Fine Dining For Hamsters
Watch hamsters eat tiny burritos. Your afternoon delight from advicegoddess.com -- the site that serves all your deepest, most intellectual needs:
You May Want Criminals Tortured But That's Not What The Constitution Allows
From Wikipedia, the Eighth Amendment:
The Eighth Amendment (Amendment VIII) to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights (ratified December 15, 1791[1]) prohibiting the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishments, including torture. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause also applies to the states.
Jonathan Turley blogs about the botched Oklahoma lethal injection of inmate Clayton Lockett, sentenced to death for killing a woman during a 1999 home invasion. Clayton was not speedily dispatched but left in obvious agony for over 25 minutes. He eventually died from a heart attack:
Notably, the execution tonight used a new combination of drugs after a shortage in lethal injection drugs arose from an international campaign. They gave Lockett the sedative midazolam which was to be followed by the muscle relaxant vecuronium bromide to stop breathing and then potassium chloride to stop the heart.The botched execution will only magnify concerns that there remain too many unknowns about lethal injection and that it constitutes a cruel punishment.
Notably, this incident comes a day after the release of a new report showing over four percent of death row inmates are likely innocent. The calculation of one in 25 death row being innocent in the study contradicts the earlier statistical data offered by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion in 2007 when he said that the error rate was 0.027 percent "or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent."
The execution and the study raise two of the main objections over the death penalty: that it is cruel and that the criminal justice system still produces false convictions. However, 55 percent of people polled reportedly still support the death penalty while a substantial percentage of 39 percent now opposes it.
Where do you stand? I would rather see a guilty person live in prison than an innocent person possibly be executed.
(I also don't believe we have a right to slaughter another person, except in self-defense.)
Related, from Max Fisher at Vox,"Why Oklahoma tried to execute a man with a secret, untested mix of chemicals."
Welcome To Backwards Day, Sponsored By Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia -- yes, that bastion of human rights and civil liberties -- has criticized "Norway's human rights record," as Felicity Morse reports it in the Telegraph/UK. They accuse Norway of "failing to protect its Muslim citizens and not doing enough to counter criticism of the prophet Mohammed."
Clearly, they exhibit a big FAIL! in comprehending what Western society is all about -- at least until the Sharia law-practicing populace overtakes The Enlightenment-inflected populace in some of these countries that don't have the population of the US:The gulf state called for all criticism of religion and of prophet Mohammed to be made illegal in Norway. It also expressed concern at "increasing cases of domestic violence, rape crimes and inequality in riches" and noted a continuation of hate crimes against Muslims in the country.
The Scandinavian nation came under scrutiny during the United Nations' Universal Periodic Review, in which 14 States are scheduled to have their human rights records examined.
...Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende was in Geneva to hear the concerns from 91 other countries. He told Norway's NTB newswire prior to the hearing: "It is a paradox that countries which do not support fundamental human rights have influence on the council, but that is the United Nations," reported The Local.
Human Rights Watch last report noted that in 2012 Saudi Arabia "stepped up arrests and trials of peaceful dissidents, and responded with force to demonstrations by citizens."
It continued "Authorities continue to suppress or fail to protect the rights of 9 million Saudi women and girls and 9 million foreign workers. As in past years, thousands of people have received unfair trials or been subject to arbitrary detention.
About that United Nations, a Sun News editorial:
Nope, it's not from a parody website. This is real news: "Iran wins seat on UN body that presses for women's rights." That's an actual headline from the Washington Times.The Islamic Republic of Iran was elected to several United Nations human rights committees last week, including receiving a four-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women.
Human rights in Iran? Wiki-Mmm, mmm, good!
The government of Iran is criticized both for restrictions and punishments that follow the Islamic Republic's constitution and law, and for actions that do not, such as the torture, rape, and killing of political prisoners, and the beatings and killings of dissidents and other civilians.[2]Restrictions and punishments in the Islamic Republic of Iran which violate international human rights norms include harsh penalties for crimes, punishment of "victimless crimes" such as fornication and homosexuality, execution of offenders under 18 years of age, restrictions on freedom of speech and the press (including the imprisonment of journalists), and restrictions on freedom of religion and gender equality in the Islamic Republic's Constitution (especially attacks on members of the Bahá'í religion).
Reported abuses falling outside of the laws of the Islamic Republic that have been condemned include the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, and the widespread use of torture to extract repudiations by prisoners of their cause and comrades on video for propaganda purposes.[3]
Economic Disaster
Michael Snyder blogs the real unemployment rate at Washington's Blog -- that in 20 percent of American families, everyone in the family is unemployed:
According to shocking new numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of American families do not have a single person that is working. So when someone tries to tell you that the unemployment rate in the United States is about 7 percent, you should just laugh. One-fifth of the families in the entire country do not have a single member with a job. That is absolutely astonishing. How can a family survive if nobody is making any money? Well, the answer to that question is actually quite easy. There is a reason why government dependence has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Without enough jobs, tens of millions of additional Americans have been forced to reach out to the government for help. At this point, if you can believe it, the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.When I was growing up, it seemed like anyone that was willing to work hard could find a good paying job. But now that has all changed. At this point, 20 percent of all the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job. That includes fathers, mothers and children.
Awful and scary.
Elsie
Got link?
Accepted Totalitarianism On Campus
Welcome to the USSR -- on US campuses. A tweet by Bob Beasley:
@13013B Colleges depend on, reward passersby & eavesdroppers who stir the pot. Sound like any other regime? #1A http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5577 @instapundit
The article he tweeted?
Kaitlyn Schalhorn writes at Campus Reform that two football players at Lewis & Clark college are on probation after some passerby heard a race joke at a party:
An inside joke made at a party has sparked Lewis and Clark College (LC) in Portland, Ore., to hand down severe disciplinary sanctions on two football players--one black and one white.According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a national university free speech organization that has reprimanded the school in a six-page letter, a pair of friends exchanged some inside jokes while at an off-campus party in November.
"Most universities will say that they share dual commitments to free speech and to the ideals of diversity, civility, and inclusion. But when incidents like this bring those into conflict, universities often seem to think they have to pick one over the other, and free speech often loses out when they do." Tweet This
During a game of beer pong, a black football player named his team "Team N***a." Each his team scored, he shouted its name. At one point, the pair referenced an inside joke and exchanged two sentences roughly along the lines of "Can I get a 'white power?'" "White power!"
While no one attending the party was offended, another student passing by heard the slurs and reported them. The school then hauled the two players before the College Review Board, which found they had used "discriminatory language" and placed the players on unconditional probation for a year.
If the players were to get in trouble again during the probation period, they could be suspended from the college.
"And as for this case, I think universities are prone to taking incidents like these and thinking the solution is simply to go after and ban the offending language and punish its speakers, trampling on their right to free speech in the process," Peter Bonilla, director of FIRE'S Individual Rights Defense Program told Campus Reform.
The Government Is A Pearl-Clutching Bully
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at reason about the disgusting bank account terminations experienced by adult film performers recently, and notes that the DOJ may have had something to do with it:
Under "Operation Choke Point," the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuing banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling--the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it's own politically biased moral judgements. Targeted business categories so far have included payday lenders, ammunition sales, dating services, purveyors of drug paraphernalia, and online gambling sites."Operation Chokepoint is flooding payments companies that provide processing service to those industries with subpoenas, civil investigative demands, and other burdensome and costly legal demands," wrote Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, at The Hill.
Absolutely disgusting.
Better To Know Who The Bigots Are
Greg Lukianoff, of campus free speech-defending FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), writes at CNET of the damage that will be done by purging mass media of hurtful opinions:
"Hate speech" is constitutionally protected in the United States. But the push against "hurtful" and "blasphemous" speech (primarily speech offensive to Islam) is gaining ground throughout the world. Last fall, for example, when many thought a YouTube video that satirized Mohammed caused a spontaneous attack on our consulate in Benghazi, academics across the country rushed to chide America for its expansive protections of speech. And as someone who has spent more than a decade fighting censorship on American college campuses, I run into antagonism toward free speech on a regular basis, most recently last month, when I spoke at Columbia Law School. After my speech, law professor Frederick Schauer criticized his American colleagues for not being more skeptical about the principle of free speech itself.This has become a fairly standard refrain, in my experience, as academics who want to limit free speech often paint themselves as a beleaguered, enlightened minority struggling against the unquestioned dogma of free speech. Free speech is certainly alive in U.S. courts. For example, since 1989 more than a dozen courts have declared different politically correct college speech codes unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the idea that hurtful or offensive speech should be banned prevails on American campuses: approximately 63 percent of over 400 top colleges maintain codes (PDF) that violate First Amendment principles. Meanwhile, prominent professors, such as Jeremy Waldron and Richard Delgado, attempt to seize the moral high ground for "enlightened censorship," and some students even paint themselves as heroes for tearing down campus "free speech walls."
...Simply making bigoted speech illegal results in two distortions of reality. First, it can create an overly rosy picture of public sentiment, thus preventing real and festering social problems from being addressed. Or second, paradoxically, it may lead people to believe that they live in a far less tolerant society than they actually do.
...The only lasting fix to the real problem of racism or anti-Semitism is cultural. A necessarily incomplete attempt to suppress bigotry may well have far worse unintended consequences, as legal regimes that try to ban hate speech drive social resentments underground, thus preventing the right allocation of resources to address social problems openly.
Twitter lets us see people as they are -- a mixed lot on any given day, to be sure. But it is especially important for a free society to learn not just the good news but the bad news as well.
Linka
Binka bottla ink...
Cheap Mother!
I mean, cheaper. I mean, save on Mother's Day gifts at Amazon
Spend $80 and get 20 percent off by entering the promo code MOMSHO14 on eligible items at checkout.
Purging The Heretics: Now A Writer's Politics Are The Most Important Thing About Him
This is something I've experienced personally -- people going after my writing because they don't like my political beliefs.
Most recently, this has been happening to Larry Correia. Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today:
Authors with the wrong politics are no longer acceptable, at least to a loud crowd that has apparently colonized much of the world of science fiction fandom.The Hugo Awards are presented at the World Science Fiction Society's convention ("Worldcon") and nominees and awardees are chosen by attendees and supporters. The Hugo is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in science fiction, but in recent years critics have accused the award process -- and much of science fiction fandom itself -- of becoming politicized.
That's certainly been the experience of Larry Correia, who was nominated for a Hugo this year. Correia, the author of numerous highly successful science fiction books like Monster Hunter Internationaland Hard Magic, is getting a lot of flak because he's a right-leaning libertarian. Makes you wonder if Robert Heinlein could get a Hugo Award today. (Answer: Probably not.)
Here's how Correia, writing on his blog, characterizes what's happened since he was nominated:
The libel and slander over the last few days have been so ridiculous that my wife was contacted by people she hasn't talked to for years, concerned that she was married to such a horrible, awful, hateful, bad person, and that they were worried for her safety. I wish I was exaggerating. Don't take my word for it. My readers have been collecting a lot of them in the comments of the previous Hugo post and on my Facebook page. Plug my name into Google for the last few days. Make sure to read the comments to the various articles, too. They're fantastic. ... I've said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheerlead for left-wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.
Dartmouth: Phuck Free Speech -- Somebody's Offended!
A student, Daniela Hernandez, was offended by Dartmouth's Phi Delta Alpha frat and Alpha Phi sorority's party theme of "phiesta."
Eric Owens writes at CapitalismIsFreedom:
As a result, the soiree, which was scheduled for Saturday, has been canceled by the presidents of the respective Greek organizations.Had the party happened, it would have included a live band as well as virgin piña coladas and strawberry daiquiris. There would also have been burritos, chips and salsa, and guacamole.
The cash raised at the event would have gone to benefit cardiac treatments.
...However, Hernandez's deep offense about racial insensitivity was enough to call it off.
The self-proclaimed "Mexican-born, United-States-raised, first-generation woman of color" declared in an angry email that "there are various problematic structures and ideologies regarding a Cinco de Mayo-inspired event," according to Campus Reform.
She decreed her distaste for "the Americanization of Cinco de Mayo and its construction as a drinking holiday in the United States, cultural appropriation and the inappropriate usage of cultural clothing, and the exploitation of groups of people and cultures for the sake of business opportunities"--and, apparently, charity opportunities.
There's more!
This incident is one more in a long of episodes that pretty clear prove that Dartmouth is slowly going insane as an institution.
A couple of examples:
In February, for example, a lengthy, enigmatic email from an anonymous group of students appeared in students' inboxes threatening "physical action" if administrators failed to meet a long list of demands. Administrators later caved and met many of those demands....In January 2013, an unidentified student at the august institution (founded 1769) allegedly walked past two students, made eye contact and spoke a bunch of gibberish that the students perceived as mock Chinese. Dartmouth's Bias Incident Response Team then sprung into action. However, as far as The Daily Caller knows, that student remains a fugitive.
The world is filled with parties, people, and phrases that all of us find offensive. Personally, I find it yicky that people wear flipflops to nice restaurants. I of course respond by removing the offenders from the restaurant at gunpoint. Okay, in reality, I just look away.
I suggest this method for the fragile students at Dartmouth. It will be terrific practice. They should find that in the world, it's a little harder to get everyone to bend to their will.
via @popehat
TweetyKaus
Good point, Mickey:
@kausmickey "10.5 million Americans still looking 4 [work] employers feel no pressure 2 raise wages." Solution: More immigration! http://nyti.ms/PJbI0q
Lickie
Linkie with a little tongue.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Denise Minger On "Death By Food Pyramid" And How To Eat A Science-Based Diet
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
How did so many of us get so fat and unhealthy?
Well, it started when our government advised us to eat a high-carb, low-fat diet -- a diet that actually makes us fat and unhealthy. News reports distorting scientific findings and reporters unable to tell solid science from the shoddy kind are another problem -- leaving most of us pretty confused about what we should be eating.
Tonight, Denise Minger (of "The China Study" debunking fame) changes that. She will lay out the disturbing history of the ruining of America's health. She'll explain simple ways the ordinary person can identify scientific distortions in the media. And she'll detail the nuances of science-based healthy eating (whether you're a vegetarian or a carnivore or something in between).
Minger's meticulous (and very readable) book we'll be discussing is Death By Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/28/denise-minger-death-by-food-pyramid-how-to-eat-a-science-based-diet
Don't miss last week's show with Dr. Edward Deci on How To Be Self-Motivated And To Best Motivate Others.
Many people seem to think that the most effective motivation comes from outside of us, that motivating is something one person does to or for another. The studies done by my guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Edward L. Deci, find that self-motivation, not external motivation, is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change.
This is essential to understand whether we are trying to motivate ourselves or looking to encourage others to successfully motivate themselves.
On tonight's show, Dr. Deci tells us what research shows about we go wrong in our thinking on motivation and how we can become more self-motivated -- and thus happier and more successful in every aspect of our lives.
Dr. Deci's book is "Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation."
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/21/dr-edward-l-deci-on-how-to-be-self-motivated-and-best-motivate-others
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
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.)
The Fraud In Facebook "Liking" That Gets People Thousands Of Worthless "Likes"
Sam Juno (@marscrumbs) sent me to a fascinating video by Youtube science channel Veritasium showing me the fraud in Facebook "liking" that gets people and businesses (and even fake businesses) thousands of unengaged likers:
The problem is, publishers and others make decisions whether to buy a book based on things like "platform." I'm not going to do dishonest things to get Facebook likes (and I really just post links to my blog items there) but I may be competing against authors who do.
More, also from Sam Juno -- how new Facebook settings are limiting what you see in your newsfeed.
The "New Facebook" has a newsfeed setting that, by default, is automatically set to ONLY SHOW POSTS FROM PEOPLE WHO YOU'VE RECENTLY INTERACTED WITH OR INTERACTED WITH THE MOST (which would be limited to the couple of weeks just before people started switching to the new profile).HERE'S THE FIX:
Scroll down to the bottom of the Newsfeed on your HOME page and click on"Edit Options". In the popup, click on the dropdown menu next to 'Show posts from:' and select "All Of Your Friends and Pages" and then clickSave.
Apparently, it takes forever to get to the end. Annoying. If anyone has another way, please let me know.
What Seems Racist To Me Is Calling This "Black Excellence"
These are three smart boys -- triplets -- with married parents with good values who are wealthy enough to send them to a $36K/year private prep school. Is it any surprise whatsoever that they've gotten accepted to Columbia and University of Pennsylvania?
What this should be called is "wholesome upbringing excellence," and the foundations of it -- intact families and solid values -- are to be encouraged across the board.
And, sure, these boys were privileged in being able to attend a pricey and excellent school, but a former assistant of mine is a first-generation American (Korean), whose (intact) family didn't have much money but did instill the value of hard work and expected excellence from her. She went on to a top-tier grad school -- on scholarship.
"Best Photo Ever Taken At A Dog Show"
And it probably is. From a tweet by @MicahGoulart.
Inkie
Linkieblots. Do you see the squirrel in the top hat, too?
Bicker Your Love Alive
Rather hilarious video from The Onion:
Both Men And Women Are Portrayed Unrealistically In The Media
Great point -- photo- and art-illustrated -- by Sonny Bunch at the Washington Free Beacon. More here.
I wrote sexual male-female unrealism this back in 2005:
Each gender has its sexual Disneyland. While men fantasize about "pornotopia," note researchers Bruce J. Ellis and Donald Symons, where everybody's too busy having no-strings-attached sex to "talk about the relationship," women turn to romance-otopia, the multi-billion-dollar romance novel industry. Women's "commitment porn," with its formulaic happily-ever-after-gasm, "imposes a female-like sexuality on men that is...perhaps no more 'realistic' than that of pornotopia," writes psychology professor Catherine Salmon. "But no one is out there lobbying to ban romance novels because of the harm they do to women's attitudes toward men."
via @instapundit
Unfree Speech Invites Free Totalitarianism
I appreciated a letter in the WSJ by Norman Gersman, and was reminded of my own support, in my early teens, for the Nazis to march in Skokie.
I grew up Jewish and endured a good bit of kicking around (sometimes literally) from Jew-haters while growing up in a Detroit suburb. But Gersman is absolutely right on where speech-squashing can lead:
The April 21 letter by Brandeis student Jack Zev Hait in defense of barring Ayaan Hirsi Ali from speaking is truly disappointing. In the winter of 1966/67 the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was invited to speak at my college, SUNY at Oswego. Despite the fact that Rockwell's "sentiment" was extremely hurtful to many students, he was, of course, allowed to speak. My generation believed, and I hope still believes, in free speech as a basic premise of our liberty. Today's youth who bar free speech invite totalitarianism.Norman Gersman
Great Neck, N.Y.
Loopy
Fruitylinks.
Men Panting
Sorry -- this is a blog post about nice men's pants. Hmm...that could be taken the other way, too. Okay, nice slacks. Cubavera men's clothing is the "Deal of the Day" at Amazon
Horrible Betrayal Of What You Owe A Pet
Headline from CBS Los Angeles:
2 Poodles Abandoned At LAX When Owner Says She Can't Afford To Ship Them Home
The story:
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) -- Two miniature black poodles were left at LAX after their owner told authorities she could not afford to ship the dogs back home.KCAL9′s Juan Fernandez reported from LAX Friday evening, where an effort was already underway to find both of the dogs new homes.
While abandoning dogs at the airport is relatively rare, officials told Fernandez it has happened before.
Airlines charge anywhere from $175 to $250 per animal to travel as cargo.
Fernandez said the poodles' owner was retiring overseas and found the cost to send the animals too steep. The crate she had them in to travel was not regulation size and she couldn't afford to send them as cargo.
Both dogs were taken to the West LA Animal Shelter (11361 West Pico Boulevard, 213-485-0494).
