to paw around the living room floor).
Being Right And Being Direct In Saying So Isn't Always The Best Persuader
Directly confronting a wrong belief people have tends to engender defensiveness, not change.
And putting out the message about what's wrong gets that message out in a way that may increase its reach and pull.
Old RPM Daddy sent me a link to a Science 2.0 piece by Hank Campbell that suggests that pro-vaccination PSA may do more harm than good because of the way they put the message across:
In 1948 [Lyndon Johnson] was trailing the incumbent in his first Congressional election with just over a week to go. He instructed his campaign manager to spread the rumor that his opponent's family wanted him to stop having sex with their farm animals. His campaign manager said it was crazy, no one would ever believe it. Johnson replied, of course not, I just want to make him deny it. He closed a 10-point deficit and won.Making companies publicly defend problems they never had - "have you stopped beating your wife?" - is a time-honored tactic.
So it seems like it would be a bad idea to proactively declare you have stopped beating your wife. Yet that is what vaccination PSAs debunking a link to autism might be doing.
Reality And Charles Blow Are Not Close Companions
Blow writes in The New York Times:
The same week that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, helped start a campaign to ban the word "bossy," so as not to discourage women from being assertive, the "Princeton Mom," Susan Patton, who penned a widely condemned letter about why young women should focus on marriage in The Daily Princetonian, went on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to flog her new book. This is what she told a group of young women working in the studio's newsroom:"You're going to start looking for a husband in your mid-30's? You're going to be competing with girls who are 10 years younger than you. And not only can you not compete for men with women 10 years younger than you, because they are 10 years younger than you: they're dewy-eyed, they're fresh, they're adorable."
Dewy-eyed, fresh and adorable? What an anachronistic message to send to young working women -- that desirable men, who presumably have their druthers, are so superficial and libido-driven that professional women can't hold a candle to perky ones, that a woman who wishes to marry must submit herself to being chosen by the most superficial of men before the wick of her beauty burns low. This, according to Patton, apparently happens in her 30s, which could be only the first third of a woman's life. This reinforces the most destructive gender stereotype.
Undoubtedly there's some evolutionary-biological drive among many men and women to choose mates who are fertile and capable of protecting and caring for children, but those are only base instincts. Much of the youth-fetishizing, particularly as it relates to women, is culturally constructed and reinforced. We hyper-sexualize little girls and juvenilize grown women. Both genuine youth and seasoned maturity are sacrificed to that altar.
This is a societal disease.
It's actually just a biologically-driven fact of life.
We have choices in life. For example, picking from column A -- type-A career -- means sacrificing from column B: Mommytime!
Women are at their hottest in their early 20s, typically. Or at least their 20s. Some men don't want a 22-year-old, for conversational and other reasons. Other men do.
Recognizing and being honest about the tradeoffs (as I advised in Psychology Today) is the way you help women -- help each woman make the best possible, wisest decision for herself. Rueing that life is like this is just silly and childish.
Oh, and while we're on "bossy," I use it as a high compliment when I talk about a dear friend of mine, and I hope people use it to describe me. Guess what: If you aren't all insecurie-pants, you have no use for the thought police.
via @ScottGreenfield
There's Still No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Walter Olson writes at Cato about Obama's overtime edict -- his order to the Department of Labor to come up with regulations to require overtime pay for " several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as 'executive or professional' employees":
Olson compares Obama's binge of executive orders to a "toddler's destructive tantrum," and notes that the overtime regulations are anything but a free lunch:
As with the expansion by decree of minimum wage law, it will be interpreted in some quarters as an undiluted boon to the employees it covers - their employers will either raise their pay or limit the hours they are expected to work, or both, and how could they be anything but happy about that? But as the piece quotes Cato's Dan Mitchell as warning, "There's no such thing as a free lunch... If they push through something to make a certain class of workers more expensive, something will happen to adjust."
Any guesses on what that might be?
Here's how it's been working:
For years, some lawyers have been advising clients not to hand out company-paid cellphones to any workers who lack a lawful overtime exemption, lest a claim later be made that work was done on the phones during evenings and weekends. Where the law is particularly stringent about calculation of lunch breaks, as in California, some lawyers have advised employers to make it a firing offense to do any work during the allotted break.
There's a work environment I want to be in. Today, I worked through lunch. (Should I fire myself?)
More from Scott Shackford at reason.
Ulrika
Sexy Scandinavian linkie.
Perhaps We Should Change Our Stupid "Health" Laws That Prohibit Dogs In So Many Places
There's an article in the LA Times by Marc Lifsher about people with fake service dogs. It is easy to get a little vest that says your dog is a service dog, and no papers to get that anybody could check.
Much as I want to bring my dog everywhere with me, I refuse to do this -- I committed to being ethical and I don't get to drop that commitment when it's convenient or better for me.
An excerpt from the LA Times piece:
SACRAMENTO -- Jim Power, a licensed trainer of guide dogs for the blind from San Rafael, was visiting a crowded Southern California theme park a week ago when he spied "a 20-something lady...with a Chihuahua on a leash." The small pooch wore a vest identifying it as a service dog."It didn't particularly look...very legitimate," Power told a state Senate committee looking into what the disabled community, dog trainers and businesses call a growing problem: fake service dogs.
Representatives of the California restaurant, retail, hotel, apartment and condominium industries testified that dog owners, who don't want to be separated from their pets, are abusing the Americans with Disabilities Act and other federal and state laws by falsely identifying their canines as working animals.
Broadly written laws that carry stiff financial penalties make it difficult for business owners to question an animal's credentials, unless it misbehaves or isn't housebroken, they said.
Fake service dogs, critics charge, can create health and safety problems for the public and sully the reputations of trained animals essential to helping people with disabilities.
Health and safety problems? Oh, please. As I wrote at the LA Times' site:
France has not descended into a public health crisis for allowing dogs in restaurants and elsewhere. Maybe we should reconsider our laws. (For the record, I stay home rather than taking my business to the cafe I love, having gotten a new puppy in August and not wanting to just leave her alone at home.)
In France, I took my dear late Yorkie everywhere, including cafes and stores, where she was welcomed. (She was better behaved than most people's children -- as is my current dog, who's been trained to sit and be quiet, and basically just wants to be with me in my lap.)
Here's Lucy on my shoulder at the French department store Samaritaine. Sadly, both Lucy and Samaritaine are no more. 
Yale Decided She Has An Eating Disorder
Yale threatened to kick a healthy woman out of school if she didn't gain weight.
Frances Chan writes at HuffPo that she's always been small and slim but that a trip to Yale's health center for a worry over a lump in her breast (benign) turned into forced health checks and interventions over a belief she had an eating disorder:
I visited the cancer hospital on September 17, 2013, worrying about a lump in my breast. It turned out to be benign, but I received an email in November from the medical director about "a concern resulting from your recent visit." My stomach lurched. Was the lump malignant after all?I met with a clinician on December 4 and was told that the "concern" was my low weight and that I would meet with her for weekly weigh-ins. These appointments were not optional. The clinician threatened to put me on medical leave if I did not comply: "If it were up to the administration, school would already be out for you. I'm just trying to help."
I've always been small. I've been 5'2'' and 90 pounds since high school, but it has never led to any illnesses related to low weight or malnutrition. My mom was the same; my whole family is skinny. We all enjoy Mom's fabulous cooking, which included Taiwanese beef noodle soup, tricolor pasta, strawberry cheesecake, and cream puffs, none of which make the Weight Watchers shortlist. I just don't gain weight easily.
Yet the clinicians at Yale Health think there's more to it. Every week, I try to convince my clinician that I am healthy but skinny. Over the past several months, however, I've realized the futility of arguing with her.
"You should try to gain at least two more pounds." (What difference does two pounds make?)
"Come next week to take a blood test to check your electrolytes." (No consideration that I had three exams that week.)
"I know you've said in the past that you don't eat as much when you get stressed out." (I've never said that.)
So instead of arguing, I decided that perhaps the more I complied, the sooner I could resume my normal life.
...Finally, I decided to start a weight-gain diet. If I only had to gain two pounds, it was worth a shot to stop the trouble. I asked my health-conscious friends what they do to remain slim and did the exact opposite. In addition to loading up on carbs for each meal, I've eaten 3-4 scoops of ice cream twice a day with chocolate, cookies, or Cheetos at bedtime. I take elevators instead of stairs wherever possible.