...Fernandez also spoke to a woman who just arrived at LAX after traveling more than 15 hours with her dog. She couldn't have imagined just leaving her little Maltese, Nona, at the airport in Barcelona.
"I would have had to give her to my mom, my sister, someone I trust," Geraldine Klein said. "I would never have abandoned her. No, I would have found a solution."
My little love last night before bed:
I just don't know how you take the responsibility for a dog's life, look into those eyes day after day, and then just hop on the last lifeboat and leave him or her behind. A person who can do that is a person I'm afraid to know or be around.
Sexual Harassment Is Whatever Sneering Feminists Say It Is
Via Twitchy, Amanda Marcotte tweet:
@AmandaMarcotte http://gawker.com/high-school-student-suspended-for-asking-miss-america-t-1565510180 ... I really wish people would stop acting like it's cute when teenage boys sexually harass older women.
Yes, now normal male behavior, for millions of years of human history -- pursuing women -- has been deemed sexual harassment.
What do we expect males to do, sit cross-legged and wish really hard a woman will fall through the ceiling into their laps?
Thanks, JS
The Working Rich Now Have Less Leisure Than The Poor
Interesting piece in The Economist, noting that it's the rich who now don't have so many breaks from their work time. (Of course, they are more able to choose to take them if they want.) The piece gives a number of reasons, but here's an excerpt I found interesting:
The status of work and leisure in the rich world has changed since the days of "Downton Abbey". Back in 1899 Thorstein Veblen, an American economist who dabbled in sociology, offered his take on things. He argued that leisure was a "badge of honour". Rich people could get others to do the dirty, repetitive work--what Veblen called "industry". Yet Veblen's leisure class was not idle. Rather they engaged in "exploit": challenging and creative activities such as writing, philanthropy and debating.Veblen's theory needs updating, according to a recent paper from researchers at Oxford University*. Work in advanced economies has become more knowledge-intensive and intellectual. There are fewer really dull jobs, like lift-operating, and more glamorous ones, like fashion design. That means more people than ever can enjoy "exploit" at the office. Work has come to offer the sort of pleasures that rich people used to seek in their time off. On the flip side, leisure is no longer a sign of social power. Instead it symbolises uselessness and unemployment.
The evidence backs up the sociological theory. The occupations in which people are least happy are manual and service jobs requiring little skill. Job satisfaction tends to increase with the prestige of the occupation. Research by Arlie Russell Hochschild of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that as work becomes more intellectually stimulating, people start to enjoy it more than home life. "I come to work to relax," one interviewee tells Ms Hochschild. And wealthy people often feel that lingering at home is a waste of time. A study in 2006 revealed that Americans with a household income of more than $100,000 indulged in 40% less "passive leisure" (such as watching TV) than those earning less than $20,000.
Personally, I find that I am the most productive when I have a ton on my plate.
Lunchy
Linkie with a pudding cup without the pudding. (School lunch these days.)
The Power-Mad Morons Running The Academy
Excellent column in USA Today by law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds about the tiny little power barons running colleges these days:
Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an "adjunct administrator."But it's not just the fat that is worrisome. It's administrators' obsession with -- and all too often, abuse of -- security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.
Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as "threats." A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a "threat" that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: "I will take what is mine with fire & blood." Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt's Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)
What kind of person claims that a picture of a 9-year-old girl wearing an HBO T-shirt is a threat? The kind of person who runs America's colleges, apparently. And Miller, alas, is not alone in his cluelessness and, apparently, paranoia.
...With college enrollment falling and budgets under pressure, legislatures, donors and alumni will be looking at ways to restructure schools in the future. The profusion of self-important deanlets and the abuse of campus police forces ought to be looked at as part of this process. It's just another symptom of the now-imploding higher education bubble.
Reynolds' book on remaking higher ed -- The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself
Repealing The Drinking Age Is Long Overdue
Camille Paglia in TIME writes that the age 21 rule for drinking sets the US apart from other advanced Western nations and pushes kids toward mind-deadening drugs and binge-drinking -- and she's right. An excerpt:
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who with all good intentions were wrongly intruding into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing 19th-century Temperance crusaders, typified by Carrie Nation smashing beer barrels with her hatchet. Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14 years of Prohibition. That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze smuggling, laying the groundwork for today's global drug trade. Thanks a lot, Carrie!
What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world.
I agree with her -- as she puts it about the in loco parenting by the government: "This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!"
via @adamkissel
I Want This Budget Air-Conditioner!
Yoohoo, Gregg!
I live close enough to the ocean -- about a mile away -- that I don't need AC more than a few days a year. I generally just tough it out on those days, but it seems there's no need.
via @greenpointless
Radley Balko Asks The Right Questions About The Police Response To The Boston Bombing
The second one also applies to the rights-violating TSA. Balko in the WaPo:
Were the heavy-handed door-to-door searches and lockdown in Watertown justified by the belief that Tsarnaev was holed up in that particular neighborhood?...Might a better approach be to merely accept that exercising the freedoms we cherish requires accepting a certain amount of risk?
I made a similar point in my op-ed about the TSA -- that we are in greater danger by removing our civil liberties in the name of "security" (and the fantasy that we can be "secure").
Limpie
A linkie that had too much to drinkie last night.
Sweat For Less!
Up to 50% off ladies activewear, including sports bras, at Amazon
Some Of My Neighbors Have Flippers
Two of my neighbors met up on the beach. Mari Snyder is the one in clothes. 
The Incredible Rudeness Of Being Cheap
Wonderful piece by a writer I've been a fan of since my days back in New York, Joe Queenan, on cheapness. Per the question he poses in the headline -- "Cheapskates: Misguided Thrift or Character Flaw?" -- yes I believe it is a character flaw: one that may be prompted by fear (which is no excuse for not overcoming it). An excerpt from Queenan's piece at The Rotarian:
Several things about cheap people baffle me. One, do they think they are getting away with it? Do they think the rest of us don't notice that they're always in the bathroom when the check arrives? And what do they hope to gain from this? Are they keeping a running tab of how much money they save over the course of a lifetime? Were the proceeds from all those un-tipped waiters and shortchanged friends enough to buy a Barcalounger? A trip to Myrtle Beach? If you add up all the money that cheapskates save by stiffing friends over a 70-year period, it works out to $456.78. Yes, I have run the numbers.Cheapness in the modern world may well be a product of the ʼ60s, when people developed the idea of "sticking it to the man." This mindset manifests itself in such baleful activities as lying about being a senior to get cheaper movie tickets or asking your neighbor if you can illegally share his cable feed.
I view cheapness as a deal breaker vis-à-vis friendships. I do not want to be around cheapskates. Their behavior introduces a level of suspense into each and every outing, in which I spend the whole time wondering whether I am going to get stiffed. I dread that awkward moment when the check arrives and I wonder if my friend is going to feign a coronary, or say that he forgot his wallet, or simply fail to pony up for his portion of the tip. Of course, all this could be avoided by asking for separate checks. But "separate checks" are the two most disgusting words in the English language. They are. They suggest that you have already decided that you are not going to treat the other party to a free meal, that you have made a preemptive decision not to be generous. Or that you already fear you are going to get stiffed.
...But what I most hate about cheapskates is the disappointment I feel in their presence. Cheap people make me sad. When people who borrowed a bottle of classy, expensive wine replace it with swill, my heart breaks. It makes me sad that there are people so lacking in basic human decency. It means they are not really one of us.
...To me, cheapness is a sign of a much deeper problem, a poverty of spirit that I find appalling. Cheapness is a reflection of a deeper character flaw. It is a form of theft. A person who would stiff you on a bar bill would probably turn you over to the secret police too.
via @HardenKurt
Your Plate Isn't Dirty
Marty Nemko blogs at Psychology Today about the notion pushed on a lot of us that it is virtuous to "clean" your plate. I like the way trappleton put it at Lifehacker, where I saw this, that we "stop looking at our plates as challenges to be overcome."
Nemko writes:
6. Do you suffer from the "finish your plate" syndrome? I will finish what's on my plate even when I'm quite full. That's not because my mother told me "People are starving in Africa." It's unconsciously because I think of finishing my plate as a task to be completed, and I don't like to keep tasks uncompleted. Also, I don't like to waste things. Both reasonings are stupid. For example, it's better that those extra 500 calories get saved for the next meal or even thrown out than to make myself fatter. But that irrational thinking is alive and well within me and perhaps you.Possible solution: Perhaps you and I can quell that tendency by staying aware of it.
The guy apparently is rather clueless about dietary science, per his first point about fat, but this point above, about the idiocy of cleaning one's plate, is an important one to make.
I was raised this way, and I used to try to do that -- and feel overly full and sick afterward. I learned to figure out whether I was still hungry and stop eating if I was. This meant, on Saturday, when Gregg brought over In 'N' Out burgers, I left one tiny morsel on my plate, which I had to cover and put in the refrigerator. Better than stuffing myself and feeling like crap -- and having unnecessary food and calories.
Hermosa Beach Mom Beats Power-Mad TSA Thugs In Court
Brian Summers writes for The Daily Breeze about the tentative legal settlement Stacy Armato won for being imprisoned in a glass booth by TSA thugs four years ago over not wanting them to irradiate the breast milk she'd pumped for her son:
Stacey Armato sued in federal court in Phoenix after a 2010 incident in which she asked the TSA to provide an alternate form of screening that would not expose her 7-month-old son's breast milk to radiation. During the incident, Armato claimed in court papers, she was forced to wait in a glass enclosure for more than 40 minutes while she was "frequently harassed and abused by the TSA agents."Under the terms of the proposed settlement, which should become official within the next month, the TSA will take steps to retrain its officers on proper breast milk-screening procedures, Armato said. The agency also will pay her $75,000, which she plans to use for her legal fees and to donate to BreastfeedLA, a group dedicated to promoting breast-feeding across the region.
"Moms can now travel more confidently with their breast milk," Armato said. "It's a big day for breast-feeding moms."
And still yet another small day for our overall civil liberties, thanks to how pitifully few ever complain about the rights-violating indignities that the mall food court clerks repurposed into "security" jobs for the TSA perpetrate on all of us.
UPDATE: My wonderfully dedicated colleague at TSA News Blog, Lisa Simeone, has done a terrific post on this, with original reporting, which I'll post here. (Mosier is Amato's lawyer.)
*UPDATE: Rob Mosier just told me that this fight was made all the harder because it was only him and Stacey against multiple other lawyers all working for or hired by the TSA: "the U.S. Attorney, agency [TSA] counsel from DC, plus 4 other law firms, so at every deposition, every hearing, we were facing 7 or 8 other attorneys; every hour spent on this case cost taxpayers thousands of dollars per hour." In addition, Mosier was the only one from his law firm allowed to view any of the relevant documents -- he couldn't get help, in other words, from his colleagues -- because everything was deemed SSI. As for the names of the TSA agents who harassed Armato, Mosier and Armato know those names but acceded to a confidentiality agreement not to release them, because four years ago, in the days after her video went viral, so many negative comments were posted all over the place, threatening to harm the TSA agents. And the conveniently missing portion of that video? The TSA claims it doesn't know what happened to it. Though they requested it repeatedly, neither Mosier nor Armato has seen it.
via KateC
Linkie Continental
With suicide doors.
Disgusting: Video Proof The TSA Is Still Groping Children
Teach your kids that there's "bad touch" -- except when a police-costumed government thug is doing it.
Lisa Simeone writes at TSA News Blog:
The TSA has been saying for years now that they don't give "enhanced pat-downs" to children. Even though we have loads of evidence -- verbal and visual -- to the contrary, the agency and its mouthpieces continue to spout these lies. Here's yet more proof.
Simeone continues with a question for parents:
How can you allow this to be done to your children?? How can you allow strangers to touch them and rub their hands all over their bodies??...This video is infuriating not only for the simple fact that it exists, but because the TSA agents are being all nicey-nicey and jokey with the children as they're pawing them. This is what sexual predators do. This is mimicking that behavior. I don't care what you think of the TSA and its policies, the fact is that this is mimicking the behavior of sexual predators. It's called grooming.
"Let Them Drink Chocolate"
Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times about stupidity in the name of dietary health for children:
When the district took away chocolate milk, it substituted skim milk. (The district already offered 1 percent milk.) If the goal was, as the researchers suggested, to make white milk more "attractive," why didn't they consider offering whole milk, the tastiest, most satisfying white milk, rather than the watery stuff that I, for one, can't go near?The answer, surely, is that the milk study wasn't just about milk. It was about virtue. To the anti-chocolate mind-set, whole milk is still too decadent. It's creamy, fatty, enjoyable. Even if it's healthier than chocolate milk, it's still too sinful.
I do think government should take obesity seriously and try to nudge people toward healthier behavior. Our farm bills should not favor corn, and thus cheap corn syrup. We should build bicycle lanes, not more highway lanes. And we should ensure that all Americans, even those without cars, have access to markets with affordable fruits and vegetables.
But food is in its own category, and we don't want to be too puritanical about it. For one thing, while we all know that, say, exercise is good, the conventional wisdom is always changing on which foods are bad. Some research has indicated, for example, that drinking whole milk is associated with being thinner. And as the Cornell team was forced to conclude, hooking children with a temptation like chocolate milk ups their overall milk consumption, as well as the likelihood that they'll take the healthy school lunch. In all sorts of ways, then, skim milk may be bad for the student body's nutrition.
But more important, sweets, unlike commuter miles in an S.U.V., are necessary to the good life. We wisely use sweets to celebrate milestones. Sweets help make family rituals: My father believed that one was remiss not to drink Coca-Cola with our Friday-night pizza. And, as I am reminded this week, foods sanctify religious occasions. Right now, my family's special collision of vegetarianism and Judaism necessitates a good bit of chocolate. But when Passover ends, that doesn't mean we should put the chocolate cake, or the chocolate milk, away.
I don't eat starchy carbs -- no sugar, flour, rice, potatoes, bananas or any fruit -- but I eat either a small chocolate bar or a scoop of gelato once a week. Without that I'd feel deprived.
As a kid, my mother worked the deprivation strategy. What it turned me into was a kid who'd dive into raw sewage after an m&m. (Wipe it off with a Kleenex and it's good as new!)
A healthy diet is a good thing -- filled with a lot of fat and nutrients (for example, whole milk, which is actually the most nutritious kind, and chocolate milk from time to time). A Puritan diet is not a healthy thing, because it causes you to always feel like you're missing something -- leading to your sticking your face in a giant Oreo bag and never coming out.
via @WalterOlson
Where's Shop Class?
Josh Mandel writes in the WSJ that he found welders making $150K a year:
In American high schools, it is becoming increasingly hard to defend the vanishing of shop class from the curriculum. The trend began in the 1970s, when it became conventional wisdom that a four-year college degree was essential. As Forbes magazine reported in 2012, 90% of shop classes have been eliminated for the Los Angeles unified school district's 660,000 students. Yet a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics study shows that 48% of all college graduates are working in jobs that don't require a four-year degree.Too many young people have four-year liberal-arts degrees, are thousands of dollars in debt and find themselves serving coffee at Starbucks SBUX +0.47% or working part-time at the mall. Many of them would have been better off with a two-year skilled-trade or technical education that provides the skills to secure a well-paying job.
A good trade to consider: welding. I recently visited Pioneer Pipe in the Utica and Marcellus shale area of Ohio and learned that last year the company paid 60 of its welders more than $150,000 and two of its welders over $200,000. The owner, Dave Archer, said he has had to turn down orders because he can't find enough skilled welders.
According to the 2011 Skills Gap Survey by the Manufacturing Institute, about 600,000 manufacturing jobs are unfilled nationally because employers can't find qualified workers. To help produce a new generation of welders, pipe-fitters, electricians, carpenters, machinists and other skilled tradesmen, high schools should introduce students to the pleasure and pride they can take in making and building things in shop class.
Two people's thoughts from the comments. The first:
ESTELLE BRENNAN Wrote:
There's an old joke told about plumber fixing some problem in under half an hour and charging $250. The guy he was working for said, "I'm a lawyer, and I don't get $500 an hour." The plumber replied, "When I was a lawyer, I didn't get $500 per hour either."There actually is nothing stopping a liberal arts graduate from entering a skilled trade program (unless he has no mathematical aptitude.) Or for a high school graduate from going into a skilled trade and using his well paid job to finance a college education. You'd be surprised at how many blue collar workers are well educated and intellectual.
One of the great things about America is that you can change your mind and take another path when you are 25 or 35 or 45 or at any time.
The next:
Thomas Archer Wrote:No quarrel with the premise of the article that there are good jobs in the traditional trades and that high school students may be wiser to follow that path. The path is not risk free and $150K jobs are not plentiful or easy.
What the article doesn't say is how many overtime hours the 60 welders had to work to earn $150k, or what the working conditions were like. It doesn't mention that welding, especially on pipelines, is filthy, all weather, exposes the welder to hazardous fumes, it can be dangerous and may require that you work at a remote site; you won't be home for dinner. It may be a job you can do in your early years, but perhaps not so in later years. A lot of prospective Keystone pipeline welders have been waiting for that job to start. The first death I witnessed on an industrial site was a welder who was electrocuted working on a coal conveyor.
Welding is labor intensive, highly skilled and still filled with quality risks which is why stressed welds are often x-rayed and 20% to 30% rework is often common. The point of all this is that since the mid-80's a lot of money and research has gone into fully automating the arc welding process. Robotic systems that used to cost $500k and more now cost under $100K and can run 24/7. The author mentions for example, 3D printing, another technology that generally eliminates the need for welding.
A lot of tradespeople have been and still are without work. So, if you choose a trade for a career, understand what you're in for and what the future may be. Don't be guided by some cherry picked career example that isn't sustainable.
As an aside, Mr. Mandel is Ohio's state Treasurer, obviously working to remake his image following an ugly campaign (both sides) against Sherrod Brown and resounding defeat in a bid for the US Senate. Ohio's Treasurer's aren't traditionally champions of vocational education.
It's A Bad Thing That Doctors Can't Own Hospitals Anymore
Doctors can't own hospitals anymore -- a direct result of government policy, writes Loren Heal at FreedomWorks.org -- and this is not good for patients:
Doctors effectively can't own new hospitals any more. That's because the Big Hospital lobby convinced the leftists who designed Obamacare that physicans owning hospitals was a conflict of interest. That's right: according to that theory, the people who have devoted their lives to the study of medicine want to own hospitals so they can profit by withholding care, or by overcharging for it.The trouble with that line of reasoning is that the non-physicians in charge of hospitals and insurance companies have no such conflict. Their incentives are to provide as little care as possible while charging as much as they can. Their desire to protect their personal reputations and adherence to ethical code are not as strong as for physicians.
As a solution, he'd like to see a repeal of Obamacare. Anybody think that is likely to happen?
via @ScrewedByState
Slurpee
Frozen cherry links. Brain freeze sold separately.
Forbes On Starbucks: "Do Beer And Coffee Mix?"
Question, at Forbes, by Roger Dooley, about Starbucks' testing of wine and beer sales at some establishments:
A coffee shop serving wine and beer might seem a bit incongruous to long-time Starbucks customers, but the chain must have seen enough positive results in its tests to expand the program. And the concept itself is far from revolutionary. Houston Press writer Kaitlin Steinberg lists a flock of alcohol-fueled coffee shops in that city alone. (See Starbucks Won't Be Bringing Booze to Houston, But Who Cares?) With names ranging from the sedate Southside Espresso to the more suggestive Double Trouble Caffeine & Cocktails, these establishments show coffee and alcohol can be compatible partners.
In fact, it's ridiculous that most coffee places don't have wine and that it's hard to get a license from the government to do so. (Or that there is a license required to do so.)
In Paris, Gregg and I sometimes sit out with a friend or just together at Bar du Marché and watch the world go by. Depending on the time of day, we'll either order an espresso or a glass of wine. It really isn't a big deal. And shouldn't be.