Eventually, the scale said I was two pounds heavier. When I saw her last Friday, I felt my stomach tighten, my heart racing. Would I finally be granted parole?
"You've gained two pounds, but that still isn't enough. Ideally, you should go up to 95 pounds." I hung my head in disbelief. I've already shared with you the memorable exchange that followed.
She had finally cracked me. I was Sisyphus the Greek king, forever trapped trying uselessly to push a boulder up a hill. Being forced to meet a standard that I could never meet was stressful and made me resent meals. I broke down sobbing in my dean's office, in my suitemate's arms afterwards, and Saturday morning on the phone with my parents. At this rate, I was well on my way to developing an eating disorder before anyone could diagnose the currently nonexistent one.
Other Yale students have experienced similar forced "health" interventions.
Note that what Yale actually did is send this woman into unhealthy forms of eating -- carb-loading, eating a lot of sugar -- and refraining from exercising.
I think this may suggest shades of what we're to experience if we have healthcare supplied by the state -- an expressed goal of Obama's -- and where we may end up if Obamacare sends private healthcare concerns out of business.
via @jbrodkin
Animal Protein Worse Than...Smoking?!
Actually a case of researchers torturing the data until it confesses -- that is, confesses what they were looking for it to confess, writes Dr. Michael Eades. An excellent post on this recent news-colored bullshit contending that eating animal protein will send you packing off to your grave.
Lurky
Linkie in a dark alley.
Your Teenager Is Either In A Gang Or Is Just A Teenager
Popehat is right with this tweet:
@Popehat
2/3 of the warning signs on the "Parents' Guide to Gangs" describe normal teenagers. Being a Kansas City Royals fan?
A few excerpts:
Negative changes in behavior, such as;Withdrawing from the family.
Declining school attendance, performance, or behavior.
Staying out late without a reason.
Unusual desire for secrecy.
Confrontational behavior, such as talking back, verbal abuse, name calling, and disrespect for parents authority.
Changes in attitude about school, church, or other normal activities or change in behavior at these activities.
Drastic changes in hair or dress style;Or having a group of friends who have the same hair or dress style.
Obamacare Quietly Failing: Individual Purchase Mandate Repealed For Two Years
From the WSJ:
Last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.
That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.
In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a "hardship" that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.
But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you "believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy" or "you consider other available policies unaffordable."
This lax standard--no formula or hard test beyond a person's belief--at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that "you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance," which only requires "documentation if possible."
One more way to buy people voting D at the booths.
But keeping this quiet now keeps people thinking they will have to enroll by the end of March, which will get their dismal numbers up. Remember the hordes of people they said were without health insurance? The clamor of those people to sign up has been more like a distant whimper.
via Shannon Howell
Do The Marijuana Math
Instead of paying to jail pot smokers, Colorado is taxing them. They raised roughly $2 million in taxes -- in January.
No Good Deed Goes Unlitigated
A Colorado man, saved by divers from his submerged car, has filed an intent to sue his rescuers for half a million dollars, reports ABC News. Alyssa Newcomb reports:
Roy Ortiz filed his intent to sue the county of Boulder and his rescuers for a tentative $500,000 as a "preservative" measure, his attorney, Ed Ferszt, told ABCNews.com.Ferszt said the county should have closed the road during floods in September. He said the first responders were also included because they did not realize Ortiz was trapped in the car until they prepared to lift it out of the water.
"He was not seen or it was assumed no one could have survived it," Ferszt said. "No one discerned he was there."
The incident began Sept. 12 when Ortiz was driving to work. His vehicle hit part of a washed-out road and then plunged into a creek.
"He tried to feel even above his head and all he felt was water everywhere. It was not much of an air pocket," Ferszt said.
Ortiz was able to find a small air bubble in the back of his car where Ferszt said his client spent two hours waiting to be rescued.
From another story -- from thedenverchannel.com, by Russell Haythorn:
Ferszt says even though divers with North Metro Fire Rescue have a very difficult job, if they didn't realize Ortiz was still alive inside the car that was flipped upside down, those rescuers were negligent...."Well, well let's talk for a second about the divers," said Ferszt. "If divers went into the water in an attempt to locate Roy and they didn't see him there, as dangerous a job that it is -- and we are thankful for first responders, that was a mistake. And the legal term for that mistake is negligence."
Ferszt said the letter filed only says that it's possible that that negligence may have contributed to the length of time Ortiz spent in the water.
...Ferszt said they don't plan to seek the full $500,000.
"Obviously, I don't contend that Mr. Ortiz suffered actual damages in the amount of $500,000," he said. "But governmental immunity notice required you to state a figure."
via @overlawyered
Lippy
Those mouthy links...
How To Make Your Customers Hate You, By GoDaddy
Trying to manipulate your customers into action is not a way to keep doing business with them.
Why do so few companies these days seem to understand this?
So many seem to think they're cleverly jolting you into action -- instead of doing what they're doing, jolting you into hating them.
Today is my deadline day and I woke up just after 5 am to write, but instead got worried by this manipulative crap included in an email GoDaddy sent me asking me to "verify" my email address.
"If you don't take care of it in a timely manner we'll be required to put any hosted content on hold."
Now I know, intellectually, that they probably can't and won't do this, and that a real issue with a deadline would come with that deadline in the email, but I knew I couldn't keep my mind focused on my writing if I didn't deal with this, so I did.
Oh, just click on the link in the email the guy on the phone told me (after I waited four minutes for somebody to come on the line).
I don't click links in email because I'm not a moron. I instead had to reset my password, blah, blah, blah.
But it turned out clicking the link was the only way to deal with this. Wasn't in my "messages" on the site. Since I had one of their employees on the line telling me it was a valid email, I did click it.
But I hate them for this and would like to switch every product I have with them.
Boyfriend Engaging In Furtive Nose-picking?
It could be worse.
How "Male Privilege" Worked For One Man
It's a whole story posted at Skepti-schism, but here's the upshot, following his wife's demanding a divorce and telling him he had to leave:
I'm a man of somewhat mathematical bent so I did some simple calculations that may surprise you:Every year that I was the non-custodial parent I was able to spend about 58-59 days with my son. Less than 60 days out of every 365. Zack was able to spend over 300 with my son.
In the 11 years that I was the non-custodial parent I was with my son for just under 2 of them. I lost 9 years of his life. He lost 9 years of my contact.
That's half of his life to this point.
We lost half of his life.
This is why I have a problem when people tell me I'm "privileged" just by virtue of my being a male.
@SubManUSN
Elinktricity
Light me.
Bard College Prez: Time To Ditch The SAT
Leon Botstein writes in TIME that the SAT is part hoax, part fraud:
The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a "right" answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician--and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member--pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity....The time has come for colleges and universities to join together with the most innovative software designers to fundamentally reinvent a college entrance examination system. We need to come up with one that puts applicants through a rigorous but enlightening process showing what they can and cannot do, and what they know and do not know, all in an effort to reverse the unacceptable low standard of learning among high school graduates we now tolerate and to inspire prospective college students about the joy of serious learning.
via @CitizenJoan
Our Country's Power-Mad, Constitution-Ignoring CEO
The dismaying thing is that nobody seems to care as long as that header isn't describing George W. Bush.
Jonathan Turley blogs:
Recently, a bizarre scene unfolded on the floor of the House of Representatives that would have shocked the framers of the Constitution. In his State of the Union address, President Obama announced that he had decided to go it alone in areas where Congress refused to act to his satisfaction. In a system of shared powers, one would expect an outcry or at least stony silence when a president promised to circumvent the legislative branch. Instead, many senators and representatives erupted in rapturous applause; they seemed delighted at the notion of a president assuming unprecedented and unchecked powers at their expense.Last week, Obama underlined what this means for our system: The administration unilaterally increased the transition time for individuals to obtain the level of insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act. There is no statutory authority for the change -- simply the raw assertion of executive power.
The United States is at a constitutional tipping point: The rise of an uber presidency unchecked by the other two branches.