Yes, they may lose some people who come to Starbucks after their AA meeting. They also sell beer and wine at the supermarkets in California. Perhaps those people get their groceries delivered.
While The TSA Is All Up In Your Panties...
A 16-year-old boy is hopping the airport fence and stowing away in a plane's wheel well -- all the way to Hawaii.
The TSA provides "security" for idiots -- a security puppet show put on by people who couldn't catch a terrorist if he walked up and introduced himself as "Al Kaida." It's intended to fool people who confuse police-ish-costumed inconvenience and idiocy for actual protection from anything meaningful. Their numbers, sadly, are legion.
And this isn't to say that I buy into the ridiculous fallacy that we can be perfectly safe.
What these costumed thugs are helping make a dent in is our civil liberties. Thank you to all who stand up against the TSA and all of the others who take money for violating people's civil liberties. Jonathan Corbett, especially, deserves our thanks. From a FreedomToTravel newsletter I subscribe to:
Freedom To Travel USA is paying close attention to Jon Corbett's lawsuit.So what's next? Oral arguments are scheduled for June 4th, 2014, in Miami.
In the meantime, Jon had a heart-felt closing paragraph in his brief:
CORBETT CONCLUDING BRIEF PARAGRAPH
"Nothing that the TSA has argued mitigates the fact that they are literally touching the genitals of random passengers who have committed the sole crime of having desire to travel. Nothing that the TSA has argued mitigates the fact that they are imaging every square inch of the bodies of random passengers when less intrusive, more effective, and less expensive measures are available to it.If the jurists of this Court wish to live in a world, and have their children grow up in a world, where the above is 'reasonable,' please deny this petition and inform the cave-dwellers in Afghanistan that they have won."
The Thought Crime Of Questioning The Notion Of "Rape Culture"
Julius Kairey writes at The Cornell Sun:
To those who believe in "rape culture," rape is not the result of a few bad actors, but is tolerated, even encouraged, in our college culture. Few people seem willing to challenge this narrative for fear of being called insensitive to the suffering of those who have experienced sexual violence.A respect for the truth requires that the following question be asked: Is rape so widespread on campuses as to be an epidemic? The oft-cited figure that one-in-four women will been sexually assaulted at least once over the course of her time at college is of dubious accuracy. In fact, more reliable statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that one-in-forty women will be raped over four years of college. Even these lower statistics indicate that there is still much work to be done in reducing sexual violence on campus, and all decent people share the goal of a campus free of sexual violence. But the truth is that the overwhelming majority of people on this and other campuses do not condone or engage in rape.
I would be less concerned about the exaggerated statistics about "rape culture," and thus less inclined to criticize it, if it were not causing concrete harm to students. But the belief that rape must be prevented by "any means necessary" has been used to justify the elimination of key protections for students accused of rape in campus judicial systems. Some want the claims of the alleged victims of rape to be accepted as true, and not scrutinized in a fair legal proceeding. Just two years ago, Cornell stripped those accused of sexual offenses of the right to retain an attorney in University proceedings and the right to cross-examine their accusers. A student accused of a sexual offense at Cornell is now not able to directly ask the person who is making a potentially life-ruining accusation a single question about the incident. This is an inexcusable erasure of the fundamental right to confront one's accuser, a right that has existed for all of our country's history. Such rights are not superfluous. They protect us against arbitrary action by those who hold the levers of power.
To make matters worse, the University has dropped the standard of proof in sexual assault cases from "clear and convincing evidence" to "preponderance of the evidence." This means that a Cornell student accused of a violent offense that is sexual in nature will not have the legal safeguards given to others whose alleged offenses were non-sexual. With the punishment being so severe and so much on the line for the accused, how can we accept such a low standard of proof?
Given that this university has a tremendous power to punish students, we have an obligation to make sure that the innocent do not get hurt. Whenever the University makes the scales of justice unequal, the safeguards of due process and equal protection are put in jeopardy. We must always be presumed to be innocent until proven guilty and be allowed the basic tools needed to defend ourselves. Do not assume that you will never be accused of something you did not do.
There was a correction at the bottom, which I'm pasting in here:
CORRECTION: This piece originally stated that "one in four women will be raped at least once over the course of her time at college." In fact, the statistic, according to data compiled by the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, is that one in four women will be the victim of sexual assault during their academic career.
via @CHSommers
Jaywalking Stings
So much safer than chasing the bad guys, notes Ted Balaker in the video from reason.tv:
Lunkie
Linkie with oafs and raisins.
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: Dr. Edward Deci On How To Be Self-Motivated And To Best Motivate Others
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
*Easter Sunday "Best Of" Replay.
Many people seem to think that the most effective motivation comes from outside of us, that motivating is something one person does to or for another. The studies done by my guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Edward L. Deci, find that self-motivation, not external motivation, is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change.
This is essential to understand whether we are trying to motivate ourselves or looking to encourage others to successfully motivate themselves.
On tonight's show, Dr. Deci will tell us what research shows about we go wrong in our thinking on motivation and how we can become more self-motivated -- and thus happier and more successful in every aspect of our lives.
Dr. Deci's book we'll be discussing tonight is "Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation."
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/21/dr-edward-l-deci-on-how-to-be-self-motivated-and-best-motivate-others
Don't miss last week's show with "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams.
Adams, obviously, is not a scientist. But he thinks and views his experiences like a scientist and his wisdom is well-supported and worth hearing.
For example, Adams found that it isn't goals that are the key to success, but what he calls "systems."
And Adams advises, based on his own steady stream of failures in business, that "Everything you want in life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out."
As a cartoonist, he thinks of himself as a "professional simplifier." That's what he does in his just-published book, How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and simplifying for all of us what it takes to succeed in business and be happy in life is what he'll be doing on tonight's not-to-be-missed show.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/14/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-adams-on-how-to-fail-your-way-to-success
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
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.)
Name Your Trendy Baby
My proposed hot baby boy names for the near future: Zeus, Euripedes, and Aristophanes.
Demonizing Alcohol To Your Kids Isn't The Answer
Barry Adkins writes at Good Men Project about his son dying of alcohol poisoning the day he moved out on his own, but Adkins takes the wrong approach in advising other parents how they might avoid this, thinking his intuition is enough:
I am not advocating that we go back to the days of prohibition. It didn't work before, it won't work now. I am guessing that at least one person reading this article is asking this question; Barry, do you drink? The answer is yes, typically I will have one beer and I am not talking about one of those huge, 24 oz. beers.I am advocating better educating our children about the dangers of alcohol abuse. Uneducated decisions, made by our children, can lead to tragedy; Educated decisions will lead to a far better outcome. As a society we do a lousy job of discouraging our children from drinking. Television shows and movies glorify binge drinking. They show people getting drunk and having a "good time." They don't bother to show you the bad things that can happen when your child drinks. Your child could get behind the wheel and kill someone or themselves, die from alcohol poisoning, or get a DUI. There could be things like rape or sexual assault--your child could be either victim or assailant. For your precious little girl, unwanted pregnancy and STD's. For that boy you are so proud of, he could be assaulted, or assault someone, or become an unplanned father.
...I am often asked for advice on how to talk to teenagers about the dangers of alcohol abuse. The standard advice is: "talk to your teenager." Great advice, but I suspect for many of us, including me, it turns into an awkward conversation, with your teenager tuning you out. I believe that the easier thing to do, in the beginning, is to have conversations about alcohol with your spouse/adult family member while your teenager is within hearing distance. Teenagers are typically much more likely to want to listen in on a conversation than to be in the middle of it. The car is always a great place for this. Start by talking about a recent news story, and there is no shortage of them, where alcohol led to something bad happening.
Another fairly easy thing to do, is to make a list of the bad things that can happen when you abuse alcohol. Under each bad thing, list someone you know that has suffered the consequences. Everyone knows someone who has been impacted by alcohol abuse! Print it out and post it in places where it will be seen in your house such as, the refrigerator or the bathroom mirror. Update it when you hear new stories.
It's a horrible thing to lose a child, and the guy means well in trying to prevent that happening for others, but his advice is pretty bad.
Kids shrug off the bogeymen presented to them. You give kids a responsible attitude about alcohol by giving them alcohol and showing them drinking responsibly as a normal part of life.
Addiction treatment specialist Stanton Peele wrote in 2008:
Alcohol poisoning incidents are extremely rare, remarkably enough, given the widespread binge drinking that occurs among young Americans in late adolescence, college, and through their mid-twenties.Those fatal drinking events that do occur are most likely to befall young people from abstinent backgrounds who have no experience limiting their drinking when they participate in extreme initiations with other teens or college students.
One point these speakers make is that, the earlier young people begin to drink, the more likely they are to become alcoholic later in life. Perhaps they are harkening to a study led by Wake Forest Medical School researcher Kristie Foley which found that teens whose parents permitted them to attend drinking parties were twice as likely to binge, a finding broadcast around the country.Less publicized was this result from the study: children who drank with their parents were one third as likely to binge outside the home. The difference between young teens sneaking into the woods to become falling-down drunk and kids sitting around the table with their parents drinking small amounts of wine is so obvious you wouldn't think the distintion would need to be drawn, would you?
Here's another mother I spoke to. Although her father, mother, and brother all had serious drinking issues, she drank moderately. Moreover, she made sure to introduce her two children to alcohol at home. When I complimented her for overcoming her own troubled family background with alcohol to create a moderate drinking household, she disclaimed credit.
"It's so obvious that I didn't want them to learn to drink by sneaking drinks around the house like I did or by bingeing when they got to college, I really can't take any credit for doing something so sensible."
I respectfully demurred. This woman, although not from an ethnic background (e.g., Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Greek) that socialized drinking in the home, figured out that this was the best policy on her own. And, apparently, there are other Americans out there like her!
Peele explains further:
The Italians, Jews, Greeks, and other low-alcoholism cultures, on the other hand, teach youngsters to drink at meals and religious celebrations within the family. In these ethnic groups the whole outlook and atmosphere connected with drinking are different--it doesn't carry the emotional baggage that drinking does for groups with a greater susceptibility to alcoholism. In the homes of low-alcoholism ethnic groups, alcohol is usually served at home very early to children, who see drinking occur as an ordinary part of family celebrations. What they don't see occur when people drink is violence and drunkenness....The two sociologists went further and asked Jews about their attitudes toward drinking and alcoholism. They found that Jews as a group are antagonistic to the disease view of alcoholism. Jews think alcoholics drink out of a psychological dependence, and they regard problem drinkers with distaste and avoid them.[16] In other words, groups with higher alcoholism rates, like the Irish and Baptists and Slavs and Scandinavians, already fear alcohol and readily accept that alcoholism is a disease, whereas the Chinese, Jews, and Italians--groups with the lowest alcoholism rates--think of alcoholism as a self-initiated problem that can be controlled. How, we might wonder, have the people with the worst drinking problems taken over in telling the rest of us about the nature of alcoholism and how we should drink?
Sowell: Ahead Of His Time On Drug Legalization
Thomas Sowell from 1984 on "Why drugs should be legalized":
via @Mark_J_Perry
Islam And Tolerance: A One-Way Street
Brunei is about to implement a penal code that conforms to the Quran, allowing them to stone people for having gay sex.
Aileen Graef writes for UPI:
The penal code allows stoning for multiple offenses: rape, adultery, sodomy, extra-marital sex, gay sex, insulting the Quran or Hadith, blasphemy, declaring oneself a prophet or non-Muslim, and murder.Brunei hasn't conducted an execution since 1957, but this is a part of Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah's push towards a stricter interpretation of Shariah law.
The United Nations and human rights advocates have condemned Brunei's penal code and have asked the sultan to stop its implementation, as it violates international law.
Additionally, per Weasel Zippers, alcohol consumption in public by Brunei's non-Muslim citizens or permanent residents during their time abroad would be punishable under this new penal code.
P.S. If you're gay, might be time to give up on the Beverly Hills Hotel, owned by the Sultan of Slay The Gays.
The hotel, in The Hollywood Reporter, came out with a strong message in favor of money, uh, gay rights:
"[W]e do not tolerate any form of discrimination of any kind," read a statement issued by the Beverly Hills Hotel to THR. "We are also against any law in any other country around the world that punishes people for their religious beliefs, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation. The laws and policies that govern how we run our hotel have nothing to do with the laws that exist in any other country outside of the United States. We do not tolerate any form of discrimination and strongly value people and cultural diversity amongst our guests and employees."
Blurkie
Linkie, touched by an alien. (No relation to Balkie.)
Kindle Deals
One hundred Kindle books for $3.99 or less, at Amazon
There are fiction and non-fiction, and the non-fiction include The Millionaire Next Door
There's also a book I loved as a girl but probably a better translation than what I read: The Iliad: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation)
If you have kids, this cupcake architecture book looks like fun: Hello, Cupcake!
And this isn't on super-sale, but an enormously popular book for people who cook is by my friends', Karen Page and her chef husband, Andrew Dornenberg: The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs
Medical Homelessness Under Obamacare
CBS Local's ConsumerWatch says some "Covered California" patients say they can't see a doctor:
Rotacare, a free clinic for the uninsured in Mountain View, is dealing with the problem firsthand.Mirella Nguyen works at the clinic said staffers dutifully helped uninsured clients sign up for Obamacare so they would no longer need the free clinic.
But months later, the clinic's former patients are coming back to the clinic begging for help. "They're coming back to us now and saying I can't find a doctor, "said Nguyen.
Thinn Ong was thrilled to qualify for a subsidy on the health care exchange. She is paying $200 a month in premiums. But the single mother of two is asking, what for?
"Yeah, I sign it. I got it. But where's my doctor? Who's my doctor? I don't know," said a frustrated Ong.
Nguyen said the newly insured patients checked the physicians' lists they were provided and were told they weren't accepting new patients or they did not participate in the plan.
And Nguyen says - while the free clinic isn't technically supposed to be treating former patents they signed up for insurance, they can't in good faith turn them away.
Dr. Kevin Grumbach of UCSF called the phenomenon "medical homelessness," where patients are caught adrift in a system woefully short of primary care doctors.
Being a primary care doctor has become an idiotic career choice. For all the years of medical school, internship, and residency, and all their financial and other massive costs, doctors become government serfs with a lot of paperwork to fill out and controls on the amount of money they can make.
I predict huge shortages in the years to come.
via @instapundit
Imagine Paying $14 For A Subway Sandwich
Michael Saltsman writes in the WSJ about wonderful Zingerman's deli, in Ann Arbor, where I attended the University of Michigan. If I were having a last meal, Zingerman's would be on the list of places to consider for takeout.
Seriously, go there if you're in Ann Arbor. Your tastebuds will thank both of us.
Back to Saltsman, his piece is about Obama's call to raise the minimum wage, and how he touts doing it at pricey restaurants and not the fast food places where it would hurt:
In a visit this month to the University of Michigan, for instance, the president stopped at the local deli Zingerman's. He raved about its Reuben sandwich as well as the generous wages that the business offers. Like Mr. Jelinek, Zingerman's co-founder Paul Saginaw supports hiking the minimum wage. He posted a minimum-wage manifesto on a company website last September.As Mr. Obama relished the perfect sandwich prepared by well-paid employees, he neglected to mention how much he paid for the happy experience: Zingerman's Reuben costs $14. That's about three times as much as a Subway foot-long. When I was an undergraduate student at Michigan, I rarely dined at Zingerman's because it was so expensive.
If every deli could charge $14 a sandwich, then perhaps an $11 or $12 minimum wage would be feasible. But your local sandwich shop cannot match the price points of a shop serving a parent-subsidized clientele in a college town. Expecting restaurants everywhere to do so is a recipe for business failure.
I believe in paying and treating employees well, but I don't believe the government should be setting wages. And I say that as somebody who deplores the idea of having an "intern" who does anything more that sit around and observe. If they're working, I think they should be paid. And for the record, I've never had an "intern," and never will.
Commenter James Hishmeh wrote at the WSJ:
Minimum wage jobs were never meant to pay enough to raise a family and buy a home. These jobs were a way for young people to enter the work force and learn good work habits and to give them a chance to improve their skills and move on to higher paying jobs which would sustain them to do the aforementioned.But that is hard to understsnd for anyone(even a president) who has never had a real check a week job.
It also doesn't make sense economically unless of course getting votes trumps economics.
Islam And Human Rights Are Incompatible
Majid Rafizadeh writes on FrontPage:
How can Islam be compatible with a modern notion of human rights and gender equality, when social and legal laws of Allah's words in Quran, depict women as inferior to men in every aspect?Article three of the universal declaration of human rights, states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." But in Islamic countries, a person who rejects and abandons Islam has no right to life. According to Islam, unbelievers commit the gravest sin in Islam.
While article four of the universal declaration of human rights says "one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms," slavery is officially recognized and accepted in Quran.Article five states that "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Cases of stoning, lashings, and other violent acts are rampant in Islamic countries.
How can Islam be compatible with human rights when, according to Muslims and the Quran, Allah specifically states in the Quran that a woman's testimony in a court of law is considered half the value to that of a man?
...In addition, how can the ideology of Islam be in line with human rights when abandoning Islam triggers punishments, including execution?
...The aforementioned laws reveal how women are restricted and seen as inferior. While men can marry any women from any other religion, Muslim women are not allowed to marry a non-Muslim.
Everybody's so busy complaining about Israel -- where peaceful Arab citizens have rights and even serve in government -- that they can't be bothered to complain about the terrible human rights violations written into the Quran (and considered unchangeable and unquestionable, because they are the word of Allah).
Count Linkula
Sink your links into these fangs.
A New Mother's Day Is Dawning
Get your gifties in Home & Kitchen at Amazon
More gifts for mom
Obamacare: Health Coverage In Name But Not In Practice
Sweden, with its universal healthcare coveage, has excellent quality medical care. The problem is getting access to it. Per Bylund writes at the WSJ:
According to the Euro Health Consumer Index 2013, Swedish patients suffer from inordinately long wait times to get an appointment with a doctor, specialist treatment or even emergency care. Wait times are Europe's longest, and Swedes dependent on the public-health system have to wait months or even years for certain procedures, or are denied treatment.For example, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare reports that as of 2013, the average wait time (from referral to start of treatment) for "intermediary and high risk" prostate cancer is 220 days. In the case of lung cancer, the wait between an appointment with a specialist and a treatment decision is 37 days.
This waiting is what economists call rationing--the delay or even failure to provide care due to government budgetary decisions. So the number of people seeking care far outweighs the capabilities of providers, translating into insurance in name but not in practice. This is likely to be a result of ObamaCare as well.
...This is why Swedes over the past two decades have been rushing to purchase medical coverage through private insurance, which guarantees and delivers timely and qualitative care. Insurance Sweden, the country's national insurance company trade organization, reports that in 2013 12% of working adults had private insurance even though they are already "guaranteed" public health care. The number of private policyholders has increased by 67% over the last five years, despite the fact that an average Swedish family already pays nearly $20,000 annually in taxes toward health care and elderly care, including what Americans call Medicare.
The Notion Of Strengthening Marriage By Clamping Down On Divorce
There's been talk of making it harder to divorce as a way to strengthen marriage -- and perhaps keep low-conflict couples from splitting up and devastating their children, because oh, sex with the same person was getting kinda ho-hum.
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg explains why making divorce more difficult is a bad idea -- one likely to lead to unintended consequences -- with an example from recent history:
After World War II, many left-wing European governments wanted to do something about unemployment. As I discuss extensively in my book, unemployment is about the worst thing that can happen to you in a modern democracy, short of death or dismemberment. So they passed laws making it very, very difficult to fire workers. In Italy, for example, a judge could reverse a layoff decision, not because you'd fired the worker unjustly, but because the judge didn't think you needed to cut staff. Hurrah! Finally, workers were protected from the dark specter of unemployment!Well, not quite. Workers were thrilled; employers were terrified. Now hiring a worker meant you were stuck with them unless they committed some absolutely flagrant offense -- like, say, emptying the till and running out the door.
That's a hell of a commitment to make to someone you barely know. So employers didn't want to hire scary strangers; they wanted to hire close friends and family. Or, better yet, no one at all. Youth unemployment in many of these nations was staggering. The insiders had a great deal, but people without jobs found themselves consigned to a series of temporary, not-very-well-paid contracts. Or the dole.
The lesson is that when you make it harder to exit, you also make people reluctant to enter. If we try to strengthen marriage by clamping down on divorce, we may find that more and more people simply refuse to get married in the first place.
I'm always a little surprised when people write to me -- those who are not 20 and just having their first relationship -- who are shocked that the fireworks are not consistent two years in.
I just responded to a reader email with this issue this morning. She does happen to be 20, with a boyfriend who's 25, so she gets a bit of a pass. But plenty of people who are a bit older and should know better expect way too much in the way of newness and excitement from the person they're with. I think not living together helps, as seeing the person you're with stays more fresh, and you also aren't so likely to feel a little flash of hate for them every time they drop something on the floor and leave it there.
via @vpostrel
Surprisingly, Yes, The Parenting Responsibility Belongs With The Parents
James Stafford writes -- very sensibly -- at Good Men Project:
My neighbor--correction, my neighbors, as this is a rapidly spreading cancer--have taken to sticking a bright orange sign near the middle of the street to remind us all that children are playing in our residential neighborhood. Let me say that once more for emphasis: children are playing in our residential neighborhood. These are people who insist upon a "may contain peanuts" warning on a bag of peanuts....But child safety cannot be purchased. The world is full of sharp edges, speedy cars, and peanuts. The best way to keep your kid safe is to teach him or her to properly assess danger and react accordingly. If you don't want your child to get hit chasing a soccer ball into the street, teach him not to chase a soccer ball into the street. Still not sure? Monitor her until she's responsible enough to monitor herself. That way your little darling won't chase any soccer ball into any street, regardless of the presence of a "children at play" sign. Teach your kids to be responsible for themselves, not dependent on a warning label. It's a big world out there full of unsupervised adventure, danger, scissors that must not be run with, and irons that should not be used on clothing one is wearing.
Slinkie
Slinkie around and find some linkies, and then post them here for our horror and amusement, not necessarily in that order.
Feminism And The Culture Of Shut Up
Robin Urback writes at the NatPo of Canada about the silencing of those who don't speak the approved feminist party line:
Professor Janice Fiamengo had planned to speak on men's issues and rape culture as part of a talk organized by the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE). The lecture, called "What's Equality Got To Do With It? Men's Issues and Feminism's Double Standards," was intended to dispel the notion of rape culture, according to Fiamengo, as well as discuss issues such as suicide by young men and custody rights after divorce. But some student activists decided Fiamengo's lecture was not appropriate, so they took it upon themselves to shut it down.The entire display is chronicled in a 50-minute YouTube video that shows protesters booing, yelling and blowing a vuvuzela throughout Fiamengo's attempted address. The lecture organizer tried to reason with protesters, but it didn't work. Campus security tried to intervene, with little success. Finally, the event moved to another room, but shortly after, the fire alarm went off.
This is thuggery. As I've written before, the answer to speech you deplore is more speech, not shutting speech down.
The notion that shutting down speech is the way to go is becoming more and more prevalent. Mark Steyn gives a number of recent examples, and then explains at the Spectator/UK:
What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: '"Shut up," he explained.'A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody's asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that's further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: 'What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.' Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.
...As it happens, the biggest 'safe space' on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there's nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme's famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.
As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die.
via @marcorandazza
The Government Is A Bully
The EEOC, writes Mary Kissel at the WSJ, sifts through tens of thousands of cases a year and must choose carefully which to pursue, yet they chose to spend taxpayer dollars to litigate on behalf of a potato chip thief:
In September 2008, Walgreens employee Josefina Hernandez claims she had a hypoglycemia attack, grabbed a bag of potato chips off a shelf and ate them to boost her blood sugar. The drug-store company has a strict policy against "grazing" (i.e., stealing) and so a supervisor fired Ms. Hernandez, an 18-year veteran of the company.Three years later, the EEOC sued Walgreens for discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act and asked for punitive damages.
Instead of settling (as it seems the government figures they'll do -- and as Starbucks and others have done when the government came after them), Walgreens fought back. Kissel writes:
While Ms. Hernandez's firing might sound harsh, it was perfectly legal.The ADA requires employees to request an accommodation for a medical condition, which Mrs. Hernandez never did. Nor does federal law sanction illegal activity--i.e., theft--under cover of a disability, as the Supreme Court made clear in 2003's Raytheon v. Hernandez. Walgreens "estimates that it loses $700 million annually to theft, approximately 50-60% of which is employee theft," according to court documents.
Unfortunately, a judge ruled against the store's motion for summary judgment last week. Whether Walgreens will continue to fight remains to be seen.
Commenter Grant Miner wrote in the WSJ:
There is one glaring discrepancy in the plaintiff's reason for taking the potato chips. As a 20+ year diabetic, I can tell you that if you suffer a hypoglycemia attack (low blood sugar), the most effective quick remedy is to drink some orange or apple juice. A candy bar is also good. Potato chips are almost worthless, so the case should have been thrown out on the grounds of it being a phony excuse.
More on the case from Robin E. Shea at EmploymentAndLaborInsider (other cases at the link):
Walgreen: The Case of the Pilfered Potato Products. (I wanted to entitle this one "All that and a bag of chips," but another blogger beat me to it.) This case has received more publicity than the others, but Walgreen has nonetheless declined to comment.According to the EEOC, a cashier who was diabetic grabbed a store merchandise bag of potato chips worth $1.39 and ate them to stave off low blood sugar. She paid for the chips "as soon as she was able to do so." (In other words, she didn't pay for them promptly, even though she was at the cash register.) She was fired, presumably for stealing store product. As we all know, diabetes is now a "disability" within the meaning of the ADAAA. Walgreen should have accommodated her medical-emergency need for a bag of potato chips.
I expect Walgreen's defense to run something like this: As a retail employer, we have to be vigilant about theft of store product, aka "inventory shrinkage," which causes us to lose $X billion a year. This employee knew that theft in any amount, no matter how small, was ground for immediate discharge, and it's in our employee handbook, and we include it in new-employee orientation, and we have her signature on documentation showing that she was instructed about this upon hire. We were not aware that she was diabetic, but if she had problems with low blood sugar, she should have brought snacks with her to work so that she could nibble when she needed to do so. If this was unexpected, she should have eaten our chips and then promptly paid for them, since she was already stationed at the cash register and had her purse right there under the counter. If her purse was in her locker, she should have immediately notified the manager on duty or a co-worker that she'd eaten the chips and would pay for them as soon as she could get to her purse. She also could have placed a handwritten "IOU" in the cash register. She did none of these things, and we caught her on video eating the chips. She paid for the chips only after we confronted her about it, and at that point it was too late.
So, who wins? Assuming Walgreen can prove what I've just said, my vote is for Walgreen. On the other hand, if it turns out that the cashier really had no way to get to her money and no way to notify someone else that she'd eaten merchandise without paying for it, perhaps the EEOC has a chance.
Persecution Of Christians Just Isn't Sexy Enough For Anyone To Care About It
Christians who refuse to convert to Islam are being brutally murdered as the world yawns.
Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the UN, writes in the WSJ:
In the rubble of Syrian cities like Aleppo and Damascus, Christians who refused to convert to Islam have been kidnapped, shot and beheaded by Islamist opposition fighters. In Egypt, mobs of Muslim Brotherhood members burn Coptic Christian churches in the same way they once obliterated Jewish synagogues. And in Iraq, terrorists deliberately target Christian worshippers. This past Christmas, 26 people were killed when a bomb ripped through a crowd of worshipers leaving a church in Baghdad's southern Dora neighborhood.Christians are losing their lives, liberties, businesses and their houses of worship across the Middle East. It is little wonder that native Christians have sought refuge in neighboring countries--yet in many cases they find themselves equally unwelcome. Over the past 10 years, nearly two-thirds of Iraq's 1.5 million Christians have been driven from their homes. Many settled in Syria before once again becoming victims of unrelenting persecution. Syria's Christian population has dropped from 30% in the 1920s to less than 10% today.
...The scene unfolding in the Middle East is ominously familiar. At the end of World War II, almost one million Jews lived in Arab lands. The creation of Israel in 1948 precipitated an invasion of five Arab armies. When they were unable to annihilate the newborn state militarily, Arab leaders launched a campaign of terror and expulsion that decimated their ancient Jewish communities. They succeeded in purging 800,000 Jews from their lands.
Today, Israel, which I represent at the United Nations, is the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population. Its Christian community has increased from 34,000 in 1948 to 140,000 today, in large measure because of the freedoms Christians are afforded.
From courtrooms to classrooms and from the chambers of Parliament to chambers of commerce, Israeli Christians are leaders in every field and discipline. Salim Joubran, a Christian Arab Israeli, has served as a Supreme Court justice since 2003 and Makram Khoury is one of the best-known actors in Israel and the youngest artist to win the Israel Prize, our highest civic honor.
Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest living in Israel, recently told me: "Human rights are not something to be taken for granted. Christians in much of the Middle East have been slaughtered and persecuted for their faith, but here in Israel they are protected."
Minkie
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Amazon Outlet
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Thanks to all who shop through my Amazon links. Helps keep the lights on here. Much-appreciated. Search here
Why Are People Choosing To Couple Up Without Getting Married?
Your thoughts and experiences?
And if you decided to marry the person you're with, why marry instead of just continuing as a couple without the state license and all?
And for those who married, did being married change your relationship?
For the record, per Science Daily about research from Bowling Green State University, the marriage rate in the U.S. is the lowest it's been in a century:
Since 1970, the marriage rate has declined by almost 60 percent. "Marriage is no longer compulsory," said Dr. Susan Brown, co-director of the NCFMR. "It's just one of an array of options. Increasingly, many couples choose to cohabit and still others prefer to remain single."Furthermore, a woman's average age at first marriage is the highest it's been in over a century, at nearly 27 years old. "The age at first marriage for women and men is at a historic highpoint and has been increasing at a steady pace," states Dr. Wendy Manning, co-director of the Center.
There has also been a dramatic increase in the proportion of women who are separated or divorced. In 1920, less than 1 percent of women held that distinction. Today, that number is 15 percent. "The divorce rate remains high in the U.S., and individuals today are less likely to remarry than they were in the past," reports Brown.
The marriage rate has declined for all racial and ethnic groups, but the greatest decline is among African Americans. Similarly, the education divide in marriage has grown. In the last 50 years there have been only modest changes in the percentage of women married among the college educated and the greatest declines among women without a high school diploma.
Something Oprah said about the "wife" role, from NecoleBitchie, quoting an Access Hollywood interview Oprah did with Shaun Robinson:
I'm gonna leave this earth as a never married woman, and that's really okay with me. Stedman would tell you Shaun, if you ever interviewed him, he would tell you [that] had we married, we would not be together.Really? Why is that?
Because he's a traditional man and this is a very untraditional relationship. I think it's acceptable as a relationship, but if I had the title 'wife,' hmmmm. I think there would be some other expectations of what a wife is and what a wife does. First of all you gotta come home sometimes.*laughs hysterically* I think it's time for this interview to end.
Is there something to this -- the "wife" role (or the "husband" role) -- changing the relationship?
TSA Expanding Its Civil Rights Violations -- Sans Accountability
Via PressTV, former intelligence analyst Scott Rickard said (annoying autoplay video at link):
The TSA is "unfortunately expanding its horrific violations on American civil rights as well as American constitutional rights," Scott Rickard told Press TV on Saturday."You have an organization that was born post-9/11 that has really become one the many Stasi-type organizations that operates outside of the Americans' civil liberties," Rickard said. "The freedom in the United States has been under attack for decades, but certainly for the last 20 years it's escalated."
Rickard was referring to the Stasi agency, the Ministry for State Security in East Germany, which has been described as one of the most repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed.
"There is no accountability and there certainly is no one regulating the TSA. They operate pretty much on their own as another security service much like the FBI... and it's just an expansion of the police state that we've seen occurring in the United States over the last half-century," he added.
Related from Techdirt's Tim Cushing, "The TSA Vs. The Fourth Amendment: You're Free To Board A Plane, But You're Not Free To Leave The Screening Area."
Extenuating circumstances, dating back to the 1970s, have turned an airplane ticket into a waiver of Fourth Amendment rights. While I appreciate the fact that restoring these rights would make it much easier for would-be attackers to probe for security holes, the same rationale makes anyone attempting (or asking) to leave the screening area instantly suspicious -- and subject to additional searches and screenings.This aligns very much with the general law enforcement view on "reasonable suspicion" in terms of checkpoints and roadblocks. Any driver who turns down a side road or performs a U-turn in order to avoid a police checkpoint is presumed to be guilty of... something and therefore should be pursued and stopped. At no point is this driver ever in "custody," and yet, he or she isn't free to leave the area, even when the driver is several cars back in the line. This would seem to violate the Fourth Amendment as well, but courts in many states have determined that simply avoiding a checkpoint is, in itself, enough reasonable suspicion to allow officers to pull over the vehicle.
Other courts have argued that a legal maneuver to avoid a checkpoint is not enough to indicate reasonable suspicion, but the reality here (as lawyers caution) is that drivers avoiding a DUI checkpoint or other police roadblock should expect to be pulled over and questioned. In the end, the only practical difference between these two rulings is the admissibility of evidence in court. At the point where the Fourth Amendment should matter, it doesn't. It's only after the fact.
Although they aren't told explicitly, simply entering the screening area is giving consent to the TSA to search you and your belongings. Should you wish to revoke this consent, you would need to make that decision before reaching the screening area. Practically speaking, this means finding another way to reach your destination. There's no way to assert your rights and still board a plane, even if you haven't broken any laws and aren't planning to.
Caselaw (and some common sense) supports the TSA's claim that travelers are not free to leave the screening area. But the TSA should be honest about it, rather than simply expect all travelers to be perfectly fine with waiving their rights for the "privilege" of boarding a plane. And the courts should be wary of issuing more caselaw supporting the expansion of "constitution-free zones" to anywhere the TSA (or other government agencies) might be operating.
Time Warner Screws Up My Phone Service And Has A Great Solution: I Do The Work To Fix It
My landline, which I need to do radio shows about my column and book, was really expensive, even after I'd brought down the cost.
After some consultation with people about Ooma, I ordered Time-Warner phone service -- on April 5. They told me the modem would be sent within five days.
Five days pass. No modem. And more no modem.
Tuesday, April 15, I get an email saying it was being sent out -- that day.
Meanwhile, on April 15, they also shut off my incoming calls. Gregg found this out -- there was not even a dial tone or a recording -- and called me on my cell four times before I noticed the message. (I have my cell set never to ring.)
Furious, I stopped my work on my next book and called Time-Warner. The rep, sitting in Colorado, said there's an easy solution: *I* can drive to Time-Warner Wednesday morning and go pick up a modem.
Yes, I can stop my work, leave my house, and drive somewhere. Take a couple hours out of my writing day and enjoy me some LA traffic.
Because they screwed up.
I asked for a supervisor.
Then, instead of doing my work, I waited on the phone for 20-plus minutes before a supervisor came on.
I told him the solution: They can get a technician out to my house with a modem at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, and have him set it up free of charge.
There's a problem with that, he said -- their dispatch center closed 30 minutes before.
This supervisor said he'd see IF he could make this happen for tomorrow. IF.
Because all the technicians are booked.
IF.
I have no phone service. This morning, when I woke up, there wasn't even an outgoing dial tone.
And they don't have anybody for trouble-shooting in cases like this?
Thanks, Time-Warner! Glad to see you're getting a headstart on the Comcast merger.
UPDATE ON GETTING THIS FIXED (excerpted from my full comment below, 12:09 pm, April 16):
I had the name and phone number of Time-Warner's field supervisor, this lady, Andrea Jefferson, who was really good. Customers are not supposed to have this number but I did. She's gone but the number still works and I got through to the new field supervisor. A technician will be here between 3pm and 4pm.
Because I had the magic number customers don't have.
Is it really supposed to work that way?
Time-Warner: "We really appreciate your business. Just not enough to unfuck you after we've fucked you (in any timely manner)."
"Your Bra Is Not Killing You"
I wish there were a scientific Snopes site where people could look up BS scares. Dr. Jen Gunter, thankfully, has blogged this particular one -- the myth that wearing a bra causes cancer:
A couple of anthropologists wrote a whole book about their incorrect theory back in 1995, Dressed to kill: The link between breast cancer and bras....[They] opine that bras restrict the flow of lymphatic fluid keeping "toxins" in the breast where they can cause mayhem (*note, the use of toxins in a quasi-medical sense is snake oil alert). They compare this phenomenon to swelling in the feet and ankles on long flights. Huh? The complete medical gibberish of this aside if your breasts are swollen when you remove your bra at the end of the day just like your feet on a transatlantic flight then you are wearing a bra about 4 sizes too small. It might hurt, but it's still not going to give you cancer. This statement also leads me to believe that the woman of this duo must never have actually worn a bra or at least one that fit. I have never, ever heard a woman say, "This bra has made my breasts swell to a disproportionate size." In fact, if there were a bra that could defy the laws of physics and biology and once removed leave the breast tissue larger for a period of time it might be popular.
...Apparently, the authors of the lethal bra book quote a 1991 Harvard study that says bras cause cancer! That sounds legit. The study was published in the European Journal of Cancer in 1991 by Hsieh, Breast size, handedness, and breast cancer risk. The only problem? The study does not say that bras cause cancer, but that larger breasts are a risk factor:
"Premenopausal women who do not wear bras had half the risk of breast cancer compared with bra users (P about 0.09), possibly because they are thinner and likely to have smaller breasts. Among bra users, larger cup size was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer (P about 0.026), although the association was found only among postmenopausal women and was accounted for, in part, by obesity. These data suggest that bra cup size (and conceivably mammary gland size) may be a risk factor for breast cancer."
Larger breasts have a higher risk of cancer not because larger breasted women are more likely to wear bras or underwires, but because more breast tissue means more cells to potentially go haywire and because obesity is a risk factor for breast cancer (heavier women tender to have larger breasts).
There are no studies or giving credence to the biological implausible theory that wearing a bra causes breast cancer. If tight clothing were carcinogenic then breast cancer would be decreasing because in days gone by women were trussed up and strapped down to the Dickens in corsets. And why would this phenomenon be linked with bras alone? What about the dangers of shoes and skinny jeans?
via @sciencegoddess
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Why Does Everything Need To Be Denuded Of "Gender"?
I clicked on a tweet about a Passover story, leading me to a piece at Slate by Miriam Krule on how the "wicked son" in the Passover Seder is "actually the best of the four children in the Haggadah" (the booklet read at Passover).
Well, it drew me in until I got to this passage below where, all of a sudden, the son the author has been talking about is transformed into a "her" -- for no reason that makes any sense in the piece. (See my italics below):
I prefer to refer to the wicked son as the challenging child, a more alliterative, gender-neutral, and helpful way of looking at this character. As for her question, it sounds less evil to me than sensible. The idea of searching for meaning in practices, and understanding their motivations, is a natural one. Challenging the reasons behind tradition, and the logic underlying the holiday's restrictions, can only lead to greater understanding and more honest practice. Whereas the smart son merely asks for, and receives, the law, the wicked son asks for the reasoning underlying those laws.