This massive shift of authority threatens the stability and functionality of our tripartite system of checks and balances. To be sure, it did not begin with the Obama administration. The trend has existed for decades, and President George W. Bush showed equal contempt for the separation of powers. However, it has accelerated at an alarming rate under Obama. Of perhaps greater concern is the fact that the other two branches appear passive, if not inert, in the face of expanding executive power.
King Obama "has shown similar unilateral inclinations in other areas":
• He asked Congress to change the law to exempt certain classes of immigrants -- particularly children -- who are in the U.S. illegally from deportation. Congress refused to pass the so-called Dream Act, but Obama proceeded to order agencies to effectively guarantee the very same changes.• The administration ordered all U.S. attorneys to stop prosecuting nonviolent drug crime defendants who would be subject to what Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. called draconian mandatory minimum sentences. The new rule effectively negates sentencing provisions set by Congress.
• Obama opposed the No Child Left Behind Act and in effect nullified it through waivers of his own making.
• For years, the Wire Act was interpreted to mean that Internet gambling was prohibited, which some states and businesses opposed. The Obama administration declared the act would now be treated as having the inverse meaning.
Paul Bloom wrote about how people give their party a pass in The Atlantic, in "The War on Reason":
Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it's hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters. A set of experiments run by the Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrates this principle perfectly. Subjects were told about a proposed welfare program, which was described as being endorsed by either Republicans or Democrats, and were asked whether they approved of it. Some subjects were told about an extremely generous program, others about an extremely stingy program, but this made little difference. What mattered was party: Democrats approved of the Democratic program, and Republicans, the Republican program. When asked to justify their decision, however, participants insisted that party considerations were irrelevant; they felt they were responding to the program's objective merits. This appears to be the norm. The Brown psychologist Steven Sloman and his colleagues have found that when people are called upon to justify their political positions, even those that they feel strongly about, many are unable to point to specifics. For instance, many people who claim to believe deeply in cap and trade or a flat tax have little idea what these policies actually mean.So, yes, if you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half.
San Francisco: The City Where Freedom Bugs Them
I know people who don't drink bottled water very often to be more environmental. One of them carries a reusable lidded cup. This is her choice.
In San Francisco, they like to remove choice as often as possible, it seems.
The City's Board of Supervisors, taking that supervisor-y thing very seriously, has voted unanimously to ban the sale of bottled water on public property.
Barbara Taylor writes for CBS/SF:
The legislation includes the sale and distribution of water in plastic bottles (21 ounces or less) on city property beginning in October and would go into effect for sales on streets and sidewalks by 2016.Hours before the vote, supervisors took the 'Tap Water Challenge' hosted by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and anti-plastic activists on the steps of City Hall.
The test lined up two glasses with bottled water and one with tap water. The challenge was to distinguish between them all.
Supervisor Eric Mar participated with one of his constituents. Mar said the tap water had a cleaner taste.
I don't care whether bottled water tastes like monkey ass. If what's in the bottle is not liquified, sex-trafficked children, it is not -- or rather, should not be -- the business of government to decide whether it can be sold to people who want to buy it.
Sure, some people litter with those bottles, just as some people drive drunk. You don't get to tell the rest of us we can't have a glass of wine, and you shouldn't get to tell the rest of us we can't buy a bottle of water at the courthouse.
By the way, geniuses, it isn't just water that comes in plastic bottles of 21 ounces or less. Oh, did you think Sprite drinkers think they'll be turned into geese if they litter?
Prediction: People in public buildings will not avoid drinking bottled water. They will just spend their money to buy it outside of those buildings -- or drink bottled Sprite, Coke, or Pepsi if they can't get water.
via @PaulHsieh
Affordable For Whom? Even Obama's Union Base Is Grousing
Paul Bedard writes about Obamacare and the hospitality workers' union in the WashEx:
A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very "income equality" President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare's much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. "If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage," said the union in a new report.
"Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality," said the report from Unite Here. "Without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage," said the report, titled, "The Irony of Obamacare: Making Inequality Worse."
Based on government and private reports, polling and statements from administration officials, the report, to be sent to pro-union members in Congress, charges that low-wage workers are taking the hit under Obamacare, while wealthy insurance companies fatten up on government subsidies.
How Ya Like Them Shriveled-Up Avocados?
Some of the most productive farmland in the world is going fallow thanks to a man-made water shortage, thanks to environmentalists, contends a farmer and his congressman. Allysia Finley reports on the drought condition and the battle over the land in the WSJ:
About 400,000 acre-feet of water over the past two years have been diverted from farm use merely to conduct salmon test-runs on the dry river. Such prodigious use of water for seemingly everything but farming is starting to seem familiar to growers. For the past seven years, federal regulators have been flushing hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta into the San Francisco Bay on the pretext of protecting three-inch smelt from pumps that send water to farmers in the Central Valley.It's ironic, Mr. Watte says, that the biggest threat to the smelt is "Sacramento and other communities that are pumping their sewage into the delta--or not treating it the way they should be." Another irony: Government biologists kill more smelt each year conducting population surveys than do the delta's water pumps. Meanwhile, Mr. Watte notes, San Francisco is piping in "pristine water from Yosemite"--thereby circumventing the delta--while liberals demand that more water be diverted from farmers to restore the smelt's polluted ecosystem.
Lispy
Linky with a speech impediment.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg On Depression -- An Evolutionary Understanding
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
We have a depression epidemic in this country, now affecting more than 15% of the population, and it's striking people at younger and younger ages. It seems clear that our current modes of understanding and treating depression just aren't working.
My guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg, draws on research to show why we are failing to help depression sufferers and turns to our evolutionary roots to offer a nuanced understanding of why we get depressed, explaining why our modern environment's mismatch with our evolved psychology can drag us depression. All of this leads to insights on how we might help depression sufferers get better, or, at the very least, not lead them to feel defective and broken because they are depressed.
His inspiring and scientifically rigorous book we'll be discussing tonight is The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/10/dr-jonathan-rottenberg-on-depression-an-evolutionary-understanding
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 successful negotiation.
There have been two major schools on negotiating -- Ury, Fisher and Patton's "win-win"/"relationships are everything" approach and Roger Cohen's "nail 'em to the wall" hardball approach.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler finds that these rigid, one-size-fits-all strategies often clash with the real-world realities of negotiating. Drawing on his and his colleagues' research, he finds that the most successful negotiating techniques are born of an ability to adapt while negotiating, and use agility, creativity, and wise preparation.
He advises us all on how to adapt (and do all the rest) in order to win in negotiation, the subject of his book we discuss on the show, "The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World."
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/03/harvards-michael-wheeler-adaptation-is-the-key-to-successful-negotiation
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Pay Your Own Damn Tuition Loan Debt
Josh Mitchell writes in the WSJ that Obama's latest budget proposal "includes new initiatives to ease Americans' student-debt burdens while nodding to concerns that a debt-forgiveness program enables universities to boost tuition."
Unintended consequences acknowledged and given the finger straight out.
Arrogance in action.
Payoffs for voters in action.
Disgusting. Why the hell should I pay for anyone else's utter stupidity in going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt while going to Harvard or some even more expensive private school to take women's studies or po-mo philosophy?
I went to University of Michigan for three years because I got instate tuition, and I consider myself very lucky that my parents paid for my schooling. I only was able to go to NYU for my last year of school because I wrote my way into a scholarship. My parents paid for the cost of Michigan, my scholarship paid for the rest of NYU, and I worked to pay my living expenses in NYC (and lived in an 8 x10 room with no kitchen). The idea that I would incur massive debt through student loans was just too stupid to even fathom.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
You pick the topics. I'll post more on Sunday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Should The Cross Be Removed From The WTC Memorial?
An atheist group is suing to do just that. Brenna Cameron writes at HuffPo:
The cross, a fused steel t-joint which served to gird the towers before they fell, was unearthed from the rubble following the attacks. Unusual for its proportions resembling the Christian cross, it quickly became a symbol of hope for men and women coping with the horror of the day.It was moved to nearby St. Peter's church in 2006, where it bore a plaque which read: "The Cross at Ground Zero - Founded September 13, 2001; Blessed October 4, 2001; Temporarily Relocated October 15, 2006. Will return to WTC Museum, a sign of comfort for all."
The cross was moved back to the World Trade Center site on July 23, but according to the American Atheists, it should have stayed at St. Peter's.
"The WTC cross has become a Christian icon," the group's president, David Silverman, said in a press release. "It has been blessed by so-called holy men and presented as a reminder that their god, who couldn't be bothered to stop the Muslim terrorists or prevent 3,000 people from being killed in his name, cared only enough to bestow upon us some rubble that resembles a cross. It's a truly ridiculous assertion."
...The group wants equal inclusion of other belief systems - including nonreligious groups - or outright removal of the cross. The 9/11 Memorial Foundation told ABC that other religious artifacts, including a Star of David and a Jewish prayer shawl, will be added the museum ahead of its scheduled opening on September 12, 2011.
I'm an atheist and believe in the separation of church and state but I also am a civil libertarian who believes that the answer to speech you dislike or deplore is more speech, not less speech.
Also, if this were just a cross, unconnected to the events of the day, it would be different. This is an item of significance from the rubble -- significant for many, though not spiritually significant for non-believers like me.
If they did not allow atheist, Jewish, or other religious or non-religious symbols, that would be one thing, but it sounds (from the article) like those will be part of the museum. They didn't mention the inclusion of atheist symbols in this article -- just other religious ones -- but perhaps atheist symbols (I'm not sure what) would or could be included as well. They don't mention anyone saying no to that, either.
Guess Who Obamacare Isn't Reaching: The Uninsured
On TheHill.com, Jonathan Easley writes:
ObamaCare isn't achieving its primary goal of extending coverage to the uninsured, according to a new study.The survey released Thursday by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm found that only 27 percent of people who have selected a plan on the new exchanges didn't previously have coverage.
The Obama administration says 4 million people have selected a plan since the exchanges launched on Oct. 1, but has not said how many of them already had an insurance plan.
via @instapundit
Linkieteria
Get your lime Link-O here.
Chicago -- Outrageously -- Bans Commercially Bred Pets
Government overreach in Chicago now extends to the origins of your pet and whether you can get a pure-bred pet from a breeder, though all you have to do to get around this ridiculous law is get a pet from outside the city or state limits -- as I did.
My tiny Chinese Crested, Aida, just below, is from New Jersey -- though I will say she lacks the accent. 
Law prof Jonathan Turley explains the law:
Beginning next March, all stores in the city will have to start getting their pets from government pounds, humane societies or animal rescue groups rather than for-profit operations.
And Turley blogs about how ridiculous this is, even beyond the government overreach:
First, it effectively treats all commercial pet operations as the same as mills, which is clearly not the case. Second, rather than regulate the conditions of such operations for breeding, it limits both the right to sell and right to buy such animals. (I realize that many operations are outside of the state, but the city could require certification of the sources for such animals). Third, it clearly disfavors the purchase of pure bred animals as a general rule unless obtained from pounds etc. Finally, the law only applies to retailers defined as "any person licensed or required to be licensed under this chapter who offers for sale any dog, cat or rabbit in the City." That would still allow the purchase from breeders or stores outside of the city, even just across the city limit. Presumably, someone could also "purchase" an animal over the internet or phone and have the animal delivered to their home from an enterprising store outside of city limits.The law seems arbitrary even under a rational basis test in my view. The preference given adoptions also intrudes on the choices of consumers as to the animal that they want to add to their families. It seems like the animal rights version of a "Big Gulp" ban on the issue of choice. There are breeders who raise animals in humane settings. They tend to be more expensive than mills and these breeders tend to resent the mills as much if not more than others.
Let's not equate people who throw a couple of dogs together with professional breeders.
The breeders I like (and would only begin to consider) are those who are suspicious of everybody who wants a puppy.
For our breeders, I had to fill out 10 pages of paperwork, sign a contract giving them liquidated damages if I broke it (with pledges to spay her and agreements about how she would be treated) and had an hour and a half phone conversation with the wife and two hour long Skype conversations with the husband and Gregg and me before they would consider giving her to me.
Also, our breeders test for genetic diseases and register their results with the organizations, and are careful to not breed a carrier for a disease with another carrier. (Our vet wanted me to get a rescue dog. Well, though there are no guarantees, even with testing, with a rescue dog, health is a total crap shoot, and it is just too heartbreaking to have a sick dog, and expensive, too.)
Our breeders also have a "call anytime" policy about ANY question with Aida. Tim, the husband said, "The only dumb question is one you don't ask."
They welcomed me into their home in New Jersey and spent a day training me to care for Aida and have emailed me many times, at length, with answers to my questions. (I try not to abuse this!)
They are amazing people who care deeply about these puppies and not just people who sold us a dog.
Countertop Sex And Other Unrealities From Hollywood
I always marvel at those scenes where they're doing it on the countertop and they just let all the dishes and blenders and things go flying.
Joyce Wadler writes in The New York Times, "There's a Place for Us, Just Not the Kitchen":
It was about a form of movie sex I think of as the Countertop Heave: The leading man, too passionate to wait or perhaps hoping to grab a snack afterward, lifts the lady he desires onto a kitchen countertop and does the deed there. I know, from years of being on the home-design beat, that Americans are crazy about their kitchens, particularly if there's been a recent renovation. But I also know that the standard floor-to-countertop height is 36 inches.You would have to be a pro basketball player to consummate. You would also have to make room, swatting the Hurom juicer and smoothie maker and the Jura cappuccino machine to the floor and risking breakage. And believe me, the people who have this stuff would rather give up sex.
Still, the '70s were a simpler time, so I ran it past the boyfriend:
"You ever make love to a woman where you lift her up and put her on the kitchen counter?"
"Never," he said.
"What about that thing where you pick them up and they wrap their legs around you and you walk around the apartment doing it?" I asked. "That kind of lift-and-carry maneuver?"
"You're kidding, right?" he said.
Why would I be kidding? It seems to me that half the Academy Award nominees include a lift and carry, or maybe "The Wolf of Wall Street" was just very long.
O.K., I know what you're thinking: Nobody takes the kind of sex they have in the movies seriously. It's entertainment. They do that thing where the guy is carrying the woman around the apartment without fear of S.T.D.'s because it's cinematic. Everyone knows that if you tried it in real life, you would be on the phone the next day booking percutaneous disk surgery.
The other kind of unbelievable sex is the kind where the guy rips your bra off. Mine cost over $100 each (though I try to get them on sale when I'm in Paris). Tread lightly! Unhook with care! As if you are tending to a wounded baby bird.
And then get back to the more vigorous action!
Our Lowest Priority Is People Who Are Suffering Terrible Chronic Pain
Maia Szalavitz writes in the WaPo about how patients in serious pain are shut out of the debate over presciption pain meds and aren't mentioned in the hyperventilating stories about the "opioid epidemic."
There seems to be a good deal of distortion and ignoring of the facts that's used to support the war on opioids. The people it ends up hurting are those who need them to live without suffering:A review of the literature by the highly respected Cochrane Collaboration found that less than 1 percent of patients without a prior history of addiction become addicted during long-term opioid treatment for chronic pain. The review collected data from nearly 5,000 patients.
Here, too, the media can be one-sided. For example, reporting on a 2012 study which found that over 100 million Americans are afflicted with some kind of chronic pain, ABC News stated as fact that "Powerful painkillers like vicodin or percocet relieve pain but aren't intended to treat patients long-term." Some doctors certainly take that perspective -- but if it were the consensus in medicine, there wouldn't be enough data for a Cochrane Review on the issue, let alone one that tentatively concludes that such treatment can be effective.
Opioids are clearly a highly contentious subject and there are certainly cases where they are prescribed too readily and made too accessible for recreational use. But the data suggest that most of these opioids are not being prescribed for chronic pain patients. Otherwise, doctors themselves would be directly supplying a far larger proportion of the opioids used by addicts.
Policymakers and anti-addiction advocates now want to suppress opioid use, and to impose even greater restrictions on people who live with chronic pain. This isn't going to address the addiction and overdose problem. Studies are now showing that when opioids aren't as available and prices go up, addicts just switch back to street heroin. Pain patients, however, simply suffer. Their plight shouldn't be an afterthought and shouldn't be relegated to comments sections to stories that failed to consider their perspective. They are a crucial part of this story.