Many people in history were men. Changing the way they are described is merely confusing and silly, same as it is to try to put female artists and writers on the same level as men just to fill out the chick side of the equation.
Truly feeling equal means that you can be honest about who the greats were without feeling a need to elevate those with vaginas to feel better about yourself and being a woman.
Stop And Flirt?
Or, perhaps, stop and butthurt.
A woman on a morning walk in Whitehouse, Texas got thrown down and arrested for not being willing to answer the questions of a motorcycle cop. Nina Harrelson writes on CBS19.TV:
She says the cop was acting suspicious and she felt threatened, but police officials say she handled it the wrong way.Melissa Bonnette says she was on her usual morning walk around 9:45 a.m. Friday when a man in uniform on a motorcycle pulled up next to her, asking if she lived in the area and if he could speak to her.
"I thought that maybe he was flirting," she said. "I just thought it was odd, I thought it was odd. I wasn't really sure but I felt uncomfortable because there wasn't anyone around."
She says she was worried he might not even a real cop, so she refused to stop and began jogging away from him.
"He just crept along beside me on his motorcycle and he started saying, 'Hey ma'am! I want to talk to you. Hey stop, ma'am! I want to talk to you.' Then my anxiety rose even higher," she said.
"The motorcycle has a patch on both sides of the gas tank. It's black and white and says 'Whitehouse Police,' and has red and blue lights on it," Whitehouse Police Chief Craig Shelton said. "So you have to take it for what it is. Do you think he's a Whitehouse police officer? Why would you think he's someone impersonating a police officer?"
That's when Bonnette says he got off his bike, chased her down, tackled her and threw her in handcuffs.
"I just was crying and I was saying 'Please sir, please sir. Why are you doing this?' It was like I was in a nightmare. I hadn't done anything wrong," she said.
"Normally if a police officer pulls up, in my opinion, it's awful odd for somebody just to take off and not want to speak to the police officer," Shelton said. "And he had a lawful reason to be there and to stop her."
That reason, Shelton says, is that Bonnette was walking on the wrong side of the road.
"By law, you have to be to the far left facing oncoming traffic," he said.
Okay, why not tell her that instead of asking her a bunch of questions? And why not tell her she was guilty of this maaaajor crime instead?
A commenter at the site, TSmith1953 writes:
Well I just watched the video too. Looked to me like the cop wanted to flirt and got his feelings hurt when she wasn't impressed / intimidated by him. It's a very small alleyway with no traffic other than the motorcycle. The wrong side of the road bit was just an excuse. In fact, the cop was riding his motorcycle on the wrong side of the road too, so you tell me which is worse?!
via ifeminists
The IRS Is Letting Itself Be Robbed, Ho-Hum
A high-placed cop friend has told me that crime is trending electronic -- and will continue to go in that direction.
Dismayingly (but not surprisingly) the IRS is being scammed right and left via "stolen identity refund fraud," and Justin Gelfand, a former federal prosecutor, writes in the WSJ:
If the problem continues unabated, Treasury estimates the IRS will lose $21 billion in fraudulent tax refunds over the next five years. That's more than twice the Environmental Protection Agency's annual budget....Citizens must ask the IRS why it is so easy to steal money in this way, and why the IRS is losing so much money to this crime alone.
In some ways, the IRS is like a bank that is robbed after leaving the doors unlocked for the night with a large sign that says, "Money Inside!"--a victim, yes, but the victim of a crime that can easily be avoided.
While the IRS claims otherwise, the solution isn't particularly complex: stop wire-transferring multiple tax refunds onto the same prepaid debit card; stop mailing hundreds of tax-refund checks to the same mailbox; stop accepting thousands of tax returns from the same IP address without looking into it; and stop paying tax refunds without actually verifying the accuracy of the information with existing IRS records.
Ultimately, the law should be enforced. But this isn't a problem the government can prosecute its way out of. Instead of just demanding more prosecutions, the public should demand that the IRS increase its efforts to detect fraud before paying billions of dollars in fraudulent tax refunds. That way, victims won't have to wait months for the IRS to pay their legitimate tax refunds, Treasury won't lose billions of dollars to criminals, and the government can tackle this problem without the risk of sending innocent people to prison.
And people really believe the repurposed mall food court workers in TSA suits at the airport are really stopping terrorism?
Plenty Of Democrats Drink Koch, Too
Daniel Doherty blogs at TownHall.com that plenty of prominent Democrats have taken money from Koch Industries.
The list is from Jeff Dunetz at TruthRevolt, who blogs:
During the past five congressional campaigns (2006-14) Koch money went to President Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Mark Pryor, Chuck Schumer and other members of Congress.The chart below represents direct donations to Democratic Party candidates from Koch Industries employees since 2006 according to OpenSecrets.org (2014 donations are based on FEC numbers through March 10) Retired Democratic Party members of Congress received another $291,000 but were not included in the chart.
Many of Harry Reid's senior senators are on the chart below:
The full list is here, at OpenSecrets.
Linkie
Here.
The Difference Between Real Life And The Movies
A tweet:
@LAScanner
WEST LA: Gent is in his cups, Santa Monica Bl. near Sepulveda. "Dancing in the street." LAPD enrte.
My tweetback:
@amyalkon
@LAScanner In the movies, this calls for a camera move, not an arrest.
Raising A Moral Child
Wharton School's Dr. Adam M. Grant writes in The New York Times that character -- and praising character -- counts:
Many parents believe it's important to compliment the behavior, not the child -- that way, the child learns to repeat the behavior. Indeed, I know one couple who are careful to say, "That was such a helpful thing to do," instead of, "You're a helpful person."But is that the right approach? In a clever experiment, the researchers Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler set out to investigate what happens when we commend generous behavior versus generous character. After 7- and 8-year-olds won marbles and donated some to poor children, the experimenter remarked, "Gee, you shared quite a bit."
The researchers randomly assigned the children to receive different types of praise. For some of the children, they praised the action: "It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do." For others, they praised the character behind the action: "I guess you're the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person."
A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person. This dovetails with new research led by the psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who finds that for moral behaviors, nouns work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-year-olds to help with a task, rather than inviting them "to help," it was 22 to 29 percent more effective to encourage them to "be a helper." Cheating was cut in half when instead of, "Please don't cheat," participants were told, "Please don't be a cheater." When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.
Grant adds:
Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.
Adults setting norms of generosity (and not preaching them) seems particularly important in getting children to follow their lead. The children who were most generous in another experiment were those who watched a teacher be giving but without the teacher talking about it.
Listen to Grant on my radio show here, and buy his inspiring and science-based book, just out in paperback: Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.
Expect A Lot Of Kids And Maybe They'll Live Up To It
(Warning: instaplay video at the link -- but one that's good to watch.)
A 13-year-old girl, Sicily Kolbeck, built her own little house, reports Keith Whitney at 11Alive/Atlanta:
The little house in Marietta, all 128 square feet of it, is called La Petite Maison. It started out as a homework assignment from her teacher, who's also her mom."We say 'no' a lot in education to kids, and we tell them what to do and how to be and put them in a box," Suzannah Kolbeck said. "It's funny that this is a box; it's kind of ironic. But I never thought to say 'no.' She asked if she could do it and I said yes."
...The quality of the tiny [home] is exceptional. Sicily's mother said even though nobody builds a home alone, she and Sicily did about 80-percent of it. They got help with advice and materials from friends and businesses like their local Home Depot and Dr. Roof.
Suzannah Kolbeck runs a very small private school called HoneyFern. She admits the project was ambitious, but said it was also what they needed in the wake of the tragedy.
"Kids are amazingly capable and can do anything they want to do with guidance and help," she said. "That was one part of it. The other part was it was really a reason to get up in the morning. It's kind of silly and cliché, but it's true. You know, put my feet on the floor and say well 'Siding's got to be done today." There was always something to do. Having such a life changing event at such a young age and having the whole map of your life be erased, it's sort of starting over. So that helped a lot."
via @AnnoCNN
Charlie Rangel's War
It's a war against being treated like all the rest of us, like by being expected to pay his rent.
Rangel stiffed New York taxpayers out of at least $87K, reports the New York Post, when he stopped paying the rent for his Harlem district office.
Michael Gartland reports that Rangel blamed the sequester (after his staffers claimed something about not being able to find the signed lease):
Rangel paid $7,253 in monthly rent on the 125th Street office he has rented since 2000, expense reports from 2012 show. But the payments stopped for all of 2013.Incredibly, instead of demanding payment of the back rent and late fees from its deadbeat legislative tenant, the state cut him a huge rent break.
The state says it allowed Rangel in March 2013 to enter into a new sweetheart deal in which he could postpone paying six months of rent. That "abatement" money has still not been paid, nor has the other six months of missed rent from 2013, a OGS official said.
The state comptroller approved a $101,000 lease between Rangel and OGS on Dec. 26, 2013, retroactively covering the period back to April 2013 and future months through December 2014, records show. The 21-month deal resulted in a deeply reduced rent of $4,809 a month.
Linkie
Postie.
Advice Goddess Radio, Tonite, 7-8pm PT, 10-11pm ET: "Dilbert" Cartoonist Scott Adams On How To Fail Your Way To Success
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
*Tonight's show is a "Best Of" replay, because I'll be off interviewing Austin Kleon at the LA Times Festival of Books.
"Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams, obviously, is not a scientist. But he thinks and views his experiences like a scientist and his wisdom is well-supported and worth hearing.
For example, Adams found that it isn't goals that are the key to success, but what he calls "systems."
And Adams advises, based on his own steady stream of failures in business, that "Everything you want in life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out."
As a cartoonist, he thinks of himself as a "professional simplifier." That's what he does in his just-published book, How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and simplifying for all of us what it takes to succeed in business and be happy in life is what he'll be doing on tonight's not-to-be-missed show.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/14/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-adams-on-how-to-fail-your-way-to-success
Don't miss last week's show with psychologist and researcher Dr. Adam Alter.
We aren't the independent thinkers we like to believe ourselves to be.
Alter shows in his fascinating book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave
On this show, he lays out the ways we are influenced, sometimes causing substantial changes in our behavior that make the difference between success and failure in our endeavors. Knowing these influences is the best way to avoid being swept away by them, so don't miss this show.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/07/dr-adam-alter-the-hidden-influences-shaping-our-thoughts-beliefs-actions
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.)
My Child Has Four Legs And A Tail
Here she is helping me with my book proofs.
Cheryl K. Chumley writes in The Washington Times that the CDC finds women shunning babies for little lapdogs:
Young women just aren't that crazy about babies any more, shunning the diaper changes and midnight feedings for dubbed-in family members that don't demand as much care: dogs. And not just any type dog -- specifically, those that weigh less than 25 pounds."I'd rather have a dog over a kid," said Sara Foster, 30, the proud owner of a French bulldog named Maddie, the New York Post reported. "It's just less work and, honestly, I have more time to go out. You ... don't have to get a baby sitter."
Her view is being repeated across the nation by women in the 15-to-29-years-old group, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. New statistics show that big drops in the numbers of babies born to women in this age group coincide with big increases in the numbers of dogs owned by females around the same age range, the business site Quartz reported.
The truth is, some women just have a hunger to have babies. I'm not one of those women. It's allowed to spend all of my time writing. I'm just beginning my next book, which terrifies and excites the hell out of me.
I see this as clickbaiting -- a made-up epidemic that is probably mainly about a few urban women, some of whom may feel differently in time. It's also probably about women -- probably wisely -- waiting to have children until they have something they can do for a living under their belt. Marriages don't always last. To be the secretary or retail clerk who suddenly needs to support children isn't a good situation.
And finally, having a dog makes me a better person -- more compassionate and patient. Having a smaller dog means the poops are the size of Tootsie Rolls, not rollaboards. Having a hairless dog means no fleas and not much to bathe or brush. Having Aida, specifically, is having joy on four little furnished paws. (Her "furnishings" are what the furry bits on a Chinese Crested are called.)
via @mpetrie98
Gun-Toting Woman Goes Out To Rescue A Man Beaten By A Mob
Steve Utah, a white man, accidentally clipped a kid with his truck when the boy, 10, ran out into the street. A mob of black people set upon him and beat him. A gun-toting retired nurse, Deborah Hughes, who is black, grabbed her gun and ran out to protect the man.
Deborah Hastings reports in the New York Daily News:
She got her gun, she ran into the street, and she threw herself on top of a white man being beaten by a mob of black men."He was a man. He wasn't white. He was a man. And I was ready to shoot anybody who hit that man again," retired nurse Deborah Hughes told FOX2 News in Detroit.
Nine days after he was beaten by the mob, Utash awoke from a coma, but is not back to normal. The boy whom he hit suffered a minor leg injury.
Charlie LeDuff reports for Fox Detroit:
Fox 2 News Headlines
In double standards news: Note that Al Sharpton is nowhere to be seen and nobody's calling this a "hate crime."
via @KarenDeCoster
Dinkie
Hershey's minilinks.
The Emperor's New Blazer
You've got to love golf (and I don't mean as a sport). One of its high honors is a hideous green blazer fit for a 1970s Sears appliance department manager.
Fruitanthropy
Love this -- an LA organization, foodforward.org, will come pick the fruit off your trees to feed the hungry. Fruit donation line (to ask them to come pick your tree or trees): 818.530.4125
Related: Wharton School's Dr. Adam Grant's wonderful book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
Also related, my book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," which you can pre-order at Amazon, and which includes ways we can improve our own lives by making the world a better, kinder place.
What Price Should We Put On Human Life?
Because, in a lot of cases, at some point, it comes down to dollars and cents. How much should we all pay to keep a person alive? Is there a difference price list if you're 90? If you're a Nobel laureate?
Princeton econ prof Uwe E. Reinhardt was taken to task by members of congress for a post on his New York Times blog. He had called the idea that human life is priceless "both romantic and silly."
He blogs that he was asked about that view by Rep. Phil Gingrey, M.D., a Georgia Republican. In Gingrey's words:
Dr. Reinhardt, do you believe that we, as individuals, in America should have the ability to value our own lives, or is this something we should ask the government to do for us, i.e., ration that care when you get to be 90 years old and you need a hip replacement, do you just let them fall and break the hip and die of pneumonia? Or do they get the opportunity, if they value that, to get that hip replaced?
Reinhardt continues:
In their public appearances, on the campaign trail or at hearings, members of Congress may find it useful to pretend that they deem human life priceless. It can explain, for example, why Congress refuses to allow considerations of costs - what is called "cost-effectiveness analysis" -- to be pursued by the federally funded Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute that was authorized by Congress in 2010.But as a legislative body, Congress routinely, albeit implicitly, puts finite prices on human lives in the trade-offs members make during budget votes. They may forbid cost-effectiveness analysis for coverage decisions under Medicare, but they implicitly price out human life as finite at the margins of their budget allocations - for example, in budget cuts on health programs for the poor.
Congress also implicitly puts prices on human life when it foists upon the Pentagon expensive weapons systems of dubious effectiveness that please cash-carrying lobbyists, retired generals now fronting for military contractors and constituents in districts where the weapons systems are manufactured.
In giving in to those entreaties, however, Congress may leave the Pentagon to send America's forces into battle without adequate body armor or properly armored vehicles and even without sufficient troops to guard ammunition dumps left behind by the defeated enemy - literally as free weapons supermarkets for insurgents. All of this happened in Iraq.
What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Would Have Said At Brandeis
A civil liberties- and free-speech celebrating excerpt from the talk she was not allowed to give, posted in the WSJ:
Two decades ago, not even the bleakest pessimist would have anticipated all that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that women's basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.Today, however, I am going to predict a better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.
When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has been a revolution full of disappointments. But I believe it has created an opportunity for traditional forms of authority--including patriarchal authority--to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications for the oppression of women to be questioned.
Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled, we in the West must provide the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions.
One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I'm used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.
I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women's and girls' basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.
The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.
So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy--punishable by death--to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.
Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.
The motto of Brandeis University is "Truth even unto its innermost parts." That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.
Rilke
Linkers To A Young Poet.
Horrible Miscarriage Of Justice: Man Jailed For 20 Years On False Sexual Abuse Charges
Clyde Ray Spencer spent 20 years of his life in jail for a crime he did not commit -- the sexual abuse of his children that his ex-wife claimed was going on. He was just awarded $9 million by a jury in federal court in Tacoma, Washington, for the disgusting denial of his civil rights by police officers and prosecutors there.
Via Lenona, Robert Franklin, Esq., posts at NationalParentsOrganization:
In 1985, Spencer was an honorable man and father serving Tacoma as a police officer. He had two children, Matt, 9 and Katie, 5, and a stepson who was four. His wife was having an extramarital affair with a police sergeant, Michael Davidson, and decided to divorce Spencer. Not long after their divorce was final, she went to Davidson claiming Spencer was sexually abusing the children.Davidson, eager to please his paramour, went right to work. He put Detective Sharon Krause on the case and soon she had the children on videotape claiming their dad was a brutal serial pedophile. Faced with that evidence, Spencer entered an "Alford" plea meaning that he maintained his innocence but admitted that a jury could find him guilty. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus 14 years and began serving his time.
But all was not right with the case against him. Eventually he found a lawyer who was willing to do the hard work of overturning a plea entered into by a man considered the worst sort of monster. What that investigation turned up was the entire fabrication of a case by police and prosecutors. Here are a few of the findings of the civil jury in federal court this past February.
•Spencer's wife, who called policed about the abuse claims, was secretly having an affair with Sgt. Davidson, who led the investigation of Spencer. This was not revealed until after Spencer was in prison.
•Spencer's natural children Matt Spencer and Katie Tetz testified that they were never abused.
•The stepson maintained that we was abused. However, he has a long criminal record for crimes including burglary and forgery. The authorities reduced his sentence in exchange for his testimony against Spencer.
•The detectives concealed medical exams showing that Spencer's son and daughter were not abused.
•Attorney Zellner charged that Det. Krause was motivated by advancing her career, and that after she started working in the field the conviction rate in child abuse cases rose by 800%. She had been a hotel clerk and met police officers who came to the hotel bar. She joined the Clark County Sheriff's Department and became a detective investigating child sex abuse, even though she had no training in the subject area.
Even more of these points at the link.
And then there's this:
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there's the issue that's been almost entirely overlooked. The simple fact is that a mother - Spencer's ex - wanted a father - Spencer - out of his children's life, and with essentially no effort on her part, the legal system accommodated her wishes. She complained to Davidson and then sat back and watched the wheels of the criminal justice system crush an innocent man.
Beyond the imprisonment -- which is, of course, a huge thing -- this man and his children were denied a relationship for most of their childhood. And imagine what this can do to a kid -- being used for adult machinations in this way, to the point that they ended up sending their own father to jail.
Something I haven't seen in stories I've looked up: What happens to the ex-wife who accused him?
I've suggested that those who make false accusations -- those that are provably false beyond a reasonable doubt (same as the standard for the accused) -- serve the same prison time the accused would have.
Your thoughts?
Who Really Pays For Medicare? Your Barista And The Rest Of The Young
Catherine Rampell writes at the WaPo that the average worker who turned 65 in 2010 will pretty much break even on Social Security, while earlier generations really made out. ("Members of an average one-earner couple who turned 65 in 1990 receive twice as much in Social Security benefits as they paid in taxes.")
Medicare, on the other hand, is pretty much a steal no matter when you turned 65.For Americans who turned 65 in 2010, Medicare benefits will typically amount to two to six times what beneficiaries had paid into the system, depending on their marital and work histories. For example, an average-wage, two-income couple who turned 65 in 2010 paid today's equivalent of $123,000 into the Medicare system during their working years. They will receive about $385,000 in Medicare benefits over their decades of dotage, even after subtracting out the cost of premiums. For a similar couple that retired 20 years earlier, the comparable numbers were $43,000 paid in vs. $227,000 received. A decent return, no?
It boils down to this: Despite all the "we already paid for it" rhetoric popular among seniors, seniors did not pre-pay for their entitlements. If anything, they paid for their parents' entitlements, which were more modest than the benefits today's retirees receive.
So who's making up the difference between what seniors paid yesterday and what they receive today? "Spoiled millennial [expletives]" like me, as well as Gen-Xers and both groups' children. And absent a major influx of working-age immigrants, the burden per worker stands to grow enormously in the coming years. That's because the bloated baby-boomer cohort is aging into retirement, Americans are living longer and health-care costs per person are rising.
Now, the fact that seniors didn't pay in full for their entitlements doesn't necessarily mean anyone should take those entitlements away. There are lots of social safety-net programs that are, by design, subsidized by the entire U.S. tax base, not just by direct beneficiaries. That's the whole point of transfer programs. I am glad that my taxes pay for food stamps, disability insurance, low-income housing and Head Start -- and I will count myself lucky if I'm never on the receiving end of that safety-net spending.
But as a society, we must decide exactly how much we're willing to subsidize the growing ranks of the elderly. Republicans argue that we should control entitlement spending because (I'm paraphrasing here) deficits are evil. They should be joined by Democrats, but for a different reason: Money for other worthy, traditionally liberal causes -- education, infrastructure, children, the deeply poor -- is being gobbled up by increasingly expensive and unfunded promises to the old.
Lumpy
The Eighth Dwarf. The one who collected links and wild mushrooms.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Brandeis University's Withdrawal Of Their Offer To Give Her An Honorary Degree
The WSJ had this in their Notable & Quotable section:
From a statement issued Wednesday by writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali the day after Brandeis University withdrew its offer of an honorary degree:"Yesterday Brandeis University decided to withdraw an honorary degree they were to confer upon me next month during their Commencement exercises. I wish to dissociate myself from the university's statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me--just a few hours before issuing a public statement--to say that such a decision had been made.
When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution's distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called 'honor killings,' and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.
What did surprise me was the behavior of Brandeis. Having spent many months planning for me to speak to its students at Commencement, the university yesterday announced that it could not "overlook certain of my past statements," which it had not previously been aware of. Yet my critics have long specialized in selective quotation--lines from interviews taken out of context--designed to misrepresent me and my work. It is scarcely credible that Brandeis did not know this when they initially offered me the degree.
What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles. The "spirit of free expression" referred to in the Brandeis statement has been stifled here, as my critics have achieved their objective of preventing me from addressing the graduating Class of 2014. Neither Brandeis nor my critics knew or even inquired as to what I might say. They simply wanted me to be silenced. I regret that very much.
Not content with a public disavowal, Brandeis has invited me "to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues." Sadly, in words and deeds, the university has already spoken its piece. I have no wish to "engage" in such one-sided dialogue. I can only wish the Class of 2014 the best of luck--and hope that they will go forth to be better advocates for free expression and free thought than their alma mater.
I take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported me and my work on behalf of oppressed women and girls everywhere."
Robert Spencer offers more detail at FrontPageMag, and adds this:
The cancellation of Hirsi Ali at Brandeis demonstrates yet again that there is no one who opposes jihad terror who is acceptable to CAIR and its allies. A report on Islamophobia in the U.S. that CAIR produced in conjunction with the Center for Race & Gender at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 stated:"It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes. Equally, it is not Islamophobic to denounce crimes committed by individual Muslims or those claiming Islam as a motivation for their actions. 'A critical study of Islam or Muslims is not Islamophobic,' former CAIR Research Director Mohamed Nimer wrote in 2007. 'Likewise, a disapproving analysis of American history and government is not anti-American... One can disagree with Islam or with what some Muslims do without having to be hateful.'"These were empty words. The report offered no examples of what it would consider to be acceptable and legitimate criticism of Islam and jihad, and neither CAIR nor the University of California Center for Race & Gender have ever done so anywhere else.
Here, from thereligionofpeace.com -- "A woman's place" under Islam -- are some of the things Hirsi Ali opposes:
To this day, it is absolutely forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man, even though men are not under the same restriction as to their choice of marriage partners. This is is a consequence of the low status of a wife against that of her husband. A Muslim is not allowed to be subordinate to a non-Muslim, and a wife must be subordinate to her husband.
In her lifetime, a Muslim woman is never to be without the guardianship of a man, from her father to her husband to the male members of her family (in the event that she is widowed or divorced).
Many contemporary Muslims realize that traditional Islamic practice is painfully out of step with modern tastes. Thus have ensued very imaginative efforts to reinterpret the long held traditions of their religion, exaggerating both the negative treatment of Arab women prior to Muhammad and the reforms that he is said to have brought about.
Muhammad's blunt words on marriage are what they are. On top of this, he forbade women from traveling alone. Nor are they allowed to be alone with a non-relative male. Women must cover themselves, and, when there is sexual sin, they nearly always bear the responsibility of guilt, as it is assumed that they are under a higher standard of conduct.
Stonings, honor killings, floggings and even the mutilation of female genitalia are sporadically employed in the Muslim world to keep women in their place.
According to a recent fatwa on the Muslim Matters website, "a Muslim woman should keep her home as the focus of her attention and activities, and make it the base of her affairs." Women are allowed to leave the house under certain conditions, such as medical emergency and religious observance. Islam also permits them to get a job "if there is no mahrum man providing for them", but it should be limited to certain occupations that only involve other women, such as catering, teaching, fashion, beautician or a variety of domestic positions.
Yes, anyone opposed to such things must be quite the hater.
In other news, Iraq is poised to legalize marriage for girls as young as 9. (Boy, did we ever "liberate" 'em in Iraq.)
You Don't Get To Stop The Music Because You've Been Told To Be Offended
It's become easier than ever to stop that nasty free speech. Or to shut down music that other people want to hear.
"Trigger warning" is now being used as a form of power -- a way to tell other people they must bend to your will and shut up. Or shut off the music that other people want to hear.
Much of popular music has lyrics like "I know you want it." Are we really going to call all of it off-limits or start boycotts of any venue that plays it?
Jenny Surane writes at the Daily Tarheel:
What started with a spat between a UNC student and a disc jockey at a bar Saturday night ended with a boycott and a formal apology from the pub.When a DJ at Fitzgerald's Irish Pub played "Blurred Lines," Liz Hawryluk stepped into the DJ box to ask him to stop.
Critics say the song promotes rape culture with lyrics like "I know you want it."
Hawryluk said she was then asked to leave the bar completely.
But Lauren Shoaf, a spokeswoman for Fitzgerald's, said it was a misunderstanding, and the UNC senior was only asked to leave the DJ's area, not the bar.
"Fundamentally, all I was aiming to do is to create a safe space in the Carolina community," Hawryluk said. "In a lot of ways, violent or graphic images that allude to sexual violence are triggers."
She took her mini-war to Facebook, and fellow free-speech condemners went after the pub.
A couple of comments from the Daily Tarheel page:
Bobby Anstatt
I feel that these students, while well intentioned, really misguided their frustrations. I understand the objection that people have with Blurred Lines, but that shouldn't give students the license to demonize the establishment and post disparaging things on their websites in an attempt to hurt their business. They were playing a hugely popular song to entertain their patrons, just like every other bar on Franklin; they were trying to run a successful business, not promote or propagate sexual assault. Perhaps it would have been a bit more prudent to work with Fitzgerald's to make changes, rather than attack their livelihood. The level of activism on our campus is amazing and something that we, as Tarheels, should all take pride in- but lets direct our anger at those who deserve it, not Fitzgerald's.Richard Climer
This is such an aggressive conception of "safe space." You declare someone else's business a safe space, and then act like you have the right to make them play by your rules. For people that also rail against imperialism all the time, they seem pretty happy to be imperialists when it suits them.
Turns out the DJ is now out of a job, too. And Fitzgerald's has apologized to Hawryluk and her posse and pledged that the song will never be played there again.
The lyrics to Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" are here and, by the way, involve a woman grabbing at a man. Thicke sings:
The way you grab me Must wanna get nasty Go ahead, get at me...
Let's get real. Until the term "trigger warnings" came up, has anyone ever heard of or experienced victims of sexual assault being deeply disturbed by the lyrics of popular music? (I can understand that a victim would be deeply upset if they heard a song that played while they were being raped.)
Also, there's a whole lot of music that's going to have to be shelved. I Googled "I know you want it" (with "-Thicke" to try to get rid of all the Robin Thicke mentions) and came up with 81,300,000 results, including Christina Aguilera's "Your Body."
What will become acceptable to play at music venues, the collected works of Enya?
via @CHSommers
Don't Turn Left
This isn't an argument against becoming a Democrat; it's an argument against left turns in your car. Matt McMarland writes in the WaPo that left turns are generally unsafe and inefficient:
Please remember that quote as I propose what will appear outlandish -- a ban on left turns on heavily-trafficked roads. Making left-hand turns is as American as apple pie. But remember, we once accepted slavery and the beating of wives and children. There's no doubt we're doing things today that future generations will find abhorrent. Here's why turning left on crowded streets is one of them:Left turns are unsafe for everyone.
Federal data have shown that 53.1 percent of crossing-path crashes involve left turns, but only 5.7 percent involve right turns. That's almost 10 times as many crashes involving left turns as right. A study by New York City's transportation planners concluded that left-hand turns were three times as likely to cause a deadly crash involving a pedestrian as right-hand turns. And 36 percent of fatal accidents involving a motorcycle involve a left-hand turn in front of a motorcycle, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association.
"Left turns create some concerns when it comes to generating potential for congestion, back-up traffic flow, safety, accident situations," said Phil Caruso, the deputy executive director for technical programs at the Institute of Transportation Engineers. "So if you can eliminate left turns, especially concurrent left turns, that's a positive."We could save lives by restricting left turns, but we're unwilling to sacrifice what we see as a needed convenience. Even if you discount the safety concerns, the efficiency of turning left is questionable.
I'm not for banning left turns but I agree with him on the efficiency point, and try to avoid making them because of that. (You tend to get stuck in a line of cars because self-absorbed dipshits don't move up so anybody else can turn along with them.)
The "Plight" Of The Palestinians In Israel
If you look to how the Druze are treated in Israel, it becomes obvious: the "plight" of the Palestinians is self-caused -- by how they don't want to live side-by-side with the Israelis; they want them dead and gone.
Norman Podhoretz writes in the WSJ:
Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.Well, to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population, are now facing imminent death by starvation.
And the Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason that there were none to be found.
Nor did anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.
Speaking of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a base for firing rockets into Israel.
The main reason he says the Palestinians don't deserve any sympathy?
It is that ever since the day of Israel's birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet--here we go topsy-turvy again--for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself "anti-Zionism" but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
A particularly cuddly hadith:
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177: Narrated Abu Huraira:Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."
From thereligionofpeace.com:
The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.
The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today's Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book's call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.
Slunk
The linkwalk of shame.
Go Drop Free Speech Turds On A Free Speech-Squashing College's Facebook Page
I blogged about this here -- "Disgusting: Asnuntuck Community College Punishes Student's Speech, Ignores Exculpatory Video."
Tim Cushing now has a great post up about it at Techdirt, where he notes that the college is erasing critical comments on their Facebook page.
Well, Iet's not let them get idle!
For an example of what you can do, here's my post on Asnuntuck Community College's Facebook page. Scroll down from the top of their Facebook page to leave a "review" or comment on one.
Obama Girl Not Liking How It All Worked Out
Also, she's hot.
via @lewrockwell
In A Blind Test, World-Class Violinists Preferred The New Violins To The Old Ones
It's the Coke vs. Pepsi test of the classical music world. Seth Borenstein writes at phys.org:
Ten world-class soloists put costly Stradivarius violins and new, cheaper ones to a blind scientific test. The results may seem off-key to musicians and collectors, but the new instruments won handily.When the lights were dimmed and the musicians donned dark glasses, the soloists' top choice out of a dozen old and new violins tested was by far a new one. So was the second choice, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Of the six old violins tested, five were by made by the famous Stradivari family in the 17th and 18th centuries. The newer violins were about 100 times cheaper, said study co-author Joseph Curtin, a Michigan violin maker. But the Strads and other older Italian violins have long been considered superior, even almost magical.
...Canadian soloist Susanne Hou has been playing a rare $6 million 269-year-old Guarneri del Gesu violin and knows what she likes and what she doesn't. During the testing, some of the violins she played for only a few and then held the instrument out at arm's length in noticeable distaste. But, like others, she was drawn to a certain unidentified violin. It was new.
"Whatever this is I would like to buy it," she said in video shot during the September 2012 experiment.
Schmidt, who normally plays a new violin with a little more down-to-Earth price tag of $30,000, liked a different new one, calling it extraordinary in a phone interview: "I said kiddingly to them I will write you a check for this fiddle right now."
Curtin said the researchers won't ever reveal which instruments were used to prevent conflict of interests or appear like a marketing campaign.
Study is here.
"Soloist evaluations of six Old Italian and six new violins," by Claudia Fritz et al. PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1323367111
Related: My friend Max Ferguson's beautiful painting of a violin repair shop.
Adventure Sports: Who Should Pay If The Adventurers Get In Trouble?
Lois Kazakoff tweet (via @debrajsaunders):
@lkazakoff
Should the parents of a sick baby rescued from a sailboat by Navy, Coast Guard and Air National Guard have to pay for the rescue? #sickbaby
The story, by Lyndsay Winkley at UTSanDiego:
The Coast Guard, a Navy warship and four Air National Guard parachuters helped rescue a San Diego couple with a sick baby and another young daughter from a stalled sailboat 900 miles off the coast of Mexico Sunday.One-year-old Lyra was in stable condition when she, her 3-year-old sister, Cora, and parents Charlotte and Eric Kaufman were brought aboard the USS Vandegrift about 8 a.m. Sunday, southwest of Cabo San Lucas.
In a statement, the couple said it was grateful for the rescue and as prepared as it could have been to sail the seas with two small children.
"We understand there are those who question our decision to sail with our family, but please know that this is how our family has lived for seven years," the Kaufmans wrote. "We are proud of our choices and our preparation, and while we are disappointed that we lost our sailboat and our home, we remain grateful for those who came to our aid and those family and friends who continue to encourage and support us."
RELATED: Who pays for search and rescue operations? , on the costs of search and rescue.
Anti-Vaxxers Are Giving Horrible Diseases A New Life
Yamiche Alcindor writes at USA Today (warning -- annoying auto-play video at the link):
The mother, who was inoculated years before giving birth to Brady, later learned that she could have gotten a booster shot during her pregnancy that likely would have saved Brady's life. Although Riffenburg didn't know to get revaccinated, people actively choosing not to are helping diseases once largely relegated to the pages of history books -- including measles -- make a comeback in cities across the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Recent measles outbreaks in New York, California and Texas are examples of what could happen on a larger scale if vaccination rates dropped, says Anne Schuchat, the CDC's director of immunizations and respiratory diseases. Officials declared measles, which causes itchy rashes and fevers, eradicated in the United States in 2000. Yet this year, the disease is on track to infect three times as many people as in 2009. That's because in most cases people who have not been vaccinated are getting infected by others traveling into the United States. Then, Schuchat says, the infected spread it in their communities.
The 189 cases of measles in the U.S. last year is small compared with the 530,000 cases the country used to see on average each year in the 20th century. But, the disease -- which started to wane when a vaccine was introduced in 1967 -- is one of the most contagious in the world and could quickly go from sporadic nuisance to widespread killer.
Measles kills about once in every 1,000 cases. As cases mount, so does the risk. "We really don't want a child to die from measles, but it's almost inevitable," says Schuchat. "Major resurgences of diseases can sneak up on us."
Vaccination rates against most diseases are about 90%. Fewer than 1% of Americans forgo all vaccinations, Schuchat says. Even so, in some states the anti-vaccine movement, aided by religious and philosophical state exemptions, is growing, says Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He points to states like Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and Vermont -- where more than 4.5% of kindergartners last year were unvaccinated for non-medical reasons -- as examples of potential hot spots. Such states' rates are four times the national average and illustrate a trend among select groups.
"People assume this will never happen to them until it happens to them," Offit says. "It's a shame that's the way we have to learn the lesson. There's a human price for that lesson."
The most vulnerable are infants who may be too young to be vaccinated, children with compromised immune systems and others who may be unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, scientists say.
via @DrPaulOffit
Milkie
Links with a better moo factor.
Sentenced To Life In Prison For Loaning His Roommate His Car And Going To Sleep
Our justice system needs to change -- in that it needs to start revolving around justice instead of "zero tolerance"-type laws that end up sweeping up the innocent and throwing them in jail along with the guilty on sick technicalities.
Ryan Holle is serving a life sentence with no change of parole. Charles Grodin writes in The Nation:
Ryan, who had no prior record, is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole in Florida. He was convicted of pre-meditated murder, even though no one, including the prosecutor, disputes that Ryan was asleep in his bed at home at the time of the crime. This could only happen in America, because we are the only country that retains the Felony Murder Rule. What the Felony Murder Rule essentially says is if anyone has anything to do with a felony in which a murder takes place, such as a robbery, that person is as guilty as the person who has committed the murder. Every other country including England, India and Canada has gotten rid of it because of its unintended consequences. In America, Michigan, Kentucky and Hawaii no longer have the law. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled, when they discarded the Felony Murder Rule, that a person should be held responsible for his own actions not the actions of others.Exactly what did Ryan Holle do? At a party in his apartment over ten years ago, he lent his car to his roommate and went to sleep. He had lent his car to his roommate many times before with no negative consequences. This time the roommate and others went to a house where they knew a woman was selling marijuana from a safe. They planned to get the marijuana, but in the course of their break-in a teenage girl was killed. Those at the scene all received appropriately harsh sentences, but so did Ryan Holle.
...He is now in his eleventh year of incarceration. Again, this is a young man who was home asleep in bed at the time of the crime. I personally know of no other felony murder conviction where the person was not even present, and the pre-meditated part of the conviction suggests that Ryan knew his car was going to be used in the course of a murder, which to me, isn't credible. To the best of my knowledge, in the entire history of the criminal justice system in America, no one has ever been convicted and sentenced to life in prison for loaning a car and going to sleep.
Unbelievable -- the note added at the bottom of the piece:
Note: Since writing the above, I have been told that Ryan was just denied clemency.
Worth Seeing: The Photos Of Murdered Photographer Anja Niedringhaus
An Afghan policeman, tasked with protecting Niedringhaus and her AP colleague Kathy Gannon, turned on the two unarmed women sitting in the back of a vehicle and murdered them for Allah.
"Allahu Akbar!" -- "God is great" -- he reportedly shouted as he slaughtered Niedringhaus and gravely wounded Gannon. (God needs to have two unarmed women brutally murdered?)
See Niedringhaus's photos of Afghanistan here at TheAtlantic.
Straight People Get Asked The Question Gay People Get Asked
Your answer?
Slurpee
Linky with a brain freeze.
"The Culture Of Shut Up"
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, in an unfortunately overly long piece in The Atlantic, makes some great points about the problem with "The Culture of Shut Up" -- the chill on free speech:
The trouble, I think, is when ostracizing a viewpoint as "beyond the pale" becomes not an end but a means to an end; that by declaring something unsayable, we make it so. It makes me uncomfortable, even as I see the value of it. I for one would love homophobia to fully make it on that list, to get to the point where being against gay marriage is as vulgar and shameful as being against interracial marriage. But it isn't. Maybe it will be. But it isn't. And kicking a reality-show star off his reality show doesn't make that less true. Win the argument; don't declare the argument too offensive to be won. And that's true whether it's GLAAD making demands of A&E or the head of the Republican National Committee making demands of MSNBC.The bottom line is, you don't beat an idea by beating a person. You beat an idea by beating an idea. Not only is it counter-productive--nobody likes the kid who complains to the teacher even when the kid is right--it replaces a competition of arguments with a competition to delegitimize arguments. And what's left is the pressure to sand down the corners of your speech while looking for the rough edges in the speech of your adversaries. Everyone is offended. Everyone is offensive. Nothing is close to the line because close to the line is over the line because over the line is better for clicks and retweets and fundraising and ad revenue.