Art Linkieletter
He's a TV guy I never saw but whose name was rattling around in my head for some reason. Gordie Howe is also in there. No idea why on that one, either.
Learn A Foreign Language-zon
Amazon has a great "Gold Box Deal Of The Day" with 40% or more off wonderful Rosetta Stone
Today only, while supplies last.
What's Your Bet On Whether Little Girls Want "Average" Or Barbie?
Some guy is crowd-funding a doll with "reasonably standard human body proportions -- as opposed to the exaggerated dimensions of Barbie," reports the BBC:
American artist Nickolay Lamm created a prototype of a Barbie-like doll last year based on US government measurements for an average 19-year-old American woman and the response was huge.
If average sold, women's magazines would be filled with housewives instead of top models.
I think parents will buy this doll (with the weird widely-spaced eyes and an unattractively waistless look in the red dress) but I think their little girls will beg for Barbie instead. 
Washington Sleazebags Exchange More Free Lunch For Votes
Wanna live on a flood plain? No problem. If you lose your house, taxpayers will pick up the bill! Still!
(There was an attempt to reform this, but it of course failed.)
Mary Kissel writes in the WSJ:
All you need to know about the 306-91 House vote Tuesday night to gut federal flood insurance reform is that 12 committee chairmen, including Texas fiscal hawk Jeb Hensarling, voted against the measure. That's a strong signal that the bill is a loser for taxpayers.The National Flood Insurance Program is $24 billion in debt because it charges below-market premiums and was blown sideways by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. The 2012 Biggert-Waters bill aimed to move the NFIP toward charging actuarially sound rates over a period of years and encourage private insurance companies to shoulder more of the risk.
Cue the panic. Realtors and homebuilders, worried that higher rates would slow sales and new construction in lucrative coastal areas, lobbied hard against the law. House Republicans like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is running for Senate against Democrat Mary Landrieu, wanted to flog cheap insurance to win votes. And the national media dug up scare stories to further pressure the House to do something.
But the people who do insurance for a living, such as the Reinsurance Association of America, were arrayed against the bill. National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies executive Jimi Grande noted that property owners "with subsidized rates lose any incentive to protect themselves from flood damage." The Association of State Floodplain Managers called the House's promise to refund premium payments "a huge unknown liability."
Yes, those of you who live in the middle of the Dust Bowl will be subsidizing the fancy people with beachfront property -- such as movie stars living in Malibu in multi-million-dollar houses along the ocean.
How would they ever manage to make it on their $20 million-a-picture salaries without our picking up their Malibu beach house's flood insurance costs?
Your Friends Are Assholes And/Or Have Assholes For Friends
That should have been the determination here.
But, Kathleen Miles at HuffPo Los Angeles blogged a bunch of heaving pronouncements about Hollywood sexism -- because...there were a few trashtalkers at a party?
Yep.
Her piece, complete with melodramatic title: "I Witnessed Hollywood's Sexism Firsthand -- And Said Nothing":
At one party, one man said to another, "Would you rather keep the Oscar statue or get a blow job from any actress in the first three rows?""So I don't keep the statue -- but everyone still knows I won the award?" said the other, in an attempt to clarify.
At a second party, as Pink was singing "Over the Rainbow," a man commented, "Yeah, her titties don't look very good."
When Gabourey Sidibe, the star from the film "Precious," walked on stage, the man held up his hand to block her from his sight, giggling like a middle schooler making fun of the chubby girl in class. He was similarly vocal about his disgust for Whoopi Goldberg, the only female presenter who didn't bare skin.
When Charlize Theron, Kate Hudson or any thin, blonde had a cameo, he loudly groaned as if he was having an orgasm right there at the party, in front of mostly strangers.
For hot non-blondes, he charitably muttered, "I'd do her."
Oh, the horror, the horror.
What did the ladies do?
The worst part: no one said anything, including us. We sat quietly in terror, hands folded over our laps, staring at the screen. The misogynists were only a few men, among numerous progressive men and women, but they were the ones who were heard.
Why not give back if you're so troubled -- maybe laugh and make dirties aloud about Matthew McConaughey or whomever?
What is it with women these days that they think being equal means waiting for somebody to say or do something while they huddle like frightened kittens?
To me, those guys were just trying to make themselves look big by being assholish.
But if I had been troubled, I would have blurted something out.
I'd do that because I'm actually an equal, not an eggshell -- my recent term for these women who are too fragile to make it anywhere but a knitting group or in front of the oven in a frilly apron, but would probably never admit that, even to themselves.
And about this complaint:
Women got only 28 percent of speaking roles -- often hypersexualized roles -- in the 100 top-grossing fictional films from 2012. About 32 percent of female characters wore "sexy" clothing, compared to 7 percent of male characters, and 31 percent of these women were shown partially nude, compared to 9 percent of men.
This is the problem with people who deny that there are differences between men and women -- and in what they want to see. The marketplace tells the tale. Look at women's magazines and see how many naked men are in them -- compared to the number of naked and half-naked women in men's magazines.
This is no accident.
(It's biology, bitches!)
Are We Going To Get More Women On The Roof To Clean Out The Rain Gutters?
UNESCO has taken on, as Charlotte Allen put it, the "burning 'human rights' issue" of getting husbands to do more housework. (For the record, she and I think kind of the same things about this -- I saw her post on Facebook and wrote this one before I clicked on her link.)
Allen wrote about a blog post by Gary Barker, whose Huff Post bio says he "is founder and International Director of Promundo, an international organization with offices in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Washington, DC, and Kigali, Rwanda, that works to engage men and boys in gender equality and ending violence against women."
Again, wouldn't "gender equality" -- a ridiculous term -- require women to do all the yucky, dirty, strong-arm jobs men tend to do around the house? Sure, some women can -- and do. Personally, I can barely manage replacing a lightbulb, and I hung all my pictures when I moved in with a nail and a string.
What people who refer to "gender" instead of "sex" are pretending is that men and women are the same, which they are not. Men have higher testosterone and greater muscle mass and evolved to take risks to score chicks, which is likely why more of them die doing dumbass things -- and why more of them make physically risky achievements.
Barker posted his blog item for the silly "International Women's Day." (If there's no International Men's Day, aren't we mucking up the gender equality thing right there?)
His call on the housework front:
Men and boys must do 50% of the world's unpaid care work: that includes washing dishes and waking up for 2:00 a.m. feedings.
In my relationship, Gregg does 95 percent of the cooking. (I make a fabulous cup of coffee with foamed milk riding the top -- that's where I get my five percent.) Is this horribly something or other -- or just what works for us?
I wrote about rewarding men for doing the tire-rotating and all here.
Linkle
No relation to Yertle the Turtle.
McGill University Activists: Even "Yes" Doesn't Necessarily Mean "Yes"
Feminists are competing with each other to infantilize women and deny them agency. The latest, writes Robyn Urback in Canada's National Post, is from a group at McGill:
On Wednesday evening at McGill University in Montreal, a group of students and community activists assembled to discuss when "yes" doesn't actually mean yes. The Forum on Consent, which was also open to the public, featured several panel participants who spoke to the question of what we understand as "consent." The theme was similar to a campaign launched by a Nova Scotia coalition earlier this month -- the More Than Yes campaign -- which contended that "sexual consent is more than just a yes." According to that campaign, and echoed by the forum participants at McGill on Wednesday, real consent "must be loud and clear. Sex without enthusiastic consent is not sex at all. It's sexual assault or rape."
No, there's no more pretending, coyly, "I've never done this sort of thing before."
It sounds like these ladies expect women to go on top of the dorm, get a megaphone, and scream: "Yes, I want to do you!" and yell out names, dates, and college ID numbers.
What's next, a written permission slip? (This is something I've suggested for men who are rich and famous in the past. Also, checking IDs to make sure the girl is of age.)
More from Urback:
There's no question that a "yes" uttered under in response to a threat or under some other form of duress does not constitute consent. Nor does an intoxicated "yes," since an individual loses the capacity to consent when under the influence of alcohol and drugs. But the Forum on Consent takes the consent conundrum to an entirely new level by suggesting that a meek "yes," or a nonchalant "yes," or a "yes" without emphatic body language does not constitute consent. According to the panel "It must be loud and clear."
And it seems we think alike:
The message, undoubtedly, is that men should tune into their partners' body language -- as well as their words -- before proceeding. It's not a bad idea. But in effect, telling men that "yes" doesn't mean "yes" could conceivably frighten them into bring a consent form on their next sexual rendezvous. And I don't blame them. If "yes" doesn't constitute consent, how can anyone be sure when to proceed? How much enthusiasm turns an I-don't-really-mean-it "yes" into a consent-granting "yes?" And what if partners have different views on enthusiastic expressions through body language? This suggestion also opens a Pandora's box of another kind: If a "yes" isn't always a "yes," how can we claim a "no" is always a "no?" If words have no meaning without the corresponding body language, wouldn't a "no" have to be accompanied by physical manifestations of denial?
Well, I do think this bit below (from Urback) is ridiculous:
Nor does an intoxicated "yes," since an individual loses the capacity to consent when under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
If so, I've had a fuckload of unconsenting sex. But I enjoyed the hell out of it.
And let's be clear, there's a big difference between "under the influence" -- which I see as, oh, under the influence of a couple glasses of dry white wine -- and "too wasted to be in control of what you're doing."
The answer for men, at least to me, seems clear:
Hire a hooker. It's far less costly.
via Charlotte Allen
About The Meanness To Kim Novak And Other Aging Hollywood Sex Symbols
It's easy for people to forget, but stars have feelings, same as the rest of us.
A female star, made famous for her beauty, was ripped apart for trying to hang on to the face she had.
An excerpt from a post by Self-Styled Siren:
As we age, the fat that plumps the skin and makes it glow inexorably begins to disintegrate. Because this is 2014, and we're on our way to curing women of the worst thing that can happen to them-- getting old -- doctors can solve this terrible problem with injectable fillers.So let's say -- just as a hypothetical for-instance -- you are an 81-year-old star whose last movie was in 1991 and who hasn't been to the Oscars in many a long year. Not that you were ever nominated for one in the first place; you were, after all, a sex symbol for most of your career. As the evening approaches, the anxiety sets in. Harsh lights, you think. High-definition cameras. And a public that remembers you chiefly as the ice goddess whose beauty once drove James Stewart to the brink of madness.
And even back then, when you were 25 years old, you worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn't good enough.
So a few weeks before the ceremony, you go to a doctor, and he says, "Relax honey. I have just the thing to make you fresh and dewy for the cameras."
And you go to the Oscars, so nervous you clutch your fellow presenter's hand. And the next day, you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face.
Nice system we got here, isn't it.
No wonder Kim Novak, like Tippi Hedren, Doris Day and Brigitte Bardot, has long said she'd much rather spend her time with animals.
Linkscream
More sprinkles, please.
The New Sexual Double Standard: When Alcohol Is Involved, Men Are Rapists And Women Are Rape Victims
It sounds like a cartoon of a standard, but it's one many are taking seriously on campuses: If a man has a beer and has sex, he is a rapist. If a woman has a beer and has sex, she is a rape victim.
Margaret Wente writes in The Globe And Mail:
So here's the $10 question. Can a woman consent to sex when she's been drinking? Universities have decided that the answer is no. "We heard that students don't understand that it is illegal to have sex with someone who is drunk because they can't give consent," says the Saint Mary's task force report. Although that sentence is crafted to be gender-neutral, its warning is directed at men. It means that drunken sex is tantamount to rape.Is there a double standard here? Indeed there is. Men are treated as potential rapists, and women as their helpless victims (or, in current parlance, "survivors"). If two young people get hammered and have drunken sex, he is responsible for his behaviour, but she's not responsible for hers. And even if she does say "yes," it's up to him to figure out whether she means it.
As Wayne MacKay, the law professor who wrote the Saint Mary's report, told Maclean's: "Clearly the focus needs to be on the fact that men need to have a better understanding and stop raping."
Let's be clear about a few things. Obviously, someone who is passed out or barely conscious cannot consent to sex. Men, who have physical size and strength on their side, have an extra duty to rein in their disinhibitions whether they are under the influence or not. And some men really are predators who deliberately target women. But the truth is that a great deal of alcoholic sex basically involves "stuff I wouldn't have done if I was sober."
via @walterolson
Go Buy A Scissors, Guvvy! (How It Works In A Free Market)
A gay hair stylist in Santa Fe has refused to cut the anti-gay-marriage governor's hair. From MSNBC:
A Santa Fe hairdresser is waging his own boycott of sorts: He is denying service to the governor of New Mexico because she opposes gay marriage.Antonio Darden, who has been with his partner for 15 years, said he made his views clear the last time Gov. Susana Martinez's office called to make an appointment.
"The governor's aides called not too long ago wanting another appointment to come in," Darden told KOB.com. "Because of her stances and her views on this, I told her aides, 'no.' They called the next day asking if I'd changed my mind about taking the governor in, and I said 'no' again."
Martinez has said marriage should be between a man and a woman. Darden, who said he has cut the governor's hair three times, said he won't serve her unless she changes her mind about gay marriage.
"If I'm not good enough to be married, I'm not going to cut her hair," Darden told The New Mexican on Wednesday.
Free Speech Yanked From High School Students
Jonathan Turley writes about the ruling out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over a ban at a California high school of students wearing tee-shirts with American flags during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo:
On Cinco de Mayo in 2010, students who came to Live Oak High School outside San Jose were rounded up by teachers for engaging in offensive speech. The speech? They had American flags on their T-shirts, something the school viewed as insulting to Hispanics. Administrators insisted that only the Mexican flag could be shown on campus that day.Last week, the school's actions were unanimously upheld by the federal appellate court in California -- a ruling that would allow flags and other patriotic symbols to be banned like profanity or hate speech.
In reality, the ruling is not a sign of contempt for the flag but a sign of contempt for the rights of students. The fact that this speech concerns the flag itself (the very symbol of civil liberties) captures how far the courts have gone in abandoning core First Amendment rights for students.
Disturbingly, contrary to Tinker (the finding that students do not "shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate"), federal courts have been stripping students of their free speech rights at the schoolhouse gate, but not only there -- inside their bedroom doors, for speech on social media.
It's one more way rights are being eroded in this country as citizens do fuck all about it.
Turley delineates the ultimate problem:
Citizens shaped in such an environment are likely to view speech as a discretionary privilege allowed by our government rather than an individual right guaranteed in our Constitution.Ironically, the flag is the very symbol of a nation of differing faiths, cultures and races bound by liberty. Perhaps the school was right: If you are going to deny free speech, it is the last thing you want to see.
Worthy Petition
I generally think online petitions are pretty useless, but this is one I think is worthy and can maybe even make a difference. All they're asking for is for the government to look at the dietary science (instead of promoting -- as the government has -- dietary guidelines that are the antithesis of the science).
I respect both Judy Barnes Baker and Richard Feinman, who are behind this. (Judy sent it to me.)
I have to say that I don't have great faith that government officials will be able to discern between solid and crap science and the same goes for much of the citizenry, but I think at least trying on this is important.
As long as the government is putting out dietary guidelines, which much of the population will believe, they should be science-based dietary guidelines.
I'll show you Judy's letter -- just below. And below that is the blurb about the petition.
I know you are an advocate for healthful eating and I wanted to tell you about a project Dr. Richard Feinman (from SUNY) and I have been working on.
We filed a White House Petition to change the way the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are created. The first set of guidelines was based on weak population studies from the 1950s and the same basic message has just been recycled every 5 years. They are currently written behind closed doors by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. There is no oversight, no transparency, and no accountability for the outcomes. The two agencies appoint an advisory committee, but they are free to ignore its advice. They have the final say and the committee's report is never disclosed to the public.
We are seeking common ground with our petition and not promoting any particular diet. All we are asking is that the government hold open hearings so people can hear the testimony of impartial experts and judge for themselves what the science shows. We hope you will help us reach your many fans and encourage them to support this petition.
We would be grateful for anything you have time to do to help spread the message; even a Tweet including the link would be much appreciated. We only have until March 20 to reach the target of 100,000 signatures.
The petition is here. More information about the petition is here.
Thank you for your help!