It's like a financial bubble. It's a bubble of subprime outrage and subprime apologies. I just hope we can rationalize the market before this chilling effect leaves us with a discourse more boring and monotone than it already is--a discourse that suits the cable networks and the politicians but not the many disparate voices who occasionally need to say outrageous things because there are outrageous things to say.
And there are real consequences to the outrage bubble. When Congress was debating the debt ceiling, one of the sticking points was a set of changes to the military-pension system. You don't even have to take a position on these changes to say that it's a reasonable debate: whether we should save money in the defense budget by reducing the rate of increase in pension benefits received by veterans who are younger than retirement age.
The bottom line is, you don't beat an idea by beating a person. You beat an idea by beating an idea.
Agree, disagree, you're not crossing the line, right? Wrong: Supporting this proposal is described, over and over again, as "sick" and "obscene" and "offensive." Do we really want to make policy this way? Do we want our already timid and craven elected officials to have even more to fear?I'll be honest: In my own small way I feel the chilling effect. I'm in a fortunate position that nobody really cares what I say, but even so, occasionally I'll make a dumb joke on Twitter and the next thing I know it's on a whole bunch of conservative websites that exist to catch liberals crossing the line. As much as I can pretend otherwise, I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me hold back just a little, doubt myself a little, on occasion. And while it's hard to measure the absence of speech, measure the things unsaid, I have little doubt that others on all sides are feeling the same chilling effect, only more so because people do care what they have to say.
Jeb Bush: Illegal Immigration Is Often "An Act Of Love"
Bush is married to a Mexican-born woman, born Columba Garnica Gallo.
Peter Cooney writes at Reuters:
In comments at odds with the views of many in his party, Bush, the son of the 41st president and brother of the 43rd, said of the divisive immigration issue: "I think we need to kind of get beyond the harsh political rhetoric to a better place."I'm going to say this and it will be on tape and so be it," Bush said in an interview with Fox News host Shannon Bream in an event at the Texas presidential library of his father, George H.W. Bush.
"The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally ... and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work, to be able to provide for their family, yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony."
"It's an act of love, it's an act of commitment to your family."
Bush, 61, added: "I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime. There should be a price paid, but it shouldn't rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families."
Your thoughts?
My Tweets On Andrew Sullivan's Piece On Eich
This is the resignation and public shaming of Eich, who gave money to a campaign I deplore -- the Prop 8 campaign against gay marriage. This began, writes Tamara Tabo at Above The Law, with OKCupid:
Dating site OkCupid rerouted all of its users accessing its site from a Firefox browser to a message that began, "Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid." The message goes on to read, "Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure."
Sullivan's tweet and the link from it:
@sullydish A civil rights movement w/o toleration is not a civil rights movement; it's a cultural campaign to destroy opponents.
My tweets.
@amyalkon .@sullydish @instapundit Thank you. I'm very pro gay marriage & dislike his support for 8 but feel strongly that we must foster free speech@amyalkon
.@sullydish @instapundit "A civil rights movement without toleration is ... a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents"@amyalkon
.@sullydish @instapundit I'm reminded of activists who showed they were better than the Phelps by standing w/"Sorry for your loss" poster
Sullivan writes at the above link:
Brendan Eich was regarded as someone whose political beliefs and activities rendered him unsuitable for his job. In California, if an employer had fired an employee for these reasons, he would be breaking the law:1102. No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.Now Eich was not in that precise position. He resigned as CEO under duress because of his political beliefs. The letter of the law was not broken. But what about the spirit of the law?
The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger. And let me reiterate: this principle of toleration has recently been attacked by many more on the far right than on the far left. I'm appalled, for example, at how great gay teachers have been fired by Catholic schools, even though it is within the right of the schools to do so. It's awful that individuals are fired for being gay with no legal recourse all over the country. But if we rightly feel this way about gays in the workplace, why do we not feel the same about our opponents? And on what grounds can we celebrate the resignation of someone for his off-workplace political beliefs? Payback? Revenge? Some liberal principles, in my view, are worth defending whether they are assailed by left or right.
From The New York Times' Nick Bilton and Noam Cohen:
While he was being portrayed as an opponent of gay people, Mr. Eich said he believed in inclusiveness within Mozilla and had never discriminated. A different issue was at stake, he said -- the right not to be judged for one's private beliefs. This right was vital to a collaborative software project like the Firefox browser, he said, because it harnesses the work of volunteers and contributors from around the world in a competition with large corporations like Google and Microsoft."If you can't leave your other stuff at the door you're going to break into other groups," he said in an interview. "We have to be one group."
Mr. Eich said he had a number of gay supporters within Mozilla who didn't agree with his personal beliefs, but supported him as chief executive. He said the issue of his donation came to light in 2012 at a conference. When a friend who would have been barred from marrying by the successful Proposition 8 effort learned of his donation, "I could see the pain in her eyes. I'm sorry that people felt a lot of pain," he said. Proposition 8 has since been struck down in federal court.
The conflicting values between free speech and gay rights were a riddle that was hard for many Mozilla officials to solve, and there is no indication that Mr. Eich behaved in a biased manner at work.
A comment at the NYT from someone who feels as I do:
adc, Minneapolis
As someone who strongly supports marriage equality, I think firing Mr. Eich is terribly unjust. Mr. Eich supported prop 8 in a private capacity; there is absolutely no evidence that his private beliefs affected anyone under his management. Opposition to gay marriage was mainstream just a few years ago. Will we now fire anyone who previously expressed opposition to LGBT rights? As a society, we are better off acknowledging that people of conscience may disagree on critical issues like this one, even if such people are wrong. Taking retribution for being on the wrong side of an issue, particularly one where public opinion has changed very quickly, is not in anyone's interest.
Another NYT commenter:
Beachwalker, Provincetown
As a consultant who has worked for over 20 years to help businesses support workplace equity for all groups, including LGBTQ staff, and as a lesbian, I am troubled by this story. Since when is it ok to have a litmus test about personal political beliefs? My father was persecuted during the McCarthy era and lost much of his employability due to litmus tests in use then. I don't want to see them return, no matter who advocates for them and who gets excluded due to them. If Mr. Eich says he can separate his personal political stance about same sex couples' access to marriage from his leadership of Mozilla, including being able to support its LGBTQ inclusive policies and benefits, then he should be able to lead the organization, in my view. Personal political beliefs are just that - personal. I hope the LGBTQ community will think again about pushing leaders and organizations into this sort of decision.
This mob going after Eich puts a chill on free speech, and sets a dangerous precedent. We need to hear from those who disagree with us. We need their views exposed to sunshine because this is the only way we can fully debate them, which is how we make change. This also, as @radleybalko suggests, is a good argument for privacy in political donations.
And again, let me remind you that I have this view of Eich while, as I've joked in the past, being so for gay rights, and especially the right to marry the person they love, that I should probably have a wife instead of a boyfriend.
Sleazy Campaign Tactics: Hijacking The Phone Line You Pay For To Make Their Message Cheaper To Send
I posted this on sleazy candidate Betsy Butler's Facebook page. She's running for office and thinks it entitles her to have her campaigners hijack a phone line I pay for in order to invade my home, interrupt my life, and steal my time. This isn't the first time, either -- she's done this in previous years.
As I wrote in I See Rude People, ethical people trying to persuade you of something pay to send a letter that you can either open or use to pick up after your dog. It is no more okay to use my phone to invade my home than it would be to push your way into my living room and yammer out your political message.
Please, somebody send me her home phone number so I can call her at home and tell her what I think of her sleazy tactics.
Oh, and it seems there's a new trend -- using what seems on the surface like polling but is really a way to ask loaded questions that prime you to think a certain way about an issue or a candidate. This is a way around the few laws we do have that protect us from the unethical who parasite off our phone lines to their marketing costs cheaper.
There's a terrific post up on this at ChuckmeisterUnleashed. An excerpt:
A woman identifying herself as "Monica" was on the phone. She said she was calling from "California Opinion Research" and asked if I would answer a few important questions about a subject that may appear on the ballot during a special election this November. I agreed to participate. I was not expecting what then ensued.It became immediately apparent that the questions the lady was asking me were clearly of a type known as "push polling." For those not familiar with this term, push poll questions are phrased in such a way as to elicit the desired response. The questions are designed to educate (or indoctrinate) the respondent so that the desired answer to the various questions will be given. An example of such a technique could be, "If you were told that your next door neighbor had stopped beating his wife, would you be a) very happy, b) happy, c) sad, or d) neutral in your feelings." The questions coming at me from Ms. Monica were nearly that transparent. And, by the way, I spent 35 years as a marketing, sales, advertising and P.R. exec, so I'm pretty well versed on the subject.
California Opinion Research is actually Maguire Research Services. Contact info is conveniently provided here. I think if you're bothered by them you should call them and let them know how you feel.
P.S. I'd rather vote for my dog than Betsy Butler. Better ethics!
How Can You Be Happy If You Don't Believe In God?
By Stephen Fry -- a humanist's view of the meaning of life. Meaning isn't something out there waiting to be discovered, but something we create in our own lives:
Linksome
Like irksome, but with fewer consonants.
Advice Goddess Radio, LIVE tonight, 7-8pm PT: Dr. Adam Alter On The Hidden Influences Shaping Our Thoughts, Beliefs, And Actions
Amy Alkon's Advice Goddess Radio: "Nerd Your Way To A Better Life!" with the best brains in therapy and research.
We aren't the independent thinkers we like to believe ourselves to be.
Psychologist and researcher Dr. Adam Alter shows in his fascinating book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave
On tonight's show, he'll lay out the ways we are influenced, sometimes causing substantial changes in our behavior that make the difference between success and failure in our endeavors. Knowing these influences is the best way to avoid being swept away by them, so don't miss this show.
Listen at this link from 7-8 pm Pacific, 10-11 pm Eastern, or download the podcast afterward:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/04/07/dr-adam-alter-the-hidden-influences-shaping-our-thoughts-beliefs-actions
Don't miss last week's show with Wharton School's Dr. Adam Grant, "How Giving Can Lead To Success Or Work To Your Detriment."
On this show, 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.
Listen at this link or download the podcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/03/31/dr-adam-grant-on-how-giving-can-lead-to-success-or-work-to-your-detriment
Join me and my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
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Your "Inner Moonlight" And The Creative Process
Last night, Gregg and I went to a friend's party and I spent most of the time there talking to a very interesting guy who's in finance. At one point, he sort of pooh-poohed what he did -- I think because people in Los Angeles, especially, tend to look down on people in the business of making more money out of money, but I know doing this successfully takes a lot: creativity, risk analysis, knowing when to listen to intuition as based in something and knowing when it's baseless fear primed by something extraneous.
Yes, whether you're a banker or a writer, creativity is important -- as is being true to your vision, even if everybody thinks it's ridiculous.
Yesterday, when looking for writing on what goes into a person's art for a column I'm working on, I found this quote by Allen Ginsberg, which hit home:
It's more important to concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. Take [William Carlos] Williams: until he was 50 or 60, he was a local nut from Paterson, New Jersey, as far as the literary world was concerned. He went half a century without real recognition except among his friends and peers.You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you.
This -- below -- resonates with me as well:
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." --Joan Didion
I hadn't really thought of writing this way, but it is what I do. Very often, when I go into a topic on my column, I realize that I need to do some deeper thinking on an issue. Writing about something has me digging deep where I might not otherwise.
I find that when I'm having trouble writing a passage, it's often because I haven't done enough reading and thinking. And sometimes, the reading and thinking I need to do isn't directly on the topic that I am writing about. I just need to consume some information about some neighboring topics to home in on where I need to be.
I know I'm not a hack because I approach at least part of each week's column with a sense of terror about a subject -- how I'll ever say something worthy and meaningful about it, something that hasn't been said to death already. And how I'll ever manage to say it clearly enough for people to truly get it.
Science is particularly hard to make clear. I can understand a concept through and through and yet not be able to describe it in a way other people can understand it. That was the hardest part of writing my upcoming book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." It's based in science -- it's findings from research turned into practical advice. And that made it hard as fuck to write, but wildly satisfying when it was done.
About the book: My next book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," is coming out in June via St. Martin's Press. It's a science-based book, not on prissy stuff like which fork to use but how to treat people, how to keep others from walking all over us, and basically how to leave the world a nicer, kinder place.
P.S. I love my publisher, St. Martin's Press, and, among all the many awesome things they've done so far, they did an absolutely, wildly awesome cover. (Note the fork.)
Obamacare: The Reality And All The President's Spin
In the WSJ, Peggy Noonan suggests stepping back and viewing the thing -- Obamacare -- at a distance:
Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said--blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly--that we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi's statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn't understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she'd done. This is how we make laws now.
Her comments alarmed congressional Republicans but inspired Democrats, who for the next three years would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they'd read the bill and understood its implications. They were later taken aback by complaints from their constituents. The White House, on the other hand, seems to have understood what the bill would do, and lied in a way so specific it showed they knew exactly what to spin and how. "If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan, period." "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period." That of course was the president, misrepresenting the facts of his signature legislative effort. That was historic, too. If you liked your doctor, your plan, your network, your coverage, your deductible you could not keep it. Your existing policy had to pass muster with the administration, which would fight to the death to ensure that 60-year-old women have pediatric dental coverage.
...What the bill declared it would do--insure tens of millions of uninsured Americans--it has not done. There are still tens of millions uninsured Americans. On the other hand, it has terrorized millions who did have insurance and lost it, or who still have insurance and may lose it.
...Social Security was simple. You'd pay into the system quite honestly and up front, and you'd receive from the system once you were of retirement age. If you supported or opposed the program you knew exactly what you were supporting or opposing. The hidden, secretive nature of ObamaCare is a major reason for the opposition it has engendered.
The program is unique in that the bill that was signed four years ago, on March 23, 2010, is not the law, or rather program, that now exists. Parts of it have been changed or delayed 30 times. It is telling that the president rebuffed Congress when it asked to work with him on alterations, but had no qualms about doing them by executive fiat. The program today, which affects a sixth of the U.S. economy, is not what was passed by the U.S. Congress.
Related: In California, the poor are falling through the cracks as their applications for Medi-Cal are trapped in the state's computer system.
The question is, what will happen from here on. Your predictions?
"The Bosnia List," By Kenan Trebincevic And Susan Shapiro
My friend Susan Shapiro has co-authored Kenan Trebincevic's The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return
This book is a primer to a war as horrific as any in the 20th century. But it is also the details that make "The Bosnia List," which Trebincevic wrote with the journalist Susan Shapiro, acutely painful to read. Through a child's eyes, he witnesses his world slipping away, and he is brutally aware of what it is that he is losing: normality."The first sacrifice of war was her flowers," he writes of his mother. "We kept our shades closed to avoid being sprayed with bullets. Without sunlight, her cactus and hibiscus withered."
...The family finally -- with the help of sympathetic Serb neighbors -- crosses the border after several attempts. But they leave Bosnia with nothing. Left behind are their apartment, their baby photographs and their status. His father goes on to work at a fast-food restaurant in Connecticut. His mother watches news of the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in 1995, on CNN, baffled at the English version of what is happening to her country.
Even remembering old acquaintances back home doesn't provide Kenan with much solace. "All I could think was: Look what they'd taken away."
Two decades later, his mother dead, Trebincevic -- who is now a physical therapist in Queens -- makes the journey back to Brcko with his brother and their ailing, gentle father. On Kenan's arm is a tattoo of a medieval Bosnian flag, and in his pocket is a list of what he wants to do when they get there, which includes the names of those who betrayed the family. He plans to urinate on the grave of his karate teacher; he even thinks about how much water he will need to drink.
The stillborn rage he feels abates only when he realizes there were, in fact, kindly Serbs, who helped his family survive -- ordinary people who showed "flickers of goodness."
Linkosphere II
A giant terrarium with links.
Sorry, But Ads Shouldn't Be Handed Out In Public Schools
This ad happened to be for an Easter Egg hunt at a church.
Muslim parents were upset. Rightfully so.
Eric Owens writes at the Daily Caller:
In Dearborn, Mich., home to over 40,000 Americans of Arab descent, some Muslim parents have complained about flyers handed out at public schools advertising an Easter egg hunt at a local Presbyterian church.The Muslim parents assert that the flyers - emblazoned with the word "Eggstravaganza!" - violate the separation of church and state widely ascribed to the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, reports the Detroit Free Press.
Students at three Dearborn elementary schools received the flyers. A large number of Muslim students attend the schools.
The "Eggstravaganza!" is scheduled to take place on April 12 event at Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church in Dearborn.
The flyer urges students to RSVP "to secure your free spot," note the Free Press. The associated imagery includes a festive bunny and some eggs.
Rick Moran, at PJ Tattler, engages in a specious snarl about Muslims and atheists:
Muslim parents get an outrage twofer: They can claim bias against Muslims and play the old atheist trick of claiming that passing the flyer out at public schools violates the separation of church and state.
...but what would your prediction be of his position if some Muslim organization had the school handing out flyers to come to the mosque for a secular event?
He stretches further here:
In fact, public schools are part of a larger community and have a duty to serve that community. If that means making flyers announcing a secular church party available to all students, then they are fulfilling their mandate. If public school teachers actually handed out the flyers -- something that wasn't made clear in the article -- they would simply be fulfilling their mission to engage the community.
Demonizing separation of church and state always seems like a great idea to certain Christians -- and will until there's a Muslim majority and it becomes a question of mosque and state.
It's like free speech. When you deny it to people whose speech you deplore, you jeopardize free speech for all of us. Down the road, maybe your speech becomes the deplored speech that's up for banning.
You are free to advertise your event at your church, mosque, or synagogue; you just shouldn't be allowed to do it by having flyers handed out to children in a public school.
"Tough On Crime" Approach To Drugs Can Mean Death For An Opioid User
André Picard, at The Globe And Mail, argues for the distribution of Naxolone, which reverses overdoses:
As R. Gil Kerlikowske, former head of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, has said: "We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem." What is required is a series of measures, such as better education about the real benefits and risks of drugs like painkillers (for patients and medical practitioners alike), sounder prescribing practices, investment in non-pharmaceutical pain-control methods, better access to addiction treatment and harm-reduction measures.What is also needed are pragmatic approaches to dealing with one of the frightening symptoms of the public-health crisis that is opioid abuse: overdoses.
...Naloxone is a drug that has been used for decades in emergency rooms to reverse opioids overdoses. It blocks opiate receptors and essentially reverses the effects of drugs such as heroin. Paramedics carry naloxone (also known as Narcan) and so do firefighters and police in many cities. In fact, there are ongoing squabbles about who should be allowed to administer the drug.
When turf wars are set aside, the simple answer to that question is whoever arrives first. That's because, when stopping an overdose, a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death.
Administering naloxone is simple. It works much like an epinephrine auto-injector (best known by the brand name EpiPen). You have a vial loaded with the drug (or sometimes a syringe and liquid that need to be combined) and stick the needle into a muscle (thigh, shoulder or buttocks); if that doesn't work, you inject a second dose. When responding to an overdose you should also perform CPR and make sure the person gets to hospital, because the drug can trigger withdrawal. It should be noted, however, that the drug works only for opioid overdoses; it won't reverse an OD from cocaine or crack, drugs that bind to other receptors.