Best,
Judy Barnes Baker
A few more details on the petition here:
The right to petition the government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. We now have a special online tool for doing this, called We the People, where any citizen can file a White House Petition to ask the Administration to take action on an important issue. If a petition reaches 100,000 signatures within 30 days, the White House staff will review it, ensure it is sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response. We are seeking common ground with our plea and these numbers are certainly within our reach.
Our petition asks that the government select an impartial, fact-finding panel of experts who have no stake in nutrition policy to hold public hearings to evaluate all sides of the issue. This would at least serve to open up the process, invite media attention, and expose the lack of consensus behind the current guidelines. A large response to this petition would show that there is a groundswell of public opposition to the current guidelines and the way they are created.
Here's how it works:
Go to: http://wh.gov/lUu8B. Register for an account with your e-mail address, answer the security question to prove you are human, and sign the petition. It's that easy. Only your initials and city will show up on the site, not your name.
We need every one of you to help us reach the goal. Please support the petition, share it, Tweet it, Pin it, and pass it on to your contacts. We have until March 20 to reach our target.
Thank you.
Judy Barnes Baker
Dr. Richard David Feinman
Of course, Judy didn't ask for this, but I just remembered that she and Feinman have a cookbook out: Nourished: A Cookbook for Health, Weight Loss, and Metabolic Balance
Louie, Louie, Louie
Linkie, linkie, linkie...
Indeed, The "Best Amicus Brief Ever" (PJ O'Rourke Had A Hand In It)
Here, from David Lat at Above The Law, is a PJ O'Rourke gem from this First Amendment challenge to an Ohio law that makes it a crime to "disseminate a false statement concerning a candidate, either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false." An excerpt:
[W]here would we be without the knowledge that Democrats are pinko-communist flag-burners who want to tax churches and use the money to fund abortions so they can use the fetal stem cells to create pot-smoking lesbian ATF agents who will steal all the guns and invite the UN to take over America?Voters have to decide whether we'd be better off electing Republicans, those hateful, assault-weapon-wielding maniacs who believe that George Washington and Jesus Christ incorporated the nation after a Gettysburg reenactment and that the only thing wrong with the death penalty is that it isn't administered quickly enough to secular-humanist professors of Chicano studies.
An amicus brief is a "friend of the court" brief, by somebody who is not a party to a case.
via @walterolson
We Can -- And Would -- Oppose Bigotry Without State Intervention
Sheldon Richman writes at reason that the government has no business stopping the ugly business of those who refuse to serve particular customers due to their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Let me say that I think doing this is terrible, and I would picket a business that did this, and not give them a dime if I were dying of thirst. But again, like Richman, I don't think it is the government's job to dictate this. And I can't see businesses behaving this way, except in a few places I would avoid like I avoid going to Saudi Arabia or Dubai.
An excerpt from Richman's piece, "We Can Oppose Bigotry Without Politicians." (The subhead: "Should bigots be allowed to exclude gays or blacks? They should be stopped--not by the state, but by nonviolent social action.")
While such behavior is repugnant, the refusal to serve someone because of his or her race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is nevertheless an exercise of self-ownership and freedom of nonassociation. It is both nonviolent and nonviolative of other people's rights. If we are truly to embrace freedom of association, logically we must also embrace freedom of nonassociation. The test of one's commitment to freedom of association, like freedom of speech, is whether one sticks by it even when the content repulses.But does this mean that private individuals may not peacefully sanction businesses that invidiously discriminate against would-be customers?
No! They may, and they should. Boycotts, publicity, ostracism, and other noncoercive measures are also constituents of freedom of association.
So why do many people assume that the only remedy for anything bad--including bads that involve no physical force--is state action, which always entails the threat of violence? Are we really so powerless to deal with repulsive but nonviolent conduct unless politicians act on our behalf?
And no, I don't think hospitals should be allowed to turn away patients, but I do think a cake-maker, photographer, or a diner should be allowed to do so -- as ugly and awful as I find this.
We should have a freedom of association and a freedom of serving who we want to serve except in life or death matters.
As Mario Rizzo of New York University, whom Richman quotes, wrote on Facebook:
The difficulty is that the law singled out an approved reason--religious--why someone could refuse his or her services to another person. The default used to be freedom of association and contract unless there was some very good countervailing reason. Now it seems that the default is you must behave according to "progressive" values or else. No one in Arizona would have been in danger of being deprived of vital services--the environment is competitive and people want to make money. It is totally unlike the old south. But, hey, no one has the interest in subtle distinctions about liberty.
Richman explains -- and he's right:
When Rizzo says that "No one in Arizona would have been in danger of being deprived of vital services--the environment is competitive and people want to make money," he's referring to the fact that, unless government intervention protects bigoted business interests (as it did in the old South), markets will punish them and reward inclusive establishments.
And he continues:
State prohibitions drive bigotry into the shadows, making private response more difficult. Would a Jewish couple want an anti-Semite photographing their wedding? Would a gay couple want a homophobe baking their cake? Moreover, legal prohibitions may cut both ways. Should a black photographer have to work the wedding of a white-supremacist couple? Shouldn't the thought of forced labor make us squirm?
A Life Well-Lived
Author Philip Roth quotes Joe Louis in an interview he gave to Daniel Sandstrom, culture editor for Svenska Dagbladet. It was reprinted in the Sunday New York Times Book Review:
When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I'd published between 1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I'd wasted my time. You never can be sure, you know.My conclusion, after I'd finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine, Joe Louis. He was world heavyweight champion from the time I was 4 until I was 16. He had been born in the Deep South, an impoverished black kid with no education to speak of, and even during the glory of the undefeated 12 years, when he defended his championship an astonishing 26 times, he stood aloof from language. So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. "I did the best I could with what I had."
"I did the best I could with what I had."
If you're not already living that way, it seems the way to start living.
My dog lives that way, seizing every moment, being excited to be alive.
It's amazing that a dog can show you how to live smarter, but this one reminds me of it all the time.
The Nanny State Drops By The Newsroom
A WSJ op-ed piece by Gordon Crovitz makes a great point:
Last week the Federal Communications Commission dropped a planned study of newsrooms, following objections that the government has no business meddling with journalism. The critics were right, but it's a shame the FCC gave up so quickly. Even the brief experience of being micromanaged by regulators reminded reporters and editors of the kind of government overreach every other industry routinely experiences....The spectacle of the FCC's abandoning this study is a reminder that this remains the agency posing the greatest threat to the open Internet. Lobbyists for "net neutrality" want the FCC to set rules for the Internet on everything from how content is sent across the network to pricing. Will the agency now also invoke "net neutrality" for a study on how bloggers make their news decisions? Will bureaucrats review the demographics of people posting YouTube videos? Can regulators require Facebook FB -0.70% and Twitter TWTR -1.54% to have a "fair" representation of links to news and opinion articles by their users around the world?
Many of the journalists who were aghast at the idea of government meddling in their affairs also cheered for net-neutrality regulations to define how the Internet operates, despite the unprecedented success of the unregulated, open Internet to produce rapid innovation and intense competition.
Perhaps more journalists will now feel empathy for highly regulated companies.
Don't get your hopes up.
Linkateria
Your automat for links.
Cheaper Sneakers
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Advice Goddess Radio, "Best Of" Replay, Tonight, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Harvard Business School's Michael Wheeler On How Adaptation Is The Key To Successful Negotiation
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
*Oscar Sunday "Best Of" Replay. Live show again next Sunday!
There have been two major schools on negotiating -- Ury, Fisher and Patton's "win-win"/"relationships are everything" approach and Roger Cohen's "nail 'em to the wall" hardball approach.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler finds that these rigid, one-size-fits-all strategies often clash with the real-world realities of negotiating. Drawing on his and his colleagues' research, he finds that the most successful negotiating techniques are born of an ability to adapt while negotiating, and use agility, creativity, and wise preparation.
He'll advise us all on how to adapt (and do all the rest) in order to win in negotiation, the subject of his book we'll be discussing on the show, "The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World."
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/03/harvards-michael-wheeler-adaptation-is-the-key-to-successful-negotiation
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 science writer and psychologist Dr. Maria Konnikova on how to think like Sherlock Holmes.
This was 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 discuss: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/02/24/maria-konnikova-how-to-think-like-sherlock-holmes
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.
Jew-Hatred And Rise Of Islamism In Europe Compel A Belgian-Jewish Family To Leave Europe For The USA
Testimony detailing the reasons a Belgian Jewish family chose to leave Belgium for the United States: the rise of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, the attacks of Toulouse, Islamism, etc.
Is It The Economy Or The Quality Of The Movies -- Or The Quality, Lately, Of TV?
The Oscars are tonight and we haven't seen ANY of the films. This is even more stunning because I have a few of the first-runs piled up here on DVDs.
I'm in SAG/AFTRA, and I get them because of the SAG/AFTRA awards, though I know I am unqualified to vote, and thus don't.
Technology has made it possible for us to watch both movies and TV on demand, and Gregg has Netflix and an Apple TV thingie, and we've watched "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "Homeland," "Ray Donovan," and we are watching "Downton Abby" and "Justified."
I love seeing these series and it's changed our movie consumption. I think the last time we went to the movies was to see a French movie at Landmark in Westwood (a cushy theatre that shows the small movies in a room with couches).
Has your movie consumption changed? And if so, why?
Awful Clusterfuck For Injured Combat Vets
Combat veterans are being stripped of their medical benefits. Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic about how the U.S. Army is failing some of its wounded warriors by discharging them for misconduct -- misconduct likely related to their injuries (physical or psychological) from battle:
As their tours abroad ended, they returned to bases in the U.S., where their injuries affected their ability to maintain discipline. They committed small infractions. Over time, these demerits added up. They were discharged for misconduct.As a result, they lost their medical benefits for life.
Unable to afford treatment for the combat injuries they sustained, many wound up taking on debt in emergency rooms or living on the street without any treatment at all.
Their plight is a moral outrage and a public health disaster.
...Often the offenses aren't even serious. "The Gazette found troops cut loose for small offenses that the Army acknowledges can be symptoms of TBI and PTSD. Some soldiers missed formation a handful of times or smoked marijuana once. Some were discharged for showing up late or missing appointments." And then there's the detail that is perhaps the most jaw-dropping in the story: "Some tested positive once for drugs, then were deployed to combat zones because the Army needed the troops, only to be discharged for the drug offense when they returned." Then again, on another occasion, an infantry soldier who served two tours of duty abroad "was targeted for discharge after missing three doctor appointments because he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for being suicidal." There's enough depravity on display that choosing the worst example is difficult.
The story comes out of a Colorado Springs daily, The Gazette. Read the whole thing here.
California's Private Insurance Rates Jumped Almost 70 Percent Under Obamacare
The guy lays out a Kaiser story similar to mine -- though she's younger than I am and pays far less, total, because of it.
The guy talks about people getting dumped off their employer's healthcare like it's a bad thing. The way you have continuity of care -- and insurance -- is by not getting it through your employer.
I keep saying this, and this was obvious -- or should have been -- due to how few people work in a single job for a lifetime these days.
Uberlinkie
I just felt like using the word "uber." Please don't hold it against me -- much.
Vicious
"I think I killed it." Aida, my tiny Chinese Crested, with her toy bat. 
The War On Legos
Charlotte Allen writes in the LA Times that the PC people are hoisting their pitchforks against Legos:
Here's Lego's problem: The main market for the $4 billion company's traditional plastic bricks and mini-figures is boys. Certainly some girls enjoy making castles or skyscrapers out of the bricks, just like their brothers, but in 2011, Lego's market research boys found that 90% of Lego users were boys. And now, the company's attempt to address the disparity has outraged the sizable "gender-neutral toys" contingent....The anti-Lego campaign started in 2011 when Lego, after years of research, decided to do something to attract more little girls with its Friends line of bricks and mini-figures.
Unlike the bright primary colors of the regular Lego sets, the Friends colors tend toward pink and purple and soft pastels. The comical mini-figures of the regular Lego lines have been replaced by five slender and stylish plastic tweens of various ethnicities, each with her own narrative story, along with puppies, kitties, "My Little Pony"-style horsies and baby animals ranging from penguins to lions.Little girls are encouraged to build things, all right: patios, cozy kitchens, cafes, beauty shops, doghouses for the puppies, stalls for the horses, all characterized by a level of decorative detail unknown in the regular Lego universe.
And guess what? Little girls love Friends. By the end of 2012, Friends was Lego's fourth-best-selling product line and the number of girl consumers of Legos had tripled.
But the gender-neutral people went ballistic, and they've been that way ever since. A Change.org online petition was launched calling on Lego to stop selling the "body dissatisfaction"-promoting Friends line. Carolyn Costin, an eating-disorders specialist in Malibu, told Time magazine that the Friends line "promotes damaging gender stereotypes and limits creativity and healthy role development."
Why give little girls what many seem to want?
How many of you know parents who have all sorts of toys available for their male and female children, only to predictably have their kids fall into gender lines: boys playing with guns and transportation toys and girls making "babies" out of stuffed animals, making crafts, and playing house with Barbies?
As Charlotte rounds out her piece:
Maybe little girls actually like the colors pink and purple, and they actually like pretend-home decoration and pretend-mothering of baby animals.And boys -- maybe they're more interested in building vast mechanical and architectural projects with their Lego bricks because, as neuroscience has demonstrated, their brains are different and they, as a group, have superior spatial skills, whereas girls tend to gravitate toward interpersonal connections and stories.
Maybe, in other words, there's more than a grain of truth in the gender stereotypes.
Raining Generosity Of Spirit
Last night, I got all dressed and prettied, wrapped a present and pulled a bottle of wine I'd chilled out of the refrigerator to go to a friend's birthday party. It was raining a little as I got in the car -- and raining torrentially by the time I'd gone five blocks.
The rain was so sheeting and harsh that I was terrified just crossing the boulevard. I could barely see and my windshield wipers could not go fast enough on the high-speed setting.
The party was across town, way, way over on the edge of Hollywood. I didn't feel safe going even one more block, so I did what I hate to do when I've said I'd be somewhere -- called the host. Her voicemail picked up, and I said I couldn't come -- explaining and apologizing.
Next, I called the birthday girl -- or so I thought. I just had her number as a text and I thought I remembered it as I dialed. It's a New York area code, though she lives in LA. She answered and I started talking, blurting out that I was in my car with a bottle of wine and a wonderful present I'd wrapped for her, and I felt terrible, and I never do this, but I thought the rain was just too dangerous to drive in...
Her response?
"Who are you calling?"
I said my friend's name.
The woman said, "Well, I'm not her..." but was so kind and sympathetic about my distress. I wish I could remember her words. She signed off with, "Well, you should call your friend..."
And after I hung up, I realized I'd been calling her at around 10 p.m. New York time, and thought she was even sweeter to be so kind and sympathetic.
There's far too little of that these days. I think, the next time somebody interrupts my writing day -- inadvertently, not because they're making money for bothering me -- I'll try to follow this woman's lead and be sweet to them.
Amazing how you can make a difference by extending yourself a little when somebody else has made a mistake.
Obummercare: 14,500 People In California Have To Redo Their Online Applications
14,500 people in California have to redo their online applications for Obamacare thanks to a software error. Soumya Karlamangla writes in the LA Times:
California's health insurance exchange said about 14,500 people have to redo their online applications for Obamacare coverage because of a software error.The state's announcement late Friday comes shortly after a five-day outage of the Covered California enrollment website.
About 14,500 people who partially completed applications or updated them Feb. 17-19 -- just before the website went down -- have to either start over or resubmit any changes they made, the exchange said.
Covered California said it will contact the affected consumers and help them complete the sign-up process by March 15 for coverage that takes effect April 1.
"We regret any inconvenience this has caused," Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, said in a statement. "Our enrollment website has been up and running this week, and we look forward to helping consumers get the health coverage they want."
I had the health coverage I wanted -- affordably -- before Obamacare, which has not untied coverage from the workplace, meaning people will still lose continuity of care if they leave their job or are fired.
Slurpee
Frozen Cherry Coke linkie, with brain freeze, no extra charge.
Rather Funny, Considering There Was A Near Flood Here Last Night
Take 20 percent off swimwear at Amazon
Sunhats for men and women are here