...Naloxone is so easy to use and effective that forward-thinking public-health officials have taken to handing out take-home naloxone kits to regular drug users, those who tend to use needle-exchange programs.
About 85 per cent of intravenous drug users who overdose do so in the presence of others, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. But, because their activities are often illegal, there is a reluctance to call 9-1-1 for help.
In New York City alone, more than 20,000 kits are distributed a year, and some 500 overdoses are reversed. (And that doesn't count all the other ODs reversed by paramedics and firefighters.) Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver also have take-home naloxone kits, and others are considering them.
They're Girl Scout "Cookies," Not Girl Scout "Dinner"
Eliza Barclay writes at NPR.org about people trying to get the Girl Scouts to stop selling Girl Scout cookies, on account of their containing meth. Oh, sorry...sugar and other ingredients that aren't exactly broccoli.
It's a pretty bold move to blast Girl Scout cookies, those precious sugary treats whose limited run from late winter to early spring is just about over for the year.But a few brave voices argue it's no longer all that delightful to see little girls peddling packaged cookies, or to buy them in the name of supporting the community. (And no, this is not an April Fools' joke.)
To some doctors and parents, the tradition increasingly feels out of step with the uncomfortable public health realities of our day.
"The problem is that selling high-fat sugar-laden cookies to an increasingly calorie-addicted populace is no longer congruent with [the Girl Scouts' aim to make the world a better place]." That's what John Mandrola, a heart doctor in Louisville, Ky., wrote on his blog in March. (He also blogs for Medscape/Cardiology.)
The sentiment was echoed by Diane Hartman, a writer and editor in Denver, who penned an indignant op-ed in the Denver Post, "Why are we letting Girl Scouts sell these fattening cookies?"
"They have some trans fat, some palm oil and are high carb ... all those things you've probably been trying to avoid," writes Hartman. As Allison Aubrey just reported, it's the refined carbs in our diets doctors say we really should be cutting.
Guess what: My mom restricted us from having sugar as kids and, as I've joked to Gregg, if an m&m had fallen in raw sewage I would have dived in after it. I was a sugar binger for years thanks to having it so restricted as a kid.
And I've cut out flour and almost all sugar. Once a week, I eat a tiny French chocolate bar. And last night, after the art show, Gregg took me to dinner and I ordered a scoop of dark chocolate gelato. If I didn't do this, I'd feel deprived, which is what kids will feel if they only get those particle-board "cookies" they sell at Whole Foods. Which is what I think leads people to binge -- along with never feeling satiated because they never get enough fat in their diet.
via @WalterOlson
Blurky
Linky with a helping of nonsense on top.
It's The Rare Gallery Opening That Reminds Me Of The Ninth Amendment
Last night, Gregg and I went to a gallery opening of the late Jack Kevorkian's paintings at Gallerie Sparta on Sunset Boulevard.
Kevorkian is a hero. He not only helped suffering people who wanted to die accomplish that, he spent eight years in jail for it.
Here's the Mike Boehm LA Times piece on the exhibit, which included his assisted suicide devices.
The piece that moved me the most was not the most interesting visually. It was this painting about the Ninth Amendment, which says that even rights that are not expressly mentioned in the Constitution are retained by the people. This would include the right to take your own life or have help doing that if you cannot do it yourself.
If you're in LA, go see this show, and be sure to read the statements alongside the paintings. I was particularly moved by his words about how music affected him -- especially Bach. He was an amazing guy and I hope will be seen as he hoped he would and as he rightly should be -- as an alleviator of horrible suffering of others.
The TSA Has Erased The Constitution To Make It Easier To Violate Your Rights
John Brennan, who stripped naked at a TSA checkpoint to protest, was found "Not Guilty" of public indecency. But, writes Lisa Simeone at TSA News Blog:
Not content with that ruling, the TSA pushed on, charging Brennan with "interefering with the screening process." This week, a judge sided with the TSA:WHEREFORE: IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, after consideration of this record, that a violation of 49 C.F.R. § 1540.109 is found PROVED and a civil penalty in the amount of five hundred and dollars ($500) is ASSESSED.Granted, it was a reduction of the fine the TSA wanted ($1,000), but it still doesn't favor Brennan. The judge in the case is the Hon. George J. Jordan, a U.S. Coast Guard Administrative Law Judge (don't ask me what the Coast Guard has to do with anything).
As Brennan reports on his aptly named Facebook page, Naked American Hero, he's planning to appeal.
. . . Brennan expects an unfavorable decision, but believes his actions will not be the cause. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 removes Constitutional defenses for defendants at the initial hearing phase of the legal proceeding. Said another way, jurisdiction of Federal judges for ruling on Constitutional defenses has been removed by the TSA. Mr. Brennan was using his affirmed First Amendment right to protest violations of his percieved 4th Amendment rights. If Mr. Brennan loses this round, he will appeal. TSA contends that disrobing posed a security threat.
Right -- a threat to the emotional security of the TSA management and workers that Americans will docilely comply as their rights and bodies are violated in the pretense of security. Every time you comply as your rights are being violated, or don't at least protest afterward, you make it that much easier for the next rights grab and the next.
Simeone notes:
Brennan, in fact, proved that TSA procedures have nothing to do with security. If they did, he would've been allowed to board his flight after irrefutably demonstrating that he wasn't harboring any weapons, explosives, or incendiaries, the only things the TSA is allowed to search for.In other words, he was safe. He should've been cleared. Instead, he was arrested.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
Sleepy. You pick the topics. I'll post more on Friday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
Could You Date A Person Whose Art Work You Absolutely Hate?
If that person is serious about their art work -- to the point of aspiring to earn a living at being a painter or sculptor -- and you really dislike their creations?
Shocking: Police, At A Distance, Shoot A Homeless Man In The Back
The standoff was for the homeless man's illegally camping in the Albuquerque hills. The man is said to be mentally ill. Yes, we now send out a team of militarized police with a big German shepherd to sic on the homeless.
Jonathan Turley, like me, doesn't see the need for lethal force. He blogs:
Three officers approached him on March 16th about camping in an unauthorized area. After they woke him, they had a three-hour standoff and Boyd is heard saying that he was "going to walk" with them. However, he then gathers his things and one officer is heard yelling "Do it". A flash-bang device then exploded at his feet, causing Boyd to drop his bags. The police released a German Shepard and Boyd appears to take something out of this pocket that might be a knife. However, he seems to be looking straight at the dog and he may have been trying to protect himself from the dog. Then he turns away from the officers. He is then shot repeatedly in the back by two different officers. A dog is then released again to be sure that he is not moving. He was later pronounced dead....There seems to be a rapid escalation of force by the police that is not explained by what we are seeing on the videotape. After all, this is a case of someone sleeping in a non-camping area -- not the execution of an arrest warrant for a violent offender or some other high-risk operation. Clearly, there is always a risk in approaching a homeless person with both mental illness and prior violence. However, I do not see how the shooting is justified based on this videotape alone.
Occupational Licensing -- The Rhetoric And The Reality
There was recently a "crackdown" on unlicensed contractors here in California. What I want to know is, why can't I choose whether or not to hire somebody state-approved? We have building inspections to make sure properties are safe -- which doesn't actually guarantee their safety, but people like to believe it does -- and, the truth is, people don't want to kill their friends and family with shoddy work. Also, it is no guarantee that work is going to be of a high standard simply because you hire somebody with a license.
Donald J. Boudreaux writes at Trib Live:
The first hint that the real goal of occupational licensing isn't to protect consumers' health and welfare is that far too many of the professions that are licensed pose practically zero risks to ordinary people. Among the professions that are licensed in various U.S. states are florists, hair braiders and casket sellers. What are the chances that consumers will be wounded by poorly arranged bouquets of flowers or that corpses will be made more dead by defective caskets?The real goal of occupational licensing is to protect not consumers, but incumbent suppliers. Most occupational-licensing schemes require entrants into a trade to pass exams -- exams designed and graded by representatives of incumbent suppliers.
But what about doctors? Lawyers? He says:
The case for licensing these professions is no stronger than is the case for licensing florists and hair braiders. The reasons are many. Here are just two.First, precisely because medical care and legal counsel are especially important services, it's especially important that competition to supply these services be as intense as possible. If the price of flowers is unnecessarily high or the quality poor, that's unfortunate but hardly tragic. Not so for the prices and quality of the services of doctors and lawyers.
Too high a price for medical visits will cause too many people to resort to self-diagnosis and self-medication. Too high a price for legal services will cause too many people to write their own wills or negotiate their own divorce settlements. Getting matters wrong on these fronts can be quite serious.Won't, though, the absence of licensing allow large numbers of unqualified doctors and lawyers to practice? No.
People are not generally stupid when spending their own money on themselves and their loved ones. Without government licensing, people will demand -- and other people will supply -- information on different physicians and attorneys. Websites and smartphone apps will be created that, for a small fee, collect and distribute unbiased information on doctors and lawyers. People in need of medical care or legal advice will be free to consult this information and to use it as they, rather than some distant bureaucrat, choose.
And competition among physicians and lawyers -- made more intense by the absence of government licensing -- will drive these professionals to offer high-quality services at affordable prices.
Does that go too far? Who should need to be licensed? Who should not?
via @overlawyered
Obama: No Need To Have Checks On Presidential Power. I'm A Nice Guy.
Steve Chapman notes at reason that Obama doesn't find the notion of a president ignoring checks and balances such a bad idea when he's the one who's president:
Every so often, we get proof that Barack Obama, when confronted with a grievous abuse of government power by his administration, will do the right thing. Sometimes, I mean. When he can't get away with it anymore, that is. Just as soon as he's tried everything else.That's the case with his domestic phone records collection, which the president finally said he wants to put under tighter control than before. At moments like this, believe it or not, Obama sounds faintly like that guy who ran to replace George W. Bush.
"This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security," he complained in 2007, while promising to be very different. "We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers."
But it turns out Obama was not against indulging the whims of a stubborn ruler if that ruler happens to be him. Upon arriving in the White House, he left the Bush-Cheney surveillance programs largely alone. Why? "He has more information than he did then," one former aide confided to The New York Times. "And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration."
The fact that Obama trusted himself with these powers is ample reason the rest of us shouldn't. But we already had sufficient cause for suspicion. Our Constitution does not show an abundance of trust in elected officials. It rests on the belief that those in power need to be curbed and checked at every turn.
Also, for Obama, parts of laws he doesn't like or that happen to be inconvenient are parts he can just decide to ignore. Michael D. Tanner wrote at Cato March 26:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty told Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."To which, Alice responded, "The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things."
Clearly Alice had not yet experienced the Wonderland that is ObamaCare.
This week the Obama administration changed the rules once again. It announced that the March 31 statutory deadline for enrolling in insurance under ObamaCare's individual mandate actually meant sometime in the middle of April, the exact date to be determined later.
Sorry, but did we elect Barack Obama president -- or king?
Twinkies
Linkies with fluffy, last-forever filling.
I Wish They Were "Yoda Bundles"
I keep misreading a tweet by Amazon about savings on "Yoga bundles." Here.
A better (if less amusing) deal seems to be Deal of the Day (for men)
Amazon has also announced Amazon Fire TV
Or to buy anything at Amazon and help support this site (at no cost to you!), Search Amy's Amazon here.
"Not Looking For Anything Serious Right Now..."
Guys, what do you think when you see that in a woman's online dating profile?
Hobby Lobby: It's The Obamacare, Not The Principle
Whoopsy, seems Hobby Lobby puts their money and their mouth in distinctly different places. (That categorization somehow seems appropriately dirty, considering the topic.)
Hobby Lobby, while yelling that they can't be made to pay for contraceptive medication that violates their beliefs, is...funding contraceptive medication and devices up the wazoo with their employee retirement plan.
Molly Redden reports at Mother Jones:
Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012--three months after the company's owners filed their lawsuit--show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby's retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby's health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.
These companies include Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which makes Plan B and ParaGard, a copper IUD, and Actavis, which makes a generic version of Plan B and distributes Ella. Other holdings in the mutual funds selected by Hobby Lobby include Pfizer, the maker of Cytotec and Prostin E2, which are used to induce abortions; Bayer, which manufactures the hormonal IUDs Skyla and Mirena; AstraZeneca, which has an Indian subsidiary that manufactures Prostodin, Cerviprime, and Partocin, three drugs commonly used in abortions; and Forest Laboratories, which makes Cervidil, a drug used to induce abortions. Several funds in the Hobby Lobby retirement plan also invested in Aetna and Humana, two health insurance companies that cover surgical abortions, abortion drugs, and emergency contraception in many of the health care policies they sell.
In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, the Greens object to covering Plan B, Ella, and IUDs because they claim that these products can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman's uterus--a process the Greens consider abortion. But researchers reject the notion that emergency contraceptive pills prevent implantation the implantation of a fertilized egg. Instead, they work by delaying ovulation or making it harder for sperm to swim to the egg. (Copper IUDs, which are also a form of birth control, can prevent implantation.) The Green's contention that the pills cause abortions is a central pillar of their argument for gutting the contraception mandate. Yet, for years, Hobby Lobby's health insurance plans did cover Plan B and Ella. It was only in 2012, when the Greens considered filing a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, that they dropped these drugs from the plan.
Disgusting: Asnuntuck Community College Punishes Student's Speech, Ignores Exculpatory Video
The Foundation for Individual Rights In Education posted this about a student who asked the Connecticut governor questions about firearm legislation and was then forced off campus and made the subject of a disciplinary action -- sans due process:
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called on Asnuntuck Community College (ACC) to drop its disciplinary action against a student following a conversation on campus with Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy. Making matters worse, ACC deprived the student of crucial due process protections, even refusing to review exculpatory video evidence.On October 23, 2013, student Nicholas Saucier recorded on video a conversation with Governor Malloy, who was speaking at ACC that day. Saucier asked Malloy questions about recent gun legislation, and the conversation was halted abruptly when Malloy got into his car and left. A second recording shows ACC President James Lombella and a campus security officer leading Saucier off campus.
He was accused of violations of the college's Policy on Student Conduct, including harassment, threats, and failure to "[d]emonstrate good citizenship by not engaging in conduct prohibited by federal, state, or other laws."
Watch the video -- see how outrageous that is. The governor, if anything, sounded a little annoyed -- not threatened.
Kinky
Swinging links.
Soak The Childless?
On Slate, Reihan Salam contends parents should pay lower taxes -- which he says should happen by making the childless pay higher taxes:
Who should pay more? Nonparents who earn more than the median household income, just a shade above $51,000. By shifting the tax burden from parents to nonparents, we will help give America's children a better start in life, and we will help correct a simple injustice. We all benefit from the work of parents. Each new generation reinvigorates our society with its youthful vim and vigor. As my childless friends and I grow crankier and more decrepit, a steady stream of barely postpubescent brainiacs writes catchy tunes and invents breakthrough technologies that keep us entertained and make us more productive. The willingness of parents to bear and nurture children saves us from becoming an economically moribund nation of hateful curmudgeons. The least we can do is offer them a bigger tax break.Raising children is not exactly a thankless undertaking, I realize. As many parents will tell you, the satisfactions of parenting can be their own reward. Parents appear to be very into the supposed cuteness of their progeny. I wouldn't know, but that's the word on the street. We as a culture still hold parents, and particularly working parents, in high esteem.
Yet it is also true that we've stacked the deck against parents in all kinds of ways. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found that raising a child born in 2012 will cost a middle-income family a cumulative total of $301,970 over 18 years. As high as this number sounds, it is actually a massive understatement, as it fails to take into account the cost of postsecondary education. It also fails to factor in the value of forgone earnings and career opportunities. While nonparents can focus on their jobs in laserlike fashion, parents are rarely in a position to do the same. Every time a sick child keeps a parent home from work, her earnings suffer, either directly, because she's taking an unpaid leave of absence, or indirectly, because she's missing out on opportunities to climb the corporate ladder.
Even when we compare a nonparent and a parent who are working exactly the same hours and earning exactly the same income, the nonparent has a clear leg up. Most obviously, the nonparent has far more disposable income to play with, which she can save, to become much richer than her parent counterpart over time, or spend, to travel to exotic locales, to eat out constantly, to wear awesome clothes, or to live as I do in a conveniently located shoebox in a great American metropolis. Raising taxes on nonparents could even the score a bit, tilting the balance ever so slightly in favor of those who toil on behalf of America's future workforce by wiping their butts and painstakingly removing their head lice.
Sorry, but I'm for the other direction -- sales tax rather than income tax. And smaller government. Far smaller.
And the notion that we get graded on our helpfulness to society -- what about parents who raise lazy-good-for-nothings, drug addicts, or criminals? Do we make them give it all back?
Do We Care About The Ways Life Kicks You In The Ass? Not If You're A Man
A lot of journal articles are a slog to get through. This one isn't, and it's worth the read. It's Wayne State law professor Kingsley R. Browne's paper on how only certain sex disparities -- those negatively affecting women -- become the subject of widespread concern, and something seen to be in need of correction. A bit from the abstract:
Ones that are perceived as favoring men are labeled "gaps," while those that favor women are simply facts. Outside the workplace, men are arguably disadvantaged in a variety of arenas, whether in terms of health and longevity, crime and violence, domestic relations, or education. In the workplace, men are far more likely than women to be killed and to work long hours. None of these disparities is generally viewed as a "gap" deserving of intervention, however. Men earn a disproportionate number of Ph.Ds in some fields, while women earn a disproportionate number in others. Only the former set of disparities, however, is typically viewed as a "gap."Many of the statistical disparities between the sexes in the workplace are a consequence of average sex differences in the choices that men and women make about education, the workplace, and the family. Many of these choices are products, in part, of biologically influenced sex differences in talents, temperament, and tastes (all of which appear to be influenced by testosterone), and they all involve trade-offs.
Download it here, free. (Saving the $20 you'd pay on Lexis-Nexis.) You'll be glad you did. Promise!
An excerpt from the paper:
Although it is true that there are more spectacular male successes there are also more spectacular failures, though they get far less attention. Similarly, the tendency of men more than women to devote themselves single-mindedly to their careers is certainly related to some of the workplace gaps, but it is also the reason why women more often end up with custody of the children upon divorce when status as primary caretaker is given weight in custody decisions. That same devotion to the job can also lead to premature death from overwork. Moreover, many of the traits that may pay off in the workplace are the same traits that can lead to violent crime and early death.The fact is that the workplace requires tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs are likely to be weighed differently by different people, according to their own preferences and motivations. What leads one person to choose a career in finance and another person to choose a career in elementary education? Or one person to be a high-rise iron worker and another a dental hygienist? Or one person to intensify workforce commitment after becoming a parent and another person to reduce it? Individual differences in talents no doubt play a large role, as do well-established sex differences in social preferences, risk preferences, and competitive preferences. Which is the "better" choice? It depends upon the abilities and preferences of the individuals, but more men will choose careers in finance and as iron-workers, and more women will choose to be dental hygienists and elementary-school teachers.
Despite the frequent assertion that the gaps that favor men (although not those that favor women) are results of invidious social forces, the truth seems to be somewhat more basic. If the various workplace and non-workplace gaps could be distilled down to a single word, that word would not be "discrimination" but "testosterone." Testosterone is associated with a variety of sex-typed behaviors and traits (even in females), including dominance seeking, aggression, risk preferences, fear, spatial ability, occupational preferences, entrepreneurship, nurturance, and empathy, and it may also be causally related to differences in life expectancy. These traits are all related in one way or another to most of the gaps that have been discussed.
The failure to acknowledge tradeoffs has resulted in a somewhat distorted perspective on the part of some advocates for women. They seem to want all of the benefits of being a man with none of the costs. The question should not be "do you want the good stuff or the bad stuff?"; it should instead be "do you want the high-testosterone package or the low-testosterone package, each of which comes with some good and some bad?"
Impy
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